No Arcane or Divine

[JacktheRabbit]

I am considering a campaign based around an idea of mine. Basically I am going to make divine and arcane magic primarily the domains of evil.

Clerics are worshippers of various Devil Lords and gain their powers through pacts with their fell masters. They often belong to elaborate and brutal church heirarchies.

Wizards as dedicated studiers of arcane also associate closely with devils revelling in the power and control this grants them.

On the demonic side there are the physical temptations and the disturbing temptation of pure chaos. Casters on this side will be Sorcerors and Favored Souls who are willing to manipulate and violate their bodies and souls directly to gain power.

This will obviously limit character choice in a good aligned campaign. Players will be able to be druids, who represent the natural world and whom in this campaign I will forbid from evil alignments (with of course the ocassional fallen protector) to help balance things.

The setting will be an almost victorian age where thought and science are reigning supreme over superstition and fear. To show this players will also have access to the various psionic classes. This is the effort by the civilized races to lift themselves up and make themselves better through self improvement.

Bards will be a nebulous area. Their spell ability will be explained more and the power to inspire as opposed to actual spellcasting.

Any suggestions or thoughts on major holes in this idea? I am going to use the magic=psionics idea. Protective spells will be equivalent and dispel magic/psionic will pretty much overlap in effect.

Any comments are appreciated.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Using psionics instead of magic? Almost like an extreme Dark Sun.

I don't recall how the 3.5 psionic healing powers worked (or is this 4e?). I just hope they're available in a reasonable amount of time during combat.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Using psionics instead of magic? Almost like an extreme Dark Sun.

I don't recall how the 3.5 psionic healing powers worked (or is this 4e?). I just hope they're available in a reasonable amount of time during combat.

This will be a modified 3.5 psionics ramped up some to work with Pathfinder. Psions use powerpoints to cast spells, the casting time is comparable to clerics and wizards.

Psionic healing is through a few different powers, a self heal, a usable on other, and an ability heal. I don't remember a poison or disease but that might be a augment to an existing power.

That is one benefit of psionics, a psion can have a fairly extensive spell list since powers scale and augment well. You only need one psion version of summon monster to do the same as every level of the wizard spell. You just dump more points into it.

 

[Haltherrion]

I and many players would be leery of this. For one thing, a good many players really like to play the classes you are forbidding. But if you allow bards, psions and druids, you have toned down the arcane/divine but you really haven't eliminated it. Leery can be overcome.

In many ways, it might prove to be more a matter of how you position (i.e. sell) it with the players. After all, in a group of say 4 players, you might very well have a druid, bard, psion and warrior even in a vanilla setting. Put another way, how many players are actually going to be restricted? Just 1-2 who might have played a restricted class.

Myself, as a player I'd be looking for:

• A good setting rationale for this restriction to exist
• A clear idea of what is allowed and what is not. If you still allow paladins, druids, psions, bards, and so on, this isn't horribly restricting, for instance.

And it might not hurt to remind the players that this will increase the value of druids, paladins, bards, etc., classes in most D&D editions that are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as weaker than other classes. That is, this could be a great campaign to play that druid you always wanted to play but were afraid to because you were worried that it wouldn't stack up against a cleric.

So, be clear on what and why you are doing it. Sell your setting as something cool and different. Remind those players that might actually see this as an upside and it will probably go over.

It is possible that the group won't like it and the campaign will sputter out but lay a good foundation and it has a fine chance of success.

As for holes, it sounds like you are still working out what classes are in and what aren't. That needs to be clearly defined. Also need to be clear on whether you would allow someone to be a hidden caster (I would suggest no).

If you are going to really dial back magic to the point where there is little healing or arcane-type effects than you are going to have a bigger challenge. On the plus side, you are making the setting much more like most fantasy novels on the down side, many playing FRPGs want lots of magic. More practically, the party can start looking very similar without casters and the players can get very cautious (read: the game can move at a crawl) if you don't make healing easy. But you could always add healing one shots (common holy springs for instance).

 

[Ryltar]

A possible issue I can see is healing. Both druids and bards are not as effective in healing others as a cleric is, and the psionic classes (IRRC - it's been a while since I read the 3.5 Psionic rules) are mostly focused around self-healing. This means that you would either have to increase the healing powers of available classes or provide an alternate, non-magical (herbalism?) source of healing if you want to prevent any caster class from being forced to play a dedicated healer. This was one of the excellent fixes of Pathfinder, IMO: making clerics clerics again by giving them healing powers separate from their spellcasting. If you take away the option to play clerics, you might have to adress that.

 

[Celebrim]

I've long wanted to run a campaign in a dark age kingdom with a culture based loosely on Merovingian France, and a historical reason to rabidly hate magic-users. The situation you describe will largely exist in this kingdom, at least in the minds and perceptions of most everyone in it, so that all arcane magic users would be percieved as witches and warlocks and be burned at the stake (or at least expediently killed and then burned) when discovered. I don't think I've ever tried to take it as far as you have, but I would suggest that if you are going to take it that far take it all the way and have all magic be evil. I personally feel that if you allow druids - probably in 3.5 the most powerful class in the game - and psions (also famous for being breakable without trying hard), that you aren't actually creating much of a differently flavored campaign as the backstory suggests. It will I think still largely feel like ordinary D&D only with a slightly restricted class list which is more than made up for by the fact that there are perfectly good substitutes available for pretty much everything. A Paladin, a Psion, a Druid, and a Bard (or Ranger) make a pretty well balanced party despite being all spell-casters.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

Most of the decisions are being made for flavor reasons and plot reasons. As the campaign progresses encounters with clerics or wizards will be terrifying events because it means demons or devils are not far behind. It means foes who regularly cooperate with the agents beyond.

The setting will definitely not have a low magic feel. Imagine a government backed by a psion dominated inquisition that constantly probes society for secret cults, perversions, and pact makers. This inquisition hunts Wilders as often as it hunts Sorcerers while purging the impure. Imagine a powerful order that is almost exclusively Lawful Neutral in alignment and believes that law and society are more important than any individual no matter what.

Soul Knife thugs act as powerful enforcers for the underworld. There will be little that is black and while in the campaign. Sorcerers are created through perversion, but if that happens before birth does it automatically equate to evil? Druids are the one divine agents of good in the world but rarely do the goals of druids match the goals of urban society.

As the campaign progressed other items (which may change depending on how I write this up) appear. Good society is likely to be riddled with Mind Flayers and Dopplegangers (and their Ravenloft big brothers Dread Dopplegangers) who feed on society but at the same time work to protect it from devils and demons because they cannot feed on a dead herd.

I will probably add a feat that druids can take that allows then to mimic a clerics ability to spontaneously heal. To balance out how powerful druids already are I am considering dropping them to D6 hitpoints.

Bards will retain their spells but they will be looked upon as the ability to inspire mixxed with a light psionic base.

Paladins will not exist, just no way to explain how they can.

Barbarians will exist alongside druids as the martial branch of the keepers of nature.

Rogues will be very common but most will be more like super experts, I might even create an ability one can take in place of backstab that is non-combat based. A level 8 rogue who is a beaurocrat in the government doesnt have much use for backstab (the litteral ability that is) as much as some sort of manipulation ability. Not certain on this and it will be created in such a way that its mostly a NPC taken ability.

 

[kitsune9]

Sounds like a campaign I'd play in.

It also makes sense too. If clerics receive divine power from various devils, then the appeal for good folk to stay away from religion could lead to a society more focused on technology or scientific progress--unless of course those clerics have some measure of power in society-political or societal.

Now wizards having power from devils makes society more interesting. Since wizards have to be intelligent to understand the most powerful of spells, then they could easily be in other professions of prominence. They could also be the very scientists, government administrators, business investors, and advisers who are supposed to provide the tools to protect us! You could have some kind of secret Mensa society with a total Illuminati angle going on here.

And if these wizards have political power, then they could create public opinion on those classes or individuals who could thwart their power. Paladins would be hunted down for their ability to detect evil. Psions would be labeled as the "devil worshippers". Druids represent vile religious practices and hedonism, and so on.

Of course, if you want it to be more clear cut with people knowing who the bad guys are and who the good guys are, then there would be other societies that would already be under the brutal yokes of the wizards and clerics. The PC's can be freedom fighters or charged to take back regions and wastelands under those spellcaster's control.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

At least in the start there would be no such thing as a Paladin at all. All things from beyond that answer prayers or respond to ceremonies are demons or devils. So there is nowhere for a Paladin to come from.

This does leave an opening later in a campaign for a party to encounter a powerful angel or deva and through that association become the first paladin, but that person would be hard pressed to explain to the masses that their angel sponsor from beyond is different from the devils and demons people are used to.

Mages living in secret would exist, some having powerful positions they use to finance their research. It would be a very risky life. I plan on patterning the Psion inquisitors around the Witch Hunters of Warhammer, dedicated to the point of fanatacism and granted powers through the law that allow them to do almost anything.

 

[Rune]

At least in the start there would be no such thing as a Paladin at all. All things from beyond that answer prayers or respond to ceremonies are demons or devils. So there is nowhere for a Paladin to come from.

That's a shame. It would be very fun to play a paladin quested with hunting down clerics and wizards.