D&D 4E 4e Campaign Idea w/ Core Fluff - The Sundered Isles

[timbannock]

Two things:

1) Had a similar idea myself after a dream I had depicting an island with but a single town at the southern tip. At the northern tip -- maybe a week's travel by horse from the town -- was a massive bridge reaching across the sea towards...something. A mainland, perhaps, or another island? Nobody knows, because about 20 or 30 miles out, the bridge was collapsed.

I had thoughts of some great cataclysm that caused this, and it also reminded of Shadow of the Colossus (PS2 game) and the Forbidden Lands featured therein.

2) A neat spin on this would be that the Sundering wasn't some kind of man-made or magic-made event. Make it divine, but not in the typical "The Gods were unhappy with their children so they smashed them" way, but more of a "Nature/Earth Mother said 'F this!' to the high magic and advancing technology* and raised the oceans up to swallow those things."

I also loved Monte's Arcana Unearthed origin story of Giants being the "major" race that created civilization and such. Explains ruins and building sizes in a D&D world more realistically.


*Technology could mean the "magi-tech" stuff like Eberron's lightning rails and airships, or could simply mean more mundane but certainly still "advanced" siege engines and sprawling castles, which take a lot of natural resources to build. Thus why Mother Earth is like "F this!"


But yeah, I like what you wrote. Might steel it.

P.S. Similar but with high technology: the PC game called Septerra Core. Reminds me of that too.

 

[reveihort]

I like this idea so much better than my own hastely planned 4e setting that i think i may have to pilfer it for my own ends.

It occured to me that if the players were kept enough in the dark about the catastrophe during the initial campaign, that the next (set in a more standard fantasy setting) could end with them intentionaly drowning the lands in order to defeat some large world destroying daemon summoned by the tiefling forces.

I like the idea of one campaign ending in such a way as to suggest a link with an otherwise seemingly unrelated previous campaign.

Jolly good show.

 

[Riekling]

This is epic.

Exactly like something I've been planning for quite a while. I've got a few A4 pages of my own... Which seem almost exactly the same as this. Seems lots of people have had this idea.

Mine is heavily influenced by "TES III: Morrowind" which shows through in my islands and coasts as well as the culture.

Best of luck to you there, Novem5er, and I'll be watching this thread.