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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nazerel" data-source="post: 2080490" data-attributes="member: 24002">The magitech, steam punk, airship, floating islands/cities, plane-hopping, "pulp" settings do seem to be all the rage these days. It boils down to a matter of taste. Now I'll admit that I've used these very same themes in my campaign setting, but I tend to give it a slight twist. My main problem with these "hip" settings is not that they're hackneyed or derivative, but because these very same themes are assumed to already be the norm in these settings. For example, in Eberron, flying ships, floating cities, and Warforged are accepted more or less, and are generally innovations that have been progressing in the long time coming (yes, Warforged are debatable since they're more recent but the fact remains they are not so uncommon a sight). That is, these ideas already assumed to have already been developed and explored. I say that about kills half the fun for the PCs right there.In my game, I tend to reserve the technological and steam punk bent (airships, crude firearms, magical manipulation and splicing of creatures to create perfect soldiers, the very first Warforged being brought into existence, an underground railway, machines and vehicles of the magical construct variety, etc.) for a very strong and lawful evil empire that is threatening the rest of the continent with conquest. This empire is also very humanocentric and despises both "lesser" humanoid races (elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc. and forcing gnomes to help create more technology) and arcane magic (Imperial mage slayers with the Occult Slayer PrC are common), so they rely on this new technology to further their power. This effectively keeps the technology side of things limited to the PCs' enemies (the PCs have destroyed an Imperial airship, an underground railway, and ran into a few of their experimental monsters over the past 150+ sessions) and does help preserve the "mystique" of these themes to a greater degree (unlike if all nations had access to such things and were commonplace enough to be accessible to PCs as well). Make things too accessible and it becomes old hat.Another thing is floating cities or towers, where they are already assumed to have been created and are a common sight in Eberron. For my game, there is a kingdom (an enemy to the empire) that has just woken up one morning to find that a nearby mountain range has been left decimated and that huge land masses of earth and rock have been thrown up into the sky and suspended by raw magical energies unleashed therein (the PCs had a hand in this after having failed to stop the BBEG - the mountain was also home to a hidden civilization of avariel - though they aren't elves - which was destroyed too). These floating islands are a source of great concern and panic for the local populace, but of greater concern and interest to their military and those in power. The PCs can now help to explore and even pave the way for colonization of these newfound territories (the kingdom reveres dragons and relies on lesser dragons for defense and transport - felldrakes for ground cavalry, wyverns and dragonnels for aerial support - so getting up to and around these islands isn't too much of a problem). This way, the PCs can take a more active role in helping to shape history and their world if they so wish, rather than just be spectators or mere "consumers" of these ideas and themes as they would otherwise have been.Despite all this, I try to keep the world as believable as possible and make sure things, including magic level and character level, make sense in relation to everything else. Characters in the teen levels are rare (the current party level is 12 so the PCs are already people of some renown and influence), and those of epic levels are virtually unheard of unless they're legends. In that sense, I try to keep the power level between Greyhawk/Eberron (low-mid) and Forgotten Realms (ridiculously high). But to each his own.</blockquote>

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