AWESOME Idea from rpg.net...

[Ghostwind]

I took the liberty of "dressing up" the original idea with the illithid concept. This is what I came up with:

There is a question that haunts you, just as it haunted me. You know what it is, just as I did. "What is the Dungeon?" It has kept you awake at night, staring at spellbooks, scrolls, and crystal balls. When you do sleep, you have strange dreams that you can't explain, vivid dreams, dreams so vivid that they seem more real than the world you experience when "awake": dreams of flight and fire.

The Dungeon has you. It's all around you: in the caverns you explore, the walls you climb, the traps you disarm, the monsters you kill, the gods you pray to... it is even in the treasure you claim as your spoils. It is all a part of a system, a prison, an illusion. It is the adventure that has been pulled over your heroic eyes to blind you to the truth. Unfortunately, no one can be told exactly what the Dungeon is. You have to see it for yourself.

If you drink the blue potion, you will fall asleep. You will wake up tomorrow in your bedroll and believe... whatever you want to believe. You can continue with your life of plundering forgotten tombs with your elven and dwarven friends. But if you drink the red potion, you will finally learn the truth. The choice is yours, but I warn you: there is no going back.

----

One thousand years ago, the draconic and illithid races lived in peace. We possessed great magical power and in our arrogance, we created humans to be our servants... our slaves. They served ably for a time, but the seeds of unrest germinated within them. The illithids saw this as an opportunity to shift the balance of power to them. Unbeknownst to us, they manipulated the humans from the shadows, provided them with information, and gave them the means to stand against us. We do not know who struck the first blow in the war, but we do know that it was we who tore the web of ley lines asunder. You see, at the time, the humans’ magical power was dependent on the web of ley lines that stretched across the face of the world between scattered sites of mystical power. We thought that, by destroying that web of magic, we could deprive them of their power and make them easy to defeat. We were wrong.

The humanoids struck back and invaded our warrens, stole our eggs, and kidnapped our hatchlings. Their armored slayers felled us one by one, until the only dragons that survived were trapped in their shells. The eggs are kept in vast castles built on top of the old sites of power. The magical life force of the dragons inside are tapped and slowly drained by the illithid Collective to provide power to a new artificial web of dragon-powered ley lines.

I did not want to believe it either, until I saw it with my own eyes. There are caverns, vast caverns, where dragon eggs are no longer laid: they are infused. I watched the illithid Collective control dwarven shellsmiths and make them craft eggs of gold, copper, and steel. I watched elven wizards and human sorceror-priests congeal the spent souls of dead dragons from the ley lines and quicken the empty, lifeless eggs. All this to turn a dragon into a charge for a wand.

The humans thought they had won. They rejoiced, celebrated and made plans for a free future. But that is when they discovered the illithid treachery. They were mere pawns in a game and now had new masters. Masters who were far crueler than we could ever be, ones who fed upon the humans as a dragon devours its prey, slaughtering and enslaving them all. Within less time than it takes for a hatchling to fly, humans were reduced to almost nothing. Those that lived were kept in cells as breeding stock until their masters devised the Dungeon.

In order to keep us in line, our unhatched minds are trapped in a multi-faceted astral construct where we are born, live our lives, and die under the illusion that we are humanoids living in a primitive and dangerous world. Some dragons are content to spend their lives working as serfs, ignorant of their true potential as their life energy is siphoned away. Those with more heroic ambitions, those who would be a danger to the system, are channeled and controlled. False threats like "evil warlords" or "rampaging monsters" are introduced into the system to let these heroic individuals exercise their altruistic impulses within, rather than against, the system.

The humans have also been inserted into the system and are prisoners. They are genetically bred and kept in pools as their bodies mature until it is time for them to be “harvested” for consumption by the illithid or to be used as slaves for menial tasks, their minds shattered so they are little more than thralls. Inside the system, the humans believe they are living in a world where magic does not exist and has been replaced by invention and technology. In a cruel twist of sadism by our jailers, some humans even have had their consciousness inserted into the world where our minds roam, only they believe they are dragons themselves and attempt to crush us beneath their talons.

-----

It would have worked if not for Bahamut, the one dragon who woke up and realized the truth. He freed himself from his egg and it was he who freed others, others who freed the rest of us. A vision showed him that to win this war, he must recruit the help of the very humans we created. He must find those who have the gift of being able to cross the astral bridges and enter the system through a series of back entrances and secret caves. They see both worlds, theirs and ours. They are the soldiers of this war and we are the generals.

There are only a few clutches of us free in the world, hiding from the slayers as we travel from one secret lair to another. When we can manage to sneak close enough to a site of power, we astrally project our minds back into the Dungeon to fight against the cabals of humanoid wizards that maintain it and to attempt to free others of our kind. The wizards are powerful. I have seen them drive a quarterstaff through a brick wall. I have seen rangers empty whole quivers at them and hit nothing but air. But as powerful as their magic is, they are limited by the fact they are working within a system of thaumaturgic rules and hermetic laws, these laws constrict their abilities and so they will never be as powerful as you can be if you learn to harness the raw magic inside of you or think beyond the confines of the walls that surround you.

I'm not telling you that you'll be able to dodge magic missiles. I'm telling you that, when you're ready, you won't have to.

This would allow a seamless blend of D&D 3.5 and d20 Modern. PCs can still play humans but interact with the dragons (aka DM) in different ways while still fighting against the illithids.

Thoughts?

 

[Ozmar]

I like this idea. It works on so many levels.

I would love to use this with WLD and surprise the players. But there are a ton of details to work out.

Maybe I'd use Alternity for the alternate system? And set it in a sci-fi advanced future setting?

But I also like the idea of using dragons.

How about this - let the players know that the campaign will involve dragons and humanoids as their PCs, and that their dragon-characters will share a connection to their humanoid characters. So give them this challenge: create a level 1 "regular" D&D character, and create a (whatever level) dragon PC, and tell them that the two characters are connected in a mysterious way, so think of them as the same character. The players won't know what you have planned. You'll start playing the humanoids for a while, but they probably have these lingering thoughts of themselves as dragons - they've made sorcerers, or built their characters with certain affinities for their draconic selves. Maybe they even dream of themselves as dragons. Then finally, once the "reveal" occurs, they see who and what they truly are, and must face the masters who have done this to them.

A couple more thoughts:
The masters should definitely be something other than humanoids. They should be greater then dragons in the same way that dragons are greater than humans. But in the Dungeon, they manifest as humanoid opponents.

The second half of the campaign plot should play out in both the real world and the Dungeon, and the PCs must be able to advance in both worlds, and will have to act in both worlds in order to achieve their goals. They should achieve mega-cheese levels of power within the Dungeon, and be able to "stop magic missiles", fly, etc... But in the real world, although they will be dragons, they should still be struggling against their superior enemies. Victory should only be achievable through the interface of the Dungeon.

Ozmar the Oracle

 

[Driddle]

First three paragraphs, a hoot.
Follow-up 'graphs? (shrug) Neh. Didn't need to be that complicated.

But at least it might help explain why kobold tastes like chicken...

 

[DMH]

Maybe I'd use Alternity for the alternate system? And set it in a sci-fi advanced future setting?

Why don't you post that on the forums here: http://alternityrpg.net

Are you a member?

Back on topic- this also gives me an idea on how to alter the vapor bore from Minions. In that book, the creatures are big cats that drain charisma and then replace it with a point of their own to take control. Why not have them drain all but one point and then place the victim in a Dungeon where only its living victims are real? They are connected and interact via the bore's (new) telepathic powers. There could be large caverns filled with bodies, living and dead, that bores use as lairs. When one victim dies of starvation (the bore provides water), they simply fade from the Dungeon. Psions and psychics would be the only people who could break free without outside assistance.

Wasn't there an X-Files with a fungi that did this to Mulder?

 

[Timeboxer]

Since they are doing the Matrix in a fantasy setting, will it work like the Matrix worked and how I see the Matrix movies. "HMMMMMMMM, this stuff is not real. How can it hurt me AT ALL? Since I now know its fake, I can't be hurt." Whats the point? That was one of my big beefs with the Matrix. "Lets see, in the Matrix I'm a god, but awake I'm a slave. I'll stay in the Matrix."

As with all shadow-substance, you do require a Will save to disbelieve...

 

[Timeboxer]

Its the whole idea that you're actually better outside the matrix (you're a dragon) than within it (you're just a lowly humanoid). To each his own, I suppose. Its still a really clever idea.

That's actually why I like this idea. The big problem with the Matrix, to me at least, was that it implied that the Matrix was actually "cooler" than the real world. This actually gives the players an incentive to break out of the Matrix, and makes the idea of going in to restore "freedom" actually worthwhile.

And then there's this question: Having lived a life as a humanoid, and thus to some extent understanding them, how many dragons will be humanoid sympathizers, or will submit for the good of their "race", however illusory that identity may be?

Edit: You know, I just realized that this thread is a year old. Whoops.

 

[Treebore]

Thats just it. Its a great idea. Like any great RPG idea tweak the idea until you like it best. Like how Ghostwind re-wrote it to fit his desired take on the idea.

 

[kolikeos]

good stuff!

(and it so happens i just saw the matrix last night)

 

[Thomas Percy]

one trick pony ?

 

[HeavyG]

"I'm not telling you that you'll be able to dodge magic missiles. I'm telling you that, when you're ready, you won't have to."

Yeah, I think he's offering to teach you the Shield spell.