Bizarre Magic, Empires, Terrible Advances In Technology, and Pushing The Limits!

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Hey there! Yeah...you just gotta love *Necromantic Elves*! That's such a cool thing, you know?

I think that if one uses the same *recipe* for the game all the time that after awhile, it can start to taste like stale saltine crackers, you know? For example, in my campaign-world, which I have been playing in for over 14 years, there comes a threshold where you need more ideas. The current campaign I'm in has been going on since 3Edition came out--that's what, 2 years? So the characters are pretty high level. When they go exploring, I allowed them to on occasion find some cultures and civilizations that were really bizarre and distinct in some manner. Some times I would foreshadow it by them hearing rumours and stories about the strange kingdom, and so on.

It allows me to push the limits in different areas, and add in different twists and variations. It makes it more interesting than just meeting the same *savage* humanoids all over again, just dressed up differently! Or they meet the same old type of elves or halflings, you know? I think it's very cool to change the stats and so on of different races, but it's also just as important to change and experiment with the blending of different alignments, culture, magic, and even technology. Mix *these* elements together, and be willing to be a bit daring, and I think the payoff most of the time will be some very interesting cultures and groups of creatures. These differences will not only make it more interesting for the players, but also adds a more richer dynamic to the whole campaign!

Great stuff!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Tuerny]

Hey SHARK, would a matriarchal matrilineal collection of city-states with an integrated animism and personal enlightenment faith count?

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Hello Tuerny! of course it would count!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Viking Bastard]

I'm not really sure if it fits, but my Cops & Robbers game (see sig) has a kinda technocrazy theme going on.

To put it shortly, it all comes down to a weird substance called Thunderstone and a denizes of a gnome city, Harrgard. With Thunderstone, the Harrgard gnomes can create pretty much any kind of machine or gadget, just as long as I think of it. Until today airships, elevators, cars, rockets, wargolems, tanks, portals and pod racers (like the ones in Star Wars) based on this thunderstone tech have all turned up in my game.

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Mastermind, that sounds pretty interesting! How has the higher levels of technological development impacted your broader campaign world?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Tuerny]

Ral-Auth

Well since its relavent....

First a little background:

My campaign setting is set in the world of Vadaris, which is basically a name that I created years ago to use as the world for my settings years ago. It has evolved greatly since then. My modern setting is based around the idea that, rather than a traditional planet that is found in most settings, the world is actually a unique plane.

The plane itself is composed of hundreds (if not thousands, have not decided yet) powerful spirits known as "great spirits." Each of these spirits serves as an embodiment for the natural landscape. Whether or not an individual spirit mirrors the landscape or the landscape mirrors the spirit is irrelevant. That is just how it is. In some cases spirits have been killed or warped. When that happens the landscape usually becomes hellish and chaotic, as bad as any of the Infernal Realms.

In addition to the great spirits there are countless lesser spirits representing such varied things as music, disease, animals, and lesser geographical features (forests within a vast plain, a stream, etc.)

Mortals tend to worship the great spirits using various animistic traditions (which I represent using Mongoose's shaman class). Some regions basically ignore the spirits due to either hostility or because they are unaware of the spirits existance. In either case they usually rely (whether they are aware of it or not) heavily on their god(s)' influence to keep any anger a great spirit may have towards them in check. Such regions have a greater than usual problem with monsters though, as a result of the spirit's hostility.

Most regions tend to follow a combination of abstract gods and more concrete spirits. My main campaign setting at this point, the Kopi of Ral-Auth, follows such a model, with a pantheon of gods that represent abstract fundamental concepts of the universe such as existance, law, chaos, and the cosmos. Individual worshippers seek to achieve Ascension through various paths, some of which are inividually defined, others of which are based on established political groups.


All of this stuff has a definite effect on the feel of the setting. Powerful temples devoted to providing paths to ascension for the elite Scoli caste while the more common ecstatics (shamans) provide spiritual guidance for the masses while helping to insure the economic power of the nobility. Add to this a matriarchal society (I have not decided exactly why it is matriarchal yet though. I am assuming it is a combination of the fact that most early magic users in this society were women and that said magic makes differences in size less relevant), a hostile great spirit living the great sore in the earth known as the Mist Crater, elves formed from combining humanity and dragons on a genetic level (as the last in a series of such experiments by the dragons), and a collection of arcane societies that hunt down sorcerers for being abominations against the gods and it makes things fairly interesting

 

[Viking Bastard]

Mastermind, that sounds pretty interesting! How has the higher levels of technological development impacted your broader campaign world?

Well, only the people with a lot of money have access to the tech since thunderstone is very, very rare and expensive, so the PCs don't have direct access to much of it.

But still, cross-nation trade by any other means than airships is now nearly non-existant, wars take very little casulties (except for those poor barbarian nations that were nearly all wiped out in less that a century since the discovery of thunderstone). Orcs and other savage species have been mostly intergrated into society as rightless workers or as slaves. The same goes for all the small border countries have all been swallowed up by the larger (and usually richer) nations, so now all the world has been divided amongst a handful of empires.

 

[F5]

Great thread! I had to jump in and add my 2 cents...

The first 3E game I ran was set in a SteamPunk/pseudo victorian city, because I wanted the characters to have to take on a villain modelled after Jack the Ripper. So, in order to make a late 1800s era setting viable, I had to add a lot of weird advances in technology and magic.
I actually had to manipulate a lot to MINIMIZE the impacts of technology. Dwarven-crafted revolvers and shotguns made melee weapons and armor obsolete (house rule: against firearms armor provides 1/3 of the normal AC bonus, all movement and Dex penalties apply normally...simplistic, but it worked OK). I didn't want to elimiate melee combat entirely, so I house-ruled it that Aberrations, Magical Beasts, Dragons, Elementals, Etc are immune to bullets, which do subdual damage instead. So, armor and battleaxes are all but useless in civilized areas, but in the wild they were necessary. This way the game kept a semi-D&D feel.
So, to make use of this set-up, I decided there would be two civilized regions seperated from each other by vast areas of dangerous wilderness. Travel from city to city was acheived by heavily armored trains pulled by Iron Golems in the form of steam engines. If the train comes under attack, the giant Golem stands up off its' wheeled platform, pulls the train into a circle making a makeshift fortress, and fights off the beasties. Instead of using morse code telegraphs to communicate across long distances, they invented Runecasters; pairs of magical globes covered in symbols that turned in perfect unison, no matter how far apart they were. Trained specialists could spin a Runecaster in a kind of shorthand, which was read off the corresponding globe.
The City itself was built atop a centuries old Dwarven complex, the Undercity, which was essentially a giant clockwork and steam-driven machine that extended for miles undergound. The purpose of the machine had been forgotten over time, but it was maintained and expanded by the Dwarves out of tradition. The humans in their city above ground used the vented gasses and heat and motive force from the Undercity to fuel their factories.
It was all very quickly bodged together, and not terribly well thought out, but it was fun regardless.

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

F5, that sounds very cool! What kind of creatures did you have in the campaign? How did the players respond with such a mixture of magic and technology? It sounds like a facinating campaign! Have you gone back to it to try and perfect it? You should! What were your cities like? Where there any advances in naval technology? Of interest also, is what kinds of magic or technology changed the standard modes of living? Like clocks, hospitals, running water, industry, production, storage of food, marketing, architecture, and so on. Cool stuff indeed!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Desdichado]

Yeah, I liked that touch. That realm where the necromantic elves live is also populated by fairly primitive dwarven, orkish and human settlements, who are all loosely allied against the elves and the vampires (a humanoid race, not a template here) who both constantly prey on them.

The world itself is one of those "sundered worlds" huge floating remnants of a once mighty world ripped apart by some divine cataclysm. This is the bottom-most layer and is seperated from the rest of the world by layers of clouds and never-ending storms, making it always as dark as night.

Because of their constant exposure to vampires and the necromantic elvish society, the human/orc/dwarf tribal groups have a loosely common "death cult" amongst them, with rituals and ordinances that prevent the dead from being called back to serve the elves. Many of them create white tattoos that cover almost their entire bodies with a life-sized skeletal image.

The world was a lot of fun to create. In fact, I still dicker around with details on it. I haven't actually ever run that campaign setting before, though...