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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 9407703" data-attributes="member: 63">The short version is that you probably don't need to change anything in Death of the Author, other than a mention of apotropaic jade (which was a superstition before, but now actually has a mechanical effect to hurt malice beasts due to Amrou).To be thorough, though, Adventures in ZEITGEIST went with (in order of closest to the sun):<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Jiese, the Fire of Industry. Close to the sun, this burnt rock is riven with seams of red. Jiese’s influence makes advanced technology possible. Outside this planar system, the innate fluctuations of magic in the rest of the multiverse makes most industry unreliable. Existing technology won’t stop working, but the engineering needed for mass production breaks down at scale. A tinkerer might craft their own personal devices, but on those distant worlds, society will never have industrial revolutions.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Caeloon, the Paper Wind. Caeloon was a world nearly destroyed in fire, rescued and reborn in the Great Eclipse. A soothing green planet, its presence is ineffable, but lends people inner strength in times of despair. Suicide rates have declined since before the Eclipse.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Waking. The main world of the Zeitgeist setting is sustained and enriched by the energies of other worlds. It is orbited by Av, the Plane of Mirrors, a pale white moon that in rare conjunctions appears to be translucent like glass. Scholars believe its presence causes the Waking to be mirrored into the Dreaming and the Bleak Gate.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Ostea, the Beating Heart. A planet the color of dark wine strengthens resistance to infections, and also enhances divinations fueled by blood. Deaths by infection are down from before the Eclipse.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Urim, the Shattered Golden Chains. Flecks of gold glint along one stretch of the starry night, revealed by telescopes to be a stretch of asteroids. Urim’s presence causes gold to impede teleportation and extraplanar travel. One otherwise nondescript boulder amid the tumbling debris of Urim, Teykfa the Ticking Pendulum, produces a subtle regular chime, faintly audible across the vast gulf of space to those who watch the heavens. Awareness of it helps track the passage of moments, and instills a clearer sense of the grand scale of time.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Mavisha, the Mysterious Deep. A watery blue orb, Mavisha causes divination about islands to be unreliable. A small green moon orbits it, Ascetia, the Hidden Jungle, and though little is known of the world, scholars tie its presence to how since the Eclipse interest in history has increased.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Amrou, the Salt Waste. A pale orb that flickers on the darkest nights, Amrou empowers nonmagical defenses against the supernatural. Acts that were once mere superstitions – like pouring a line of salt to fend off fiends – now actually have some effect, albeit temporary. Knowledge of these apotropaic techniques are taught to everyone in Crisillyir, to help survive the various evils that escaped during the Eclipse.</li> </ul>(Plus Iratha Ket is tucked away into a pocket of the Bleak Gate. It's there to provide a sliver of hope in the otherwise, um, bleak realm.)Now, some of that I think actually isn't canonically possible with the stuff we wrote in Adventure 12: The Grinding Gears of Heaven, but there was some precedent of 'sub-planes' with the Ob including Baden the Ghost Moon, and my co-authors on the book had some fun ideas for what a planet-hopping Jules Verne-esque element of the setting could be.A lot of what we picked overlaps yours. The key changes are that we have Urim as Earth and Mavisha as Space. In Death of the Author, the action happens on an island, so Mavisha shielding the island from divinations done elsewhere doesn't really matter, so its absence won't change much. (But thematically, I liked Mavisha being responsible for keeping spellcasters from just casting divination spells about the other planets; they're basically islands, and so you have to go there to learn about them. Alas, we never got around to writing an actual ZEITGEIST space opera.)Honestly, it's easy to ignore the effects of most of the planes. Like, Caeloon has a mechanical effect:Ostea has one too:But if the PCs don't use those abilities, it's not like that interferes with setting canon. The only big thing is that Urim still blocks teleportation through gold, which you'll all already know.Honestly, Dunkelweiss is the biggest change. We actually have a section in Adventures in ZEITGEIST advising what abilities a few alternative planes could have, and Dunkelweiss's is: We went with a combo of Teykfa and Ascetia for Time, and neither really impacts day-to-day narratives. Amrou makes mundane superstitions have a bit of protective power, like holy symbols to repel the dead and jade to harm aberrations. You could just nix that part of the plot, or maybe make it a side effect of Iratha Ket. I . . . um, personally wouldn't include an upbeat musical number in the adventure, because it would go a bit against the themes, but hey, your call.</blockquote>

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