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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Osterneth" data-source="post: 6040132" data-attributes="member: 78381">Yeah, I've read The Warded/Painted Man by Brett, and that was my inspiration for the wards, although I'm not really looking to make them the primary form of magic for the setting. I was mostly looking for a way to incorporate subtle magic into the life of the populace so that it's a generally accepted part of the setting (i.e. while I'd like there to be some mystery and amazement at say a wizard throwing around visible spell effects, I'd prefer that reaction to be more along the lines of "Wow! That's right out of legend!" as opposed to "What the hell is that? Kill it!").I envisioned the Doom and the Blight to be separate (although likely connected) things, but I was trying to keep them purposefully vague in order to allow me to decide on specifics later and potentially steal whatever cool explanations my players think up if they chose to investigate either phenomenon further. The Doom I figure is some generic cataclysmic event that wiped out the Imperial capital, and potentially the Gods (main inspiration being the Doom of Valyria from A Song of Ice and Fire), while the Blight I was aiming for more of a creeping disease that turns the land barren and generally makes it an unpleasant place to try to live (hence the wards being required to keep it at bay long enough to grow crops and the like). The whole monster horde thing was really just a logical (in my mind, at least) conclusion from the collapse of the Empire; presumable they'd have been out on the Empire's borders before this and held back by the Imperial Legions. Take away the Legions and suddenly you've got monsters running around.I don't want to restrict any PC classes or power sources, since despite the rather grim setting I'm still aiming for a high fantasy game, just with PCs generally leading the way. A big theme I'd like to play with is the Old World vs. the New World, so in terms of deities and divine magic, I'm likely going to end up going the route of divine power only being available from old gods who fell out of favor during the Imperial Age. Mostly borrowing once more from a Song of Ice and Fire: when the Empire first formed it spread its own religion into the region and the previous gods pretty much fell out of favor. Now that the "new" gods don't seem to be granting divine power, folks will have to look for it elsewhere, like say a pantheon of pissed off and capricious nature gods (I'm picturing like classic harvest/nature deities that aren't evil, but not entirely good, either... more just the divine representation of nature/survival/the natural order). I'm thinking maybe the Old Gods were the original pantheon of the elves, who introduced them to other races ages ago before the Empire, but that their worship was largely stamped out when whatever culture of humanity came and conquered the region to form the Empire and brought their own gods.I think I'd like to try to keep wards on the subtler side of things on the magic-scale. I might include new wards as like consumable magic treasure if I can come up with some cool ideas, and I'd be perfectly fine with a PC telling me that they have a background of working with and scribing wards, but I don't personally envision them as really having a combat application. Essentially, at the start of the campaign at least, the only wards known to people are those to stave off the Blight, and maybe superstitious ones that ward of nightmares, bad luck, etc. That said, if one of my players was really into the idea, I'd be more than happy to expand my initial take on wards and possibly go the Warded Man route, where there are combat oriented wards that just haven't been rediscovered yet.Whew. Think I may be approaching wall of text territory, so I'll leave it at that for now.</blockquote>

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