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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spatzimaus" data-source="post: 2874511" data-attributes="member: 3051">Well, there are real-world precedents for the whole "purity through austerities" concept, within Christianity.  So you wouldn't have to go far to find details on this sort of thing.Personally, I think this whole situation is a chance for you to try out all sorts of things you haven't had a chance to include previously due to lack of detail; after all, it's not like your players are going to be spending a lot of time with these groups.  (First, because the campaign's almost done, and second, because they're now too high in level to deal with minor mundane stuff.)  Second, like you said before, you've never fleshed out the other continents, but now is the appropriate time for them to be meeting the most powerful people from these other places, so you've got carte blanche to add new stuff without having to completely balance it all out.For instance, when I think about this topic, I keep coming back to an idea I mentioned in passing earlier... if Aedrae is the goddess of Fate and the "waychooser" (usually meaning an oracle of some kind), imagine a distant LN theocracy where divinations are used to determine every 5-year-old child's eventual career (again, "waychooser" takes on a more sinister meaning) and this determines what training/education/social resources the person gets.  More importantly, this lets the priests maintain absolute Big Brother-style control by quietly weeding out anyone who the divinations say will be a rebel, criminal, or any other "undesirable" career; minor deviations can be adjusted along the way, but the people who'll end up with really chaotic philosophies (adventurers!) get removed (killed if you want them evil, shipped off to other lands if not).Also, a quick question: How widespread are non-Human civilizations?  In the story hour, while the non-Humans were common, most of the places seemed to be very Human-centric and I'm not sure if there was ever anywhere where they had distinct societies outside of the Underdark.  Maybe it was just a question of how things were phrased, but when reading I basically assumed that anyone they met was Human unless specified otherwise...So, this'd give you a starting point for other civilizations in the world; what would an Elf-based or Dwarf-based multiracial society look like?  I don't mean a pure Elf society, that's easy.  In one of my previous campaigns I had a city that was Elf-founded, and they still made up a plurality of the population (maybe 40%, with 30% human and 30% other); it was a challenge to come up with something that still had a vaguely elvish feeling but that wasn't purely dominated by them (for the record, I don't think I pulled it off completely).  For a dwarf-based one, ever read David Weber's "Oath of Swords" series?  They had a good dwarf-and-human empire, very commerce-oriented with an unmatched professional infantry army.  I used it as the model for the main civilization in my last campaign, except I integrated psionics into it.</blockquote>

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