Explicit use of Rules Elements in the Campaign

[Irda Ranger]

Introduction: In Bo9S there were a lot of implied setting elements. It wasn't just the names of the powers, but also the story side-bars. It was (strongly) implied that cruel Hobgoblin Academies established one school, that desert nomads established another, etc. You didn't need to accept these assumptions to use the rules, but I did (as an experiment) and it was an interesting experience to incorporate all those assumptions directly into my campaign. They took my campaign in directions I hadn't planned on, which I think it pretty cool.

The Point: What if we do the same in designing a 4E campaign setting? Not just to work with the races and classes given, but to really run with the ball on all the elements (or all the ones we idiosyncratically like, at any rate). I've got some ideas:

The Towers of High Sorcery (very broad)
Name stolen from Dragonlance, obviously, but what if all Arcane-Powered classes have a central meeting place; a neutral ground. This would include Swordmages once released; they're the physical guardians of the place. Bards too, if they're an Arcane class.

You may think at first that Warlocks and Wizards should have nothing to do with each other (thematically they are quite different), but I'm trying to work with the rules as a thought experiment to help break me out of prejudices I may not be aware of. You should too, just for the exercise, no matter how you end up deciding to go. Once you ask yourself "Ok, why would they collaborate?" you can think about how Rituals might bring them together. Also cool plot ideas might arise, like how the Orb-Wand-Fey alliance is angling to neutralize the hegemony of the Staff-Infernal Cabal while the Shadow Warlocks retain their traditional neutrality and acceptance of death and fate.

Or, if one Tower of High Sorcery is too unitary for your taste, you could always go with competing schools of Orb, Wand and Staff traditions with Swordmage Monasteries and each Warlock for himself; but at least make that choice knowingly.

The Marshals of Rohan (very narrow)
All of the persons in the world who have Mounted Combat Power XYZ studied with the Border Guards of Rohan. A similar thought would be the Ninja clan that controls dissemination of knowledge regarding particular Rogue powers.

Half-Elves of Ilmoria
To the extent that any racial builds allow for choices (e.g., +2 Dex or +2 Con) you use this to establish ethnicities, historical reasons for the difference, religious beliefs about the difference, etc.

The idea is to make everything in your campaign a package of crunch and fluff that can't be chosen in isolation. You shouldn't be restricting rules choices (like making certain race/class or class/class combos being taboo) and certain generic feats can be allowed for pretty much any nation or background (e.g., Weapon Focus) but that doesn't mean that Weapon Focus can simply be taken without any further thought. "Oh, you have Weapon Focus, eh? What academy did your PC attend? You can't be that good with a sword without training, you know. Who are that school's rivals?"

Does anyone else have some good suggestions for how we can take the rules and use them as a springboard toward some cool campaign design?

 

[Rex Blunder]

I think those are cool ideas. How would you make roles explicit? I can't think of an interesting way to do that.

 

[Irda Ranger]

How would you make roles explicit?

Hmm. That really is very broad. A problem with doing that would be that the classes within a role do their job in very different ways. Warlocks and Wizards at least have Rituals in common, but Clerics/Warlords and Rogues/Rangers/Warlocks have literally nothing in common other than practical effect.

Frankly, I have no idea. I'm open to ideas though.

 

[SmilingPiePlate]

Just off the top of my head:

Spartans were exiled if they returned from war without their shields. The hoplite's shield was a heavy piece of gear, and soldiers fleeing a lost battle often threw theirs away so they could run faster and escape; abandoning the phalanx in this way was a grave dishonor for a Spartan. However, I've read sources that say that, for example, a Spartan was not seen as having dishonored himself if he returned missing other pieces of armor. Losing one's breastplate, or greaves, or helm, wasn't a big deal, but losing your shield was very bad.

It was, according to one source, because a hoplite's body armor protected only him. But his shield protected him and the man beside him, and to abandon that was to abandon his duty as a soldier to protect the man beside him on the line in order to save only himself.

My point being not to blather about Spartans, but to illustrate how a "defender" ethic might work in a game. Imagine a knightly order, or a martial academy, that identifies themselves as shield bearers, whose whole shtick is literally being the shield that guards the lives of their friends and allies, and who consider their shields their most prized, valuable possessions. This could easily accomodate both paladins and fighters, although future defenders that don't use shields might complicate things.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

In before this dissolves in a simulation war like every other thread.

 

[Lackhand]

Great, five posts before Charwoman Gene, with his time machine, spoilers the thread.

On topic: I don't know that I'd try to tie all defenders everywhere together, but tying a few together -- fighters and paladins serving together in knightly orders, rangers and rogues working together in the smuggler's coves beneath the Tyrant's Citadel, or clerics and warlords contending at the Speaker's Circle at the center of the city for political office; these seem okay to me.

I think getting together a list of infernal patrons for warlocks (probably from the game rules), and then assuming that those beings were patrons of houses of Tieflings in Bael Turath (I happen to like this backstory!) and therefore have certain types of magical items devoted to them might have interesting results.

Restricting knowledge of specific special-effects of daily powers (a daily power that rips out a foe's heart instead of decapitating them) to individual teachers might be neat.

 

[Harshax]

Isn't Points of Light another 'implied element' in the upcoming default 4E world? While I like what you're suggesting; I'm a big fan of ancient esoteric orders; the idea that there would be several well established schools/academies in a world going down the river in a hand basket is sort of a stretch.

Then again, it might be interesting if one or two still existed, and later to learn through the course of a campaign of the locations that were overrun. This might give a dragonborn the motivation to recover some ancient books or techniques from a Dragon Monastery, and would be a great segway to the paragon path.

 

[Raduin711]

I'm not sure what edition it was, but one of the older ones required levels in druid in order to take a level in bard... which made me wonder why that association would exist.

well, here's a thought. You have the whole druid "nation" which guards the wilderness, headed by the archdruid and high druids and so on. Well, the first "bards" were druids that learned song magic from satyrs, sirens and other fey. they would eventually pass this on to what would become the currently recognized bardic tradition; travelling troubadours gathering information and learning a variety of skills, who, in exchange for news and stories are allowed safe passage through druid lands and even allowed to learn their secret paths through the wilderness. Some people are talking about primal bards, rather than arcane, and this origin might make sense for that power source. Arcane bards are fine too. This is just an idea.

 

[JohnBiles]

I'm not sure what edition it was, but one of the older ones required levels in druid in order to take a level in bard... which made me wonder why that association would exist.

In Celtic culture, the Bards as lorekeepers were intertwined with the Druidic priests.

That's where.