Hey, sorry, I didnt even know this thread picked up. I've been pretty ghost on enworld since the crash. But I'll attempt to update you guys and let you guys know the ramifications.
In general it went well. It's been about 6 months of game play since the magic is gone. When we resumed play several factors led to a new party being formed.
1. two players died in the climatic scene
2. a player and i had just reached our end, so the player and hte husband left the camaign
3. a new player joined
With all the newness, the party decided to retire whatever remaining characters were left and start restart the campaign with a different party. The timeline went like this.
- The party activated the device accidently
- They wake up in their world as if nothing had changed.
- They go through two sessions of this "happy,shiney,place" before realizing that things are too perfect. They realize that its all an illusion. Their really in a time-lord prison awaiting trial for disrupting the time stream.
- They escape and somehow make it back to their world but 15 years after the magic was sucked away. This gave the world a bit more time to stabilize and provide some unpredictablity for the players .
- The world is completely changed. Magic is still there, but those whom do magic are rare to find and magical objects are even rarer. The theocracy that ran the land is even more rooted because it has the most mages and magical objects. Those mages not registered withthe church are burned at the stake.
- The world is on the brink of a civil war as the device opened a fissure into the shied allowing a powerful god being known as Blyth (from the psionic web complements) to enter the land and start a following. Teh following controls the northern portions of the world now.
This new god is pelting psionic magic as the better than normal magic thing. People are flocking to his cause.
-
- The game is run with iron heroes rules now to compensate for the lost of magic.
- Magic is VERY unstable. Mages have to roll to cast their magical spells. Failures and low rolls cause the user to start getting taint and corruption points. This is because they are pulling the magic out of the abyss to use it.
-The old party broke up. The oldest pc finally decided to follow her father blyth and steal both of the major artifacts from the party. Her sister, another pc member, joined her. The other two decided to go back to their people to prepare them for the calamity that will surely come. The new party is an adventuring guild whom works for the theocracy (but not for religious reasions.
frankthedm said:
PCs operate the machine and all items disenchant. The magical energies that were bound in those items, including godly artifacts, begin to flow through the world causing all sorts of havoc.
I'd say make Level / Hit die based rules for characters / creatures absorbing raw magic energy in the area and using it as they more or less choose, with large margins for error if you like unreliable magic.
I am thinking burning HP to produce the effects so that the characters who lost their weapons can still 'keep up'. Don't worry too much about balance since with all the magical energy floating around, reality should rip itself apart eventually
Try looking at the white wolf Exalted game for ideas.
This was done to an extend. I used charisma to be burned instead of HP (that way i don't scrw the already low HP mages). But the large margins for error are definatly there
[quote =kigmatzomat] I would oh so definitely let them nuke their own world. Heck yeah! ...[/quote]
Yes, I enjoyed them pushing their own button. Everything you described happened. There are more fractions, the shared reality concept is gone, instead of just two countries, there are 7 distinct nations now and a massive civil war started last month with the new pcs in the middle.
Shenron said:
I think you should NOT change any rules of the game....
If the pcs had gone back to their original time, i would have kept more tings the same because they'd be at "that point". But when they arrived back I ralized that after 15 years the world would have compensated. Very early pistols have been introduced that are quite powerful. Mages are still there and special. The system is such that a mage could very well cast high powered spells all day if she rolls good, or she could crap out after her first magic spell and lose all her charisma. Those whom show signs of the taint are outcasted.
There are no magical items, so adventurers have learned how to use their own abilities and not rely on magic sources. The five or six magic items powerful enough to remain are major artifacts that have changed the tide of the war.
theyeti said:
Yes it would be interesting to find out how this proceeded. ...
There was afailsafe. The two people whom operated the device retained all of their magical objects and spells. Unfortuantely, one turned on the other nearly killing her and stealing her magical objects. (this was a conscious decision by the player whom thought her character would do that considering her characters always been out for herself and side whom she thinks is the winners). The other character is still alive and I wnated the player to keep playing that character, but she changed her character (sigh-) and we had the other character kidnapped by the first.
The more expensive an item is, the more liekly it is that it is still around. For every 2,000 there's a 1 percent chance that the item retained its magical value. There is also an inverted percentage chance that the item carries the taint.
The first few games with the new party in teh changed world were set up to get the party familiar with the world. A big tournament was put in place to let them test out the Iron Heroes Mechanics. They ended up winning the tournament.
The overarching story so far is this:
The gods have long since gone, so they wouldnt have been in their celestial home waiting for a break in the fissure. All but one of the demon lords have moved on, that demon lord is blyth. The fissure is not large enough for him to go through yet, but his minions and followers from his new realm have gone through (new realm, astral plane of faerun). Blyth has made friends with one of the original gods of the world, Set, some time ago. His followers arenow attempting to free Set from a shadow deminsion. This would allow Set to travel through the fissure with his buddy Blyth. So that would equal two evil gods, no good gods.
Its been 15 sessions, and the new pcs have learned of this plot somewhat (they don't know the blyth part but they are very familiar with the set part. They have set up an official guild unto their own and have sent out a sepearte party to investigate ways to restore magic to the world before this "hits the ceiling". (this new party is a sepearte campaign ran by the player nik, he's running it while i take a break from faantasy dm'n to do my mutants and mastermind campaign). This new group have found the fissure, but were absorbed into the past of chrystaria where magic was rampant.
