Gods, Monsters, and PCs

[Durandal]

Hi, all. In a very short amount of time, I'm going to be running a campaign in a homebrew setting of mine. It's an odd mesh of things, but the gist of it is that the PCs will be travelers come to an island kingdom in chaos. The deities of the island disappeared a century or so ago, and only a year or so ago the entire royal family died suddenly, for no apparent reason. The lords of the island and the king's elite guard are trying to hold the nation together, but an influx of monsters isn't helping. Consequently, the island makes a great spot for adventurers. Enter the PCs, three of 'em - yet to be created. When they arrive, they'll be visited by an angelic being of some kind, who will tell them that the unused divine force of the old gods is ready to return, and they are the carriers of a portion of it. If they try, and grow in power, they have a chance to eventually become the new gods of the land, and hopefully keep it from self-destructing. Naturally, these three won't be the only ones imbued with this divine spark - and it'll be a kind of Highlander-esque struggle to gather power.

Which is where I run into a problem. I wanted originally to use something like the heroic paths from Midnight to simulate their gradual growth in power, but my Midnight books have inexplicably disappeared, and nobody around here has new ones. So I ask you, ENWorlders, to help me out. If you had something like this going on, what would you use to simulate the gradual growth in power of the PCs? It has to be something in addition to what their classes already give them, and I've looked at the bloodlines in Unearthed Arcana - didn't really like they way things worked. Is there someplace online I can find a collection of things like the Midnight heroic paths (though certainly nothing illegal)? Any help you can provide would be most welcome. Thanks.

 

[Durandal]

Hello? Anyone? Should I be posting this elsewhere?

 

[random user]

There are many things you could do. Here are a couple of suggestions.

1. (this one is stolen from another campaign I was in). The rings of elemental control have various abilities. Start with the lowest one and give them the ability every other level (or whatever you want them to progress at). So for instance, one might be able to waterwalk at will starting at level 2, be able to create water at will at level 4, water breath at level 6, cast wall of ice once/day at level 8, ice storm twice/week at level 10, and control water twice/week at level 12. Adjust the level as appropriate, or mix and match.

Really you can just string together whatever innates you want to give them if you want, though of course balancing it could be tricky.

2. You might take a look at a solar's (or another celestial's) innates and start giving those out as they gain level. Of course don't give them the powerful stuff right at the beginning nor let them do it at will. So maybe at level 1 give them low light vision (if they aren't human they won't notice), at level 2 give them resistance fire 5, at level 3 give them continual flame 3/day, at level 4 give them darkvision 60 feet, at level 5 remove curse 1/day, level 6 resistance electricity 5, etc etc

The danger with this too is that they can get very powerful very quickly if you don't balance it well. However, there are a number of things you can give them which don't really help them out often (ie you can give them fire resist 5, run an adventure where they can discover it and be happy about getting it, and then make sure you only have a low number of monsters that primarily use fire... though make sure you let it shine enough that they don't forget they have it).

Other powers (polymorph self, blade barrier, earthquake, mass charm monster) etc are going to be too good to really give them till very high levels, though perhaps if it's a highlander style and many of the encounters they will have will have monsters having similar abilities it will be mitigated. I think, however, that many of these powers lead to very high varience (ie either party wins quickly or it's a TPK in 2 rounds) that I would still be cautious about handing them out until they are on teh verge of attaining diety status.

3. for each other level, give them some spell they can cast 1/day as an innate ability. So for at first level maybe say they can cast shield 1/day. At third they can cast rope trick 1/day. At fifth they can cast tongues 1/day etc. I would aim for more utility spells than offensive spells, as having the ability to cast say, fireball, web, and magic missile each one per day adds up to a very powerful character.

Just my 2cp. There are many possibilities here.

 

[Greybar]

Durandal,

If you have Savage Species then I'd definitely back up random_user here and suggest using those as levels. That should keep your roughly on balance with the rest of the game (CR/ECL/etc). Minor problem being that Savage Species is 3E and not 3.5E.

There were some other Heroic Path concepts out there before Midnight. I'm thinking Green Ronin as the publisher, but I could be wrong.

Are you looking at these powers as elementally tied, or celestial vs. fiend?

On the WotC site there were a number of Template progressions that might be very nice for walking your way up to half-fiend or half-celestial.

Half-Fiend and Wereboar Template Classes

Lich and Weretiger Template Classes

Fiendish and Werebear Template Classes

Half-Dragon and Wererat Template Classes

Vampire and General Rules on Template Classes


Ghost and Werewolf

Transition Classes from template to half-blood