Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Azlan" data-source="post: 1353946" data-attributes="member: 2340">I'm creating a campaign world that is an alternate Earth, during the medieval/Renaissance times. Magic will exist in this world, but it will be less common than in typical high fantasy worlds such as the Forgotten Realms. This world will be historically accurate, though not strictly so, for much of myth, legends, and folklore will be made reality.Now, ideas, suggestions, and rules for low-magic worlds have already been discussed in other threads, so there's no need for us to discuss that here. What I am asking for, here, is ideas and rules for something else altogether.First, for this world, players will not be able to choose from the standard D&D races, i.e. elves, half-elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes. Instead, all player characters will be human. (I may sometimes allow a player character who's human with fae blood, but that will be at least +1 ECL, and those player characters will be the exception, not the norm.) What players will be able to choose from is the initial culture of their characters, which will give ability adjustments, favored classes, languages, and so forth, in the same vein as those given in the PH for races. These cultures will include:  urban commoner  country commoner  barbarian  merchant/guild family  monkish/religious order  low nobility (but not high nobility -- that's strictly for NPCs)Question #1: Is this list of cultures all-enclusive, offering an ideal amount of variation that is historically accurate (with legend and fiction allowed for), while still being generic and minimal, as is the list of races in the D&D 3.5 PH?Question #2: Given this list of cultures, what would you assign to them, i.e. what ability adjustments, favored classes, languages, free skills/feats, etc.? Above all, the cultures should be pretty much balanced with one another, just as the races are in the PH. Then again, perhaps certain cultures (particularly low noblity) should be +1 ECL, considering what all they give to a character?Next up, I want to compile a list of languages that characters can speak. Again, I want a list that is all-enclusive and historical, while still being as generic and minimal as possible. For example, do I really need for Spanish and Portugese to be two, separate languages? (I dunno... do I? I know not enough about languages to know.)So, question #3: What should be the list of languages, given the medieval/Renaissance setting, which includes all of Europe? And what should be added to that list if the following countries are (optionally) included in the campaign: northern Africa, all of the Middle East (including India), and the more prominent parts of Asia?Question #4: If I decide to make language skills more realistic, making characters need more than 1 rank to know how to fully speak and write a different language, then what languages on the list should be related enough to where, if you have at least 5 ranks with one, you get a +2 synergy bonus with the other?</blockquote>

Verification