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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8033788" data-attributes="member: 6704184">I'm more into airships as an emerging technology, but I am also biased against lost technologies in general. But otherwise, I like the idea of travel to the sky islands being limited and hard, and airships being something to aspire to and work for.Love all of that. I have an idea for psuedo-French Eladrin from a place called Capet (after Hugh Capet, the first "King of France", as such).I prefer to keep cultures insular, but have regions and archipelagoes have a decent amount of exchange. As for trade, yeah for sure. No need for the "even without formal authority", since trade didn't rely on such things for most of humanity's existence IRL.Yes! I actually have done this a bit before, and would almost certainly play with this more in such a world.Yeah, you know I might as well reread those books before starting such a campaign. It's been almost 20 years.Lots of stuff here! Nice! Why would the world have never seen soap lather? There is fresh water on islands, for one thing. For another, there are potassium based soaps that do lather in saltwater. I wouldn't go with no metal armor, but I would encourage and engage in heavy reflavoring of armor and weapons in terms of materials.Nope but I'm gonna check it out!Abe Sapien, from Hellboy.I prefer to allow small fishing boats and the like at starting levels, but otherwise yeah, makes sense.That depends on the players, which is why I want a lot of ideas from people other than myself. But! Here are some ideas;<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Dragons returning! True Dragons, Great Dragons, Wyrms, whatever you call them, the terrible beasts of the ancient tales are waking, and the world will tremble in their shadow. These dragons are something more than the metallic and chromatic super-mortals of vanilla dnd. These are more like primordials or titans. Beings so ancient and elemental that a single one can be an entire adventure locale. A standup fight with one is Epic level stuff, but an adventure that starts at level 1 could involve discovering that if the Dragon Atracraxis awakes, the island chain you grew up on will be destroyed, and take you all the way to level 5 as you enter ancient places and discover that they are part of the Dragon's body, and solve the puzzles and find the objects and perform the tasks required to return Atracraxis to her slumber, only to find out that another Dragon from the deep has risen, and now you must go all Shadow of The Colossus on the thing, because you're the only people alive who have explored the body of a living primordial dragon.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Casablanca. Bends the "no empires" parameter, but keep the empires fairly localized and it's fine. You're locals, or adventurers, archeologists, deserters, whatever, and you're in a city poised between two powers, one rising with terrifying speed on the back of a great war machine, the other crumbling after a terrible defeat by the first in the land of it's very capitol.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The princess must escape her homeland to survive, and has stowed away on your ship in order to do so. (Final Fantasy 9 ripoff, basically)</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The Omens speak of your destiny, and a coming storm that you must face. An old god rises, long thought dead, and only those born under a certain sign can defeat him. You must go into the wider world, and find both allies and legendary items, before it's too late.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A conspiracy, itself the legacy of mistakes made by your collective parents, has come home to roost. The spring festival that brings together the people of the entire island chain is interrupted by the agents of this conspiracy, and the children of those targeted need to come together to find out what is going on.</li> </ul>I mean, deep ocean volcanic terrain with rivers of lava or sulfur or mercury, with great heat vents turning the sea into bubbling steam...pretty hellish. Not sure about the Tarrasque, but that sounds like a reworked astral dreadnaught to me! Sounds like an awesome take on The Leviathan. I don't think scattered populations need much explanation. The sea is vast, with an exponentially larger diversity of creatures, both food and predator, than on a landmass. True or not, this could certainly be part of the setting's mythology.Okay, I love dwarves on volcanic islands to the far south, where the lava flows meet the glacial ice.I like this. Definitely not my only take on gnomes for such a setting, but for sure one I like a lot. You and I may have different inclinations wrt silliness in world building. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f923.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":ROFLMAO:" title="ROFL    :ROFLMAO:"  data-smilie="18"data-shortname=":ROFLMAO:" />I'm actually tempted to use Leonid and Tabaxi as Greek and either Roman or Persian influenced cultures, having physically similar people sharing regional waters and having both trade and conflict in the more Mediterranean influenced region.lol I don't love the halflings as blissfully ignorant shirefolk trope, but it is an entertaining thought.My own take on them would probably be to put them in the shores and on Polynesian style catamarans, or something like that. Maybe work out a subrace with a swim speed and the ability to hold breath for much longer than others, but not breath water, and be acclimated to diving deep in the ocean. I can definitely see a really wide variety of cosmetically distinct grung, with skin toxins that are mechanically the same but in world are very distinct, and it might be fun to do the same with gnomes or halflings, as well. Maybe switch out forest gnome cantrips island to island. Also, reflavoring small races in some places as dwarf populations of other peoples could be fun, but has some unfortunate real world tropes attached. This sort of diversity in a (compared to continental peoples) relatively small space is exactly what I want from an islands game. Just like Maui is an important figure from Hawaii to New Zealand, with most of his traits and stories being very similar throughout, you can have hundreds of localized cultures over the span of hundreds of miles who revere and tell stories of The Raven Queen and how she tricked the old god of death into giving her his name and then killed him or commanded him away from the world or other fates varying from island to island, and hid her name where no one could find it so that she could never suffer the same fate.Sure, and you'll have different responses to those tensions. Some will have strict and/or byzantine rules of hospitality, others may be essentially socialist, others may raid outsiders, etc.</blockquote>

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