Including and altering races

[Staglord]

Hi Enwolders

I am about to start a zeitgesit which me and the players are looking very much forward to.

In prep for the campaign I wanted to focus on the aspects of the campaign that differs a lot from the traditional fantasy (timeline etc). To do that i was thinking of adding a mechanical race alla warforged, gearforged etc. Does anyone have experience with this in the zeitgiest campaign or some maybe advice about doing it?

The reason I wanted to include them is since this is a very philosophical adventure path it could be interesting how people would react to a mechanical being whether it had a soul or not. Inspiration for this is I robot, mass effect (the geth) and Prometheus.

I would like to hear your thoughts

 

[hirou]

Personally I would include Warforged as unique experiment by Risuri military, perhaps somehow linked to

Spoiler

Colossus project

, perhaps even disguised as a normal human. It seems to me that warforged as a race are unlikely in this world: Danor lacks needed arcane mastery and the rest of the world lacks the technology to produce such beings. Another possibility is

Spoiler

the experiments of the good doctor von Recklinghausen

, if you've read the adventures 2 and 4. Both options will probably provide the players with some plot leads

 

[RangerWickett]

Later on in the adventure path the industrialist Benedict Pemberton starts trying to sell mass-produced human-sized constructs for construction and combat work. You could easily have a PC be an early production model, perhaps offered to the RHC on a trial basis.

In fact, the whole Pemberton plot line came from the ideas of my players during the playtest. One PC's animal companion was a Pemberton Industries B.E.A.R. (battle enhanced animalistic robot), and another PC used warforged stats to represent a humanoid Pemberton construct. The construct PC actually faked his death on Axis Island and got illusion magic to pretend to be another RHC member who had died, so that he wouldn't remain property of Pemberton.

 

[Staglord]

That sounds like a very good idea. Thanks for the help

cannot waitto play this adventure I really like the story

 

[Bruize]

I've used other races not usually found in this campaign as well. We've had numerous Shifters, Changelings, and of course lots of humans and dwarves. One of my players wanted to play a Hamadryad at the start and I made him roll human and as the game progressed, the character slowly reverted into a Hamadryad (my side plotline of a blood witch that experiments on living things has been tied to so many plotlines it is like she was part of the module....she even "trained" under a resident of odim island from Always on Time).

I think the key is to find a way to make that race work for your version of the campaign and to put your own unique spin on things. I remember reading about the B.E.A.R unit and thought that was really clever. Our own technologist built a spider simulacrum and called it Clack.