Stormborn said:
PS Cardinal, your campaign setting sounds great. Willing to share more info with us? In another post or elsewhere?
I'm glad you like it, but since I'm not convinced that this requires a whole new thread:
Rains of Mana
It's 1702. 20 years ago a great comet appeared (Halley
will not publish his theory on this one until 1705) in
the skies - and the world changed: Maybe some ritual
worked better than planned (i.e. at all), maybe the
comet brought *something* with it, maybe someone
*failed* to perform an important ritual...
Whatever it was, it caused the level of mana, of magical energies,
on Earth to rise exponentially - with a devastating
side-effect: the enormous amounts of additional energy
flowing around the planet caused an enormous rise in
global temperatures, a kind of magical hothouse
effect. And that was not all.
While storms and floods drowned millions of people,
things - and people - *changed*: vulcanic and
earthquake activities rose to unknown proportions,
humans woke up one morning to learn that they had
turned into strange fairy creatures (dwarfs, elfs,
centaurs, trolls, ghouls, etc.), or that their petty
curses *worked*! In more exotic or remote areas of the
world whole cities, tribes, or nations, even seemed to
change *retroactively*, remembering a past of magic
and monsters that never happened (?), and in other
places men soon learned that some things and objects
of legend or fame suddenly had *real* powers...
Now, 20 years later, the age of piracy is still on the
rise: with London drowned, Spain is again a great (if
decadent) power, the death of the Netherlands created
thousands of dutch pirates, faraway China (or what the
floods have left of it) is haunted by ghosts and
strange monsters and has fallen into a permanent state
of civil war, jungles and forests have grown with
supernatural speed all over the globe, but the deserts
of the world are even more hot and deadly than before,
large sections of the Alps are controlled by fiercely
independent dwarfs, ghouls stalk the graveyards of
Algier and Alexandria, inner Asia now has bloodthirsty
tribes of centaurs, and the red indians of North
America now share the plains and forests with a
strange but hardy breed of humanoids commonly called "orcs"...
System: GURPS, especially Swashbucklers, Magic Items
1-3, Fantasy Folk, Undead and Myth; advanced combat
system, martial fencing rules; knack magic and magery are
available to PCs
PCs: 200 pts. and up to 45 pts. from disadvantages
- most people are still human, but you
may also pick any fantasy race you want
Map: a global map showing Earth after the 1682 reality quake (i.e. without the polar icecaps and about 80 meters higher sealevels) can be found here
http://flatplanet.sourceforge.net/maps/images/earthicefree.jpg
On a smaller scale, however, this map is not altogether accurate for the setting since the rise in volcanic activities combined with local reality quake effects created lots of new islands...
