More campaign ruminations...

[Mouseferatu]

So since I still may (or may not) be in the mood to run something in the near future, I've been giving some idle thought to campaign ideas. And what keeps bubbling to the forefront of what's left of my brain is to use the upcoming 4e Dark Sun setting as a baseline to build a campaign world that is actually Earth near the end of the universe's life span, a la Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique Cycle. But, uh, more desert/Barsoom-ish, as befits Dark Sun. The assumption being that, as the universe enters its dotage, the laws of physics have begun to fray and unravel just a bit, allowing for the appearance (return?) of magic.

So we'd still have a few scattered major city-states--ruled by Sorcerer Kings, as per the DS setting--but that are made up of a combination of medieval-style stonework and the last lingering, broken ruins of the steel-and-glass metropolises of the age of science.

What I haven't yet decided is

A) whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper, and

B) what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about. But I really like the basic idea...

 

[ppaladin123]

How much longer does the universe have and what sort of death is it? Heat-death? Or does the universe oscillate (collapse and re-big bang)?

One idea: In the latter case you might borrow a page out of Gallactus's origins in the Marvel universe. The previous universe collapsed into a singularity but before this happened, the consciousness of the dying universe merged with the final surviving life form (a space explorer who piloted his ship right into the collapse). They formed a new being that survived the destruction of the universe and emerged in the newly created universe with all the memories and knowledge of all the previous peoples.

The "gods" and/or those powerful mortal practitioners of magic may be searching for ways to survive the death of the universe and ensure their presence in whatever new creation emerges in the aftermath. Gallactus did it in a "cosmic egg." Perhaps a similar vessel or demi-plane or whatever could be constructed to weather the end times...something like a cosmic arc. It would be vital to collect the aggregate knowledge, history and culture of the world to carry it on. Different entities would have different ideas about who and what should/should not be a part of the new creation. Imagine if the gods of avarice and murder did not survive the cataclysm to taint the new world. Imagine if the gods of justice and life did not instead.

This may have happened innumerable times before...the current "gods" are beings (possibly originally mortals) who weathered previous collapses. The divine power source is, "the power cosmic," an energy harnessed from their mastery of space/time that they share with their minions. The individual gods may or may not have any intention of sharing salvation with their followers. Some motivate with empty promises. It remains to be seen who will survive this time. New "gods" and their followers (angels?) may emerge. Old gods may die. Some followers may survive by merging their consciousnesses with their "god" to create a new gestalt entity.


(Or...if you want an odd spin....how about the gods and denizens of this dying world invade the far realm (a parallel universe) to escape their fate and find a new home. I like the idea of reversing the typical invasion. The aboleths and mindflayers and other abominations would of course view us as horrifying invaders. )

 

[Steel_Wind]

I like the general idea, but seems to me what the setting REALLY needs is a complete set of psionic powers as the Tiger in your Tank. Psionics in that setting as the source of "strange power" I can buy. Magic? Uhm. No. Not so much.

Blame evolution. It's not as if there hasn't been time.

There will also be significant continental drift by that time as well. You can take significant liberties with the map.

There is a real physics based, actually doable, solution to move the Earth to an orbit further out from the sun so that it is not consumed by the Sun when it shifts to its Red Phase. It does not require unobtanium or warp drive - it uses an asteroid in the correct orbit pulling the earth gradually further away from the sun as it is expanding to its Red phase.

Sure - it takes millions of years to accomplish, but again, you have the time.

 

[JoeGKushner]

Jack Vance Dying Sun no?

 

[.5 Elf]

Stephen King - The Dark Tower - probably rich for ideas that might spur further creativity.

 

[I'm A Banana]

whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper

I'd do one of two things.

The first is to just keep it out. The gods are long dead. There is no one out there to save you. The most powerful things are evil Sorcerer-Kings. This keeps the hopelessness and struggle of Dark Sun pretty intact.

The second is to use an apocalyptic pantheon, like the Norse, or the Mayan, Aztec, or Incan. Ragnarok and the bak'tun cycles are ripe for use on a dying world, and I think if you go with the Meso/South American stuff, it will jibe with Dark Sun weirdness very well. Blood sacrifices and hummingbird war-gods and feathered dragons are very evocative (though, honestly, I'm a bit partial to that whole mythscape ). I'd even be a little tempted to use the Book of Revelations from the Bible or the Qur'an's apocalyptic entires, but I'm a dork about that stuff.

what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about.

Well, since you're already playing around with the idea of a "return of the gods," I might make it about that. Sacrifice, worship, and potential salvation at the End of Days.

The Left-Handed Hummingbird drinks our blood to fight the darkness. We know that some day, he will fail.

Our city was carved from the dry sands and steel bones of our giant ancestors who lived in the sky. It was beset upon by wilderness, and sorcerers, and death. It is still being carved, still being flayed from the flesh of the armies of our enemies, their blood staining the sands as dark red as the sun. Ours does too. The Left-Handed Hummingbird is our immortal king, and without our blood, he will die.

We give him our blood because he returns to us an unseen power. This is not the dark magic of sorcery. This is not the mental tricks of oracles and enchanters. This is not the brutality of the hermits of the wilderness, or the simple actions of soldiers. We call it the True Power, and we call it Sacred. In our Lord's name, we heal our soldiers {Clerics}. With our Lord's image, we protect and destroy {Runepriest}. Our Lord has assassins {Avengers} and soldiers {Paladins} who make war in his name. Through our Lord's words, we shape the world {Invoker}.

We give him blood, and he gives us unheard of power. Without the blood, he will die. When he does, we will eat his flesh, and become Lords ourselves.

So, through sacrifice of some sort, the divine power source is being unlocked, creating gods out of lords out of mortals.

And this is where the PC's come in.

They may be characters in service to one of these "lords." Or they may be from a traditional city-state, perhaps even agents of a jealous Sorcerer-King. Or they might even be looking to become "lords" themselves, puzzling out the mystery of where this power is coming from, and how to give their own followers this.

The secret that they should discover, by the end of the campaign, is that this relates to the End Times that are near. Those whose souls are dedicated to a Lord might find life after the End of the World, in an Afterlife, something no one has ever heard of before. Perhaps in the sand-filled, steel-barred ruins of the Ancients, they find a Codex relating to the End of Days (perhaps they stumble on a ruined museum, or even a destroyed chapel with a Bible inside).

Their enemies include sorcerer-kings trying to quash this new source of power, and rival lords, and, of course, the horrible creatures of the wastes themselves, where the clues to this ancient secret lie buried.

This means that their final adventures will be a central question: with this knowledge, do they try to save the people of the world? And are they willing to be the cause of sacrifice, if it means giving people an Afterlife? Which ones get Saved? And how?

They may have the capacity to become gods themselves (or to advance the cause of their own god), but this should be a bit of a moral dilemma for them, a question that is reflected in the world. Everything is going to die some day soon. Do you let nature take its course, or do you let people harm themselves through fasting, through human sacrifice, through various abstinences, in order to have a shot at an Afterlife that even you (even as a god) are not entirely sure of the nature of?

You can bring hope to a hopeless world. You can give people a reason to live. You can save souls. You can become a god yourself.

 

[Ainamacar]

Given a universe expanding at an ever-increasing rate, our best current understanding, I think it would be kind of fun to imagine the world as the stars and galaxies disappear from view. (The edge of the observable universe is shrinking, since past a certain distance light omitted from objects cannot ever reach the Earth, even given an infinite interval of time. Current observations suggest that in about 2 trillion years nothing past the local supercluster will be observable.) All knowledge of the former cosmology becomes a matter of faith, even if the old knowledge were preserved, since they are no longer observable even in principle. Naturally, this would occur long after the Sun went out, but if the setting is "post sci-fi" then maybe the ancient inhabitants of Earth found a way to extend its life well beyond its normal span, or just made a series of additional suns.

I actually thought this might be a good setting for a sci-fi story. Earth has colonized distant worlds, but in the far future these start to be irreversibly lost from each other, until even "Mother Earth" and the colonized worlds becomes a myth. "Do not go gentle into that good night." If a little magic is introduced, maybe some visitors from these lost worlds come, creatures as if from another dimension.

Although, probably someone has already done this. I just don't read enough sci fi.

 

[Mouseferatu]

The second is to use an apocalyptic pantheon, like the Norse, or the Mayan, Aztec, or Incan. Ragnarok and the bak'tun cycles are ripe for use on a dying world, and I think if you go with the Meso/South American stuff, it will jibe with Dark Sun weirdness very well. Blood sacrifices and hummingbird war-gods and feathered dragons are very evocative (though, honestly, I'm a bit partial to that whole mythscape ). I'd even be a little tempted to use the Book of Revelations from the Bible or the Qur'an's apocalyptic entires, but I'm a dork about that stuff.

It's funny you should mention this. One of the things I was thinking about after I posted was using some of the trappings of Revelations at the end times, just because I'm fond of the imagery. (I love the idea of the PCs encountering the Four Horsemen throughout the campaign--and not in the form of old men wearing magic rings, either. *)

Though I hadn't thought about mixing Apocalypse imagery from different cultures; I love that idea.

I'm thinking--again, based on a mix of my own ideas and some excellent suggestions--that I will allow the divine power source, but it's something that the sorcerer-kings are trying to keep secret and stamp out. In fact, I'm thinking that they refer to themselves as God-Kings in this setting, and that most of the population believes them to be actual deities.

*This is a reference to Supernatural, for those who don't watch the show. I loved the idea of them involving the Horsemen, but I thought they really dropped the ball on the execution. Whose idea was it to give the Horsemen magic rings in which all their power was stored? They were like Satan's Green Lantern Corps...

 

[Psion]

So since I still may (or may not) be in the mood to run something in the near future, I've been giving some idle thought to campaign ideas. And what keeps bubbling to the forefront of what's left of my brain is to use the upcoming 4e Dark Sun setting as a baseline to build a campaign world that is actually Earth near the end of the universe's life span, a la Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique Cycle. But, uh, more desert/Barsoom-ish, as befits Dark Sun. The assumption being that, as the universe enters its dotage, the laws of physics have begun to fray and unravel just a bit, allowing for the appearance (return?) of magic.

So we'd still have a few scattered major city-states--ruled by Sorcerer Kings, as per the DS setting--but that are made up of a combination of medieval-style stonework and the last lingering, broken ruins of the steel-and-glass metropolises of the age of science.

Well, I'm not channeling any Dark Sun, but I recently created a mini-setting called Twilight Dominion for the purposes of one-shots that was inspired by Zothique and The Dying Earth, though leaning towards Conan-like sword & sorcery and borrowing from some other Sword & Sorcery resources (like clips from Heavy Metal and old schlock Sword & Sorcery flicks). It had scattered city states run by corrupt nobles, fearsome necromancers, and bargains with otherworldly creatures.

There's also another solar system crashing through ours, causing havoc. But the race of lizard-folk sorcerers who inhabit a world circling the alien system is getting the worst of it, and they are making desperate escapes to Earth.

What I haven't yet decided is

A) whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper, and

Can't offer any suggestion there, as Dark Sun isn't my inspiration and 4e is not my system of choice. That's really up to you.

In my case though, I allow Divine Magic, but there are no good and pure gods; the best of the lot are largely neutral (like the machine-gods) or insane. There are many dark forces to make pacts with, a la Zothique. Though this jives better thematically with the Zothique feel using Fantasy Craft than I imagine it would with the 4e Divine power system.

B) what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about. But I really like the basic idea...

In my case, I dipped into the Sword & Sorcery roots of Zothique. What it's generally about is personal goals against the backdrop of a savage world. My inaugural adventure was a group of prisoners with a vendetta against a queen (and one who actually killed her), determined to prevent her resurrection as an undead creature (what Zothique would call a Lamia).

 

[Klaus]

So since I still may (or may not) be in the mood to run something in the near future, I've been giving some idle thought to campaign ideas. And what keeps bubbling to the forefront of what's left of my brain is to use the upcoming 4e Dark Sun setting as a baseline to build a campaign world that is actually Earth near the end of the universe's life span, a la Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique Cycle. But, uh, more desert/Barsoom-ish, as befits Dark Sun. The assumption being that, as the universe enters its dotage, the laws of physics have begun to fray and unravel just a bit, allowing for the appearance (return?) of magic.

So we'd still have a few scattered major city-states--ruled by Sorcerer Kings, as per the DS setting--but that are made up of a combination of medieval-style stonework and the last lingering, broken ruins of the steel-and-glass metropolises of the age of science.

What I haven't yet decided is

A) whether to go ahead and allow the divine power source, assuming that the old gods of Earth mythology returned with the return of magic, or to keep them away as with Dark Sun proper, and

B) what the hell the campaign itself will actually entail/be about. But I really like the basic idea...

Demon dogs!