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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1873619" data-attributes="member: 812">1. adventurers as a separate class of peopleAnyone on Barsoom who goes running around with the notion of "adventuring" doesn't live long enough to form a class of any kind. My PCs are just trying to stay alive. Barsoom is a bad place, and it doesn't give you many chances. And it's out to get you.2. PCs as exceptional charactersWell, kind of, but pretty much EVERYONE on Barsoom is exceptional. Everyone the party meets, anyway. They're forever running into preternaturally skilled swordsmen, sorceresses who can destroy half the world, ancient grim-faced warriors out to exterminate their racial foes...Hey, the wilderness includes DINOSAURS. All the first-level clowns got eaten a long time ago.3. clear distinction between PCs and monstersEm, one of the PCs is a savage undead shapechanging werebeast who must drink human souls on a regular basis. So, no, not a BIG distinction.There are no goblinoid or bad-guy humanoid races on Barsoom, at any rate. There are yak head guys and an ancient race of draconic wizards who used to "ranch" humans, but neither are very common.4. arcane/divine magic divideNope. There's Sorcery, which involves drawing on the foul forces of the Shadow Realm, or there's Psionics/Spirit Magic, which calls upon the unpredictable powers of the Dream Worlds.Gods on Barsoom are just people who got so stupidly powerful they couldn't reasonably be called "human" anymore. They certainly don't grant spells.5. PCs organized into a cooperative party structureWell, they hang out together and they know their chances of survival are marginally better if they stick together. If only because that gives me more targets to choose from.6. medieval European setting (well, a more hygenic version, anyway)Imperial Rome next to Burgundian France across from early-Islam North Africa near Renaissance Italy (recast as Spain) south of pre-Columbian Central Plains with Celtic Ireland, pre-Moslem India, and Czarist Russia. Oh, and Tang-era China and Tokugawa Japan.With dinosaurs, steam engines, flintlock pistols and flying ironclads.7. race = cultureEverybody's human.8. epic or heroic plot scaleDid I mention the sorceresses who can destroy half the world? The gods (who are invariably insane and bent on mass destruction)? The three-thousand-year-old undead warriors devoted to exterminating an entire race? 9. cash economy based on gpDon't really worry about that. The PCs have FAR bigger worries than what they can afford, and usually when they're in a town they're staying on somebody else's nickel. Any gear they want they can have, pretty much.10. universal languagesNo sir. It's always a scramble to figure out who can understand what NPC Bob just said.11. alignment = personalityNo alignment. No personality.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />12. universal pantheonSee above on gods. They're bad.14. cosmopolitan cultural relationsPretty much. There's a couple of more xenophobic cultures but by and large Barsoom is pretty cosmopolitan. It's not an untracked wilderness or anything like that.</blockquote>

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