Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ssampier" data-source="post: 5199783" data-attributes="member: 10205">Psychotic Jim, excellent questions thank you.I'll address them by each point.I think the fantasy Rome takes an ambivalent stance to adventurers. Sure adventurers cause trouble much of the time, but adventurers are helpful to unload some of the burden of administrating a large empire.My fantasy Rome has a LN alignment, so lots of forms and red-tape for adventurers. Of course this depends on the current Hesar or emperor. Excellent question. This is ripped straight out of Monte Cook's playbook. Ptolus has one church, the Lothian Church (gnostic Christianity) and many churches. I simplified and said most people belong to Church of Lothian or the Honored Seven.In my timeline in my head, the Vikings raided in 800 CE/AD or thereabouts; long after the empire fell. My Vikings are Dwarves. Now dwarves always existed before, but never in  these numbers. I just kept the Roman army alive and well for them to fight back the dwarven army. Eventually, they both grew tired of this and let the human Nordic (called Jords) settle in Northern England. The Jords simply have to pay a tax and swear fealty to the Emperor. Jords and dwarves are okay with this, as long as they can worship their own gods. Rome (Toran) doesn't care, as long as it gets it coin.The justification for this is to establish a different pantheon to conflict with Lothian. The Honored Seven are really influential in the Empire; mostly because it's something new -- a Renaissance of religious ideas, if you will.In Ptolus book, Lothianism has been around for a long time, longer than the current empire. Obviously there are faiths that have been around longer than the Empire, the most notable is the Elven belief in a dualism. The elves have two important gods: the Good God and the Evil God. Most elves today are somewhat stoic after surviving persecution and pay lip service to whatever god you want them to worship. They build fire temples mostly to provide a place for meditation and to meet other elves.Yes, absolutely. I have been re-reading the Eberron 3.5 book again. In Eberron they have planes that have orbits, wax and wane. What if I took that same concept and applied that to real planets?Basically I could have 7 planets named after the Honored Seven. I could assign characteristics to each planet, such as appearance and general structure, such "green forest/fey planet", "dark dismal death planet". Then when the planet comes close in orbit to "Earth", there are certain effects; the Eberron 3.5 book mostly hand waves this to DM fiat.To me the planetary system makes more sense than planes since in the Call of Cthulhu book monsters  regularly jaunt to other planets. In Ptolus other planar travel is off limits as well. So the planetary cosmos sorta fits my <s>theft of ideas</s> inspiration.Further, for extra kicks, I could add like the <a href="http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/retrograde/aristotle.html" target="_blank">Sphere of Prime Mover</a> as the outer ring of orbit where the gods' power reside. I prefer to keep this hidden; I am liking the non invasive god model.</blockquote>

Verification