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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pawsplay" data-source="post: 4760467" data-attributes="member: 15538">Magic items are pretty rare. Most PCs won't have any, at least early in their careers. Creating a magic item? A character nearing retirement might, just maybe, discover some of those secrets and retire from the campaign in order to work on the enchantment. Most magic items are relics; the rest are made by NPCs, mostly elves or polymorphed dragons, who specialize in collecting, making, and reselling items. It has the traditional devils and demons, law versus chaos, although the conceptions are Kevin's own. There are soul-sucking runeswords, the mere rumor of which can stir kings and heroes to a frenzy. The main pantheon are the Egyptian deities. Another major influence is the Dragonwright cult, which due to the activities of its evil members has gotten a bad reputation. Technology is solidly 14th - 16th century or so, minus gunpowder. The setting has psionics sprinkled here and there. Ancient empires abound.One adventure I remember has the PCs encounter a powerful elven wizard who is seeking immortality. He has made some headway, at the cost of his sanity. PCs can enter his magic circle if they wish, and have the knowledge to activate it. The results are likely unpleasant, but it's theoretically possible to get a reasonable approximation of ageless immortality. There are some wonderful touches. The Yeeks are pderodactyl like creatures, which happen to be extinct; all that remain are their reanimated bodies, used as steeds by ancient magicians. Shapechanging dragon-men, quasi-demonic Worms of Taut, cold-breathing ice giants, all sorts of goodies. At the same time, you won't be bored running a could of errant knights and a scout tracking down bandits and orcs. My last campaign featured a wolfen longbowman, a kobold shaman, and an elven paladin, hot on the trail of an infernal witch; the unlikely trio stumbled onto a plot that would bring the entire region under the rule of diabolic cultists. Whereas Tolkien is Anglo-Saxon, Palladium tends more toward the overtly gothic. It's decidedly in the swords-and-sorcery genre, in the fashion of the Jack Vance, Poul Anderson, Michael Moorcock, and L. Sprague de Camp. Despite the prevalence of tangible evil, the setting lacks D&D's very literal treatment of alignments. While some things are clearly inimical to humanoid life, there is very little in the way of pure, metaphysical evil, and certainly nothing that can be identified as pure, metaphysical good.</blockquote>

Verification