johnsemlak said:
Actually, I don't think any of those points except #1 aren't really dictated by the fact that the apocolypse happened only 150 years ago. In fact, if the apocolypse happened 1000+ years ago, I think it's easier to attach a mysterious feel to pre-apocalypes artifacts and history.
Ahh. And this is where we disagree. (Night may be bailing out on this one but I think I smell a winner). What makes for a better mystery story of the following two?
1. Your grandmother and grandfather left her parents during a great uphealval. You have had no word of what happened to the family members who they left behind.
Until recently the Blood Monsoon (kicked up as a result of the divine war) rendered the passes back to your family's home to trecherous for travel. You return to their village, the first person to have set foot in it for over a hundred years and discover the village lies abandoned, as if everyone in it just disappeared one day. (or it is filled only with young children, or the village seems completely normal, or...)
2. You read in an old book that someone so many generations removed from you that you can't be sure you are even related lived in a village where everyone disappeared.
For some reason you decide to look into the matter and travel to the village, which has seen 2 different empires and now less than six city states claim it, was breifly ruled by orcs and was deserted for two hundred years.
There is a great mystery here but for some reason (that the DM has to fabricate) despite years and years having passed nobody else has ever managed to discover the secret/find the treasure/beat the flumph/etc.
The Divine war
2. allows there to be ancient mysteries that the characters just stumble across by accident
Allows there to be great mysteries which were hidden for ages and recently allowed access to by the catclysmic changes that have occured.
Can you do the "a recent earthquake opened a long lost ruin"? Yes but it requires suspention of disbelief. You can litterally make a game of a bunch of ruins which were exposed when Kaduum rampaged accross the contient. You don't have to do that of course but it saves the DM a lot of twisting and turning to try to justify why this maze that a bunch of 4th level characters can navigate has never been breached/solved by anyone else since ancient millinia. You can also use the:
the (effectively epic-level) guardians were savagely attacked by a god's avatar during the war and weaked enough that a weaker group of people could gain access
lots of other stuff I have more points so I'll cut this short.
3. lets PCs be important
In Greyhawk (only bringing it up because johnsemlak did) there have been 1000 years of heroes and warriors. You can wave your wand and make the PCs important ("you are the CHOOSEN ONES" kinda stuff). I don't mind that but I like having other choices. I prefer: "you're the first knight of madriel to have entered Hollowfaust". The PC doesn't get anything from it, but they can be important naturally, without having to be super-high level or really weird. The fact that Hollowfaust and just about every other civilized place has only been around for about 150 years makes this reasonable.
4. lets there be terrible secrets that people don't know about
There are two prongs here a. 1000 years is a long time to have to figure things out (especially if the PCs are going to figure it out in about 4 weeks of game time) b. time was broken during the Divine war and scrying Divine war events is impossible. So its possible an entire city was destroyed by a tratorious man who lives on using some weak form of life preserving magic (though he's very old). And nobody can scry to easily figure out. Research records are jsut being recovered and there hasn't been enough time for scholarship to be done (until a PC gets involved).
5. gives the DM the chance to change things in game reasonably in a short period of time. The hegemony hasn't been around so long that it would be weird for it to fall apart if someone wanted to.
I admit this is a flavor thing & I'm going to do something kinda tacky but I think its hard to make my point any other way.
In the FRCS it says that Cormyr was ruled justy for a 1000 years. Then one day the whole kingdom is on the verge of collapse (I realize a novel was involved and it wasn't a decision made by the RD folks at Wizards).
The recent god changes in FR also suffice to make a point: for who-knows-how-long there were a bunch of gods of darkness and death. Then over the period of about 15 years the gods have changed seats, positions, etc. so often I don't even know who's the god of death or disease anymore.
Given that roleplaying games love having gods rise and fall and all the rest of that the Divine war and the recent shake-ups make it possible to have a few recently dead gods, a bunch of gods with new rules and maybe even a god who was thought dead return without having so much contradiction.
6. explains why magic items aren't traded like baseball cards in every major city (undeveloped economies/trade)
Uhhh.
Not really sure how to say this but last time I checked you could buy magic items in stores in Living Greyhawk. Now I'm not saying that's bad or good (one of my players doesn't get this part of SL and wanders around Hollowfaust, at least 4 times so far, trying to buy magic stuff. It doesn't matter how much I explain. For a while I thought he was going to get a tattoo but he's got a low con)
You -can- do a similar thing in any world. But a recent divine war (and the number of cursed magic items created by Mesos' destruction and the rest of the the titans warped taints) easily explains why you can wander in to an old ruin and find a perfectly useful magical sword that no-one will pay you much for.
7. may allow for some interesting religious developements.
This was my allusion to the creation of a polytheistic church post divine war. I'm already quitely setting the seeds in my game with a rogue geomancer. I may do a prophesy from the future suggesting that 300 years from now the church will become a force for darkness and asking the players to kill this perfectly nice guy who is starting the church.
Obviously "interesting religious developements" is vague to the point of being useless....
johnsemlak said:
In other words, most of the points you mention above are also true in greyhawk, for example.
I'm not bagging GH or FR or any other setting. I do think the Divine war is a big difference. It has lots of ramifications on game play, especially the sorts of games I like to run (as enumerated above).
johnsemlak said:
I think the key is haviing a campaign setting with a sense of a greater age before it, a 'golden age' if you will, which was more civilized and richer than the present age. But this glory age should be shrouded in mystery.
(sorry I can't think of serious way to take this comment)
;] I don't remember saying that SL's golden age was the Divine war...
In point of fact it was probably the single worst period of time to live in in Scarn's history.
SL has lots of golden eras in bygone times (some so bygone that nobody remembers them at all).
Roderick said:
BTW Here is a map of Mithril I`ve found on the website of a french magazine. It`s in colour, and they fixed the problem with the missing entry-numbers of the original map.
http://www.hexagonal.net/d20/img/mithril.jpg
This was bad-ass btw. I remember somebody posting about it on the sl mailing list but I couldn't download it....
(or was that a better version of the Calastia map?)
Anyone know why the French are so more on top of it that us yanks?
)... 
Anyway I do think you'll find that the "greater or golden age" Pre-divine war was relative BUT it was a golden age in that LOTS of empires and great magics were more readily available then. 
