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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gez" data-source="post: 424893" data-attributes="member: 1328">All these exist, of course, IMC.Actually, the campaign world is a quite little continent (a bit smaller than Australia, with no other continents or major islands in the known world). When you have humans and halflings and elves and dwarves and goblins and orcs and giants and gnomes and kobolds and gnolls and lots of other things, it's quite cramped. This make it a place of conflict and evergoing war.Dwarves rules nearly all mountains; and a fascist elven empire rule nearly all the rest. In that empire, if you're not an elf (imperial citizen) or a dwarf (citizen of the dwarven confederation), you're a slave and your life has no worth.In the north-east, there is the sentient city of Kaztengarken, the evergrowing citadel. Kaztengarken wants only one thing: to spread over the whole world. To further "her" ends, "she" mutated a tribe of orcs, whose minds where reshapped in a more useful (to "her") way. These LE überorcs now have the sacred duty of raiding and pillaging for slaves, food, and other resources so that Kaztengarken could grow ever bigger, ever stronger. Some of these orcs are in constant mental communication with the City, and can use a portion of her deific power, making them psions or psychic warriors. Mind-control is heavily used on new slave to coerce them more efficiently, but breaking a mind is easier when the body is attacked also; so torture and rape are very common also. The Kazten orcs raid other orc tribes (classical CE orcs) to subjugate them into becoming battlefodders, and raid imperial settlements for working slaves.Male slaves are set to work, mining, building, and so on, while female slaves are put in military brothels, where they help keeping the CE orcs in check and provide with future half-orc troopers.Old or wounded slaves are sacrificed, then their bones are used as construction materials for the City and their flesh is used to feed wardogs, soldiers, and other slaves.In the empire, the nobility (self--called high elves) frequently abuse their human and halfling servants, in more ways than one. Those who have the pretention of keeping a touch of the wildness of elves enjoy making hunts, releasing several slaves and prisonners in their domain before chasing them with dogs, mounts, and bows. While ugly slaves, like kobold and goblins (who are not even allowed to live outside of factories and slave parks, contrarily to humans and halflings) are just fed to the dogs once caught, no hunt is complete without a female human or halfling to catch and rape (before feeding her to the dogs). Always very young, because elves, lacking body hair, don't like body hair. And also because they're perverse cowards.In the dwarven confederation, things are much, much better for everyone. Dwarves are LG. No slavery, no rape, no murder or torture. Stern and boring, heavily militaristic albeit good-heartedly (good-hearted militarism... That's a fantasy world, no doubt !). In fact, the dwarven confederation, like the hidden gnome towns, are off-topic.Finally, there's two small independant human nations. One "democracy" (as much democratic as ancient Greece,  that is: voting is expensively taxed, so only the upper class can vote) and one oligarchy (ruled by a bunch of mafious families that works together only because of the high importance given to things like Honor, Prestige, Panache and the Face). In both of them, rape and murder is a crime, and slavery is not legaly recognized. The fact that slavery is not recognized don't means it is inexistant or even simply illegal; just that there's no laws whatsoever related to that (so a slaver can't complain if his "cattle" has been stolen by someone else, and there's no legal penalties for an escaped slave). However, if slavery is forgotten by the laws, something very close exist in the oligarchic state: most crimes are punished by having the guilty work for the wronged party until he repays wholly his "debt of atonement". Needless to say they're rarely paid enough for their forced work to ever be able to pay this debt totally...Finally, there's nothing special about madness. Insanity exist, and it sometime explains some villain's behavior; but otherwise... NOthing special, really.That's for the setting. Now, for how all this affect the PCs...Madness: Mad PCs are totally the domain of the players. It's not CoC, I don't enforce insanity on the PCs. If a player think his/her PC has been so traumatized by something the character is becoming mad; that's up to him/her.Rape: None of the actual PCs would rape anyone, I think (two lawful goods, including one paladin, one deceased chaotic good, and one chaotic neutral with rather good tendancies; who'd rather steal something than rape). Raped PCs is not something impossible, but rather improbable. I will not try to get the scenario into that direction; however if, because of some tactical stupidities, a PC end up captured by amoral bullies, that PC is going to suffer all sort of nastiness before being executed. I would not describe it longly, however.(Actually, two PCs got captured once by an ogremage's minions, but it was not in that ogre's behavior to rape and torture physically -- I planned him to be somewhat civil, and to be someone the PCs would meet and discuss with, but they didn't behaved like I thought. So, the captured PCs ended up in jail, underfeed, and the ogre used angst and boredom to try to make them speak about some topics of interest to him, all the while posing as a cultivated, reasonnable host, with whom it would be much better to discuss freely before a glass of fine wine than in the dankness of a cave. Eventually, however, one of the PCs ended up in the ogremage's dish for her refusal to cooperate and a failed escape attempt.)Slavery: Normally, none of the PCs should be interested in having slaves. They actually have freed slaves, to the contrary (notably the goblin and kobold slaves of the aforementionned ogremage, freed to help the rescue and escape operation). Like for rape, I don't think the PCs would end up enslaved; except if they behave stupidly when the danger exist (like, if they want to make some tourism in Kaztengarken or if they try to meet an illithid loremaster, or something silly like that). In such a case, I would not pull my punches, and it would be up to them to successfully escape or die trying (thus screwing the campaign, probably).War: There's ongoing wars and cold wars everywhere. The PCs have a quest (finding the mythic Ark of Lymbo, where they could throw a cursed artifact they carry to destroy it once and for all), and they will probably avoid getting engaged in one of these struggle as long as they have that mission to fulfill. But they'll come across razed cities, might see battlefields from a distance, and might encounter scouts from one army or another. They may be taken for spies, or requisitionned and asked to perform some missions. That's mainly depends on their choice of itinerary, and their success (or lack thereof) at stealthiness.</blockquote>

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