Stargate Thingy.

[HeavenShallBurn]

That doesn't work. Haven't you been watching Stargate: Atlantis? The Wraiths' gate is orbiting the planet.

Nope, stopped watching SG-1 after about five seasons except when I caught it by accident. After I caught the first few minutes of the Atlantis premier I decided it was even worse than SG-1 had become and not worth the time.

Should have expected something like that to be done though. Sure gravity can reach through the Gate but it stops atmosphere from escaping, pretty pathetic IMHO but eh no big deal. The series kind of went in a different direction than I prefer anyway.

 

[Sir Elton]

Seems odd to have paladins and rangers but not clerics and druids. Are the divine magics suppresed somehow?

No. But the clerics aren't really needed given their roles as Missionaries, teachers, or administrators of their various religions. If a cleric is going to be on the team, it would add a complication to the campaign I don't want to think about; which is proselytizing. This is Earth, which means that the campaign will deal with real religions (Catholicism, Taoism, Hinduism, Restoration Christianity [LDS and others], etc.). I don't want to put anyone on the spot, and I don't want to deal with a bogus religion.

And . . . I have this thing against druids. Sure, D20 Advanced Magic makes them pretty strong by making it capable for all spellcasters to cast spells with nary a thought, so druids can cast spells while in animal form without the Natural Spell feat. But what rubs me the wrong way is that they can shapechange and cast spells.

They are either spellcasters or shapechangers, not both in my way of thinking. So, Clerics and Druids don't make good PCs. They make great NPCs for this type of campaign, like a brotherhood of monks going to Oerth to spread the Good Word; but really bad PCs. I can never really tell who I'm going to get as players since it is an online campaign and the scenario is terrible to think about. So I'd rather leave the priests and druids out if you don't mind.

Chakra healers make a better replacement for this type of a campaign. They are essientially psions trained to use their power to heal the body.

 

[Sir Elton]

Okay, writing first adventure.

 

[BlackMoria]

I use the Stargate concept in my FR campaign.

The Imaskari were the original gate builders who built the gate network to facilitate their extraplanar / transspace exploration and raiding. Canon in FR states that the Imaskari conquered entire peoples and transplanted them to Faerun.

My spin is that the Imaskari ran into a foe even they could not defeat and they buried their gate end and didn't have time to disable the gate network.

Fast forward several thousand years. The party has discovered the Imaskari ruins of the capital in the Rauvin desert and are exploring it. They find a strange very large hoop of a unknown metal that looks like it has been deliberately buried...

Currently in my campaign world, the gate has been unearthed and they are trying to figure out how it works (as a precaution, the Imaskari removed the rare earth crystal matrix that helps control the functioning of the gate). That was last campaign and they didn't get it working, getting distracted by other issues. However, word of the discovery somehow leaked out and the gate will resurface as a plot point at some point in the current campaign.

 

[Sir Elton]

That sounds very cool, Black Moria.

 

[WhatGravitas]

I use the Stargate concept in my FR campaign.

The Imaskari were the original gate builders who built the gate network to facilitate their extraplanar / transspace exploration and raiding. Canon in FR states that the Imaskari conquered entire peoples and transplanted them to Faerun.

Funny, I did something similar in a campaign (but sadly, the group fell apart before the campaign really started): The Netherese Archwizards were powerful enough to create portals - not as mean of conquering, but rather as pure expression of their magic... they used them as shortcuts, as exploration tools, just as we use airplanes today, and within their cities, they're powered by Mythallars. On other planes, they erected small halls for the gates, and placed some kind of mini-Mythallar next to it to operate them.

The gates looked like huge circular mirrors, but as hard as Adamantit, and when activated, the mirror changed into a planar portal. Today, they can still be used without Mythallars (but they certainly help) by investing 10 levels of spell slots into the portal...

Rumors say, that one destination of the portals lead to a plane infested by Phaerimm (well, I just stated that it's the source of the Phaerimm), and with Karsus' folly, I got a reason to bury all Toril-side portals deep in the Anauroch

 

[BiggusGeekus]

Would a campaign taking off from Stargate SG-1 be viable?

I think this kind of campiagn is fine, but it really shines for a group that meets infrequently and has uneven attendance. The gate acts as a kind of "home base" and that way if the cleric can't make the next session, his character simply doesn't go through the gate that time.

 

[helium3]

Your biggest problem is that for the campaign to really work, you need to put together a certain level of detail on all the different places the network can go. Otherwise, every world they go to starts to look like British Columbia. You're talking about a ton of work unless you find someway to limit the party to a certain radius around the gate.

 

[Sir Elton]

Dude,

Every fantasy world is about my English Countryside Vaction.

 

[GreatLemur]

Man, Hunter Village really stinks of a "my ideal society" setup. Maybe that's cool with you, but I'd rather introduce some shades of gray. Maybe give them some social strife or economic problems, or maybe their definition of "perversion" is unreasonably strict or loose, or just hypocritical in its application. Or maybe--and this is pretty likely--their loose legal system is taken advantage of by criminals both foreign and domestic (think shady offshore tax shelters and money-laundering operations, or extradition policies that protect both political dissidents and war criminals).

But I'm actually really interested in the alternate earth you're envisioning, here. Sounds like kind of a magical modern setup, and I'm wondering how it would work, and why you're bothering to use earth at all.

If you're keeping the real world's religions, I think I'd keep divine magic out of the setting all together. The Rangers can be replaced with the non-spellcasting version from Complete Warrior, but I guess the Paladins would pretty much have to go. ...But then it sounds like you're keeping all the old D&D worlds mostly unchanged, so I guess removing divine magic isn't an option. And, hell, functional Clerics of real-world religions could actually be pretty interesting; you'd just have to ditch the modern concept of true monotheism in favor of a henotheistic norm.