[URBIS] Neon Urbis Evangelion!

[Jürgen Hubert]

Maybe it's a bit presumptuous of me to write crossovers while my setting hasn't been finished yet, but I simply couldn't get this idea out of my head:

"Durgoth of Byblos predicted the End of the World for the year 1627 NA. In his lifetime, most mocked him for this, but a few heeded his words and began to prepare for this future.
Now it is the year 1620. The cities of Rothea have expanded to form gigantic sprawls. And suddenly, gigantic monsters start dropping out of the skies to ravage the planet - monsters that make the mighty Tarrasque look like a kobold!
Many people panick, and the off-world colonies recieve more applications than they can handle. The cities of Rothea have formed an uneasy truce in the face of this new threat, and created the Bodenwald-based Rothea Defense Force to combat the alien invaders. The RDF has contructed giant golems that can be piloted by humanoids to fight the monsters, and the first prototypes have just been finished.

Level entire city blocks as you fight the invaders! Navigate the hidden agendas of the RDF's backers! Discover the hideous truth of how your golems were created! And above all, develop lots and lots of Angst as you begin to doubt your own idenditiy!"

Well, what do you think?

 

[ajanders]

Urbis Evangelion

Epic Level Campaign, anyone?
First decent justification I've seen for that switchover anywhere.
I am so milking your ideas it's not funny...
So I'll throw this out to you in exchange: check out the Dragon article on "Small Gods". I could see the worship of the city as a god beginning to happen, at least among those individuals who had any volition.
Maybe that's an alternative for survival without a nexus tower: literally creating your own genius loci/god. (Tho I might imagine it would take a while to build up any kind of high powered god.)
Second disturbing thought...if you've seen the Stronghold Builder's Guide, you know buildings can have enchantments placed on them. (If you haven't, trust me, they can.)
What might happen if you enchanted a building until it developed intelligence? How do you make sure it stays loyal? Or friendly? I'm playing in a D&D game where three of the players have intelligent weapons and it sometimes becomes a real issue. Think how bad that could be with buildings...like magically enchanted forts, complete with siege weapons.
Sufficiently advanced magic can be used to duplicate anime technology easily

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Re: Urbis Evangelion

Epic Level Campaign, anyone?
First decent justification I've seen for that switchover anywhere.
I am so milking your ideas it's not funny...

Well, that's why I am posting them!

So I'll throw this out to you in exchange: check out the Dragon article on "Small Gods".

Which issue is this in?

(I sort of skipped out on Dragon when I subscribed to Pyramid...)

I could see the worship of the city as a god beginning to happen, at least among those individuals who had any volition.
Maybe that's an alternative for survival without a nexus tower: literally creating your own genius loci/god. (Tho I might imagine it would take a while to build up any kind of high powered god.)

Hmmm... Maybe that's what Ouneiros is - perhaps he isn't just the ruler and demigod of his city-state, he is that city-state in a very real sense.

Must ponder this further...

Second disturbing thought...if you've seen the Stronghold Builder's Guide, you know buildings can have enchantments placed on them. (If you haven't, trust me, they can.)

Still no money for it.

What might happen if you enchanted a building until it developed intelligence? How do you make sure it stays loyal? Or friendly? I'm playing in a D&D game where three of the players have intelligent weapons and it sometimes becomes a real issue. Think how bad that could be with buildings...like magically enchanted forts, complete with siege weapons.

New campaign idea: The PCs start their own small guild whose profession it is to demolish or otherwise "deal with" buildings that have become intelligent.

Now, how do you fight a tower that's half a mile high?

Sufficiently advanced magic can be used to duplicate anime technology easily

Well, that goes without saying.

Now all we have to do is wait for Mecha d20...

 

[ajanders]

Speaking of urban sprawls

I'm sitting here considering why Urbis works...sort of a chicken and egg question.
Did the nexus towers encourage wizards to gather people together into cities, or did the cities inspire the creation of nexus towers?
I could make an argument either way. A spellcaster of any sort capable of building a nexus tower can create some pretty spectacular reasons to come settle there: street-lights, running water, interesting biological resources like trees with buttered toast for leaves, or decent sewer systems. If that doesn't attract people, go out with the mass charm spell and recruit that way. (Or buy people as slaves, if you prefer.)
Alternately, the "natural" ecology of the world might be so supernaturally vicious that humans/elves/dwarves/whatever were forced to gather together for defense and support more quickly than in the history of our world. If the average caveman had to deal with krenshar and displacer beasts as predators rather than the relatively simple lion and tiger, he might well have decided to give the whole hunter-gatherer lifestyle a miss and go straight to urbanization.

As an aside, this may not matter. A world like Urbis is so urbanized that, like in North America, there is nothing entirely natural left...so depending on when in the timelines of Urbis a campaign is set, the point may be moot. But this in its turn raises some interesting questions about druids. Are there any? Perhaps all druids do now is try to reconstruct what they thought nature was before civilization messed it up.
Or perhaps they've been bought off by urban spellcasters: if they control the weather and increase the fertility of forty acres, for example, the rest of the section can be left wild and free.
That concentrates the population near the nexus towers, enhancing the soul drain, and keeps wild parts of the country very wild, securing your mundane flanks and discouraging people from moving out of town because of an unreasonable attachment to their life-force.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Re: Speaking of urban sprawls

I'm sitting here considering why Urbis works...sort of a chicken and egg question.
Did the nexus towers encourage wizards to gather people together into cities, or did the cities inspire the creation of nexus towers?

The former... though it wasn't only wizards who encouraged people to move to the cities.

What happened was this: Once upon a time, the power structures in Urbis were feudal at best - power was measured in how much land you owned, and most people lived in the countryside.

Then, 1423 years ago, some wizards in the city of Atalus built the first Nexus Tower. The rulers of Atalus recognized a useful tool when they saw one, enthusiastically supported the creation of more Towers, and used the gathered magical energy to conquer half the continent.

While the Atalan Empire is long gone, its lessons are not forgotten. Most rulers realize that their power base requires the magical energies from Nexus Towers, and plan their realms accordingly.

The result is usually a city-state crammed full with people that hosts several nexus towers, and a large rural protectorate that supports it.

Traditional family farms are mostly gone - most rulers regocnize that the food needs to be harvested with maximum efficiency to feed the cities. Thus, large plantations owned by merchants in the city are the standard. They just hire poor folks from the cities for the harvests and other crucial times, and don't keep more people around than necessary.

Most people move to the cities out of sheer economic necessity - there simply aren't enough jobs in the countryside to support them. Better to live in the shadow of a Nexus Tower than starve...

(Incidentally, don't believe that all city-states in Urbis are ruled by wizards - this isn't the case for the same reason why real-world nations aren't always ruled by generals of the army...)

I could make an argument either way. A spellcaster of any sort capable of building a nexus tower can create some pretty spectacular reasons to come settle there: street-lights, running water, interesting biological resources like trees with buttered toast for leaves, or decent sewer systems. If that doesn't attract people, go out with the mass charm spell and recruit that way. (Or buy people as slaves, if you prefer.)

Some rulers do that - but economic pressures are the most effective. When merchants in the cities own all the land in rural areas, there simply is no way of supporting yourself and your family there...

Alternately, the "natural" ecology of the world might be so supernaturally vicious that humans/elves/dwarves/whatever were forced to gather together for defense and support more quickly than in the history of our world. If the average caveman had to deal with krenshar and displacer beasts as predators rather than the relatively simple lion and tiger, he might well have decided to give the whole hunter-gatherer lifestyle a miss and go straight to urbanization.

Well, there are a few regions of wilderness and hunter-gatherer societies that remain... but, well, they are so uncivilized!

As an aside, this may not matter. A world like Urbis is so urbanized that, like in North America, there is nothing entirely natural left...so depending on when in the timelines of Urbis a campaign is set, the point may be moot.

At the "default starting time" of Urbis (1423 NA), the population density could be compared to that of Earth in about 1850 (especially Western Europe). There's still plenty of wilderness, but in many regions the wilderness is under retreat.

But this in its turn raises some interesting questions about druids. Are there any? Perhaps all druids do now is try to reconstruct what they thought nature was before civilization messed it up.

There are certainly druids in the wild areas. As for urban areas... I want to put some in, but I'm still thinking about a good "hook" for urban druids.

Or perhaps they've been bought off by urban spellcasters: if they control the weather and increase the fertility of forty acres, for example, the rest of the section can be left wild and free.
That concentrates the population near the nexus towers, enhancing the soul drain, and keeps wild parts of the country very wild, securing your mundane flanks and discouraging people from moving out of town because of an unreasonable attachment to their life-force.

There's already a god of the harvest and agriculture, and a powerful one at that ("Kortus" - see the details on my home page) whose priests do the plant blessings...