fnork de sporg
First Post
Union is just laughably bad.
There's a fifteenth level Fishmonger (Fighter 11/Expert 4) who uses a Cubic Gate to get fish directly from his fishing vessels, so it'll be fresh, and to get ice to pack them in directly from a arctic polar region.
Or the fact that the Union Sentinels, the epic level town guards mentioned earlier, are payed Character Level x 5 gp each day. They are depicted elsewhere in the chapter doing things such as selling 15gp Trade Writs to visitors, helping traffic flow in the market district, and breaking up arguments over about price gouging.
Or the Halfling cat-burglar who lives in a small second story apartment and is level 34.
As a planar metropolis Union isn't that bad. A trading post run by the Mercane that regularly connects to different places and worlds. But there is no reason for it be all Epicy. It certainly doesn't feel Epic. If you were to cut everyone's level in half the place would run fine without changing a single bit piece of flavor text.
Well, that's not true, you'd have to go back and say all the groups from the Epic Organizations chapter are based elsewhere, but I'd probably do that anyways since they have nothing to do with the city and near as I can tell were only put there because they happened to be in the same book. Would the uber assassin guild really be based in a heavily regulated trade-center entirely owned by the Mercane?
It's as if the author had this place in his home campaign, had always wanted to get it into a D&D book, and retrofitted it when he learned he would be working on the ELH bumping up everyone's levels but changing little else.
A lot of the book had this same under thought feel to it. Like that uber assassin's guild, which is just like a normal assassin's guild except everyone is higher level.
Well,, no that's not true, they have access to a super-poison that prevents people from being raised/resurrected and their leader has a cloak that opens to an unnamed "void dimension" that even Greater Gods cannot access. Of course the cloak has no origin story, nor does the leader herself. The cloak itself is barely mentioned, and the leader herself is only described as Enigmatic, Powerful, and Subtle. She has no goals, no personality, no history, and certainly no given reason why she is wasting her power playing den mother to a bunch of contract killers and not, say, ruling an empire of countless worlds or conquering her own level of hell.
No one is given such a reason. It's as if the authors were unaware of the changes high level play can bring.
I actually intend to use the city in my campaign but I won't be giving it any special epic status and there certainly won't be any potential warlords gutting fish for a living.
There's a fifteenth level Fishmonger (Fighter 11/Expert 4) who uses a Cubic Gate to get fish directly from his fishing vessels, so it'll be fresh, and to get ice to pack them in directly from a arctic polar region.
Or the fact that the Union Sentinels, the epic level town guards mentioned earlier, are payed Character Level x 5 gp each day. They are depicted elsewhere in the chapter doing things such as selling 15gp Trade Writs to visitors, helping traffic flow in the market district, and breaking up arguments over about price gouging.
Or the Halfling cat-burglar who lives in a small second story apartment and is level 34.
As a planar metropolis Union isn't that bad. A trading post run by the Mercane that regularly connects to different places and worlds. But there is no reason for it be all Epicy. It certainly doesn't feel Epic. If you were to cut everyone's level in half the place would run fine without changing a single bit piece of flavor text.
Well, that's not true, you'd have to go back and say all the groups from the Epic Organizations chapter are based elsewhere, but I'd probably do that anyways since they have nothing to do with the city and near as I can tell were only put there because they happened to be in the same book. Would the uber assassin guild really be based in a heavily regulated trade-center entirely owned by the Mercane?
It's as if the author had this place in his home campaign, had always wanted to get it into a D&D book, and retrofitted it when he learned he would be working on the ELH bumping up everyone's levels but changing little else.
A lot of the book had this same under thought feel to it. Like that uber assassin's guild, which is just like a normal assassin's guild except everyone is higher level.
Well,, no that's not true, they have access to a super-poison that prevents people from being raised/resurrected and their leader has a cloak that opens to an unnamed "void dimension" that even Greater Gods cannot access. Of course the cloak has no origin story, nor does the leader herself. The cloak itself is barely mentioned, and the leader herself is only described as Enigmatic, Powerful, and Subtle. She has no goals, no personality, no history, and certainly no given reason why she is wasting her power playing den mother to a bunch of contract killers and not, say, ruling an empire of countless worlds or conquering her own level of hell.
No one is given such a reason. It's as if the authors were unaware of the changes high level play can bring.
I actually intend to use the city in my campaign but I won't be giving it any special epic status and there certainly won't be any potential warlords gutting fish for a living.