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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Greenfield" data-source="post: 5913281" data-attributes="member: 6669384">We ran a campaign like this, though we approached it from another angle.In our campaign the secrets of crafting permanent magic items had been lost over the years.  So had many Prestige classes and a number of spells.These things had become trade secrets of various guilds and trade halls.  And as with all secrets, one of two things happened: They ceased to be secrets after a while, or they ceased to be.You didn't just take a level in a Prestige Class, you had to apply (or be invited) to their order to receive the training, and over time many of these elite groups simply became too elite and weren't accepting enough new members to maintain their ranks.  They died out.The drive of the campaign was that the various deities had seen the dark times coming, when mortals would need these lost arts once more.  So they commissioned, through their churches, a collection of people whose job it was to rediscover these lost arts and spread the knowledge throughout the lands.PCs came from many countries, many of them rivals, banding together not out of trust or friendship, but out of distrust and rivalry. What if someone discovers how to craft magic weapons, and only one kingdom gets the benefits?  No, the only way to keep the other guy honest was to watch his every move.Now magic weapons and items existed in this world, though they were rare.  Things like magic carpets and clothing were wearing out and/or simply falling apart with age, and every permanent magic weapon in the world was owned by one noble house or another.  Each had a name and a history, a tale of how it was earned, and all the battles it helped decide.  They were definitely not for sale.For game color, we determined that the process of making a permanent magic weapon included giving it a name.  The process wasn't complete until it had a name.In this campaign the gods would send clues via visions and dreams, telling PCs where to go and look.  And the player characters had their marching orders:  Any and all of the lost arts recovered had to be shared equally among the various kingdoms.At one point we discovered some dark arts, things like ritual sacrifice to harvest EXP for item creation.  It was kind of sobering when a warrior looked at the magic weapon he'd acquired from an enemy, and had to ask, "Who did this used to be?  Who gave their life so this could be made?"  Kind of hard to be happy about your new toy when you know that somebody's little kid got tossed onto an altar to make it possible.Arts like that were added to our "codex" in pages bordered in black, and while we did ensure that copies were provided to each kingdom, they were frequently "provided" in writing, with the treatise carefully mis-filed in the back room of a library somewhere.  And then never spoken of again.We also traded info.  When we encountered an order of Red Mages who knew how to craft magical clothing, we traded instruction on the crafting of magical jewelry.There was a delightful scene towards the end of the campaign when emisaries  of this order came to support one of the PC's (a Paladin) claim for the throne of his kingdom.  They said that they finally understood that we weren't foolish for giving or trading away such power, because the process ultimately involved our group being the recipients of every magical craft in the known world.  The Paladin was embarassed and unhappy to have the support and admiration of an order of evil Wizards.As a campaign, it worked very well.</blockquote>

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