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View Full Version : The Artifact Wars: First draft rough overview D&D campaign setting [PEACH]



Izmir Stinger
2009-01-22, 05:08 PM
First off, the caveats:

I am building this for the 4E ruleset, but at this point in the design it is not yet specific to a ruleset, or even D&D, so I didn't tag the post as 4E. This concept as it stands now will apply well to 3.x or maybe older, or maybe even some other fantasy RPGs, but it does make most of the core assumptions of a D&D campaign setting. The one exception is the disenchanting/residuum mechanic from 4E. My campaign setting modifies it, but it is present and would require additional houseruling in other rulesets. (In fact, the idea spawned from the ludicrousness of this mechanic - I'm sure people have noticed that the 4E magic item economy taken RAW breaks all the rules of real economics and is completely unsustainable. This idea grew into an explanation of how the prices could get so out of whack.)

Don't ask me "Why D&D 4E? This or that or the other thing would be so much better in blah blah blah." It's 4E cause I can get people to play 4E. It doesn't matter how awesome a game is if no one will play it with you.

Second caveat, this isn't really a campaign setting. The actual "setting" in the literary sense -when and where the plot takes place - can be many existing settings with the political climate adapted to meet the description herein. It is not dependent on particular locations or characters; there are no proper nouns in my description. It is really more of an "event" in which a player campaign plays a part. Multiple concurrent campaigns, actually (more on that at the end). Haven't named the "setting" yet, but I am leaning towards something like "The Artifact Wars" or "The Divine Culling."

OK, if you got past my caveats, here is the set up. With it, this post is TL;DR - but you can consider everything in the spoiler tag fluff and skip it. What I want comments on is mostly the part beneath it.

The churches of most gods have recently undergone a fundamentalist revival, with new stricter doctrines being emphasized or enforced by their followers. People in positions of power within the churches have been more free to just make stuff up and preach it as the words of the gods because there has been nearly a century of limited to no direct intervention by the gods in the affairs of the world. People continue to have unfettered access to divine power, but the gods seem to have stopped using it themselves, in person. This has been interpreted in different ways by the different churches: some say that the gods have abandoned the world due to its wickedness and justify their repressive doctrines on those grounds. Others say that the gods have deemed the lesser races sufficiently worthy to manage their own affairs without the oversight of the gods, and justify their new departures in theological thought as doing just that - managing their own affairs. One even declared the gods dead and disbanded.

Despite the different churches reactions to the mysterious absence of the gods (mystery optionally solved in late game play) there is one common thread among almost all of the churches new doctrines: arcane magic is dangerous or evil or taboo or the reason the gods abandoned the world - whatever; magic is the enemy (most have been changing terminology for the last few decades so that the divine power of clerics and paladins are not considered magic). The nature of their opposition takes different forms. Some churches just preach about the evils of the arcane. The churches of the more militant gods have started instructing their paladins and clerics to seek out and destroy any wizards or warlocks they encounter and have waged a small scale war on various institutions of arcane learning.

All have, to some degree, started using new rituals that essentially make residuum disappear. Some believe they are sacrificing the residuum to appease their gods, inducing them to return. Others believe that enchanting items was slowly leeching power from the gods, and their rituals return it to them. Others believe they are destroying it because it is corrupting the world. Whatever they believe the purpose of the ritual is, it makes the residuum go away - presumably forever. The churches understand that to obtain more residuum and fight the wizards they need to use, at least on a temporary basis, magic items - but the ultimate goal is to obtain all of them and disenchant everything in the world except the holy relics of their god. They realize that after dealing with the primary offenders, wizards and such, and destroyed all the magic items they have created through the ages, they may need to turn on each other to obtain holy symbols and holy weapons to obtain more residuum unless their god returns before that (they won't, but the church leadership doesn't know that).

Arcane practitioners didn't take this lying down. They lacked the hierarchical leadership and world spanning organization of the churches when the attacks began, but once it became clear this was not some random heresy and was going to be a long bloody conflict, they built one fast. This council of wizards is sometimes crippled by inaction due to it's democratic nature and the headstrong personalities of its members (basically, it is the US House of Representatives, except they hurl the occasional fireball during debates), but overall they are more unified than the divine faction because there is no history of conflict between them like there is between the various churches. Some members are only interested in defending themselves and their institution, but others see this conflict as an excuse to finally rid the world of those annoying, pious, holier-than-thou churches and their Lawful-Stupid Paladins once and for all.

The primary strategy of the council is to obtain, horde and protect magic items from the reckless destruction the churches are perpetrating. They wind up disenchanting much of it themselves, though, to power an immense teleportation, scrying and communication network they have created as part of their defense strategy.

Secular, non-magical institutions - such as governments and guilds and mercantile interests - are caught in the middle of it all, mostly to their detriment. Constant efforts are made by both sides to get cooperation from these groups because the burgeoning conflict (which will escalate into a full blown world war as the campaign unfolds) has an insatiable appetite for personnel, goods and the cold hard cash to pay for them.

The conflict takes part mostly in the civilized parts of the world - so the practitioners of primal magic are left out to some degree. Both sides have enlisted the cooperation of practitioners of primal magic, and are actively seeking to bring them over to their side formally and permanently, but it is complicated by the completely un-unified, tribal nature of their "organization."

Pretty generic faction war stuff so far, I know, but here is the real meat of the concept. This "Artifact War" or whatever I wind up calling it is a foundation for competitive D&D play. You run two (or more, most of what I write assumes two) concurrent campaigns in the setting, with two different groups of players. The parties are agents of (or contracted by) the different factions that are in conflict with one another. Primal magic is either neutral, or a third faction if you have a third party.

These two parties either have a single DM or one person DMs group 1 and plays in group 2, while another DMs group 2 and plays in group 1. There are fairness issues to work out if you do the second one, but I think it is optimal if they can be worked out. Group 1 is a Divine party, barred from using most arcane classes and Group 2 is the Arcane party, barred from using divine classes. Martial classes can work for anybody, but some incidents with unscrupulous mercenaries that worked for both early on in the conflict have made both sides distrustful of anybody known to have worked for the other side - so being a double agent is effectively not an option for a martial class exclusive party. They essentially chose a side the first time they were publicly seen working for that side.

Normal play sessions for the two groups are separate, either at different times or some kind of turn taking arrangement. The campaign allows a great deal of flexibility on what kind of challenges are available each session, presenting a party with a multitude of options and possibilities and essentially letting them choose. This factions have much more work for adventurers than there are adventurers to do it. These challenges can be diplomatic ("get the local druid grove to agree to help our faction"), clandestine ("infiltrate city X where the other faction has control and conduct espionage/sabotage/theft), ritual based ("we need to teleport supplies to our allies, but our high level cleric/wizard died, and we lost track of them, help us"), or just plain straightforward combat ("there is a goblin fort / enemy caravan / dragon lair with lots of magic items, go get them and we will pay a bounty on what you find"). Players are given choices that allow them accept a higher level of risk for a greater reward, in order to outstrip the competing party in level and/or wealth. Overreaching on their part can result in player death, and replacement characters are going to lag behind for a while to give a tangible consequence for foolhardiness.

Generally, the players have to choose between keeping the magic items they find/steal/loot for themselves, or DE them for residuum to use in ritual based challenges or to make their own magic items, or to turn in for bounty or other benefits. The amount of residuum obtained from DE - and required for enchanting - is variable and skill based. Turning in magic items as is gives a variable reward, which can be negotiated (also skill based), so they need to make choices about whether to do their own DEing or turning in whole magic items. The magic items looted by the party are random, not taken from character wish lists, but there will be a lot more of them than a party would normally find, so you will frequently get stuff you can use by luck and DE/turn in the rest. Specific magic items above your level can be found for sale at inflated prices with the right skills, so you can fill in any gaps left by the random loot system with this, or making your own with the spare residuum.

The choices of quests/contracts presented to the party will offer varying ratios of tangible rewards (XP, money, loot), semi-tangible rewards (territory control, contacts for new quest options), and intangible rewards (notoriety within the faction, strategic gains in the overall war). The intangibles are mostly fluff, but they are tracked using a well defined numerical system that I am working on. The reason you track them is because they cease to be fluff during PVP.

Every 5-10 sessions, you have a joint session with both parties. One or both parties do a little roleplaying with the DM (or their respective DMs) to get a mission to interdict/assassinate/steal from some known operatives of the other faction. Guess who the operatives are? Right... the other party. This is where the intangibles come in. The events leading up to the encounter are a series of skill challenges - tracking, stealth, information gathering or prolonged overland pursuits, etc. The points from your intangible rewards become tangible bonuses at this point. Contacts in the faction can assist with tracking the other party, or smuggle you into the city they are in so you can achieve surprise. You essentially "buy" these bonuses with the points you have accumulated in intangible rewards. The largest point buys get you NPCs that are on your side in combat, or let you manipulate the battlefield in your favor - like setting traps and/or an ambush, fighting around specially prepared "anti-magic" fields that disrupt the arcane without effecting the divine, etc.

Then the parties fight each other. If the DMs are party members, the conflicts of interest crop up here, but I don't think they will be unresolvable. If one party spent more time pursuing intangible rewards, the conditions of the battle will be favorable to them, but it also means the other party spent more time on tangible rewards, and might have a 1 level edge, or more magic items. If a party accepted more risky adventures with bigger payoffs they may have an edge, but if any members of their party died doing so, the replacement characters won't be up to snuff yet (less wealth, maybe a level behind).

Any character that dies in this battle does not suffer the same death penalty as if he died in a non-competitive adventure. So that one party won't run away from the other in power, the dead from pvp get a boost when making their replacement character. Players have a vested interest in their characters (usually) so they shouldn't throw them away just to get the boost from a PVP death. Likely, when the advantage shifts clearly in one side's favor, the other side will flee, moreso than when it happens vs. DM controlled monsters. Players know the DM (again, usually) doesn't want to kill their characters, and if he made an encounter too hard he will scale it back or fudge rolls as misses. The other players, OTOH, will do no such thing so if it looks like you are going to loose, flight is much more attractive.

Pursuit is not always likely to occur as the ultimate goal of these encounter's is to loot the other guys magic items, and if you leave a corpse behind it might not be there when you come back, especially in a settlement. In the event a pursuit is engaged there will be skill challenge rules for resolving it, and there are various ways you can spend your intangible rewards to help with fleeing/chasing, but the ones fleeing get a discount.

And to top it all off, the losers buy the pizza, booze and pop for that session. :smallsmile:

I will be using the homebrew section to get feedback on various mechanical aspects as I develop them (those will be 4E specific). So what do you guys think of the concept?

RoninFrosty
2009-01-22, 08:20 PM
So, I didn't read your entire post, and I'm sorry for that, but I did catch the bit about a two party system.

I'm currently playing in a game where there are two parties (law vs. chaos) that haven't YET been made out and out rivals, we're very close (because of me, to be fair). I'd like to give you a few notes:


Keeping track of time will be key. Making sure events happen at the same time in each campaign will be critical to make sure things are working the same for both parties.
You're definitely going to have to make sure the players are either not talking about the game out of session, or you've got a group that you can trust not to metagame. I've actually watched the opposite party's sessions before, but the DM knows that I'm good for not metagaming (though the tempation is so, so sweet :-P)
To the players on each team, no matter what kind of evil is threatening the world, the greatest threat to them is the other party, and you'll have to prepare for this. Make sure you (and they) are clear on the difference between what the PLAYERS consider a threat and what the CHARACTERS do.
If anyone's read the Head of Vecna, I can assure you, something along those lines will be attempted. You can encourage or discourage this as you see fit, just be prepared.


That's not to say it's not a fun concept. I'm very much enjoying myself, and I believe my party members are as well. You just definitely have to watch out for those things I mentioned above.

And for those interested, I, as a swordsage, used Mighty Throw to toss a member of the other party's organization (NPC) into a freezing lake. In fullplate. :-D

Izmir Stinger
2009-01-23, 11:16 PM
So, I didn't read your entire post, and I'm sorry for that, but I did catch the bit about a two party system.

I'm currently playing in a game where there are two parties (law vs. chaos) that haven't YET been made out and out rivals, we're very close (because of me, to be fair). I'd like to give you a few notes:

Thanks for the feedback! I know my post was TL;DR, and in fact I went back and put in a note that you can skip the stuff in the spoiler tag after your comment.


Keeping track of time will be key. Making sure events happen at the same time in each campaign will be critical to make sure things are working the same for both parties.

I had already thought of this, and plan on making one member of each party responsible fro tracking the ingame date. This will also enable us to track things like XP per (in game) day, wealth per day and faction currency per day, so the two groups will have stats to compare to each other and brag. They will also help the DM know to give boosts or penalties if one party has been much luckier than the other.


You're definitely going to have to make sure the players are either not talking about the game out of session, or you've got a group that you can trust not to metagame. I've actually watched the opposite party's sessions before, but the DM knows that I'm good for not metagaming (though the tempation is so, so sweet :-P)

For the most part, it won't matter if group 1 knows what group 2 is up to, except in the final days before the confrontation sessions. Because their own characters lives are on the line, I think I can trust the characters not to give away their position and activities just prior to a PVP session.

Ha ha ha, trust the players to keep the best interest of their character at heart... I crack myself up. That's why free pizza and beer are also on the line. That is an incentive to keep your mouth shut that will actually work.


To the players on each team, no matter what kind of evil is threatening the world, the greatest threat to them is the other party, and you'll have to prepare for this. Make sure you (and they) are clear on the difference between what the PLAYERS consider a threat and what the CHARACTERS do.

I hadn't thought of that. Having the parties obsess over each other to the point of ignoring advancement between PvP sessions would be a problem. I'll make sure to discuss the importance of this with them.

"Overall, those guys you fought last week didn't seem any more important than any other agents of the bad guys, they were just talented. Maybe you will see them again, maybe not. Only if they consistently interfere with you should you pay them any special attention."


If anyone's read the Head of Vecna, I can assure you, something along those lines will be attempted. You can encourage or discourage this as you see fit, just be prepared.

Wow. Thanks for the heads up (pun intended). I hadn't read that story - so now that I have googled it I am prepared for the eventuality - thanks!