PairO'Dice Lost
2009-10-02, 01:39 PM
Chapter 0: Introduction
Hello, Playgrounders! I've mentioned my group's wacky hijinks in several threads, but it occurred to me recently that I'd never really written down all the cool stuff that goes on in my campaigns, so at the start of the campaign I'm running now I decided to keep a campaign journal. After seeing the proliferation of campaign journals here recently, I figured I'd post all the juicy details for you to read—though I can't promise that wacky hijinks will ensue. I know it's out of the ordinary for the DM to be the one posting the log, but (A) I'm the only group member with an account here and (B) I'm the group's best writer if I do say so myself, so there you go.
As the thread title says, I'm running a low-magic campaign, specifically a low-power-magic, high-prevalence-magic, low-items campaign; there are tons of people with one or two levels in a casting class of some sort, but the most powerful casters in the world top out at 5th-level spells. Just thought I'd explain that up front, since “low magic” means different things to different people. Oh, and it's gestalt as well, to make up the power difference. Without further ado...
The Premise
The setting is a pseudo-realistic Europe in a vaguely-Roman-Empire era; it's realistic in the sense that most of the historical nations (and stereotypes!) exist, but names have been changed around and society is obviously vastly different with access to bits of magic (such as the prevalence of newspapers, which I'll explain later). It's pretty much “totally-not-Europe,” as I explained it to my players: Eyre is totally-not-Ireland, Nubia is totally-not-Egypt, etc. The players are all Faeries (elves, dwarves, gnomes, red caps, etc.) from the Emerald Isles who have sworn allegiance to the Faerie Courts and are opposing the Evil EmpireTM: the Empire of Man, an empire ruled by humans and composed of demihumans and near-humans of all sorts (half-orcs, illumians, and so forth). Pseudo-Latin is all over the place for Imperial people and places and other nations get good-enough translations for their names. This isn't a rebels-against-the-monolithic-empire scenario, though—the good guys are winning the war for once.
For simplicity's sake, I'll just post the campaign intro document I sent to all my players to explain the rest:
Historical Context
You are all experienced soldiers in the armies of the Emerald Isles, Tir na Nog, the Realm of Faerie...essentially, mythological Ireland and Scotland. To the east across the sea lies the Empire of Man (a totally-not-Greco-Roman empire), a sprawling expanse of nation-states united under a human and demihuman government. Since humans breed like rabbits, they count many demihumans (half-orcs, half-giants, and so on) and near-humans (illumians, shifters, and so on) among their number and for this reason have managed to unite the tribes of reptilian humanoids, giants, and other monstrous creatures in their territory. Driven forward by their gods' commands of conquest and increasing population pressures, the Empire of Man annexed many lands, adding their inhabitants to their empire—forcibly, if necessary, and it usually was.
In its expansion, the Empire of Man came into contact with the Realms of Faerie. The magic of the fey waxes and wanes with the turning of the seasons and the centuries, and at the point of first contact their magic had waned to the point that there had been no contact with the Otherworld for several years. The Imperial armies put their cold iron to good use and almost obliterated the fey, but the Faerie alliance with the Norse nations of the frozen north allowed them to hold out for several months. Just as the Imperial assault reached a point of certain victory, the power of the fey rushed back and the gates to the Otherworld poured out massive armies of the fey. Caught by surprise, the invading armies were utterly crushed, and the conquests which had taken them a matter of weeks to accomplish were reversed in a matter of hours. The Northern armies struck back and reclaimed territory on the mainland while the Courts consolidated their control of the land the Empire had previously occupied.
Now, a few years later, tales and rumors from the heart of the Empire tell of the men and half-men turning to powers beyond the world for aid; their older gods, focused on expansion for the good of their creations, have been overturned by gods who revel in conquest and genocide for their own sakes and sermons of just wars and peaceful occupation have been replaced by those of expansion, magical and technological development, and extreme moral flexibility. The Faerie Courts have taken advantage of the surprise of their return to go on the offensive, and now they have a solid foothold in the Empire's land. The northern army, depleted in defense of the Emerald Isles, is regrouping and consolidating while the newly-returned fey aid them in thanks for their prior help; for all practical purposes, however, the Norse and the Empire's subject nations are mostly out of the fight.
Will the fey destroy the Empire's armies once and for all, returning the subject nation-states to their own rule and ending the threat? Or will the Empire regroup and add the Emerald Isles to their long list of conquered nations? Diviners on both sides have found the future difficult to see, but all agree that the fate of both the Empire and the Isles will be decided soon.
Current Situation
You are among the best-trained and most powerful of the mortal fey; your magic is potent even in lands where the youngest of folk can use a few cantrips, and your battle prowess is exceptional even in the armies of the Courts themselves. Rather than being promoted to command, you have been assigned to an expeditionary group composed of Faeries of all different Courts (one of only six such groups in all the realms) and tasked with infiltrating the enemy armies, striking surgical blows against Imperial leadership, and otherwise advance the cause of the fey above and beyond the battles fought by the rank-and-file troops.
You have mostly been granted autonomy, and are able to choose your own missions, but you are still answerable to the faerie nobility: Your direct superior is the Regent of Winds, a general in the fey armies and a minor noble in the court of the Queen of Air and Darkness. On occasion she may be willing to lend you aid in the form of loaned soldiers or materials, and on occasion she may call on you to perform urgent missions, but for the most part she is quite willing to let you go your own way. At the moment you have just returned from a mission to destroy temporary gnoll fortifications on the enemy shore and are planning your next missions.
The Setup
The way I chose to represent the Faeries' innate magic was simple: every character begins with two levels in an arcane casting class and two in a divine casting class at 2nd level (gestalt, remember), the exact combinations of which are determined by the Court to which a character declares allegiance. Spring Faeries, being gentle and subtle, start as beguiler//healers; Summer Faeries, being passionate and warlike, start as warmage//dragonfire adepts (DFA being suitably reflavored, of course); Autumn Faeries, being flighty and creative, start as bard//favored souls; Winter Faeries, being dour and dark, start as sorcerer//shugenja (with the option to specialize in any element but fire on the shugenja side). Everyone started at 3rd level, so they have 1 non-casting level on each side of their builds.
Other than these two starting levels, the Good Guys don't get any other full casting—other arcane and divine classes don't exist, psionic classes don't exist (though psionic feats and such are fine), and there are restrictions on variant magic systems (binders and shadowcasters are reserved for the Bad Guys, only enemy martial adepts can use Shadow Hand maneuvers, and you can only take ½ your levels in incarnum classes). Casting PrCs are available but all casting-related prereqs are waived and they don't advance casting, so everyone still has some interesting options on the PrC front.
The Empire and their allies aren't innately magical, but what few arcane and divine casters they have (all either wizards, clerics, or archivists) can take up to 5 levels and thus gain up to 3rd level spells; this is part of the reason why they were winning for so long, and only the Faeries' quantity was able to overcome the Empire's quality when it came to spellcasters.
Plot-critical and named NPCs are exempted from these restrictions to a degree, plot-critical foes being gestalted like the PCs and both types being able to take more levels in a casting class; there are fewer and fewer characters of each level up until you hit 9th; there are fewer than 40 divine casters and fewer than 15 arcane casters in the whole world who can cast 5th-level spells. The Good Guys' named NPCs can reach even higher, but they have the whole mythological fae restrictions theme going so (A) by the time they hit 6th level spells they're pretty much bound to the Emerald Isles and (B) the PCs can eventually be “promoted” in the courts to reach that level (details omitted because my players may be reading this).
The Rules
Other miscellaneous changes or bits of info that might be handy to know (and that were also in the campaign intro doc) are below; you don't have to read any of it, but if something's confusing you might want to look here for answers:
The Fey
The Faerie Nobility, unlike the mortal fey, are tightly bound to concepts of the natural world from which they draw life and power; a gnome is a gnome is a gnome, but a sylph is a wind fae or a cloud fae, a dryad is a cedar fae or an oak fae, etc.
Faerie nobility grant titles based on the extent of a particular fae's power, and the more specific a fae's source of power, the less powerful it is: the Queen of Mist is less powerful than the Queen of Winds is less powerful than the Queen of Air and Darkness, and so on, up to the four Queens and Kings of the seasons. Nobles have political power based on their station: Queens/Kings > Ladies/Lords > Duchesses/Dukes > Contessas/Counts > Earls > Baronets > Regents, so a Lady of the Lake has more political clout than a Duke of the Sea, even though in a straight-up duel the latter would probably defeat the former. (This means that your patron, the Regent of Winds, has been assigned to be your patroness because she is physically and magically powerful enough to guide and teach you if necessary, but is not politically powerful enough to warrant command of a portion of the full army. “Going over her head” politically is possible, but not advised.)
The magic giving life and power to the fey and the Faeries is wild and unpredictable, and so too are the fey themselves. The Faeries are bound by certain strictures of magic and their sources of power (most notably the restriction that they're much weaker outside of their home Realm), and fey have the free will and variance of all mortals, but there are certain Faeries known as Wyldfae who have some of the power and magical bindings of the Faeries but are otherwise free-willed—they are full-blooded Faeries but are native to the Material World. Monstrous-seeming creatures such as centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, dryads, weirds, and other similar beings fall into this category, and thus frequently fight in fey armies alongside full mortals both because they don't weaken when away from the Emerald Isles and just because they want to; if groups of Faeries are sent into Imperial lands, it's most likely these races.
Fey magic is bound up in the natural cycles of the world, racially on the order of seasons personally on the order of days. A fey doesn't need to do anything special to restore his magical energy once it has been used, but he does need to wait for the right time—all of a fey's spells are restored at moonrise if the fey is outdoors, or at midnight otherwise.
Fey who swear allegiance to one of the Faerie courts can learn the natural magic of the Otherworld once they are sufficiently skilled. At 6th level, you can multiclass into druid as if it were a prestige class; its class abilities function normally, but it uses the bard's spells per day table instead of the normal druid table.
Cosmology
The Otherworld is the home plane of the Faeries, and is a realm parallel to the Material World (replacing the Ethereal). It can be accessed by using any sort of magic that will rend a temporary hole in the aethereal curtain that separates it from the World, but as the innate magic of the mortal fey is quite weak, only the most powerful of Faeries or their relics are capable of forcing entrance or egress—of course, when the natural magic of the World weakens the curtain enough, even the least skilled fey can slip through in particular locations.
The aetherial curtain also separates five other parallel worlds from the Material World: the planes of Elemental Air, Cold, Water, Earth, and Wood. Life energy and elemental fire flow from the sun, the moon, and the stars. Two other worlds are not parallel to the Material World and are planes in and of themselves: the Heavenly Realms and the Underworld, both of which are the source of negative energy in the world.
Mechanically, the Ethereal substitutes for the Astral, so some game effects may chance (like force effects blocking teleportation because it goes through the Ethereal instead of the Astral). Cold, air, water, wood, and earth elemental creatures come from the elemental planes; celestials come from the Heavenly Realms; undead come from the Underworld. There are no fiends or fire elemental creatures, though magma and smoke elemental creatures can sometimes be found near volcanoes.
The Empire
The hierarchy of the Empire is strict, and is racially-based for the most part: Humans are on top, monstrous creatures are on the bottom, and demihumans are in the middle, with a creature's exact rights being based on the amount of human blood possessed or how human-seeming it is.
The ruler of the Empire of Man is human, as is to be expected: Emperor Maximilian Aurelius the Seventh has held the throne for 62 years, and is universally supported and loved by the human and demihuman population. His advisors, the Imperial Senate, consist of one Senator of every race governed by the Empire (usually the member of the race best aligned with the Empire's desires and most willing to cooperate), and so stands at 37 members and growing.
Where fey have their ruling Courts, the Empire has its religion. The Empire is a theocracy in all but name, and all but the highest ranks in the government are occupied currently with religious leaders of some sort. The main deities they worship promote expansionism and some form of humanity or demihumanity; the clergy of Wastri, the Hopping God, are the most vocal (for obvious reasons), but the individual gods and their clergy are for the most part on even footing.
The religious leadership of the Empire is fractured—the “old guard” believes in expanding their god-given power by tapping into the older gods and beings beyond the planes in order to draw on their experience, wisdom, and power; the “new guard” believes in the promise of alchemy, shadow-weaving (drawing magic from the Gloom, the Otherworld's dark reflection and the replacement for the Plane of Shadow), and elementally-power clockwork. The latter is in its infancy, but alchemy has been established for at least a decade and shadow-weaving (along with spirit-binding) has been practiced since before the new pantheon was adopted. Both, however, are united in their desire for expansion and growth; only on the methods of reaching these goals do they disagree.
Going purely out-of-character for a moment for an analogy, the Empire's army is essentially what Rome's would be if their priests of Jupiter could actually smite people with lightning and so forth. The army's structure is strictly divided into the hierarchies of Kenturius (martial troops), Okkultus (priests, soul-binders, necromancers, and shadow-weavers), Auxilius (monstrous troops, golems, and other non-human/non-demihuman troops), and Logistikus (support/supply units), and members of each hierarchy are readily identifiable as such.
Equipment and Materials
The main currency of the Realms and the Empire is copper, silver, gold, and platinum (as per usual), but in addition the Realms possesses electrum coins (1 ep = 5 sp) and mithral coins (1 mp = 5 pp) and the Empire mints adamantine coins (1 ap = 10 pp). You're unlikely to find these in day-to-day circulation, as they're mostly used like letters of credit to avoid carrying tons of currency, but you might find some as treasure occasionally. Gems and art are also prized highly.
All fey have a weakness (almost like a severe allergy) to ferrous metals; cold iron is the purest form of wrought iron and thus exceptionally harmful, but normal iron, steel, etc. are still dangerous. As long as a fey is holding a ferrous item or touching large quantities of ferrous metal (such as being bound with iron manacles or wielding a steel mace) he is fatigued; this fatigue disappears as soon as he lets go of it. If encased in large quantities of ferrous metal, such as steel full plate or an iron cage, his innate magic has a 50% chance to fail to function. Cold iron increases these penalties to exhaustion and 75% failure rate, respectively.
Because of their aversion to ferrous metals, pretty much any equipment made by the fey that would otherwise be crafted of these metals is instead made of either ironwood or glassteel. If you want to craft anything, details on creating these materials will be provided. Selling items of ferrous metals is thus generally frowned upon and won't get you much in exchange; finding a buyer outside of the Realms would be a better bet. Precious metals, bronze, and other non-ferrous metals are perfectly safe, so ceremonial weapons are often crafted of bronze and copper.
The Characters
I'm not going to put down the characters' names because firstly, several of them took my suggestion and used Gaelic names that are hard to spell and pronounce, and secondly, we have 8 people so it'll be easier to keep track of them via a description.
The Dragon LN Autumn dragonkin; swordsage//fighter; the tank of the party. He's your typical crush-first-question-never martial type and is the party's MVP in combat so far. His player is new to the group this year and isn't familiar with our style of play (we're all in college and he wasn't in the same dorm last year), so he's slowly developing a personality for his character as he figures out how much RP we do and what's acceptable.
The Changeling CG Summer changeling; rogue//ranger; the party face. This changeling is also a changeling in the traditional sense, a sort-of Faerie who doesn't know anything about his real parents or his name but has devoted himself to (and been adopted by) some royals in the Court of Air and Darkness. He's very sneaky and not very hardy, so in combat he prefers to disguise himself as a human or demihuman and sow confusion in the ranks rather than fight directly; out of combat, he's an excellent infiltrator and spy, as in this world there are few shapechanger detection measures in place and the Empire isn't familiar with all the kinds of Faeries there are.
The Captain LE Winter drow; fighter//rogue; the party leader. She's the captain of the ship the group has been assigned to, and being a drow is a loyal servant of Lolth (i.e. the Queen of Air and Darkness). She's a bit creepy and is a vocal advocate of the total war philosophy when it comes to the Empire, but doesn't adhere to many drow stereotypes, which is a nice change.
The Assassin LN Summer high elf; warblade//rogue; the party's go-for-the-important-looking-NPCs warrior. She mostly uses a combination of Iajutsu Focus and sneak attack to strike from the shadows during combat and is the party's conscience and planner outside of it. Her player is new to D&D, so she's basically the strong silent type for now.
The Maul CN Huge maul; the Tank's weapon of choice. Yes, someone's playing a weapon; the player wasn't sure how often he could make it to games, since he has a chemistry lab right before our Friday game, and he suggested that he play something or someone that would be easy to take over if he couldn't make it; he proposed being one of the very few legacy weapons in the world, a former Court agent who pissed off a few nobles and was transformed into a weapon as punishment, and I thought it could work out as a plot hook later. Being an intelligent legacy weapon, his two main tricks are making big illusions and taking over enemies who touch him with his ridiculous Ego score.
The Gunslinger NG Spring earth kobold; ranger//scout; the party's ranged support. The party's only small character, this guy usually serves as the party scout and general sneak. He dual-wields hand crossbows and is going the Swift Hunter route (particularly useful in gestalt), so he likes to run around a bit farther away from the party and snipe people (in and out of combat...).
The Bear LG Summer shifter; swordsage//barbarian; the odd man out. We call this guy the bear-bear-bear-[...]-bear because he's a werebear-ish shifter going for Bear Warrior and Emissary of Barachiel who's focusing on Tiger Claw maneuvers...basically, if there's something bear-related or -themed, he's trying to get it.
[B]The Tank LG Autumn earth dwarf; fighter//rogue; the party bruiser. He's not a tank in the sense of someone who soaks damage, but in the sense of a gigantic war machine encased in metal. He dual-wields Large spiked shields and wears a suit of full plate (all mithral, of course). He's essentially a very weird sort of ubercharger who's focusing more on the “I have a bazillion feats” and “I can squish you between my shields” aspects rather than going for high damage. He's the Captain's adopted son in-game; out of game, he's also a new player, so he has an excuse to follow the Captain's lead.
I made it clear early on that we'd be taking the mythological approach to Faerie morality: the fey are beyond mortal classifications, and if the alignment grid is a graph on a piece of paper, the Faeries are the ones who're trying to light the paper on fire. I do have a preference for party cohesion, so people can do whatever they want alignment-wise as long as they have a reason to stick together (supplied by me in this case) and no one tries to kill another party member. So far it's working out, but there have been some rough spots between the Captain and the Bear
We're already on the fourth session of the game—I've just been too busy with schoolwork to post session logs in a timely manner until now—so the next few posts will be the logs for the first three sessions, and you can expect an update on session 4 sometime soon after tonight's session.
Hello, Playgrounders! I've mentioned my group's wacky hijinks in several threads, but it occurred to me recently that I'd never really written down all the cool stuff that goes on in my campaigns, so at the start of the campaign I'm running now I decided to keep a campaign journal. After seeing the proliferation of campaign journals here recently, I figured I'd post all the juicy details for you to read—though I can't promise that wacky hijinks will ensue. I know it's out of the ordinary for the DM to be the one posting the log, but (A) I'm the only group member with an account here and (B) I'm the group's best writer if I do say so myself, so there you go.
As the thread title says, I'm running a low-magic campaign, specifically a low-power-magic, high-prevalence-magic, low-items campaign; there are tons of people with one or two levels in a casting class of some sort, but the most powerful casters in the world top out at 5th-level spells. Just thought I'd explain that up front, since “low magic” means different things to different people. Oh, and it's gestalt as well, to make up the power difference. Without further ado...
The Premise
The setting is a pseudo-realistic Europe in a vaguely-Roman-Empire era; it's realistic in the sense that most of the historical nations (and stereotypes!) exist, but names have been changed around and society is obviously vastly different with access to bits of magic (such as the prevalence of newspapers, which I'll explain later). It's pretty much “totally-not-Europe,” as I explained it to my players: Eyre is totally-not-Ireland, Nubia is totally-not-Egypt, etc. The players are all Faeries (elves, dwarves, gnomes, red caps, etc.) from the Emerald Isles who have sworn allegiance to the Faerie Courts and are opposing the Evil EmpireTM: the Empire of Man, an empire ruled by humans and composed of demihumans and near-humans of all sorts (half-orcs, illumians, and so forth). Pseudo-Latin is all over the place for Imperial people and places and other nations get good-enough translations for their names. This isn't a rebels-against-the-monolithic-empire scenario, though—the good guys are winning the war for once.
For simplicity's sake, I'll just post the campaign intro document I sent to all my players to explain the rest:
Historical Context
You are all experienced soldiers in the armies of the Emerald Isles, Tir na Nog, the Realm of Faerie...essentially, mythological Ireland and Scotland. To the east across the sea lies the Empire of Man (a totally-not-Greco-Roman empire), a sprawling expanse of nation-states united under a human and demihuman government. Since humans breed like rabbits, they count many demihumans (half-orcs, half-giants, and so on) and near-humans (illumians, shifters, and so on) among their number and for this reason have managed to unite the tribes of reptilian humanoids, giants, and other monstrous creatures in their territory. Driven forward by their gods' commands of conquest and increasing population pressures, the Empire of Man annexed many lands, adding their inhabitants to their empire—forcibly, if necessary, and it usually was.
In its expansion, the Empire of Man came into contact with the Realms of Faerie. The magic of the fey waxes and wanes with the turning of the seasons and the centuries, and at the point of first contact their magic had waned to the point that there had been no contact with the Otherworld for several years. The Imperial armies put their cold iron to good use and almost obliterated the fey, but the Faerie alliance with the Norse nations of the frozen north allowed them to hold out for several months. Just as the Imperial assault reached a point of certain victory, the power of the fey rushed back and the gates to the Otherworld poured out massive armies of the fey. Caught by surprise, the invading armies were utterly crushed, and the conquests which had taken them a matter of weeks to accomplish were reversed in a matter of hours. The Northern armies struck back and reclaimed territory on the mainland while the Courts consolidated their control of the land the Empire had previously occupied.
Now, a few years later, tales and rumors from the heart of the Empire tell of the men and half-men turning to powers beyond the world for aid; their older gods, focused on expansion for the good of their creations, have been overturned by gods who revel in conquest and genocide for their own sakes and sermons of just wars and peaceful occupation have been replaced by those of expansion, magical and technological development, and extreme moral flexibility. The Faerie Courts have taken advantage of the surprise of their return to go on the offensive, and now they have a solid foothold in the Empire's land. The northern army, depleted in defense of the Emerald Isles, is regrouping and consolidating while the newly-returned fey aid them in thanks for their prior help; for all practical purposes, however, the Norse and the Empire's subject nations are mostly out of the fight.
Will the fey destroy the Empire's armies once and for all, returning the subject nation-states to their own rule and ending the threat? Or will the Empire regroup and add the Emerald Isles to their long list of conquered nations? Diviners on both sides have found the future difficult to see, but all agree that the fate of both the Empire and the Isles will be decided soon.
Current Situation
You are among the best-trained and most powerful of the mortal fey; your magic is potent even in lands where the youngest of folk can use a few cantrips, and your battle prowess is exceptional even in the armies of the Courts themselves. Rather than being promoted to command, you have been assigned to an expeditionary group composed of Faeries of all different Courts (one of only six such groups in all the realms) and tasked with infiltrating the enemy armies, striking surgical blows against Imperial leadership, and otherwise advance the cause of the fey above and beyond the battles fought by the rank-and-file troops.
You have mostly been granted autonomy, and are able to choose your own missions, but you are still answerable to the faerie nobility: Your direct superior is the Regent of Winds, a general in the fey armies and a minor noble in the court of the Queen of Air and Darkness. On occasion she may be willing to lend you aid in the form of loaned soldiers or materials, and on occasion she may call on you to perform urgent missions, but for the most part she is quite willing to let you go your own way. At the moment you have just returned from a mission to destroy temporary gnoll fortifications on the enemy shore and are planning your next missions.
The Setup
The way I chose to represent the Faeries' innate magic was simple: every character begins with two levels in an arcane casting class and two in a divine casting class at 2nd level (gestalt, remember), the exact combinations of which are determined by the Court to which a character declares allegiance. Spring Faeries, being gentle and subtle, start as beguiler//healers; Summer Faeries, being passionate and warlike, start as warmage//dragonfire adepts (DFA being suitably reflavored, of course); Autumn Faeries, being flighty and creative, start as bard//favored souls; Winter Faeries, being dour and dark, start as sorcerer//shugenja (with the option to specialize in any element but fire on the shugenja side). Everyone started at 3rd level, so they have 1 non-casting level on each side of their builds.
Other than these two starting levels, the Good Guys don't get any other full casting—other arcane and divine classes don't exist, psionic classes don't exist (though psionic feats and such are fine), and there are restrictions on variant magic systems (binders and shadowcasters are reserved for the Bad Guys, only enemy martial adepts can use Shadow Hand maneuvers, and you can only take ½ your levels in incarnum classes). Casting PrCs are available but all casting-related prereqs are waived and they don't advance casting, so everyone still has some interesting options on the PrC front.
The Empire and their allies aren't innately magical, but what few arcane and divine casters they have (all either wizards, clerics, or archivists) can take up to 5 levels and thus gain up to 3rd level spells; this is part of the reason why they were winning for so long, and only the Faeries' quantity was able to overcome the Empire's quality when it came to spellcasters.
Plot-critical and named NPCs are exempted from these restrictions to a degree, plot-critical foes being gestalted like the PCs and both types being able to take more levels in a casting class; there are fewer and fewer characters of each level up until you hit 9th; there are fewer than 40 divine casters and fewer than 15 arcane casters in the whole world who can cast 5th-level spells. The Good Guys' named NPCs can reach even higher, but they have the whole mythological fae restrictions theme going so (A) by the time they hit 6th level spells they're pretty much bound to the Emerald Isles and (B) the PCs can eventually be “promoted” in the courts to reach that level (details omitted because my players may be reading this).
The Rules
Other miscellaneous changes or bits of info that might be handy to know (and that were also in the campaign intro doc) are below; you don't have to read any of it, but if something's confusing you might want to look here for answers:
The Fey
The Faerie Nobility, unlike the mortal fey, are tightly bound to concepts of the natural world from which they draw life and power; a gnome is a gnome is a gnome, but a sylph is a wind fae or a cloud fae, a dryad is a cedar fae or an oak fae, etc.
Faerie nobility grant titles based on the extent of a particular fae's power, and the more specific a fae's source of power, the less powerful it is: the Queen of Mist is less powerful than the Queen of Winds is less powerful than the Queen of Air and Darkness, and so on, up to the four Queens and Kings of the seasons. Nobles have political power based on their station: Queens/Kings > Ladies/Lords > Duchesses/Dukes > Contessas/Counts > Earls > Baronets > Regents, so a Lady of the Lake has more political clout than a Duke of the Sea, even though in a straight-up duel the latter would probably defeat the former. (This means that your patron, the Regent of Winds, has been assigned to be your patroness because she is physically and magically powerful enough to guide and teach you if necessary, but is not politically powerful enough to warrant command of a portion of the full army. “Going over her head” politically is possible, but not advised.)
The magic giving life and power to the fey and the Faeries is wild and unpredictable, and so too are the fey themselves. The Faeries are bound by certain strictures of magic and their sources of power (most notably the restriction that they're much weaker outside of their home Realm), and fey have the free will and variance of all mortals, but there are certain Faeries known as Wyldfae who have some of the power and magical bindings of the Faeries but are otherwise free-willed—they are full-blooded Faeries but are native to the Material World. Monstrous-seeming creatures such as centaurs, satyrs, nymphs, dryads, weirds, and other similar beings fall into this category, and thus frequently fight in fey armies alongside full mortals both because they don't weaken when away from the Emerald Isles and just because they want to; if groups of Faeries are sent into Imperial lands, it's most likely these races.
Fey magic is bound up in the natural cycles of the world, racially on the order of seasons personally on the order of days. A fey doesn't need to do anything special to restore his magical energy once it has been used, but he does need to wait for the right time—all of a fey's spells are restored at moonrise if the fey is outdoors, or at midnight otherwise.
Fey who swear allegiance to one of the Faerie courts can learn the natural magic of the Otherworld once they are sufficiently skilled. At 6th level, you can multiclass into druid as if it were a prestige class; its class abilities function normally, but it uses the bard's spells per day table instead of the normal druid table.
Cosmology
The Otherworld is the home plane of the Faeries, and is a realm parallel to the Material World (replacing the Ethereal). It can be accessed by using any sort of magic that will rend a temporary hole in the aethereal curtain that separates it from the World, but as the innate magic of the mortal fey is quite weak, only the most powerful of Faeries or their relics are capable of forcing entrance or egress—of course, when the natural magic of the World weakens the curtain enough, even the least skilled fey can slip through in particular locations.
The aetherial curtain also separates five other parallel worlds from the Material World: the planes of Elemental Air, Cold, Water, Earth, and Wood. Life energy and elemental fire flow from the sun, the moon, and the stars. Two other worlds are not parallel to the Material World and are planes in and of themselves: the Heavenly Realms and the Underworld, both of which are the source of negative energy in the world.
Mechanically, the Ethereal substitutes for the Astral, so some game effects may chance (like force effects blocking teleportation because it goes through the Ethereal instead of the Astral). Cold, air, water, wood, and earth elemental creatures come from the elemental planes; celestials come from the Heavenly Realms; undead come from the Underworld. There are no fiends or fire elemental creatures, though magma and smoke elemental creatures can sometimes be found near volcanoes.
The Empire
The hierarchy of the Empire is strict, and is racially-based for the most part: Humans are on top, monstrous creatures are on the bottom, and demihumans are in the middle, with a creature's exact rights being based on the amount of human blood possessed or how human-seeming it is.
The ruler of the Empire of Man is human, as is to be expected: Emperor Maximilian Aurelius the Seventh has held the throne for 62 years, and is universally supported and loved by the human and demihuman population. His advisors, the Imperial Senate, consist of one Senator of every race governed by the Empire (usually the member of the race best aligned with the Empire's desires and most willing to cooperate), and so stands at 37 members and growing.
Where fey have their ruling Courts, the Empire has its religion. The Empire is a theocracy in all but name, and all but the highest ranks in the government are occupied currently with religious leaders of some sort. The main deities they worship promote expansionism and some form of humanity or demihumanity; the clergy of Wastri, the Hopping God, are the most vocal (for obvious reasons), but the individual gods and their clergy are for the most part on even footing.
The religious leadership of the Empire is fractured—the “old guard” believes in expanding their god-given power by tapping into the older gods and beings beyond the planes in order to draw on their experience, wisdom, and power; the “new guard” believes in the promise of alchemy, shadow-weaving (drawing magic from the Gloom, the Otherworld's dark reflection and the replacement for the Plane of Shadow), and elementally-power clockwork. The latter is in its infancy, but alchemy has been established for at least a decade and shadow-weaving (along with spirit-binding) has been practiced since before the new pantheon was adopted. Both, however, are united in their desire for expansion and growth; only on the methods of reaching these goals do they disagree.
Going purely out-of-character for a moment for an analogy, the Empire's army is essentially what Rome's would be if their priests of Jupiter could actually smite people with lightning and so forth. The army's structure is strictly divided into the hierarchies of Kenturius (martial troops), Okkultus (priests, soul-binders, necromancers, and shadow-weavers), Auxilius (monstrous troops, golems, and other non-human/non-demihuman troops), and Logistikus (support/supply units), and members of each hierarchy are readily identifiable as such.
Equipment and Materials
The main currency of the Realms and the Empire is copper, silver, gold, and platinum (as per usual), but in addition the Realms possesses electrum coins (1 ep = 5 sp) and mithral coins (1 mp = 5 pp) and the Empire mints adamantine coins (1 ap = 10 pp). You're unlikely to find these in day-to-day circulation, as they're mostly used like letters of credit to avoid carrying tons of currency, but you might find some as treasure occasionally. Gems and art are also prized highly.
All fey have a weakness (almost like a severe allergy) to ferrous metals; cold iron is the purest form of wrought iron and thus exceptionally harmful, but normal iron, steel, etc. are still dangerous. As long as a fey is holding a ferrous item or touching large quantities of ferrous metal (such as being bound with iron manacles or wielding a steel mace) he is fatigued; this fatigue disappears as soon as he lets go of it. If encased in large quantities of ferrous metal, such as steel full plate or an iron cage, his innate magic has a 50% chance to fail to function. Cold iron increases these penalties to exhaustion and 75% failure rate, respectively.
Because of their aversion to ferrous metals, pretty much any equipment made by the fey that would otherwise be crafted of these metals is instead made of either ironwood or glassteel. If you want to craft anything, details on creating these materials will be provided. Selling items of ferrous metals is thus generally frowned upon and won't get you much in exchange; finding a buyer outside of the Realms would be a better bet. Precious metals, bronze, and other non-ferrous metals are perfectly safe, so ceremonial weapons are often crafted of bronze and copper.
The Characters
I'm not going to put down the characters' names because firstly, several of them took my suggestion and used Gaelic names that are hard to spell and pronounce, and secondly, we have 8 people so it'll be easier to keep track of them via a description.
The Dragon LN Autumn dragonkin; swordsage//fighter; the tank of the party. He's your typical crush-first-question-never martial type and is the party's MVP in combat so far. His player is new to the group this year and isn't familiar with our style of play (we're all in college and he wasn't in the same dorm last year), so he's slowly developing a personality for his character as he figures out how much RP we do and what's acceptable.
The Changeling CG Summer changeling; rogue//ranger; the party face. This changeling is also a changeling in the traditional sense, a sort-of Faerie who doesn't know anything about his real parents or his name but has devoted himself to (and been adopted by) some royals in the Court of Air and Darkness. He's very sneaky and not very hardy, so in combat he prefers to disguise himself as a human or demihuman and sow confusion in the ranks rather than fight directly; out of combat, he's an excellent infiltrator and spy, as in this world there are few shapechanger detection measures in place and the Empire isn't familiar with all the kinds of Faeries there are.
The Captain LE Winter drow; fighter//rogue; the party leader. She's the captain of the ship the group has been assigned to, and being a drow is a loyal servant of Lolth (i.e. the Queen of Air and Darkness). She's a bit creepy and is a vocal advocate of the total war philosophy when it comes to the Empire, but doesn't adhere to many drow stereotypes, which is a nice change.
The Assassin LN Summer high elf; warblade//rogue; the party's go-for-the-important-looking-NPCs warrior. She mostly uses a combination of Iajutsu Focus and sneak attack to strike from the shadows during combat and is the party's conscience and planner outside of it. Her player is new to D&D, so she's basically the strong silent type for now.
The Maul CN Huge maul; the Tank's weapon of choice. Yes, someone's playing a weapon; the player wasn't sure how often he could make it to games, since he has a chemistry lab right before our Friday game, and he suggested that he play something or someone that would be easy to take over if he couldn't make it; he proposed being one of the very few legacy weapons in the world, a former Court agent who pissed off a few nobles and was transformed into a weapon as punishment, and I thought it could work out as a plot hook later. Being an intelligent legacy weapon, his two main tricks are making big illusions and taking over enemies who touch him with his ridiculous Ego score.
The Gunslinger NG Spring earth kobold; ranger//scout; the party's ranged support. The party's only small character, this guy usually serves as the party scout and general sneak. He dual-wields hand crossbows and is going the Swift Hunter route (particularly useful in gestalt), so he likes to run around a bit farther away from the party and snipe people (in and out of combat...).
The Bear LG Summer shifter; swordsage//barbarian; the odd man out. We call this guy the bear-bear-bear-[...]-bear because he's a werebear-ish shifter going for Bear Warrior and Emissary of Barachiel who's focusing on Tiger Claw maneuvers...basically, if there's something bear-related or -themed, he's trying to get it.
[B]The Tank LG Autumn earth dwarf; fighter//rogue; the party bruiser. He's not a tank in the sense of someone who soaks damage, but in the sense of a gigantic war machine encased in metal. He dual-wields Large spiked shields and wears a suit of full plate (all mithral, of course). He's essentially a very weird sort of ubercharger who's focusing more on the “I have a bazillion feats” and “I can squish you between my shields” aspects rather than going for high damage. He's the Captain's adopted son in-game; out of game, he's also a new player, so he has an excuse to follow the Captain's lead.
I made it clear early on that we'd be taking the mythological approach to Faerie morality: the fey are beyond mortal classifications, and if the alignment grid is a graph on a piece of paper, the Faeries are the ones who're trying to light the paper on fire. I do have a preference for party cohesion, so people can do whatever they want alignment-wise as long as they have a reason to stick together (supplied by me in this case) and no one tries to kill another party member. So far it's working out, but there have been some rough spots between the Captain and the Bear
We're already on the fourth session of the game—I've just been too busy with schoolwork to post session logs in a timely manner until now—so the next few posts will be the logs for the first three sessions, and you can expect an update on session 4 sometime soon after tonight's session.