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Jeffling
2010-06-30, 01:28 AM
Hi everyone. This is pretty much the first time I've posted anything on here, so I want to check that I'm posting in the right place first:
I've been reading through Rich's guide to creating a campaign setting, and because I've been particularly bored recently I've been sort of coming up with my own world, although since I've never played a (real) role-playing game I'm not sure I'll really be up to producing the appropriate rules etc. for such a world.
I was looking for a bit of criticism/comments and so on... Is this the right place? Should I be posting somewhere else, or should I just keep my thoughts to myself :smallamused:

Thanks

Hague
2010-06-30, 01:30 AM
Well, I suppose we have to wait for some material.

Do you have a baseline for how you want your game or world to be?

Jeffling
2010-06-30, 04:01 AM
This is the right place, though?
Ok, so basically I've always like the imagery that goes with angel's and (less so) demons. You know, the cool angels. I also absolutely loved the old Dark Sun computer game. Now, I haven't really had much experience with that many campaign settings per se, but I've read at least three sci-fi/fantasy books, and know that the norm for gritty blah blah blah worlds is post apocalyptic. You know, "big golden age, big disaster, now we're all dark brooding heroes, trying to make the best of a bad bunch" stuff. See Dark Sun.
So I thought "what if it's just always been that way?". I considered what would have happened if the world were so chaotic and life so hard that society as we know it has never been able to form. But I didn't want total barbarism: it had to be a world where intelligent life has been around for a long time, and has formed some kind of society, but nothing like what we're used to. No cities etc. I wanted society to behave in a kind of tribal, bushmen-esque fashion, with sophisticated language and some degree of technology, though pretty primative.
Another thing I wanted was to nerf magic. Wow, it is starting to sound like Dark sun isn't it? =/
Bear with me, I don't think the end result is actually too much like it...
So, because of the low magic, I didn't want any gods. None. As far as Creation goes, it never happened. My world always has been, and always will be there. Keeping with the theme of infinity, the main part of the world is a plane (mathematical plane. Big, flat, 2D object, goes on infinitely in two dimensions) on one side of which lives most of the traditional fantasy races, and essentially every other kind of living creature you can think of (I'll get to that).
The focus of the setting is around a big lump of Stuff (I haven't figured out what to call it yet. Think, source of life/pretty much deadly. Think Warp Stone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warpstone). The effect that this has on life is to make it VERY intense near to the deposit, and less enthusiastic as you get further away.This is the reason that people can't really settle: the stone Stuff produces exceedingly large and nasty critters that roam the countryside, and will destroy anything very permanent.
Because I'm a bit tired of elves, I decided to change them a little: my brother suggested that I make the change-stone (I think I'll refer to it as that from now on) particularly deadly to them, and reduce their life-span. This wasn't enough change for me, so I did the opposite. I decided they would be immortal as long as they had adequate exposure to change-stone, which means that they live smack-bang in the middle of the most deadly part of the world, which means they're even more barbaric than everyone else and are (in the words of my brother) "bat**** crazy".
Now, further out the landscape becomes less intense, and the big nasties fewer and further between, so the more intelligent races (other than elves) live further out. Right on the very furthest edge of the habitable world, there are some trade villages. The ground is too infertile to sustain agriculture, so they are sustained by the population constantly coming and going. Tent-city kind of thing. These trade villages correspond to clans, which are totally irrespective of race. So the clans contain a mix of orcs, humans, goblins, etc.
The big clans don't have much to do with one another as they are seperated by religious differences. Lack of gods has never stopped religion in the real world.
Now, even further out in the desert I like the idea of having huge mobile contraptions that travel between the different trade villages using sails, surviving purely on what it can trade for. Stealing that from a book I read ages ago, though I can't remember what it was called now...
On the other side of the Big Plane live the traditionally dark monsters. Underdark monsters etc. and also, this is the only place the dwarves live. The dwarves, unlike everything else, have evolved to be immune to the change stone. Because of the evolutionary requirements for such an immunity, though, the dwarves are extremely slow breeding blah blah blah.
Also, since the change-stone is kind of deadly to most other life forms, the dwarves surround their selves with it, as protection, and thus have very little contact with the rest of the races. This is the only race that has any kind of technology, and is very ancient, can build cities. Source of old underground ruins blah blah blah.
Now, over all of this I've skipped the angel/demon stuff, but that changes now! Rather than having a sun and a moon etc. (which kind of proves difficult, given that a plane can't really orbit or be orbited...) the "main" plain is parallel to two other planes, made primarily of glow-stone. Predictably, the one that's 'up' from the 'human' side is white, and on that plane resides the angels. The other is made of red glowstone, and houses the demons. Because the angels and demons evolved on the other planes, they have even less tolerance for the change-stone, and thus can't spend much time on the centre plane. It is the Angels that the clans worship, and the demons are pretty much myth to them. Now, the angels are NOT good and the demons are NOT evil. As such. The Angels are very family-oriented, very power-hungry and scheming. Think Mafioso on a munjumbus scale. Kind of Neutral Evil, if you like. It's from the different families that the different clan religions come up: each family wants control of the races in the center, as they have a certain power over the change-stone, power the angels want. However, the races on the centre plane generally see the angels as divine benefactors, as that is how the angels proclaim themselves.
The demons are very much lawful neutral. If you've read Raymond E. Feist, think the Tsurani, but even more strictly lawful, and less caring, particularly about other races. The demons hate the chaos of the centre plane.
Of course, the upshot of having the upper plane being glowstone is that there is no night.
I had some ideas about replacement for magic: I want instead of traditional magic for the intelligent races to be able to control some of the effects of the change-stone. Nothing spectacular, and very slow. I came up with three classes, replacements for Druid, Wizard and (kind of) sorcerer classes. The Druid-like one uses his power over the change stone to benefit allies that he makes with creatures willing to provide protection in exchange for the druidy guy giving them beneficial mutations. Animal companion type thing. So it's good for everyone, and the clans generally like these guys, and individual tribes might commonly have one.
The wizardy type guy is more nasty: he has less focus on physical change and more on mental change: over time, he puts up blocks in creatures minds to make sure that they aren't capable of hurting him, then makes them into vicious fighting machines. By changing their minds over time he can make them respond to commands and so on, so the longer he stays with a creature the more his slave it will become.
The last is a little weirder, and is the replacement for the sorcerer. This guy, who I've dubbed the 'changeling', has been born with high physical susceptibility to the effects of the change-stone, a fate that generally results in death. However, some of these survive, and can control the change in themselves. These can be really quite formidable, as not only do they have the intellect of whatever race they came from, but can change their bodies to become essentially whatever they can imagine, given enough time.

As far as divine magic, I wasn't really sure what to do for Clerics and Paladins. I wasn't sure I should do away with the 'healy' class, but I couldn't find an acceptable way to fit them in, until my brother offered me a solution: instead of controlling change-stone, these guys would recieve power from glowstone. They literally get this from angelic sponsors, and so have to do whatever the angel wants in order to keep their supply up, as the power of the glowstone runs out rapidly. I didn't want this to be very powerful, though, so as well as running out, the glowstone won't produce really dramatic effects. The resulting class would be more of a combination between cleric and paladin: a kind of beefed-up cleric, with less power. Now, the two different kinds of glow-stone would have different effects. Naturally, the white would be more protective: it has the ability to nullify the change-stone to some extent, whereas the red would be more destructive and would actually amplify the effects of the change-stone. I'm imagining that an elf, exposed to red glow-stone, would simply go berserk.
The red glow-stone opens the door to a (very) rare power user making a deal with the demons in order to obtain some. Since they don't really care about anything much, though, he'd practically have to sell his soul to get their interest...

As a side-note: Since the planes go on forever I'm imagining that there would be other 'nodes' of life, some very different to this one. However, due to the lifelessness of the deserts in between, travel between nodes would be almost impossible, and the likelyhood of someone finding any other particular node would be almost zero (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_never).

Also, maybe some kind of REALLY fluid retentive lizard folk in the desert? Like, they carry months of water or something? I can imagine that the desert might be pretty cold though, since glowstone can't really emit a significant amount of heat. Which I guess is good for the idea of fluid retentive guys, cos they wouldn't burn off much water.

So... TL;DR, right? Wow... seriously. Ok, I don't really expect anyone to read that, but oh well...
If anyone actually does bother to read through it, what do you honestly think? Do you like anything about it? Any ways you can think of to improve it? Is it absolute rubbish? etc.