Campaign for Incoming Freshmen

[ungaru]

So, I'm on the executive council for my college's gaming club. Next year I plan on running a campaign for incoming freshmen.

The only known races are Humans, Gnomes, and Dwarves. Dwarves will be at the head of all the primary religions. Humans will be most pervasive.

Arcane Magic is relatively new. Gnomes are starting to Delve into it.
Dwarves don't like that.
Divine magic isn't really that powerful and Dwarves don't like that people are starting to acquire power from sources that aren't their gods.

Only a few of the religions are actual gods. They are granted power because the gods or a few demi-gods recognize that they are working with the proper mindset so they are granted a few powers.
The entirety of known civilization is living within one gigantic city that hits a wall on the one side and has nothing at all on the other. You look out from the one side and can see just nothingness as far as the eye can see. Open sky and nothing. Nothing except poisonous fog at the base. Or at least everyone thinks the fog is poisonous, it isn't.

The fog is slowly rising. At least that's what people believe, the city is actually lowering toward the fog because it's on an extremely massive wheel. That has started turning again.

On the ground there are races that have been lost for as long as people can remember. Elves, which will be very similar to Aztecs, Orcs, which will be similar to the Viking civilizations, Halflings which will be like the American Indians close to the Eberron halflings.

Well Can I get any comments, ideas, or anything else.

[Machinekng]

Interesting.

The big theme I see here is that magic is rising.

Maybe the city is based on steampunk style technology, and the technology is failing. And as more people become aware of that, fear will rise among the common populace. The adventures (or at least some of them) are trying to discover the cause of all these changes.

I question how the city is fed.

Also, I don't think that the peoples of the mist appreciate thecity-slickers pumping their waste out on them (were else can it go? :smallamused:)

[Gourtox]

Interesting.

The big theme I see here is that magic is rising.


Realy? I saw the theme to be more of discovery than magic.

[ungaru]

Interesting.
I question how the city is fed.

The city is fed off of Fungus that grows on the "Wall side" of the wheel and livestock that is fed off of that and corpses.

There is a bit of a black market in selling corpses for food. No one eats their own race though.

That's something I'm going to have my players deal with for a bit before they "Go out into the world" while the wheel is turning down. Killing black marketeers.

The discovery of Arcane magic is quite important. Divine magics have always been present, but at low power.

As the fog rises it increases the prevalence of Arcane magics, and reduces Divine. "Cutting off" people from their gods.

The Dwarves are upset as the fog is lowering their divine power even more and they fear the end of times when they hit the poisonous fog.

Coincidence is, they worship the same gods as the Elves. The elves just do so with sacrifices and such. To "regain" the lost favor of their gods.

[Glinthall]

If one of your players decides to play a dwarf cleric, will he reach a point where all of his magic stops working and he realizes his god is a fake? If that happens, will he have to change his character, or his class? This seems like a cruel thing to do in a game where you've already limited player options so drastically.

I also don't understand the wheel. It seemed like you had a city on a wheel (which explained how it could have a wall on just one side) and this wheel just started rolling across ground that is covered with fog. As this wheel roles it will crush black market salesmen against the ground, but not the entire city? The ground that the wheel is rolling on has other races on it that aren't on the wheel. How will players transition from the wheel to the ground or vice-versa? Which direction is the wheel rolling; is the fog coming towards the wall or filling the nothing on the other side of town?

It seems like you're building an entire world around a plot twist for a single campaign. I understand that you don't want to broadcast that twist to potential players, but it's hard to understand a world that is built around a secret.