Ayedi_Star
2013-06-14, 08:43 PM
Hello to the playground!
It's been a while since I ran a 3.5 game, our group normally prefering Anima as a system.
Due to me designing and coming up with a "small" campaign, for me to run for a period of 8 weeks or so, I began setting up the links to the larger picture, the overarching story and plot, and boy did my scale go beyond expected level.
plus, this is an idea I had and just had to outright run with it.
it's been some time since I did my homework, so please feel free to add in any useful books or resources that could be useful.
At the moment, yeah, this is a pretty barren project, but I hope to flesh it out into one that can be an amazing close to the game or an opening into epic (which my group has never ran) - so bare in mind this is all set aorund the idea of fighting at level 19-21 in a mostly unoptimised fashion.
The players who will eventually reach this are not all optimisers, nor fully aware of the tier system or of "optimal" builds, only two out of four of them have any prior demonstration of building to tier 2, most of the time, the group operates at tier 3 to 4.
For purposes of all construction and objects, please consider materials, gold, and experience to be irrelevant, aside from book-keeping.
The Tower of the End
alternatively, The Spire, The Cradle of Death, The Seat of Unending Evil.
The Tower of the End is the seat of power for a god-emperor lich who lords over an entire demiplane dedicated to raising an undead army and invading the material plane.
at my conceptual stage I originally had two listed sizes:
1 - the tallest tower in the world is currently the Burj Khalifa, and while these figures do not match reality, I'd personally "rough-edge" it at 560 x 560 x 2,720 feet in regards to making it a stronghold.
I initally thought this would be big enough, but it kinda gets cramped once the ideas start flowing, and besides, while it's certainly big, it's not -dauntingly- big and certainly not epic in size and scale where magic is available. the god-emperor of the dead isn't impressed.
2 - But this is a lead into epic, and the BBEG besides, so let's go big or go home!
500 x 500 x 30,000 feet.
this is a "tower" that doesn't just touch the clouds, it reaches past them and brushes the lower transistional layer between the Troposphere and the Stratosphere, the tropopause.
It could be bigger, but really, there's no sane point in doing so for this group. if it was tippyverse? oh yeah.
so by doing a bit of volume calculation I ended up with the following.
500 foot by 500 foot surface, measuring 25 by 25 stronghold spaces, means a total of 625 stronghold rooms on the first floor.
being 30,000 feet tall, this gives it 3,000 "floor layers"
and a total of 1,875,000 stronghold spaces.
Now we're getting somewhere!!
So what does a god-emperor DO given an amount of time approaching NI, unlimited resources and a demiplane in which he has divine rank of some form from which to launch an assault on the entire material plane using this as his base of operations?
I used the idea of 'districts'
districts are sections of floors that all suit a unified purpose, consisting of part of, or even an entire floor 500 x 500 x 10 feet in area, but for larger districts, the floor may even reach 500 x 500 x 500, creating large specialist chunks or even hollow areas for huge scale projects.
Each district should be designed as to work both uptright and converting to a side-on format, but you can take for granted that spiderwalk-style magic or outright relative gravity shennanigans will be available as desired.
these are the districts I have in mind so far:
Assault, Security & Defence.
Multiple floors will be for internal and external security, dedicated to the idea of taking out incoming fliers, attacking cities, and dealing with intruders into the tower.
Think walls sliding back and platforms raising ballista teams, spell turrets and seige engines into posistion to fire outside the tower, as well as nests inside the tower itself that perform the same function internally.
the skunkworks.
The laboratories and associated space for making and storing as much mindless undead as possible, alchemical labs, holding pens, maybe even battery-farming undead into 5'-5'-5' pods to be carpet bombed down on cities as drop pods from the fleet of airships.
the machine.
Crafting district, to outfit the unintelligent undead with usable arms and armor, as well as equipment for the intelligent beings, magical items used for the base and its supporting / dependant assets. Expected staff is roughly 1,500 crafters / artificers who don't need to worry about XP costs when they can invade a plane as if it was a dungeon raid.
The Cradle.
Roosts for flying undead, as well as ship docks for eberron-style airships to be built, repaired and stored. at its largest, this may even contain small hill or mountain tops in the same vein as netherese enclaves, but we'll see if those are too big or not, or should just also be capable of teleporting / dimension hopping seperately.
The Core.
I appreciate it may not be necessary, but I'd like to include some notion of artifact-level power driving the tower, such as elemental binding rings, giant psionic focusing crystals, or even Mythals stacked to cover the entire area of the tower. I don't have much information on the Mythals or Mythalars, so any books I should search for or knowledge bases to read for those would be appreciated.
The Grave.
Accommodation for as many of the 6,962 intelligent beings on the tower that follow the emperor, though really it does not need to house them all as the tower does have an attached fleet of floating fortresses that could double as barracks or homes. the grave doesn't need to necessarily feature ideas useful to living habitation - 90% of these beings are going to be medium sized necropolitans, and the minority of intelligent beings that are living have essentially free access to magic and items for their use.
Given that free time is limited but available, this should not just cover occupancy (homes or crypts), but also methods of passing free time suitable for undead.
The Library.
A huge library / magical lab with enough magical tomes and equipment to service an entire caste of casters of both divine and arcane classes and provide the tools for item creation, summoning, scrying and large-scale projects not held within another district. I don't have any kind of number on how many of those followers will qualify for this area, but it won't exceed 1,500, nor will XP be a concern (Exactly as The Machine).
The Vault.
A district entirely for keeping items or beings too vulnerable, valuable or dangerous, if there are prisons in here, they are of the Stasis variety. anti-magic fields, quintessence lock-boxes, the occasional thinaum spellclock of true ressurection for VIPs...
the palace.
A smaller subsection of floors for unique individuals, mostly casters as well as at least one god-emperor lich to reside in.
There are 7 primary leaders, The lich, two vice leaders, and four sub leaders, though I don't have exact personalities or roles yet, they will each have the equivilant of a VIP suite in a hotel, if not private labs just for themselves.
The god-emperor, of course, will have an entire floor just to himself for a suite, and will be sandwhiched between the floors of the other leaders and the highest security floors imaginable.
the throne.
At the very top floors the tower will begin narrowing to a tip, and at the very top will be an ornate open plan balcony where the god-emperor views his entire plane from, as well as space for rituals, or just basking in the glory of, you know, sitting on the top of a 30,000 tower of death, metal, and magic that can fly, teleport and cross the planes full of legions of the dead and thousands of servants willing to die for you.
when the tower converts to side-on, this space will seal up using movable panels to be less vulnerable.
At some point of the tower, but especially at the top, the altitude will drop the temperature to -60C (-76F) so anyone climbing the outside or exposed to the air will begin suffering extreme exposure. the lich will be fine, but everybody else better be packing thermal gear or magic.
The topics that don't exist inside the tower itself are two-fold:
The Blockade.
The tower can make and house airships to act as patrols and troop transports, as well as undead fliers ranging from swarms to colossal dragons - the fliers are easy, but designing several classes or roles of airship might get tricky.
The other idea is small-scale netherese enclave forts, smaller floating strongholds that can act as outposts or seige weapons, perhaps even as locations suitable for prisons, living accomodations, or 'black box' strongholds for redundant or dangerous experiments.
The Screen.
While the tower is meant to be nearly indestructable and houses tens of thousands of undead, over a thousand casters (some of epic level), I like this idea too much to give it up.
The tower itself is magically warded against teleportation, scrying, and damage, however the machine district designs and produces what are essentially UAVs, or semi-intelligent construct agents.
in the Screen, these are diminuative sized constructs that are near-mindless, nonviolent and serve the role of scouts, sensors, security and the like.
They are essentially diminuitive, mechanical crabs that can float under their own power to a designated location and then use an immovable rod to perch there, scanning for intruders, acting as intelligent alarms, and using spell-like abilities ranging from Sending and True Seeing to Anti-Magic Shell.
Yes, I want to include diminuitive spy satellites in the form of metal or effigy crabs / birds / pixies.
What I'd like feedback on, or even concepts or ideas on, are the following:
His Phylactory - Given that the god-emperor feels utterly impervious to any challenge short of a coalition of gods taking him on, where should this be stored? the vault, the core, his palace?
I appreciate the smart thing to do would be to make it impossible to find and then just lose it, but I don't want to go down that route currently.
Districts - how would you go about designing any of the districts I mentioned, or even ones I didn't? I had ideas for districts related to teleporting parties of intelligent undead to another plane as a method of farming experience, or calling in high-level creatures for the same purpose, but didn't make it into a district currently.
The Blockade - How would you go about design floating keeps, and where can I find more information on the Mythals that are used in the construction / running of them, if those would be of use either in the flying keeps or just in the tower itself as something used in the core?
The Screen - Any good ideas for diminuitive, floating spy satellites? I'd rather they either be mindless or mostly harmless, inquistive unless given orders.
the things they send for, on the other hand, can be a pack of flying metal small-to-huge sized metal murderbeasts.
Dead Space / life in the middle of the dead - 100% of the tower might not be used, in fact I'd appreciate good chunks of 'dead air' in sections that either allow future expansion or storage, it may be possible that entire pockets of other factions can take up residence, converting an unused, remote and empty section to set up farming and living spaces for themselves. as long as they never, ever go out of these sections, these can act as secluded spots of life or even good in the tower, too remote or too small for the god-emperor to even care. After all, as long as they don't disrupt his tower's running, they essentially put themselves in prison to be killed later once the real work of killing an entire plane is done.
The End!
I'll be updating this once I've even began contemplating how many different ways this could go, as you can imagine, there's Hundreds of possible variations of even one floor alone, given the 'district' nature I'm using.
Please feel free to offer advice, comments, relevant books or design ideas, or even come up with design philosophies entirely.
My own ideas would probably run stale fairly quickly, and if the tower can give the illusion that the BBEG allows his servants to set up shop in their own styles, it lends credibility to the feeling that the tower is lived in, or rather, unlived in.
As a final note, thank you to all of those who read all this, whether or not you reply - I look forward to seeing what this provokes in response from those of you with the time and interest to explore the idea.
It's been a while since I ran a 3.5 game, our group normally prefering Anima as a system.
Due to me designing and coming up with a "small" campaign, for me to run for a period of 8 weeks or so, I began setting up the links to the larger picture, the overarching story and plot, and boy did my scale go beyond expected level.
plus, this is an idea I had and just had to outright run with it.
it's been some time since I did my homework, so please feel free to add in any useful books or resources that could be useful.
At the moment, yeah, this is a pretty barren project, but I hope to flesh it out into one that can be an amazing close to the game or an opening into epic (which my group has never ran) - so bare in mind this is all set aorund the idea of fighting at level 19-21 in a mostly unoptimised fashion.
The players who will eventually reach this are not all optimisers, nor fully aware of the tier system or of "optimal" builds, only two out of four of them have any prior demonstration of building to tier 2, most of the time, the group operates at tier 3 to 4.
For purposes of all construction and objects, please consider materials, gold, and experience to be irrelevant, aside from book-keeping.
The Tower of the End
alternatively, The Spire, The Cradle of Death, The Seat of Unending Evil.
The Tower of the End is the seat of power for a god-emperor lich who lords over an entire demiplane dedicated to raising an undead army and invading the material plane.
at my conceptual stage I originally had two listed sizes:
1 - the tallest tower in the world is currently the Burj Khalifa, and while these figures do not match reality, I'd personally "rough-edge" it at 560 x 560 x 2,720 feet in regards to making it a stronghold.
I initally thought this would be big enough, but it kinda gets cramped once the ideas start flowing, and besides, while it's certainly big, it's not -dauntingly- big and certainly not epic in size and scale where magic is available. the god-emperor of the dead isn't impressed.
2 - But this is a lead into epic, and the BBEG besides, so let's go big or go home!
500 x 500 x 30,000 feet.
this is a "tower" that doesn't just touch the clouds, it reaches past them and brushes the lower transistional layer between the Troposphere and the Stratosphere, the tropopause.
It could be bigger, but really, there's no sane point in doing so for this group. if it was tippyverse? oh yeah.
so by doing a bit of volume calculation I ended up with the following.
500 foot by 500 foot surface, measuring 25 by 25 stronghold spaces, means a total of 625 stronghold rooms on the first floor.
being 30,000 feet tall, this gives it 3,000 "floor layers"
and a total of 1,875,000 stronghold spaces.
Now we're getting somewhere!!
So what does a god-emperor DO given an amount of time approaching NI, unlimited resources and a demiplane in which he has divine rank of some form from which to launch an assault on the entire material plane using this as his base of operations?
I used the idea of 'districts'
districts are sections of floors that all suit a unified purpose, consisting of part of, or even an entire floor 500 x 500 x 10 feet in area, but for larger districts, the floor may even reach 500 x 500 x 500, creating large specialist chunks or even hollow areas for huge scale projects.
Each district should be designed as to work both uptright and converting to a side-on format, but you can take for granted that spiderwalk-style magic or outright relative gravity shennanigans will be available as desired.
these are the districts I have in mind so far:
Assault, Security & Defence.
Multiple floors will be for internal and external security, dedicated to the idea of taking out incoming fliers, attacking cities, and dealing with intruders into the tower.
Think walls sliding back and platforms raising ballista teams, spell turrets and seige engines into posistion to fire outside the tower, as well as nests inside the tower itself that perform the same function internally.
the skunkworks.
The laboratories and associated space for making and storing as much mindless undead as possible, alchemical labs, holding pens, maybe even battery-farming undead into 5'-5'-5' pods to be carpet bombed down on cities as drop pods from the fleet of airships.
the machine.
Crafting district, to outfit the unintelligent undead with usable arms and armor, as well as equipment for the intelligent beings, magical items used for the base and its supporting / dependant assets. Expected staff is roughly 1,500 crafters / artificers who don't need to worry about XP costs when they can invade a plane as if it was a dungeon raid.
The Cradle.
Roosts for flying undead, as well as ship docks for eberron-style airships to be built, repaired and stored. at its largest, this may even contain small hill or mountain tops in the same vein as netherese enclaves, but we'll see if those are too big or not, or should just also be capable of teleporting / dimension hopping seperately.
The Core.
I appreciate it may not be necessary, but I'd like to include some notion of artifact-level power driving the tower, such as elemental binding rings, giant psionic focusing crystals, or even Mythals stacked to cover the entire area of the tower. I don't have much information on the Mythals or Mythalars, so any books I should search for or knowledge bases to read for those would be appreciated.
The Grave.
Accommodation for as many of the 6,962 intelligent beings on the tower that follow the emperor, though really it does not need to house them all as the tower does have an attached fleet of floating fortresses that could double as barracks or homes. the grave doesn't need to necessarily feature ideas useful to living habitation - 90% of these beings are going to be medium sized necropolitans, and the minority of intelligent beings that are living have essentially free access to magic and items for their use.
Given that free time is limited but available, this should not just cover occupancy (homes or crypts), but also methods of passing free time suitable for undead.
The Library.
A huge library / magical lab with enough magical tomes and equipment to service an entire caste of casters of both divine and arcane classes and provide the tools for item creation, summoning, scrying and large-scale projects not held within another district. I don't have any kind of number on how many of those followers will qualify for this area, but it won't exceed 1,500, nor will XP be a concern (Exactly as The Machine).
The Vault.
A district entirely for keeping items or beings too vulnerable, valuable or dangerous, if there are prisons in here, they are of the Stasis variety. anti-magic fields, quintessence lock-boxes, the occasional thinaum spellclock of true ressurection for VIPs...
the palace.
A smaller subsection of floors for unique individuals, mostly casters as well as at least one god-emperor lich to reside in.
There are 7 primary leaders, The lich, two vice leaders, and four sub leaders, though I don't have exact personalities or roles yet, they will each have the equivilant of a VIP suite in a hotel, if not private labs just for themselves.
The god-emperor, of course, will have an entire floor just to himself for a suite, and will be sandwhiched between the floors of the other leaders and the highest security floors imaginable.
the throne.
At the very top floors the tower will begin narrowing to a tip, and at the very top will be an ornate open plan balcony where the god-emperor views his entire plane from, as well as space for rituals, or just basking in the glory of, you know, sitting on the top of a 30,000 tower of death, metal, and magic that can fly, teleport and cross the planes full of legions of the dead and thousands of servants willing to die for you.
when the tower converts to side-on, this space will seal up using movable panels to be less vulnerable.
At some point of the tower, but especially at the top, the altitude will drop the temperature to -60C (-76F) so anyone climbing the outside or exposed to the air will begin suffering extreme exposure. the lich will be fine, but everybody else better be packing thermal gear or magic.
The topics that don't exist inside the tower itself are two-fold:
The Blockade.
The tower can make and house airships to act as patrols and troop transports, as well as undead fliers ranging from swarms to colossal dragons - the fliers are easy, but designing several classes or roles of airship might get tricky.
The other idea is small-scale netherese enclave forts, smaller floating strongholds that can act as outposts or seige weapons, perhaps even as locations suitable for prisons, living accomodations, or 'black box' strongholds for redundant or dangerous experiments.
The Screen.
While the tower is meant to be nearly indestructable and houses tens of thousands of undead, over a thousand casters (some of epic level), I like this idea too much to give it up.
The tower itself is magically warded against teleportation, scrying, and damage, however the machine district designs and produces what are essentially UAVs, or semi-intelligent construct agents.
in the Screen, these are diminuative sized constructs that are near-mindless, nonviolent and serve the role of scouts, sensors, security and the like.
They are essentially diminuitive, mechanical crabs that can float under their own power to a designated location and then use an immovable rod to perch there, scanning for intruders, acting as intelligent alarms, and using spell-like abilities ranging from Sending and True Seeing to Anti-Magic Shell.
Yes, I want to include diminuitive spy satellites in the form of metal or effigy crabs / birds / pixies.
What I'd like feedback on, or even concepts or ideas on, are the following:
His Phylactory - Given that the god-emperor feels utterly impervious to any challenge short of a coalition of gods taking him on, where should this be stored? the vault, the core, his palace?
I appreciate the smart thing to do would be to make it impossible to find and then just lose it, but I don't want to go down that route currently.
Districts - how would you go about designing any of the districts I mentioned, or even ones I didn't? I had ideas for districts related to teleporting parties of intelligent undead to another plane as a method of farming experience, or calling in high-level creatures for the same purpose, but didn't make it into a district currently.
The Blockade - How would you go about design floating keeps, and where can I find more information on the Mythals that are used in the construction / running of them, if those would be of use either in the flying keeps or just in the tower itself as something used in the core?
The Screen - Any good ideas for diminuitive, floating spy satellites? I'd rather they either be mindless or mostly harmless, inquistive unless given orders.
the things they send for, on the other hand, can be a pack of flying metal small-to-huge sized metal murderbeasts.
Dead Space / life in the middle of the dead - 100% of the tower might not be used, in fact I'd appreciate good chunks of 'dead air' in sections that either allow future expansion or storage, it may be possible that entire pockets of other factions can take up residence, converting an unused, remote and empty section to set up farming and living spaces for themselves. as long as they never, ever go out of these sections, these can act as secluded spots of life or even good in the tower, too remote or too small for the god-emperor to even care. After all, as long as they don't disrupt his tower's running, they essentially put themselves in prison to be killed later once the real work of killing an entire plane is done.
The End!
I'll be updating this once I've even began contemplating how many different ways this could go, as you can imagine, there's Hundreds of possible variations of even one floor alone, given the 'district' nature I'm using.
Please feel free to offer advice, comments, relevant books or design ideas, or even come up with design philosophies entirely.
My own ideas would probably run stale fairly quickly, and if the tower can give the illusion that the BBEG allows his servants to set up shop in their own styles, it lends credibility to the feeling that the tower is lived in, or rather, unlived in.
As a final note, thank you to all of those who read all this, whether or not you reply - I look forward to seeing what this provokes in response from those of you with the time and interest to explore the idea.