Seeking Templates, Fixes, Classes, Items, Materials, Spells, Monsters, and More!

[Nevershutup]

Hello once-more, people of the Playground! I've finally stopped putting it off, and started work my own campaign world. Currently, it's all pretty basic, but I know you guys have some fun stuff here on this forumn. If you've ever read Bearers of the Black Staff by Terry Brooks, the setting is somewhat similar to that, but no advanced tech.

Currently, the setting is based around a valley or something that escaped a magical apocalypse of sorts. It left most other life outside it tainted (as far as they know.) The setting is set mainly about 70 or so years after this apocalypse, when there's a culture of somesort, but still not much in the way of research, magical or otherwise, meaning self-taught classes only for the most part.

Anyway, what I'm here for, is items for PC's to find in the ruins, spells for them to find, monsters to encounter, etc. So, yeah. Have at it, I suppose? Thanks ahead for any help you can provide.

[jqavins]

Well, obviously, spell books or scrolls of lost magical knowledge. But how about making it harder than that? No one knows how to use the spell books and scrolls they find, so they also have to find teaching texts.

Each self taught caster has his or her own way of understanding magic, and his or her own method for wtiting spells down, if she uses any writing at all. So, when they find these old books and scrolls written in what was once a standard language of magic, they don't understand it. It's as if someone reinvented mathematics, maybe even through advanced calculus, diff eq's, vector analysis, etc. The really foundational theorems would be pretty much the same as we know today, but all the vocabulary, notation, and intuitive aids would be different, so one of our books on, say, tenser analysis wouldn't make any sense. Thus, the spells alone are virtually impossible to use without elementary texts to make sense of them.

Conversely, the teaching texts alone are not much use without practical examples and demonstrations, i.e. working spells.

I don't know how magic heavy you want the world to be, but finding and "decoding" enough of this stuff to establish a new magic school could be an ongoing backdrop quest.