A Runescape Campaign Setting in 3.5?

[supersonic29]

I always really liked the world of Runescape even as its gameplay got old. It has a pre-established world, an endless amount of its own sidequests, the map is even made on a grid already, the monsters are simple ones that either are or are similar to your general high fantasy stuff, it seems like it could come together very nicely. You might have to sort of remove or alter the actual runes thing since 3.5 has its own functional magic system, but for the most part the world seems to stand on its own well in my mind.

Anyone have any reasons this does or does not seem like a good idea? Maybe ideas I didn't state for how it would/could work out really well? Overall lets discuss, seems like it could be a lot of fun :smallsmile:

[Darthor]

I think it would be easier with some homebrew stuff honestly, i don't remember any aspect of the game that is really impressive, you might want to add some special material stuff, focus on some Profession skills, aside from that it's all fluff.

[StoneCipher]

The runescape storyline is about as deep as a puddle.

[Jormengand]

I always liked the idea of a class who got so many of each type of rune per day, and had to create spells a la Runescape using those runes. Of course, the at-will Word of Recall might get a bit much, as might the WBL-breaking potential of High Alchemy (but then, we already knew you could do that) but in honesty if you just limit Home Teleport to the major cities as it is in RS, and tell the players that no, this demon-killing business is urgent, you do not have time to stand at the Grand Exchange High Alch'ing until kingdom come, it should be fine (And high-level wilderness is dimensionally locked anyway... except for the teleportation lever which takes you between varrock-wilderness-ardougne, but that's clearly an artifact).

It could work. I don't see why it wouldn't work.

Incidentally, I did like the whole dungeoneering thing, whereby you have to make new stuff every time you step into Daemonheim, with the ability to keep a small number of items - you can keep the same promethium two-handed sword of epic noobslaying, but not a full set of armour and every tool ever to come to be, on every single floor.

[supersonic29]

The runescape storyline is about as deep as a puddle.

If there was a main plotline to Runescape I don't even recall, I figured the attraction would be world and sidequests and your party would have some sort of set goal to kill some BBEG who happens to be in this world.

[Jormengand]

If there was a main plotline to Runescape I don't even recall, I figured the attraction would be world and sidequests and your party would have some sort of set goal to kill some BBEG who happens to be in this world.

You could set a campaign during the God War, which would be kinda cool. But yeah, Runescape doesn't exactly have a single, overarching plot because that's Not The Point.

[georgie_leech]

If there was a main plotline to Runescape I don't even recall, I figured the attraction would be world and sidequests and your party would have some sort of set goal to kill some BBEG who happens to be in this world.

A note of caution that while making such a setting is possible, it's very easy to screw it up, especially if your audience isn't as much of a fan as the inspiration as you are. I find that an overarching goal that the varied bits of the setting just happen to be working towards can help tie things together.

[supersonic29]

A note of caution that while making such a setting is possible, it's very easy to screw it up, especially if your audience isn't as much of a fan as the inspiration as you are. I find that an overarching goal that the varied bits of the setting just happen to be working towards can help tie things together.

Audience is always a good point. I thought I might try and faithfully recreate as best I can and then just stow my work away for later use, maybe even post it somewhere in case someone else would like to use it.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Guys... when was the last time you played Runescape? It got some pretty badass storylines, the Mahjarat/Dragonkin, the Void knight questlines, the Drakmeyer questline, the God Wars. Runescape has a lot of stuff that can be adapated into a D&D game.

[supersonic29]

Guys... when was the last time you played Runescape? It got some pretty badass storylines, the Mahjarat/Dragonkin, the Void knight questlines, the Drakmeyer questline, the God Wars. Runescape has a lot of stuff that can be adapated into a D&D game.

I'm with ya man, I think the plot thinness that was being confronted was the part where all these future heroes appear on some island (island might have been removed I forget, but the rest stands) and pick up doing all the same tasks thousands of times and sometimes interacting between them. Or at leasts thats what I meant when i agreed.

I always played Runescape as if it were singleplayer, it felt good that way, but of course the clearly canon pvp and player interaction aspects step on that. For that reason I think a small d&d party would be perfectly suited though.

[Troacctid]

Yeah, I mean, just a little while ago there was that whole big thing where Zamorak and Saradomin had a giant battle where they summoned massive armies and shot lasers at each other for more than two months, and they ended up blowing up half of Lumbridge and left a huge crater where the forest used to be. That was a thing (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/The_Battle_of_Lumbridge).

[supersonic29]

They killed off Guthix? Dude :smalleek: that ruins that cosmology for me a little bit.

Edit: Also that ruins how nice Saradomin/Guthix/Zamorak represented Good/Neutral/Evil for d&d purposes.

[Dusk Eclipse]

Actually the "main" RS gods represent Law, neutrality and chaos in Jagex own lore.

[supersonic29]

Guthix is/was definitely not good or evil though, he explicitly believed in balancing the two.

[rg9000]

No, given his backstory, in D&D alignments, the god's alignments are:
Guthix: Neutral Good (Balance of World to remain safe and peaceful)
Zamorak: Chaotic Evil (Majarrat)
Saradomin: Lawful Neutral (But thinks and has persuaded everyone that he is LG)
Armadyl: Lawful/Neutral Good
Bandos: Chaotic Evil (Basically Grummsh)
Seren: Neutral Good

No, Guthix believed in balancing the forces of law and chaos, allowing for peace. They just happened to be in the forms of good and evil. Saradomin and a boar goddess destroyed his village and killed his daughter.

[Troacctid]

I think the Saradomin/Zamorak conflict was always Lawful Good vs Chaotic Evil.

Saradomin definitely preaches a Lawful Good philosophy, although I believe he himself would detect as Neutral Good because of the compromises he is willing to make in order to defeat evil. His dialogue in The Death of Chivalry (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/The_Death_of_Chivalry) gives a pretty good sense of his character. Basically, he wouldn't live up to the Paladin's code, but he sincerely has the best interests of the world at heart, and he is a good guy. He's just not perfect.

I think Guthix was True Neutral. He wasn't into actively helping people or fighting the bad guys. He just wanted everyone to be left alone to their own devices without the interference of the gods.

As for Bandos, even though he was the leader of the Orks, I'd peg him closer to Hextor than Gruumsh. He was all about the strong dominating the weak. Lawful Evil for sure. The Mighty Fall (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/The_Mighty_Fall), and Bandos's backstory (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Bandos%27s_Memories), make it hard to dispute IMO.

Oh, Bandos died, by the way. After Saradomin defeated Zamorak in the Battle of Lumbridge and Sliske announced his "Whoever kills the most gods gets the Stone of Jas" (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Missing_presumed_death) contest, Bandos and Armadyl had their own huge fight (http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/The_Bird_and_the_Beast) where each side scrambled to be the first to build a giant god-killing laser beam weapon of god-death. Armadyl won and smashed in Bandos's head with his own mace to deal the killing blow.

[rg9000]

I had thought that Guthix had men's best interests at heart, worrying of the harm his interference could do to the world.
I haven't done The Death of Chivalry, only BNF. Haven't done the fall either.
I thought it was implied that that was Bandos's avatar.
Also, more on the subject of alignments:
Brassica Prime:Neutral Cabbage(NC)
Marimbo: Chaotic Neutral

[Ninane]

This is actually something I'm hoping to do with the help of a runescape fansite community, but for fear of take-down notices and any other nasty things that might happen, I'm trying to limit the conversion to only Open Game Content published under the Open Game License. So far we're still in the very small dreaming stages and figuring out how to tackle things.

It's encouraging to see others interested in the same thing!

[supersonic29]

This is actually something I'm hoping to do with the help of a runescape fansite community, but for fear of take-down notices and any other nasty things that might happen, I'm trying to limit the conversion to only Open Game Content published under the Open Game License. So far we're still in the very small dreaming stages and figuring out how to tackle things.

It's encouraging to see others interested in the same thing!

Yeah I'd love to take this further. I immediately wanted to start looking into making some good ol grid maps for d&d, but I can't find a way to have a fully rendered world-map, only the world map that is equivalent to the minimap in accuracy. Is there any way to get the fully rendered map to poke around with? Ideally with some sort of debug grid across it since old RS has a grid.

[Troacctid]

I thought it was implied that that was Bandos's avatar.

Bandos's avatar was destroyed by Zanik and the player in The Chosen Commander, some time before his battle with Armadyl. Bandos's followers blamed Zanik and the Dorgeshuun for his death because the defeat weakened him. They were going to launch a big invasion of Dorgesh-Kaan, and The Mighty Fall was about stopping them by distracting them with a ceremonial tournament to determine the new leader of Bandos's army.

[supersonic29]

I feel like the dumb guy who just dabbled at one point with you guys and your in depth knowledge :smalltongue:
Nobody knows where I could find like, big images of overhead views of areas instead of just the minimap/worldmap style?

[Troacctid]

There are some more detailed maps on the official Jagex wiki (http://services.runescape.com/m=rswiki/en/Area_Guides), but they tend to be low-resolution. Example:

http://i.imgur.com/Nf6pi9x.jpg

[Vaz]

Heh, I used to play Runescape back in the day in Iraq. My neice was ill in hospital, and so rather than go and play dollies with her over facecam, she started playing on the laptop my sister had got for when she was in hospital. No matter what time it was she was always up, really kinda cute, used to quest together haha.

Camping Hill Giants in Edgeville Dungeons for weeks on end grinding big bones, haha, them were the days. Man nostalgia packs a punch.

I really liked the spellcrafting system. Replacing Material Components of spells for those would be cool. Craft (Runes) as a new skill, with Rods acting as a focus for the rune. Obviously, trained only.

[Dusk Eclipse]

It was a great game, I stopped playing around 2012 I think? Just before the combat system rework hit the game. Eitherway more on topic, while I agree that a magic system re-work so it works more similar to the game would be pretty cool I think that is bigger in scope than this thread. Frankly just switching the setting from FR/Eberron/Greyhawk to Gleinor isn't that difficult. The main problems I'm seeing is how to deal with non-human races since in general they are far stronger than humans and in some cases they don't even exist (Orcs for example, IIRC there aren't orcs per-se, just the Bork in the chaos tunnels). Perhaps re-skining some of the human ethnicies so they take the role of the other races? For example.... Taverly is a magic-heavy city so you could say that Humans hailing from there use Elves mechanics (who according to the fluff are powerful spellcasters). I don't know, just throwing some ideas out there.

[supersonic29]

Your racial diversity would really be changed. I recall dwarves and gnomes existing, but halflings, elves, and half-orcs... not as much. You could lazily retcon those races in as existing on some landmass other than those relevant I suppose. The benefit would just be an excuse for your PCs to have access to all the base races though.

[Hexalan]

I actually tried running a very rudimentary ~3.5 game set in Gielinor for a couple non-rper friends once. They got killed by cows.

There's a lot of interesting campaigns you can do here, and some of the grand-master questlines can work well for a leveling party.

The old melee combat system was very much like DnD. Stab/Slash/Crush is exactly the same as our Piercing/Slashing/Bludgeoning, and especially back in RS1 when all the weapons attacked at the same speed. I believe the game does still run in equal ticks, but weapons have different speeds about inversely proportional to power.

The biggest hurdle would be the rune-based magic system, which is completely different from pretty much every other game. Divine magic is completely absent (Edicts of Guthix, y'all), though you could probably finagle Prayers into divine-casted buffs. Alternatively, a game set way back in the God Wars would have some merit, though there isn't really any description of how that worked in the game.

There was (is it still there?) a high resolution map of the entire game world somewhere on the Runescape website, hidden in the "Downloads" or "Extras" section or something. I haven't played in a long time, so I couldn't say for sure. The Runescape wiki (meaning, runescape.wikia.com) probably has maps of most every area somewhere.

The races are mostly there. Humans, of course, are still dominant, dwarves and gnomes are all over the place, goblins are the generic weakling enemies, but elves are in their own little hidden kingdom and the only other important races are made of snow, lava, or intelligent gorillas. You could work with the nationalities as races, such as an Misthalin human versus an Ardougne human, the Burthorpe/Falador Asgarnians could be like High Elves vs. Grey Elves, etc.

[Troacctid]

Elves are beginning to reintegrate with the rest of the world now that their leaders have returned, the civil war is over, and their city is being rebuilt, so there shouldn't be too many hurdles there, although Half-Elves would be suspect. I'd also include Raptorans--the Aviantese seem to be making a resurgence since Armadyl's return. Anthropomorphic Monkey might be a possibility too; Jungle Goblin stats could be used for them if Savage Species isn't allowed.

It should be noted that Dwarves in RuneScape are incapable of using magic because their race was cursed by Zamorak. Unless their innate magical abilities are suppressed, they mutate into evil, near-mindless Chaos Dwarves. That's why they developed their advanced technologies.

[Dusk Eclipse]

So dwarfs are artificers? That's perfectly fine with me :smalltongue: