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View Full Version : DM Help High Magic Mythic Campaigns with Malleable Reality



Yora
2018-01-18, 01:10 PM
I was looking into ways to run a campaign with a world that has a greater sense of magical wonder than usual and make the adventures feel like a mystical quest, and I found some intriguing advice in the Planescape campaign setting. The setting wants to be more than dungeon crawling treasure hunts and give the magical wonders some feel of deeper meaning instead of just random weirdness. The way GM's are meant to achieve this is a focus on the theme of "Belief changes Reality". Not in the way that things can appear out of thin air if you just wish hard enough (though one faction in the setting believes just that), but that the believes and convictions of the population of any place can subtly reshape the environment of that place and ultimately move it to another dimension whose rules, inhabitants, and environments are a better match. This leads to the rise of various philosophical and ideological factions which are each trying to make the universe comply more with their ideals by convincing people through action that their way is the best way and everyone elses way would be worse for them.

There are a couple of other fantasy settings that also play a bit with ideas of mutable reality. In Dark Souls, time and place is often very fuzzy and you run into people who seem to have been completely unchanged over hundreds or thousands of years, or whole parts of cities appearing in completely different places. And the people are aware of it. And from what I understand, the Myst games had multiple dimensions whose realities where defined by what is written in special books that can be changed. There's also elements of it in The Last Unicorn with the world getting more grim as the unicorns disapppear and the evil king living in a wasteland.

I think it's a neat idea for a campaign that isn't about getting rich or the fun of killing things, and one that actually lends itself better to an open ended free roaming campaign than a big main quest to destroy a dangerous evil or lift a specific curse from the land. I always love it when heroes really have to stop and think hard about what they really want to accomplish and to consider the many consequences of their actions. And when great deeds can have subtle but direct changes for the whole land around them, the whole scope of the consequences can be reflected in a much more visible way.

But it also doesn't sound like something that would be very easy to do, at least doing it well. What I want to do is to take the idea from Planescape that people in the world know that this effect exist and that there are various factions who want to mold various areas to be more to their own preferences. But I also want to keep it somewhat subtle and not as extreme as hacking the Matrix for example. Since I'm always a big fan of spirits and fey, my idea is that priests and sorcerers are trying to manipulate the lesser gods of the land so that the environment slightly changes to their own personal benefits. One straightforward option is always to use evil sorcery to enslave a god of the land and force it to remove natural obstacles to gold mining for example. But I also like the idea of building great temples or errecting shrines to project the power of a faith so that spirits leave the townspeople alone. Or perhaps bribe or deliberately antagonize a spirit to make it use its powers of weather and animals against a rival. And it would make a great space for fighting over powerful non-combat artifacts.
When the players become aware of such attempts, they could decide to interrupt or support them, depending on what they consider might be best for the land and its people and spirits.

It's a very open idea yet. But do you have any further ideas or suggestion where I could go with this?