Emergent Campaign Settings?

[Rogthnor]

I was on another thread earlier, and someone wrote this.


WhatIf said: ↑

If you insist in rooting D&D in some form of realism
It hilariously fails to be an actual Medieval setting


So I was thinking about how to reconcile the above two points. Thinking about it I remembered the metaphor of magic as technology that @Chloe Sullivan often brings up. (Which I really like by the way)


Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

Well, technically, all adventurers are magic users. Even a fighter, (which don't exists in many of my games because why would they when Warblades and Psychic Warriors are a thing?) in 3.x games is wearing the GDP of a substantial nation in magic items by the high levels.

D&D magic is technology, and like in any technological society, Spec Ops soldiers equip themselves with the best tech that money can buy.

Magic is ubiquitous in D&D, and there are no mundanes among adventurers. Martial characters use martial magic. They may not call it magic, but it's fundamentally still super-human if not supernatural.

There are no [ordinary] or [mundane] abilities after all. Even 'non-magic' abilities in 3.5 are [extraordinary] and can explicitly break physics.

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

D&D is fundamentally a high tech world where the tech happens to run on magic. if you can't at least afford an elephant gun and a jeep, stay the [expletive] out of the elephant hunting grounds. Adventurers are highly trained, lavishly equipped spec ops. If you want to play mortals the dysenterying, please leave me out of it.

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

Again, D&D 3.x is a fundamentally modern combat paradigm, which is why you get fantasy equivalents to Radar, Radio, Artillery, Drones, etc.

I means sure, instead of COD: Modern Warfare, you can play COD: Viet Cong, but well... If I want to play low magic GOT-esque fantasy, I can find a more thematically grounded system for it than PF, thank you.

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

D&D is not modern first world country where deadly threats are rare. D&D is a setting where you can run into Acid-Spitting Giant Bugs (****ing Ankhegs!) if you go even a bit off the beaten path (and can still run into bandits on the beaten path easily enough).

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

Yes, D&D is absolutely a setting where characters will eagerly upgrade from Inherited Sword to Sword of Smiting +3 given the chance. just like in real life where if you are under attack by a mob of AK-wielding terrorists, you will happily upgrade from your daddy's service revolver to a MP-5 given the chance (and availability of ammo).

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

And the PC can go toe to with a Dragon in melee ... precisely because he is wearing at least the GDP of Botswana in magic gear and buffing powers.

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

D&D characters would actually need the fantasy equivalent of Kelvar tactical armor to get away with that sort of ****. Be that adamantine chainmail or psionic force screens. Because D&D doesn't give you plot shields.

Chloe Sullivan said: ↑

That's a ****ty base of comparison. Adventurers are not Bob the beat cop. They're the fantasy version of Spec Ops squads and Airstrikes. Which means that the threats they worry about are the fantasy equivalent of Missile batteries, attack helicopters, and AFVs. EG: dragons, beholders, and necromancers.

Fighting a beholder is rocket tag, just like modern fighter jet battles are often settled with a single exchange of missiles. We have the technology/magic to be that lethal.

And when you volunteer to wade into Taliban-held-Territory/Tomb of Lich Kings as a squad of four up against who knows how much nasty traps, insurgents/monsters, and weaponry/spells, you damn well carry the best gear money can buy, with the best doctrine you(r nation) can devise.

It's a good metaphor. The D&D world is closer to modern day, or the cold war, than it is to a medieval world. The Material Plane is a land ravaged by war and pestilence and lower wealth and prosperity than other planes, It's the Third World! Baator sets up proxy governments on the Third World Material Plane to ensure a steady supply of Oil Souls.

Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells Pages 13-14 said:

HUNTING GROUNDS

Faustian pacts and active corruption of souls by imps should play a major role in any campaign that pits player characters against devils. Soul harvesting can take many fun and dramatic forms and create plenty of entertaining story possibilities.

However, only a tiny fraction of the wracked souls streaming into Baator on a daily basis were condemned to spend eternity there by the active participation of devils. The vast majority of the damned became lawful evil early in life and stayed that way until they died, without ever getting within miles of a devil.

Nevertheless, many such souls are still marked and claimed by particular devils even before reaching Baator. Exceptions include those souls marked as the property of lawful evil deities or the rare few souls that owe their choice of alignment to no creature, region, or religion.

The apportionment occurs through a system of “hunting grounds,” in which individual devils stake out territories on various Material Plane worlds. All mortals who become lawful evil within a given territory arrive in Baator with the mark of a diabolical owner on their souls—unless they were actively turned by another devil.

Because these territories can produce large numbers of souls without the active participation of the devil that claims them, they are highly coveted—and what devils covet, they fight for. Thus, while the owners of territories need to expend little or no effort securing individual damnations, they must constantly struggle to fend off other devils trying to encroach on their turf.

For this reason, much diabolical activity on the Material Plane consists of internecine conflict between cadres of devils. Vassals of rival lords struggle to control territory rich in lawful evil souls. Devils within organizations scheme to oust their superiors and ascend to the vacant positions. Cultists and other mortal minions are drawn into these struggles, along with lesser devils serving the local bosses.

At the same time, the Lords of Hell who control these areas must ensure that their hunting grounds remain fertile sources of damned souls. It does no good to drive off rivals if at the same time the forces of good are turning ordinary people away from evil, or demons are inducing a taste for chaos among the populace.
The Lords of Hell assign territories within rich hunting grounds to favored greater devils called undercontrollers or factotums. Such assignments are always highly political in nature. For example, an ambitious but troublesome servitor might be granted dominion over an area securely controlled by a vassal of a rival archdevil. In such a case, the underhanded lord wins, no matter what happens. If the pesky servitor prevails over the rival, the lord’s soul intake increases. If not, she rids herself of an annoying underling while escaping accusations of unfair treatment. After all, the destroyed minion was granted an enviable opportunity, wasn’t it? Some undercontrollers spend the bulk of their time within the boundaries of their assigned areas, but most prefer to operate as absentee lords, governing from Baator while trusted lieutenants monitor the situation on the ground. In keeping with the tendency of devils to delegate, undercontrollers often carve their territories into portions, which they dole out to loyal inferiors. Depending on the size of a given territory, it might be further parceled, with shares consisting of neighborhoods or villages going to followers of the followers.
The minions of factotums jockey for position, hoping for the chunks of territory with the highest concentrations of damnation-bound mortals. Some undercontrollers allow their subordinates to battle each other for turf, so that the fittest prevail. Others, especially those pressed by rivals of their own, forbid infighting, preserving resources for turf wars that might cost them a share of their souls.

Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells Page 15 said:

Tending Damnation’s Garden

Undercontrollers take an acute interest in the customs and structures of the societies based in their assigned hunting grounds. Most mortals are only weakly aligned. They go about their daily business without thinking too much about the big issues, and they rarely take actions dramatic enough to register as good, evil, lawful, or chaotic.

Devils use their behind-the-scenes influence, whether as political advisors, cult leaders, or purchasers of souls, to force the vast majority of ordinary folks to take a stand—on their side.

Thus, devil-influenced societies tend to display the following characteristics.

Unquestioning Deference to Authority: Rulers are loved and obeyed because they are rulers.

Worship of Strength: Benevolence is considered undesirable and a sign of weakness, both in leaders and in neighbors. People grow up hoping to prove both their strength and their ability to dominate others.

Strict Rules: Conformity to a single identity is harshly enforced. Citizens strive to prove that they belong to a mass whose collective wisdom is greater than individual will. Foreigners and minorities are oppressed when weak and seen as threats when strong. All endeavors, no matter how innocuous, must express the prevailing ideology.

Intrusive Control: The authorities monitor all pursuits and activities, ensuring that strict rules are followed to the letter. Ordinary people are expected to be strong, pure, militant, and self-denying.

Harsh Punishments: Tough punishments are routinely meted out for even minor infractions. The common person enthusiastically supports public humiliation, floggings, torture, and related forms of corporal punishment. Ordinary folk view such measures as essential to the maintenance of social discipline.

Bureaucratic Precision: All transactions, especially those of enforcement authorities, are tracked and recorded with obsessive attention to detail. No official act is too sadistic or gruesome to engender shame; all must be entered accurately into the annals, for posterity’s sake.

Exemptions for Rulers: The rules are meant for everyone except figures of high authority, who are by definition so important that their actions cannot be contained in a rules set. They deserve all the comfort, pleasure, and aggrandizement they can get. Anyone who says this attitude represents a contradiction in terms is arrested, imprisoned, and tortured.

Expansionist Aims: Believing fervently in their manifest superiority, citizens of this culture cannot bear the thought of other societies that are organized differently or that adhere to other values. Such decadent cultures must be conquered, subjugated, and turned into reflections (though inevitably inferior ones) of the lawful evil society.

Devils wholly embrace the above values, which mirror those of Baator itself. At the same time, they recognize that societies based on these principles function as damnation machines, sending more souls to Baator than cultures functioning on any other ideology.

In theory, devils can live forever, so they tend to think in an extended time scale. Some of their best schemes take several generations to pay off. Any act that corrupts a society toward the above model can eventually turn it into a fertile territory for soul collection and is thus eminently worthwhile.

The Planes of Good send missionaries and set up humanitarian groups in the form of churches. These organizations treat disease through Remove Disease. they provide water purification through Purify Food and Drink. They provide food and water aid through Create Food and Water. They can even restore lost limbs through Regenerate, cure the blind and deaf through Remove Blindness/Deafness, and even bring back the dead through Raise Dead, Resurrection, and True Resurrection. They do have an interest in the region, souls, but they are also doing it for the good of the people living there.

Local governments, some of them potentially fragile democracies

3.5 Dungeon Master's Guide Page 140 said:

Republic: A republic is a system of government headed by politicians representing the people. The representatives of a republic rule as a single body, usually some sort of council or senate, which votes on issues and policies. Sometimes the representatives are appointed, and sometimes they are elected. The welfare of the people depends solely on the level of corruption among the representatives. In a mainly good-aligned republic, conditions can be quite pleasant. An evil republic is as terrible a place to live as a land under the grip of a tyrant.
In an advanced republic, the people directly elect the representatives. This type of republic is often called a democracy. In such lands, the right to vote becomes a class-based privilege. Citizenship might be a status that can be bought or earned, it might be granted automatically to those born in the location governed by the republic, or it might only transfer via bloodline. Because having the entire populace vote on representatives is cumbersome, this political system usually works only in small areas, such as a city-state.

most governments not democratic but at least leaning towards good. These governments may have questionable justice systems and strong economic inequality but the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia hopes to be a positive influence on the region.

Local countries are often trying to develop their own magical weapons programs rather than having to buy them from foreign planes. However this can come at a cost to single-minded nations who focus on weapons programs while leaving their people starving and diseased. In this desperate land your PCs must rise to the challenge of dealing with the threats to their community and doing some good in the world.

(Of course if you wanted to do Rogue Trader, but in D&D, you could always do Spelljammer imperialism/colonialism. Spelljammer is more 20th century than the more Planescape-ish modern day or cold war I described above.)



The reason I bring this up is that it perfectly encapsulates something I really love about dnd, what I call emergent campaign settings. Dnd is generally assumed to represent a medieval fantasy setting, but I really enjoy when people look at bits of fluff and, and use it as inspiration to create unique settings or set pieces for their world. The Tippyverse is another great example of this.

So does anyone have any interesting bits of world building or fluff that they have devised by looking at the RAW and combining that via fluff? For example I've come up with several differewnt arguments to justify creating undead being an always evil act so that the rules and my fluff coincide.

[BowStreetRunner]

I took one world past the brink to effectively accomplish this, actually. In a world where characters of 20+ levels exist, and there are encounters with an equally high CR, one runs into the paradox of the Superhero Universe (Marvel, DC, etc). Statistically speaking, when you look at the frequency of potentially world-ending threats cropping up, sooner or later the heroes are going to fail to save the day and the world is going to...well...end.

So I did that. The world actually ended a long time ago and the PCs were living on one of the remnant pieces. After all, if you are living in a world where characters can attain epic abilities, there ought to be truly epic consequences. And there are lots of stories like this out there if someone needs some good source materials. The Dragon Hunters tv show has a piecemeal world suitable for this sort of campaign. 'The Shattered World' by Michael Reaves is a great book with this sort of background.

[Afgncaap5]

I'm almost on the opposite end of the spectrum, actually. There are surprisingly few truly high level characters, but world ending villains and monsters and things-that-can't-be do crop up with alarming frequency, to the point that there's an almost fatalistic, dreadful apprehension among so many ancient dragons, sorcerers, gods of evil, and beasts of anathema. While most of the world's inhabitants are blissfully unaware, the growing sense among these great evils and nightmares and reality enders is that there is something ineffable, ephemeral, or just wrong going on. One of them should have really succeeded by now... and that's not a "statistically, one of us should have been successful", it's "through every ability of measuring, each one of us should have been successful."

I mean, there's no reason that a Wizard with three digits (or more) in an intelligence score should ever lose out to meddling kids just because they happen to get lucky repeatedly, right? ...right?

But alas, it keeps happening, in spite of all reason. It's just... unfair.

So ultimately, I determined the nature of what was going on and secreted it away where the players wouldn't ever really be likely to find it (and I won't be mentioning it here just in case), but I like knowing that it's there. So far the only villain to really see much success in spite of this is a psionic mummy-thing named Thuzdek The Undying who gave himself enough vantage points to figure out the best way to play a long game.

Related but for different purposes: I finally got tired of how uppity the Aboleths were about the memories they have that they claim refutes every other story of existence. Long story short, the Aboleth who discovered the tag-team prank/ritual from Loki and Robin Goodfellow that gave said memory to all Aboleths went the Aboleth equivalent of insane and murdered itself to prevent its horrible revelation from spreading to its kin, because it's just too much to bear.

...basically, humanity and goodness are the C'Thulhus to the evils, dangers, and, well, C'Thulhus of my game universe, because statistically it's the only thing that makes sense.

[atemu1234]

I've been tempted to write worlds like this a few times, but typically I prefer to stick to a middle ground - the world has 'ended' lots of times, but people have survived and rebuilt. The fall of rome might have been an apocalypse to the romans, but to a peasant in china or a farmer in middle america at the same time, it was just another day.

[Fizban]

First: multi-spoilers to cover small bits of text take up more space and are harder to read, I'd recommend taking those comments and putting them in order with ellispses (. . .) to separate, for readability.


Second, I do the lot: figure out how the world should work based on the mechanics, figure out how to change the mechanics to alter the world, and figure out how things work in real life to build appropriate mechanics. There's always been threads on the topics of course. I put in a bunch of work in this Industrializing a Setting (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?522922-Industrializing-a-Setting) thread regarding power sources and transportation, mostly calculating the feasibility of magically powered steam (spoiler: extremely feasible) before comparing transport costs for things that actually have pricing, and also advance of steel making.

Heck, I can search up a ton of threads I've participated in: Trench Warfare (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?509310-Trench-Warfare-Mages-Pathfinder-3-5), Surprise Teleportation (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?513475-Question-for-the-Forums-Teleporting-and-Surprise), Mundane Means of Blocking Teleport (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?540790-Mundane-means-of-blocking-teleport&highlight=teleport), Three (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?539357-Security-in-a-world-of-scry-and-die-for-the-general-public) Different (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?545750-Modifying-Spells-for-a-Magic-Heavy-Intrigue-Campaign) Threads (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?549817-Teleporting-into-a-sealed-room-that-has-moved) on scrying/anti-scrying, a thread on Use of Undead (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?537020-Use-of-Undead-A-Tangent&p=22522865&viewfull=1#post22522865) (linked at the point where a poster did the math to prove undead labor is significant), Magic Also Taketh (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?543316-3-x-Magic-Also-Taketh) (discussion on magical entropy and DM counters to "economy breakers"), Weirdness Building Cities (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?542188-Weirdness-with-Building-Cities) (more on effects of spells on daily life), 3.5 vs Pathfinder business rules (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?494767-How-much-gold-does-it-take-to-open-a-store), Merchant Wealth (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?489630-DM-s-Advice-on-Merchant-Wealth), and Should Magic Items be "off the shelf" or Custom Ordered? (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?483538-Should-magic-items-be-readily-available-or-custom-ordered).

Medieval Demographics Made Easy (http://www222.pair.com/sjohn/blueroom/demog.htm) is a great resource (article+random mechanics if desired, not a thread) for figuring out how many cities of what size you should actually have- from there I've calculated that even the larger cities should be able to fit all their farms in a 12 mile radius, with all of DnD 3.5's Town sizes fitting their farms within an hour's walk (and a light horse is twice human speed). With the number of cities/towns/villages/etc and a map of the roads, you can space them out realistically aside from just saying "you pass a bunch of farms."

There are also plenty of threads on why monsters haven't destroyed all humans/PC races, such as this one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?476916-So-the-fantasy-world-is-a-bit-screwed-up), or this one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?525133-On-Commoner-Mortality), or this one (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?476832-Should-Fantasy-Humans-be-Extinct-DnD-Specific)- Mind Flayers and Dragons are popular topics, and economics and NPC level arguments naturally follow.

And of course there's the pretty well known Races of War (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=33310) and Dungeonomicon (http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=28547), which have massive piles of mechanics I disagree with (like basically all of them, especially the "wish economy") but plenty of good analysis on how racial and other mechanics should affect societies and social norms (honor, sahaugin supremacy, etc). The old DnD Commoners make Plenty of Money (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?443776-D-amp-D-Commoners-Make-Plenty-of-Money) is also a mainstay.


Recently I've been looking into things like more realistic armor (which ironically ended up looping back towards some PHB stats on things I'd intended to axe, just with fixed names and descriptions, though not negating any of my existing improvements), while also finding that normal AC mechanics combined with proper DnD armies (which are 1st level non-elite warriors or even commoners) work just fine, with grappling and tripping making the difference just as it should in real-life.

I did some research on cannons: fixing their damage mechanics to match realistic use vs ships and castles is a doozy not the least of which because data on ancient castles vs cannons is spare (and for that matter ships need to not sink because they're made of wood that floats), but I did gather the simple fact that if you want "bombards" as they're presented in Stormwrack to have existed for any length of time, you're gonna need to convert medieval castles into star-forts/bastion-forts. Digging into the details of how artillery and fortifications evolved, you can find the exact break-points to code into the physics of your fantasy game re: what limits need to exist on "gunpowder" and other explosives in order to maintain the effective tech levels you desire. Same thing for guns and how you want them to work.

I'll use city generation of NPCs to justify knightly orders with flying mounts (including my PrC), priced out a bunch of mounts that should be but aren't given normal prices, and collected several different versions of steampunk/magitech rules to compare against each other along with a method to make "ridearmor" with normal 3.5 mechanics (the secret is Permanent Animate Objects on a chariot with legs) and digging up/filling out the old MoF artificer to supply tech. NPC WBL, Affiliations, and commoner income+tax rates can all be used to generate appropriate amounts of wartime materiel.

Or at least I would if I needed anywhere near that level of detail for a game.

[Florian]

So does anyone have any interesting bits of world building or fluff that they have devised by looking at the RAW and combining that via fluff?

I homebrewed a setting for tackling some of the usual D&D tropes and issues, namely huge amount of bizarro monsters and half breeds, dungeon delving, having an extensive underdark and magic items for the looting.

So I came up with the solution that the game world is actually an artificial planet, housing a rather large and complex bio weapon lab and mass manufactory in its core, always inventing new monsters, spells an weapons and sending them up to the surface for testing, again and again.
The world will regularly end with one side defeating the other, then the scientists in charge will generally reset the world, resettle it and start again.
The interbreeding, bloodline effects and such stem from all creatures being basically cloned from the same source material and cloning vats.

[TalonOfAnathrax]

I once participated in a high-level 3-session game in a setting where Gods, Celestials and Devils/Demons had all been pretty much sealed away.
So now the implicit balance of power integral to all D&D settings was wrecked and undead were a periodic extinction event (they tended to cull the Underdark population every few centuries too). Turns out there are a few CR 18 or Epic undead with Create Spawn out there, and so the DM felt inspired...

Our adventure was: once again the undead threat had grown unmanageable, and things looked grim. Whole areas of the world were uninhabitable, undead were spreading into Elemental Planes again, and idiots were starting to align with the undead now that they seemed to be winning ("become a Ghoul and you too can live forever and rule over the Ghouls you create!").
So we had two sessions as a game of politics trying to set up an alliance of sorts between 2 kingdoms, 1 Elder Brain, and a Deep Dwarf/Svirfneblin Underdark settlement that was crazy prepared for all this. It kinda worked (it would probably not fall apart before the undead killed them all and might hold most undead out for another year or two, especially after we found and purged the main vampire coven that was infiltrating Spawning undead into cities). We became a strike team once or twice, playing high-level D&D Spec Ops against a Vampire Coven, a Half-Fiend and a Lich that we suspected of directly helping the UndeadPocalypse for various reasons. Pretty cool, but we failed to find a way to save the world against the stupidly huge numbers of Shadows and whatnot that were slowly grinding down the world's population. We did help avoid too much internal chaos and infighting between mortals, but the future looked grim. We had to find a trump card.

Last session had us try to figure out what had been done against the UndeadPocalypse in the past (the last one was only a thousand years ago, which isn't that huge in D&D). Indeed, there was apparently a Dragon that had lived through two of them already somewhere! So we had to find her (of course she was somewhere stupidly dangerous and she was a CN Great Wyrm) and persuade her to help us instead of just hiding and trying to find a better immortality than the one she already had (Wish+Reincarnation abuse). She did indeed have the knowledge of how the UndeadPocalypse had been defeated last time - it hadn't. She told us about the Genesis spell instead and gave us the focus to Plane Shift back to the forgotten Plane she'd been born in.
So we went back to a Plane that was really post-apocalyptic. Pretty much nothing living remained, full of Undead fighting between each other to control a few magical items that could produce satisfying victims for them to kill (magic traps of Polymorph Any Object), and the entire Plane was slowly being absorbed by the Negative Energy Plane so we were taking a few points of damage each turn. The GM made up a few pretty cool magically tainted places to fight in as we plundered a tomb for spellbooks to get our hands of the Genesis spell.
We lost a teammate in the process. Only problem was that he was carrying a focus to Plane Shift back to our Material Plane, so now the undead on this Plane could come to finish off our own Plane. Thankfully the rarity and selfishness of Intelligent undead on this Plane meant that we wouldn't face an extra billion Shadows tomorrow - but an extra few lv20 intelligent undead hell-bent on spreading their kind and feasting on the living was pretty bad for us too.
Thankfully we found and recruited a few undead who'd decided (after a millenia surrounded only by mindless undead) that this whole UndeadPocalypse plan sucked and that they wanted another chance at living. Not entirely trustworthy, but no worse than the Mind Flayers we'd allied with earlier.
We did manage to get our hands on the Genesis Spell.
When we got home their situation was pretty damn bad, but we started a Noah's Arc type of situation evacuating to a new Plane like what had been done last time.
At the last minute when we thought everything was done, it turned out that some of the people we had evacuated had been improperly vetted and were undead. Last minute desperate fight to protect the few hundred people of various races we'd managed to bring along! The more powerful enemies were away or destroyed, but this one was tactically very challenging!
My PC ended up as the last Elf alive after a few bad choices :/

[Fizban]

@Florian: that sounds rather similar to the Cattle Driving Necromancers campaign, except on a more macro level.

@Talon: my question would be how the DM was handling magic and leveled NPCs. Celestial Brilliance in particular makes it real easy to clear out minor undead, and if you're allowing custom infinite items it would be even easier to weaponize. Vampire Spawn are reasonably tough but they don't have Create Spawn, and full Vampires are dependent on the power of the level 5+ people they're made out of. For that matter, if epic spawn were around I don't see how any of the weaker spawn would really matter.

Presumably they've handwaved the Genesis spell (as the normal size is tiny), but what fire-resistant spawning undead were capable of overrunning the Plane of Fire? Unless it's just the cool poritions overrun and no one cares about the fire creatures that live just fine. Presumably some of the epic stuff could do it, but see above.



While I was digging up old links I forgot about the other thing I've been tossing around in my head- another response to mechanics rather than built off them, but since I feel the two paths are just different sides of the same coin (and don't feel like making a thread for it) hey. So a lot of people don't like implications of WBL and don't agree with city generation, wanting items to be special but also not accepting a limited number of high level NPCs without some outside force.

I've proposed before that instead of WBL, you could just give people special items that level up with them to match WBL, buying whatever effects they want a la carte rather than shopping at magic mart a la carte. But those items don't mesh with the normal game, they need to be special. And at the same time there are shows and games with special weapons that mark out the pro/an-tagonists while everyone else is literally incapable of matching them, and these items may very well be limited to a known number of cataloged (but potentially lost) artifacts.

So you tie it together: no one can level up past 6th without one a special item to unlock their power, said items automatically gain points to spend on level for whatever magic item abilities you want, and the number of high level characters in a setting is specifically limited by the number of these items that exist. The main problem I have is lacking a third name for them for a good opening paragraph: they're Imperial Arms in Akame ga Kill, Furies in Fairy Fencer, but I haven't played Shin Megami Tensei so I don't know if their Evokers qualify, and weapons that are just upgradeable don't qualify.

As always, once you've replaced WBL with something else you can cut treasure gain down to your desired consumable/non-adventuring budgets. Stuff like firearms and magitech are far more obviously important when it's not just the lack of highly skilled individual, but the literal inability to have more than X high level characters driving the desire for better tech to arm normal people. With a target level for normal people the required strength of that tech to be significant becomes readily apparent, and the stats can be calculated to be a credible threat to PCs while also being available for their use without invalidating their own progressions.

[Andor13]

I was musing on D&D rules one time and realized that if you combine one optional rule (training costs to level) with world building that doesn't include a world swarming with monsters that are floating sacks of teeth and loot then emergent properties would rapidly drive the world in a particular direction.

Consider the ramifications. Every nation would know about the power of high level characters and would need to maintain a supply of them for defense and espionage. You would need to centralize your hero training centers. Leveling up and training these heroes is expensive, and (without the monsters) not self-financing. To generate funds, and XP gaining opportunities you would need to hire them out as guards, etc to people who do actually generate revenue like merchants. Adventuring life then would center around these training towns who periodically send you out on training/money making missions, and much more rarely engaging in covert or open war against the adventurer teams of other nations.

There is already a long running series set in such a world, it's called Naruto. If you really want to pump the Naruto flavor then have certain classes/spells/martial traditions be secrets held by particular clans.