LeGuin's Earthsea as a setting?

[bbugg]

Has anyone used Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Trillogy as a setting before? I would play it as a low magic setting with few wizards and mostly sorcerers or warlocks just because the mechanics would work best.
Has anyone else thought this through? How'd it work? How would you play it??

It seems to me that the scattered islands would provide for lots of independant adventures, if you wanted..

[Azerian Kelimon]

Everyone's a commoner, except the wizards, which are Truenamers.

Yeah, it sucks as a setting under D&D mechanics.

[Tsotha-lanti]

As in every case ever, anywhere, a setting-specific system would do a much better job at modelling that setting. (I know, that's about as self-evident as "blue is blue.")

I can't think of any system I've played that would fit the setting as-is, although I'd lean toward a system something like WoD/Exalted, Fading Suns, L5R, or Seventh Sea. The magic rules would need to be entirely new, obviously.

[bbugg]

Right - I agree with you guys, as a full setting, it'd be pretty dull... I guess I misspoke.

How would it would as the basis for a setting? I.e. keep the geography and some of the fluff (dragons to the west, etc), but toss out the stuff that doesn't work in D&D.

[Telonius]

If you just wanted to copy the geography, then it really isn't "Earthsea." It'd be like trying to have a d20 campaign in Middle Earth. By seventh level, you'd be able to kick Saruman's butt. The changes you'd need to make would either rip the heart out of the setting, or require an evisceration of the rules. The magic system (as well as the Planes) just don't work the same in Earthsea as in the standard D&D world, and most of the "monsters" are human (except for the Dragons).

That said, there's nothing stopping you from pilfering the geography. If you really wanted to stretch it, you could have Roke be the Wizards' Island, with each Master teaching a specialization. You'd probably do best with using some elements from Stormwrack, for naval adventures.

[namo]

http://www.google.com/search?q=Earthsea+D20

See the 1st link : there was some discussion about combining Earthsea with D20. Predictably nothing definitive was achieved, but you may glean some ideas from it.

[Tsotha-lanti]

Right - I agree with you guys, as a full setting, it'd be pretty dull... I guess I misspoke.

That's not what I said at all.

It'd certainly beat the stuffing out of any and all D&D settings just by virtue of actually having had real novels set in it.

It's just a pipedream to fit it into D&D, which is good for precisely one genre and setting: D&D, a sub-genre of fantasy.

[Aquillion]

As in every case ever, anywhere, a setting-specific system would do a much better job at modelling that setting.

Not Jack Vance's Dying Earth.

Let's see... we need a magic system in which spellcasters have to prepare their spells in advance each day. That'll be difficult, Vance invented it whole-cloth to provide dramatic--

Oh, wait, nevermind.

Ok, we'll need strange items called Ioun stones which float around spellcasters and provide them with their powers. It's a nonsense word he invented, surely there won't be anything we can adapt--

Right. Ok. We wizards creating clones of themselves to survive death, spells to imprison people beneath the earth in a tiny hollow cyst, spells to imprison rival wizards by shrinking them down and putting them in a tiny environment, spells that fire deadly lasers (seriously, lasers! Who would have wizards firing rays from their hands?), and, most absurd of all, a spell called The Excellent Prismatic Spray that fires seven colored beams that each...

All right, screw it. At least there's no setting in D&D where the sun is a burnt, darkened husk and the remnants of humanity live out their lives amid the ruins of older civilization at the edge of a vast sandsea of salt, where tyrannical god-kings rule entire regions with an iron fist using their sorcerous might.

...to be fair, when you look at it D&D (and Dark Sun in particular) pretty much is setting-specific to the Dying Earth.

[Leewei]

GURPS has been generally successful at adapting novel worlds into game worlds; a quick Google search shows that people have mused about doing just that with LeGuin's wonderful novels.

The magic system would be a whopper.

[Yahzi]

Not Jack Vance's Dying Earth.

Don't forget the "swordsman of the seventh circle" (i.e. 7th level fighter); the thousands of isolated communities, each with their own random civilizations, rules, and magic; left-over artifacts; regular inter-planar traffic; and wacky monsters like grues and erbs.

Ya... D&D is way more Vance than Tolkien. All Tolkien added were rangers, hobbits, and dragons.

[Koji]

A friend of mine read some Earthsea novels and wanted to make a truenamer.

After we realized how crappy they were, it was never brought up again.

[RTGoodman]

As others have pointed out, folks in the Homebrew forum were working on this same idea a few months ago. I didn't keep up, but it looks like it died off.

Having only ready the first book (A Wizard of Earthsea), I can't speak for the whole series, but it seems like it would be at least sort of workable. As Leewei said, though, the magic (from what I remember) was pretty complex and did all sorts of stuff, and that could be a problem in d20/OGL stuff. Adding in a point-based skill system like HERO System or something might work for the magic, though.

A friend of mine read some Earthsea novels and wanted to make a truenamer.

After we realized how crappy they were, it was never brought up again.

Yeah, the same happened to me...

[dspeyer]

I doubt you could really build a workable RPG out of Earthsea. The basis of the magic there is that it's fairly easy to do powerful things and much harder to do them safely. An over-proud first-year student can unleash a deadly monster with the ability to threaten the world, and a third-rate adult wizard can punch a hole in magic itself. What wizards mostly do is consider things very carefully, to the point that the greatest wizards might go years without casting a spell.

Now stick a typical DND party in this setting and they'll destroy the world by the second session.

[Roog]

Not Jack Vance's Dying Earth.

Yes, even Dying Earth.

The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game (from Pelgrane Press) does a better job of modeling the setting.

[Aquillion]

Don't forget the "swordsman of the seventh circle" (i.e. 7th level fighter); the thousands of isolated communities, each with their own random civilizations, rules, and magic; left-over artifacts; regular inter-planar traffic; and wacky monsters like grues and erbs.

Ya... D&D is way more Vance than Tolkien. All Tolkien added were rangers, hobbits, and dragons.

Also, high-level wizard = win. Although I suppose that one's pretty universal, really, Vance would really drive it home occasionally. I think that was the first one where they could stop time, too...

I doubt you could really build a workable RPG out of Earthsea. The basis of the magic there is that it's fairly easy to do powerful things and much harder to do them safely. An over-proud first-year student can unleash a deadly monster with the ability to threaten the world, and a third-rate adult wizard can punch a hole in magic itself. What wizards mostly do is consider things very carefully, to the point that the greatest wizards might go years without casting a spell.

Now stick a typical DND party in this setting and they'll destroy the world by the second session.

When you put it like that, it sounds a bit like Ars Magica or Mage -- only instead of Twilight / Paradox killing you, it has the potential to kill everything, and any botch at all can catastrophically threaten the world.

I think you could do it, but you'd need the right group -- it would have to be played by the kinds of people who like Ars Magica, Mage, Exalted, and so forth. And not even all of them, obviously, since if they try to play 'evil' characters they're probably going to end up destroying the entire world.

[Tsotha-lanti]

[QUOTE=Leewei;4323845]GURPS has been generally successful at adapting novel worlds into game worlds/QUOTE]

But GURPS is a generic system, and fails horribly at modelling anything other than sci-fi or realistic modern.

I doubt you could really build a workable RPG out of Earthsea. The basis of the magic there is that it's fairly easy to do powerful things and much harder to do them safely. An over-proud first-year student can unleash a deadly monster with the ability to threaten the world, and a third-rate adult wizard can punch a hole in magic itself. What wizards mostly do is consider things very carefully, to the point that the greatest wizards might go years without casting a spell.

That's how magic already works in several RPGs - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay comes to mind. Where D&D fails is precisely this, too - magic has no cost or risk.

Weirdly enough, D&D is not the standard for RPGs. It's just the standard for D&D.

[Aquillion]

That's how magic already works in several RPGs - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay comes to mind. Where D&D fails is precisely this, too - magic has no cost or risk.

Weirdly enough, D&D is not the standard for RPGs. It's just the standard for D&D.

Not quite on Earthsea's level, though. Those examples weren't exaggerations -- you botch something in one of those other settings, you might do a nasty number on yourself any maybe anyone nearby, maybe anyone remotely near by if you were casting a serious enough spell.

One screwup in Earthsea, though, can permanently damage magic itself. And very little skill or training is necessary to do it -- even a mediocre mage could literally destroy the entire setting if they made enough mistakes.

Basically, imagine a version of Mage where instead of individual mages accruing Paradox, the entire universe has a single Paradox score and is affected accordingly, with everything potentially popping out of existence or suffering some equivalently catastrophic fate if it ever gets too high. That's Earthsea.

[Telonius]

Ah, that reminds me - I think I did comment on the original Earthsea thread. An idea I had for the setting would be to reflavor the "Sanity" rules onto normal spellcasting. For example, to use the game mechanic version, Sparrowhawk used a combination of Obscuring Mist and Ghost Sound in the first chapter. The DM was using the "Extreme Sanity Loss" method, so Sparrowhawk rolled 2d6. Lucky him, he rolled 3 and 5, for eight points of sanity loss. His Wisdom score was only twelve, so that triggered a sanity check. He rolls percentile ... oooh. Fails the check. Rolls again ... oh man, long-term insanity. Rolls to determine the effect ... catatonic. He goes unconscious until Ogion shows up to fix him.