The Campaign Builder's Guild

I was thinking about the elemental plane of air and the astral plane, in 3ED&D. They are supposed to have "subjective directional gravity" but I find that boring and lame, so I was wondering how creatures would get around if the planes were largely devoid of gravity. There would also be magically produced gravity, but such effects would be very constrained.

Now I'm trying to imagine zero g vehicles, like some kind of gigantic-oar-propelled submarines, only oars spend half their motion outside the medium and that doesn't exactly work in the sky.

Maybe something like:

/->/->/
_<-_<-_

Where the panel extends perpendicular to the body and moves backward, then folds back to the surface and returns to its forward position. Several such panels would be arrayed in parallel and alternate.

"Ultratech" magical travel exists as well, but I'm focusing more on how the unwashed masses would get around.

Thanks to you both.

Or bats? Not necessarily by instinct, but at least in principle by the mechanics of their wings?

(And not in the vacuum of space, mind you. Just zero gravity)

What about you, Xathan? Anything brewing?

The N is for "National". It ain't no contest. At least not hereabouts.

I wish I had the time for NaNoWriMo, but college is taking up most of my creative time.

I want to know who the movers and shakers are. Where do they live and what do they eat and how do they coerce the other denizens into compliance? How do children entertain themselves and how busy are the streets and how do they smell and what are the fashions of the day? The city's deafening susurrus comprises what sounds? How varied in size are the volk? Are they only small, as "critters" might imply, or as false protrusions of the infra might they be mistaken for whole buildings? How are records kept, so that the speaker knows the city was built by Architects? Do they only think that it was created thus? Do the echoes ever manifest with discernible intent? Are their languages only and always unfamiliar? What creatures dwell there, amid the infra's endless and strangely lit envelopment, beside hounds and volk and half-electric fauna (and, of course, the people)? Is the speaker even human? Are gods believed in? How are they invoked and to what end and with what effect? Where do people bury their dead?

This is the sentence that hooked me, by the way:

"where the cores buried vectoral kilometers through the depths of the infra are dry husks lit only by the bioluminescent hounds that lurk in the substrata"

Hot stuff.

I like all of this. It is right up my street.

Thank you. This is not the same world, but another planet that the ancient worldship verdigris has seeded with humanity. The short-lived green world stories describes yet another such planet.

They used to be our gods
They commissioned the destruction of nations and the extinction of entire races. A few errant men did not follow such commands (they molder even now in the oubliettes of your rejuvenated cities), but I was not among them. Do not judge us. Without our oaths we were nothing. Should those majesties revisit the world I will execute these selfsame instructions.

I know that you sing the names of great deities in order to invoke their power, but you should not speak these names aloud. Such creatures are jealous of their titles and may seek to do you harm.

Pathame
She exhorted our species to shed the ungainly instruments which nature has endowed us. The cities that loved her best were not filled with men and women, but with chimeras of disparate flesh and a thousand animal types intermingled. Her servants were exultant xenophiles whose extremity I will not pretend to understand. Though we were not so in love with our own natures as you are, I do not know that we could have taken our transformations far enough to satisfy her.

Lubjigett Sartent
Your propagandists have doctored the holos that depict him so that he appears conniving, malicious and insane. Yes, he was all of these things, but we did not know this at the war's commencement. He was more beautiful than any woman I have known and may in fact have been partway through a transition between the sexes, as others of his kind have transformed before. His siblings loved and feared him equally and his subjects adored him utterly. Even had we known how much he would diminish by war's end, we might have followed him regardless. How else could we have come so close to glory?

Maiden
An ironic euphemism. I do not know her true name. This carnivorous deity had no place in our monastery and the boys who crept into cankerous Okrum to partake of her mysteries would not explain them to us.

Quhaiha
The pearl city Zagint was among the last to fall. Many of the war's most horrible stories take place here, because we were not permitted to bombard it and had to advance on foot. For five days my company besieged a temple that was already half destroyed and none of us knew - or cared - which deity inhabited it. At last we overcame its defenses and discovered that its goddess was one of ours. A priest had mercifully cut her throat so that we could not rape her, but some vengeful comrade had then impaled her lengthwise on his spear. None of us knew why that temple had defected, or if other temples had followed suit, because we lost the war soon after.


[ooc]This occupies the same universe as "and you, ARRUNTULLA!"[/ooc]

Dear friend, take heed:

The blood is foul

I need to know all about this. I neeeeeeeeeeeed it.

Princess Mononoke and Mushishi?

I'm in.

My goodness the Basic Rules book has no teeth and no vision. Its pitch is terrible and the pdf isn't visually or verbally arresting. It needs to be filled with bad-ass images like this one, which is for some reason on the basic rules download page but not in the book itself. Also where are the half-demons and dragonpeople and furries? I'm not even joking. Elves and dwarves don't cut it. I have no idea how they imagine this is going to reinvigorate the IP.

Quote from: SteerpikeThis is why despite Alignment bugging me philosophically I think it's a useful roleplaying tool

For me it's the reverse. I much prefer alignment as cosmological allegiance rather than personality description. The fact that the metaphysical underpinnings of the D&D universe are so inconsistent with mortal morality and ethics is half the reason I still GM on the Great Wheel.

Superb on PC. Fanastic PvP. Disappointing lore. I'm really looking forward to Bloodborne.