The Campaign Builder's Guild

So taking one of those kingdom concepts and fleshing it out a bit.  

An ancient empire still ruled by it's (undead) founder.

So I definitely want to avoid Egyptian or Mesoamerican themes here.

So - first of all need to decide the racial make-up of this culture - how much it is mixed basically.

Undead dwarf ruler - I don't remember seeing that too often - and it could work with their desire for continuity - looking after his or her descendants for all time.

Dwarf communities are typically not too racially mixed - but I don't want to create a dwarven version of Eberron's elves - so mixed is probably best.  So with whom and why?  Adoption themes would make sense - started with adopting the occaisonal excellent crafter or some such and very very gradually became more prevalent.  Gnomes, halfings are easy to fit in.  Goblins would also work given I plan to have a Hobgoblin empire that is not keen goblins getting above their station - the traditional dwarven emphasis on merit could work well here.

Some of this kindgom would be underground and some not - I can see a lot working underground but coming back up to live - maybe not daily but on rotation - kind of like offshore oil workers.

Art style - lots of stone statues - with the classical greek style level of artistic realism.  With a nod to modern views of these statues - the stone is left bare - but also going back to their classical roots - they are draped in illusions for festivals to give them the proper attire (the real statues were heavily painted - often quite garish). So much for not ripping off ideas from real cultures.

Stories are traditionally a big thing for dwarves - but I need to put some sort of twist on this to make it more unique. Hmm.

Led by an undead - what are their views on death? Undeath as a great burden for those who serve their families - with a corresponding hatred for those who casually make the mindless dead?

Hmm, too tired to think of more ideas - my sleep pattern is still knackered.  Maybe more tomorrow.

Oh sorry Llum - missed your reply.  Well - it could be selling their soul - or it could be freely giving it - there's some minor difference there I think :)

Basically there is a strong military force backing the empire so any small group of separatists would be crushed, but more there are very strong cultural beliefs that is the only viable society (this society has always been unified since these races were created) - it's also a strongly religious society and all the gods support this model -  the gods deliberately set up the society this way by choice as a group so there is no dissent there. It's also very resource rich, so there is less pressing need to take from others.

It's also mainly intended as a very different culture for the PCs to visit when they go plane-hopping so it doesn't need to be quite so robust as the primary setting.

Well I ate this prawn sandwich on Monday, and I've only just recovered from the ghastly food poisoning that gave me, so I'm a little delayed on the more specific update I promised, but it's a long weekend now anyway, so I should get some more done tomorrow.

Well - it needs a lot more detail of course - reading back over my notes I realised how much I got sidetracked into system issues rather than setting design. But the plan is from here to take some of those ideas for cultures and start building them one at time, to assemble a decent area for playing in.  I'll write up something specifc about one of them at work tomorrow ;)

Other Planes.

Because of the changes to the classes, using any other published planes would be a lot of work, so homebrew cosmology as well.

Some other Material Planes

1. Pangaea supercontinent - all one monolithic state - fully mixed race.  Believes anyone fully adhering to any moral code is morally correct and admirable - regardless of how distateful they personally find that particular belief.  All alignments of deities openly worshipped.

2. Undead dominated.

Other planes - Shadow, Ethereal, Astral, Postive Energy, Negative Energy,  Elemental Planes (Fire, Air, Earth, Water - and something for Sonic too?)

Far plane? I don't really like it - and it doesn't seem necessary.

The Afterlife.

Just one destination, where everyone goes regardless of their deeds in life. It's just a pleasant place to rest before reincarnating.

If it were timeless and you could meet people there long after they had been reborn what effect would that have?
You could prevent multiple versions of the same soul running around, by making it so that the only way to leave the plane is by being reborn (at least if you are dead, the living can briefly visit but it is difficult and dangerous - not just standard plane shift).

If there is one morally ambiguous afterlife, good and evil outsiders have no real dealings with mortal souls - maybe they can make deals according to their own tastes?

Good would invite chosen heroes to aid them temporarily before reincarnating as normal or more rarely permanent service leading to transformation into an outsider.

Evil would have its own champions in a similar way - but people can also sell their soul for power - if they do well this can lead to the champion path but otherwise they end up as (probably rather mistreated) servants or food.

Law would want champions too - some inivited - and perhaps working under specific contracts.

Chaos would have champions - probably more dealt with on a case by case basis - aiding freedom fighters etc.

Countries and Cultures

I want to try very hard to avoid the Greek land, the Egyptian land etc.  So far I've got a list of concepts for countries(which are mostly pretty classic concepts) that need some flavour to go with them.

A region filled with numerous small kingdoms
An ancient empire still ruled by its (now undead) founder.
An elven artistic community, which sees so many visitors of races that it seems very cosmopolitan.
City states.
Sexist societies - both matriarchial and patriarchal.  (They are handy for PCs to come from and to visit).
Xenophobic societies.
Communes set up as an attempt at creating a utopia.
Tribal cultures.
Refugees who fled persecution in a distant land, searching for a new home
A once great, now decaying kingdom.
Followers of a usurped monarch now living in exile.

Gods.
I don't like omnipotent deities - they don't make sense to me. I like gods you have a chance to beat up.  But should Gods be something more than an Immortal Outsider? I have some vague plans for redoing the epic rules entirely - and the idea was roughly 20 levels of mortal, 20 immortal and the remaining stuff was something akin to sovereign magic drawing on the land.  Deity levels don't really make sense to me - so would probably be more a template in system terms - although nowhere near as wussy as the official ones.  I want a variety of regional deities, but nothing too close to racial deities - each race has multiple different cultures (that stuff I wrote next to hobgoblins was more just a sample).  So multiple gods who are the father or mother of their people.

Reserved for description of world.

So back to those rugged settlements in the foothills, surrounded by lots of ancient forests.  So why haven't those forests been cut down to make way for cities?  Well, why are cities needed? Concentration of resources enables civilization to advance because of easy access to food, concentration of resources and increased specialization of skills. It depends how far I want to go towards magical utopia - but food is probably still much less of a problem than of any loosely equivalent historical culture. So how relevant would specialized skills be anyway? When sufficient access to magic can make most things.  It's easy to imagine the longer lived races simply building goods to last and slowly handcrafting everything mundane - although the effects of fabricate should not be forgotten.  So, luxury goods are carefully handcrafted by an elven/dwarven master craftsperson over centuries, and other things are fabricated close to the raw materials source. So the main issue is transport (mostly of finished goods, but a small amount of raw materials for projects which needs multiple raw materials not all available at the same source).  Teleportation is available for the wealthy of course, but for more ordinary goods what is the efficient form of the trade caravan?  Actual trade caravans are slow and vulnerable to raiders.  Magically enchaced guards and draft animals can only help so much before the value of the caravan exceeds the value of the goods. So, if roads don't work, that leaves trains, ships and planes.

Ships are obviously only useful on water - but can be made efficient and a viable choice there (especially on the mooon of course - but the planet has rivers too).

Planes = airships - always a cool option in fantasy and can be made efficient because they are not really so different from ships.

Trains - well there is that lightning rail thing in Eberron - but I always thought that was kind of silly. What about actual steam engines(with some modest magical enhancements of course)? What issues would introducing mundane steam power cause elsewhere?  Would it inevitably lead to factories?

Reserved for discussion on classes.

Commoner
Expert
Adept equivalent needed. *
Aristocrat
Magewright equivalent needed *
Crusader
Warblade
Swordsage
Psion
Wilder
Psychic Warrior
Factotum
Scout
Ranger(no spells) (or a Martial Ranger variant?)
Binder
Truenamer
Shadowcrafter(fixed version)
Incarnate
Soulborn
Totemist
Psithief
Ninja
PsiArtificer
PsiDruid*

*So I'm removing all divine and arcane magic and using psionics in their place. I'm not a fan of Vancian casting, and I think psionics is more balanced overall (being slightly weaker). So I need equivalents of Adept for the low end npc caster, Magewright for magic item maintenance etc, and for Druid I don't want to entirely lose that archetype so I'm looking for a good homebrew psionic variant, that doesn't reintroduce too many of the balance problems that I removed all the core casters to resolve.

Psionics gets a reflavouring to make it sound more magical - and crystal will no longer be quite so mandatory in its magic items.

Out of core's non-casters none really seemed to be filling a unique niche. I've never been a fan of paladin - holy warrior is not a concept that really needs an alignment restriction with martial gods of all alignments available - and Crusader fills that archetype better, with the martial side being better mixed in - rather than a not so good fighter with some spells vaguely.  Hybrid classes just aren't as good basically.  Ranger suffers less from this problem (it's got a better base with the free feats, and it's spells are better once splatbooks are added in, but I'm getting rid of all divine spells, so the spells have to go to.  Once I find a good Martial Ranger from the ToB homebrew stuff I'll use that.  Rogue - it's classic but between Factotum and Scout it seems redundant.  Fighter and Barbarian are obsolete thanks to ToB finally giving melee a chance to shine.  That leaves Bard - skillmonkey is covered better elsewhere, it's spells need to go - and that leaves its music which is not duplicated anywhere and is too cool to lose.  So it becomes a feat to open up the special uses of the perform skills - which the extra abilities becoming available when you have the appropriate skill levels.  Usually taken by Factotums, but not restricted to them.

Edit:
Warlock and Dragonfire Adept could sneak onto the list too.  And a fixed version of Soulknife too - if anyone cared.

The original premise for this setting was cutting down heavily on the races, so there was a small number of sentient races, and all other monsters are either unique creations by magic - so would usually be found grouped near their creator - or are extraplanar.  

I scribbled the original notes on various bits of paper while at work, so collating the info which wasn't always written in a sensible order and updating the posts as needed to fill in the details

Sentient races:

Humans, elans, illuminians, aventi, illithids
Elves (Moon, Sun, Star, Aquatic, Drow)
Dwarves (Working on some changes to dwarves to make them more magically connected with the earth - with maybe goliaths being a recent creation by a dwarf).
Gnomes and Halflings - These are related but need to be distinct - gnomes being the more innately magical version.
Goblinoids (Goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears - Hobgoblins are the leaders, they have a very organized society, bugbears are their enforcers and muscle, and ordinary goblins struggle to rise above peasantry)
Fey - Fey are a mixture of extraplanar and naturalized extraplanar (so now native).  Elves were once fey and some choose to reawaken those ties. Centaurs are ex-fey like the elves.
Dragons(and kobolds) - Like Eberron, getting rid of the connection between colours and alignment - it's more about which terrain type they are tied to - this means two colours per terrain type at least - so maybe some are the native dragons of the moon and some of the planet. Kobolds are their favoured servitor race - and all dragons like make new servant creatures via magical breeding....
Yuan-ti - an example of a magically created race that has thrived and spread.
Sahaugin - dominant underwater.

This may not seem to be cutting it down much compared to some campaigns, but the idea is that these races are all roughly equally represented in civilizations on this plane, with no one race particularly dominant in any way.  There are also a normal amount of mundane creatures - it's the magical beasts etc that get their numbers cut drastically. It's intended for humanoids with class levels to be the primary antagonists.

The main plane of the setting has a planet with a moon(roughly the same scale as the Earth and the moon), except that moon is fertile and inhabited.  In terms of terrain, the moon has no large landmasses, just archipelageos, with some thriving underwater civilizations.  The planet is relatively young, with lots of mountains and forests.  It does have larger landmasses, with several continents. With a general style of lots of rugged settlements in the foothills.

This setting is intended to be used with house rules which drastically cut down on the number of available classes, and then for the world to be able to make sense with reasonable amounts of people having those class abilities.  So the next post is reserved to cover the classes, and then the post after that can cover what I've down in world design so far.

They have personal interest because they are all very pro-magic - plus they belong to an organization which exists to preserve and defend magic - and all the evidence points to this curse being a major danger - and I don't really care if they investigate the curse and somehow come to the conclusion the curse is not dangerous - it's not a railroad plot - it only exists to give them something interesting to poke at which fits into the things their org is interested in.

Thanks for the comments about my players.  My honest answer is I am running the game so I can play in the games they run.  None of us really like GMing but we are all giving it a go. Still, you raise some good points and VGM - it's just very hard for me to adapt to that style of play - although I play a lot of CRPG I always get really frustrated by the lack of options of forced linear nature of the plots (it's why I like stuff like Morrowind so much - although I don't particularly like Oblivion for other reasons) and when I've played tabletop in the past I've never played in that kind of linear game before - it's just such a big change and I'm finding it hard to adjust - hindered partly I must admit by the fact I don't want to adjust (my bad).


Anyway - I don't want to just moan about my players behind their back - so back to setting discussion please ;)  (Although the insights are very much appreciated).

Sorry Bill - I didn't mention too much about the plot in case one of the players found this site ;) But the cultures in the coastal area are all heavily affected by the curse - there isn't any lack of conflict because they will have plenty to do.  To give a vague outline of the curse - it grants magical powers but at a heavy cost, but there are materials that can partially mitigate the effects of the curse.  The PCs are coming to the area to fix the curse because they are a primarily magic using group - and magic in the world recently switched off for a week - they weren't too happy ICly - particularly since they were in a magical flying Avariel city at the time ;)  The cultures have mostly adapated to the curse and a fair few don't actually want it gone - but there will be enough hints to the PCs from evidence of what they find that the curse is more dangerous than it seems.  Obviously the curse itself will be a major impact on the cultures - but if know the baseline cultures I can work out how it altered them.

Well - good to know I didn't entirely muck up my first thread ;)

The issue with the players isn't really part of the setting but just briefly  - the players don't want to more pro-active.  They are quite happy to sit and wait for plot to happen to them - and seem to view any attempt by players to take active steps towards some goal that is not the GMs plot as that player ruining the GMs plot and making things difficulty.  We've discussed this a lot - but I've kind of given up on trying to change their mind - it's more of a problem when I'm playing in one of their games - which I am currently - I'm not used to not being able to persue personal character goals.  Hopefully this will resolve itself in time.

As for the portrayal of each species - you can't go too far away from the standards or your not really using that particular species but just their name but I hope I put enough of a twist to make them distinct.  Maybe I just didn't mention enough details to make things clear.

Humans - I don't like the idea that humans are this generic average generalists and get along with everyone and that they will inevitably become or already are the dominant power in the setting.  They are still pretty average in terms of innate power (no stat modifiers), but I made them a little less generalist by giving them a favoured class (Rogue) - I felt they were a little over powered anyway - that extra starting feat is just a little too good - and favoured class any on top of that is just too much.  They certainly don't get along with everyone - real life humans have trouble getting along with other humans from 10 miles down the road cos they do things differently - I don't really see humans coping that well all these different sentient species.  And they are definitely not the dominant power in the setting - having just recently taking a serious beating from the elves - and they aren't particularly likely to improve that situation any time soon - since elves have the advantage of extra magical knowledge that humans have not yet acquired - and much longer lifespans in which to have gained that power.  Maybe the differences aren't so obvious in writing - but in actual play the players seemed to pick up that human society was different to standard D&D settings they had played before.

Elves - well people do a lot of different things with elves - but one thing that is very different is that my elves are in no way a declining race.  In the long term the human birth rate will overtake them - but that assumes humans will get the chance to continue to grow like that - this is by no means certain.  And population isn't the only factor - any elf can learn magic, but not any human can.

Dwarves - I'm not a big dwarf fan - and no-one is playing one in the game - but I did my best to make them distinct.  Once I find a sourcebook with the right sort of stuff they will also gain some appropriate ancient knowledge which gives them edge in dealings with other races.  Any suggestions on making their culture more unique and for appropriate lore would be appreciated.

Gnomes - the standard ones are more trickster than mine.  I changed their favoured class to cleric.  But those are probably the most obviously different in any case.  The merchant thing is still a bit too stereotyped I must admit though.

Hobbits - when the sourcebooks first came out with nomadic gypsy halflings I was very wtf - I certainly wouldn't use them normally like that - the desire for many square meals a day does not mix well with constant travelling - but I wanted another nomadic species for this setting - and they are generally seen as friendly with Elves - so I decided to go with it.  I'm still kind of swithering if I could get away with switching the Gnomes to being the other nomadic species.

I'm still trying to work out cultures for individual human cultures that are not just the Greeks - but with Chinese art styles or something.  There's nothing wrong with using real cultures as a basis - or part of a basis - but I like to camoflage it a lot.

Alkaru

Blast - just noticed I'd posted this in the wrong area sorry - still getting the hang of forums *blush*