The Campaign Builder's Guild

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"There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit."
    -A dead and forgotten emperor

The old Empire was huge, spread across the galaxy with 22 million inhabited human worlds before it crumpled beneath its own weight centuries ago. There are literally trillions of people who live and die without ever knowing that they are apart of a galaxy filled with human beings.

For thousands of years man conquered the stars through sorcery and might. Now, it is a dark age, a forgotten age of war and sorcery. There are horrors in the dark places of the universe that humans were never meant to see. It is a frontier of lost civilizations and hidden knowledge where death will come at any moment.

Only the quick witted and the deadly will survive in the Dark Frontier.

The Worlds of Cosmos

There are millions of worlds in the galaxy, each of them connected by sorcery. It is through magic that the starships are able to enter the dreaming and attain faster than light speeds. This is an account of only a small collection of these worlds. For even if I were to visit and chronicle a new world every day it would still take me about 423,076 years (by most calendars).

Khrysos
Once a complete and whole kingdom sworn to the Lotus Throne, it has now broken apart into a world rending civil war. Where once it was united, there are now 18 provinces ripping themselves apart.

Threlis
Home to the shining city of Arethet ruled by the guilds as well as home to the Order of Deltreon which has dedicated itself to categorizing worlds, fauna, flora, lost artifacts, and forgotten information about the galaxy. More ink has been spilled writing about Threlis than any almost any other world in our library.

Marad
Marad is broken into three kingdoms: The Kingdom of the Jackal, The Kingdom of the Scorpion, and The Kingdom of the Serpent. Each ruled by a powerful Caliph who wields a signet ring that allows them to command fealty from the armies of the dead. It is a dangerous and inhospitable place, but there are secrets

Letinsia
A once beautiful planet, it was tainted by corrosive sorcery leaving it a rotting husk of world. The beautiful twilight forests are now weeping sores bleeding acidic sap. The fauna have become mutated horrors that could drive a normal person insane.

Icthillion
It is an old world, where the blood of the old empire still flows like a flooded river. It is a land of kings, it is ancient and beautiful but plagued by a dark shadow.

The Twin Worlds of Aradar and Shol Lomenar
Also known as Dawn and Dusk (respectively). Aradar is a world of light and beauty where heroes are born and magic flows. Shol Lomenar is a dark world corrupt by a powerful Demonlord and dark magic causing it to rot from within.

About the Author
Ariel Hapzid is a Maiden of Secrets and Searcher of Lore. She has served in The Order of Deltreon for 40 years and has personally visited and documented hundreds of new worlds. She is most famous for her discoveries of Tombs of the Jernai Kings, the lotus sword of Braxisor, and her many books on politics among the stars.
[ooc]
What is Cosmos?
It is an entire galaxy of adventure. That being said, it is different from most roleplaying products, unlike a lot of published campaign settings, this is written in character with almost no rules to speak of. The reason for that is to allow a gamemaster and their gaming group decide what system they like to use the most. Maybe you love Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition or 4th edition, or the HERO System, or something you all cooked up yourselves. It doesn't matter to me, just as long as you're all having fun. That means it requires a little more effort on the part of the players and the gamemaster, but I think it's worth it.

I will be describing some of the miraculous alien creatures of Cosmos or some of the strange NPCs, but it's up to the Gamemaster what kind of stats they receive. In one game, a Borogroth is a creature a party of first level heroes could take on, and in another game it is an epic threat that only the toughest warriors could handle. Adventures I write will be more like novellas, with a prose chapter, followed by a section that describes the action in more gaming terms (maps, NPCs, creatures, and sweet loot!).[/ooc]

There wasn't any confusion. You know I love Predator, but I was pulling from a lot of different sources. There is an alien race in star trek that are hunters (like predator) but I was also looking at the Dwarf Slayers who are looking for a glorious death.

Quote from: SilvercatMoonpaw

Quote from: Gnome NachosEssentially porn for nerds.

"I'd hit that with my +5 Vorpal Tachyon Beam."

Make it so!

Oh and I forgot about Elementals! They are a lot like the elementals in standard dnd games (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) but are actually made of Elements found on the Periodic Table. (Gold Elementals, Boron Elementals, and more!)

Introduction

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." --Larry Niven

Welcome to my campaign setting. When I began working on Cosmos I knew that I wanted something different. It has the qualities that I love in a great Science Fiction story (aliens, many planets with unique bio-systems, and space ships) while combining with it qualities that I love in a great fantasy story (magic).

The idea is that the great ships are powered by powerful wizards not warp drives. It is also a universe without elves and dwarves. One of my initial rules was to have plenty of aliens populating the galaxy, and oh what a galaxy it is! Filled with war, intrigue, danger, hidden treasures, and opportunities. It is a scary galaxy out there and in the darkness between the stars there are horrors no one was ever meant to see. Empires rise and fall under the uncaring burning eyes of the stars. It is not a universe for the weak. Are you ready?

Races
Hunter: a race of wandering hunters, they seek their death by a worthy foe.
Chosen: Pilgrims and zealots, the Chosen are a race of travelers. What makes them stand out in the galaxy is their unconventional star ships. Known as Worldcrafts, they are huge capital ships powered by an enslaved god locked away int the depths of the ship.
Fallen: A race of alien vampires who lost their world when they crossed the wrong aliens.
Humans: not sure what to do with these guys.

The idea behind all of this would be mixing Dungeons and Dragons with Star Trek. Essentially porn for nerds. It's first and foremost about Alien Wizards and how they would conquer the universe. I'd like some advice and opinions and thoughts. What sort of things do you want to see?

So if anyone has read the blog post on Penny-Arcade.com where Gabe ran his weekly DnD game as something inspired by World of Warcraft.

 

QuoteI try and make sure that each of my games has a "hook". Sometimes the hook might be one encounter where the players are fighting a dragon in free fall, or it might be an entire night of encounters using mirrors and a laser. Even if it's just for one fight, I always want to make sure I have something each night that makes the players put their cell phones down and lean in a little closer to the table. For my game last Monday the hook was "World of Warcraft".

The story of our campaign has been building and building recently and the whole thing has gotten very serious. I think that's great but I also wanted to give them a little break and have some fun. With that in mind I set out to build a night of encounters and quests full of inside jokes for my players, all but one of which are huge WOW fans. My players are currently stuck in the Underdark with a tribe of humans that they are trying to get some information out of. I decided that in order to get in the tribe's good graces the party would need to do some good old fashioned rep grinding. They started off by taking a bunch of little quests from the different tribe members. All of these were pulled right out of WOW and tweaked just a bit to work in D&D. Here is an example:

A small squat man is hunched over a cooking fire. A fat stone kettle sits atop the smoldering blaze. A bubbling roiling broth is releasing a sweet, not altogether unpleasant smell.

-Hello there! My name is Barak, I'm the tribe's one and only chef. As you can imagine, feeding a group our size from what's available here in the caves is no easy task. I'm working on a pot of my famous Underdark Goulash but Sadly I have run out of my key ingredient. If you could bring me 10 helpings of crisp Phaseweb spider meat I could feed the entire tribe for a month.

This got all the WOW players at the table laughing and I wasn't done yet. They also picked up a quest from the tribe's healer, who wanted them to collect Kharolian crystals for her and one of the hunters wanted proof that the spider queen had been killed. I gave them all their quests on little cards and they set out into the Underdark.

It's a cool read, I strongly suggest reading it.

Anyways, you all may remember the WoW d20 books that came out, except that they were horrible. It was like they were completely removed from WoW, it was like it was an adaptation of the WoW novels rather than the actual game. Now, I'd love to play a game that was inspired by MMOs (not a direct adaptation of WoW or anything).

What do you guys think? any thoughts?

Quote from: Jürgen Hubert

Quote from: Gnome NachosHome politics definitely have an impact. But I would think that this would become a secret. A place for the modern wizard to escape and take a vacation.

From what I've read here so far, there are lots of resources to be found in that city. Which means that if there is a reliable and comparably cheap way of getting there, people will try to make a profit with it.

And secrets have a way of getting out.

Good point. But think about this. Do your average people in the Points of Light setting try to make money off of the Feywild? There is an abundance of resources (food, wood, fruits, animals) and it's filled with dangers. I kind of want this to be the polar opposite of the feywild, instead of nature unleashed it's city unleashed. That being said, I'm sure that in parts of the city there may be toll booths ran by bandits who will beat you up if you don't pay. Or super corporations trying to find ways to privatize and sell off aspects of the city. Or shady sellers trying to make a quick buck on strange and left behind curios.

Quote from: Jürgen HubertA question: Where do all those new people in the city come from? From other planes?

If so, are the portals still open? In that case, the politics of the home plane will have an impact on this plane. After all, the discovery of the portal will significantly upset the local power balance - and some will seek to close it...

The city is filled with immigrants from other planes. Some of these other worlds are very similar to ours, some are very different. Unfortunately, your average joe does not come to Aromos. Travel to the plane is usually not as simple as a straight portal. Sometimes it is a rare artifact that can get you to the plane. So the major population are skilled, classed NPCs (so wizards, fighters, and rogues not Adepts, warriors, and aristocrats if we're looking at this from a 3rd edition view).

Home politics definitely have an impact. But I would think that this would become a secret. A place for the modern wizard to escape and take a vacation.

Quote from: sparkletwist

Quote from: Jürgen HubertSooner or later, you will probably want an Evil Empire bent on conquest...

With that much space and that few people, I'm not sure if anything like that could really get going. There's just so absurdly much space available that anyone could just go somewhere else, pretty much.

Sure. In our world (of Earth) the scarcity of resources is one of the leading factors of war sometimes. And in this world there is plenty of room for everyone. But what about the desires of a Dungeons and Dragons culture? What I think separates this setting from some others is that I am building it with the logic of a game rather than of reality.

So there may be a community of Vampires who want to use humanoids as cattle, or to let them loose through the city for a hunt.

There may be a community of Lawful Evil humanoid monsters who want to enslave everyone.

Then there is the Empire from a universe that is nothing but humans. They see elves, dwarves, and halflings as demon-spawn and will stop at nothing until they have eradicated them all from every universe.

Then there is the Dragon who is worshiped as a god-king, and he wants everyone to worship him so that he can ascend to godhood. Whether they worship him out of fear or love doesn't matter to him.

Then there is the gnome community that use wizards and other spellcasters as slave-weapons. A lot like in Wheel of Time with the collars.

So as you can see, there are plenty of opportunities for evil empires here. Not just because they want to expand their holdings. I believe that once you remove the want of resources, they will find more creative reasons to kill one another.

As for food. I at one point toyed with Replicator Statues. They are statues that hold platters, you walk up to them and ask for food. It summons the food. This takes care of the need for farms. Thus producing a society that has a very low peasant/commoner population. Everyone would have the ability to follow their dreams now that they don't have to farm! It'd be just like Star Trek.

In fact this is very much a fantasy star trek. Society no longer needs to hunt for food, it's given to them. They explore the universe (by walking rather than spaceship) and come into contact with new worlds and new civilizations. To boldly go where no gnome has gone before!

Quote from: Jürgen HubertWhat you need is politics. Organizations, religions, merchants, and all sorts of other groups squabbling over the resources. Otherwise the city will just be scenery, and all scenery will get boring after a while. All gaming thrives on conflict, after all - and different factions will help you generate such conflicts.

So what kind of resources might there be?

- Food is an obvious one. Sure, the terrain in the warehouses can be used to create food - but that will require no less effort than in "normal" worlds. Owning the land in those warehouses means controlling the food supplies from those - and even if that's not possible, controlling the access points allows you to tax everything that goes into or out of them. Different pocket planes allow you to create different food staples - and if you can establish a monopoly on one popular type of food, you can make a very handsome profit indeed.

- The same goes for any other type of raw resource which has to be extracted from the pocket planes - raw ore, ivory, silk, and whatever else you can think of. Control the access points to the pocket planes, and you can control the resource.

- Safe trade routes between the settlements. If much of the plane is uninhabited, then much of the plane is wilderness. Thus, the few trade routes that have established themselves need to be guarded. But guarding such routes requires money - either in the form of fees paid by the merchants, or by more generalized taxes taken by whatever nations will develop in such an environment.

- Hearts and Minds. Religions and political groups will vie for followers - and they might get rather pushy with those not following their own views.


Oh, and you definitely need some barbarian raiding tribes - the difference between them and urban gangs might be rather fluid...

These are exactly what I want. Food is of course an important resource, and I can see it being treated very much like in our modern world. See, in your average DnD campaign, a village has a bunch of farmers who might bring their stock to town to try and sell. They farm to care for themselves. In this world, the farms would be privatized by corporations. They supply the seed, you come to work, then they sell the mass amounts of food at supermarkets and restaurants. It's not any different from how we handle food today. Except, perhaps, that they use Wizards, Sorcerers, Druids, and Clerics to speed up the process, and to make the animals bigger.

There are definitely going to be organizations. I want to avoid looking too much like the Guilds or Ravnica and the Dragonmarked houses of Eberron. So I think instead these will be more like Unions for the most part. I've always felt the mentioned guilds work well for the nobles and such, but not well for the workers. Just like a corporation. I'm also going to throw in political parties, not sure what kind though.

The setting will probably focus in on a small area, a community that is a small city. Using that as the beginning point there will also be trips to some of the other communities (like the one populated by demons, or the one populated by dark elves)

Quote from: XXsiriusXXYou may want to look at Planescape for inspiration.

I definitely love Planescape and I have read through it countless times. I think though, I want to avoid some of the whimsy, and I definitely don't want to copy them. But Sigil is of course a big inspiration.

Quote from: sparkletwist

Quote from: Gnome NachosSo what do you think? Any thoughts? This is a huge Ecumenopolis the size of a whole universe, what else does it need?

The first thing that came to mind is, honestly... what's the point?

I know that people like to think big, particularly in fantasy, where anything goes. Big things are impressive, and big numbers like "septillions" are fun to throw around. But still... you've basically created something that could every decently developed campaign setting inside of it and still have room for a few thousand more. The vastness is so vast, it starts to seem comical.

Your average PCs would have a rough time completely exploring a megalopolis the size of a continent, never mind something that filled an entire planet. That goes double if there are "pocket plane" spaces inside of it... not that there isn't enough room to begin with.

The point my friend, is the same reason you climb a mountain. Because it's there. Or in this case, because it's not there.

Now, that said, you're absolutely right. It is big and throwing around words like Septillion is crazy (that's the population of bugs on earth by the way). Which is why I kind of want to avoid the Coruscant or Ravnica look, and that is that this is a huge city and every building is just full of people.

Instead, this is a tomb city. It is filled with emptiness, abandoned by those who once owned it. The only people who live there now are immigrants from other planes. Those other planes include all other campaign settings too btw. In my multiverse (maybe not yours) I like the idea that all cosmologies fit into it (the true meaning of infinite). So, in this city campaign, a player could play a Drow Swordmage from Waterdeep who found one of the many planar portals to Aromos.

As for the scale of this setting, it's up to the DM how you run it. Right now, I see 3 or so different styles of play.
 

You can be a local hero, the infinite city-plane is just in the background. You and the PCs stay in the general area, maybe even in the same 10 block radius. This is good for more political games

You can have a huge sprawling game. The adventure takes you all over the map, to different communities (each with different cultural identities) as you hunt for something important.

You can explore the mystery of the city itself. Go into the underground, the dimensional buildings, who were the titans who lived here and where did they go?

Now a thought came up earlier about the city itself. It's not a city that was built by man. It is a being. A living city. Does it have an intelligence? Not the kind that we would recognize. But it is designed very much like a living creature, it has Cells (buildings), Arteries (sewers), antibodies (automatons), and nerve centers (the flow of magic). Even though it's body is made of concrete and steel instead of flesh and blood, does that make it lifeless?

to answer those. This is a society Built by Dungeons and Dragons style magic. So all the dimensional buildings would need is an enchantment that creates a "sun". inside the building, probably with some sort of "night" setting.

As for Sanitation, I've been leaning towards using constructs called Servitors that are like tiny golems. They run around and keep everything nice, so you won't see any crumbling buildings or anything like that (unless the servitors in a region have been corrupted) DUN DUN DUN!

Aromos the Plane-City

So my friend and I began working on thinking up a nice interesting Campaign setting and we think we have a winner. The idea stemmed from the thought of what a city the size of a universe (or in DnD terms, a Plane) would be like. Aromos is that city. However, it is an initially empty one. Whatever or whoever built the city is long gone now. Instead, all of the septillions of inhabitants are migrants from other planes, domains, and demi-planes.

So this plane is built a lot like the points of light campaign setting. We have pockets of densely populated communities surrounded by a blanket of uninhabited buildings. Instead of this wilderness consisting of forests and valleys it has towering buildings and streets. It's as though you removed every person in Tokyo and moved the population of Springfield, Illinois there. Everything has been left behind by the previous owners, a new city filled with mystery.

We also are using "bag of holding" style buildings. A lot of these buildings look 1000 sq ft on the outside, but once you're inside they are actually 1000 sq miles! and these aren't just huge warehouses, they are filled with all sorts of weird terrain (forests, hills, grass) it's speculated that these may have served as holding areas from animals from across the multiverse.

Aromos also has a huge underground, vault-like fortresses that stretch deep beneath the surface, sewers, and even a huge underground ocean.

When thinking about where this city came from, a few ideas came up:

    * This is a Genesis style spell gone wild.
    * This is the creation of a long lost uber god
    * This is the physical manifestation of a long lost uber god's mind.
    * It was created by a super-race who have since moved on.


So what do you think? Any thoughts? This is a huge Ecumenopolis the size of a whole universe, what else does it need?

So in my campaign setting Shattered Horizons I'm working on the Empire of Man. One of the keys to the government is breaking it up into 5 pillars of power. One of these pillars is the Church of the Light, which is ran more like a corporation than a government. Which brings me to one of the capacities of the Church of the Light and that is providing health care to the citizens of the Empire with their divine magic. I was thinking that everyone has socialized health insurance paid for by the gov't.

How could I make that work, what would be the best way to supply divine healthcare to the commoners of the empire?