The Campaign Builder's Guild

Quote from: Vreeg's Barolohave severe doubts that most people have enough intelligence to come in out of the rain...

Yeah, that. The questions made a lot of assumptions about situations that are way beyond "multiple choice" complexity.

<~~Brother Honorable Claymore of Forgiving Rationality

Level 12 Half-Elf Bard, and yeah, I think I'm more chaotic than the test suggests...

Quote from: SteerpikeI'm wondering if level is determined by the age bracket...

I'm wondering that myself.

Neutral Good Human Sorcerer, 7th lvl

Strength- 14
Dexterity- 13
Constitution- 12
Intelligence- 15
Wisdom- 13
Charisma- 14

Also all the melted ice has gone into Earth's hydrology budget, so it's probably noticeably wetter. The Sahara is likely to be prairie, the Thames suitable for crocodiles and hippos. Bonneville Salt Flats are likely part of the Great Salt Lake again. Check into Earth climate models for about 4500 BC, it should be fairly close to what you're looking at.

Now if you want to be evil, you can

Quotedo something unique with the world that they havent seen before

by doing just that. Give them the same old ho hum world they've been in... until something about the size of, oh.... Hong Kong, or Sicily, comes within the Roche limit at cometary speeds, calves into a bunch of pieces, and strikes.
The first they find out about it is when the sky changes color, and the clouds start to move *really fast*.... and then it rains salt water and mud for the next few weeks.

Several points:

1) Rings are objects within a planet's Roche limit. In short, they are so close that tidal forces pull them apart, or keep them from coalescing into a moon in the first place. All those billions of ring bits are therefore, by definition, in unstable orbits that eventually fall to the planet. Thus, the planet's equator will be subject to a constant light meteor shower.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn
Saturn is also a good place to look at moons. Saturn's moons do more weird stuff than anywhere else we know. If I remember correctly, there is a pair fairly close in that do a constant do si do, sharing the same orbit.

2) Earth's moon is a fourth the diameter of its parent. Small moons that behave in fun ways will be barely more than bright specks in the sky, and will barely affect the tides at all. Large moons that will noticeably affect tides... it'll be a neat trick finding orbits where they don't eventually collide.

3) The longer a small object stays in orbit around a large object (relative masses), the closer the plane of rotation gets to 90 degrees off the planet's axis, and the more circular the orbit gets. The larger the difference in mass and the closer the orbit, the faster this occurs.

Quoteim wanting a bbeg to pull something roughly moonsized towards earth and the good guy im wanting to move our moon in the way stopping the other one and then the two would be stuck pretty close together with alot of debris floating around it. How would this affect our tides, and by this i mean roughly 2/3rds of one moon and 1/2 the other floating around the planet?

Hmmm.... unless the speeds and angles are *just so*, and they collide VERY gently, then you are going to have mountain sized pieces falling on the planet, possibly at cometary speeds. Read "Lucifer's Hammer", it'll paint you a picture.
A more likely result is that one moon slingshots away from the planet, the other falls on it. In the face of that, tides seem a rather minor issue. I'd be happy if the worst I got out of such an event was unreasonable tides.
If the "capture event" is fairly recent it doesn't matter too much what the tidal effect is *now*, because it will be different next month.
If it's old enough to be stable, nearly all possible multiple satellite orbits require masses small enough that tidal effects are no big deal.

http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/orbits.html

That may give you some ideas.

Quote from: Elemental_ElfSo you, as a DM, give a story to your players? I do the opposite (well sort of), I prefer to give my players a template on which they can create their own stories. I don't restrict myself to what I want to do, rather I bring forth a world and people in it so that my players can do and see what they want.

Sorry, I phrased that poorly. No, I don't give them a story, they make that up themselves. I'm the one who throws in all the little unlooked for details that give it depth.

[quote1229012138]I don't restrict myself to what I want to do, rather I bring forth a world and people in it so that my players can do and see what they want.[/quote]

Yeah, that.

Quote from: Vreeg's Coachwhip.Celtricia for 25 years. (3 of my players have been part of it for the full quarter century)

GMing for 30 years.

PLaying 32 years, starting with melee/wizards-Tunnels and Trolls-original D&D.

And the longer I go, the more I respect the story, and everything else is a vessel for that.

Exactly. I started playing in 1975, started GMing in 1978. And yes, I agree. Give them a story so full, with such depth and realism that they can be "caught up in it", and they'll forgive you anything and everything else.

My dragons are NPCs. I don't buy the idea of any species having no close evolutionary relatives, so I have several types, but they are based on habitat rather than on color or something equally arbitrary. They each have a lot of heavy natural offense and defense that works well for the environment they evolved in, but ultimately what makes them dangerous is that they are probably smarter and more skilled than you are.
I once had a young male dragon get a "hoard stake" by using spells to give him the aspect of a human, and then getting a gang together and engineering a bank job. Then during "split the loot" phase he let his spells expire, turned back into a dragon and killed off the gang.
Needless to say, just figuring out what the hell happened, much less trying to get the money back, involved a lot more thought than the typical "go into the cave and kill it" response to most dragons.

I look at Geography, then History. Here's why:

Geography: People are people. While we are all different, we are still all similar enough to make our responses to given stimuli highly predictable. Therefore the differences in the environment we live in is going to define the differences in who we are.

History: Geography may define the basics of who we are, but only the basics. We live in the Himalayas, therefore we are not real big farmers or sailors. We live on the banks of the Nile, therefore we are not real big on mountaineering or skiing. Fine and good, but culture is built up of today's reactions to the environment being stacked on yesterday's reactions, which are stacked on those of the day before.

Those two factors pretty much define the cultures that exist in a given place. Once you have that, myths, politics, religion, location and layout of cities, all become comparatively obvious. Note the word "comparatively". It's not suddenly easy, but knowing your environment and history makes it obvious what choices *don't* work.
Example: Dallas, TX. Dallas was founded where it was for one reason: There is a ridge of hard rock that crosses under the Trinity River right there, making it one of the few decent crossings within a hundred miles. Dallas continued to grow until it reached its present size for one reason: Because it won the political battle for where the railroad went through.
See? Geography and history, all else kind of clicks into place.

Because of that, I tend to assume that if a world designer made sure to get his geography and history right for what he wanted, the result will be a good work. His world will have depth, a 3 dimensional, realistic feel, rather than being cartoonish. Even if I personally don't find it entertaining, I will still be impressed by how well constructed it is.