I need help with my campaign setting.

[Malagigi]

I need some help crafting my campaign setting. First I need editors and help organizing my thoughts. Second I'll need help coming up with major organinzations and and NPC's. I'll also need help with classes (deteriming which roles they will play) and races (see classes). As you can guess by my first thread that I'm new to campaign creation and that I'm going to need a lot of help. Please, help me make my first campaign setting. Any of you could help. See a few humble campaign ideas to gain an unstanding of what I need help with.

[Numinous]

Hey.  I saw your old thread, and I'm ashamed at how I let your setting slip by without comment.  I skimmed it over, and I have suggestions on how to prevent this thread from falling into similar decay.

Without entering too much detail, I'd suggest you post what you have now in bullets.  Keep it in bite-sized pieces, and I'll do what I can to help.

Now, the one question I always ask.  Why are you building this world?  Is it as a hobby, is it for a game you intend to play?  Does it need to fit within the laws of an RPG, or would you rather use the world to tell stories?  What do you want to do with this world, when it's done?

[Malagigi]

Hey.  I saw your old thread, and I'm ashamed at how I let your setting slip by without comment.  I skimmed it over, and I have suggestions on how to prevent this thread from falling into similar decay.

Well your here to help and that's all that really matters now.

Without entering too much detail, I'd suggest you post what you have now in bullets.  Keep it in bite-sized pieces, and I'll do what I can to help.

Okay, I'll do just that. Thank you.

Now, the one question I always ask.  Why are you building this world?  Is it as a hobby, is it for a game you intend to play?  Does it need to fit within the laws of an RPG, or would you rather use the world to tell stories?  What do you want to do with this world, when it's done?

I actually am thinking of running a campaign in this setting.

[Malagigi]

First, let's cover monks, divine magic and those who call upon it.

1.The core monk class will not be used for Western or Byzantine-style monks. The core monk class is more appropriate for a Far Eastern campaign. Monks based off of Western or Byzantine monks will either clerics (for warrior monks) or archivists (for scholarly monks and friars). Favored souls will be rare.
2. Any and all religious knightly orders will be comprised entirely by clerics, not paladins. Paladins are more accurately thought of as Lawful Good solders whose devotion to his or her god or goddess is rewarded with extraordinary powers. Paladin equivalents of other alignments would also be secular (non-clerical) warriors specifically blessed by their patron.
3. Clerics serve as warrior priests or warrior monks.
4. Druids, clerics, and archivists require a specific patron for their powers. They also can only cast spells appropriate to that deity.
5. The core druid class will not be used for druids. A new druid class shall be made to more closely match its namesake, the original Celtic druids. I'm not quite sure what to call the core druid.
6. The bard class will be changed from being an arcane spellcaster to a divine one (serving as auxiliary druids). The core bard class will be renamed minstrel.

So we'll start with making and or barrowing deities for this campaign setting. Afterward we'll begin assigning religious orders per class and alignment as well as druidic circles per alignment. Let's start this project people.

[Stargate525]

There's a built in way to use lists, just put ["list] at the beginning of the list, use ["*] for the numbers in the list, and put ["/list] at the end. Remove the " and it'll put them all in a nice list that's spaced perfectly for reading.

As to actual advice, you seem to be overloading the divine spellcaster list. As far as I can see you've got Druids, Celtic Druids, Bardic Druid Auxiliaries, Clerics, Archivists (might be arcane, I'm unfamiliar), rangers,  and Minstrels. Quite a few, considering the fighting classes are reduced to Ranger (a divine spellcaster), Cleric (divine), the fighter, and the rare paladin (also divine).  

[Malagigi]

There's a built in way to use lists, just put ["list] at the beginning of the list, use ["*] for the numbers in the list, and put ["/list] at the end. Remove the " and it'll put them all in a nice list that's spaced perfectly for reading.

As to actual advice, you seem to be overloading the divine spellcaster list. As far as I can see you've got Druids, Celtic Druids, Bardic Druid Auxiliaries, Clerics, Archivists (might be arcane, I'm unfamiliar), rangers,  and Minstrels. Quite a few, considering the fighting classes are reduced to Ranger (a divine spellcaster), Cleric (divine), the fighter, and the rare paladin (also divine).  

How about this? There are primary divine casters (cleric, druid, Celtic druid, favored soul [if used] and archivist), secondary divine casters (bards), and tertiary divine casters (such as paladin and ranger). Also, minstrel will be an arcane class like the core bard.

[Numinous]

I'm going to note right now, for clarity, that I'm reading only this thread, but I will read everything here in it's entirety.

[spoiler=Response to posted stuff]

2. Any and all religious knightly orders will be comprised entirely by clerics, not paladins. Paladins are more accurately thought of as Lawful Good solders whose devotion to his or her god or goddess is rewarded with extraordinary powers. Paladin equivalents of other alignments would also be secular (non-clerical) warriors specifically blessed by their patron.

4. Druids, clerics, and archivists require a specific patron for their powers. They also can only cast spells appropriate to that deity.[/quote]6. The bard class will be changed from being an arcane spell-caster to a divine one (serving as auxiliary druids). The core bard class will be renamed minstrel.[/quote]

I notice that you're using a

lot of classes in your setting.  Do you really need them all?  It might be simpler if you crafted or altered existing classes, and skimmed some less useful ones out of the metaphorical pot.

*Do you intend to use NPC classes at all?  They fill many of the roles in which you try to fit clerics and paladins.  I prefer to think of anyone having a PC class as a hero, or at least extraordinary.  It's all an opinion, what's yours here?  Click here for an example of my point-of-view.

*What kind of Gods are you using in your setting?  Are they active and real, or distant and mysterious?  Is there even any evidence that they're real?  You have a lot of divine classes that apparently rely on specific patron, so this is important to think about.  This is why I generally allow powers to come from faith instead of divine favor.

*One thing I notice is that you seem to place particular importance on the names and role of every class in-game.  A paladin might call himself a lord, champion, paladin, or saint, as likely as a paladin.  This idea makes classes much more flexible and available to PC's, while still allowing you to label "knights" and "monks" as members of organizations or residents of certain regions.  You might want to think about this.

*Do you want to include everything in the game, or make a specifically toned world with detail?  Your attempts to include and reconcile all classes leads me to suspect the former, but it's good to know so I can help more effectively.[/list][/spoiler]
That's all for now, I hope I gave you plenty to digest.

EDIT: Damn, you posted before I did.  I guess you'll have to deal with some irrelevant text, because I am not editing this monster of a post.

[Wensleydale]

On the bard... well.

As far as I can remember (and being welsh, I remember quite a bit) bards did have a kind of mystical feel to them, and some of the 'powers' that (only legendary) bards were supposed to have are alike to those of a druid, who isn't really divine in a celtic sense anyway. So...

[Tybalt]

I had some thoughts about Persian Culture/Zoroastrianism. I'd suggest putting together a few of your ideas on this. Players will find it often more enticing to have the DM present the cultural background than for them to have to go look it up. You could make your own creation myth and simply fudge in details about Zoroastrianism.