Post/Author/DateTime	Post
OatsMalone 12-13-07, 08:10 PM	Heya! I've already posted this on my blog, but I thought I'd throw this up here as well. There isn't a whole lot of detail here yet (in my mind, yeah, but not here), but it's the first steps toward a fleshed out campaign setting. I'll be working through the intricacies of this campaign setting for the next 8 or 9 months, and I'll be posting most of it's creation on the blog. So, I guess I'm posting this here for general thoughts and, if you can swing it with what's here, constructive criticism, tips, or, heck, even praise. My ego can always use boosting. It's pretty general thus far. Oh, and the blog is here (http://carsareflowers.blogspot.com). Without further ado... This is the start of a fun project to create a campaign setting in front of all of you. I'll be running a game in this setting when 4th Edition D&D comes out. To start off, then, I'll look at what 4th Ed. assumes about the setting. "Imagine a world shrouded in darkness -- vast stretches of wilderness untouched by the civilizing hands of humans and dwarves, dotted with crumbling ruins left by the ancient empire of the tieflings or the last great elf kingdom. "Scattered far and wide amid that darkness, like faint stars in the night sky, are the enclaves of civilization; here and there one finds a great city-state or strong barony, but mostly you encounter frontier towns or close-knit villages of farmers and artisans who cling close together for protection against the dark. " I really like this starting point; it definitely excites me. The games that I'm running right now take place in Eberron, which is set in a sort of post-WWII climate, and with magic in the world that rivals Renaissance-level technology. On top of that, since Eberron was my first real campaign, the flavor was perhaps a little different than I would have established otherwise. It's not a bad thing, but the campaign certainly tends towards the epic; since they beginning, the characters have been doing jobs for important people and changing the face of the world with their actions. Since about halfway through, some of the characters have started to bear dragonmarks, magical symbols that manifest on the skin of certain races and allow them to use a single spell-like ability once per day, that they shouldn't have. For instance, a chaos gnome and changeling developed the Mark of Shadow, which is an elf-only mark. The elf in the party developed a dragonmark as well: the Mark of Death, which was meant for elves. Problem is, it's been unseen for hundreds of years. So they're definitely special. The Draconic Prophecy certainly talks about all of them. The 4th Edition game will be a little different. The party will know each other at the start of the campaign. They'll all have grown up in the same fishing village, and they'll be extremely ordinary. It's only whenever the afore-mentioned darkness invades their little beacon of light that the party members will be forced to take up the mantle of adventurer and protect the things they hold dear. Unlike Eberron, where the party ran around the entire world in their quest to collect a set of schema for House Cannith, and now, to stop the machinations of Salan Gheli, rakshasa sorcerer, who had been masquerading as Merrix d'Cannith and whom they unwittingly gave the pieces of a doomsday device to, the party in the 4th Edition game will be centered around the place that they call home. Instead of the brand of non-stop adventure that Eberron was, the new game will be run far more realistically. In addition, the party will have a chance to get settled in their hometown, or in a larger city, if it suits them better. The thing that I'm looking forward to the most is allowing my players to become heroes in the world. I want to show them how their actions have affected the political and social climate of their world. My goal is to make a living, breathing, dynamic world, and for my players to be big movers and shakers in it. Of course, for that to happen, I need to make a believable and complex world for them to play in. I've already talked about the setting flavor a little bit. It's a frontier world, a world recovering from the fall of a great empire. For this world (which is still unnamed; I'll get to that before too long), I've decided that the last truly great empire is a thousand years lost. Since then, there have been valiant attempts to regain the glory of the past, but all of them have ended in failure. The great empire will be called the Golden Empire, until I come up with something more evocative. In fact, I may just stick with it. It's easy to remember, and calls up images of gold-paved streets, happiness, and "the good 'ol days". For ease, I'm having the timeline mirror that of Earth's. 0 AG (Age of Gold, for now) was when the Age of Golden Empire began, and when the Empire was founded. It lasted until around 920 AG; it was actually a really strong and good government. In the present, which will be the summer of 2008 AG, the Age of Golden Empire, or the Empire of the Sun, as some have taken to calling it, will be looked back upon as the perfect empire, as the time to reclaim. Not even the oldest of the longest-lived races have accurate knowledge of this time, but everyone knows some form of the stories of Alastair, the elven illusionist that fooled an entire city into believing that a beggar was on the Council, or Jarvis Ironmoor, the dwarven warlord who pushed back an invading army from the realm of shadow with only one thousand soldiers and holy warriors. I'm not certain how the empire fell right now; I'm caught between internal conflict and some sort of cataclysm. I like the idea of a cataclysm; it would give me a lot of fun ruins to play with, and give me a decent excuse for why they haven't already been sacked. If they've only recently been uncovered, either on purpose or by the shifting of the earth, then they're prime for invading. I also know that, along with whatever other races are available for players, I want to make gnolls a playable race. It seems to me that gnolls don't get enough love; they're usually the odd monster out. I've secured an important spot for gnolls in my world. From 1625 to 1932, the Old Gnoll Empire was in power. The gnolls of this world aren't the unorganized rabble that they are in other settings. They've accomodated their pack attitudes into clans of sorts, and organized themselves into a society around those clan settings. I'm drawing from medieval Japan for inspiration on how the Gnoll Empire looked, because I think it fits their race well, and I really like the idea of gnoll samurai. There's something about bi-pedal hyenas wearing O-Yoroi and following bushido that excites me. I've got this awesome sketch... Plus, I think that there might be room to fit in kami-themed classes, and maybe even an obscure kitsune race. But if the gnolls were the lords of this empire, that puts the rest of the sentient races in positions of servitude or, more accurately in most cases, slavery. In order to keep the slave system working, the gnolls established a slave hierarchy. I want this hierarchy to affect how certain races are viewed; the empire is recent enough that the hierarchy is still felt today, often in the form of racism. I'll go into the details of that hierarchy and some things that I want to do with it in another post. The gnoll empire fell in a bloody revolution. The gnolls weren't wiped out by any means, but they were pushed out of power. There's still a vacuum; no race or power has claimed dominance over any other. It's a little unusual that nothing has risen to that level, but nobody has really tried. Sure, small baronies and pseudo-kingdoms have popped up. The fishing village that the player characters will start off in will be a fringe town of one of those baronies, though it will only be loosely connected. There will be a sheriff to enforce the "will of the baron," and a few soldiers (no more than six) will be stationed there as well, but the people will be mostly free to do as they wish. The nature of the empire's fall leaves dungeons in it's wake, as well. The wild is still very alive and well. Civilization covers relatively little of the available space. Frankly, there's plenty of room for adventure and danger. Already there's some interesting hooks in the two fallen empires that I've come across already. I figure there will be an empire before the Empire of the Sun was established, one considerably darker than both the Golden Empire and even the Old Gnoll Empire. The ruins of those three civilizations will be easy to differentiate; they all have a pretty distinct feel. I'll flex out the Eastern flavor of gnoll society in the ruins of their empire. The Golden Empire's ruins should have a nice, classy feel to them, they've got a nice sense of purpose, and the artifacts of that age are bound to be powerful and interesting. The more ancient empire's ruins will be more esoteric, and leftovers from that age will likely be a little moral-bending at best, and sanity-bending stuff won't be too uncommon. Besides, I really like the sort of ex-slave feel, and how a lot of those conflicts will play out. Old humans will be able to remember their slave days, and most of the elf population, and a good portion of some of the other races, will be former slaves themselves. I expect racism to play a big part in the political conflicts of the world.
OatsMalone 12-13-07, 08:15 PM	Oh, forgot to mention this. In early January, I'm running my players through the Ashenport Lovecraftian adventure that just came out in Dungeon, and setting it during the last year of the Old Gnoll Empire. This is to introduce them to the world, allow them to see and experience some of the social issues that they'll be interacting with, and enjoy some horror-themed gameplay. I'll run about five or six sessions with the 3.5 group, and then 4th Edition will come out and they'll play an entirely new party, set 60 years after the 3.5 group.