The problems set in when we came to the point of magic in this new world. At first though we needed to either go no magic at all and really focus on the steampunk side, or we just add the steampunk feel to a normal Magic campaign.
One of our "Senior Members" that was helping plan out this world decided that HE wanted magic to exist but wanted it to be basically useless and only accesible by the NPC beasts of the world. Basically turning all mages and high magic creatures (such as elves) into badguys.
It's been about a week of nonstop arguing over how this should all work and I've decided to reach out to the wise community of Role Players.
So hopefull you all can help us:
Should there be races besides humans? if no, why? if yes, How should they interact with the new Tech?
Should Magic exist? and to what degree?
Please feel free to give me anymoe ideas and suggetions that you have, We are desperate!
Thank you!
As to the issue of magic, in the same regard as how to fit races in, why not have the steam engine play a hand in how magic works? Methods by which steam powers devices can be made different based on the mannerisms by which the steam is created. Instead of standard steam, why not magically created steam produced from naturally enchanted resources (in such a way that certain rituals and alechemical products take certain ingredients to make. Magic stones that dissolve into steam under appropriate settings are a simple way of doing this, but it could even be as complex as changing the properties of basic water to achieve the desired result. Regardless of how you do it, "magic steam power" is the best way to simulate magic within a steampunk setting without it seeming too silly or too powerful.
To that same end, more common place magics of other settings would be great high rarity finds for PCs in a steampunk world. A sword could be steam powered to achieve fire damage properties, but another kind of sword could literally create fire from nothing, and may have more discerning traits than to simply transform damage done by the sword into fire damage. It would be a rare find, and might be a hearkening back to a time where such high magic was more common place than the tech magic of today's society. Such items are great to build story arcs around, and the discovery of such high magic would be a great way to make the transition from each tier as they rediscover more of it. The finding of such legendary and long forgotten magic could in and of itself be the entire premisis of a campaign for such a setting.
Nothing should be removed to achieve a steampunk style setting. Simply changed around. Maybe a wizard doesn't cast magic in the traditional sense, but is more like an alchemist, using a variety of chemicals and tech related products that they created to achieve the same result. This wouldn't change the in-game mechanics, but would simply be a way of reflavoring to make it more stylized towards the setting itself.
Hope that helps some. Happy Gaming
But in all fairness which races would eagerly accept the idea of high technology and which races would be be to afraid to let something challenge there magic?
I think elves would apose the technological movement, and while dwarces would support the technology I don't think they'd be comfortable with everyone hacing access to it.... Halflings? gnomes? half-orcs? the other races? Would there even need to be an industrial revolution if magic were prevelant?
My friends and I have been talking for soemtime now about making a more steampunk style campaign for our RPG nights. We wanted to make a something that had heavy steampunk in both RPG elements and Combat, really hoping to get that steampunk feel down.
The problems set in when we came to the point of magic in this new world. At first though we needed to either go no magic at all and really focus on the steampunk side, or we just add the steampunk feel to a normal Magic campaign.
One of our "Senior Members" that was helping plan out this world decided that HE wanted magic to exist but wanted it to be basically useless and only accesible by the NPC beasts of the world. Basically turning all mages and high magic creatures (such as elves) into badguys.
It's been about a week of nonstop arguing over how this should all work and I've decided to reach out to the wise community of Role Players.
So hopefull you all can help us:
Should there be races besides humans? if no, why? if yes, How should they interact with the new Tech?
Should Magic exist? and to what degree?
Please feel free to give me anymoe ideas and suggetions that you have, We are desperate!
Thank you!
Well I ran the use of Steam Artillery and firearms which require the use of the Heat Metal Spell. Basically It has become a Druid-only Spell.
Steam Warden (Druid/Any second class with appropriate skills) is the basic rifleman in such a steam age setting.
Sure dwarves are an obvious choice to harness steampower, but dragonborn and teiflings would have a solid base to workfrom, with dragon breath or eldritch fire. Halforcs less so, not because of a desire not to burn stuff, but more because of the societal position they have.
what you are talking about is flavour fluff for the classes really. Every wizard class becomes a gadgeteer of some sort, changing the power type from arcane to industrial.
For some ideas to steam powering a fantasy world, look at the eberron books. i always felt that would be the best campaign setting to steamerize.
The airships and elemental galleons and sending stones could provide the mechanics base for steampowered wonderment.
My question regarding the races is more along the lines of...Would the elves even allow technology to move into their world? Steam punk means industry to a certain degree, and industry means deforestation to an equal degree. I like the idea of true magic like the flame creating sword being more of a rare callback to high magic and was actually talking to my group about that earlier tonight as a possibility.
But in all fairness which races would eagerly accept the idea of high technology and which races would be be to afraid to let something challenge there magic?
I think elves would apose the technological movement, and while dwarces would support the technology I don't think they'd be comfortable with everyone hacing access to it.... Halflings? gnomes? half-orcs? the other races? Would there even need to be an industrial revolution if magic were prevelant?
The mindset here is poor. The question is not why would a race like Elves resort to technology in a steampunk setting, but rather why WOULDN'T they? In reflavoring a setting/race typically devoid of technology, the better question is to ask is usually the opposite of what one would think to justify the change. If you're not going to adapt, why suggest the change at all? Sure, there isn't much of a conceivable reason to change Elves just to make them part of the steampunk bandwagon, but isn't it much more interesting to see an Elven Techno-Tree city than a Elven Tree city. The reason to accept the change is as easy to answer as "because that's how the world works". Same as why humans of today's age have all accepted the technology of today. It's a part of our society, and only a few folk (tribal people, Amish folk, etc.) go against the grain. In this scenario, Elves, who are typically against such technology, would make a more interesting choice to add to the list of races that utilize the steampunk technology than to be against it.
If anything, I think Dwarves would be more interesting as the anti-tech race because it's playing against a common grain for a race of miners and metal workers. But that's just me.
Don't try to be against such changes. Instead, think of how to make it work and be interesting. If you're going to keep a large portion of races unchanged by the addition of steam-tech, why add in the steam-tech to begin with?
www.enworld.org/ap/zeitgeist.html
You'll need a subscription for the later parts, but the first adventure and campaign guide (all that's been published so far) are available for free, and could be useful for some ideas. The basic idea is one part of the world was cursed after killing off an eladrin goddess, this created an area where magic couldn't work as well and turned it's inhabitants into tieflings. The tieflings responded by developing technology which is starting to spread to other areas and be mixed with magic.
Why does magic need to go? It's a power source.
Why do elves need to abhor technology? The technology of the game world could rely on power sources other than burning fossil fuel, especially in a world with magic.
And as far as magic is concerned there are a few reason it should either leave or become severly stunted in it's use....
1. If we had magic I don't think we'd bother evolving technology...what would the purpose be? If i can conjure water at will im sure as hell not gonna waste my time inventing a complicated pump system to bring it from a nearby lake. Heck in pathfinder the first place guns are really invented enmass is the "Mana Wastes" which is basically a magical dead zone.
2. Technology is easy, If i can get a machine to do in 2 days what a Wizard studies and practices for years to be able to do...I'm buying/building/stealing the machine instead. It's the same concept of the crossbow over the longbow... You could make a regiment of crossbowmen into experts in less time it took to train 10 longbow men to be good at it.
3. Magic isn't really a power source....not on it's own anyways...It's a raw energy like lightning is. Without a transformer to turn it into a useable energy source its just not useful. Same thing with magic, without a spell to channel it into a purpose its just ont useful for technology. To make it useful for technology you'd need to invent a system of new spells to make sure they are compatible with the arriving technology.
1. If we had magic I don't think we'd bother evolving technology...what would the purpose be? If i can conjure water at will im sure as hell not gonna waste my time inventing a complicated pump system to bring it from a nearby lake.
You won't, but what about the farmer who doesn't know how to conjure water, or can't turn a profit selling crops irrigated with magically conjured water? What if the magic-using community doesn't care to grant you access to their vast stores of mysterious knowledge so you can spend ten years learning how to be a human irrigation system? Magic isn't going to be the best tool for every job, or for every user. Yeah, for an elf who has the wind at his beck and call as a consequence of his birth, flying is just a matter of building a big kite with handlebars and singing for a puff of wind. For an eladrin, whose family has amassed a vast library of magical reference and given him decades to study it, making things explode is a matter of complicated words and gestures that can't be taken away from him. To farmer Muggleton's three sons, making things blow up is gonna take a few pounds of seagull crap and some time at the anvil, among other things. They're not going to send a son off to wizarding school to come home and irrigate the field; they're going to buy a water pump from some dwarf who showed them how any farmhand could stoke a boiler.
2. Technology is easy, If i can get a machine to do in 2 days what a Wizard studies and practices for years to be able to do...I'm buying/building/stealing the machine instead. It's the same concept of the crossbow over the longbow... You could make a regiment of crossbowmen into experts in less time it took to train 10 longbow men to be good at it.
And yet the game makes room for both. You can too! Your heavy crossbowmen reload slowly, and not at all on horse without mechanical assistance. A mounted archer can harry heavy cavalry with a bow, where crossbows are better suited to zone defense. Most horses aren't going to buck a rider who mumbles and wags his fingers in the saddle, but you have to train a horse not to flinch when a gonne goes off behind its right ear. You can also disarm a musketeer without major surgery.
Steam power scales down horribly. It makes no sense to try and rig up a steam powered radio because you don't need high torque power that spends fast and takes time to build up. So if you want to stay in communication with the next kingdom, you hire a diviner to commune with His Other Majesty Next Door's diviner via crystal ball. Once your majesties have talked yourselves purple and decided it's time for action, you fire up the steam tanks and manifest some destiny. You could have your diviner try to summon a demon and ride that into battle instead, but it's like as not to break loose and eat him, and then you've got a monster on the rampage and no phone service.
3. Magic isn't really a power source....not on it's own anyways...It's a raw energy like lightning is. Without a transformer to turn it into a useable energy source its just not useful. Same thing with magic, without a spell to channel it into a purpose its just ont useful for technology. To make it useful for technology you'd need to invent a system of new spells to make sure they are compatible with the arriving technology.
. . . or you could invent items that work with magic in its current form.
What if you could use a mainspring the size of a jeep to drive a portable clockwork device the size of a soda can? What exactly is stopping you? Well aside from the spring being dangerous, it's not very portable! So wind up your spring, and shove it in a portable hole with the drive shaft sticking out. Build a little casing to house the hole that you can unscrew when it's wound down and remove the hole. Hells, carry a few extra holes with wound springs in case you need a fresh one on the fly. Since the hole weighs very little, you could use the spring to propel an engine. Unlike the elf who has dominion over the wind, you can stay home while your brother propels the engine with your portable mainspring.
Magic and technology will lend themselves to different end uses, and would logically be combined in a world where both developed. And they could both develop simultaneously in the right world, with the right mix of races and governments and the right history. Figuring out why this person or that would use one or the other (or that specific combination of both) might be a more productive problem to solve than excluding one of them entirely.
2.) Google "Amethyst Foundation" 4e campaign setting
3.) Reflavor as needed.
4.) ???
5.) STEAM POWERED PROFIT!
My friends and I have been talking for soemtime now about making a more steampunk style campaign for our RPG nights. We wanted to make a something that had heavy steampunk in both RPG elements and Combat, really hoping to get that steampunk feel down.
The problems set in when we came to the point of magic in this new world. At first though we needed to either go no magic at all and really focus on the steampunk side, or we just add the steampunk feel to a normal Magic campaign.
One of our "Senior Members" that was helping plan out this world decided that HE wanted magic to exist but wanted it to be basically useless and only accesible by the NPC beasts of the world. Basically turning all mages and high magic creatures (such as elves) into badguys.
It's been about a week of nonstop arguing over how this should all work and I've decided to reach out to the wise community of Role Players.
So hopefull you all can help us:
Should there be races besides humans? if no, why? if yes, How should they interact with the new Tech?
Should Magic exist? and to what degree?
Please feel free to give me anymoe ideas and suggetions that you have, We are desperate!
Thank you!
I loved the game "Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura" - I thought it was a fun computer game campaign setting, and it seems like it should be a fun pen-and-paper setting as well
However, I think I would refer instead to this quote:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke
"Magic" is actually sufficiently advanced technology that only appears to be magical to casual cargo-cult observers, like PC races, in the game world, but in reality things like Beholders and Illithids and extremely intelligent Dragons understand "magic" on a heavily scientific, rational basis, with PC civilizations aping the work of these scientists to the best of the ability of their limited intellects, with the results being that they seem to other members of PC races to be tapping into occult (literally, "hidden") powers, or the powers of spirits.
From there, it's only a short distance between the standard D&D description of how Wizards operate (by years in school of studying difficult laws governing magic effects), and how the wizards in many of H.P. Lovecraft's stories operate (e.g., by tapping into scientific laws and priciples, physics and mathematics and geometries and dimensions, that ordinary human beings are not prepared to understand on a rational level without taking a severe hit to their sanity... it becomes easier to think of these ultimately real sciences as sorcery, the work of the gods, and as "black magic".)
With that foot in the door, it becomes relatively easy to reflavor D&D magic into the framework of "pseudoscience" in the form of psionic abilities, ancient lost sciences, new super-scientific principles, manipulation of hidden force fields or 3-dimensional objects through other dimensions, contact with alien beings in parallel universes who have a different way of interacting with our world, and so on.
Thus, there is no conflict between magic and technology and no need to write one out of the equation at the expense of the other, because magic IS a form of technology, though it may not appear to be one.
I loved the game "Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura" - I thought it was a fun computer game campaign setting, and it seems like it should be a fun pen-and-paper setting as well
If you loved it so much maybe you'd be willing to help me convert it into a 4e campaign setting! I tried to do so with 3.5 but found the system unltimately too clunky to pull it off elegantly, but I think it could be done with 4e! The only other major problem I encountered was glaring plot holes/in-game issues x3
Up to you, but I think fantasy RPG players tend to expect other races, and it really doesn't put a lot of extra work onto you.
A couple of easy possibilities:
- fantasy race hand-wave: the video game Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura just inserted most standard fantasy races (Dwarves, Orcs, Elves, and Gnomes) into a Steampunk setting without much explanation
- "awakening": the RPG Shadowrun inserted most fantasy races into a cyberpunk setting with the explanation that the races spontaneously sprang from a portion of the human population, with Dwarves and Elves being born to human parents, and other humans becomeing "goblinized" into Orcs and Trolls as a sort of disease
- "masquerade": standard fantasy races live hidden among the human populations, who are barely aware of their existance
- from far-flung corners of the world: standard fantasy races developed independently in distant parts of the world, and, because steampunk technology has made the world a smaller place, immigrant populations of Elves and so on are settling into the land forming the game's central setting... some examples:
- Elves and Halfling "Pygmies" might have come from other, "less civilized" continents, bringing strange cultures with them
- Dwarves might have come from a hollow Earth subterranean world
- Morlocks, basically re-fluffed Half-Orcs, might have been bred by scientists specifically to work in the dark, harsh environment of subterranean factories
- with a little more work, you might create your own races with backstories unique to your world, with your work made easier by re-fluffing existing meta-human races...
- Elves might be re-fluffed into the moon beings or martians popular with early science fiction
- any sort of non-human race you can imagine might be discovered in the Lost Worlds of isolated jungles, lost continents, distant icy mountain tops, barren deserts, and mysterious islands
- interplanetary or interdimensional travel would provide even more opportunities to intruduce just about any race you can imagine
There's no reason that any of these PC races would be inherently more or less capable of adapting to and using the same technologies and magics that human characters would be able to adapt to and use. Some might be fluffed to culturally handle "magic" as a natural part of their world better, others might have introduced important technologies to human populations, and so on. In the end, though, it should just be "fluff", with the players ultimately deciding how they want their characters to handle magic and/or technology.
I loved the game "Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magick Obscura" - I thought it was a fun computer game campaign setting, and it seems like it should be a fun pen-and-paper setting as well
If you loved it so much maybe you'd be willing to help me convert it into a 4e campaign setting! I tried to do so with 3.5 but found the system unltimately too clunky to pull it off elegantly, but I think it could be done with 4e! The only other major problem I encountered was glaring plot holes/in-game issues x3
That would be something for a new thread or even a new group, I think, but that could be a lot of fun
I should re-install the game and refresh my memory on how everything fits together, and consider how they would work in a pen-and-paper setting. Edit to add: you start the group and send the invite, and I'll be happy to join it to help brain-storm Earthdawn had some ideas with pieces of raw elements being solid objects in the world. You drop a piece of fire and a peice of water into a firing chamber and boom. Instant steam cannon. Or you use a controlled interaction between the two to make a steam engine.
Iron Kingdoms has steam technology. I remember reading that their war golems were an arcane "brain" that controlled a steam powered golem. Basically the entire thing was a steam powered machine with the brain controlling all of the pistons and hydrolics. They do guns by having two small bags of alchemical powder. The firing pin is a needle that peirces the two bags. When the two powders mix, they explode.
For a more magical feel, I'm inclined to use the solid elements route from earthdawn.
I wouldn't look into ebberon too much. While one of my favorite settings, I don't view it as steam punk at all. To me it's more about the industrialization of magic. There really isn't much that resembles technology in it.
One of the best "gritty" steampunk settings I've read so far has been Iron Kingdoms. I need to read more about zeitgeist though. It sounds interesting.