Does a homebrew exist, for any system?
In 4th edition terms, becoming a Planeswalker sounds like an Epic Destiny to me. :D
Why has this not been done?
Because I oppose, as a RPG fan.
There are better IPs to focus on RPG development with so few people working in WotC's R&D division. (That's the RPG design staff. You don't honestly think the TCG division can develop RPG themselves, do you? :rotfl: )
The reason it hasn't been done officially is that there's a company policy about not mixing properties like that. The reason it hasn't been done unofficially (at least, not that's been shared) is that there's just so much stuff out there, most of which isn't really cohesive. It would take an effort along the lines of the Planescape/Dark Sun/Birthright 3e conversion sites, and to the best of my knowledge nobody's really been interested enough to try to set one up.
Star Wars and Transformers. They mix those all the time.
They are the ones making toys for each.
I could only imagine the Nerd Whiner Rage if Wotc announced a Magic The Gathering Setting. I mean hell look at the raging we had over Power Cards. (which had existed loooong before Magic did in concept and application)
I think it'd be interesting. Abit too Generic Stereotypical D&D (unless it was like a Weatherlight type campaign) but interesting none the less.
Star Wars and Transformers. They mix those all the time.
Wizards makes game products for the Hasbro-owned Transformers line, and holds a license for Star Wars RPG products - that's not the same scenario as taking material from one product line and transplanting it into a separate product line with separate IP and a separate trademark. It's an issue of brand identity - some properties you can get away with tying together and some you can't - and thus far, WotC has considered D&D and Magic to be in the 'can't' category.
Han Solo and Chewbacca combine to form the Millenium Falcon!
Ahem...
Point is, D&D and Magic could work together. More likely, if they were ever to do it, it would be the core system of D&D stripped down and rebuilt to suit the Magic setting.
that's exactly what I was referring to.
D&D: A group of adventurers explore uncharted lands and fight monsters.
I think that one can infer from that why it hasn't been done.
I remember specifically they wanted to make a Dominia campaign set around the time of the takeover of TSR. Not sure why it never happened.
Probably a good thing.
One in particular that always springs to mind, that I sooo want in D&D, is the rabbit/pirhanna hybrid creature (that I can't currently remember the name of.)
If unique NPCs or class/path/destinies are brought over, I really feel that Planeswalker would either be an epic destiny or would pretty much be treated as the same thing as Demigod/Archmage.
Oooh... afterthought... Slivers, we definately need slivers in D&D. They're pretty much the kick-@ss fantasy equivilant of Xenomorphs (from the Aliens movies/comics/novels.)
i'd love to see just Shards of Alara adapted into a 4e campaign setting. i'll probably end up doing something along those lines for part of my next 4e campaign anyway. etherium warforged ftw!
I have the Planeswalker's Guide to Alara, and it's half-way decent for D&D purposes.
http://ww2.wizards.com/books/Wizards/Products/?doc=219957400
Vebrandson: I think comparing M:TG to DDM would be a more fair comparison. M:TG has inspired a lot of good fluff and a little bit of good fiction (the books on Urza are generally considered to be the best). Check out http://forums.gleemax.com/forumdisplay.php?f=456 and see what I mean.
Oooh... afterthought... Slivers, we definately need slivers in D&D. They're pretty much the kick-@ss fantasy equivilant of Xenomorphs (from the Aliens movies/comics/novels.)
Slivers were absurd when Wizards of the Coast created the cards. The last thing we need is them ruining another game. Slivers are why I quit MtG that was the point where it became overly obvious that WotC was trying to create new stuff that was making the older stuff obselete just to try and keep their game alive and still make money in the proccess.
Point is, D&D and Magic could work together. More likely, if they were ever to do it, it would be the core system of D&D stripped down and rebuilt to suit the Magic setting.
Hmmm, nope.
Don't want them to devote what resources the few folks that are WotC's R&D to a new setting, whether it is a limited one-book run or a long-standing line as FR and Eberron.
From a flavor standpoint, I would love to see a non-blown up dominaria represented. Or possibly set it in the post Time Spiral rebuilt dominaria.
I always thought about doing a M:tG campaign and with the 4e mechanics, it makes it much easier. Though I'm going to wait until they start coming out with summoning mechanics before I do anything of the sort. A good idea to start would be to associate Keywords with the five colors.
What keywords would you use for the five colors?
White: Healing and Radiant
Blue: Force and Cold
Black: Necrotic (Obvious choice) and Fear
Red: Fire (Another obvious choice)
Green: All I can think of is Poison and Acid... I think the best thing to do is wait until PHB 2 comes out with some new keywords used in the primal classes.
Would you create Planeswalkers as an Epic Destiny or a class of its own?
My plan is to design a world similar to Dominaria, most likely. Use the names of places and major personalities, but have the players as standard D&D type adventurers. I've also been considering the idea of a Ravnica world. I already put together a list of different classes associated with each of the guilds, but I'm not sure how the players would like an urban campaign.
I've been toying with the idea of not a D&D campaign setting, but an original RPG based on M:TG. Every now and then when I get the impulse, I set down a few ideas and/or rules
The same is true of me. I've got several articles I've written describing some Magic card, Ravnica guild, region of Mirrodin or what-not in an in-universe style, and extensive speculation about what's going on behind the scenes. (Example: I have a pet theory that Borborygmos and Rakdos the Defiler are "drinking buddies" who like to get together once every 20 years or so, have a gigantic brawl that wrecks about 30 city blocks, then tear the roof off a brewery and sit down to swap old war stories. They both seem like the type.) I have the barest beginnings of guidelines as to how you would balance player characters that were this, that, or the other type of character, though I haven't quite addressed the issue of planeswalkers to my satisfaction as yet. Still, I totally think this can and should be done. In fact I might be willing to do a test-run of a D&D conversion one of these days, though it probably won't work very well the first few times thru.
Why has this not been done? Wizards owns them both, and they both have not-too dissimilar fanbases, and M:tG's fluff is pretty awesome; though obviously becoming a Planeswalker would be the complete endgame as Planeswalker battles in D&D would just be people throwing very very very large numbers at each other.
Does a homebrew exist, for any system?
it would be difficult since the magic stories aren't set on in any one universe. i guess the only way they could do it is to choose one specific plane like dominaria or ravnica and set the campaigns there
it would be difficult since the magic stories aren't set on in any one universe. i guess the only way they could do it is to choose one specific plane like dominaria or ravnica and set the campaigns there
As I understand, Dungeons and Dragons Online is/was set on Eberron for the same reason - you can't do them all, so you pick the one you think will work best, and you try to do a good job, and if it works you can do another one. (I seem to recall it didn't work out so well, but that's probably due in main to the crap economy.) I would probably pick either classic-era Dominaria or Ravnica to start with, as they're the two Magic worlds which have the most wide-open settings and thus offer the greatest story potential. Between the two, Ravnica is my preference, but Dominaria is closer to traditional fantasy and thus might appeal to a wider audience.
Between the two, Ravnica is my preference, but Dominaria is closer to traditional fantasy and thus might appeal to a wider audience.
i would prefer ravnica too because i'm all about the adventuring in the urban wilderness of cities. The whole Guildpact storyline is ripe for any number adventure hooks too
i would prefer ravnica too because i'm all about the adventuring in the urban wilderness of cities. The whole Guildpact storyline is ripe for any number adventure hooks too
The reason I like Ravnica best is that it's Magic's closest analogue to the real world (only much, much worse - murder is legal and urban congestion is higher by a factor of ten thousand). It's the same reason I'm a perrenial World of Darkness fanboy - fantastic takes on the realistic situation, and realistic takes on fantasy, never cease to fascinate me. I can find it far easier to sympathize with the lot of an Azorius city-planner trying to best manage the conflicting needs of polluting industry, residential living, agriculture and commerce within extremely small footprints of available space, than I can with some medieval farmboy wandering around in vast underground labyrinths which are full of treasure that has somehow not been carted away by bums that stumbled down there looking for a place to take a whizz.
Ravnica has technology, it has busy marketplaces, it has transport issues, it has economics and law (but it actually makes those things vaguely interesting by involving magic in the equation, allowiing for liberal plot-devicery and minimal attention to pedantic details). In short, it's a lot like the world we live in, and teaches some very interesting metaphors for our reality, while also allowing us to get in some good old-fashioned vicarious thrills. (It's nice to take out your frustration at, say, the nonsensical policies you're forced to obey at work in a game, but this is hard if the game is one where you play a traveling minstrel in an agrarian setting, where a loaf of bread is more precious than a diamond ring unless you're within easy reach of a large castle.) Traditional fantasy has its charms, to be sure, and thus I think the two first settings to be developed are Dominaria and Ravnica. But I'd strongly prefer to do Ravnica first. (The third setting should probably depend on the second; if we go from Dominaria to Ravnica, the third step could be Lorwyn, while from Ravnica to Dominaria I'd probably say the third should be Mirrodin.)
I think all we'd really need are world maps for the various M:TG settings.
Actually I would consider that one of the least necessary things; I've found that in storytelling it's convenient to leave the lay of the land vague, so that things can be as close or as far away as the plot dictates. Case in point - my idea for a sample adventure to test out a 3.0 D&D conversion of Dominaria is to have the players be Benalish Heroes (basically level 1 fighters, perhaps with a Feat to allow for special team tactics to reflect their banding ability) who hear of an uprising in the Hurloon Mountains and go to see what the trouble is. There's some sort of schism between the Minotaur tribes and the players will have to fight the Minotaurs which are causing a problem. This hook doesn't work very well if I have a map proving that Benalia and Hurloon are on different continents, ergo I'll be happier if no such map exists. (I am always free to disregard the map as GM, but only at the cost of setting versimillitude, which is the whole point in this case.)
Imagine a wizard that can't use fire spells anywhere except a mountain, or a warlock that can't cast spells without being in a swamp. That's the way MTG works.
Sure, you can ignore it, but by doing so, you remove the most important part of the various worlds and elements that you want to use.
If they can fix that problem somehow, I'd love seeing Kamigawa and Lorwyn/Shadowmoor. It'd be awesome.
planescape and spelljammer are two settings that encourage inter-world travel. it would be nice if someone could create a fan player's guide, with brief descriptions of the different regions, guilds, and what not of each world, after which they could make a brief campaign guide describing the history of the worlds more indepth, named planeswalkers who are still around, and a list of the different monsters found in each of the worlds (with a matching entry from a monster manual, so you basically just describe a standard monster as something else)
Dominaria
Hurloon Minotaur : Minotaur
Llanowar Elf : Elven Ranger
Shivan Dragon : Red Dragon
scathe zombie : zombie rotter
Mirrodin
Alpha Mir : Goblin
Arc-Slogger : Thunder Scorpion
all i can add is is that i am not up to such a task, having never read any of the novels (heck, i stopped playing when ice age was new, with two short returns during Mercadian Masque and Mirrodan. Understand this: the stack was a strange and confusing thing to me when i returned to play.)
that being said, for anyone like me who's interested in this but can't wait for someone else to do all the work, i totally recommend http://www.phyrexia.com/ It has maps of different M:tG worlds at different points in time, detailed character bios for the major characters, and more. it's far from complete, with no information on Ravnica or Alara (as far as i could tell), but it's a great source nonetheless, and wikipedia can help you with the more recent sets, with info on the guilds and shards.
as for game mechanics issues relating to mana, and the color wheel: feats, paragon paths, and epic destinies can take care of that. right now, rather than poo-pooing us in saying the mechanics are incompatible, can't we just worry about the game world itself? can't we let rules take a back seat to fun, just this one time? who cares if no ones using mana right away, the important thing is fighting mon's goblin raiders, squaring off against a keldon warlord, discovering an artifact left behind from the brother's war, and fun things like.
if you really wanted to have something right away, then you could have magic strengthened by being in a particular area (add 1d6 necrotic damage for powers with the necrotic key word used while in a swamp, add 1d6 fire damage for fire powers used within the mountains). you could require a feat to gain that ability, with one feat per color (and having layered feats, like multiclass, so that you could spread yourself thin and do a lot or focus on one color and do more with that). but that's not in the spirit of the planeswalkers, who don't fight in the mountains persay, but draw energy from controlling regions (if you want to play a planeswalker ubermage, you should look to birthright. i'm just talking about playing in the campaign as a regular party)
As much as I love the idea and how much I want to see it happen, there's one major problem; the color wheel. It's the most important element of the game, but it doesn't work in DnD terms.
Sure it does. You just have White, Black, Red, Green, Blue and Artifact replace Abjuration, Conjuration, Enchantment, Illusion, Evocation, Transmutation, Necromancy and Divination. It'd be a lot of work to reclassify all the standard spells (or throw them away and make new ones based on Magic cards) and rebalance them, but it could be done by someone sufficiently ambitious, which may eventually be me, though I'm hardly the best candidate.
Imagine a wizard that can't use fire spells anywhere except a mountain, or a warlock that can't cast spells without being in a swamp. That's the way MTG works.
That is not how it works. A wizard uses red magic by drawing upon his MEMORIES of mountains he has encountered. We sometimes operate under the assumption that lands you play during a duel are physically manifested into a patchwork of warped reality that serves as a battlefield, as otherwise things like landwalk and Stone Rain don't make a great deal of sense. But officially, word from the company is that playing a land card represents calling upon a "mana link", not physically controlling the land. This is why, for instance, Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion isn't a legendary land; there's only one such place, but multiple people can maintain mana links to it, or one person can link to it multiple times.
If they can fix that problem somehow, I'd love seeing Kamigawa and Lorwyn/Shadowmoor. It'd be awesome.
Noted. Lorwyn has been voted in before; Kamigawa would actually be quite easy to homebrew, as you can in fact ignore the color wheel there, it doesn't really fit the setting terribly well. You can easily say that folks who live in Minamo tend to be wizards, and those in Numai tend to be rogues, and those in Jukai are monks with a hint of druid in their makeup, and not bother fitting the color wheel beyond that, as the tropes of Sengoku Japan were adapted to the color wheel for Kamigawa and can easily be liberated from it again. Just grab an Oriental Adventures sourcebook, make up monster-manual statistics for the various kami and the five nonhuman races, and have at it.
i found this thread for one specific reason, i'm looking to do a planescape game and having more "established" worlds to include in that kind of campaign is always better than creating a slew of generic worlds.
The problem with what you're suggesting is that if Sigil's gates open on Dominaria or Ravnica, then planeswalkers from those worlds can theoretically get back to Sigil and run amok; they're used to inter-universe travel, after all. It's not really possible to just "drop in" the Magic world unless you kludge some reason why it wouldn't follow you home. It might work a little better in Spelljammer, since it's been explicitly stated that planeswalkers can't hop from planet to planet in the same multiverse (they could probably planeswalk to another planet with an intermediate stop, but only if they knew the other planet, so if someone from that planet comes to visit they can't automatically return the favor, unless they stow away aboard the ship on its way back).
That is not how it works. A wizard uses red magic by drawing upon his MEMORIES of mountains he has encountered. We sometimes operate under the assumption that lands you play during a duel are physically manifested into a patchwork of warped reality that serves as a battlefield, as otherwise things like landwalk and Stone Rain don't make a great deal of sense. But officially, word from the company is that playing a land card represents calling upon a "mana link", not physically controlling the land. This is why, for instance, Sunhome, Fortress of the Legion isn't a legendary land; there's only one such place, but multiple people can maintain mana links to it, or one person can link to it multiple times.
Yes, for Planeswalkers. In the few books I have read (the Lorwyn ones), the characters (Rhys the Exiled comes to memory) draw magic from their surroundings. The explanation you supplied is true, but that's only how it works for planeswalkers.
The way I would want to bring Magic worlds to DnD is playing as the NATURAL inhabitants of the worlds, not the planeswalkers, which was the reason I said what I did.
The problem with what you're suggesting is that if Sigil's gates open on Dominaria or Ravnica, then planeswalkers from those worlds can theoretically get back to Sigil and run amok; they're used to inter-universe travel, after all. It's not really possible to just "drop in" the Magic world unless you kludge some reason why it wouldn't follow you home.
Um.... what?!
Sigil is the crossroads of the planes, where you have the conflict of perceptions and philosophies. Fighting power means nothing, personal belief everything (one faction was led by a 7th level npc, her second in command was 28th level or something like that)
Devils and paladins fight side by side because god and evil mean little on the planes, there's so much more to the universe than such petty squabbles (to some, anyway, other paladins might attack every devil they see).
traveling from hades to sigil to mount celestia and back again may not be the same for you as running to the market to pick up some milk, but to planars its certainly humdrum enough.
to say that the planeswalkers would run amuck shows that you haven't read a lick of planescape. you have powers (a term for gods by those who don't think being a god is so incredible) running all over the place, fighting one another, marshelling armies, conflicts taking up entire planes of existence for centuries. in sigil, where the lady of pain's rule is absolute, anyone who displeases her can get instantly mazed, permanently stuck in a never ending maze for all eternity (if you **** her off, she could do to you as she's done to some of the gods that have breached her city's limits, such as by turning you into an ashtray or a tavern!)
it's literally impossible to run amuck in the setting for two reasons. one is in sigil you have the Lady, who's only second in power to the theoretical source of all. they can never stat her because she is beyond power, she is beyond the combined might of the gods. the only reason why vecna came as close as he did was because he is the god of secrets, he found a back door in vecna lives! and utilized it in die, vecna, die! (vecna reborn was just filler, a fun adventure, but just filler)
as for the rest of planescape, you have gods battling gods with armies numbering in the billions, with fresh souls suppling reinforcements constantly. maybe a planeswalker would be on par with a minor god, and with the ability to make your own plane as serra did (i think) you could certainly say that there's little difference between that and being a god, but keep in mind something... the players will still be using the basic rules in making a character. unless you want to make the planeswalker class, and intentionally make a level 1 planeswalker the equal to level 30 of any other class, it won't make any difference.
i, like others on this post, am just talking about making a campaign setting where you can travel from world to world and interact with the races and guilds from magic cards, and some people make it sound like we're asking for the impossible, that there is no way to express magic cards through D&D. i'm not talking about making a red elemental blast power, i'm talking about the culture of the llanowar elves, the various guilds in ravnica and mercadia city.
saying its impossible to write down the places and organizations referenced in magic the gathering.... it's one thing to say you're too lazy or are too overwhelmed to do it, it's another to view it as some impossible, herculian labor.
i'm a busy guy, and like i said, i don't have a familiarity with anything since urza and mishra (i understand though that urza won), but if no one else here is willing to do it, fine. i'm going to get it started. it'll take a few months going at a snail's pace, being only able to devote a couple of hours to it a week, but i'm tired of hearing people whine that it can't be done. it's not rocket science people, it's just collecting information that's already out there, and coming up with a few basic feats or powers to give it that rules flavor so many people demand.
to say that the planeswalkers would run amuck shows that you haven't read a lick of planescape.
True, I know the setting only by reputation, but this wasn't what I was getting at. The point is not that planeswalkers would be overpowered in Planescape, but that them being able to enter Planescape at all immediately renders your game no longer a normal, canonical Planescape game. Visiting the Magic world is one thing; bringing it home is another, and diverts your campaign setting away from "straight" D&D, Planescape or otherwise. Which is fine, if that's what your group wants to do; just be aware that if you rule that Dominia (the seldom-used term for the entire Magic multiverse) is a plane that can be accessed from Sigil, you either deal with the consequence of having planeswalkers (and perhaps even non-planeswalkers) trickling back in, partially elbowing out the celestials and infernals and modrons and rilmani and slaad that currently have the run of the place, or else come up with some Phlebotinum to explain why this does not occur. (EG: everyone in Sigil receives special training which allows them to penetrate the Etheric Membrane across each planar portal; it's so basic a fundament of planar travel that they take it for granted and it's never even been mentioned, but Tevesh Szat finds to his frustration that it makes barging into Sigil from Dominia uninvited a functional impossibility.)
i, like others on this post, am just talking about making a campaign setting where you can travel from world to world and interact with the races and guilds from magic cards, and some people make it sound like we're asking for the impossible, that there is no way to express magic cards through D&D.
Not impossible, but Herculean. Think about how detailed a single D&D campaign setting (the notable example being Eberron, which had to be designed to the nines since only its quality could assure its publication; I'm not saying other worlds were sloppy or anything, but for Eberron to win out over thousands of other submissions meant it had to be a superlative-quality bit of design work). Magic, by its nature, contains numerous such worlds, few of them anywhere near as detailed as Krynn or Oerth or Abeir-Toril at the moment. It can be done, but it will take some doing.
I've created two homebrew monster races to date, both of them merely slight variations on canon beasties; D&D's system is, like, kinda complicated, y'know? Try creating stats for several HUNDRED Magic creatures which aren't in the Monster Manual; every single one has to have properly balanced Hit Dice, CR, Face/Reach, attack bonuses, and even Skills. Now think about how to express artifacts like Vedalken Orrery in magic item terms. Now think about creating spells to represent even a handful of the most iconic Magic sorc/insts, such as Dark Ritual. Again, not impossible, but a tall order.
Far be it from me to discourage you if you plan to do a noticeable chunk of this stuff; I do as well. But please don't disparage everyone else for not being willing to take on a project comparable in scope to translating the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica into Tolkien Elvish script.
saying its impossible to write down the places and organizations referenced in magic the gathering.... it's one thing to say you're too lazy or are too overwhelmed to do it, it's another to view it as some impossible, herculian labor.
Herculean labors are by definition not impossible...Hercules did them. Depending on which version of the mythology you look at, Hercules was either more than human, or an exceptionally potent human; either way, that which he could do was not impossible, only insanely difficult. Much like this task. Of course, one lesson we've learned since Herc's time (and particularly since the late 80s or early 90s, when this Internet thing came around) is that what one person can't do, several hundred or thousand or million people with a shortage of better things to spend their time on can accomplish.
Therefore, I am proposing the creation of, and may myself create if nobody else beats me to it, a Project Database for MTG D&D. It will be a separate thread, whose opening post and most of the other early posts will serve as archival repositories for "open projects"; this is the way engineers and software designers tend to work, I understand, and it seems to work well enough for them. It won't be quite so formal of course, since all we're working on is some silly game, but the idea will be that people will submit something they'd like to see, such as a syllabus on Sylvok Explorer cultural practices or a Monster Manual writeup of the Spiritmonger, and that Project remains on the opening page of the thread up until someone else completes that Project, at which point the Project thread will link to the result. (This does carry a risk of links breaking, as has happened with many interesting-sounding projects on these boards, but it'll do in the short term.) Eventually, when enough projects related to a subsection, such as one particular world, one particular area on a world, one particular culture, etc., it can be collated into a single entry and all the links to its chunks combined into a single link to the result (with proper credit given of course). In this fashion, we will gradually write the "book" bit by bit, hopefully with some sort of editorial oversight to ensure things balance, but that will be a function of how many people are free to work on the project.
i'm going to get it started. it'll take a few months going at a snail's pace, being only able to devote a couple of hours to it a week, but i'm tired of hearing people whine that it can't be done. it's not rocket science people, it's just collecting information that's already out there, and coming up with a few basic feats or powers to give it that rules flavor so many people demand.
By all means, do what you can, as will I and whoever else feels like it. We'll get something figured out.
Yes, for Planeswalkers. In the few books I have read (the Lorwyn ones), the characters (Rhys the Exiled comes to memory) draw magic from their surroundings. The explanation you supplied is true, but that's only how it works for planeswalkers.
The way I would want to bring Magic worlds to DnD is playing as the NATURAL inhabitants of the worlds, not the planeswalkers, which was the reason I said what I did.
If you want to read a good example of a non-planeswalker interacting with the memories of lands in order to cast his spells, you should check out the novel "The Dark" by Jeff Grubb. Its a little hard to come by these days as it is out of print, but it is a great read. Jodah, the main character, recalls his childhood home, using that to fuel his magic. It goes quite in depth into the way magic is cast.
Slivers were absurd when Wizards of the Coast created the cards. The last thing we need is them ruining another game. Slivers are why I quit MtG that was the point where it became overly obvious that WotC was trying to create new stuff that was making the older stuff obselete just to try and keep their game alive and still make money in the proccess.
Slivers, absurd? Really?
Slivers, absurd? Really?
They are a trifle silly, though I personally am still fond of them, at least outside the context of actual play (in which they are too repetitive to be much fun for me - I have a similar problem with Domain, the deck is practically always the same, because while you have three times as many cards as you could need, enough of them are indispensible that you have maybe two or three choices to make, and the rest of the deck builds itself every time).
Another example of what Helixrat is talking about is found in the webcomic "Nascent" (www.slavewagestudios.com/comic). It's not canonical, but it is awesome, and if I were a Wizards employee, I'd totally be trying to get the dude who writes it hired, as he obviously knows his stuff.
*beats the dead horse*
Ello there, just back from over a year of not lurking around these forums.
The idea of a Magic the Gathering setting has been discussed a lot, and I've actually been working on it. Nothing much came of it the first two times I started (just one of those pet projects you never finish), but now I'm working on it with a little more energy and dedication.
Anyone who is interested and/or would like to help brainstorm and such, feel free to join me at http://s4.invisionfree.com/Multiverse_of_Magic/ where I try to homebrew something up :P. (Mind you, it's not very recent since it hasn't been visited by anyone in ages, but when people start coming in I'll definately pay some more attention to it)
Not impossible, but Herculean. Think about how detailed a single D&D campaign setting (the notable example being Eberron, which had to be designed to the nines since only its quality could assure its publication; I'm not saying other worlds were sloppy or anything, but for Eberron to win out over thousands of other submissions meant it had to be a superlative-quality bit of design work). Magic, by its nature, contains numerous such worlds, few of them anywhere near as detailed as Krynn or Oerth or Abeir-Toril at the moment. It can be done, but it will take some doing.
Of course, the great help here is that we don't really need to make the campaign setting very detailed ourselves. That much has been done for us by the cards and the novels. The lore is out there, it's a matter of collecting it and putting it down on paper next to each other.
Second, if you are ever making a MtG campaign setting, wouldn't you logically base it in Dominaria? It is *the* main plane of the entire story, seeing as almost all sets were based there (excluding only Homelands, some of the Tempest cycle, and the Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Ravnica, Lorwyn and now Alara cycles). It contains vast lore and many possibilities.
Alternately, you could start in a smaller plane, such as Rath, Mirrodin or Mercadia, which are smaller and thereby easier to create (less lore/details).
That it will take some effort is a given.
I've created two homebrew monster races to date, both of them merely slight variations on canon beasties; D&D's system is, like, kinda complicated, y'know? Try creating stats for several HUNDRED Magic creatures which aren't in the Monster Manual; every single one has to have properly balanced Hit Dice, CR, Face/Reach, attack bonuses, and even Skills.
Regardless of what you're trying to make as a campaign setting, or even just as a DM trying to be original, that much is always true for creating any creature.
Now think about how to express artifacts like Vedalken Orrery in magic item terms. Now think about creating spells to represent even a handful of the most iconic Magic sorc/insts, such as Dark Ritual. Again, not impossible, but a tall order.
First off, there must come the realization that not every magic card is supposed to be a spell. A magic spell such as Dark Ritual is more accurately described as a magic ritual rather than a spell.
As such, there are a lot of cards which could be described as rituals, mundane actions or perhaps even as items.
I think it's more important to use some logic and common sense rather than forcefully try to convert every spell into a D&D equivalent.
Far be it from me to discourage you if you plan to do a noticeable chunk of this stuff; I do as well. But please don't disparage everyone else for not being willing to take on a project comparable in scope to translating the entire Encyclopedia Brittanica into Tolkien Elvish script.
I think that's overstating it just a little bit. It would hold some truth if you were fluent in tolkien elvish and it's script.
Therefore, I am proposing the creation of, and may myself create if nobody else beats me to it, a Project Database for MTG D&D. It will be a separate thread, whose opening post and most of the other early posts will serve as archival repositories for "open projects"; this is the way engineers and software designers tend to work, I understand, and it seems to work well enough for them.
That sounds like a fine plan. And I see you did
.It won't be quite so formal of course, since all we're working on is some silly game, but the idea will be that people will submit something they'd like to see, such as a syllabus on Sylvok Explorer cultural practices or a Monster Manual writeup of the Spiritmonger, and that Project remains on the opening page of the thread up until someone else completes that Project, at which point the Project thread will link to the result.
Mhrm, mhrm, sounds good. But this lacks most forms of basic structure. Making a campaign setting shouldn't be based on requests. Not in the beginning stages. You should set up a basic rule set, invent game mechanics where needed and see what original rules of the game need altering to reflect a magic world.
Then you can start doing requests like classes, monsters and spells. You need to define a basic rule set before you can justly balance your spells, creatures, classes etc.
Eventually, when enough projects related to a subsection, such as one particular world, one particular area on a world, one particular culture, etc., it can be collated into a single entry and all the links to its chunks combined into a single link to the result (with proper credit given of course). In this fashion, we will gradually write the "book" bit by bit, hopefully with some sort of editorial oversight to ensure things balance, but that will be a function of how many people are free to work on the project.
Same comment as above. Dividing a project up into bite-size pieces is a good tactic, but you need something to divide up first. In my experience, making a campaign setting or project by filling in random blanks and then putting them together when it's coherent is a bad way to do things.
I'm not sure how this project is faring (it seems a bit dead T_T), but maybe bringing in some structure can revive the project.
If not, I've come pretty far with my own efforts. I'm getting ready to playtest in september. A lot of basic rules are sort of set, but what I really need is feedback and opinions by the people that might be playing it and/or know their stuff. My project can be found here.
Of course, I'm perfectly willing to help your efforts here. In the end, I'm just looking for a cool campaign setting that I and other people can enjoy. I hope we can get that far, one way or the other
Of course, the great help here is that we don't really need to make the campaign setting very detailed ourselves. That much has been done for us by the cards and the novels. The lore is out there, it's a matter of collecting it and putting it down on paper next to each other.
And that alone is a vast labor, but it only scratches the surface of what is needed. Look at Goblin Piker - he has a name, a mana cost, power, toughness, and a typeline. The entire thing can be run together as "GoblinPiker1RCreatureGoblinWarrior2/1". Now, to achieve almost the exact same content in D&D, you need the full stat block of a Goblin, plus you need to swap out his listed Club weapon for a full-sized Spear from the Player's Handbook, and you need to figure out whether the Spear's extra damage and Reach versus the original Club makes the Goblin enough more dangerous that his Challenge Rating needs to increase from the standard 1/4. That's a good deal more data than "GoblinPiker1RCreatureGoblin2/1", but it's still only a tiny amount of effort in D&D terms. How would you construct, say, Force of Nature so that all his abilities were represented, let alone come up with enough extra Spell-Like Abilities and Special Qualities and so forth to make him impressive?
Then there are balance issues to figure out; a Lord of the Pit is basically a Balor Demon, but those are CR 18, and probably couldn't be killed by just two Lightning Blasts. How exactly will you build your Force of Nature so that it kills-but-also-dies-to four Grizzly Bears, each of which is maybe, if we're generous, a CR 7 Dire Bear, in which case four of them total CR 11 - yet this same FoN that equals the bears is strictly better than the CR 18 Pitlord and can even trample over it for 1 damage? (We might assume that the Pitlord is actually only a Cornugon Devil, in which case he's CR 10 and thus less dangerous than the Bears - but then again, we might figure that the Bears are non-Dire and thus only CR 4 for one or CR 8 for four. We might also assume that all this is excessively literal-minded of me and that the creatures' D&D stats don't have to exactly reflect their performance in a Magic game...but then again, we might not.) Nevermind figuring out exactly how to translate "trample damage to planeswalkers" into D&D terms. They're two different cosmoses, and not easily spliced.
Second, if you are ever making a MtG campaign setting, wouldn't you logically base it in Dominaria? It is *the* main plane of the entire story, seeing as almost all sets were based there (excluding only Homelands, some of the Tempest cycle, and the Mirrodin, Kamigawa, Ravnica, Lorwyn and now Alara cycles). It contains vast lore and many possibilities.
Dominaria bores the heck out of me. It's bland, generic fantasy, and has very few things that were interesting to me even before so many blocks were dedicated to beating it into my skull. Mirrodin, Ravnica, Lorwynmoor, and Alara are all fascinatingly unique places; even Kamigawa had enough of a twist on generic Japanese fantasy (as seen in a bazillion anime series, not one of which to my knowledge featured four-armed snake people or samurai riding giant moths) to feel unique. I would rather look at any of those settings; Dominaria's status as the "default," as well as the extensive amount of information on it, are only enough to make me consider it as a possible starting point, not guarantee it. Ravnica is far more personally exciting to me, with its noticeable similarities to a) Eberron, b) my beloved World of Darkness, and c) the real world, which Ravnica is like a bizarre magical mockery of that reflects many inner truths.
So while Dominaria might be a more useful setting for the game, Ravnica is the one that would be most likely to excite me enough to actually write it. (Though not just now, as my interest in Magic has reached its absolute nadir now that I've examined M10; there's some good stuff in there, but my sense that the game has jumped the shark and will never be quite as good again is even larger than when I was simply refusing to look at the new set.)
Alternately, you could start in a smaller plane, such as Rath, Mirrodin or Mercadia, which are smaller and thereby easier to create (less lore/details).
Mirrodin would probably be my choice for the first supplement after the core, if the core was set in Ravnica, or my second supplement if the core was Dominaria and Ravnica the first supplement. Rath is also an interesting world, but unfortunately its current continuity status makes detailing it problematic; you'd have to pull a J.J. Abrams and reboot the continuity by saying this is a different universe. (Mind you, I'm not at ALL averse to doing that; the way the storyline that started in Weatherlight ended up in Masques and Invasion depresses me to no end. Why, Crovax, why?
:nononoThat it will take some effort is a given.
Yes, and I had more time and energy back when I started saying I would work on this. My involvement in the process is on semi-indefinite hiatus, though I may eventually go to the bother of sharing what I have already wrote, in case someone else wants to go to the bother of fitting it into their own work. Examples of what I've done include articles on Stuffy Doll, Borborygmos, Mortify, Ball Lightning, and I think something relating to Darksteel.
Regardless of what you're trying to make as a campaign setting, or even just as a DM trying to be original, that much is always true for creating any creature.
When it comes to anything as effortful as designing or writing, I prefer to wait for the spirit to move me. They say writing is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration; I'm a 10%er.
First off, there must come the realization that not every magic card is supposed to be a spell. A magic spell such as Dark Ritual is more accurately described as a magic ritual rather than a spell.
Possibly. In the card game, casting a dark ritual actually triggers things that trigger "whenever you play a spell", so you have to figure out what each of those triggered-ability cards represents, and figure out whether a dark rit actually should trigger it, and how to make that happen if dark rit no longer counts as a spell.
As such, there are a lot of cards which could be described as rituals, mundane actions or perhaps even as items.
If Leonin Scimitar was just a sword, you wouldn't pay mana for it, nor would you be able to attach it to a Wall or a Spirit (not counting Kamigawa spirits that have bodies). There may come a point at which I want to draw distinctions between "counts as a spell in MTG" and "counts as a spell in MRP", but I will have to think a long time before I'm comfortable with where to draw that line.
I think it's more important to use some logic and common sense rather than forcefully try to convert every spell into a D&D equivalent.
Perhaps. It will be necessary to make some changes; certainly, infinite combos in MTG shouldn't automatically make you the ruler of the planet in MRP, so some disconnect is inevitable. But I want to make the translation as faithful as possible; I don't want to say the Book of Rass is just a book with info written in it that helps you cast spells but hurts your brain in the process, not unless I've absolutely exhausted the possibility of making it something more blatant to fit its status as a 6-CMC artifact that Animates as being tougher than a fifty-foot Craw Wurm.
I think that's overstating it just a little bit. It would hold some truth if you were fluent in tolkien elvish and it's script.
Actually I should probably have just stopped that sentence at "please don't disparage everyone else". Frankly, the way that person just walked in and said it wasn't that hard and we should just get it done already was incredibly rude and pigheaded. You'll note he hasn't returned to actually prove himself superior to all the people he insulted.
That sounds like a fine plan. And I see you did
I find it far easier to start projects than to finish them. And there was hardly any input from anyone else on those pages after I started them. It may be a very long time indeed before that Project goes anywhere. Real life gets in the way, y'know. (Or, as an editor friend of mine put it, "Life is a conspiracy to keep you from writing.")
Mhrm, mhrm, sounds good. But this lacks most forms of basic structure. Making a campaign setting shouldn't be based on requests. Not in the beginning stages. You should set up a basic rule set, invent game mechanics where needed and see what original rules of the game need altering to reflect a magic world.
I tried that in the first place. It proved to be a fair sight more difficult than I had anticipated. I'll acknowledge that this more recent attempt didn't do much better. The thing is, virtually nothing in D&D seems directly appropriate to Magic. Even a little thing like forestwalk raises deep, serious questions about what it means to have a land in play (excuse me, "on the battlefield", razzafrazzafirpdingblast). If the land is in play, how the heck did it get there? You just thought about it and the entire local landscape rearranged itself so your opponent's Elves could sneak through it to attack you? You either have to ignore these things altogether, in which case you're not so much playing the Magic RPG as you're playing a D&D game where the local elves are called Llanowars, or else you have to seriously figure out how you want to represent the basics of the magic experience in such a way that the setting seems to live. You have to figure out what it feels like to BE a summoned creature, or a planeswalker, or a witness on the sidelines of such a duel.
And the "official" answer has been changed several times; Baron Sengir was supposedly an actual summoned Sengir Vampire, but these days they deal with questions about summoning legends who died in continuity and so forth by saying that a creature spell is just an "etheric duplicate" of the original creature. Like I said, no easy answers, and a lot of difficult choices as to which version to believe, if any of them.
Then you can start doing requests like classes, monsters and spells. You need to define a basic rule set before you can justly balance your spells, creatures, classes etc.
I'm thinking creating them first and balancing them second is the way to go. It's possible to have fun with a game in which things are completely out of whack in terms of power level and you can kill a dragon by farting too hard, but less so to have fun in a game where neither dragons nor deadly farts have stats available and thus all you can do is choose whether to kill goblins or kobolds with either a sword, an axe, or a Rod of Ruin. (Speaking of which, the Rod right there is a good example of the kinds of contradictions we face; is it an awesome relic of devastating power, as the flavor text seems to consistently imply, or is it the magical equivalent of a plain old hunting rifle? There are a lot of things that aren't clear, and I'm wary of setting bad precedents.)
Same comment as above. Dividing a project up into bite-size pieces is a good tactic, but you need something to divide up first. In my experience, making a campaign setting or project by filling in random blanks and then putting them together when it's coherent is a bad way to do things.
Well, you may be right. It's not like i have any real proof that my method works; all I know is that this was the way I was inclined to try and do it.
I'm not sure how this project is faring (it seems a bit dead T_T), but maybe bringing in some structure can revive the project.
I'm an inherently Chaotic person in D&D terms, or a Red mage in Magic ones, so structure is absolute anathema to me. I won't deny it gets results, I just don't have the faintest clue how anyone puts up with it long enough to do so. Frankly, the amount of structure I exercised in setting up the Project pages is phenomenal by my standards. If you would like to improve on this system, I heartily encourage it.
If not, I've come pretty far with my own efforts. I'm getting ready to playtest in september.
I'd be interested in that. I'm finding that playing in a PBP game on these forums is not much of a drain on my resources; even running one campaign is manageable, albeit that my ineptitude probably shows on occasion. But I always find it easier to modify than to innovate, so if you've got a Version 1.0 to test out, I'd be happy to be one of the ones who sits around and finds fault with it. ;)
*****
By the way, kudos to Helixrat for recommending "The Gathering Dark". I discovered to my substantial surprise that I owned it, and have no idea where I picked it up, but I read it. And while it's not as astonishing as Grubb's prior opus, "The Brothers' War", it was more than sufficiently excellent to count among my top 5 or so Magic novels. (Its competition being the rest of the Urza tetralogy and the first book or two of the Ravnica trilogy - Herndon kinda effed up the Dissension book, and the Guildpact book is a little dubious so I don't know quite where I stand on it, but the RCOG novel was most excellent IMO IIRC. Sadly Herndon's potential often fails to be actualized; the Lorwyn trilogy, where he collaborated with another writer whose work I am unqualified to judge, contained glimmers of brilliance but was mostly rather awkward and unsatisfying. Magic novels are like that a lot, sad to say.)
And that alone is a vast labor, but it only scratches the surface of what is needed. Look at Goblin Piker - he has a name, a mana cost, power, toughness, and a typeline. The entire thing can be run together as "GoblinPiker1RCreatureGoblinWarrior2/1". Now, to achieve almost the exact same content in D&D, you need the full stat block of a Goblin, plus you need to swap out his listed Club weapon for a full-sized Spear from the Player's Handbook, and you need to figure out whether the Spear's extra damage and Reach versus the original Club makes the Goblin enough more dangerous that his Challenge Rating needs to increase from the standard 1/4. That's a good deal more data than "GoblinPiker1RCreatureGoblin2/1", but it's still only a tiny amount of effort in D&D terms. How would you construct, say, Force of Nature so that all his abilities were represented, let alone come up with enough extra Spell-Like Abilities and Special Qualities and so forth to make him impressive?
First off, a goblin piker would be a goblin with a pike. Obviously this increases the goblin's damage output from d6 to d8 base, on average 1 more damage. That could well warrant an upgrade to CR 1/2.
But like I said before, rigorously adapting every card and spell into a D&D equivalent might not be the best way to go. There are, after all, a lot of goblins. So why not make the race as a basic 1/1 goblin, and then allow for HD advancements, class levels and equipment switches.
It'll require some effort to draw up, but in a pretty big bang you've covered a lot of goblins (minus the ones with really special abilities, which might need some statting of their own).
As for the force of nature, it'd be a pretty big nature elemental, with abilities to match. With the vast resources of monster books out there for D&D, that shouldn't be too hard.
Trample is something which becomes a bit more philosophical. In the card game, I don't think you should see the playing table as a real-life arena. It's probably a lot bigger, like a field battle. Trample may mean that the foe loses little momentum as it charges past the enemies and keeps on going, rather than fighting a drawn out battle with creatures it encounters. Something that might well be attributed to its size and the D&D Trample feat.
Then there are balance issues to figure out; a Lord of the Pit is basically a Balor Demon, but those are CR 18, and probably couldn't be killed by just two Lightning Blasts. How exactly will you build your Force of Nature so that it kills-but-also-dies-to four Grizzly Bears, each of which is maybe, if we're generous, a CR 7 Dire Bear, in which case four of them total CR 11 - yet this same FoN that equals the bears is strictly better than the CR 18 Pitlord and can even trample over it for 1 damage? (We might assume that the Pitlord is actually only a Cornugon Devil, in which case he's CR 10 and thus less dangerous than the Bears - but then again, we might figure that the Bears are non-Dire and thus only CR 4 for one or CR 8 for four. We might also assume that all this is excessively literal-minded of me and that the creatures' D&D stats don't have to exactly reflect their performance in a Magic game...but then again, we might not.) Nevermind figuring out exactly how to translate "trample damage to planeswalkers" into D&D terms. They're two different cosmoses, and not easily spliced.
Well, you have a point. But again my opinion is that forcefully balancing everything through the card game is probably a bad idea.
At the same time, remember that a random player character in your game is simply not the same as the grandiose master of battle you play in a card game. I would imagine that the lightning blasts cast by such a master of magical art would be much more powerful than the lightning blasts cast by your players or their enemies (point in question: Kamahl can tap for three damage. His powerful fire and lightning magics, if you've read the book, compare to 3 damage a turn. For one or two mana, a magic player can cast spells that do about the same damage. But that one or two mana hardly expends the player the way it does (taps) Kamahl).
Dominaria bores the heck out of me. It's bland, generic fantasy, and has very few things that were interesting to me even before so many blocks were dedicated to beating it into my skull. Mirrodin, Ravnica, Lorwynmoor, and Alara are all fascinatingly unique places; even Kamigawa had enough of a twist on generic Japanese fantasy (as seen in a bazillion anime series, not one of which to my knowledge featured four-armed snake people or samurai riding giant moths) to feel unique. I would rather look at any of those settings; Dominaria's status as the "default," as well as the extensive amount of information on it, are only enough to make me consider it as a possible starting point, not guarantee it. Ravnica is far more personally exciting to me, with its noticeable similarities to a) Eberron, b) my beloved World of Darkness, and c) the real world, which Ravnica is like a bizarre magical mockery of that reflects many inner truths.
Perhaps Dominaria is 'boring and generic'. That saves you a lot of time right there. People are familiar with the world etc. Sure, the specifics of the world are different (names of kingdoms and countries etc), but players don't need a lot of insider info to get it and play.
I'll grant you that those other planes were indeed very interesting and original, though I haven't read the ravnica novels. They make for fine bases for expansions, but if you're taking the card game literally, you've got a rather limited set of spells etc. to work with (it may seem a lot, three sets worth of cards, but it really isn't).
Of course this is personal reasoning and I shouldn't really be trying to dissuade you from your own thoughts and opinions (though I doubt you'd be very convinced by my arguments :p)
Mirrodin would probably be my choice for the first supplement after the core, if the core was set in Ravnica, or my second supplement if the core was Dominaria and Ravnica the first supplement. Rath is also an interesting world, but unfortunately its current continuity status makes detailing it problematic; you'd have to pull a J.J. Abrams and reboot the continuity by saying this is a different universe. (Mind you, I'm not at ALL averse to doing that; the way the storyline that started in Weatherlight ended up in Masques and Invasion depresses me to no end. Why, Crovax, why?
Fortunately, you can place the setting in any given time. Or have the setting allow for multiple time settings (if you give some additional info over what happens during different times, or if DMs already know this).
Possibly. In the card game, casting a dark ritual actually triggers things that trigger "whenever you play a spell", so you have to figure out what each of those triggered-ability cards represents, and figure out whether a dark rit actually should trigger it, and how to make that happen if dark rit no longer counts as a spell.
Yes, you would need to figure out how that works. On the other hand, a dark ritual would probably still have the workings of a spell in it (after all, it costs a black mana), but it would possibly just require a lot of stuff to be done around that casting.
If Leonin Scimitar was just a sword, you wouldn't pay mana for it, nor would you be able to attach it to a Wall or a Spirit (not counting Kamigawa spirits that have bodies). There may come a point at which I want to draw distinctions between "counts as a spell in MTG" and "counts as a spell in MRP", but I will have to think a long time before I'm comfortable with where to draw that line.
I think equipments themselves require some further investigation mechanics-wise. Artifacts in general, in fact.
I'd translate colorless mana to both time, effort, cost of materials, and magical energy required to create the artifact.
The equip is something that's profoundly confusing for D&D terms. And I'd personally just omit it. With some exceptions. Nightmare Lash for example would simply drain the life force of anyone who picked it up and used it.
Perhaps. It will be necessary to make some changes; certainly, infinite combos in MTG shouldn't automatically make you the ruler of the planet in MRP, so some disconnect is inevitable. But I want to make the translation as faithful as possible; I don't want to say the Book of Rass is just a book with info written in it that helps you cast spells but hurts your brain in the process, not unless I've absolutely exhausted the possibility of making it something more blatant to fit its status as a 6-CMC artifact that Animates as being tougher than a fifty-foot Craw Wurm.
I'd personally subdivide artifacts into some categories, such as magical artifacts (book of rass) and mechanical artifacts (dragon engine, weaponry and armor). March of the Machines animates artifacts. But I'd keep it to animating only the mechanical artifacts.
Also, I'd give the Book of Rass a collection of spells which reside within its pages, many many more than any normal book of that volume could hold. Perhaps it chances it's entries based on the one that reads it to offer spells that are useful to him.
In exchange, every time a person learns a spell from such a book, it drains his life force as payment, so that the artifact can forever keep its magic for example.
Actually I should probably have just stopped that sentence at "please don't disparage everyone else". Frankly, the way that person just walked in and said it wasn't that hard and we should just get it done already was incredibly rude and pigheaded. You'll note he hasn't returned to actually prove himself superior to all the people he insulted.
Aye, well understood. It would have ticked me off, too.
I tried that in the first place. It proved to be a fair sight more difficult than I had anticipated. I'll acknowledge that this more recent attempt didn't do much better. The thing is, virtually nothing in D&D seems directly appropriate to Magic. Even a little thing like forestwalk raises deep, serious questions about what it means to have a land in play (excuse me, "on the battlefield", razzafrazzafirpdingblast). If the land is in play, how the heck did it get there? You just thought about it and the entire local landscape rearranged itself so your opponent's Elves could sneak through it to attack you? You either have to ignore these things altogether, in which case you're not so much playing the Magic RPG as you're playing a D&D game where the local elves are called Llanowars, or else you have to seriously figure out how you want to represent the basics of the magic experience in such a way that the setting seems to live. You have to figure out what it feels like to BE a summoned creature, or a planeswalker, or a witness on the sidelines of such a duel.
Yes, that's precisely the kind of basis I was talking about.
1) In the card game, lands are brought into play to represent the places the player has been. He can draw forth power from those memories, i.e. mana.
How this related to landwalk has never been clear to me even in the card game. Surely you as a player don't spend all your time just lounging in the forests waiting to be attacked by forestwalking creeps -.-
2) As such, I think 'lands' are a culmination of memories (e.g. experience). You do not physically bring lands into play. Instead, you can draw on those memories for mana. It would be odd if you could, at level 2, bring an entire range of mountains into being around you, yet you couldn't summon a wall of stone to save your life.
3) I'd cover landwalk as various bonuses in certain surroundings, usually adding the ability to ignore/reduce movement penalties due to terrain differences.
And the "official" answer has been changed several times; Baron Sengir was supposedly an actual summoned Sengir Vampire, but these days they deal with questions about summoning legends who died in continuity and so forth by saying that a creature spell is just an "etheric duplicate" of the original creature. Like I said, no easy answers, and a lot of difficult choices as to which version to believe, if any of them.
Indeed, no easy answers.
Personally I'd immediately rule summoning legends as impossible. Summoning normal creatures, that's something that can be done, I'll agree. But you can't summon a legend. Not from the dead, not some magical replica. Just not at all. It doesn't fit with the lore of the world at all, for example.
The question of summoning an actual creature vs. a magical duplicate is, however, a valid one that should be looked at.
However, again, I think it's important to understand that the way in which you summon creatures as a player of the card game does not really reflect how a mage on any of the planes in Dominia does it.
After all, you're the new Gerrard Capashen, ready to save the world with whatever it takes. You are most likely not Urza Planeswalker, summoning hordes of creatures from one location to the next, creating a crew of heroes to save the world, etc. and so on.
(Speaking of which, the Rod right there is a good example of the kinds of contradictions we face; is it an awesome relic of devastating power, as the flavor text seems to consistently imply, or is it the magical equivalent of a plain old hunting rifle? There are a lot of things that aren't clear, and I'm wary of setting bad precedents.)
The flavor text does not insist on devastating power at all. The flavor text so far has been "The rod is a relic from ancient times . . . cruel, vicious, mean-spirited times." which indicates only that it's a cruel and mean item.
To most humans, this rod channels a bolt of energy that kills a man outright (1 damage can do that to a mere human). Its activation could do anywhere from d6 to 2d8 damage and still have that effect on most 1st-level humans, commoner or not.
I'd be interested in that. I'm finding that playing in a PBP game on these forums is not much of a drain on my resources; even running one campaign is manageable, albeit that my ineptitude probably shows on occasion. But I always find it easier to modify than to innovate, so if you've got a Version 1.0 to test out, I'd be happy to be one of the ones who sits around and finds fault with it. ;)
I'll see about it. I'm getting ready to playtest it with a group of friends IRL, but of course I could easily run the same campaign online as a PBP for those who are interested. More playtesters is always better, I think.
I'll drop an announcement around here when I am going to turn that plan into action.
By the way, kudos to Helixrat for recommending "The Gathering Dark". I discovered to my substantial surprise that I owned it, and have no idea where I picked it up, but I read it. And while it's not as astonishing as Grubb's prior opus, "The Brothers' War", it was more than sufficiently excellent to count among my top 5 or so Magic novels. (Its competition being the rest of the Urza tetralogy and the first book or two of the Ravnica trilogy - Herndon kinda effed up the Dissension book, and the Guildpact book is a little dubious so I don't know quite where I stand on it, but the RCOG novel was most excellent IMO IIRC. Sadly Herndon's potential often fails to be actualized; the Lorwyn trilogy, where he collaborated with another writer whose work I am unqualified to judge, contained glimmers of brilliance but was mostly rather awkward and unsatisfying. Magic novels are like that a lot, sad to say.)
Yes, the gathering dark is a very good novel. I sincerely enjoyed it, and I loved the Artificer cycle novels (just finished time streams, now going to start reading bloodlines). Haven't read ravnica though.
Lorwyn was sadly not very satisfying, I found. It lacked a certain "oomph" as it were. It didn't have the edge I was used to.
I immensely enjoyed the invasion cycle books, too.
I'm a big fan of the books by McGough and Grubb, but mostly those by J. Robert King. That man can definately write up a good story
.But like I said before, rigorously adapting every card and spell into a D&D equivalent might not be the best way to go. There are, after all, a lot of goblins. So why not make the race as a basic 1/1 goblin, and then allow for HD advancements, class levels and equipment switches.
The other thing is that Magic's goblins are a lot of different sorts of creature (even if you discount the variation shown in the early expansions - Fallen Empires often had different artists drawing the exact same creature card so that one goblin was billious green and had pointy ears and nose, while another was greenish-brown and had more apelike features). The Moggs, Akki, Kyren, Jundians, and other such goblin subraces need to all have their own Monster Manual version distinct from the standard goblin. Heck, even in the Onslaught block, we saw goblins being mutated by the Mirari so that they ended up being distinctly monkey-like by the time of Scourge. I wouldn't want to gloss over all that variety and just use a standard D&D Goblin template.
but if you're taking the card game literally, you've got a rather limited set of spells etc. to work with (it may seem a lot, three sets worth of cards, but it really isn't).
Well no, I wasn't going THAT far. I'm certain that basic spells like Unsummon and Shock are to be found on Ravnica, even if Wizards didn't reprint those spells in the set. (Actually, with Izzet Guildmage and Djinn Illuminatus, the absence of the simplest version of such spells was a very serious problem.)
I think equipments themselves require some further investigation mechanics-wise. Artifacts in general, in fact.
There was a Homelands-era comic book in which it was actually established that artifact creatures are not summoned from other planes - they are conjured, fully-constructed, on the spot. But of course this contradicts other continuities that show you actually having to build the things laboriously over time, something we of course don't see in the game. Definitely we'll need to decide which answer we want to go with for this game.
1) In the card game, lands are brought into play to represent the places the player has been. He can draw forth power from those memories, i.e. mana.
How this related to landwalk has never been clear to me even in the card game. Surely you as a player don't spend all your time just lounging in the forests waiting to be attacked by forestwalking creeps -.-
You could reason that landwalk represents the ability for the summoned creature to planeshift into the lands that the defending planeswalker is thinking about, and then "piggy-backing" through those memories to teleport right next to them and attack and then vanish back into their mind, or else just attack them inside their mind. (There was an episode of the X-Files that showed something like what I imagine this would feel like.) But all this is dubious at best.
2) As such, I think 'lands' are a culmination of memories (e.g. experience). You do not physically bring lands into play. Instead, you can draw on those memories for mana. It would be odd if you could, at level 2, bring an entire range of mountains into being around you, yet you couldn't summon a wall of stone to save your life.
Good point. Of course you could say that it isn't something the planeswalkers deliberately do, but that it's a side-effect; as they think about the lands, ghostly images of the landscapes just sort of naturally materialize around them, just because they're planeswalkers (or even normal mages, who also get into duels). But this is strange. Maybe cool-strange enough to justify being unrealistic-strange, as is often the case in anime and such (do we honestly believe Cloud can possibly lift that 9-foot sword? No. do we care? No.), but maybe not.
Personally I'd immediately rule summoning legends as impossible. Summoning normal creatures, that's something that can be done, I'll agree. But you can't summon a legend. Not from the dead, not some magical replica. Just not at all. It doesn't fit with the lore of the world at all, for example.
It might be possible, but with certain specifications. The spell would be hard to learn, and it would memory-wipe the person and return them to the same spot in time they were taken from (which would be part of why it would be hard to learn). There's a certain cool factor to summoning Legends that makes me think it shouldn't actually be impossible, but it might have something of a "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" vibe.
The question of summoning an actual creature vs. a magical duplicate is, however, a valid one that should be looked at.
My initial take on the game assumed the former, and made it so there were Merits or Feats or whatever you call them which you could take to be less likely to get summoned away at random times. But I ended up deciding that line of reasoning wasn't productive, so the "magical duplicates" part might be more convenient for play. However, we might keep a mention in that some mages are able to do real summons too, just so there's an option to use summoning as a plot hook (ie you form a party by having all the characters be Summoned and then allowed to wander off after the duel).
After all, you're the new Gerrard Capashen, ready to save the world with whatever it takes. You are most likely not Urza Planeswalker, summoning hordes of creatures from one location to the next, creating a crew of heroes to save the world, etc. and so on.
Actually you should have the option to play either, ideally, although it would be valid to put the rules for being a planeswalker in a separate supplement, equivalent to D&D's Epic Level Handbook.
The flavor text does not insist on devastating power at all. The flavor text so far has been "The rod is a relic from ancient times . . . cruel, vicious, mean-spirited times."
(Damn, it's sad that they've never been able to improve on that lame-arse quote.)
I may be confusing a mention in some novel or story somewhere, or maybe just something I made up. Keep in mind, in the early sets, sometimes a creature card represented multiple creatures. At the very least, Mons's Goblin Raiders is three or four goblins, and the Rod can kill them all in one blast. I think there are even more extreme examples, where a 1/1 creature appears to be like eight or ten guys. So I was probably thinking that the rod needed to be more than just a "goblin bam-stick".
Yes, the gathering dark is a very good novel. I sincerely enjoyed it, and I loved the Artificer cycle novels (just finished time streams, now going to start reading bloodlines). Haven't read ravnica though.
Very sad story - I dropped my copy of Time Streams outdoors on a rainy day and didn't find it until the next morning. I still have to buy a new copy.
Lorwyn was sadly not very satisfying, I found. It lacked a certain "oomph" as it were. It didn't have the edge I was used to.
The quality seemed to vary by chapter. It had some very brilliant bits; in particular, I enjoyed Chapter 3 of "Lorwyn", and the first chapter or two of "Morningtide". But many parts of it were just not well handled. The worst by far was "Eventide", but I don't blame the authors for that one; really, there needed to be one novel set in Lorwyn and two in Shadowmoor, rather than the reverse. Lorwyn was a very small setting with a lot of known information and a relatively low danger level, so inevitably, the story set there dragged badly, even while the part set in Eventide was savagely rushed and skipped out on a huge amount of delicious detail.
But on the plus side, about half of the stories in the Shadowmoor anthology are toweringly excellent. I think I fell in love with Jenna Helland after I read "The Cloudbreaker".
The other thing is that Magic's goblins are a lot of different sorts of creature (even if you discount the variation shown in the early expansions - Fallen Empires often had different artists drawing the exact same creature card so that one goblin was billious green and had pointy ears and nose, while another was greenish-brown and had more apelike features). The Moggs, Akki, Kyren, Jundians, and other such goblin subraces need to all have their own Monster Manual version distinct from the standard goblin. Heck, even in the Onslaught block, we saw goblins being mutated by the Mirari so that they ended up being distinctly monkey-like by the time of Scourge. I wouldn't want to gloss over all that variety and just use a standard D&D Goblin template.
Oh indeed. I do think that many races would benefit from having rules to reflect their variations.
There was a Homelands-era comic book in which it was actually established that artifact creatures are not summoned from other planes - they are conjured, fully-constructed, on the spot. But of course this contradicts other continuities that show you actually having to build the things laboriously over time, something we of course don't see in the game. Definitely we'll need to decide which answer we want to go with for this game.
It's perfectly possible to summon a fully constructed artifact from somewhere...if you have one safely tucked away.
Remember that Urza didn't lift so much as a magic finger to make his artifacts. They were researched and constructed.
Plus, that makes artifacts a more special commodity to have and it maybe gives us an opportunity to make an Artificer class that's actually useful.
You could reason that landwalk represents the ability for the summoned creature to planeshift into the lands that the defending planeswalker is thinking about, and then "piggy-backing" through those memories to teleport right next to them and attack and then vanish back into their mind, or else just attack them inside their mind. (There was an episode of the X-Files that showed something like what I imagine this would feel like.) But all this is dubious at best.
Indeed, you could reason that. Except I would have the greatest difficulty believing that many rather mundane-ish creatures could piggy-back such a thing. For one, many can't teleport at all, and planeshifting is lethal to anyone not a planeswalker unless measures are taken.
No, I daresay landwalk makes little sense in a D&D setting. At least, not in the way it works in the card game... (unless someone has a brilliant idea, of course)
Good point. Of course you could say that it isn't something the planeswalkers deliberately do, but that it's a side-effect; as they think about the lands, ghostly images of the landscapes just sort of naturally materialize around them, just because they're planeswalkers (or even normal mages, who also get into duels). But this is strange. Maybe cool-strange enough to justify being unrealistic-strange, as is often the case in anime and such (do we honestly believe Cloud can possibly lift that 9-foot sword? No. do we care? No.), but maybe not.
Eh. Every magic novel I've read contradicts it. That would be reason enough for me to say hell no :P. But then, I am usually just a tad bit obsessed with making my settings ar realistic as possible within the confines of the game setting.
It might be possible, but with certain specifications. The spell would be hard to learn, and it would memory-wipe the person and return them to the same spot in time they were taken from (which would be part of why it would be hard to learn). There's a certain cool factor to summoning Legends that makes me think it shouldn't actually be impossible, but it might have something of a "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" vibe.
Except that time-travel is impossible for mere mortal beings. Even planeswalkers can't walk though time. The only being I know of that has succesfully gone through time and back is Karn, a silver golem specifically designed for that purpose (because silver was more resistant against the stress of time travel).
My initial take on the game assumed the former, and made it so there were Merits or Feats or whatever you call them which you could take to be less likely to get summoned away at random times. But I ended up deciding that line of reasoning wasn't productive, so the "magical duplicates" part might be more convenient for play. However, we might keep a mention in that some mages are able to do real summons too, just so there's an option to use summoning as a plot hook (ie you form a party by having all the characters be Summoned and then allowed to wander off after the duel).
Yes, when I read the Arena novel I had a good laugh. Everything about spellcasting there seemed extremely forced to make it represent the card game. I didn't like it much, though the plot points were pretty good.
I don't think you could summon actual beings, not until you're of very decent power (such as Barrin, master mage of tolaria).
It seems though, from the time streams novel, that mages actually create summon spells for creatures that don't exist (teferi's drake, for example.
That suggests heavily that mages create their own summon spells, and that whatever they summon is real but at the same time isnt.
However, I am also of the opinion that summoning anything intelligent is a whole other matter. As a planeswalker, it's not that difficult to tear a contingent of human soldiers from their surroundings and plop them down before you. (and then coerce them to do what you want because you're a friggin planeswalker)
As a mage, constructing something intelligent is extremely difficult. And teleport spells are not very easy to find or learn, as I have seen very few mages (apart from planeswalkers) who can teleport.
Actually you should have the option to play either, ideally, although it would be valid to put the rules for being a planeswalker in a separate supplement, equivalent to D&D's Epic Level Handbook.
Oh, I do agree that playing a planeswalker should be possible. And the Epic Level Handbook would be a place to put it, but people shouldn't be thinking that planeswalkers are epic level characters.
The definition of a planeswalker makes it a template, at most. Because they're ultimately beings of energy that exist solely by the force of their minds and wills. They are capable of summoning and commanding vast amounts of mana without considerable effort. And, their trademark feat, they can planeswalk.
Enough to warrant a massive increase in ECL and CR, of course.
I may be confusing a mention in some novel or story somewhere, or maybe just something I made up. Keep in mind, in the early sets, sometimes a creature card represented multiple creatures. At the very least, Mons's Goblin Raiders is three or four goblins, and the Rod can kill them all in one blast. I think there are even more extreme examples, where a 1/1 creature appears to be like eight or ten guys. So I was probably thinking that the rod needed to be more than just a "goblin bam-stick".
Still, Mons's Goblin Raiders is a 1/1 creature. For me that puts it in a CR category of 1/2 to 3 or so. (we have to remember that the 10/10 leviathan is pretty much one of the biggest baddest things out there, so it's likely to be 25-30HD at the very least)
Again, spells can't make the distinction against multiple creatures on a card. Lava Dart is capable of killing that goblin host. One single flaming dart. See my point? :P
Very sad story - I dropped my copy of Time Streams outdoors on a rainy day and didn't find it until the next morning. I still have to buy a new copy.
T_T. I just ordered copies of Eternal Ice and Shattered Alliance. Damn those things are expensive. I'm going to be so broke when I finally buy the magic anthologies books (rath and storm, colors of magic, myths of magic, monsters of magic....they should also prove very useful for uncovering great info on the magic setting).
White = Divine
Black = Shadow
Green = Primal
Red = Arcane
Blue = Psionic
Artifact = Martial