Here be dragons


Homebrew and House Rules


So our group has decided to make a home dew together.

We've made one giant city together which has two parts: Sund and Zanarkand. Sund is the bottom layer and is where the poorer folk live. They qre quite industrious and only remain poor because of the oppression from the ruling elite above them. The elite live in Zanarkand, which is built atop Sund so that it blocks the light from Sund in most places. The elite mainly are comprised of arcane casters and technological adepts (who make steampunk technology).

There is a rift inbetween the two factions, as though many arcanist a are scientists, not every scientist has the ability to cast. Outside the city it becomes more "barbaric" as the overlords of the city-state lose influence on the outside world.

This mega city is located in the heart of a continent (which we have yet to map out - one player wants to do it all by himself). The idea for the world is that it is a separate plane made by a powerful wizard from Neb. There are scattered portals over the plane which may or may not be active due to his inability to keep his realm secure. This wizard isn't really in the campaign (unless I see a reason to run something like Rise of the Runelords), rather he is more of a creation myth.

The majority of the inhabitants worship Nethys, as he has sort of taken this plane under his wing. The magical energies within this plane are guarded by a race of dragons, who are revered for their power (think of the worms from Dune).

My question is related to plot material, as this is my first homebrew I would very much like to have some module or AP to run that I could fall back on. One player (the one who is mapping) wants to just run around and wants me to create a plot from scratch but I don't think I can handle that. I figure the best course of action is to use a module that sort of fits in the setting, change any relevant details, and just pretend to have made it up myself (to please him, as he doesn't seem to be budging on this matter).

Based on the limited info, does anyone have any suggestions for material to use for either the plot or the setting? If you need more info, I will answer as best I can.

Thanks in advance!


I don't want to spam making new threads, so if you don't have any advice that's fine. I do have something new though, we were thinking of having constellations characters would be born under - they'd be like campaign traits but chosen randomly. Because of this I think it's okay for them to be a bit more powerful, but I'm asking for feedback on the ones we have already.

Death: 0.05% chance per level to kill enemies instantly on a spell attack. For AOE spells roll individually per target. Additionally enemies who die explode, dealing 2d6 damage per caster level to those within a 5ft radius.

The Survivor: When a creature with at least half your hit dice is killed within 30ft, heal for 5% of your maximum health. If you are already at maximum health, instead gain a +1 AC bonus that stacks with itself, but is lost when you take damage.

The Child: Aging penalties are halved (rounding up) and you can change the attitude of another person one additional time per day when using diplomacy.

The Bastion: Any weapon you wield has the brace property, and additionally gains a +2 to AC when bracing and can make an immediate action to intimidate a charging enemy. In addition, he can make a brace action as an immediate action, but takes -2 to AC and -1 on attack rolls for one round when doing so.

I'm thinking of doing 15 total: The Hand, The Banished, The Dragon, The Coward, The Slave, The Priest, The King, The Wanderer, The Husk, The Onlooker, and The Enlightened being the other 11

What are your thoughts (for this post and/or the previous one)?

Silver Crusade

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Considering you're using the name of a city from Final Fantasy, you could always try to look at lifting some Final Fantasy plots. It looks like you have a decent way to plug in some Final Fantasy 7, 8, and 10.

7 could be ripped from with the whole dual-tiered city and magical energies of the world. It just so happens that the biggest sources of this energy is being guarded by the dragons. Make the elite use this energy to make their lives easier, uncaring that it's making the world slowly die. Since it's essentially a pocket-dimension created by a wizard it's easy to say that it only has a limited amount of magical energy that's being used up. Midgard is also basically the most developed city technology-wise than any other in that world so you can use it in order to kind of develop the idea of the mega-corporation having a central seat of power and having its influence lessen as you go further out.

8 could be ripped from by having your players part of a private military academy (the equivalent of S.E.E.D.) that is commonly hired by these higher-ups. They get hired to do some mission where they find out some kind of secret that pits them against the government/other supernatural things.

10 because it does the whole "find out a secret that the government has been hiding and so now it's time to fight the power" transition rather well. Maybe have very specific members of the elite cast know that this powerful wizard is manipulating the top members of the government, or maybe they know of a way to get back to the material plane which is why they're milking this plane of existence for all it's worth before getting ready to just jump ship.

I can actually see a bit of the plot coming along from this. The players are part of the military academy. Take very heavy dystopian vibes from FF7. They get sent on a few missions to kill monsters/put down rebellions and secure these special sites where large quantities of this energy can be extracted from. They find out somehow that these energies are limited which the government has been hiding from the world. At this point they have two choices: continue on helping the government (Choice A), going full anti-establishment on their asses (Choice B), or act as spies/inside men that try and sabotage the government (Choice C). Either way they find out that the plane can be left at any time. It's just that the gate for doing so is extremely well-guarded. If the government is stopped then the plane can sustain itself for a very, VERY long time (aka, the world is saved). If the elites aren't stopped then the world has a couple-thousand years of energy left.

Choice A:
They continue to be sent on missions similar to what they've been having, eventually ending the campaign with killing the dragons to harvest the last of the world's energies. The players are now rich and can live a life of luxury.

Choice B:
They are tasked by these dragons themselves or maybe come across a group of people who are in-tune with the "feelings" of the plane and can either rally the people against the elites (Kingmaker could possibly be a nice pre-written thing for this) or do more terrorist-style strikes before eventually killing the current leaders of the elites who are running the show to stop the world from dying.

Choice C:
This one would be a bit harder to come up with things correctly but could end up being a lot of fun. Have them continue doing jobs for the government but only to build their trust. While doing these jobs and building the trust of the people in charge they're gaining intel to tell the rebels discussed in Choice B and doing things to sabotage major reactors/power extractors. This one culminates in a coup d'etat of the current government while the players place a less corrupt group on the seat of power.

The problem with this though is that you would have to get the players to agree to have characters that would all have reasons to go down one of these main paths together. It would kind of leave bad feelings if one or two players had to bench characters they had become attached to because the characters can't agree on what to do. A good way to do this is to create a ring of six circles. A is the top circle, B is the lower right, and C is the lower left (but don't mark them as such). Instead label them 1-6 and fill them with these phrases, starting at the top and going clockwise: 1."Absolute loyalty to the government" 2."Stability in the region must be achieved" 3."People shouldn't mess with the natural order" 4."I just want to help the most amount of people" 5."I don't mind getting my hands a bit dirty" 6."I'll just do whatever earns me money". Tell them that their characters don't have to be entirely based around those ideals, but they must at least be important concepts to them. Each character must be no more than two steps away from another and will help steer the story. This means that if one person is on Circle 1, everyone would have to be on Circles 6, 1, or 2.

This is my thought process for this: 1 is the main embodiment of A, 3 is the main embodiment of B, and 5 is the main embodiment of C. If the players remain within these steps of each other then you should be able to steer the campaign to one direction or another without completely leaving a player in the cold.

As an example: the players are on circles 1, 2, and 3. Oh no, we have some heavily leaning toward A and B! Well here's the thing: all of those could see the merits of siding with the government. "Absolute loyalty" would go with the government (duh), "Stability in the region" could want these rebels to stop so that chaos doesn't keep going on and "Don't fight the natural order" would see that the elites have been in power all this time and so that shouldn't change. In that same token, circles 2, 3, and 4 could all be pulled to Choice B. Stopping the plane's collapse would obviously be important to "I just want to save people", "Don't fight the natural order" could think that using the plane's energy to live in luxury is a perversion of that energy and should be stopped, and if they help the rebels become a kind alternative government then rebel attacks would stop meaning more stability in the long run.

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