This setting/campaign idea has been running through my head for some time now. It started out as my attempt at making a setting that once had magic and gods, but no longer does. As if Ao got sufficiently pissed off at the gods of Toril and decided it wasn't worth the fuss.
When I went about trying to make it I realized I couldn't let anything go unanswered and had to make it as awesome as I knew it could be. In pursuit of this I felt kind of odd asking a guy at a gaming shop if he knew anything about planescape and it's politics to help me with a godless and magicless campaign.
I'm having to revise my perspective of how magic (divine and arcane) and psionics work, and how the fabric of the multiverse interacts with them. Here's what I got so far:
In this setting psionics are fundamental, but understanding psionics and tapping it in a disciplined manner requires a deep understanding of the nature of the universe and it's relationship and literal ties with sentience/consciousness.
Arcane magic is a derivative of it formed by the birth of a being (The Serpent?) whose very mental fabric is spread out across most places in the multiverse, and is able to be manipulated by beings or objects that discover it or whose own being somehow gets interwoven with it when brought into existence. Arcane magic may be relatively easy to interact with, but there's still quite an art and science to it.
Divine magic is polarized positive and negative energy which I guess is the power behind gods that makes them unique. If you take the sum of all the divine magic gods possess and grant, it will cancel out. In other words, it will all balance. Divine magic exists because gods are able to channel and morph tidbits of the power behind them and their portfolios through a metaphorical series of arcane tubes to their more devoted worshipers. By morph I meant fashion into useful spells/prayers and such. If arcane magic fails, so too does divine.
So here's the gimmick. Something happened or was about to happen on this once highly magically developed planet that caused enough powers in the multiverse to decide that they had to immediately and without notice transport the planet to a zone in the astral plane where magic is dead and sever all the planet's ties to all other dimensions and planes, making this planet truly alone. Or maybe they're hiding something, someone, or the whole thing. Still figuring this part out!
Anyway the campaign revolves around a Githzerai (or maybe even a Githyanki to make it more interesting) somehow stumbling upon the planet (still don't know these specifics either). He doesn't know why this planet is here or its importance, but he's alone and this place seems like his last hope to getting home. I may have him as an NPC or allow him to be a PC if I trust one of the players enough.
This is all to be done before working on game mechanics, developing a new class or two, figuring out what natural selection has done to the current bestiary, and building hopefully just one continent on one planet from the ground up. I was also thinking of making it an E6 game, at least until it becomes almost necessary for the characters to actually start performing mythical deeds to advance the story.
I have a lot of other stuff in my head but this is long enough. If you have any tips, ideas, or insightful knowledge, I'd appreciate some input.
