| Weo |
I think that's a very interesting premise, dood. Thoughts:
1. The Wizards as Twin Brothers- This sounds fine to me, I wonder what some of the critics have said against it? Family ties always bring a level of depth and breadth to a campaign, and I love it when my PCs have famiy interests (and I always, as a player, create some sort of family background). Now, whether they really are twins is up to you...perhaps one is the "real" guy, the other some sort of eveil clone or doppleganger or alternate dimension version or something.
2. Common folk destroying Wizards - This needs no explanation at all IMHO; wizards must rest, memorize spells, prep components (people always forget that). Sure, a readied wizard is a formidable foe, but for how long? 1 day? 1 week? How many 10kgp powdered diamonds is he really going to have? As they said on the podcast Fear The Boot (a good "pen and paper" rpg podcast), if there really were dragons sitting on moutains of gold, it wouldnt be adventuring super-humans fighting them, it'd be massive corproations with armies that would eventually run the dragons to ground and "mine" them like we mine oil today. I think that same reasoning applies to wizards...a wand of fireballs is going to kill hundreds of people, but how are you going to stop thousands?
Now, if the wizards in your world are removed from these restrictions, maybe some more explanation is needed...the priests of the land getting involved is a good solution, as clerics can cast dispel magic as well as anyone else I believe. In many of my games, I use monks and barbarians as the "anti-mages" they were kinda meant to be (and by that I mean good saves, stunning fists, and fast movement for the monk, and temp hp and fast movement and extra str for the brb, have both classes grapple to get Attacks of Opp on casters, etc).
Perhaps the priests of God X formed monestaries of magekillers, or the druids of Nature God summoned brb hordes.
Or, and I don't know how u feel about psionics, perhaps "the people" discovered the power...of the mind. A few psions mixed in a crowd would really change it's capabilites. This solution is perhaps more acceptable to critical rules-lawyers out there if you were to utilze the "magic and psionics are different" option in the Expanded Psionics Handbook, wherein protections and dispelling of magic have no effect on psi powers, and visa versa. magine the confusion your wizads would have when ecoplasmic assassins walk right through their wards, crystal shards flying through their shields...When I play Eberron, this is how I roll it, it makes the Dreaming Dark all the more menacing...
Now, you wouldnt want to make the world too psi-heavy, b/c normally that's a pretty niche audience, your players may not like it, that's up to you. Eberron does a good balancing act here, better than the old Dark Sun setting.
3. Ley Lines - my first thought was that the world shattered along the ley lines. Would this make sense?
4. Dragon Lords- this is a tough one, let me think about this one.
5. The Gods- you are making up your own gods? And I guess the question is, what were they doing during the Shattering? I think the best "absent gods" model was played out in the old Dragonlance series, where the gods left the heavens, and when they did their constellations left the skies darker. During that time, there was no divine magic, and youve said that you have priests with power, so that isnt an apt comparison, but it s a good example of a "where have the gods gone" fiction arc.
Unless you do mean that priests have lost their power? If so, what about paladins, bards, and druids?
It would be interesting to have the gods be silent on the issue, acting as though nothing unusally happened...and by that, I mean, augury or portend spells like commune simply return no answer on the subject of the Shattering. Or maybe they're giving different answers.
6. Keys- Here's another place where I think your premise is fine. Why does there have to be a "reason" for keys being sentient? Perhaps the Guild wizards made it so, perhaps another sentient race who saw the Shattering coming, like archons or even demons. Maybe the Keys are somehow linked to the gods, like a lich has a phylactery. You've really got alot of freedom here.
Here's a question: how do people travel between the shards? And what is it like in that "space"? Visions of SpellJammer come to mind here, maybe thats good, maybe that's bad.
Anyway, hope that helps, I'll be looking for your next post, and keep up with your good, creative work :)