lord_void's page

Secret jobs of the GM:

Describe things. Describe them really well. Unless you have visuals or music, all the players have are your words. Use more instead of less.

Keep in mind the oppisite is also true. When you want to highlight one detail above all others giving vague descriptions and leaving out details works great, it makes that one detail memorable about the encounter or location or person, but at the same time it allows you to slip in things under the players radar and have them forget it pretty quickly.

An example: The party had just encountered what was to be the main villian of the entire campaign. They were in some minor baron's office and the villian was there trying to coerce the baron into cracking down and abusing his serfs and peasants to start a rebellion. I described the villian as being an older gentleman in stained traveling clothes covered by a heavy cloak to ward off the cold (the game at the time was set at the end of fall). I went on to describe sparklying blue eyes holding shrewdness and a confidence of self. I then played off the entire encounter as a talking encounter where the party was trying to persuade the baron to ease up on his hold.

The entire session was a throw away adventure taking place between one location and the next, I put it in to give a bit of story, there is discord taking place all over the land and it is about to grow into a full on civil war. However, I slipped in the major villian, the hand at the chess board and the group had already forgotten about him by the next week's session so it was really fun when they unraveled everything and finally went after the big bad only to realize they had already met...the pay off was one of the more memorable events in my current gaming group, they still talk about it and pay attention to any little detail I spend some time to play up.

I was reading the write up for chill touch and it says I can make the attack one time per level, so does this mean that when I use the spell I keep the "charge" until I've used it a number of times equal to my caster level or does it mean I make three (I am level 3 atm) attacks with the spell the turn I cast it?

I thought the same enhancement from different sources did stack, like with a belt of giant strength and bull strength stacking.

With that in mind, would a belt of Giant stength and an Ioun stone of strength stack? they are both giving +2 to the strength but they are from different sources.

I worded my response wrong, I meant a focus bonus not stacking with each other.

I figured as much but I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing an errata somewhere that says the bonus from different sources does not stack, like with the keen weapon ability.

Were you thinking about bloody assult from pg 151 of the apg? It's almost like what you are looking for only instead of additional damage against an unwounded enemy you just deal aditional bleed damage.

Question about stacking, would Elemental focus Cold stack with Spell Focus evocation for casting a cold spell from the evocation school? Ray of frost for example would have a DC of 10+0+5+1+1(Spell and elemental focus) for a save...well, that's a bad example becuase RoF doesn't have a save, but you get my point.

Still Spell?

thank you.

I'm not totally sure this is the right play for this but here goes:
I remember from 3.5e a feat that allowed casters to ignore the gesture and movement component of a spell and was looking for it in pf and can't seem to find it...can someone direct me towards what I am looking for? It's totally possible I am wrong and it was in a totally different system, but I'm 80% sure it was in 3.5e.

lol, if Sneak Attack applied to Ray of Enfeeblement, it'd be SOOOOO terribly broken. 11d6 Strength Damage???

It was really really funny.

What about steering the player into a ranger or fighter with light armor and skills? Trying to snipe is really difficult in most situations, and requires loads of patience to be marginally effective.

Note: Magic missile doesn't require an attack roll, thus does not qualify for sneak attack unless using the arcane trickster cap-stone ability. Grease could allow you a sneak attack, but it involves getting out a wand, a UMD check, the creature to make the DC 13 save (or else it is prone and gets +4 to AC and is not flat-footed). Then you have to draw a ranged weapon, and IF the creature decides to move, you get a chance to sneak attack. Ugh.

I would basically just explain to the player that ranged rogues are not very well supported in a system that involves a lot of melee combat (for a variety of logical reasons). If the players are OK with this, and willing to have the character contribute a shot here and there, go for it. My guess is that the player would have more fun playing a rapid-shotting ranger, or zen archer more then a sniper.

Note: There is a sniper rogue-archetype, and also an item called sniper goggles in the APG.

As an aside to this, as has already been mentioned above the rogue talent Greater Magic allows the rogue to select one level one spell to be able to cast, so grease could be used without the UMD and wand...still not the greatest option but a bit better.

My rogue used a wand of ray of enfeeblement and a wand of burning hands for his ranged sneak attacks. My gm and I might have done the ray of enfeeblement wrong though, we applied the sneak attack damage to the str drain. Burning hands on the other hand is just funny because if we couldn't immediatly get into Melee I used it to catch the enemy on fire with the help of my spellcasters...mage hand + flask of oil...instant fun.

My friends and I have had a discussion like this before actually. I personally like the addition of expansion material but I do understand the balance issue--psionics being a major issue for my group. The expanded psionics handbook was the only book from 3.5 to ever be banned at my table for hopefully very obvious reasons, but aside from EPH some classes were banned from use mainly for the flavor the campaign was going for so there were no permanent bans in my group with the exception of the above mentioned book.

As for the Ultimate Magic material I am really looking foward to it mainly because of the Magus...in this instance the added content greatly helps to the overall system by replacing a fairly subpar prestige class with an awsome base class. The magus gets it built in to avoid penalties from wearing light armor at least but the eldritch knight still suffers those penalties without the arcane armor feats, which then hurts the fighter part of the class. On the same note the Magus can combine his spells and sword strokes but the eldritch knight cannot.

I also have high hopes for the Ultimate Combat book because of the gunslinger class. I like to run an ebberon like steam punk setting and for the most part I have yet to find any really good gun usage rules.

As of right now the balance I think has been wonderfully maintained, the potential was there to unbalance the APG because lets face it, half those new classes are just really really good, but the additions of alternate favored class bonus, racial bonus alternatives and the specialized base class options I think brought the core classes up to par with the bit of power creep that was there...the monk especially got helped out (I'm overly fond of the Monk of Four Winds). As long as the core classes can keep up with the new material it shouldn't really become a problem with things becoming unbalanced--after all unbalanced games are a problem with the GM not the system.

What about for the necromancy thing kind of a cure wounds mass type feild in a radius around the caster that would act like channel energy but it only affects allies and would work basically like sucking the life out of enemies in the field to pump into the party with it taking the life drawn out of the enemy and dividing it among the allies within the field evenly...having the wiz basically act as a channel but thats about it.

Hmm...I feel kinda short sighted right now, I hadn't thought about that little tidbit...the world has been without the divine for about 150 years so the research would have been done and probably be out there so I could solve my problems by just dropping healing spells into the spell lists for the sorc/wiz.

There is no divine magic at all.
I honestly hadn't thought about the witch class as a healing option, I only picked up the APG about a month ago and havn't had time to read all of it, I instantly fell in love with the Inquisitor and have been building a lot of them and dropping in my old world. As for the bard as a back up healer he would work but his limited number of both spells per day and spells known kinda turned me off to him.

I will however look into the witch and see if I want to just use her as is or maybe change it up a little. Thank you very much.

I was tossing and turning in my sleep the other night and had an idea for a new campaign for my weekly game, the basic concept is a demon went through and killed the mortal worshipers of the gods thus stripping them of their power and in the process of this purge literature pertaining to these gods, i.e. bibles, have been put to fire and if your caught in worship of a god you're dead.

Now, the problem...I don't have a medic dedicated class now. I know the cleric isn't just a bandaid station but he was the premiere healer and I find myself lacking that...the paladin was easy enough, I just allowed a player to use the magus, I was curious how it would work out anyway and this is a pretty good oportunity to test it--but I digress. I was talking to another member of my group and he suggested just building a new class in the form of an arcane caster with healing powers...

On the other hand I thought maybe just building a few new spells and tweaking the necromancy school a bit to get what I want, kinda like the mage in Dragon Age with it's life sucking abilities...what does everyone here think? I don't have my notebook handy but when I can I'll post a couple of my new spell ideas.

I suppose as a third option I could tweak the celestial bloodline to do what I want with the creation of new spells, maybe give here something like a Paladin Lay on Hand ability...I don't really know.

She has been asked, but perhaps a sit down conversation with her between the two of us and explain my position might help the situation...thank you very much.

I don't think it's burn out, I have plenty of ideas and have started scribbling ideas in a little notebook I carry around for my next story arc, I have a lot of ideas. The problem gets worse once I am at the table, I have a player who is very disruptive and does not pay attention and is actually a bad match for the rest of the group...I have made it clear over and over that I was running a heavily skill based game with a minimum of combat, but all she wants to do is fight things, I try to throw in enough combat encounter to hopefully keep her interested, but as soon as she is done rolling the dice she stops paying attention and even starts talking to the other players while they are trying to pay attention. She takes not active part in a dialogue, does not listen to descriptions or anyting the npcs are saying...and the worst thing the group as a whole acknowledges this but continues to refuse my prompts to expel her from the table for one reason or another.

We have another gm at the moment who is switching off with me and he seems to be able to tolerate her, but it's driving me batty and actually affecting how much I enjoy playing as a character...I understand it is a difference of style, but she is unwilling (or unable) to acknowledge another style of play besides her own, especially when I made it clear I was interested in something more than a hack n slash dungeon crawl every week.

I guess my question really should have been as follows: trapt as I am what can I do to compensate for a player who is disruptive but the rest of the group is turning a blind eye to? As I said, I am beginning to dread game mastering and really am having to force myself to do it when it is my turn to do so.

Here lately I find myself lacking the will to game master my weekly game. Now, I have about five adventures written out and ready to be ran and pretty much have everything ready to end my current story arc, however I find myself having no desire to run it at all. I enjoyed writing it, I enjoyed GM-ing there for a little while, but here lately I have been finding myself lacking any desire at all to game master...what does everyone else do when/if they ever have this problem? Normally the answer would be just to take a break after the current campaign wraps up, but I really really do not want to finish it and my players tend to get butt hurt if a game is dropped, so what should I do?

With the upcoming release of dragon age two I have been obsessively playing dragon age origins and couldn't help thinking the game world would be a great setting to play in and expand on.I am here to see if anyone has any suggestions for making a pathfinder dragon age game...the templar, blood magi, and grey warden are proving problematic to really create out, any ideas?

Not to be rude Raemann, but is what you just said not the exact same attitude you are condemning another for? You are saying players of the massivly multiplayer online role playing games are some how not good enough to play a pen and paper role playing game--because I am seeing it like that.

To play devils advocate here but there are mentally stimulating challenges to be had within a massivly multiplayer online role playing game--true these challenges are inferior to those presented in a well written pen and paper game running for three plus years in the same campaign world and building a rich tapestry of mythology for said world. At the same time what of the players who have never experienced a pen and paper role playing game? I am fairly young, I have only been playing around eleven years and before I discovered pen and paper games my experience with a role playing game was exclusivly Final Fantasy on the nintendo and super nintendo.

A massivly multiplayer role playing game might appeal to a person simply because they know of no alternative. On the converse side they may enjoy playing their online role playing game because of the convenience factor (read: a lack of fellow players), or because it is just enjoyable to them. Saying a person is not worthy of a "true dungeon crawl" because they enjoy "unimpressive stories, quest and gear-popping" is fairly narrow minded and even insulting.

I play both and I find they compliment each other--my weekly Pathfinder game is full of intrigue and a rich cast of characters and a intricate and enthralling story; on the other hand my (usually nightly) World of Warcraft games allow me to hack and slash to my hearts contentment, something I do not normally get in my Pathfinder game because of the setting.

I hadn't really thought of the convenience factor, which makes me feel kinda stupid since thats why I play wow, with the exception of my brother my nearest player for my weekly game lives about half an hour away from me, so it's pretty inconvenient to get together for a game outside of our once a week scheduled game. My preference for PnP games comes totally from the difficulty of aquiring the epic gear needed for higher level playing of WoW.

For me anyway, gear grinding is probably the biggest turn off to the MMORPG genre, it takes my weeks sometimes to get all the gear I need to get into the next dungeon on it's highest difficulty for a challenge and by then the gear from the dungeon is moderatly useless...once you cap out there's no place to go but back to the beginning and that gets boring after a while, the replay factor for MMORPG's is kinda lacking

I'd reccomend a combat oriented cleric. You can wade into melee and do fairly well with the right feats. At the same token you can snap off healing spells or a channel positive energy and just pay a feat for the selective channel ability and it works just as well, with this you can fulfill both the tank and the healer.

Conversly, you could do the inquisitor like suggested for the skills, healing spells and some decent combat ability, but your healing prowess is hampered by this.

I loathe MMOs with a passion, as it is NOT an RPG in any shape or form. You level up and increase numbers. That is IT. There is no real interaction, no character development beyond the crunch and appearance, no story to speak of, no continuity, and no goal beyond higher and higher numbers.

It's an rpg in the same sense that Final Fantasy is an rpg...it's not a Pen and Paper Role Playing Game but it is a Massivly Multiplayer Role Playing Game. My friend, they are distant cousins, two different branches of the Role Playing Game family tree.

I'd like to offer this little tid-bit. A friend and I are working on bringing a new player into the fold and are going to run an old AD&D adventure, Tomb of Damara, and were discussing player classes and decided to go with two fighters, a wizard, a cleric, a hunter, and a rogue...now, I logged into WoW tonight to work on leveling my mage and picked up a random dungeon, and the player load out on the dungeon was A warrior, my mage, a cleric as healer, a hunter and a rogue. MMORPG's are imperfect mirrors of the PnP genre. They have a lot of the core elements, classes, races, abilities and what not, but they lack the human interaction element.

My argument isn't that MMORPG's are the next evolution of PnP, but are rather the half-brother of the genre. It has much of the crunch but the fluff is non-existant. I don't understand the argument that the mmo is a threat to the pnp because they coexist seperately of each other.

I am going to introduce an inquisitor into my current campaign this week, he's going to be a NG aligned follower of Iomedae who is tracking down a forger who is creating false manuscripts in an attempt to mislead the church and pervert the teachings in an attempt to further my lich's, and by extension my demon lord's, goals. His purpose, and the forger's purpose, is three fold, it changes the way my villians up to this point had been operating, slows the pace of the game down by lowering the amount of actual combat (my players have gotten cocky) and to introduce some backstory and plot that up to this point I really have been unable to introduce.

Now, my question, to what length would an inquisitor go in hunting down and capturing his target, in this case a heratic that threatens the very foundations of the faith. Would he focus on his target to the exclusion of everything else? Obviously he would work within his alignment, but thats really not a constraint (I once played a NG battle cleric who worked off the general principle of no quarter asked and no quater given, and I never once violated my alignment.)

Thanks, I overlooked it like every time I was looking for it.

Where exactly are they? I can't find them in either my copy of core or the APG...am I just missing something here?

I was playing around with it after I got off work, and while I liked it, the cleric I built wasn't as interesting as I thought. I put death domain and trickery, both of which would be a pain in the ass in combat, channel negative energy at like 8 times per day, and most of his prepared spells went to inflicts or death knell, or desecrate. At level 5 he had an armor class of 24 and 53 hit points. I equiped him with chainmail and gave him a keen great cleaving longsword. The great cleave on the longsword is there to make his cleave feat a little more useful.

The start of the campaign is set in a small town where a single adept of Iomedae resides, I didn't think such a small community would warrent a full cleric. Due too such a weak target I felt it would be best to have the adept be attacked by some basic skeletons or maybe just two or three living soldiers in the service of my lich. The heroes should hopefully be able to overcome this innitial attack and when they set off to find the source they eventually encounter their first lord skeleton cleric, a level five enemy (talked about above). I felt this would make an appropriate first BBEG and a good way to bring them into the larger story, because as of the start of the campaign the slayings of clerics is just a rumor floating around the general populace.

As for the phylactery, those are really good ideas, thank you. I think I'll have to change my hiding place. I ultimately decided to hide the phylactery as an heirloom that has been handed down for generations in the royal family. It resides under guard within the royal palace which makes it very hard to approach unless the heroes can convince the king his great great great grandfather's signet ring (very subject to change) is a phylactery.

Where would I get my hands on the magus playtest? Is it a free pdf on this site like they did with the finalized new classes from the apg?

I mention the bodyguard specializing in crippling enemies, because these NPCs strike me as a sort of murder-squad: find Iomedean priests, isolate, disable, and eliminate. With this in mind, they (the undead) would likely use methods (in addition to tripping) that handicap the prey and allow for quick kills.

essentially that's what they are supposed to be. The evil clerics neutralize the good clerics to the regular skeleton minions can slaughter them. for the more troublesom priests and targets different minions can be used--kill the archbishop? send an assassin to pay a late night visit. A knot of paladins and priests causing difficulties, call in some eldritch knights.

Two other questions now, because I can't seem to find it anywhere, what level of control would a lich have over his undead minions? I guess what I mean to ask is, would the undead minions have any will of their own?

The second question is an extinsion of the first. For the trickster clerics I was thinking of a chaotic evil alignment and more along the lines of neutral evil or lawful evil for the other enemy armies. I asked about free will first because a lot of times when I use a chaotic evil enemy, he's just that...completely unpredictable, if things aren't going well he starts slaughtering his own men, or uses his men to make some very messy object lessons to the rest.

Which roles do you need to fill in this manner?

Since it's essentially a breakdown of undead v. church, i wanted some clerics who could fight with the paladins, while the other clerics could be acting as...well clerics.

I hadn't thought about the trip bodygaurd and had totally overlooked trickery domain...I will have to read through that.

So perhaps use clerics for both roles, just have some built for offenseive combat abilities, and the other built as support and defense. The only problem I can see here is the possibility of overbalancing an encounter and just making it too hard for a party of adventurers.

The unaligned cleric option sounds better than the antipaladin (despite facing off against a paladin); clerics are full, armored casters. This is what I would do:

In the Pathfinder Adventure Path: Bastards of Erebus, there are at least 98 optional tiefling abilities; one of which is "healed by positive and negative energy". Use a tiefling, swap Darkness for Healed by Positive and Negative Energy, apply the Skeletal Champion template, and level that nasty surprise up. Many would say that the Undead type neutralizes the tiefling's healing ability based on "Undead" overriding "Outsider (Native)", but the template never implies that the original creature loses its natural abilities; so I'd keep it. Also, change around the tiefling's racial ability modifiers (+2 DEX, +2 INT, -2 CHA) to suit the build.

That sounds like a good idea, I've played combat clerics before, so that shouldn't be too much of a stretch to build. What domains would you suggest? I was thinking something along the line of Death and maybe war or Evil--not sure which one of the last two would work better as both kind of have their ups and downs.

Thanks for the suggestion martinaj, I've been having trouble deciding how to hide the phylactery...I was thinking of having it being hidden/held ransom in hell with the lich's demon master, but vetoed that because it seemed just too difficult for the party to overcome.

Perhaps the eldritch knight might be the best way to go to act as a counter to the paladins. I wasn't wanting an evil "counter-party" I was more thinking along the lines of how in Star Craft the terrans have battlecruisers and wraiths, while the protoss have carriers and scouts. Both serve the same purpose within the armies they are a part of, but at the same time both are different, they have different abilities. Though using an undead cleric to act as the undead armies counter point to the light side clerics does kind of go against this purpose, but it's all I could think of.

Sadly right now all I really have access to is PF Core and the Bestiary. I had to sell off my 3.5 books to make a bill that popped up on me, and I just havn't had the money to even begin rebuying them.

I'm starting a new pathfinder campaign next weekend using a lich as the major villian. The lich is in service of a demon trapped in hell. The demon was sealed away by Iomedae (who is the Queen of the pantheon in my world--akin to Zues). Seeking a way to escape this demon has dispatched the lich to weaken the goddess by destroying her followers on Earth, a member of the party will be playing a Paladin of Iomedae. However, the lich not being a complete incompetent sought a way to counter the weakness his undead minions have against the powers of the paladins and clerics.

For a counter to the clerics I simply planned on using a cleric character build without a specific diety and applying the undead template. However, it the paladin counter I'm running into problems with. I really don't want to just rewrite the paladin class to suit my needs, I don't have access to the Advanced Players Guide at the moment for the Anti-Paladin option. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

The lich has some non-undead in his service, some mortals within the various governments who have been subverted, some wizards drawn to the allure of power he offers, and some otherwise just nasty fellows who sulk around the world selling their sword and soul the the highest bidder.

Any suggestions from my fellow pathfinder players would be appreciated, either for how to handle a undead evil paladin, or just general suggestions for fleshing out the villian set-up more.

WPharolin wrote:

The economy of D&D breaks down further when you realize that nearly every single purchase the PC's ever make will be at such a high amount of gold that it must be introduced slowly in the market.

Not so. Just like folks such as wizards can violate the laws of physics, which in D&D aren't really laws but more like friendly suggestions, so to are D&D economics influenced by ambient fantasy energies. Thus, no matter what monetary policies are used, no matter what Keynesian programs are implemented, et cetera, everything just chugs along just fine, unlike what happens in the real world, when Keynesian interference with the market causes inflation, drives up unemployment, et cetera. :)

It's a fantasy game, so I totally agree with your point here. However, even with a total obliteration (suspension doesn't even cover some things in PF) of disbelief, some basic economy still needs to be followed. However, anything beyond basic and I'm lost...I'm an english major so I avoid economics--no head for numbers.

A rule gripe I have is the alignment system. I've had arguments every session sometimes about alignment with players.

Example:
I had a player who was playing a lawful good priest. The party encountered a man on the side of the road who had been mugged and was asking for help. The party all agreed, but the clerics player instantly jumped to asking what he was going to be getting in return for helping the guy out. I pointed out that as LG he probably wouldn't be so worried about getting paid for his actions, but more woried about stopping some highway men. My player tried to argue back that his character was just trying to collect a tithe from the man for his church.

WPharolin wrote:

-When players go to purchase magic items and and they honestly expect the shop keep to accept over 500 pounds of coins dumped out of a bag of holding. As if the merchant is so dumb as to inflate the local market enough to jeopardize his own business and put his community into a recession. (not really a misconception of rules as a misconception of what a stable economy is. Can't really blame players though, since that's how it works by the RAW. The RAW for the D&D economy are pretty dumb.)

Since when have private individuals put 'the good of the local economy' before their own personal greed? I can't imagine any shopkeeper thumbing his nose at thousands of gold coins because of some esoteric concern about inflation in the real world, let alone in any game world.

Besides that, I'm not really sure why one merchant becoming extremely rich would necessarily spur on inflation or put that rich merchant's business in peril, but that's another discussion I guess.

My solution to this was a little different. For potions and scrolls, I limited the number available at any given time...for example, my party was looking to buy some healing potions so I told them the brewer in the villiage only have five on hand--not too much of a stretch. With making magical weapons, it may be within the ability of the armorer in town "A" to create +1 or +2 masterwork items at most without enchantments.

Most big purchases--magical gear--or large orders--multiple potions and scrolls (greater than five or so) had to be made in a decent sized city at least, and some extremes were only available in capital cities--enchantments for gear requiring a +4 or +5.

Admittedly I wasn't thinking of the effect on an econemy, I was more thinking that a small village smithy would not have on hands the means to make some of the more extravagent items--a vorpal sword probably isn't being created by a man in a village with a population of 50.

I see your point. I like the idea of a sky citidel housing the main body of the church...I think I have to use that.

As for the fuel source, I was thinking a coupling of a fire elemental, howls moving castle, and maybe a water elemental to produce the superheated water that then generates the steam. What I originally had in mind was that my BBEG and his armies only had access to the airships, the rest of the world being behind in the tech.

Well, in answer to your first question the most concentrated amount of power within the world would be the church, but they cannot normally exercise it. The kings and queens of the kingdoms of my world hold all power within their kingdom. The Church can, with the declaration of a religious crisis (something that threatens the life of the church) circumvent the rulers of the nations and take direct control of the kingdom themselves.

Arcane casters have been nearly wiped out with only a limited number within the world and only one actual school for learning arcane magics...so there is no magic in the steam at all.

As for the airships, I was thinking something along the lines of water based ships as far as look goes, that fly by using propellors powered by a steam powered engine below decks...or something like that I guess. I was just kind of planning on pulling a George Lucas and not really explaining how it works ever and just saying it does.

As has been pointed out, the choice for players or the gm to roll checks like perception and stealth etc. is a matter of style. I personally like to do both. I'll prompt players to make skill checks such as perception when there is nothing really significant to find but on larger things i'll roll for them. I've found it instills a healthy level of paranoia in my players. This is a bit of a hold over from the first campaign I sucessfully ran. It was a conspiracy setting and after a couple games the players were into the story but werent really invested in the game emotionally (like how a good horror story drags you in and scares the hell out of you). So I started using the rules to drag the characters in and by the end I had them checking everything and jumping at shadows in the room we were playing in.

It's a matter of style but I've found if you can make the rules of the game work in your favor for creating an atmosphere just about anything you do is worth it in the end, after all the rules are there to help tell the story not confine it. If a rule is in the way of story, throw the rule out.

I hope that at least kind of helps you out.

Qreetings friends,

I am working on a steam-punk style settig for my pathfinder campaign and would like some tips, tricks, or advice from those of you who have experience with this type of setting, because sadly, I have none...back in the day my group prefered high fantasy style (forgotten realms) type games over the more eberon looking games.

The basic model I am working off at the moment is something along the lines of Final Fantasy VI. The only problem with the VI model is it doesnt really look like a medieval setting so much as a victorian era earth--more or less. I thought about using the dwarf city and towns from World of Warcraft as a reference but over all that really didn't feel right either because i the case of WoW it's more of a racial gimmic really than the way the world works.

I also really don't want to just drop gears and pipes pumping steam and what not onto a basic medieval building and say there you go, but I'm really having an akward time coming up with the way the setting should look.

The whole reason I came up with running this type of world as opposed to the "standard" medieval world is becuase I was musing one day "how cool would it be to have the bad guys flying around in airships ala Baron from Final Fantasy IV." However, a friend of mine pointed out that I really can't just drop airships into a standard medieval world without at least attempting to account for the technological level of the world. So I decided to go all the way and just run a steam-punk looking game...I find myself now needing some advice or tips on how to make the world feel authentic and interesting.