I intend to create a campaign with a more subjective alignment system, and a religious system much like Eberon at the base, but without True Divine magic.
A few thoughts :
- Using Core Rules as the basis
- Ban Clerics and Paladins (and oracles)
- Allow all classes of the APG (except oracles)
- Allow wizards and sorcerers access to cleric spells as if they were 2 spell levels higher. (though they would technically be arcane spells).
- Magic level in general will be a fair bit below the standard 'magic level', availability and crafting will be harder and require higher level, though it won't require any feat to do so.
- Druids and Rangers will be unaffected, calling upon nature magic rather than divine magic.
- Likely I will remove spells and items dependant on alignment, or rewrite them in a fashion to suit the campaign.
- Creature alignment will be a rough guideline on morality and personality, though it will have probably little in game effect, except to make multi-classing in certain classes harder.
I would like to hear some ideas, balance / mechanical issues I have not considered, or opinions on this type of campaign.. strictly an idea for a home brew campaign, looking for some inspiration to build on it.
Just mulling over some of the things that jumps out at me.
If I understand your idea, a Wizard has to reach level 5 before he gets a basic cure light wounds and a sorcerer would have to wait until level 6, and then how gimpy would he feel spending that precious 'spells known' slot on CLW. I guess you wouldn't have ANY Wizards/Sorx casting any Divine spells; your healer duties would fall upon Druids pretty much exclusively.
With this change, does the cost of consumables increase? Would this make a CLW potion cost 750gp? Or are only Druids crafting potions?
How are Bards affected (since they already have some access to cure* spells)?
What do you do with Spells that have both Cleric and Wiz/Sor availability but different spell levels (e.g. Blindness/Deafness).
Looks to me like this setting would increase the number of Druids, Rangers and Bards in play. Thats not a bad thing, really.
What about Monsters with SLA versions of divine spells, are their levels increased along with their Caster levels and DCs?
Are all 'morally ambiguous' cult leaders now Druids instead of Evil Priests? ;)
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I intend to create a campaign with a more subjective alignment system, and a religious system much like Eberon at the base, but without True Divine magic.
A few thoughts :
- Using Core Rules as the basis
- Ban Clerics and Paladins (and oracles)
- Allow all classes of the APG (except oracles)
- Allow wizards and sorcerers access to cleric spells as if they were 2 spell levels higher. (though they would technically be arcane spells).
- Magic level in general will be a fair bit below the standard 'magic level', availability and crafting will be harder and require higher level, though it won't require any feat to do so.
- Druids and Rangers will be unaffected, calling upon nature magic rather than divine magic.
- Likely I will remove spells and items dependant on alignment, or rewrite them in a fashion to suit the campaign.
- Creature alignment will be a rough guideline on morality and personality, though it will have probably little in game effect, except to make multi-classing in certain classes harder.
I would like to hear some ideas, balance / mechanical issues I have not considered, or opinions on this type of campaign.. strictly an idea for a home brew campaign, looking for some inspiration to build on it.
Look at the original DragonLance modules/novels.
what about inquisitors? They are divine casters and definately religiously themed. Will you be banning them as well or repackaging them as something else?
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Research Arcana Evolved. It is pretty much everything you mentioned but put into a nice tidy book for you. All that is left is to convert 3.5 to pfrpg. It is a good system that lacks the arcane / divine magic divide. http://www.montecook.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?arcanaevolved
This solution solves the following thoughts:
-Distant Gods
- Ban Clerics and Paladins (and oracles)
- Allow wizards and sorcerers access to cleric spells as if they were 2 spell levels higher. (though they would technically be arcane spells). (better actually)
- Druids and Rangers will be unaffected, calling upon nature magic rather than divine magic. (The equivalent classes are there)
- Likely I will remove spells and items dependant on alignment, or rewrite them in a fashion to suit the campaign.
- Creature alignment will be a rough guideline on morality and personality, though it will have probably little in game effect, except to make multi-classing in certain classes harder.
This solution does not solve the following thoughts
- Using Core Rules as the basis
- Allow all classes of the APG (except oracles)
- Magic level in general will be a fair bit below the standard 'magic level', availability and crafting will be harder and require higher level, though it won't require any feat to do so.
I guess you wouldn't have ANY Wizards/Sorx casting any Divine spells; your healer duties would fall upon Druids pretty much exclusively.
Actually, I think Witches would be even better healers.
Just mulling over some of the things that jumps out at me.
If I understand your idea, a Wizard has to reach level 5 before he gets a basic cure light wounds and a sorcerer would have to wait until level 6, and then how gimpy would he feel spending that precious 'spells known' slot on CLW. I guess you wouldn't have ANY Wizards/Sorx casting any Divine spells; your healer duties would fall upon Druids pretty much exclusively.
With this change, does the cost of consumables increase? Would this make a CLW potion cost 750gp? Or are only Druids crafting potions?
How are Bards affected (since they already have some access to cure* spells)?
What do you do with Spells that have both Cleric and Wiz/Sor availability but different spell levels (e.g. Blindness/Deafness).
Looks to me like this setting would increase the number of Druids, Rangers and Bards in play. Thats not a bad thing, really.
What about Monsters with SLA versions of divine spells, are their levels increased along with their Caster levels and DCs?
Are all 'morally ambiguous' cult leaders now Druids instead of Evil Priests? ;)
Well, I was considering making the witch a primary magic-user rather than wizard, maybe get rid of wizard entirely might not be a bad idea.
I think spells that are exclusively divine can function as sorcerer spells 1 level higher.
Bards are fine as is.
One of the major thematic changes would be there is no true divine magic, druids are using magic, and common folk might conisder them witches or shamans.
Inquisitor, I would have to repackage them, but I feel they can function without being linked to religion directly, maybe with some adjustments and perhaps letting them pick spells as a sorcerer rather.
I don't see a compelling reason to change monsters, but on a case to case basis I might, I would probably avoid those that cast spells as a cleric.
How about making divine casters more like monks in that their abilities come from some mystical internal source?
How about making divine casters more like monks in that their abilities come from some mystical internal source?
Sounds like sorcerer to me.
Think it might be too much to allow sorcerers to pick divine spells at the same level ? in theory clerics have a better package anyway, picking cleric spells should most likely be subpar. I might remove a few spells like miracle or other spells closely linked to alignment or Gods in specific.
A healing based Sorcerer Bloodline is a good way to add non-divine healing.
Add in Bards and Witches, and you should have enough healing to get by.
This is true. However, I would second the recommendation that you should look at Arcana Evolved - if you have any players who love to run gishes, you can hand them the mage blade character class.
NOTE: If you do decide to use Arcana Evolved, I have to warn you - it already has a witch class that is based around mastering innate magic. The way I see it, you can either merge the AE witch and sorceror and use the APG witch, or you can choose which witch class is available in the campaign. (Or you can just assume that the witch class in the APG is a variant version of the witch. Lord knows, there are half a dozen witch types in Arcana Evolved already, to say nothing of all the fanmade variants. One more type of witch won't hurt.)