To all creative minds,
I have recently resumed work on an original ("homebrew") Dark Fantasy Campaign Setting, which I intend to serve as the backdrop for d20 OGL campaigns, fiction writing and so on. The goal is to make something richly detailed and immersive and original, and yet retain a sense of familiarity. The focus is more on the setting itself than any game mechanics, though we will likely be incorporating d20 OGL content.
If you're unsure of what "Dark Fantasy" entails, I recommend the amusing (and quite accurate) summation here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DarkFantasy
I've been working with a team of like-minded individuals brainstorming ideas, and I'm on the lookout for more. I'm interested with working with people from all kinds of backgrounds and with all kinds of influences. If you're interested and feel like you're up to the task, please PM me and we can discuss it further.
Just one word for you:
Midnight
We have many sources of inspiration, and Midnight may number among them. To be honest though, perhaps this thread is a misnomer. Our setting (as developed so far) is more of an heroic fantasy/low fantasy setting with dark fantasy elements; think more akin to the world of Dragon Age than that of Midnight.
Well, you could take a look at the alignment thread I just put up for a little bit of moral ambiguity and a system that represents heroes who are deeply unpleasant in their heroism.
http://paizo.com/paizo/messageboards/paizoPublishing/pathfinder/pathfinderR PG/houseRules/mortuumsAlignmentThread&page=1#1
I'd try giving people medieval values and educations. Backward views about race, gender, sexuality, human rights, animal cruelty, reading, hygiene and raising children. Have them fear most magic, too.
It would also be interesting to try changing the requirements for being a paladin to lawful neutral instead of lawful good. Give them smite/detect chaos, tweak their spell list so they have lawful equivalents of the good aligned stuff, give their mount the Resolute template from the Bestiary II instead of the celestial template and you're well on your way to the world being protected be an order of really scary guys.
Anti-paladins would still be chaotic evil. They'd be paladins who have grown to enjoy punishing and fighting far to much and gone mad with power. Paladin orders might even be secretly hushing up their existence.
If you want a brutal game, I'd recommend low point-buy, E6, E7 or E8, some variation on the death by massive damage rule, limited magic items available for purchase and maybe some kind of critical wound table. I'd also make any magic that can return the dead to life forbidden. If anyone tries it, the dead come back, but they come back frighteningly and uniquely wrong. Hell, make it cheaper to cast in order to tempt people.
I played in a campaign where everything that died came back as undead, unless it was burned. The PCs were villagers from a society that was slowly being taken over by a more advanced civilization that refused to burn their dead, but instead entombed them for all eternity.
It was also low magic, the Elements of Magic system was used. I didn't play the spellcaster, so I never got to learn the rules to that system of magic. That's what made that campaign so immersive--magic truly was mysterious to non-spellcasters because the rules for magic were different than the standard campaign rule set. I think that is key to a low-magic, superstitious campaign setting. Non-spellcasting players must be as ignorant about the ways of magic as non-spellcasting characters.
Hey, sounds interesting. I might like to get involved.
I don't see any way to send PM's on this board (even after searching for an answer) so I'm posting here instead.
I've got a hankering to do some dark fantasy creation because another GM in my group called dibs on playing a Horror campaign right before I did.
Moox
Thanks for all your responses.
@nightflier - The goal of this community world-building project is not to make a setting for a particular campaign, but rather create one that could be used for a variety of purposes - d20 campaigns, fiction writing, etc. I personally intend to use it to write fiction. We want/need to build something entirely our own, though as I mentioned, we have a multitude of influences. Indeed, brainstorming has resumed in our group (which was dormant for a long time) over at: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/realmsofdarkfantasy/
@Mortuum - Thank you for the link, that looks useful/relevant. Your suggestions are also in line for what we're looking for, though the focus of our group is on world-building/"fluff" as opposed to mechanics.
@SmiloDan - We're considering the role of undead in our campaign and have been mulling over similar ideas. We're also still in the process of agreeing upon the magic system/laws of magic in our world - I personally would like to use something other than the standard D&D Vancian magic type system, but we shall see. Whatever we end up going with, magic will likely have a "cost" in some fashion or another - whether it's risk of corruption, some form of sacrifice, madness, etc.
@Moox - Sorry, your post came while I was writing mine. Check out our group link for further details (creating a Yahoo account is free if you don't have one).
The group and project is still in its infancy but we're gathering some talented minds and I feel there's great promise.
I wish I could remember who it was, but a while ago, somebody suggested a campaign in which everyone had regeneration 1 and lived forever, but there wasn't enough food, so everyone ate each other. The only things that killed permanently were acid (including digestion), fire and starvation.
If you want a seriously twisted enemy, make some otherwise normal people work like that and the rest be mortal.
They and their descendants are slowly taking up more and more resources, partly to satisfy their troll-like hunger and partly just because the number of mouths to feed only increase. They'd be ordinary, innocent people, made dangerous by their unique power and trying to make a living, either by hiding among normal humans or travelling around consuming everything, like locusts.
Just by being alive, they are gradually forcing mortals out of existence. They will out-breed them, they will out eat them and the world will fill with hungry mouths. They know that their continued existence will bring about the end of civilisation, but they don't want to be burned at the stake, dissolved in acid, or eaten alive, so there's no easy solution.
Sounds like the kind of thing that might happen if you asked a fiend to grant you a wish, so maybe that's how it got started.
I wish I could remember who it was, but a while ago, somebody suggested a campaign in which everyone had regeneration 1 and lived forever, but there wasn't enough food, so everyone ate each other. The only things that killed permanently were acid (including digestion), fire and starvation.
If you want a seriously twisted enemy, make some otherwise normal people work like that and the rest be mortal.
They and their descendants are slowly taking up more and more resources, partly to satisfy their troll-like hunger and partly just because the number of mouths to feed only increase. They'd be ordinary, innocent people, made dangerous by their unique power and trying to make a living, either by hiding among normal humans or travelling around consuming everything, like locusts.
Just by being alive, they are gradually forcing mortals out of existence. They will out-breed them, they will out eat them and the world will fill with hungry mouths. They know that their continued existence will bring about the end of civilisation, but they don't want to be burned at the stake, dissolved in acid, or eaten alive, so there's no easy solution.
Sounds like the kind of thing that might happen if you asked a fiend to grant you a wish, so maybe that's how it got started.
Sounds like "The Road." That movie was BLEAK. So bleak, I'm not sure a world like that would be fun to play in. But to each their own.
Sounds like "The Road." That movie was BLEAK. So bleak, I'm not sure a world like that would be fun to play in. But to each their own.I wish I could remember who it was, but a while ago, somebody suggested a campaign in which everyone had regeneration 1 and lived forever, but there wasn't enough food, so everyone ate each other. The only things that killed permanently were acid (including digestion), fire and starvation.
If you want a seriously twisted enemy, make some otherwise normal people work like that and the rest be mortal.
They and their descendants are slowly taking up more and more resources, partly to satisfy their troll-like hunger and partly just because the number of mouths to feed only increase. They'd be ordinary, innocent people, made dangerous by their unique power and trying to make a living, either by hiding among normal humans or travelling around consuming everything, like locusts.
Just by being alive, they are gradually forcing mortals out of existence. They will out-breed them, they will out eat them and the world will fill with hungry mouths. They know that their continued existence will bring about the end of civilisation, but they don't want to be burned at the stake, dissolved in acid, or eaten alive, so there's no easy solution.
Sounds like the kind of thing that might happen if you asked a fiend to grant you a wish, so maybe that's how it got started.
Or maybe even like The Road crossed with 30 Days of Night as filtered through an Anime lens.
May I suggest a world where the Evil Gods won? The surface is relatively uninhabitable by the common Core Races, being over-run by Orcs, Goblins, Giants and worse, and in a twist, it's Humanity and it's allies living underground and venturing worth to raid for supplies while the nominal 'fodder' races are running the show.
A world where mid-day is barely brighter than Twilight, and for 18 hours a day, the world is blanketed in Night.
Magic is there, but the majority of the world's 'natural' supply of Magic is sucked up by the Evil Gods to power the Mana Shield that keeps the world shrouded in near-constant darkness and keeps the Good Gods from physically manifesting their agents (Good-Aligned Outsiders and/or 7th level or higher spells) into the world.
'Natural' Magic is available, but is harder to cast in some cases (Conjuration (Summoning) spells are nearly impossible to pull off for all but the most dedicated, due to the Mana Shield blocking the world off from the Outer Planes) and for Good-aligned Divine Casters, end at the 6th level (I'd give Divine casters a lot more spell-slots to compensate) and thus are both more skillful in the mudane arts and better at combat (3/4 BAB classes should increase to Full BAB, +2 skill-points to Clerics, Druids and Oracles) to help balance their diminished power.
Arcane Magic, on the other hand, has become extremely corruptive due to the twisting of the Magic Winds. Arcane Spells give casters a rush of ecstasy, perhaps involving a +1 morale bonus to their next check or save per every 2 'levels' of spells cast that round+ a number of rounds equal to the spell's level. The downside is Arcane Magic is incredibly addictive, and corruptive. Continuous casting can lead to mental instabilities at best, and outright mutation is a common affliction.
Arcane Casters would risk gaining Taint, as detailed on page 63 of the Heroes of Horror manual, having to make Will-Saves against a DC equal to 5 plus the Spell-level of the highest-level Spell they have cast recently, plus the morale bonus of that spell. For example, a 6th level Sorcerer casts a 3rd level spell, which is 5 + 3 + 2 = total DC of 10.
Every 4 levels, an Arcane Caster should have to roll on the corruption effects of page 63 of the Heroes of Horror or the depravity table on page 65 to determine which 'mutation' or 'mental instability' they have been afflicted with. On the other hand, every time they do this, their taint drops to 0 and for each 'mutation' or 'mental instability' they have grants them a bonus to intimidate against non-tainted creatures (or diplomacy against other Arcane Casters and/or Abberations), +1 or +2 for each 'mutation' or 'mental instability'.
Overall, the remaining communities are small, somewhere between semi-nomadic and agricultural and only a few big 'cities' remain, nominally Dwarven enclaves or glittering forests created by the Elves that are lit from powerful magical creations that tap directly into the few remaining ley-lines. Conflict should not just be limited to Good Races vs Evil Races, but between communities for scarce resources and caverns suitable to be turned into fortified communities, between races over old grudges and plain, simply racism and against the 'normal' residents of the Underworld who did not, were not allowed to or could not emigrate to the Surface.
Such a campaign would be quite claustrophobic for the first few levels, the PCs being restricted to tunnels and caverns around their home communities, with mid-levels being raids on the surface-dwelling races for more supplies and plain, simple revenge and high-level being carving out surface communities for their people(s) and trying to rupture the Mana-Shield enough that the Good Gods can return (in some form or another), break the corruptive cycle of the Arcane Magic and help to reclaim their original homelands from the Orcs, Goblins and such.
Sorry it's been so long since I last posted, I've been so busy between reality and our community world-building project group I haven't had a chance to check this forum.
Thanks for all the suggestions - I'll try to address each in turn as best I can.
@Mortuum - an interesting idea, though I'd first like to say due to the nature of our group/project I'd never use someone's idea without the ability to give them credit/be able to trace the source. You have made me consider cannibalism's role in the setting, however, though it'll by no means have a significant role.
@SmiloDan - on the topic of bleakness, I'm trying to avoid making the setting oppressively bleak - I feel this would be an all too easy trap to fall into. As I mentioned, I'm aiming more for a heroic fantasy setting with dark fantasy elements, rather than a true dark fantasy setting. I think if that's what people are after, Midnight and several other settings are already available.
@HalfOrcHeavyMetal - because it's a community world-building group that's been rebooted, we already have a rough outline of our setting's backstory which we're in the process of developing. We're trying to stay away from the "evil won" type stuff as it's straying perilously close to Midnight (or similar) terrain. I can't give too much away here, but our setting is more in a state of "the decadence of humanity's ancient empires caused its own fall, and we're now entering a 'Dark Age' of civilization's decline, while all the while cosmic horrors threaten to invade, a corrupt and intolerant church's power is rapidly growing and arcane spellcasters are hunted". Evil hasn't won, but humanity has done a pretty good job of wrecking the world all by itself. That doesn't really do justice, but it's as good a one sentence summary as you're going to get. Coincidentally, I have mentioned the "taint" mechanic in discussion with our team as a possible option.
@pobbes - Because of the important (indeed, central) role arcane spellcasting will play in our setting, we are investigating many options in this regard - ideally I'd like to do something different, maybe even move away from the traditional Vancian/D&D system, though this has yet to be decided.
Again, if any of you are interested, you can check out our group (as linked in one of my previous posts).
@Patha787: You've mentioned the desire to use a different magic system, but that could go in a lot of interesting directions. What about a somewhat simpler mechanic than the Taint one, in which each spell has a physical cost associated with it?
Could be anything from taking damage, to ability damage, to becoming fatigued. Over a long-term period of use, magic can twist an entire race into a mockery of their former existence.
Everyone interested should join the awesome Yahoo group: http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/realmsofdarkfantasy/
Moox