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Here is the the reworked changes and explanations of what what happened in the Obsidian Twilight setting that was submitted to us. I want to get people's opinion on it. Enjoy!
Obsidian Twilight: Changes to the world of Abaddon when the Meteor fell
When the Dark Star fell, it brought with it a massive amount of negative energy, intermixed with wild and uncontrolled magical energy from unknown stars and the emptiness of the void. From the moment it hit the atmosphere, to the second it struck the world, and in the minutes, days and years thereafter, that energy has roiled through the planet and wrought catastrophic changes on the planet, beings and very magic that permeated the world.
The first thing that happened was the complete disruption of the dimensional field of the planet. Pocket dimensions tied to the world imploded, sucking in massive amounts of wild and negative magic, and annihilating all within. Bags of holding and similar items became conduits for killing blasts of dark, matter-twisting magic as they were ripped asunder.
Teleportation spells and those that traversed dimensions found themselves transported through a miasma of ripped dimensions, negative energy, and chaotic magic. Teleporters and plane shifters seeking to flee the disaster were ripped apart in transit, and the exit and entry points became holes in space that disgorged massive amounts of destructive magical power, in many cases destroying the places and people they were fleeing from and fleeing to.
Lastly, a wave of wild magic spread with the shockwave around the world, disjoining magical items and spells and making them centers of attraction for magical energies. Those laden down with items and spells of magic, or in magically defended abodes, were ripped apart by explosive wild magic and negative energies as their spells failed en masse. In particular, those flying and who thought themselves out of danger found themselves in often very long distance falls even if they survived the destruction of their magic.
The combined effects of this disruption virtually annihilated the most powerful, wealthiest, and highest level characters on the planet, as they were the locus of the most powerful spells and magical items. The only magical items that survived this shockwave were those buried underground or sealed away in non-magical surroundings. The gutting of magical knowledge and power by the destruction of the magically powerful and their abodes was incredible.
The combination of planar trauma and negative energy temporarily prevented the flow of positive energy, meaning that healing power was almost completely lost. Uncounted numbers of people perished from wounds that a mere short time before would have been magically healed away. Those attempting to channel such powers found themselves instead plugged into uncontrolled negative energy that often killed them and all those nearby when invoked.
The living perished by the millions, and in the dark storm of negative energy, arose by the millions. Even uncontrolled minor undead have a hatred of the living, and the powerful undead now had next to no resistance to their strength. Bodies erupted out of graveyards shorn of their blessed protections, those slain by cataclysm twitched and rose to their feet, and turned to prey upon the living.
The saviors of the living during this time period were a highly unlikely pairing – the ghouls and their ghastly masters, and the vampires.
Ghasts and vampires realized that their specific hungers required the living to satisfy, or they would simply devolve into maddened desires for blood and flesh that would simply no longer be available. From temporarily exulting in their new power, their ability to rove free upon a land that had no sun and slaughter and feed as they wished, they soon came to realize the rapidly increasing scarcity of the living, and began to take at first hesitant, then extremely forceful steps to protect their own future.
Other undead, not tied to such corporeal appetites, had no such qualms. Still, the intelligent among them realized that undead do not reproduce themselves, it takes the living to generate more undead. As the monstrous egos of the undead lords and masters began to clash, and their armies to take shape, the idea of replacing fallen minions stirred a pragmatic and ruthless desire to shepherd living assets, and so living survivors were corralled and rounded up to serve as breeding stock for a new generation of undead.
Free-willed and roving undead possessed of no desire but to hunt the living were themselves hunted down by undead to safeguard their own sentient humanoid cattle. Surviving members of the living were gathered up to serve as breeding stock and slaves, or slain and converted into more undead minions if they resisted.
The combination of wild magic and negative energy that swept the world inflicted catastrophic harm on the ecology. In combination with the lack of sunlight, the only plant life that survived was that which mutated to being able to endure on the energies of death and rot, and fungi which could survive on the decaying plant life around itself. In so doing, many of the plants turned poisonous or inedible to normal creatures…or became predators themselves.
Body and spirits inundated with necromantic and wild magicks, even sentient creatures began to change and adapt. Elves, ever part of the environment, changed with uncanny speed to reflect the new world they lived in, or rarely managed to defy it and cling to an old, non-existent paradigm. The dwarves fought the change with vicious willpower, and succeeded only in cursing their entire race. Gnomekind’s emotional links to the First World were crushed under a tide of negative energy, giving the entire race a black mindset and affinity for the undead. The Halfling race degenerated from a lucky, easy-going race of content folk with ties to the land, into feral, seemingly cursed savages clawing for survival.
Humankind shifted and split. Those shepherded by ghasts and vampires, or clinging defiantly to ancient ways, grew tough and resistant, veritable fountains of life energy their masters found appealing, and making the best of cattle. Those who survived under the cares of wights, mummies and other undead were born with affinity for negative energy, almost half-undead themselves, dispirited and grim souls slaving away until their masters decide to turn them into undead. One free race of Men underwent a mass magical ceremony forever branding themselves with evolving tattoos to resist the necromantic powers around them.
The tearing and healing of the dimensional tides had several more effects. The first and most noticeable of these was the effect on Summoned and Conjured beings.
As the negative tides of magic settled down, the ravaged dimensional barriers lost their ability to serve as conduits for travel. While passage from outside could be punched through the Obsidian Veil, it proved impassable in the opposite direction. The making of dimensional hidey-holes, teleporting, and similar dimension-afflicting magic decayed into either extreme short-termness, risked exposure to wild death energies prowling the Obsidian Veil, or were sharply limited in distance.
Called creatures brought through the Obsidian Veil found themselves stranded and unable to return home, their essential natures rapidly and forcibly changed so that even death or destruction would not send them home, but instead kill them forever. Summoned creatures fared even worse, with their true selves being called and hurled into battle by callous spellcasters, and only the end of the spell returning them to self-control.
For those extraplanars brought forcibly here, those who survived their first battles and the almost inevitable turning on their masters spread rapidly into the wild, and quickly intermixed with the native wildlife, to the point that Summoning extraplanars as breeding stock and food became a common practice. Such creatures were hardly free of extraplanar influences, which spread to those that consumed them. Outside the Obsidian Veil, spirits and entities marked the world as a black hole that all who responded disappeared into, and could only be gathered in by brutal force.
The new Obsidian Veil has the effect of absolutely barring the divine traffic of souls and prayer, such that no individual deity can see into, hear, or gain power from their followers on the world. The souls of the departed do not pass the Obsidian Veil to other worlds, but either dissipated into the ravaged world-aura of the planet, or were infused with negative energy and returned as the motivating forces for yet more undead. Minions sent inwards to assess the situation were unable to return home, to the point where the divine are unsure if anything lives on the world at all.
The chaotic and negative energies of the world have had a temporizing effect on the outsiders brought in here, redefining them less as extreme representations of their alignments and into more mortal mindsets and views. Knowing they can be slain forever on this world, and there are no more of their kind coming, as well as being severed from the radicalizing influence of their home planes and greater entities thereon, has resulted in behavior unthinkably ‘mortal’ in term and view from the outsiders trapped here. They, too, have been herding and capturing mortals, with an eye towards creating progeny that can carry onwards if they themselves are slain…while instinctively furthering the cause of their alignments and also giving themselves emotional subsistence upon which to feed.
Bump...
What sort of responses do you want?
1. I could point out that referring to high-level characters jars me out of the otherwise in-world description of the rest of the piece. That's a pretty nit-picky thing.
2. I could point out that the end result is very similar to an idea I had independently for a campaign (except mine was demons rather than undead). As such, I'm afraid that if I ever run that campaign, my players will think I'm ripping off Obsidian Twilight.
3. I could point out that the event seems so suddenly and overwhelmingly catastrophic as to be unbelievable, and the end result is so depressingly horrifying that I can't imagine ever wanting to play in that campaign world. You'd need to give me a really good reason to even pretend to be living there.
I'm guessing these aren't the responses you're looking for.
What sort of responses do you want?
Anything and everything.
1. I could point out that referring to high-level characters jars me out of the otherwise in-world description of the rest of the piece. That's a pretty nit-picky thing.
That's OK.
2. I could point out that the end result is very similar to an idea I had independently for a campaign (except mine was demons rather than undead). As such, I'm afraid that if I ever run that campaign, my players will think I'm ripping off Obsidian Twilight.
Please! We are all stealing something from everyone.
3. I could point out that the event seems so suddenly and overwhelmingly catastrophic as to be unbelievable, and the end result is so depressingly horrifying that I can't imagine ever wanting to play in that campaign world. You'd need to give me a really good reason to even pretend to be living there.
For Obsidian Twilight it is more of the sense that you are trapped there. It is Survival Horror we are presenting here.
I'm guessing these aren't the responses you're looking for.
All comments are thanked and welcome. Thanks again.
For those unfamiliar with it, The basic concept for Obsidian Twilight is basically Dark Sun + Ravenloft.
It's a Post-apocalyptic setting where just surviving day by day in a land ruled by the dead could be seen as a feat of heroism.
I've kind of seen it as a Setting Template, that you can attach to an existing campaign. For Example I'm actually attaching it to my Pathfinder Campaign as "What Happened to Golarion when my Players Failed to stop the Second Darkness."
In that light a wiping of Magic items and eliminating healing during the initial apocalypse makes a certain amount of sense. It's hard to have the world overrun by the undead and vast numbers of humanity die out when you have Clerics healing the injured, curing diseases and raising the dead. Not to mention facing an undead army with Channel Energy.
and making magic items more scare adds to their value in a world where wealth means nothing but a Magic item could be the difference between life and death.
I don't agree with this bit though
The new Obsidian Veil has the effect of absolutely barring the divine traffic of souls and prayer, such that no individual deity can see into, hear, or gain power from their followers on the world.
That's basically saying no Divine Magic, which cuts off a bunch of classes.
I'd reword it a bit. Maybe the veil is finally starting to weaken enough that the gods can send a trickle of power to the faithful, bestowing omens and dreams but unable to directly communicate with those few who still hold faith. Divine Spellcasters could be something only now returning to the world, lone prophets and madmen touched by the gods in this desolate waste of ash and death.
Needless to say the Undead kings will seek to suppress any growing religion of good gods, denouncing them as fakers and charlatans.
The new Obsidian Veil has the effect of absolutely barring the divine traffic of souls and prayer, such that no individual deity can see into, hear, or gain power from their followers on the world.
We have handled the issue of divine gods and their access in a very unique way (which isn't talked about here) but you still do get access to your divine spells and abilities.
So now I ask this. In a world ruled by the undead wouldn't a cleric be either a huge target always hunted by the strongest of foes or a God? I mean 1 Cleric and 1 Paladin together would be able to lay waste to vast hordes of the free mindless undead that surely rome the world looking for food. When you look at it that way there becomes no reason(other than pure roleplaying) to play as any class other than Cleric or Pld. So with that I think heavily restricting clerics in this world is kind of neccesary.
Well you have to remember the premise of people can get accidentally trapped there from other worlds in a various of way including teleport /dimensional travel mishap. People that "grow up" on Obsidian Twilight know to hide their class abilities if they are a Cleric or Paladin. Also while Clerics and Paladins are quite powerful in a setting like this, they have to rest while the undead don't have to. You can only smite or turn undead so many times a day.
Btw I know I'm speaking alot about class power and such here when you just wanted input on the background story. I just wanted to consider the repercussions of how your world interacts with specific classes in PFR. I love the setting and have greatly enjoyed using it in my game. I only wish to help you make it easier to understand and more PnP compatible with PFR.
It's funny to me because I never thought of it as a PnP but as a full setting. Apparently I was wrong about this, but in a good way. I think making the setting more PnP may be a direction we are planning for this upcoming update.