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It's months off, but once I finish my Jade Regent game I'm going to finally pick up my on again off again Numeria based game. And this time not as a jokey one off. (Which spawned the weirdest game ever of goblins, ratfolk, halflings, and a mad druid.)
There might or might not be a AP in 2013, I don't care anymore. If there is an AP I'll use it as reference material. Whatever the case I'm going to have my techno barbarian adventure and love it.
The catch is I'm trying to cook up where to start and what is the general outline and highlights I want to cover. One issue is a good 'starting' zone to introduce players to Numeria.
I was thinking about using the trade cities that transport goods to the Worldwound forces as a good starting zone. Maybe a group coming up from Brevoy. The idea they are mercenaries and adventures looking to stop the demon menance that get hijacked in the dealings of the Technic League. That's one idea.
I'd love to highlight alien creatures and environmental elements carried on the Silver Mount before it plowed into the planet. Maybe it's cargo of creatures and goods that became landscape features.
Mix in some mutated monsters and interesting local Barbarian cultures that have 'old ways' tied to the fall of the mount and the strange gifts and curses the spirits gave them. Then to contrast it with the more urban members of their nation that gave up he nomadic life style of the cities and League control.
The way I see Numeria the League is the power of the cities, the tribes control the rest and they are in direct conflict with each other. The tribes pay lip service to the Soverign these days but feel alienated with his change in mood and personality. It's causing strife among the traditionalists of the more powerful tribal groups.
I have all these cool bizarre and fantasic set pieces in mind:
A crystal forest that is safe during the day but glows with colors and crackles with energy at night.
Chrome caverns where artifical copies of people are made in half ruined vats via an automated process.
Tribes of half-human beast people who born of earlier generations contaminated from mutagenic fuels.
Mega sized bugs everywhere. Riding Spiders and guard scorpions.
A colony of small drone swarms that keep dismantling local buildings and rebuilding them into massive faux bee hives.
A town of androids trying to hide what they are from outsiders carrying on after they lost their previous masters and mission.
A sorcererous drug den of alien and exotic delights where power brokers trade salves and secrets.
Horrific League enforcers who are more machine than man and kill with gleeful delight.
Artficats of magical power that don't follow the conventional rules of magic, but seem to apply a greater/different art.
Primal guardians fighting against alien growth and infection among the wildlife. An ideological war between evolution and natural strengths.
Rival Technic League factions fighting over different applications of the Silver Mounts riches and how they can best be applied to the world at large.
Alien brokers hidding in among the factions of the cities offering transport and goods from the worlds beyond.
A gate to a dead planet where undead minds plot to invade the living world out of spite and a desire to control everything.
etc.
Any cool things you'd like to see in Numeria? Any plots you've played with in the land? Just looking for ideas to play with. More ideas and a few potential plot outlines to follow.
TLC:
Since you have time I recommend reading the Pathfinder Tales: City of the Fallen Sky by Tim Pratt. It covers two places of forgotten technology.
If memory serves me correctly there are "forests" of crystals that glow at night mentioned in the book.
Also the book gives insight to the workings of the Technic League.
Actually some of the things you've mentioned are already in the book!
How about this as a "start off": Maybe a REALLY old friend/ally of the Sovereign wants to revert him back to the way he was. This friend/ally does have info what made the changes in the Sovereign and may have evidence who "accelerated" or controlled his mad and decadent decent.
The potential cure is found at an undiscovered (and more importantly unguarded) passage the connects to the Silver Mount (or the place where the "cure is).
I like games w/ Lost tech. (The Pathfinder setting is different from the Palladium books) The Pathfinder settings deal with tech as forgotten/lost not as an "equal" or "predominant" means of power.
In the end there would (in my humble opinion) be only three places on the planet of Golarion to have a major or more amount of "tech":
Mana Wastes, the Ruins of Kho (Mwangi Expanse) & Numeria.
Alchemist would thrive on these adventures!
Again the book mentioned above will, at the very least, will give you oodles of ideas & inspiration!
That'll be 2cps please,
Rom
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Also check out the Inner Sea Bestiary. They have Android as a playable race and you have to have an encounter with the Annihilator at some point. That thing is too awesome.
As far as ideas, I think one interesting thing might be a hidden faction, descendents of the original pilots, trying to gather enough energy and tech to make it home. They use machines as their servitors, and have "fooled" the technic league into thinking they are in control of the machines. In reality, they are using the technic league as a proxy to gather the resources needed to leave Golarion.
Something else that might play into things is that there might be forces that don't want those aliens to leave Golarion. Maybe agents of the Dominion of the Black were responsible for downing their vessel, either because they were enemies, or the Dominion WANTS Numerian technology to spread into "primitive" hands, to further there own agenda. Either way, PCs might find horrors from beyond human ken arrayed against them courtesy of the Dominion
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Personally I was going to build a corruption and greed based factions of the League. The Corruption agents are puppets of outsiders from either the Dominion or other otherworldly agents. (Maybe Dark Tapestry). The greed based group is your classic power mizers and are more reasonable if more likely to stab you in the back post contract.
The idea is the PC's get in the middle of a Technique League faction fight.
Interesting stuff TLC, I had a game with multiple sub factions including a group of arcanist using 'new' sin magic in the league upon seeing their decadent description in City of the Fallen Sky. The City of the Fallen Sky even said before the fall of Kho Silvermount was already there, when the alchemist mentioned Numeria and Silvermount and the prince of kho spazzed out at the mention of the alien wreckage.
My sub factions included.
1.A group of 'new' sin based arcanist
2.A group of engineers who use no magic but more often the power of thought and knowledge of science to mimic magic items and spells. My way of including psionics and the engineer homebrew class.
3.A group of ruin priest worshiping the wreckage as the remains of a fallen god and draw their magic from a alien source(Azathoth, the Chaos Engine in my game).
4.A group of Neo-Azlantist who claim Numeria is the capital of decadence and inheritor of the dark magic their enemies claimed as their own. So the group had weird taste and often had mutations.
5.Disciples of Brigh, a religious brotherhood who see the relics of silvermount as something to be investigated in the advancement of science. This faction was a newish group around who for the most part have kept silent on their tinkering knowing the League would kill them for their secrets of technology and the reverse engineering they have done so far.
6:The Cult of the Frog, dark cultist who use the mutagenic oil and chemical to mutate frogs and the likes, it began with a group of boggards find a wreck in a swamp and their shamans consumed the foul fluids and saw 'enlightenment' in a strange vision of their gods older spawn and that the crude 'silver' staff and other relics were the last relic of this first toad race.
7.The Disciples of Mutagenics, a strange cult of druids and clerics who are mostly beast men and use mutagens to change themselves and augment their wildshape to become more debased like their gods.
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I'm not sure I want my vision of the League to be that complex. I'm really only going to focus on 2 small sub-sects in the main group. The idea being that part of the League controls the flow of substances from the Silver Mount and another is tampering with the 'goods'.
The focus of the game will start out very underworld, the 'mob' (league) hires the PC's to find out who's spiking their chemicals. It's hurting business and control.
Definitely check out Inner Sea Bestiary. Plasma lances, chain-guns, and force fields.
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Oh, I plan on looking over it. I'm also cooking up new gear. I have a Monowhip in mind which functions like an adamantim whip, needle guns, air skiffs, etc. All in various stages of decay and function.
And new enemies. One of my favorite? Skeleton Armor...it's battle armor that looks like a folding skeleton that wraps around a host and turns them into a living hostage attacker.
Nice ideas TLC! I've been kicking around Numeria for a while and am prepping to run one soon, and here are some ideas and considerations I found could help.
1.) Androids (from Inner Sea Bestiary) come in two types I can only call (for the moment) "ship-born" and "League-born" the ship-born have wandered Numeria and came from the crashed vessels, and can be anywhere from 10,000years old to simply reactivated yesterday. These androids exist outside the league's control and as such are usually in hiding. The League born are made by the technic league after finding the remains of an old forge in Silver Mount or some other place, and are used as highly specialized solders, spies, assassins, enforcers, and test subjects, but are made extremely slowly and as such are not common.
2.) It has only been 100 years or so since the Worldwound opened up and the refugees of Sarkosis came spilling in. Since their worship of nature and strange totems conflicts with the Technic League's vision of advancement and science they have been vilified by the league and are often treated as 2nd class citizens or pressed into slavery.
3.) Numeria was once a River Kingdom and as such it may still cling to some variation of the 6 river freedoms. Of particular note is the freedom against slavery. The League may be trying to reverse this freedom or corrode it, i.e. the treatment of Androids and Sarkosians.
4.) Wake effect: The passing of the Silver Mount through Golarion's solar system may have caused other planets in the system to take note. If this is so then Numeria may occasionally be visited by creatures from other planets like Eox or Verces, or gathered some detritus off in disporia that got caught on it and survived the impact.
5.) Numeria is far ahead of its time tech wise, and some entities that respect balance and fate may not like that. Inevitables, Mothmen, Aeon and the like may have held Numerian progress back or may be focusing on doing so now and could threaten the entire country with annihilation.
6.) Last one, with the proximity of the Worldwound and the flood on knights and holy men going through Numeria, you can always play with the eternally maddening question: does sentience=soul? You can have androids and supercomputers suffer from crisis of faith or existence in ways that humans simply could not understand, such as why a diety would not create perfect beings, does creation of life=godhood, and other such ideas.
Just some brainstorming, good luck with your game and have fun!