@lojakz
Nothing ventured nothing gained, getting but in chair typing is always productive even if you have to throw large sections away. I'd just caution to keep your best possible face public, have a strong editorial process maybe vetted and workshop with more than one of you before you put the finished piece up.
None of the articles suck you guy all have writing chops which is important. I like the sense of story I'm getting tastes of but my inner GM is really scared for the complicated rules system I smelled underlying the perfume of good fluff. My inner power gamer is already salivating on the possible exploits in your crunch and already calculated what spaces I could dominate by being clever.
I'm kind of upset about the whole No Good and Evil aspect.
Since you are not going to budge on that, I'm going to put that down to everyone hasn't evolved that far, like Wyverns.
That's actually exactly the reason. Most of the Gods are actually more like Lovecrafts Old Ones then the traditional DnD style Gods. Though there are a few that are a lot more like Buddhas.
We're also likely to add an overview of "Villains" once we get the other four finished.
The last of the Guilds. Look for the overviews starting on Thursday.
The Race Overview. It was going to all go up today but it ended up being twice the length of anything we've put up before. So we're breaking it up.
Thanks for checking it out!
Another person working on the project here.
I agree that some of the rules guff is going to be more difficult to simplify, though ultimately I think the added flavor will be worth it. I'll be doing a large part of the rule finagling, and if anyone has suggestions then I'd be happy to hear them.
That said, we may be trying to get a bit of alpha rules testing done soonish. I don't know who all is familiar with Hero Lab, but I've been working on creating a module for it (and currently have a few races available) - Hero Lab makes character management much easier. I of course realize that not everyone uses Hero Lab, so we'll keep it simple regardless. The goal I have in mind at the moment is to have a unique world, but not necessarily unique rules-concepts.
Thanks Aeonoris!
Also...
Last time we had Dwarves, Elves, Half-Elves, Lizardwomen, and Gren.
Today we have Frogmen! Snakepeople! The Kindred (who are kind of awesome)! And the Shards fo the Unbroken (a race of playable golems)!
Do the Elves think in terms of pro nature, and anti nature?
Are the Drugar still a few clans of Dwarves, not yet separate from Dwarves.
Do the Elves think in terms of pro nature, and anti nature?
Are the Drugar still a few clans of Dwarves, not yet separate from Dwarves.
Thanks for your questions Goth Guru. I'm going to try and answer them the best I can.
Wild elves simply do not exist in Desylinn the way they do in other worlds. The elves have very structured rule oriented society. They also have a very superior attitude when compared to the other races. They are the actual children (great, great, great, great grandchildren) to a god. It was this attitude that prompted the formation of their Empire. Many still have this attitude in the present even though the Empire fell several centuries before. The elves see nature as a tool or a resource, something to be used and harnessed. They certainly have respect for it but they don't embrace it the same way an elf from another campaign setting might. That being said:there are areas of the world however where certain strong magics have an effect on the elves, and causes them to become more feral, and almost fae like. It's the magic's influence on certain parts of their psyche though, and they are very rare and not part of elven culture.
As far as the Duegar: there are no separate dwarven races at this point in time. There is potential for this to happen, whether it does or not is beyond the scope of what we currently have planned. There is some conflict within dwarven society (and will likely be mentioned in the intro dwarven write-up in the near future) but it is not enough for there to be a split down the race.
So there's been no schism between the light and dark elves? No Drow?
There is a difference between the Elves still up in the Northlands and the Elves who came south to found the empire, but that's much more of cultural difference then a major Schism. Though given enough time the "human-blooded" elves would be considered abominations by their northern brethren who would be even more obsessed with racial purity.
And light and darkness do not have immediate Negative and Positive associations. The Elves are all associated with light and have done some of the most horrible things in this world.
On and unrelated note, the first of the religions are up.
The Church of the Five Glorious Transcendents and the Cults of the Firstborn of Chaos.
Enjoy and as always we would love feedback on the ideas presented.
And we're still working on tweaking the look of the site. It's turned into an ordeal because of all that pesky real life crap. Thanks for reading!
I know this is going to sound like we're a lot more cobbled together from spare Golem bits than we probably are, but do you have any specific examples of the type of general overview you're looking for?
And just for the record we REALLY appreciate all the help and feedback. I know we've said it a bunch but thank you all for reading and talking to us.
I know this is going to sound like we're a lot more cobbled together from spare Golem bits than we probably are, but do you have any specific examples of the type of general overview you're looking for?
And just for the record we REALLY appreciate all the help and feedback. I know we've said it a bunch but thank you all for reading and talking to us.
The overview would essentially be a general description of the world and how it works. Fitting in races, places, major groups with each other. Explaining the state of the world as it currently is, and how it got there. We've hinted at a lot of stuff, but providing a little more solid general context is a good idea.
That is an excellent template right there. Thank you Shadowcatx.
I've been working on this so intensely I get so lost in the trees I can't see the forest.
It's pre-good and evil. There may be demon and elder horror worship(they haven't attracted the attentions of any other outer planes) mostly taking place deep underground. In the future, Atlantis may be sunk, the Elves worshiping spider demons may be cursed into Drow, and some dwarves may become Drugar. PCs should have a lot to do with if and when this happens.
Some of the planes we have involve world changing events that the PCs would have the chance to shape. That's one of those themes we've wanted to have with this world.
The next Religion Overview is up.
This one deals with some of the more directly problematic Religious entities.
(My favorite is the Bloody Sacrement of the Everwar.)
And now for something completely the same.
WOO!
Have a read! Poke it with a stick! Scream at us for our insolence regarding your favorite class! Scratch your head at our non-sensical take on your most sacred and perfered bit of powergaming!
Or don't do any of those things! It's your choice!
WOOOOOOO!!
And in a desperate bid for time we have the one of the more important mythological stories.
One that perhaps has the biggest effect on the world itself.
The Creation of the Seal. Which prevents the direct intervention of the Gods into the world and makes it so that Clerics function differently.
The Beginning of the Regional Overviews. If you have any thoughts or questions we'd love to hear them.
We've got Frogmen and Treeman and cute little Gren and horrible abominations that feast on minds like they was candy. Or maybe not on the last one. It's sort of Schrodinger's unspeakable horror in the Blackfire Mountains.
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Schrolingers horror: A box that emits scratching sounds. Most detection spells will give intermittent results. Evil, nothing, evil, nothing, ect. Anyone who opens the box gets an undead cat scratching at their face. If destroyed, the cat regerates in the box, the next day. :)
So...almost all ninjas are dwarves...I am not sure how I feel about that.
Schrolingers horror: A box that emits scratching sounds. Most detection spells will give intermittent results. Evil, nothing, evil, nothing, ect. Anyone who opens the box gets an undead cat scratching at their face. If destroyed, the cat regerates in the box, the next day. :)
Devinations count as measurments. ;)
I thought about giving random results, but I decided to call it a horror instead of a cat. :)
So...almost all ninjas are dwarves...I am not sure how I feel about that.
Or trained by them. There's a fair number of those. It's still a fairly new idea in the world.
I actually quite like the idea of the random results.
It's a cat. It's nothing. It's a walrus. It's a halibut. It's nothing. It's a cat again.
Dot.
Last of the Regions. Which actually means we've completed our General overviews.
So no real post today, however we're explaining the publishing schedule on the blog for the next month or more, as well as listing all the overviews in an easy to find place.
We're also pointing people back to the open call. We're still looking for writers and artists. If you'd like to try your hand at some short fiction highlighting what you think is cool about this world, or would like to show off your art with this little Wyrmling Third Party before we become an elder wyrm (or at least some kind of pseudodragon) shoot us a line!
It's pre-good and evil. There may be demon and elder horror worship(they haven't attracted the attentions of any other outer planes) mostly taking place deep underground. In the future, Atlantis may be sunk, the Elves worshiping spider demons may be cursed into Drow, and some dwarves may become Drugar. PCs should have a lot to do with if and when this happens.
You really can't be "pre-Good and Evil" unless you're pre-sentient. Good and Evil come into play when you have beings that can make choices beyond that of pre-programmed instinct. It's what people miss most often of the Eden metaphor. The line of Genesis which reads after Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. "the scales fell from their eyes and they perceived their nakedness". Adam and Eve are more defined by this transition, than by anything else in the Genesis story. I highly recommend the book "Broca's Brain" by Carl Sagan, for those who wish to pursue this topic further.
Good and Evil are a function of being self-aware. Of being able to make choices beyond that of immediate survival, or the propogation of your gene pattern. Good and evil reflect that many of the things that animals do without concious volition, are acts that would give us pause at the very least.
I mostly agree. The idea behind this world is not that there's no such thing as Altruism or no such things as the kind of destructive selfishness that creates Proper evil. It's that on a metaplanar level there is no "The Forces of Good" and "The Forces of Evil".
The Gods haven't polarized into sides. The War in Heaven is a complicated mix of relationships plots and counterplots. Not a clear Good Guys/Bad Guys set up.
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It's pre-good and evil. There may be demon and elder horror worship(they haven't attracted the attentions of any other outer planes) mostly taking place deep underground. In the future, Atlantis may be sunk, the Elves worshiping spider demons may be cursed into Drow, and some dwarves may become Drugar. PCs should have a lot to do with if and when this happens.
You really can't be "pre-Good and Evil" unless you're pre-sentient. Good and Evil come into play when you have beings that can make choices beyond that of pre-programmed instinct. It's what people miss most often of the Eden metaphor. The line of Genesis which reads after Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. "the scales fell from their eyes and they perceived their nakedness". Adam and Eve are more defined by this transition, than by anything else in the Genesis story. I highly recommend the book "Broca's Brain" by Carl Sagan, for those who wish to pursue this topic further.
Good and Evil are a function of being self-aware. Of being able to make choices beyond that of immediate survival, or the propogation of your gene pattern. Good and evil reflect that many of the things that animals do without concious volition, are acts that would give us pause at the very least.
I don't want to get into a philosophical argument, just want to clarify what Woodengolem meant by pre good and evil. There are certainly good actions and evil actions in the world. The Unkhan clans murdering and eating each other is evil, it's evil in the eyes of all the other races including their Kindred brothers and sisters. As is most of the actions of the Mariean Empire during it's reign. People in the world have a concept of right and wrong, and what is good and evil. (Though like in our own world some of it's subjective.) The gods however do not.
There are no good gods. There are no evil gods. They have not aligned themselves with these concepts. They are curious, some of them are decidedly more benign than others. And certainly there are actions they have taken with each other that are helping to define these terms in their own minds (the Fall of the Nameless One for instance). But their treatment of mortal races is much like a group of children would treat an ant farm: some of them are content to watch, others want to burn the ants with a magnifying glass or tear the legs off just to see what would happen. The individual acts might be evil, but to the gods it's just a way to help them understand the world. They are moving toward morality, creating the Seal to prevent their own interference is one step toward that. But they haven't fully reach it yet. So when Woodengolem states that it's pre good and evil what he's really talking about is the ideas usually associated with gaming, not the concept as we understand it here in the real world.
Any anthropologist will tell you, there were laws before they called them laws. After someone's dead parents were eaten, the children had an aha moment and dedicated their lives to killing and burning all cannibals. The whole idea behind Kender and Wyvern is that they are born without any idea that their behavior is evil. This claim does not protect them from being rooted out and wiped out whenever possible. Evil that does not detect as evil is just harder to get rid of.
The people in your game world just haven't woken up to this.
No one can detect evil yet, but it's still there.
A philosophical discussion was inevitable. By calling negative attention to it, you just feed it.
Any anthropologist will tell you, there were laws before they called them laws. After someone's dead parents were eaten, the children had an aha moment and dedicated their lives to killing and burning all cannibals. The whole idea behind Kender and Wyvern is that they are born without any idea that their behavior is evil. This claim does not protect them from being rooted out and wiped out whenever possible. Evil that does not detect as evil is just harder to get rid of.
The people in your game world just haven't woken up to this.
No one can detect evil yet, but it's still there.
A philosophical discussion was inevitable. By calling negative attention to it, you just feed it.
Woodengolem wrote what he wrote with an insiders understanding of the world. Which is a mistake all of us regretfully make all too often, but are slowly getting better at. You've got an understanding of the world as far as evil goes, at least close to what we intend Goth Guru. The gist of my comment above is that people in the world understand evil/morality the gods however do not (but are beginning to).
I'm sorry I got defensive. I felt I was being accused of being in favor of an alignment-less campaign. The late stone age aspects of your game world still interests me. Also, do you see the gods as being a projection of mortal beliefs? I see it as more a case of them always being there but people seeing a limited version.
Take the elemental planes for example. Europeans see 4 elements while Orientals see 5. A madman might be able to summon cheese elementals. At a high enough level he might be able to plane shift to the plane of cheese.
Do the people in your game world believe in volcano, mountain, and river gods? Primitive gods live in the prime material and have elemental alignments.
Oddly enough cheese is one of the more important elements in this world ever since Kraftulous the Cheese God murdered the People of the Mintberry mines... No. Not really.
We actually are creating an alternate Alignment system that is more about personality traits than good and evil explicitly. It's linked to our elements. We have seven. We have two positive and two negative traits linked to each of the elements. So to determine your character's "Soul Elements" you pick two and Bob's your uncle.
Sometime in the next few weeks we'll have that up, as well as a post explaining why we're doing that for this world. So we're not really looking to do away with alignments just want to create one that's a little more flexible and (in my opinion) a little more innately complex. But that's in the pipeline. Still giving it the polish.
And we actually have three Gods that are in fact bound on the Material Plane. The God of Ice and Light Maries, the God of the Angry Heavens Tlal, and Daikado God of the Angry Earth.
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Careful Goth Guru, getting all invested in feedback is how I ended up ~6500 words of fiction in with these guys.
The world of Desylinn assuredly has both its strong and weak points but fr me at least its an interesting enough sandbox to really want to explore. Lets face it you could interchange elements of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk and probably some people wouldn't notice. Elves, Dwarves, and everything else is retty much where Tolkien left them.
I know I'm tooting my own horn but the fiction is going to be an excellent primer to introduce the world starting at Hub but branching out pretty far. I'm excited to be a part of the project, come drink the Kool-Aid with me!
Thinkin of drinkin: Old man river. That old man river. He must know something, but he doesn't say nuthin. He just keep rollin, he just keeps rollin aaaaalong!
You only have contact with the neriads, kelpies, and other minions who care. You had better talk to the minions, because they know when he's going to overflow his banks or move away. Merchants, fishermen, and someone wanting to dispose of a body actively pray to him, trying to stay on his good side.
Instead of wizards, why not have primal chaos Madges. It's like a wild madge, but every time they cast, roll randomly on the spell table for that level. They try to use the magic they get. You could instead alter the spells with tables. Magic missile could do 1D4 +level with one missile. Damage is 1-force, 2-fire, 3-frost, 4-electrical, 5-sonic, or 6-acid. In this crude form it would damage both animate and inanimate targets.
Here's the 2nd chapter of the Winding Road: Introducing Wizard Lazeron Pi!.
Sorry it's so late getting up. WoodenGolem typically takes care of these things but he's off pretending to be a pirate this weekend, and I just got home from work. :)
Instead of wizards, why not have primal chaos Madges. It's like a wild madge, but every time they cast, roll randomly on the spell table for that level. They try to use the magic they get. You could instead alter the spells with tables. Magic missile could do 1D4 +level with one missile. Damage is 1-force, 2-fire, 3-frost, 4-electrical, 5-sonic, or 6-acid. In this crude form it would damage both animate and inanimate targets.
That doesn't quite fit with what we're going for. Sorcerers are the standard, but we've found a way to incorporate wizards into the world that works very well with the flavor. As well as witches, and other spell casting classes.
The problem with any system that either changes what the core rules already does, or adds on to it (which ours will do a little of both actually), is that it still has to be close enough to what the core rules already do and not add a lot of extra bookkeeping to be appealing to the players. We have a system almost ready for alpha testing (ideally by the end of the month) that we think will work. We hope we're successful, but even if the overall mechanics work with the first one or two iterations we'll have a lot fine tuning to do.
I personally like your suggestion however. (I suspect WoodenGolem probably would to). There's something very appealing about having crazy chaotic and random spell effects. And we may be able to do something like this in a smaller scale either with a prestige class or even a feat tree or archetype.
Sounds good. I was thinking of what came before wizards. Like fire before we locked it away in stoves, the first users of magic were channeling forces they neither understood or controlled. That's why wizards and other casters have mind engrams built in their minds to contain just the triggers for the spells.