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Post by DM Nim ToastHater on Jun 26, 2018 18:28:46 GMT
A had a crazy idea and wanted to run it by everyone. Just as a preface, I don't know much about Marvel lore or about the planes in D&D.
The TL;DR version... Marvel Battle World (from Secret Wars) built using different D&D Campaign Settings and MTG Planes.
Creating a planet that is an amalgam of different versions of the material plane from different layers of the multiverse. Possibly even collapsing the inner/outer planes and merging them in somehow.
Encountering different laws of physics, and vastly different ecology when you enter the border of the neighboring lands from another plane of existence.
The event that creates the planet causes massive destruction to the individual planets. Anything left alive on the chunks used to make the new puzzle work planet is unaware that anything happened beyond a flash of light and an earthquake.
What do you think? How would this change how the planes worked? Where would you take this?
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Post by randosaurus on Jun 29, 2018 5:04:36 GMT
You have described the world mechanic for my own dream campaign. You know the one, where you spend years writing lore for it but don't ever use it.
In truth, I stole the idea for it from Legend of Mana, an enjoyable if overlooked PS1 title.
The material plane was razed to dust in some calamity. Sites, regions, cities with an exceptional quantity of some elemental or animating energy were reduced to artifacts-- emblems of their previous existence before the fall. A jungle temple might be a ceremonial mask or the beach where merfolk and humans parley became a torch made of coral. The artifacts are placed on a grid or chess board, and the region or city springs back into existence in a pocket of reality. Its denizens and occupants were held in stasis and now go back about their lives.
Where the interesting (to me) mechanic came in was interactions between artifacts when you place them adjacent. Each artifact carries its own energy but can also influence its neighbors. Say a forest terrain was placed figuratively next to a city-- from the perspective of a citizen, a forest grew up one day and now there is some sylvan influence in the city. From IC perspective, you could simply walk past the edge of the forest and enter the new region. If a palace of darkness from the underworld is placed adjacent, within the city shadows grow longer, some new catacomb is discovered or inky black gates now appear. The energy inherent to the newly placed artifact defines how it interacts with current artifacts, particularly at these interfaces.
I planned this in part because i don't have any patience for travel sessions, where players spend hours on the road encountering random owlbears. I much prefer the shimmery transition of planar passage. This isn't so different than a map that shows cities or forests with roads and waterways; I just fuzzed out the connecting lines, replaced them with elemental transitions with particular rules needed to cross-- a portal needs some talisman or token to operate, or only the initiated can pass through the flame gate to reach the City of Brass. The artifacts represent sites or locations that I built a lot of lore into, mapped, wrote interesting characters. When any two places can be adjacent, I could always move around locations to make more sense to the story, or re-insert a crucial site that players bypassed.
I made up a number of mechanics to go with the approach; regional energies have effects on spells and elemental strengths, or placement of a particularly high energy artifact draws that same energy from distant neighbors-- say a massive forest is placed, a few spaces away that region will see forests wither and stunt as verdigris energies are siphoned off. Un-populated spaces would be wasteland filled with sandworms, like Beetlejuice or Dune. Certain dramatic acts could re-artifice entire regions, pinching off energy (some from its neighbors) and leaving a new smoldering crater (but that artifact could be replaced elsewhere). Artifacts could also be found by the players, or NPCs, and placed to cause specific effects or for some storyline strategic goal.
None of the regions need be prime material planes; any of them could have any of the planar variant rules described in Planar Handbook: altered time speeds, lower gravity, elemental planes, etc. The border or transition ecology would be described in the context of the elements common between the neighboring regions-- traveling to a planar air space would see players moving into the sky, probably passing through a fog or cloud bank or planar water would be diving into a specific vortex that connects the two planes.
As far as story, take your pick. Players could investigate what caused the calamity. They could engage in the Great Game, where various factions jockey for artifacts and place them strategically (literal chessboard metaphor). My own meta plot, again never actually realized, was that all my various factions were trying to bring about calamity AGAIN so they could rebuild the world in their own vision.
So all this to say is you have almost too many things you can do with this framework. Pick some rules, be consistent, and see what develops. Anytime you're building a world from parts, I say it's best to give players agency in its creation. Don't do what I do, where you start programming a tool to automate the mechanics to automatically update and try to apply those global rules to the 5'x5' combat scale because at that point it's a different game that you never get around to running. I did get a pretty awesome chessboard and little figurines & tchotchkes I intended to give players as RL instances of IC artifacts though.
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Post by phos on Jun 30, 2018 21:13:58 GMT
So I had a very similar idea.
I wanted to play with other people who usually DM using PC's they played as a player but never got a full story arc because the game fizzled out. You know those characters you loved and wished you could have played them longer but can't fit them in anywhere and don't want to use them as NPC's?
What would be cool is that depending on the number of players, the DM could rotate based on the settings.
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Post by DM Nim ToastHater on Jul 10, 2018 3:58:18 GMT
That's some awesome stuff. I like the idea of putting a system in place that gives the players agency to help form the creation of the world.
I'm also not a fan of long-distance overland travel. I was thinking about implementing some sort of teleportation "waypoint" system (a mix between the classic Diablo waypoints and Stargate). As a thing that the players can discover and figure out.
I happened upon a Setting called "A Sundered World" that has a similar "the planes have been shattered and the gods are gone" theme. Haven't picked up a copy yet, but it's on my list.
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Post by randosaurus on Jul 12, 2018 4:56:52 GMT
You bet. The scheme I made up definitely had Stargates- one of the animating elements was metals & gold, so most of the links were artifice, portals, arcane instruments, etc.
I used 8 elements as fundamental to the frame I imagined, so coming up with interfaces between lands was just coming up with different flavors of ways to travel: Light - community & faith : cathedrals all access a transit dimension beneath the altar, or a city or town spans the breadth of two 'zones' Dark - shadow & ego : access by the shadow plane or a plain old dark hole in the ground Wood - vitality & intuition : forest glades & ley lines
Metal - artifice & senses : wondrous portals & art frames you can climb inside Fire - verve & energy : magical hearths (flue powder) & vast deserts Water - isolation & depth : magical pools, moon mirrors, and ice caverns Earth - Tradition & soil : mountain passes & cave passages
Wind - motion & change : trade routes, airships, and fog banks
I actually came up with the idea exploring a new area after I moved; I could follow streetlamps (light) sewers (dark) greenways (wood) elevators (metal) natural gas pipelines (fire) creeks (water) climb hills (earth) or follow power lines (wind/lightning) to traverse my region. Each elemental route is mutually exclusive of the others but intersect at various places, often interesting places!
From there I tried to turn the framework to one of my long considered questions : why do baddies in games always arrange themselves such that you encounter the weakest underlings outside your hometown? Shouldn't it be only the 'strongest' villainy that can reach into the heart of your pastoral origin? So I assigned levels for elemental connectedness that would set some scale for two regions' connection: a calm stream passes from hill to burg - earth 2 water 2 to light 2 water 1, or a massive waterfall passes from jungle plain to caldera basin - wood 6 water 4 to fire 3 water 2. It was important that areas of higher energy flow to lower energy, and that energy is drawn down in transit. Similarly, a creature aligned with energy can live comfortably in a hospitable region (a Treant in a wood area or a Salamander in fire) and could travel to comparable areas. However, such a creature couldn't move to a region below some elemental level (unless it's raised...) so a Salamander might be able to fit through a Fire 4 portal, but not a Fire 2. That way, you'd explain the smallest, weakest elemental creatures have the most reach because they can squeeze through smaller, naturally occurring transitions that a big beefy eidolon cannot.
The point of all the above is I came up with a few rules and tried to apply it to a world as if that world developed according to the mechanic I made up. The denizens should understand the working of the world innately being born to it. Factions or nations or NPCs will have figured out exploits to the system, just as you hope the players will. I planned to keep the exact mechanics, the numerical assignments, 'behind the screen'. They were just to provide relative guides for me to say 'the dungeon in this region (Earth 4 Dark 4) is less fearsome than that wooded labyrinth (Wood 6 Metal 5)' with some sort of internal certainty.
Anyway good luck with it if you run with it.
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