virgil wrote:FrankTrollman wrote:Finality
"
The End of your journey. But perhaps the beginning of Another."
Speaking of
Finality, are we removing Finality's timeless trait? What about the Byzantine laws that force you to stay for only a few days each month? How is the anti-fighting rule maintained? Do we have an order of militant pacifists keeping the peace,
sanctuary magic blanketing the city, police whose sole purpose is to be snitches to hit squads of cornugons?
With access to 3e-style open planeshift, planar metropolises need a shtick to get you to go there at all. Sigil is the planar metropolis you go when you are low level and you want to be able to adventure in other planes (because it bans all high level activities and has lots of portals). Union is the place you go when you want to conduct very large transactions involving epic currency. The City of Brass is where you go to barter in Wishes. Finality is where you go to barter in Souls. Shra'kt'lor you almost never go to, but it's the place you go for information and weapons to fight Aberrations. Malsheem is just a backdrop for the final boss fight. Hestavar and Grenpoli are not places that anyone
ever goes to. And that's a shame.
In a Gatejammer setting, that problem instantly vanishes. The different planar metropolises are in different places on the portal nexus, so the cities don't have to specialize so much to get players to go to them. The players will go to Grenpoli because it happens to be a short number of jumps if you start at a travel bog in the Bane Mires. The players will go to Hestavar because it happens to be easily reachable through Arvendor. So the cities no longer need or even want exclusive gimics to entire players to go there. Now the cities just want to be culturally and architecturally distinct, so that it "feels different" if the players go to trade in Ashbringer than it does when the players go to trade in Tu'narath.
So right away, Finality is going to stop being a city of "Trade Souls and GTFO". It's going to keep the soul trade, and the Dungeon of the Dying Deity is still in the city limits. But the players are going to want to go there to take advantage of the portal network and to do normal big city adventures, so it should take up those functions.
As for the Lawful Trait: heck no. That has to go, because the
Lawful Trait has to go. Law and Chaos are stupid and bad for the game, and moving forward you'd want to chuck them. Like infinite planes themselves, the alignment traits should be phased out completely. Timelessness is more complicated. The Timeless Trait hasn't done the same thing in any two editions of the game. It has been everything from a way to Rip Van Winkle yourself to a way to stay forever young to a "no resting to regain spells" challenge. At the very least, the city should have the special Acheronian preservative trait, because the fact that you can eat four month old apples is neat flavor text, and the fact that thousand year old weapons and diaries can be found in abandoned attics and still be usable creates a
lot more potential adventures than it obviates.