[D&D] Akula's RUP setting

[Avoraciopoctules]

[Hey, I found a half-finished post from a couple years ago. Might as well finish it, since the game is still sorta going.]

R.U.P.
The Real Ultimate Power setting.

A while ago, Akula started a campaign setting loosely based on Eberron, the Tales of X JRPG series, and Lost Odyssey, as well as a host of other sources. I have finally gotten around to writing a campaign thread for our group's game.

R.U.P. is about being an adventurer (as in, that's your actual job, and you belong to a union/guild) and making Faustian pacts for asymmetric power, usually with primordial forces. Most of these are elementally aligned, and their levels of power, reasonability, and malevolence vary widely. You start off doing shadowruns for the military and exploring dungeons in power sites / ancient ruins, then presumably figure out a means of asymmetric power gain that lets you become a political player and try changing the world.

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So, in this setting, there are some pretty important baseline changes from a typical one. First, most of the races are only slightly similar to their normal D&D incarnations. Few racial options are available to PCs. Generally you have "Human" and "Mutant Human" (which generally means character levels in Fiendish Brute). Most of what we know about other races comes from encountering them in play. Elves are always magically tied to a magical element such as ice. Orcs are mechanically equivalent to slightly modified SRD trolls. Trolls are the fey bridgekeepers from the Races as Nations thread. Dwarves are massive, slow moving and slow talking, made of living stone.

Character class options are semi-restricted in the first campaign. PCs are intended to start out as junior adventurers. This means that most spellcasting classes would be too prestigious and earn the players enough money that they wouldn't have to spend any time worrying about making enough money to pay their monthly guild dues. PCs are expected to be RoW martial types.

Second, the tech level is different. Powered armor that runs off of clockwork with magically animated gears is something that an adventurer too weak to take standard military contracts can afford. Guns exist, generally firing magical shells. Rifles, shotguns, and revolvers all take up a magic item slot. Auto-fire weapons do not exist outside of large, heavy, and often functionally immobile turrets. Bows retain relevance in that for the cost of a gun and regular ammo, you could have a bow and explosive or spell arrows. Unguided, inaccurate rockets can be fired out of shoulder mounted racks in volleys of 4 if you opt to start your knight off with powered armor.

Masterwork crafting is separate from magical enhancement. A Magic sword with +1d6 energy damage can be picked out of a barrel full of them in an Adventurer's Guild shop and purchased with paper money. A masterwork sword might have a better threat range or something, and that stacks with whatever magical stuff it has.

This game doesn't seem enormously focused on combat. We've fought like 3 level-appropriate battles, and over half the conflicts we've engaged in were resolved through negotiation or escaping when it looked like we were dealing with a clearly superior force.

There are 3 main political factions in the known world. First, Raillemont, the magitech nation, and the beginning point of the first campaign. Raillemont is heavily industrialized. It has large cities, many of which use enough magical power in generators, public transit vehicles, and so on that the slums and surrounding terrain for miles out are irradiated. Magic radiation often turns normal plant and animal life into monsters. Proles might end up with various mutations that mechanically translate to Fiend classes and feats. If you are one of the innumerable masses slaving away in an assembly line in one of Railemont's factories, you may eventually end up with a nasty magically-enhanced form of black lung or something (One PC was built with a stage-1 goal of making enough money to cure his health problems from working in a factory, and ).

Nation number 2 is called Avon, and I posted about it in another thread.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52934

Finally, we have the "barbarians". These arrived generations ago, coming from another continent. Barbarians are generally split into a number of distinct subfactions, and they rarely work in aggregate. We've run into like 3-4 different groups, and most seem to be jerks. Then again, that goes for pretty much every faction I remember encountering in RUP. The nice thing is that individual groups tend to be small enough to care about adventurers as individuals, so it's a lot easier to make a name for yourself working with them.

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Akula wants me to put together a list of things I'd like to see and things I don't want to see as the game continues.


Things I'd like to see in the game:
Puzzles. Not necessarily block puzzles, though a block puzzle or riddle door could be amusing. But something like "You have 4 boxes of mana cores, and you need to get them through customs and into the office of your black market contact" or "there's going to be an assault on this base in 6 hours. Fortify it, set traps, and arrange troops in order to make optimal use of your resources". Stuff with multiple solutions, problems where you need to collect information to aim for an ideal solution.

Elemental spirits which have an active political agenda. The Eternal Ice is an example of this, but getting additional ones (though I'd like it if most, if not all of these are still distinct, at least somewhat memorable individuals), some of which are more sympathetic, would be nice.

Elemental spirits which require that you prove yourself worthy of making a significant pact with them by making your way to the inner sanctum of their temple-dungeon, then winning a trial by combat of some kind. Makes for a pretty nice classical dungeon crawl scenario, and not entirely ridiculous.

Mages using the strain-based casting rules on dungeons.wikia, since these make spellcasters regain spellpower on an hourly basis and generally do a lot of stuff I like.

Some opportunity to design one or more persistent strongholds for my faction or allies later on in the game.


Things I would not like to see:

Routine combats that take more than 5-10 real-time minutes to resolve. Duels with named NPCs should take a max of half an hour.

Important details necessary to proceed in the adventure only being mentioned in passing once. I'd prefer not to have to take notes on everything I hear.

Party being sent on trivial errands that take up more than a chunk of a session. Carrying a letter or trying to find a vaguely-described smuggled good "somewhere in the city" should not be staples of the career of a PC adventurer. They should be sidequests addressed when you run into stuff connected with them while pursuing something bigger and more interesting.