[Gatejammer] Finality: Brainstorming

[K]

Ideally, factions should not be like the colors of ancient Rome or modern political parties. They should be professional and social organizations or brotherhoods, the type of thing where people gain political power because of their numbers of effective monopoly of a given trade or resource, and/or where the members help provide for each other (as was common in fraternal organizations before social security and insurance was a thing). Sure you'll have some Freemasons, corrupt union bosses, and even deep rivalries between groups, but it should be possible for two low- to mid-level people in different organizations to sit down and have a beer together without starting a fight.

Yeh, but the party is not sitting down and having beers. They are telling each other the secrets of their faction and actively working to advance the goals of other factions, some of whom are enemies.

So when water elementals are attacking the Aquaduct, one PC has a reason to do something about that. The problem is that several other PCs probably want the elementals to eat the place so that the Aquaduct faction will stop lording their Water Tax over everyone and pushing legislation about Ooze Rights.

You'd have to somehow build a reason for all possible faction members to work together on adventures where they should be at cross-purposes and give people factional credit so they can advance in their faction while working with enemy factions and advancing enemy goals.

Second, having the police owe you a favor is essentially the same as being able to loot the police for weapons. As many weapons that the chief could make disappear is about the same regardless of whether he is doing it for himself or because is is repaying a debt he occurred during the course of factional politics.

Actually getting the Aquaduct or the police is meaningless.

Now, there s a wealth of adventures if you play a independent group who takes jobs from the warring factions. You even have a campaign if it's about becoming a new and up-and-coming faction who slowly takes over parts of the city during the course of your adventures because the people stop voting for certain factions to control certain public services. The problem is that the core conceit of every PC being a different faction member doesn't work in a setting of factional politics if you expect them to rise in power within the faction.

[Lokathor]

Ok, Gelatinous Kelsey Grammer is the best part of that, Hyz. The rest makes little to no sense... Gelatinous cubes have pretty much no sensory organs with which to enjoy art. At best, they could have an artistic aesthetic based on perfumes and vibration.

...which disturbingly speaks to them being drawn to caberets, actually.

I do think whoever controls the sewers should employ gelatinous cubes, though, unless we work out a reference to Prattchet that works better, because with a gelatinous cube you can just sit it under an aggregate pipe and switch it out when it starts filling up. I don't know how much shit you can stack in a 10'cube, but it's probably a lot.

They've got blindsight 60ft, so they'll enjoy any spatial art like statues, carvings, runework, etc.

Also, (MC Bullshitting Mode: Active) the cubes can't actually be filled "to the brim", as it were. The displaced ooze has to be pushed out, and past a limit the ooze can't maintain itself while stretched too far. So a cube's limit on how much it can eat at once is volume based, and is generally no bigger than 1 Large creature or 4 Medium creatures. Additionally, the magibiology of a G Cube is such that they don't actually eat often. They're adapted to eat simple molds and minor plants most of the time, only needing a whole meat body every few years or less. They also feed on local background magic energy, so they can potentially live forever if they're trapped in the right location.

Also, feeding them too much to often causes them to divide, and they you might end up with a problem on your hands if you're not comfortable with just killing the spawns all the time (which a faction of oozes probably wouldn't be).

[Prak]

Ok, Gelatinous Kelsey Grammer is the best part of that, Hyz. The rest makes little to no sense... Gelatinous cubes have pretty much no sensory organs with which to enjoy art. At best, they could have an artistic aesthetic based on perfumes and vibration.

...which disturbingly speaks to them being drawn to caberets, actually.

I do think whoever controls the sewers should employ gelatinous cubes, though, unless we work out a reference to Prattchet that works better, because with a gelatinous cube you can just sit it under an aggregate pipe and switch it out when it starts filling up. I don't know how much shit you can stack in a 10'cube, but it's probably a lot.

They've got blindsight 60ft, so they'll enjoy any spatial art like statues, carvings, runework, etc.

An ooze’s entire body is a primitive sensory organ that can ascertain prey by scent and vibration within 60 feet.

Also, (MC Bullshitting Mode: Active) the cubes can't actually be filled "to the brim", as it were. The displaced ooze has to be pushed out, and past a limit the ooze can't maintain itself while stretched too far. So a cube's limit on how much it can eat at once is volume based, and is generally no bigger than 1 Large creature or 4 Medium creatures. Additionally, the magibiology of a G Cube is such that they don't actually eat often. They're adapted to eat simple molds and minor plants most of the time, only needing a whole meat body every few years or less. They also feed on local background magic energy, so they can potentially live forever if they're trapped in the right location.

Also, feeding them too much to often causes them to divide, and they you might end up with a problem on your hands if you're not comfortable with just killing the spawns all the time (which a faction of oozes probably wouldn't be).

Also 1d6 acid is likely enough to "digest" shit almost instantly.

[Lokathor]

Snakes and sharks and stuff can swallow animals whole, but they're still not digested super fast. They're just killed super fast.

but you got me on the blindsight. Maybe they like stone statues that they can ooze over and feel, like changelings in DS9

[Vebyast]

Ok, Gelatinous Kelsey Grammer is the best part of that, Hyz. The rest makes little to no sense... Gelatinous cubes have pretty much no sensory organs with which to enjoy art. At best, they could have an artistic aesthetic based on perfumes and vibration.

...which disturbingly speaks to them being drawn to caberets, actually.

I actually think that intelligent gelatinous cubes would make surprisingly good philosophers, mathematicians, writers, and poets. Slowly moving through a sewer tube is something they could probably do in their sleep, which means they're all spending hours alone with nothing to do but mindlessly ooze forward while they think. They also wouldn't spend a great deal of money on room and board, since they can carry everything they own inside themselves and eat off the ground. That leaves them their entire salary to spend on things like art supplies.

Ooh, there's an idea. The cubes use their ooze to etch the sewer walls as they pass by; over hundreds of years the sewers have become a palimpsest of math, poetry, philosophical treatises, sculptures, and engraved carvings fit to rival any library or dwarf fortress. Adventure hooks:

• Every thought that is possible has been thought by a Cube somewhere, somewhen, inside the sewers. You could make a lot of money tracing the movements of particularly interesting Cubes and transcribing their writings for the universities. Just watch out for Dire Alligators.
• One of the Cubes has apparently decided to start dabbling in more mystical arts, and there are random surges of magic flying out of the sewers. You need to find it and give it something else to think about.
• A Cube wants to be able to carry around a slightly more delicate work of art. Find it a magic item that will do the trick.
• A Cube thinks it's found a new trail of writings of the Great Hexahedron, but it seems that they to lead into what is now a den of Dire Alligators.
• Someone is assassinating politicians that have been selected to sit on committees for arts grants. Figure out what's going on before the Cubes decide to take matters into their own.... hands?
• For its work on planar psychology, a Cube wants to get a Balor, a Pit Fiend, an Ultroloth, and a Shator in one room to see how the conversation proceeds. Good luck.

[Username17]

How are you supposed to have a party if everyone is in a faction?

The same way it works if the players are different character classes. This is why it is so important that no faction be "You are in the army of X" or "You have a job doing X", because any player character who is a member of any faction is going to have the career of "Adventurer" and have associates who are likely in different factions. So whatever a faction does or doesn't do in town, they have to be OK with one of their members heading off to Gehenna with a bunch of bugbears and tranvestite gnomes to slay a dragon and take its stuff.

For example: the Brotherhood of Blood is an acceptable faction by that metric because you can spend pretty much however long you like adventuring off in the wherever while teamed up with whoever, and if you ever get back to Finality you can write up your adventures and call it investigative reporting. The Harmonium is not an acceptable faction by that metric because you can't get promotions without sitting around at your job in town and not haring off for adventures of the day.

Second, who wants to rise up his faction's hierarchy to control an Aquaduct? Unless that particular public works project grants magic powers, becoming the official in charge of city property is just like getting a particularly boring day job.

A city institution or major landmark probably has a larger budget than a castle on the borderlands. In D&D, there comes a time when characters get to "own land". And if they want to, they can have adventures involving those lands, and if they don't want they can just use it as a source of income and red shirts. City landmarks like The Foundry or Portal Pentagon are the same way. Being in nominal charge of them opens up a set of optional plot hooks, and if you don't take them up then you still get an income and some red shirts.

Being in control of the Aqueduct is just a slightly more interesting version of the "owns castle" option that all characters get at mid-level.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

Well, I was out longer than I thought. The PAX aftermath kicked my ass really hard.

If I had my druthers, I would actually not have absurdly spacious sewers in Finality. That's kind of been done to death in a way that public piss-pots and poop jars haven't. Also, the jars mean that the faction has a reason to have people all over the city, which is the basis for a pervasive and unobtrusive spy network. Also the jars can be really entertaining terrain pieces. The faction headquarters would be the Skunkworks, where all the noisome processes get done and they pay a premium for air-freshener cantrips.

Not to say there shouldn't be a tunnel complex under the city, just that the tunnels should be the drow/duergar/other light-sensitive neighborhoods.

A Faction is more than just a civic institution that desires things which are good for that institution. It's a philosophical and political movement whose message and resources allow it to take over one or more civic institutions and whose driving goals interest it doing so.

Okay, if the 'pro-living' faction is too boringly derivable, how about this?

The Countless Cacophany is based on the 'diversity is strength' philosophy, which gets a lot of traction because there are all kinds of bad-to-extinction events in the multiverse, and a lot of them are literally unexpectable homebrew bullshit. "Don't laugh at hermits," they say. "When that fly from The Purple Smurfs shows up, the people living in isolation will be your best chance."

They're also pro-living, because the more life, the more experiences and ideas there are; that's the tie between them and the skunkworking professions (along with the money and the espionage opportunities); but their deeper goal is to promote diversity; whether that's new hybrids, new forms of government, original spell research, etc.

So the Countless Cacophany can be behind any kind of bizarre thing you want to have in your game - they will go out into the planes and set up model towns based on gerontocractic pokemastery, or go through elaborate rom-com hijinks to try and get a Marilith and a Couatl to produce a clutch of eggs together, or fund the research of a Wizard obsessed with giant hands when no-one else will.

The Guardians of Order hate these guys.

edit: Oh, damn, apparently 'skunkworks' is actually an existing term used for radical innovation projects. That's too fucking good.

[Parthenon]

Really, why would anyone care about waste disposal? The main reason I can see is that there is money in it. Get rid of the sewers, and have the waste from the toilets be collected by workers as a chargeable service. That way the people carting away shit get paid directly for doing it, and they also get a lot of fertiliser for growing crops that they can also make money from.

That way you can have multiple factions having interests in waste disposal as a side method of making money rather than having one faction being the shit-shovelers. It also has a side benefit of having another group of anonymous workers you can disguise yourself as, with the drawback of having a large pot of shit shoved into your arms.

It also means there are less questions as to how there is a fuck-off big dungeon right under the gift-shop to the museum of dongs and why it doesn't get in the way of the sewers.

[Ancient History]

I still want to see the God-Tree of Reverse Psychology. That was the best part of the Factol's Manifesto.

[virgil]

Are there any logistical concerns with having sewage be lumped in the same category as garbage men instead of a sewer; the 'sewer' being for storm drains, storage, and general subterranean demographic.

I still want to see the God-Tree of Reverse Psychology. That was the best part of the Factol's Manifesto.

I will not deny your contribution of getting that tweaked to fit in Finality. Personally, I'm not sure what direction to take it.

So far, in terms of serious faction suggestions, we've got:
Brotherhood of Blood
Countless Cacophony
Eye of Fury (?)
Guardians of Order
The Hungry
Muse of Belphegor (?)
Scales of the Serpent (?)
Society of Arts & Beauty
Speakers of the Dead (?)
White Spider

The question marks are for those that are essentially blank slates in terms of material. Which ones are under definite approval and which ones should be thrown back to the drawing board? What kind of factions do we need to cover? At first glance, we need to make sure that the soul trade isn't covered under a single faction, as they're way too important a demographic for Finality; it would be like having a faction for White People in Salt Lake City.

[Lokathor]

Are there any logistical concerns with having sewage be lumped in the same category as garbage men instead of a sewer; the 'sewer' being for storm drains, storage, and general subterranean demographic.

Yes. Biological ones.

Generally garbage can be collected once a week or something, and it's fine just sitting in a pile or in a box. But if you leave buckets of shit and piss sitting around for a week you're more likely to get infected from it spilling on stuff, and it just plain smells bad. I work as a Janitor actually, and it'll smell horrible if you just let it sit around for an hour (It's a YMCA, kids pee on the locker room floor all the time). That's why sewers were designed to get sewage away from the people as quickly as possible.

[Username17]

Speakers of the Dead

"It has always helped that Heaven and Hell share the same currency, and the same language. Really, they are far more alike to each other than they ever have been to us."

He Said/She Said: “Just because you can raise Hell, doesn't mean you should.”

It is a matter of simple cartography that whichever afterlife you get is merely another life like our current one. Your new incarnation may live better or worse than you, dependent upon how your current life is judged by whatever arbitrary criteria of your next destination, but it is still a place. Even if one fails to manage to have life or unlife restored in the here and now, the multiverse will provide a new body or spectral form just as they will provide a new place to be. New incarnations are flung to distant corners in the multiverse, but that is no reason that anyone should have their voice or property taken away in the here and now.

The Speakers of the Dead believe that each life is eternal – that each person is immortal by default. As such they feel that inheritance is a grave injustice and that “murder” is really just an inconvenience. Speakers advance resurrection techniques in order to repatriate citizens who have been transported to distant lands and advocate for the property rights of those whose deaths have – however temporarily – moved them far away. In the meantime, they are happy to store bodies in their grand Mausoleum while they await repatriation (some forms of which require the body to be on hand). As most currently known resurrection techniques have inherent time restrictions, some bodies have been waiting their return for quite a long time.

The Speakers note that those who are reborn in the various far flung worlds of the “afterlife” are really just the same as those born on Clangor. They posit thus that those who die in the afterlife worlds go on to after-after-life-worlds, and so on forever. While these third worlds have not been found, the Speakers sponsor many exploration missions attempting to locate them.

The dead can normally be raised only before their soul is reincarnated on another world, which has led the Speakers to conclude that Tartarus is essentially a giant kidnapping ring, to which The Speakers of the Dead are naturally opposed. The faction advocates military intervention against Duat, Valhalla, Sheol, Limbo, and any other place that Finality's citizens are found to have been spirited away to after their lives have been cut short.

[Ancient History]

One possibility for keeping the gods from directly entering/interfering with Finality (as opposed to sending their agents/worshippers there) is a pax deorum like in ancient Rome, an ancient compact between the city and the gods where certain offerings and rites are performed regularly and the gods stay the fuck out.

[hyzmarca]

Ok, Gelatinous Kelsey Grammer is the best part of that, Hyz. The rest makes little to no sense... Gelatinous cubes have pretty much no sensory organs with which to enjoy art. At best, they could have an artistic aesthetic based on perfumes and vibration.

...which disturbingly speaks to them being drawn to caberets, actually.

I do think whoever controls the sewers should employ gelatinous cubes, though, unless we work out a reference to Prattchet that works better, because with a gelatinous cube you can just sit it under an aggregate pipe and switch it out when it starts filling up. I don't know how much shit you can stack in a 10'cube, but it's probably a lot.

Gelatinous Cube Kelsey Grammer is the entire point of that writeup. I started with him and worked backwards. You could totally give him a different backstory, of course.

[ishy]

One possibility for keeping the gods from directly entering/interfering with Finality (as opposed to sending their agents/worshippers there) is a pax deorum like in ancient Rome, an ancient compact between the city and the gods where certain offerings and rites are performed regularly and the gods stay the fuck out.

So gods are abusive pimps? Who bitch slap you around when you don't pay them enough?

[Username17]

One possibility for keeping the gods from directly entering/interfering with Finality (as opposed to sending their agents/worshippers there) is a pax deorum like in ancient Rome, an ancient compact between the city and the gods where certain offerings and rites are performed regularly and the gods stay the fuck out.

So gods are abusive pimps? Who bitch slap you around when you don't pay them enough?

Or gods made a deal a long time ago and are now kicking themselves. Like how SONY gets to keep the rights to Spiderman as long as they keep making movies and don't have to give the rights back to Marvel even though Marvel is now owned by Disney and totally making money hand over fist with superhero films.

So the gods set up some sort of districting scheme a long time ago and now that there is a fucking multi-million person metropolis there, the districts are still in effect as long as the people hold up their end and perform old school goat sacrifices during specified periods.

So various god agents would try to break up the official ceremonies in order to force the city to renegotiate with the gods now that the city has a lot more to lose and would be willing to pay more in rent.

-Username17

[virgil]

What kind of cap on significant factions should we have?

Most of the source-book will be detailing the factions and places of interest, that's a fact. However, we need more. We'll need structure for some of the soul trade, possibly as an entire haggling minigame. Something to add structure to any adventuring in Finality will be needed, but I'm uncertain on execution, perchance through encounter tables?

To-Do List (not necessarily calling dibs, but more as a general reminder which I will hit if Frank or someone doesn't beat me to the punch)

• Chaos, war-monger, banking faction
• Eye of Fury
• Divine Pact Monument: site for periodic goat sacrifices (the wanting to renegotiate is a great idea)
• Details on continual flame maintenance
• Food Court landmark
• Red Light District
• Actual red light district, as the sex trade wouldn't be suppressed (what's considered morally illicit in this city?)
• Temple of Silence: Presumably where one of the gods is trapped and used for power
• Pro-god faction: Possibly one invested in the soul trade, as your own soul exists as collateral

[virgil]

Cogent Cage:the Apostasy Prison

"Betrayal can only happen if you love." -John Carre

A greater crime than being an enemy to a god is being a former ally to the god. As a deity cannot threaten any negative consequences in the afterlife to a mortal until they agree to join their faith, this makes becoming a follower much like entering a civil contract. While commoners are of little consequence, receiving and providing little, clerics are a whole other matter; they are an investment on the part of the god, and they are loathe to lose this investment. Legislation in Finality has made apostasy a crime, and many religions (both good and evil) send their strays here for the prison's services.

When a cleric becomes an apostate, or even grossly violates their deity's code of conduct, they lose their blessings and all of their divine power. This does not mean the god has completely turned their back to the cleric. Atonement, both the spell and the deed, are provided at the apostasy prison. The willing serve their time in the prison as penance. The unwilling, as mind control is not a valid means of atonement, are locked away under numerous curses that prevent them from leaving their cells until they willingly return to their faith.

[virgil]

The peon is needed for business, because wizards are not part of the economy. In addition, the demographics of Gatejammer are such that there are so few wizards per capita, that their economic contribution is insufficient to meet demand or even exceed the proletariat's own production rate; and that is before accounting for the fact that the population consumes more than blocks of iron or that the commoner population in unable to provide any good or service to these wizards in which to trade for their skill.

There do exist wizards who get their rocks off on sticking their fingers in the economic pie. These graybeards get their best margins with custom-order, low-volume, rapid-order, and highly crafted goods, such as masterwork locks and magic items; which still leaves them in the upper end of the economy.

In the Finality economy, due to the breadth of worlds available, there's going to be a natural hierarchy of power. Bandits can only truly threaten people in the turnip economy, while ninja guilds stick to the gold economy. The economy below doesn't offer sufficient incentive to warrant interference (corporate executives don't involve themselves in the lemonade economy, for example), while the economy above responds with overwhelming force in the matter of disagreement (as inferred with any state that expresses the desire to secede).

In the density of a planar hub like Finality, this lead to neighborhoods being segregated by level? The Firelight District, known for the lantern archon civil servants that live there and produced much of the lighting in the city, is a slum and a ghetto. Continual flame is permanent, so any replenishment needed by the city as a whole from broken models is met each week during lazy Tuesday tea-time (presuming the local wizard can't be bothered to fix it himself), where the meagre profits earned go toward local needs. They suffer serious brain drain toward staffing their own police department, the chief of which is a blink dog.

[virgil]

Serious question here: what kind of demographics are we looking at for Finality? Will there be a clear racial dominance, such as human or tiefling? Presumably it's more metropolitan than that, but how metropolitan?

• Traditional: Five dominant humanoid races (each about 18%, varies by district), 8% are exotic races like the giff, the remaining 2% cover the higher CR range with their own demographics
• Goblin Market: Everyone is a minority
• Combo: Five super-minority (roughly 8% each), the rest is a grab-bag of stuff like bariaur, gith, and hynerian

[Username17]

The law of large numbers has weird effects when you're talking about populations, and I think it should be an "everyone is a minority" situation because of it. While a few precincts should have significant plurality populations, I don't think you should get majorities even there. The new Finality is based on a major city, and it therefore has a population in the 8 million range (divided among 20 precincts, so roughly four hundred thousand people each). But a lot of cities in D&D-land are based on medieval trading posts and the like, and their population is orders of magnitude smaller.

To put a face on it, there are only twenty thousand Drow in Menzoberranzan (the City of Spiders). Their slave population is ten times their Drow population, but nevertheless any precinct of Finality that has at least a 5% Drow population has more Drow in it than Menzoberranzan. Blingdenstone (of King Schnicktick) has only 12000 people in it total, and the population is almost all Gnomes. Any given Precinct that was 18% Gnomish would have six times the Gnomish population of Blingdenstone's entire population and be entitled to a half dozen Gnomish "Kings" on those grounds.

This is not, of course, a unique problem to D&D land. In Shadowrun, we are asked to take Tir na nOg seriously as the "Elvish Nation", but of course in that setting there are considerably more Elves in the City of Tokyo than there are in that entire country. Big cities are big, while small countries are small. Like how in the real world there are more Irish people in Metropolitan New York than there are in the Republic of Ireland, and when you land in Dublin Airport the first thing you see is a giant mural depicting "great Irish people" who are coincidentally almost all actually Americans.

Even "common" creatures like Humans, Dwarves, Goblins, and Orcs shouldn't be more than 3-5% of the population total, because that's still more of them in the whole city than you would expect to find in most D&D regions. The entire country of Vaasa would be 1.8% of the population of the grand city of Finality. The Free City of Greyhawk is only 2%. The biggest countries in Forgotten Realms land or Greyhawk are actually the Middle Eastern countries (Calimshan and Mulhorand and discounting Shou Lung as actually being a different setting), because it's based on Medieval Europe and Turkey and Egypt are simply bigger and more important than France and Germany at the time. And even those countries come in a bit north of Five million residents. Giving Finality a majority population would put that population on an equal footing with the largest empires of the Forgotten Realms, which is weird and undesirable.

-Username17

[Vebyast]

If the largest demographic in Finality is only 4% of the population, there are at least 20 different demographics around; if demographics are following the usual power laws, then a sufficiently crowded area might have members of 60 or 80 distinct demographics in line of sight. With demographics including things like "Djinn" and "Balor" and "Storm Giant", those are probably some pretty interesting streets.

[Username17]

Well, we know there are a lot more than 20 demographics around. Let's assume that major non-aquatic humanoid demographics are "common". So we have:

• Humans
  Hobgoblins
  Dwarves
  Goblins
  Orcs
  Elves
  Gnomes
  Halflings
  Lizardfolk
  Gnolls
  Bugbear
  Gith
  Planetouched
  Troglodyte (boy is that going to suck!)
  Kobold
  Kenku
  Dark Ones
  Mongrelfolk

So that's 18 common Humanoid demographics. But wait! The Gith consider themselves to be two demographics (-zerai and -yanki). The Elves consider themselves to be about seventy billion, but let's concern ourselves with the "major" types of "High, Grey, Dark, and Wood" - that's four. The Lizardfolk consider the Blackscale tribes to be a different species because they are apparently 19th century racialists. The only badtouched race that anyone gives a fuck about is the Tiefling, but technically there are like twelve flavors of those assholes. Even Dwarves have Derros and Duergar and Gold Dwarves and Mountain Dwarves and Deep Dwarves to worry about. I don't even know how you would report the demographic numbers on Goblins with their Forestkith and Rhinohorns and fuck-who-knows-what-all.

But wait! Just because it isn't a Humanoid doesn't mean it isn't common! Many of the "Monstrous Humanoids" are basically just humanoids and no one knows why they were categorized any differently. Grimlocks, Kuo-Toa, Yuan-Ti, Abeils, Boggles, Thri-Kreen, Desmodu, Ophidians, Yurians, Armands, Goatfolk, and Quaggoths are all basically Humanoids. I'm not saying they should all be "Common", but they are all basically Humanoids. So are the Fey, for the most part. And that's another over 30 monsters before we get into the Half-Fey Template, though I doubt many of them should be considered "common". Then we have Giants, of which I don't think anyone is demanding commonality for Cloud Giants, Cyclopses or Firbolgs, it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider Ogres or Trolls for the honor. And of course there are Outsiders who are presumably the city's original inhabitants. At the very least crap like Imps, Quasits, Mephits, and Manes should all be "common".

And that's just the living. The various undead creatures are probably different enough from their source species and each other to be considered a couple of separate demographics.

Bottom line: I see more than thirty creatures who should probably be considered a "common demographic", and that would mean that even if there was no space given for uncommon or rare creatures that the average "common" demographic is still less than 3% of the population. But of course, that would leave no space for Changelings, Minotaurs, Glabrezu, or Werewolves, which would be a tragedy of the highest order. With all the crazy crap, I would say that more likely we're looking at 20-30% of the population being uncommon and rare demographics. Meaning that the average common demographic is less than 2% of the total.

Thus giving us our maxim: Any Race Which Comprises More Than 1% of the Population is Considered "Common"

Or to put it another way: you are a "common" demographic if there are at least a hundred thousand of you spread among the twenty Precincts of Finality (which I point out: is still larger than the population of Lantan even before 4th edition found that it was embarrassing and had giant waves literally wash the Gnome homeland away).

That being said: we should probably have a couple of "very common" races just to make crowd scenes easier. Say, 20% of the population is comprised of just Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, Hobgoblins, and Goblins. With the other common races being in the 1-2% range, and Uncommon races being less than 1% and "rare" races being less than one tenth of one percent (which still means you could have nearly eight thousand Rakshasa or Sand Giants in town, which sounds like kind of a lot).

-Username17

[Prak]

Troglodyte (boy is that going to suck!)

I would imagine that it's considered polite for any member of a race with a stench ability to wear something which mitigates it, either a heavy perfume (or rather, something that smells a lot but relatively neutrally, like a relatively large quantity of vanilla or alcohol) or a magic item which negates it. Prestidigitation rings could probably suffice. Or at least change "Stench" into "smells like fresh baked chocolate chip cookies all the time, right under your nose"

I don't even know how you would report the demographic numbers on Goblins with their Forestkith and Rhinohorns and fuck-who-knows-what-all.

Given how classically highly morphic, and of course, heavily discriminated, goblins tend to be, I could totally see goblins as being similar to claiming tribe status for native americans in the US. You have to have a certain number of goblins displaying a trait or collection of traits, preferably not all from one family line, to count as a new kind of goblin. But even then, I could see the goblins constantly clamouring to be counted as a number of separate demographics, but always being lumped together by everyone else.

The various undead creatures are probably different enough from their source species and each other to be considered a couple of separate demographics.

Probably at least "Corporeal" and "Incorporeal," with so many sanctions related to incorporeality that it's essentially illegal to be a ghost. There's no actual law against it, but you're under so many restrictions and watched suspiciously by so many people, that you stick to Ghost Harlem and look funny at any "bodies" that wander in, until they walk the fuck back out.

Say, 20% of the population is comprised of just Humans, Orcs, Dwarves, Hobgoblins, and Goblins.

It seems kind of weird to have a planar metropolis where 20% of the population is stuff you could see in any large material plane city. Would people be against saying "intermarriage between humanoids and outsiders is so common in Finality that most of the "common" races display minor cosmetic outsider traits," that they have outsider ancestors, but so far back, or so diluted, that they don't even qualify for the fiendish or celestial templates?

[virgil]

It seems kind of weird to have a planar metropolis where 20% of the population is stuff you could see in any large material plane city. Would people be against saying "intermarriage between humanoids and outsiders is so common in Finality that most of the "common" races display minor cosmetic outsider traits," that they have outsider ancestors, but so far back, or so diluted, that they don't even qualify for the fiendish or celestial templates?

It wouldn't be weird at all. Consider the cantina scene in Star Wars. That one scene alone is nearly 50% human, and Frank is suggesting halving that demographic dominance and then splitting it 5 ways; before Luke and Obi-wan enter, Han and Wuher would be the only humans there.

Another demographic question, power level. When it comes to random encounters, we don't want 1st level players to have to seriously worry about being involved in any conflict that includes a glabrezu. I don't think going the way of old-school dungeons and having each district have a level is the way to go, but I'm at a loss how to properly represent this.