Powerlevels and Pretension: FatR's own fantasy heartbreaker
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deaddmwalking
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Thaluikhain
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Yes, so far this seems to be the most appropriate suggestion, thanks.Thaluikhain wrote: Dragon Warriors did the exact opposite, and called such spells "Direct attack". Indirect attack spells involved creating fire or something, which then affects the target (or not) normally, same as mundane fire would.
As I keep GMing this system, filling in monster manual, I'm also writing down the more specific setting. Here's a short 500-words pitch for the concept:
The Twilight Age
Since the dawn of ages, since the time when the first realm of the first sapient race erected the first building on the Hollow World, countless civilizations have risen, reached their glorious zenith, only to eventually decline and perish, over the course of countless aeons. Some left behind mysterious artifacts and forbidding dungeons, monsters and perils sleeping deep within the earth, or even heirs and descendants, still plotting a return to former glory. Most vanished without a trace, ages of their ascent, glory and downfall long forgotten by mortals.
And now yet another great civilization is sliding perilously close to this fate. Just a couple of centuries ago the mighty Eternal League reigned supreme on two continents, uniting men, elves, dwarves and others younger races. Great were the works of its Lords, who united all lands they could reach with their mastery of technology and magic. The age of their bright noon was the age of floating castles and machines of bronze and silver soaring through the sky, of monsters tamed and spirits bound to serve mortals, of shining teleportation crystals and glittering towers reaching past the clouds to command the very elements, of knowledge and plenty that seemed limitless.
That age is in the past. The last of the old Lords are long gone, and all of their successors have long been unworthy, lacking both power and vision, relying on wonders and miracles they inherited to keep things going and enforce their authority. The world of long peace and easy, decadent life no longer needed great heroes, and so the art of achieving supernatural physical and mental abilities by cultivating one’s Divine Spark through perils and challenges waned. Fewer and fewer people could understand the miracle machinery maintaining the Eternal League enough to maintain it, much less to improve it or to replace parts lost to accidents or civil wars. Decay, imperceptible at first, set in. With every passing year Lords of the League were less and less willing to risk the precious artifacts of the past for non-essential tasks, such as maintaining law and order in outlying provinces and among distant, barbaric peoples, who bent their knees before the might of the League but never were fully civilized.
Even as the official historians kept counting years of the Eternal Age, and lavishing their increasingly petty, neurotic, and irrational Lords with praise, the Twilight Age had began.
Now the Eternal League is still a shining colossus, standing in the middle of the known world, but it is no longer THE known world. Its core lands still drown in luxury, but on the former periphery semi-barbarian kingdoms, whose kings only remain satellites of the League on paper, fight wholly barbarian tribes and arising monster threats; while closer to the ailing heart of civilization corrupt officials scheme and jockey for power. Dark powers and otherworldly invaders who were lying low for a time now stalk the world of mortals once again. The time of heroes is returning. Whether these heroes will bring the “Eternal” League down once or for all, or restore it to a new golden age, whether they create a new and better civilization or leave only chaos and desolation in their wake, remains to be seen.
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The Twilight Age
Since the dawn of ages, since the time when the first realm of the first sapient race erected the first building on the Hollow World, countless civilizations have risen, reached their glorious zenith, only to eventually decline and perish, over the course of countless aeons. Some left behind mysterious artifacts and forbidding dungeons, monsters and perils sleeping deep within the earth, or even heirs and descendants, still plotting a return to former glory. Most vanished without a trace, ages of their ascent, glory and downfall long forgotten by mortals.
And now yet another great civilization is sliding perilously close to this fate. Just a couple of centuries ago the mighty Eternal League reigned supreme on two continents, uniting men, elves, dwarves and others younger races. Great were the works of its Lords, who united all lands they could reach with their mastery of technology and magic. The age of their bright noon was the age of floating castles and machines of bronze and silver soaring through the sky, of monsters tamed and spirits bound to serve mortals, of shining teleportation crystals and glittering towers reaching past the clouds to command the very elements, of knowledge and plenty that seemed limitless.
That age is in the past. The last of the old Lords are long gone, and all of their successors have long been unworthy, lacking both power and vision, relying on wonders and miracles they inherited to keep things going and enforce their authority. The world of long peace and easy, decadent life no longer needed great heroes, and so the art of achieving supernatural physical and mental abilities by cultivating one’s Divine Spark through perils and challenges waned. Fewer and fewer people could understand the miracle machinery maintaining the Eternal League enough to maintain it, much less to improve it or to replace parts lost to accidents or civil wars. Decay, imperceptible at first, set in. With every passing year Lords of the League were less and less willing to risk the precious artifacts of the past for non-essential tasks, such as maintaining law and order in outlying provinces and among distant, barbaric peoples, who bent their knees before the might of the League but never were fully civilized.
Even as the official historians kept counting years of the Eternal Age, and lavishing their increasingly petty, neurotic, and irrational Lords with praise, the Twilight Age had began.
Now the Eternal League is still a shining colossus, standing in the middle of the known world, but it is no longer THE known world. Its core lands still drown in luxury, but on the former periphery semi-barbarian kingdoms, whose kings only remain satellites of the League on paper, fight wholly barbarian tribes and arising monster threats; while closer to the ailing heart of civilization corrupt officials scheme and jockey for power. Dark powers and otherworldly invaders who were lying low for a time now stalk the world of mortals once again. The time of heroes is returning. Whether these heroes will bring the “Eternal” League down once or for all, or restore it to a new golden age, whether they create a new and better civilization or leave only chaos and desolation in their wake, remains to be seen.
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"The golden age ended because people didn't do enough fighting anymore."
That veers uncomfortably close to the kind of IRL far-right rhetoric that says the American people have gotten soft because we don't solve enough of our problems with fighting (either as individuals or as a nation). This is horseshit; there does not exist an actual real historical example of a civilization collapsing due to not fighting enough. The only reason someone would profess this belief IRL is that they are really itching to fight someone, typically a domestic minority group that has too many rights or a foreign power that has too much money.
Moreover and more importantly, this reasoning for the end of the Golden Age doesn't really provide a hook for adventuring. OK, now that the Golden Age has collapsed there are dungeons containing monsters and treasure again and that's good, but fixing the thing that caused the end of the last Golden Age isn't a thing you can plausibly do via adventuring and that's bad. I'm thinking of something like FFX's Sin, where you absolutely cannot start fixing all the other problems in the world until you find a way to permanently put down the invincible, endlessly respawning kaiju. It doesn't need to be an actual physical threat like that, but it does need to be something that a party of 3-6 heroes could plausibly resolve.
You probably want your world to be in the Dark Age rather than the Twilight Age, because this is when the world is most in need of saving and indeed rebuilding. You could have a game setting where the PCs aspire to collectively play Diocletian by saving a civilization that was otherwise likely to unravel and collapse, but that requires you and any MCs running your system to commit a lot harder to the specifics of the setting. Having PCs go out to become the adventurer/conqueror/kings of new kingdoms is a lot easier from a starting point of "squatting in the ruins of the past." Generally starting from the nadir of civilization gives the MC a lot more latitude for telling different stories in your setting and requires a lot less work from you in establishing the setting. Not to mention it's probably more conducive to PC agency since so much less of the dev work has been put into developing the Declining Empire with the necessary assumption built in that PCs will be interacting with it extensively.
You can certainly have the rump state of the previous Golden Age still around and you can get some mileage out of adventuring in the decadent, run-down shambling corpse of the remembered past glory. You kind of have to pick whether you're looking to crib off the Byzantines or Gondor. Gondor's problem was Sauron, and when Aragorn+Gandalf+Frodo+Theoden solved that issue, the Golden Age came roaring back. The Byzantines had too many hundreds of problems for a chosen hero or band of heroes to fix, and not a single one of them was that people weren't fighting enough.
That veers uncomfortably close to the kind of IRL far-right rhetoric that says the American people have gotten soft because we don't solve enough of our problems with fighting (either as individuals or as a nation). This is horseshit; there does not exist an actual real historical example of a civilization collapsing due to not fighting enough. The only reason someone would profess this belief IRL is that they are really itching to fight someone, typically a domestic minority group that has too many rights or a foreign power that has too much money.
Moreover and more importantly, this reasoning for the end of the Golden Age doesn't really provide a hook for adventuring. OK, now that the Golden Age has collapsed there are dungeons containing monsters and treasure again and that's good, but fixing the thing that caused the end of the last Golden Age isn't a thing you can plausibly do via adventuring and that's bad. I'm thinking of something like FFX's Sin, where you absolutely cannot start fixing all the other problems in the world until you find a way to permanently put down the invincible, endlessly respawning kaiju. It doesn't need to be an actual physical threat like that, but it does need to be something that a party of 3-6 heroes could plausibly resolve.
You probably want your world to be in the Dark Age rather than the Twilight Age, because this is when the world is most in need of saving and indeed rebuilding. You could have a game setting where the PCs aspire to collectively play Diocletian by saving a civilization that was otherwise likely to unravel and collapse, but that requires you and any MCs running your system to commit a lot harder to the specifics of the setting. Having PCs go out to become the adventurer/conqueror/kings of new kingdoms is a lot easier from a starting point of "squatting in the ruins of the past." Generally starting from the nadir of civilization gives the MC a lot more latitude for telling different stories in your setting and requires a lot less work from you in establishing the setting. Not to mention it's probably more conducive to PC agency since so much less of the dev work has been put into developing the Declining Empire with the necessary assumption built in that PCs will be interacting with it extensively.
You can certainly have the rump state of the previous Golden Age still around and you can get some mileage out of adventuring in the decadent, run-down shambling corpse of the remembered past glory. You kind of have to pick whether you're looking to crib off the Byzantines or Gondor. Gondor's problem was Sauron, and when Aragorn+Gandalf+Frodo+Theoden solved that issue, the Golden Age came roaring back. The Byzantines had too many hundreds of problems for a chosen hero or band of heroes to fix, and not a single one of them was that people weren't fighting enough.
I really don't care about your modern political hang-ups. If you cannot recognize a clear reference to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (or most of the successive Chinese dynasties... or most of the successive Caliphates...), I don't see that as a problem I'm responsible for.
Second, the only thing a party of 3-6 heroes cannot plausibly resolve is enthropy of the Multiverse. This is even true in most editions of DnD, if you exploit the system to become more powerful than the authors accounted for, as mentioned above, and this is explicitly true here.
Also that, as with the fall of Western Roman Empire, had as one of the glaringly obvious causes - though not the sole cause - the precise fact that people weren't fighting enough. Or indeed at all. And therefore loss of one mercenary army (at that point composed largely of barbarian foreigners, and in remaining part of semi-barbarian people from border territories), meant loss or destruction of whole provinces.
If you want a more apt comparison to the idea of my setting, consider Rome of late 1st century AD. The political structure had clearly gone to shit, as evidenced by repeated assassinations of emperors (real and alleged) and two dynasty-change civil wars within the memory of one generation. Most of the factors later specified as the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome, such as the army being nearly all-powerful, self-serving, and for the most part no longer actually Roman (though staffed with provincials, rather than foreigners, for the moment) are already in place. Yet instead of everything going where it already was going, i.e. from bad to worse, Rome got a whole century of peace and prosperity, the Golden Age of Antonines, solely by the virtue of a string of good rulers.
And if so much was accomplished by normal men, imagine what magical superheroes can do!
Excuse me, but I'm not sure what to answer except "lolwut". Last I heard, Conan and Moorcock's heroes, like Elric and Corum had pretty famous adventures. Their settings were explicitly built on the concept of the repeating cycle of civilizational decadence and downfall, with Conan coming onto the scene in the early-to-mid decline phase (at least regarding the kindgom he picked for himself), and the latter two at the moments of final collapse.Mord wrote:Moreover and more importantly, this reasoning for the end of the Golden Age doesn't really provide a hook for adventuring.
First, I don't quite remember any DnD setting ever offering PC a method of permanently resolving its chief source of conflicts. Without pushing themselves far beyond the level of power that those settings' creators had in mind. Eberron was the closest, and it still had a whole continent controlled by eldritch abominations who were higher level than you could ever be and a society of demons who were much higher level than you could ever be. So, even if your statement was true, I'm not sure about its relevance. A party can in fact have adventures without fixing everything that's wrong about the world.Mord wrote:It doesn't need to be an actual physical threat like that, but it does need to be something that a party of 3-6 heroes could plausibly resolve.
Second, the only thing a party of 3-6 heroes cannot plausibly resolve is enthropy of the Multiverse. This is even true in most editions of DnD, if you exploit the system to become more powerful than the authors accounted for, as mentioned above, and this is explicitly true here.
No, I absolutely don't. That's the starting point of most existing DnD (and many non-DnD) settings, and I want to try something new.Mord wrote:You probably want your world to be in the Dark Age rather than the Twilight Age,
How so? Post-apocalypse (and even post-post-apocalypse, in the vein of original FR or Greyhawk, when the civilization made some recovery, but pretty much everything outside of the few largest cities is one big dangerous frontier) in a monster-infested wasteland naturally lends itself to one kind of stories only: building a power base (usually in terms of your personal levels, in case of DnD) so you can take on stronger challenges and eventually secure a corner of the world for yourself.Mord wrote:Generally starting from the nadir of civilization gives the MC a lot more latitude for telling different stories in your setting
The Byzantium had one key problem, which, as it happened, was precisely the problem for a band of heroes to fix. It was not being able to stop first Persians from razing its richest provinces to the ground, and then the Arab apocalypse. After that Byzantium was irreversibly reduced to a rump state with its main sources of income lost, its international authority lost, society changed completely to deal with overwhelming everyday external threat, and all realistic hopes of restoring the full Roman empire gone.Mord wrote:The Byzantines had too many hundreds of problems for a chosen hero or band of heroes to fix, and not a single one of them was that people weren't fighting enough.
Also that, as with the fall of Western Roman Empire, had as one of the glaringly obvious causes - though not the sole cause - the precise fact that people weren't fighting enough. Or indeed at all. And therefore loss of one mercenary army (at that point composed largely of barbarian foreigners, and in remaining part of semi-barbarian people from border territories), meant loss or destruction of whole provinces.
If you want a more apt comparison to the idea of my setting, consider Rome of late 1st century AD. The political structure had clearly gone to shit, as evidenced by repeated assassinations of emperors (real and alleged) and two dynasty-change civil wars within the memory of one generation. Most of the factors later specified as the reasons for the decline and fall of Rome, such as the army being nearly all-powerful, self-serving, and for the most part no longer actually Roman (though staffed with provincials, rather than foreigners, for the moment) are already in place. Yet instead of everything going where it already was going, i.e. from bad to worse, Rome got a whole century of peace and prosperity, the Golden Age of Antonines, solely by the virtue of a string of good rulers.
And if so much was accomplished by normal men, imagine what magical superheroes can do!
Last edited by FatR on Mon Aug 27, 2018 8:24 am, edited 2 times in total.
And partially as an answer (though I wrote this fragment down yesterday):
The World and its Tone: High Adventure
The world of the Twilight Age is a world of high fantasy and high adventure. Magic and weird science may no longer march forward today, but at the heart of civilization wonders and miracles they created, such as weather control, flying machines, tamed monsters, teleportation networks, or automaton servitors remain everyday sights. Common soldiers of the Eternal League go to war armed with muskets and alchemical flamethrowers – and those are just makeshift solutions, improvised specifically because shortages of more terrible weapons started to demand large armies. Miraculous cures, that can even revive recently dead, are widely available. Heroes use Divine Spark to transcend their natural limitations, and the greatest among the heroes of today can fly, strike faster than mundane men can see, become invisible, or rain fire and lightning on their enemies; while legendary figures of the past crossed continents in seconds, leveled whole cities, raised castles overnight, and invented most of the arcane machinery used today. The world may be in its twilight, but it is still magnificent, colorful and full of wonders.
And while the world may be in its twilight that does not mean that it is drowning in the darkness already. Certainly, the Eternal League has its share of evils, injustices and simply flaws, some rooted in decadence, some in easy surrender to demands of political expedience, and some in prideful arrogance of its founders. It wouldn’t be much a place to have adventures in otherwise! Certainly its present course is leading to destruction and downfall. Certainly there are great and terrible evils threatening the world of mortals. And certainly, some of people are already living in interesting times, while all the rest can expect such times in the future. But the League is still a fantastic civilization that provides the degree of peace and safety which would have been unimaginable before it, to a population, which numbers and prosperity also would have been unimaginable. Relatively few people among the powerful and the wealthy of the League are hopelessly corrupt, or wickedly depraved – most are merely complacent, believing that the existing order of things is indeed eternal, so maintaining it demands no special effort from them, and conceited, believing that this order is universal, so what works in the heart of the League can work everywhere. It would have not been impossible to shake the League again into shape and to send its external enemies scurrying back into the darkness even for leaders and heroes of merely human capability. The world of Twilight Age is not such world. Its heroes are mighty and larger-than-life, and their exciting exploits define the course of civilizations much more than boring inertia of social trends. Just like the Eternal League was built by heroes, on whose legacy it still relies, heroes can revitalize it, or replace it with something even better. Of course they also can bring it crashing down, through folly, malicious intent, or simple refusal to act. But that would be the result of their own choices, and not unsurmountable odds stacked against the civilization.
The World and its Tone: High Adventure
The world of the Twilight Age is a world of high fantasy and high adventure. Magic and weird science may no longer march forward today, but at the heart of civilization wonders and miracles they created, such as weather control, flying machines, tamed monsters, teleportation networks, or automaton servitors remain everyday sights. Common soldiers of the Eternal League go to war armed with muskets and alchemical flamethrowers – and those are just makeshift solutions, improvised specifically because shortages of more terrible weapons started to demand large armies. Miraculous cures, that can even revive recently dead, are widely available. Heroes use Divine Spark to transcend their natural limitations, and the greatest among the heroes of today can fly, strike faster than mundane men can see, become invisible, or rain fire and lightning on their enemies; while legendary figures of the past crossed continents in seconds, leveled whole cities, raised castles overnight, and invented most of the arcane machinery used today. The world may be in its twilight, but it is still magnificent, colorful and full of wonders.
And while the world may be in its twilight that does not mean that it is drowning in the darkness already. Certainly, the Eternal League has its share of evils, injustices and simply flaws, some rooted in decadence, some in easy surrender to demands of political expedience, and some in prideful arrogance of its founders. It wouldn’t be much a place to have adventures in otherwise! Certainly its present course is leading to destruction and downfall. Certainly there are great and terrible evils threatening the world of mortals. And certainly, some of people are already living in interesting times, while all the rest can expect such times in the future. But the League is still a fantastic civilization that provides the degree of peace and safety which would have been unimaginable before it, to a population, which numbers and prosperity also would have been unimaginable. Relatively few people among the powerful and the wealthy of the League are hopelessly corrupt, or wickedly depraved – most are merely complacent, believing that the existing order of things is indeed eternal, so maintaining it demands no special effort from them, and conceited, believing that this order is universal, so what works in the heart of the League can work everywhere. It would have not been impossible to shake the League again into shape and to send its external enemies scurrying back into the darkness even for leaders and heroes of merely human capability. The world of Twilight Age is not such world. Its heroes are mighty and larger-than-life, and their exciting exploits define the course of civilizations much more than boring inertia of social trends. Just like the Eternal League was built by heroes, on whose legacy it still relies, heroes can revitalize it, or replace it with something even better. Of course they also can bring it crashing down, through folly, malicious intent, or simple refusal to act. But that would be the result of their own choices, and not unsurmountable odds stacked against the civilization.
I don't remember reading many Conan, Elric or Corum stories that took place in an area with a strong central government (i.e. "a fantastic civilization that provides the degree of peace and safety which would have been unimaginable before it"). There's the very first few Elric stories, before he gets exiled, I suppose.FatR wrote: Last I heard, Conan and Moorcock's heroes, like Elric and Corum had pretty famous adventures. Their settings were explicitly built on the concept of the repeating cycle of civilizational decadence and downfall, with Conan coming onto the scene in the early-to-mid decline phase (at least regarding the kindgom he picked for himself), and the latter two at the moments of final collapse.
Hawkmoon's Granbretan sounds like a closer fit to what you're describing, perhaps.
This is a reasonable note. To explain in just a bit more detail for now (though I hoped the pitch would be able to get the point across in the last paragraph) the setting is envisioned as a series of circles, from the heartland, where law and order mostly hold, and you play the games of political intrigue, personal rivalries between princes and princesses of the world, or crime and investigation against high fantasy backdrop; through the outlying provinces, where civilization is weaker, law is fraying and you play games of uncovering corrupt officials, hunting monsters and evil cults, or participating in much bloodier and more underhanded politics; to the outermost lands where civilization and law basically no longer exist and you play games of your normal dungeoncrawling, taking down evil overlord wannabes, or building new kingdoms of your own. Of course, there is always a possibility of an "End of the Age" campaign, which shakes up the entire setting.
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deaddmwalking
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Why build if all will fall apart eventually? Why enjoy life if you're going to die? Why adventure in DnDLand if you cannot defeat all evil forever (shit, in most settings as intended by authors you cannot even make any lasting dent in forces of evil or prevent regular world-breaking events, though this is something I myself dislike)?
For a more constructive answer, as I said already "The End of the Age" would be a campaign option, but it would not be the only option. I'm writing something that is coherent enough to be used by other people instead of simple notes for my personal campaign, because I hope others may find it useful. That, I think, is more probable, if my material can serve for different types of campaigns, instead of just one campaign, where the party reshapes the setting in a fashion I'd approve of.
For a more constructive answer, as I said already "The End of the Age" would be a campaign option, but it would not be the only option. I'm writing something that is coherent enough to be used by other people instead of simple notes for my personal campaign, because I hope others may find it useful. That, I think, is more probable, if my material can serve for different types of campaigns, instead of just one campaign, where the party reshapes the setting in a fashion I'd approve of.
Oh... oh dear. I thought this was just your thoughtless regurgitation of the Generic Fantasy Setting Backstory. I didn't realize that this is actually how you believe things work in real life. That changes things.FatR wrote:I really don't care about your modern political hang-ups. If you cannot recognize a clear reference to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (or most of the successive Chinese dynasties... or most of the successive Caliphates...), I don't see that as a problem I'm responsible for.
The mission statement for PCs that you included in your elevator pitch explicitly says PCs should be able to restore the Golden Age:FatR wrote:Excuse me, but I'm not sure what to answer except "lolwut". Last I heard, Conan and Moorcock's heroes, like Elric and Corum had pretty famous adventures. Their settings were explicitly built on the concept of the repeating cycle of civilizational decadence and downfall, with Conan coming onto the scene in the early-to-mid decline phase (at least regarding the kindgom he picked for himself), and the latter two at the moments of final collapse.
If it's in your elevator pitch, I would assume it's pretty fucking important to your game. So what the fuck? Are PCs supposed to be able to resolve the causes for the end of the Golden Age or not? I literally cannot parse what your goal is for writing your own setting. Are we playing Conan, where we're carving a piece for ourselves out of a shitty world doomed to failure, or are we playing Something Empowering, where we're actually saving the fucking world?FatR wrote:The time of heroes is returning. Whether these heroes will bring the “Eternal” League down once or for all, or restore it to a new golden age, whether they create a new and better civilization or leave only chaos and desolation in their wake, remains to be seen.
EDIT: It seems based on your follow-up posts that you do indeed intend for players to be able to give the Golden Age Empire the needful shot in the arm. This is good. The following still applies.
Conan never fixed the fundamental problems of his setting because Conan topped out his career around 6th level. If we're talking about going any higher than that, you need to grapple with the fact that players can and will want to start fighting back against the causes for their PCs' world being a crapsack. If you're not setting out to build a player disempowerment machine for the purpose of jerking off the MC, you absolutely need to have the cause of the end of the Golden Age be a thing that is soluble by the efforts of a band of 3-6 heroes.
If the cause for the end of the Golden Age Empire is something as broad and nebulous as "people have gotten soft and forgotten the old ways" then you cannot fix the problem and bring back the Golden Age Empire through adventuring. I don't care how many 9th-level spell slots you expend, that is fundamentally not a problem you can fix with a band of PCs doing the things PCs do in a dungeon-crawling adventure game. Unless you are going to have a detailed system in place for being Lycurgus and designing a new civilization that will never become soft and weak like those boy-loving Athenians the resolution to your problem is going to be MTP. Whee. If I wanted an MTP solution to an MTP problem I wouldn't need to play your game.
Regarding other DnD settings, which are of questionable relevance to a brand-new game: I don't quite remember many DnD settings answering the question "what do you do in high-level play" with more than a shrug and a cursory suggestion that "it's up to your DM." One of the principal reasons for the Tomes is the absence of any consideration given in official materials to the consequences of high-level people being out and about in the various lands of DnD.FatR wrote:First, I don't quite remember any DnD setting ever offering PC a method of permanently resolving its chief source of conflicts. Without pushing themselves far beyond the level of power that those settings' creators had in mind. Eberron was the closest, and it still had a whole continent controlled by eldritch abominations who were higher level than you could ever be and a society of demons who were much higher level than you could ever be. So, even if your statement was true, I'm not sure about its relevance. A party can in fact have adventures without fixing everything that's wrong about the world.
Second, the only thing a party of 3-6 heroes cannot plausibly resolve is enthropy of the Multiverse. This is even true in most editions of DnD, if you exploit the system to become more powerful than the authors accounted for, as mentioned above, and this is explicitly true here.
The Forgotten Realms et al never came up with a decent answer or even seemed to seriously consider the question. You should not seek to emulate that failure. Eberron's answer was batshit insane, but there was some thought put into it and it was integrated into the low-level parts of the setting, which is all to the good.
Last edited by Mord on Mon Aug 27, 2018 7:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Look dude, if the setting pitch text literally says to you point blank "the cause for the decline is the lack of characters of high enough level, who can make sufficient DCs, cast high-level spells, and reliably ward off certain threats", only in more flowery words, I feel the answer to question "but how characters can fix things?" is, like, self-evident. (And therefore the answer of how long peace is connected to decline in a DnD-derived setting is also completely self-evident.)
If you want to have a discussion, please discuss the stuff I wrote, so that I have a reason to respond.
EDIT: Also, to think of it, how did you even manage to say that we should give a special answer to the question "what do you do in high-level play" (actually published settings do give an answer to that, but it is unsatisfying "the same shit as in mid-level play"), and then not even implicitly, but quite explicitly exclude "change the world through your power" as an answer?
If you want to have a discussion, please discuss the stuff I wrote, so that I have a reason to respond.
EDIT: Also, to think of it, how did you even manage to say that we should give a special answer to the question "what do you do in high-level play" (actually published settings do give an answer to that, but it is unsatisfying "the same shit as in mid-level play"), and then not even implicitly, but quite explicitly exclude "change the world through your power" as an answer?
Last edited by FatR on Mon Aug 27, 2018 8:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.
What the pitch text literally says is this:FatR wrote:Look dude, if the setting pitch text literally says to you point blank "the cause for the decline is the lack of characters of high enough level, who can make sufficient DCs, cast high-level spells, and reliably ward off certain threats", only in more flowery words, I feel the answer to question "but how characters can fix things?" is, like, self-evident. (And therefore the answer of how long peace is connected to decline in a DnD-derived setting is also completely self-evident.)
It seems like the meaning you want me to get from those words is something like this: "An entire civilization collectively stopped going to the trouble of leveling high enough to cast TEXAS-level spells because they mostly decided they would rather spend their lives loafing in their castles with their self-resetting traps of Create Hookers & Blow and then die as Level 1 Aristocrats." So let's engage with that.FatR wrote:The last of the old Lords are long gone, and all of their successors have long been unworthy, lacking both power and vision, relying on wonders and miracles they inherited to keep things going and enforce their authority. The world of long peace and easy, decadent life no longer needed great heroes, and so the art of achieving supernatural physical and mental abilities by cultivating one’s Divine Spark through perils and challenges waned.
It seems like the solution to the dissolution of the Golden Age Empire is the same thing as the principal symptom of the dissolution of the Golden Age Empire - namely, that not enough people are in sufficiently desperate straits that their only choice is to spend their lives as adventurers. So what the fuck does your party of 3-6 heroes do to save sapient humanoid-kind? Burn the grain silos and release a bunch of minotaurs? Sure, 99% of the villagers will die in the first winter, but a handful of survivors will gain class levels! It seems to me that your mighty heroes can at best aspire to have their successor Golden Age Empire escape the law of cycles by finding a balance where some people have airships and other people have to choose between starvation and hunting kobolds for food.
Such a setting will either privilege the skill of stabbing fools over every single skill that has to do with advancing human knowledge, art, or wisdom; or, at the very least, posit that such a level of gross inequality is necessary for civilization to continue to exist. It is a world where choosing to spend your life researching the medicinal properties of herbs is an objectively worse decision for yourself and for society as a whole than choosing to spend your life alternating between getting in street fights and hunting minotaurs.
If the problem in the world is "all the good lifestyles are going away" and the cause of that problem is "there are too many good lifestyles available" then there's no solution. If it is axiomatic in your world that the success of a civilization is the catalyst for its own demise, what the fuck is anyone supposed to do about it?FatR wrote:EDIT: Also, to think of it, how did you even manage to say that we should give a special answer to the question "what do you do in high-level play" (actually published settings do give an answer to that, but it is unsatisfying "the same shit as in mid-level play"), and then not even implicitly, but quite explicitly exclude "change the world through your power" as an answer?
If my band of 3-6 heroes reaches TEXAS level and we create a kingdom of prosperity and plenty, we have doomed the next generation to decadence and the one after that to collapse. That fucking sucks and I don't want to play that game.
If my band of 3-6 heroes reaches TEXAS level and instead we create a kingdom where a limited number of our hangers-on get prosperity and the rest are part of a carefully cultivated underclass that is sufficiently desperate to follow in our footsteps in achieving TEXAS level and is sufficiently large that at least a few of those who make the attempt will survive... Well, that fucking sucks too and I don't want to play that game either.
Last edited by Mord on Mon Aug 27, 2018 10:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Imo, it is because of the problems of the Roman Republic is not solved that caused the eventual collapse of both empires. For example, nobody ever has a good solution to solve the problem of Roman armies keep getting less Roman soldiers, and that is caused indirectly or directly by a number of issues that are too costly to address in the present, such as should other Italians that fought in Roman armies get Roman citizenship(and the associated benefits), who can be a Roman soldier and who should represent them and try to solve their problems in the senate.
In all, I think Mord is right that "people are not fighting enough" shouldn't be a hill that you die on. I think you should list a big list of the possible causes(or a combo of them) of the end of Golden Age and the possible solutions.
In all, I think Mord is right that "people are not fighting enough" shouldn't be a hill that you die on. I think you should list a big list of the possible causes(or a combo of them) of the end of Golden Age and the possible solutions.
I'm not sure what to answer to a person who keeps asking me "but what the party would do if fate of the world was not determined by heroes but by my concept of social dynamics?" after being told no less than two times in very straight words that the fate of the world is in fact determined by heroes. But one last time I'll try.
Of course, there were whole 9 of them, and not 3-6 you insist on, but hey, they were NPCs, and at least one of them planned to betray the rest from the beginning.
But then again if a band of high-level heroes are okay enough with mass death to employ your scheme, they can - and will - just use population as literal human resources to make themselves or certain types of minions even more powerful and awesome. Indeed, they will go undead, the ultimate end solution for anyone who cares for longevity of their empire more than for well-being of its people. Or they can just fuck off to do whatever they find fun and let the low-level scrubs live or die as they can manage.
Why instead of either they should treat the world as a video game, where the win condition is making whatever system they built last as long past their demise as possible? I have to ask: do you actually play like this at the actual table?
*As a matter of fact, the last words of the epilogue for my last completed big campaign were: "The age of prosperity you brought lasted long, by mortal measures. Yet eventually it ended, as did the Long Summer. But that was a whole another story."
The exact thing the party of 9 heroes did to found the empire in the first place. Become (de-facto) absolute monarchs of nations from which they hailed or which they liked. Exterminate all the immediate threats. Summon some elemental servants and bind them into lasting contracts. Use your ability to zip across the world, have virtually instant communications, detect lies, magically enforced oaths and simply high social stats to ensure that your local administrators actually uphold the law. Use some spells which are spare change to you to strategically boost agriculture and infrastructure building in afflicted regions. Use your free time to craft magical things useful for your empire, because hey, your own slots for buffs and items are harshly hard-capped here, so you don't need to devote all your crafting time to yourself (speaking of that, need to assign Craft DCs to golems and shit). Rapid-drill some basic (but badass from a level 1 viewpoint) stuff into armies of henchmen. Engage in social engineering, including spreading a religion that from your viewpoint reduces risk of some cultist fuckers actually summoning demons or worshipping false gods into existence. Engage in genetic/magic engineering. Work on your personal longevity. Whatever floats your boat, really, at this point.Mord wrote:So what the fuck does your party of 3-6 heroes do to save sapient humanoid-kind?
Of course, there were whole 9 of them, and not 3-6 you insist on, but hey, they were NPCs, and at least one of them planned to betray the rest from the beginning.
Imposing conditions of harsh Darwingygaxian selection on the population would work. To an extent. You need to somehow contrive a mechanism that would make - appearing unpredictably by their very nature - heroes of epic levels (that is, level 9+ here) and now are close enough to you in power to be a threat, join up your cause, instead of devoting their lives to kicking shit out of the evil overlord that you now are.Mord wrote:Burn the grain silos and release a bunch of minotaurs? Sure, 99% of the villagers will die in the first winter, but a handful of survivors will gain class levels! It seems to me that your mighty heroes can at best aspire to have their successor Golden Age Empire escape the law of cycles by finding a balance where some people have airships and other people have to choose between starvation and hunting kobolds for food.
But then again if a band of high-level heroes are okay enough with mass death to employ your scheme, they can - and will - just use population as literal human resources to make themselves or certain types of minions even more powerful and awesome. Indeed, they will go undead, the ultimate end solution for anyone who cares for longevity of their empire more than for well-being of its people. Or they can just fuck off to do whatever they find fun and let the low-level scrubs live or die as they can manage.
Why instead of either they should treat the world as a video game, where the win condition is making whatever system they built last as long past their demise as possible? I have to ask: do you actually play like this at the actual table?
Welcome to DnD, don't stub your toe on its core assumption. At least casters (and non-casters here as well) get means to benefit the rest of humanity, as a part of their combo platter powers.Mord wrote:Such a setting will either privilege the skill of stabbing fools over every single skill that has to do with advancing human knowledge, art, or wisdom;
Welcome to DnD, I hope the concept of character levels with its inherent gross inequality does not shock you too much.Mord wrote:or, at the very least, posit that such a level of gross inequality is necessary for civilization to continue to exist.
And once again: welcome to DnD.Mord wrote:It is a world where choosing to spend your life researching the medicinal properties of herbs is an objectively worse decision for yourself and for society as a whole than choosing to spend your life alternating between getting in street fights and hunting minotaurs.
Should I also make everyone in the setting perfectly immortal? If it is axiomatic in my world that life is a catalyst for death, what the fuck is anyone supposed to do about it? Indeed, to satisfy your stated requirements for the game you'd want to play in, I'd also have to somehow conceive a setting with no entropy, because in an entropic universe the whole concept of a permanent, fixed solution to the problem of survival and prosperity is absurd.* I think that's a bit beyond the capacity of my imagination.Mord wrote:If the problem in the world is "all the good lifestyles are going away" and the cause of that problem is "there are too many good lifestyles available" then there's no solution. If it is axiomatic in your world that the success of a civilization is the catalyst for its own demise, what the fuck is anyone supposed to do about it?
*As a matter of fact, the last words of the epilogue for my last completed big campaign were: "The age of prosperity you brought lasted long, by mortal measures. Yet eventually it ended, as did the Long Summer. But that was a whole another story."
This is worth considering, actually. After all, it is not actually like people, as a rule, have a clear, unchallenged idea why things go to shit when they do, and having multiple possible causes would allow people to discuss them in-setting, so that politics of the League won't consist of pure jockeying for personal power.Mioor wrote: In all, I think Mord is right that "people are not fighting enough" shouldn't be a hill that you die on. I think you should list a big list of the possible causes(or a combo of them) of the end of Golden Age and the possible solutions.
Last edited by FatR on Tue Aug 28, 2018 1:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Thaluikhain
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That seems to be a bit of a weird mash-up of generic fantasy setting and fall of the Roman Empire (or, alternatively, "Make Eternal League Great Again"), but setting choice is subjective. If that's what you/players want, fine, even if it's not to everyone's taste.
I might recommend blurring the time when things were going well and the time's when things weren't a bit, though. Long standing issues that the League managed to do well in spite of, it's success and power wobbling up and down over time, but with a general downward trend recently.
I might recommend blurring the time when things were going well and the time's when things weren't a bit, though. Long standing issues that the League managed to do well in spite of, it's success and power wobbling up and down over time, but with a general downward trend recently.
Might just be me, be it seems that phrase doesn't fit the writing style of the rest of it.FatR wrote:Just a couple of centuries ago
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Omegonthesane
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Having your system outlive your direct intervention is, literally, the only win condition in nation building in real life. Everything else is a bonus objective; if your project cannot outlive you, you've failed.FatR wrote:Why instead of either they should treat the world as a video game, where the win condition is making whatever system they built last as long past their demise as possible? I have to ask: do you actually play like this at the actual table?
I wouldn't have even bought into that one Exalted/WoD crossover without the promise that we'd get to make changes that no force could ever reverse, and I wouldn't have been satisfied with any ending less profound than us killing the Wyrm more permanently than the Neverborn so it was dead and could never return or be replaced or even be a lingering undead horror.
Last edited by Omegonthesane on Tue Aug 28, 2018 6:32 am, edited 2 times in total.
Kaelik wrote:Because powerful men get away with terrible shit, and even the public domain ones get ignored, and then, when the floodgates open, it turns out there was a goddam flood behind it.
Zak S, Zak Smith, Dndwithpornstars, Zak Sabbath, Justin Bieber, shitmuffin
And no system had existed for as little as 300 years - which is how long certain races live naturally in both stock DnDland and here - without going through some major strife and changing so much, that you probably would have looked with horrified astonishment upon the end results.Omegonthesane wrote: Having your system outlive your direct intervention is, literally, the only win condition in nation building in real life. Everything else is a bonus objective; if your project cannot outlive you, you've failed.
Well, killing something naturally lends itself much more believably to permanency than creating something, doesn't it?Omegonthesane wrote:I wouldn't have even bought into that one Exalted/WoD crossover without the promise that we'd get to make changes that no force could ever reverse, and I wouldn't have been satisfied with any ending less profound than us killing the Wyrm more permanently than the Neverborn so it was dead and could never return or be replaced or even be a lingering undead horror.
But there is a point here, from which I too long allowed myself to distracted by bad real-world arguments. DnD is power fantasy, and people want to do the impossible in their power fantasy. Point taken. I should not obviously imply barriers in the front of that. No, I'm not going to make all problems solvable by killing some clearly identifiable source of evil, but both the pitch and certain core assumptions bear rethinking.
Last edited by FatR on Tue Aug 28, 2018 7:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
Indeed, I think that just about every kitchen sink setting (e.g. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Golarion) has a "deteriorating empire" zone in it.Thaluikhain wrote:That seems to be a bit of a weird mash-up of generic fantasy setting and fall of the Roman Empire (or, alternatively, "Make Eternal League Great Again"), but setting choice is subjective.
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Thaluikhain
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I can see the appeal, a decaying empire/return to glory is an emotive theme, seen in everything from LotR (and thus Tolkien rip-offs, which is at least 50% of fantasy) to fascist movements, and it explains ancient ruins full of fancier treasure than what your local magician can make when commissioned. But I'm a bit over the idea.hogarth wrote:Indeed, I think that just about every kitchen sink setting (e.g. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Golarion) has a "deteriorating empire" zone in it.
The more interesting takes have the past be different rather than universally better.
So Rome can build roads and concrete ports and aqueducts, but not windmills, water mills, plate armour, or heavy warhorses.
The 1960's can have a large family house cost 3 year's median wage and you have your job for life if you want it, retire at 50 set for life, but clothes and shoes are all hand-me-downs because new ones are too expensive, and hand writing is the only affordable inter-city communication method, and Russia is something the FBI arrests you for reading about in the library, and the thing you worry about your kid getting killed by at school is nuclear armageddon. Racism was the law, police would arrest people of different races for talking to each other in much of the country. But cheap houses and jobs for life, bro.
And in D&D, artifacts can just be different stuff, with maybe unfortunate side-effects because that was just how shit was back then. Swords where you had to kill innocent people for power, constantly, and gave you devil-eyes and terrible BO, seemed a good deal, not even really better than modern ones, just have weird powers not otherwise available. Armour that makes you much harder to hurt but slowly kills you, and you can't take it off, sweet deal back then, no one even knows how to make it now.
Most old D&D artifacts were that way, kinda good, sometimes completely rule-breaking good in some conditions, but also, would turn you into an evil NPC quite often. Which if you're an evil NPC already is a great deal!
So Rome can build roads and concrete ports and aqueducts, but not windmills, water mills, plate armour, or heavy warhorses.
The 1960's can have a large family house cost 3 year's median wage and you have your job for life if you want it, retire at 50 set for life, but clothes and shoes are all hand-me-downs because new ones are too expensive, and hand writing is the only affordable inter-city communication method, and Russia is something the FBI arrests you for reading about in the library, and the thing you worry about your kid getting killed by at school is nuclear armageddon. Racism was the law, police would arrest people of different races for talking to each other in much of the country. But cheap houses and jobs for life, bro.
And in D&D, artifacts can just be different stuff, with maybe unfortunate side-effects because that was just how shit was back then. Swords where you had to kill innocent people for power, constantly, and gave you devil-eyes and terrible BO, seemed a good deal, not even really better than modern ones, just have weird powers not otherwise available. Armour that makes you much harder to hurt but slowly kills you, and you can't take it off, sweet deal back then, no one even knows how to make it now.
Most old D&D artifacts were that way, kinda good, sometimes completely rule-breaking good in some conditions, but also, would turn you into an evil NPC quite often. Which if you're an evil NPC already is a great deal!
PC, SJW, anti-fascist, not being a dick, or working on it, he/him.
A project update:
(1)Finally, all the intended subsystems, including social stuff and domain rule, or at least their alpha versions, are in place, now the goal is to write enough monsters and hazards to provide a proper framework for high-level powers that character should wield.
(2)Throughout this year we've tested the system to level 8, alas much less extensively that I would have preferred. Still, I hope it is slowly going past the stage where one of the necessary accessories to run it is the author.
If something happened to the link at the start of the thread, you can find the current files here:
https://yadi.sk/d/EDAdisq63HWXjA
(1)Finally, all the intended subsystems, including social stuff and domain rule, or at least their alpha versions, are in place, now the goal is to write enough monsters and hazards to provide a proper framework for high-level powers that character should wield.
(2)Throughout this year we've tested the system to level 8, alas much less extensively that I would have preferred. Still, I hope it is slowly going past the stage where one of the necessary accessories to run it is the author.
If something happened to the link at the start of the thread, you can find the current files here:
https://yadi.sk/d/EDAdisq63HWXjA
Last edited by FatR on Mon Dec 31, 2018 3:16 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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OgreBattle
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Ruins of alien invasion is a fun way Vampire Hunter D spins itThaluikhain wrote:I can see the appeal, a decaying empire/return to glory is an emotive theme, seen in everything from LotR (and thus Tolkien rip-offs, which is at least 50% of fantasy) to fascist movements, and it explains ancient ruins full of fancier treasure than what your local magician can make when commissioned. But I'm a bit over the idea.hogarth wrote:Indeed, I think that just about every kitchen sink setting (e.g. Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Golarion) has a "deteriorating empire" zone in it.