An exercise in world building [fluff, not crunch; all are welcome]

[treehouse]

Inceptum players - some overplot details can be found within. Avoid if you don't want it spoiled for you. I don't particularly care if you know or not, just giving you a heads up in case you do. Feel free to participate otherwise.

I have a tendency to ramble on in these sorts of posts to make sure I get all of my questions answered (or at least seen) in the first run, but I'm purposely going to try to avoid that for once.


So, when I started my first Iron Heroes game earlier this year, I had no world to put it in. I didn't particularly like the sparse details of the 'Swordlands' listed in the Iron Heroes book, so I decided to start from scratch with a map of the human realm known as Valeria, and work my way out.


http://members.cox.net/treehouse916/Valeria2.jpg


They say that Iron Heroes goes on best in a 'young world', because the heroes will have lots of unchartered land to discover, but I thought it worked best for my needs if the world wasn't young, but the humans of Valeria still didn't know much about the land around them.

To that end, I decided that the Valerians were newcomers to the continent they are on. They are pilgrims, if you will, come to this new land to escape a terrible fate in their own homeland (which I won't get into here). That way, I can have an established history to the land they are exploring, but it's still unchartered territory (to them).

The Iron Heroes book also recommends the old master race cliche being used, and they provide an example of one. I threw it out the window, because I knew from the start that I wanted to use standard D&D races for that (gotta include them somewhere! Iron Heroes only allows humans for PCs).

What I started off with for the master races (plural) were the elves, the yuan-ti and the janni. In the old days, these three titan civilizations fought for dominance of the continent (no name yet). They each had slave races that they used to fight their war for them, including orcs, lizardfolk, a subrace of humans called the Aelfendar, and so on. But the three master races were terribly dependent on magic, so they weren't prepared when magic was largely taken away from them. A cataclysm of unknown origins broke the foundation of magic over a thousand years ago, and the elves, yuan-ti and janni were broken themselves. They retreated into their diminished domains, leaving the former slave races to build free civilizations of their own design. The coast where the humans would land sometime later and call Valeria remained largely untouched during all of this.

ACTUAL QUESTION APPROACHING

Now, I mention all of this backstory because it directly relates to what I want to do with the direction of the game. I had originally planned on running an exploration-heavy campaign, where the PCs are hired by various expeditionary companies to chart mountain ranges, explore ancient tombs to retrieve relics, find safe travel routes through swamps, and so on. But my players decided to build PCs who weren't so oriented for that sort of work. There's no real tracker in the party, for example, and one of the players decided to play a thief, which is more suitable for social situations. That's perfectly fine, but it made me redirect the focus of the campaign to something they would be more suited for (and enjoy more, by proxy). I'm still going to have some of the former, but it won't form the core of the game like I had thought it would.

The other thing about Valeria is that the humans are divided. After their first king died with no heir shortly after landfall, the Valerians couldn't agree on a succession, and they split into city-state factions that war with one another to this day. Alliances come and go among them, but there is no strong, unified voice in Valeria.

That's where the PCs come in. Through their own exploration of various parts of the unknown world, they will discover various threats to the Valerian people, and they will realize that if the humans remain divided, they will be crushed by various onslaughts. If I have my way, the campaign will be an even mix of exploration, dungeon crawl, diplomacy and war (for the last, I am revamping the Victory Point system from Heroes of Battle).

To my first question, then:

Am I spreading myself too thin? Play-by-posts take a long, long time to move along, as I discovered when I had to shoot my first one dead a few days ago. Is all of this backstory impractical to actually USE in the game? There are three master races, but realistically, will my players have time over years of play to actually confront all three in a meaningful way, while at the same time taking the occasional dungeon crawl and trying to convince the Valerian people not to kill each other? I have thought of narrowing the focus down to one master race and several slave races; instead of having a clash of master races, the slaves could have been in the middle of a rebellion when the foundation of magic was broken. Or I could say that there were three master races, but two of them were completely obliterated over the last millenium by their former slaves. I could go many different ways with that if I wanted to narrow the focus down, but do I want to do that in the first place?

[BigRedRod]

Am I spreading myself too thin? Play-by-posts take a long, long time to move along, as I discovered when I had to shoot my first one dead a few days ago. Is all of this backstory impractical to actually USE in the game?
The reason I decided to actually read this when I'm one of the players was that grand scheme of things background elements rarely manage to unveil themselves.

There are three master races, but realistically, will my players have time over years of play to actually confront all three in a meaningful way, while at the same time taking the occasional dungeon crawl and trying to convince the Valerian people not to kill each other? I have thought of narrowing the focus down to one master race and several slave races; instead of having a clash of master races, the slaves could have been in the middle of a rebellion when the foundation of magic was broken. Or I could say that there were three master races, but two of them were completely obliterated over the last millenium by their former slaves. I could go many different ways with that if I wanted to narrow the focus down, but do I want to do that in the first place?
Epic plots are all well and good but you need to be sure that your players will actually touch them. My game, Vodalian Special Forces died after seven or eight chapters and two hundred years of actual play time only to have the players brush their fingertips against what I had in mind for plot.

I wouldn't let that stand in your way though, although I can see merit in fitting your story to the medium you've already done that given the random classes me all chose. Reducing the scope of things is more crippling the story to avoid a single potential problem (albeit it's a large problem and it has a large chance of occuring).

Go with the whole damn thing, if the game does fail (and given that we've only lost one player so far, while the rest of us seem quite dedicated) then we'll just demand you spill the beans.

Also, I think the "slaves rising against their masters" end to an Elder Race is the most commonly played one. War has more scope for potential.

[nightinverse]

Epic plots are all well and good but you need to be sure that your players will actually touch them.

Also, I think the "slaves rising against their masters" end to an Elder Race is the most commonly played one. War has more scope for potential.

Epic plots need to have accessability. I spent four years with little actual play on a campaign setting that will never see the light of day due to the absurdly complex epic elements and a massive (read: complete) loss of data. Literally had the equivalent of three Supplement D&D Hardcovers finished at the peak, sans art. Nobody would ever have wanted to play in that world, because it would simply be like... well, a religion in itself.

I agree with BRR completely on the "slaves rising" clarification. I used it once, for the most lackluster game I have ever run... even worse than my Cyberpunk 2020 game. It can work for you, but you need to exhibit a lot of logical extension from the idea and many people will simply shy away from the concept.

[treehouse]

Maybe I wasn't clear - the 'slaves rising against masters' cliche has already happened. The slave races were the orcs, the lizardfolk, the Aelfendar, the goblins and a few others I won't mention just yet. But the PC perspective of things is protecting a civilization of newcomers who can't even get along with each other.

I think the key to making the campaign work will be simple persistence. We've been keeping up a good pace so far; as long as I don't let the narrative slip, I see this game lasting a good long time.

[nightinverse]

That's good. I'll be dropping in to watch on occasion...

[treehouse]

Question #2 (feel free to answer any question you please, even though I am moving on):

In Iron Heroes, magic is supposed to be rare, hard to use, and occasionally dangerous. I have been going back and forth on how to represent this while still having it be a tangible part of the game.

What I have 'decided' is to use the arcanist class in Iron Heroes for most magic users, who would be rare anyway. For those of you who don't have the book, the arcanist can use magic, but not reliably (there's a chance that every spell they cast will either outright fail or have an undesirable outcome). Powerful spellcasters (who would only exist among the master races) would use truename magic from the Tome of Magic, and they would have a sanity system to deal with. The foundation of magic has been shattered, so using truespeak is dangerous for one's mental health, and other forms of magic tend to fizzle.

But now that I'm looking at it, that seems clunky. I would really like magic in Inceptum to have the feel of magic in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. It's rare, but when it pops up it is both powerful and dangerous for the one using it. It can't ever be displayed domestically (no unseen servants dicing carrots and potatoes when the PCs enter an ancient elven clanhall's kitchen). I agree with what The Hive Custodian said in 'Why I'm Getting Tired of D&D (http://online-roleplaying.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6397)':

D&D magic has long stopped being, well, magical.
I think the key to making magic magical is to keep it rare and potent. Using creepy descriptions that raise the hair on one's neck would also help, and that's something that the play-by-post format really accomodates.

But what do you think? Boiled down to one line, my question here is 'how do I handle magic in Iron Heroes?'

[BigRedRod]

Boiled down to one line, my question here is 'how do I handle magic in Iron Heroes?'
I've yet to actually look over magic in Iron Heroes. I sort of skipped the chapter on the grounds that only a crazy fool would use it.

I think it would be nice if that without outside influence humans just can't use magic, they lack the midi-chlorians or whatever that facilitate spellcasting. Of course, if they can get their grips on a focus then things change.

Most literature set in a low magic world (i.e. most literature) has magic usually gained through objects of power. Whether it be a book, a magic hat or a small winged cat who is quite sarcastic. A human in possession of such an item of power can use it as a conduit to the world of magic.

What this says to me is that the Arcanist class should have the requirement of having found such an item and advancing within it represents furthering your own understanding not just of magic but of the specific item.

At low levels the item has very definite boundaries, such as it produces fire effects although at higher levels you can try and ignore its boundaries. Of course using it has all of the usual problems (possibly a sanity system) and if somebody whips it away from you, then you no longer actually have much (any?) power!

[hedgeknight]

Nice freaking map!

My advice about campaign starting is to start small. Think big if you want and maybe make some outline sketches of the direction you would like the campaign to follow. But start small - your players are coming in "cold", unlike you who has been brainstorming this campaign for weeks, months, maybe years. They might not be thinking "years of gaming" but instead maybe a few months. Beyond that........who knows?
I learned (the hard way) not to put endless hours into campaign planning. Just have a basic idea and go from there. Most of the time if you pitch your general idea - for example exploring a new region and cataloging stuff (paraphrasing your above info) - the players get on board and create characters that work for that idea.

As for your magic question......(scratches head)......well, magic systems confuse me to tell you the truth. I rarely understand them. Personally, I like runic and stone magic - earthy and elemental, which is the way I think magic should be. Druidic in nature, like the magic in the world of Shannara and also in Tolkien.
-g-

[LeadPal]

Side note: treehouse, you just made the crappy map I'm working on for Apogee look about three times crappier. Just so you know.

On the main subject, I have no real opinion. But... how did you make that map? :(

[Darius]

LeadPal- there's actually a simple answer to your question: treehouse got married.

[treehouse]

LeadPal- there's actually a simple answer to your question: treehouse got married.

True enough. I provide the 'functional' parts of my maps (via Dundjinni), but Becca is the one who gives them polish. See the shallows on the coast? Those are her work, not mine...

[hedgeknight]

Ah, so that's the trick, eh?
The love of a good woman! ;)

-g-

[Darius]

What treehouse also hasn't mentioned, and what I think is a neat trick, is that he's letting the players flesh out the individual cities a bit more using a template that he provides. He gets final say and editorial approval since he knows more of the gran scheme than we do, but it saves him the effort of having to create all of the individual cities and gives the players a bit more say in the local region.

[hedgeknight]

That's a great idea - in my current email campaign, all I've done is provide a small port town which is pretty much fleshed out. However, 98% of the rest of the surrounding region/world is left undone.
I really wanted to start small and build from there (if need be). And one of my players created a character that was from "out of town" and in one of his posts he mentioned the name of a river - just out of the blue. So, I asked him about this river and he came up with some info. I asked him to give me more and he did - created a city where his character is from along with some background history for the area. He even drew a simple map!
Love it when players take ownership in the game.
-g-

[Mercutio]

Tree- Is that the DJ campaign pack or the user created campaign pack? Trying to make campaign level maps in DJ has eluded me.

Not familiar with Iron Heroes but perhaps I should be. I like rare and powerful magic, and in home brews I've made, it's been just that. Magicians have been very rare, and I made some of the changes I've talked about with regards to magic - increasing casting time etc and moving spells around to different levels. To compensate in some respects I've upped some of the power of the spells.

[treehouse]

Tree- Is that the DJ campaign pack or the user created campaign pack? Trying to make campaign level maps in DJ has eluded me.


Look for the Darkness Campaign Pack. It's one of the free user ones, and from what I've heard, it is far superior to the one you shell out cash for.


Not familiar with Iron Heroes but perhaps I should be.


As BRR has said, it's D&D 3.6. Feat mastery is the way of the future! Skill groups are also quite revolutionary.

[zachol]

Hi. I'm the thief guy, Jack, in tree's game.
Just noting for others.

Anyway,
Am I spreading myself too thin? Play-by-posts take a long, long time to move along, as I discovered when I had to shoot my first one dead a few days ago. Is all of this backstory impractical to actually USE in the game? There are three master races, but realistically, will my players have time over years of play to actually confront all three in a meaningful way, while at the same time taking the occasional dungeon crawl and trying to convince the Valerian people not to kill each other? I have thought of narrowing the focus down to one master race and several slave races; instead of having a clash of master races, the slaves could have been in the middle of a rebellion when the foundation of magic was broken. Or I could say that there were three master races, but two of them were completely obliterated over the last millenium by their former slaves. I could go many different ways with that if I wanted to narrow the focus down, but do I want to do that in the first place?

I have no idea how you could possibly reveal this to the characters, short of some insane elvish/orcish/lizardfolk sage telling them it directly.
As far as I can tell, Jack would at least be very interested in this backstory - he has an obsession with magic and the history behind it, so you could probably use him as a conduit for the grand reveal.


For the second question... I intend for Jack to take one level of Arcanist if you allow it, so this is a mildly important question.

Personally? I'd be content if it turned out to be a thing that tended to end in bad situations any time he tried to use it, but for it to still be available.

Don't know for sure, though...

[treehouse]

Rise, ancient thread! Rise, more powerful than you have ever been! Oh, yes, they'll pay! Buahahaha! -cough- Ahahaha! -hack-

[/spooky necromancer voice]

Okay, so I haven't touched this in a few months, but I wasn't really done with the conversation, I just got busy with actually running the game instead of planning for the future. But I'm back, so off we go!

The Master Races Redux

As I said in previous posts, I'm using the elves, yuan-ti and janni as 'master races' that were brought low when the foundation of magic was shattered a thousand years ago (or so). I'm trying to keep things vague so I can go with the flow as my PCs travel through Valeria and beyond, but I at least need to understand the dynamic between the races, and what they will directly contribute to the story from the PCs' perspective.

But a new idea occured to me. Instead of just having a static 'the elves, yuan-ti and janni all struggled for power in ancient times, using the lesser races as pawns in their power plays' history, what if they were all in nearly complete power, but at different periods in history? For example, let's just arbitrarily say that civilization is 10,000 years old. For the first half of this time period, the janni had nearly complete dominance on the continent. But they were usurped by their slave race - the yuan-ti, who then ruled the continent for another thousand years before the elves came into prominence. The yuan-ti weren't usurped, but they did fall into the limelight as the elves consolidated power in places that the snake men were afraid to go. The elves didn't fall from grace gradually like the other two great civilizations - they were brought low by a single cataclysm that caught them off-guard three thousand years into their rule and sent them spinning into their own mini-apocalypse. They recovered, but not in time to cling to their power base. Now, the power vacuum exists once again, but it is being quickly filled by 'newly' liberated races free to exercise their own dominion. A thousand years isn't a long time to the elves, but it's practically an eternity for the orcs, Aelfendar, goblins and other civilizations. A thousand years is enough time for any of those races to build up proud traditions, and more importantly, amibitions for 'superpower status'. In come the exiled humans, who have unknowingly migrated to the strategic crossroad of three growing world powers.

And there's my PC connection. Because Iron Heroes is a humans-only game, I am free to turn the overall story into a racial struggle with the PCs at the helm. As they explore the mysterious lands that surround Valeria, they meet all of these exotic folks from other civilizations, and discover the looming threat of invasion that humanity faces from nearly every direction. And they'll have to decide when to play ambassador and when to join the human vanguard and fight off the threat with steel.

If I go with this model, the ancient civilizations merely provide my PCs with ruins to explore, and the occasional dangerous enemy. The actual story of the elves, yuan-ti and janni is so peripheral that I probably won't even bother fleshing it out.

[Mercutio]

No offense, but I don't like that world history. It seems to me it's been done too many times before (or at least once, anyway). My first idea wasn't much better - the races split from one progenitor race - which is also neither new nor original.

Since you've kind of sold yourself on the "master race" thing, I wondered if you couldn't tie it to something else? Rather than the races being individual master races that rose up, how about a small cabal of controllers that merely warped the races. Say there was a fiendish group that found a particularly useful janni and used their powers to gain power over the world using a few strategic disguises or mentally dominate janni as a control force. When the yuan-ti came onto the scene, the fiends had had enough of the janni. The race was too weak to really grab the power the fiends wanted, so after a few years, they managed to have the yuan-ti, with their innate magical power, to wrest control. So while the race overthrew the last master race, the cabal stayed in power. Same thing with the elves. However, something the cabal did while using the elves as controls broke the "magic" system.

That allows for a nefarious plot to regather magic, if you want to go that way, as well as plots for who the cabal is, if they're still around, what they did to break the world, how the took control, why, etc.

Just off the top of my head and rambling, so sorry.

[treehouse]

It's been done before because it's modeled after world history (think Rome-->England-->United States-->???). I went with it because it sounds plausible, not because it sounds original...

Now, the master race concept isn't set in stone. If it's too cheesy, I can scale it back. But someone has to create some ancient ruins for my PCs to explore. The orcs are semi-nomadic and the Aelfendar are still a growing power (thus, no ruins). Goblins seem most likely, but ancient goblin ruins have been done to death in Eberron.

I could always just scrap the 'master race' concept for the elves et al. and have them be plain old civilizations that have existed at various points in history. I'm more interested in their legacy than anything else.

Edit: Waitasec, I just caught the main point of your post. Demon cults behind the scenes? Now that's an idea I can use directly. Let me think for a bit.

[Mercutio]

"Just caught" it? I must not have done well with my point then. I was attempting to use the established history of master races, but giving an alternate explanation point to the reasons how and why the races rose and fell, rather than "slaves overthrew the masters and became just as bad, and then they were overthrown by their slaves." I was justr trying to give it a concepttual background explanation.

[treehouse]

My original reading of your post was disjointed (I'm at work, kinda distracted). So I didn't catch the main point until after I had responded.

Okay, so let me make sure I've got your idea straight - the janni, yuan-ti and elves seemed to be in power, but in reality their leadership had its strings pulled by powerful, secretive fiend lords? (Man, it'd be tempting to use rakshasas for that; why does Eberron steal all of the good ideas? ;))

Actually, the fiends of Inceptum already have a role to play that I won't go into here, but I think that actually fits in pretty well.

But that was what you were getting at, right? If I went with your idea, what are the origins of the orcs, Aelfendar and so on? Are they obscure-yet-independent civilizations that only came to the forefront after the big three were diminished?

[Mercutio]

But that was what you were getting at, right? If I went with your idea, what are the origins of the orcs, Aelfendar and so on? Are they obscure-yet-independent civilizations that only came to the forefront after the big three were diminished?Yes. I hadn't gotten as far in my idea as explaining the other races, but that sounds about as good as any to me.

[treehouse]

Well, I like your fiendish puppetmasters idea, and I think I'm going to use it. The whole master race history is flat and uninteresting, which doesn't really matter since the PCs won't come into meaningful contact with it (as I said, it's all peripheral), but for my own sake I'd like to have a twist somewhere. That's as good as any twist I can think of.

I still want to use the staggered world power timeline, though. What will change is how each of the big three were twisted and reformed by their secret rulers.

[Mercutio]

Sounds good to me. I didn't mean to come off as being negative with the master race history. I just have an aversion to that history after so many games I've played have it, but then it's tough not to have something like that...so that's why I tried to spin it a little bit different. Granted, fiends seeking power isn't new, and neither is a secret cabal of them running the world, but I thought the idea of them being the reasons for the rise and fall of empires was something new.

[treehouse]

Well, the only ancient fiendish power I know of in fantasy world histories (the Lords of Dust in Eberron) was pretty open about their role; they were an empire, and they had an entire age named after their dominion. Fiends ruling from the shadow is a relatively unused concept from my perspective.

I was thinking about the idea of having the 'ancient, powerful' magic be related to the world of fiends in a tangible way. The cataclysm that 'broke the foundation of magic' was actually just a side effect of someone sealing the gates of Hell. Maybe I've been playing too much Oblivion.

I don't think you are being negative; I am looking for constructive criticism, which you are giving.

[hedgeknight]

My original reading of your post was disjointed (I'm at work, kinda distracted). So I didn't catch the main point until after I had responded.

Okay, so let me make sure I've got your idea straight - the janni, yuan-ti and elves seemed to be in power, but in reality their leadership had its strings pulled by powerful, secretive fiend lords? (Man, it'd be tempting to use rakshasas for that; why does Eberron steal all of the good ideas? ;))

Actually, the fiends of Inceptum already have a role to play that I won't go into here, but I think that actually fits in pretty well.

But that was what you were getting at, right? If I went with your idea, what are the origins of the orcs, Aelfendar and so on? Are they obscure-yet-independent civilizations that only came to the forefront after the big three were diminished?

You said it right - Eberron stole their ideas just like most "creators" do. Right after I graduated college the first time (back in '85), a good friend of mine who is a fantastic DM, created his own D&D world where yuan-ti and dragon-kin were some of the major movers and shakers in the evil realm. But they were controlled by the rakshasas who in turn were attempting to master and control demons.
Now this was 20 years before Eberron was hatched and in my opinion it was a better system and a better game than a lot of the "boxed" worlds that Wizards is selling.

What I'm saying is, don't sweat it about ripping off ideas. Everybody does it. Rip the ideas, but then take them and add your own brand of creative flare and make it memorable for your players.
-g-

[zachol]

Then again, treehouse, there is something to be said for backgrounds that the PCs can at least get a glimpse of... I'd be surprised if we really got a chance to learn about the fiendish history.


Regardless, idea - the fiends are still there.
Like the Eberron Lords of Dust, they are willing to wait as long as needed, and after the elvish incident, they've been less apt to enter into mortal affairs again.


Plus, if we (the PCs) eventually end up reigniting fiendish interest in mortals, well... I've always said that when I make a diplomancy freak, I gauge his effectiveness against the number of deaths he's able to bring about.