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Forums Terrorist posted:At that point you've just gone for "technology is magic" though.
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Nov 25, 2013 21:40
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Barudak posted:
Funny how Baldur's Gate of all things made the best argument against relying on magic in one throwaway line: "So the Wizard said, 'Even if I created a twenty foot high wall of iron, what prevents someone else from making it disappear?'" not enough settings seem to take in mind of the ephemeral nature of magic. It should be treated as amazing, but unreliable.
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Nov 25, 2013 21:44
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LornMarkus posted:There's some leeway to be had depending on the circumstances described for the destruction of the ancient civilization: if the civilization was isolated/isolationist and the entire population was removed, then the knowledge of how they created their awesome technology could certainly be lost. A lot of the settings that pull it, though, use a world where the ancient civilization was universally dominant and all current peoples are descended from it or at least its slave races. At that point the idea only really works if either all of the technology just stops functioning normally (powered by some esoteric energy source that was also wiped out by the cataclysm) or all left out of reach for five or ten generations. If it's there and people know how to work it, it will get worked and knowledge will be kept up on it though some parts might get twisted up over a long enough period. Another factor would be whether or not new pieces of the technology could be manufactured or not. I've seen several settings that are that way (oMage, Kinoko Nasu's universe, and many, many others), and it really always comes down to this: "Since magic only works the less enlightened the world is, magi are fundamentally broken people with insane lust for power and a desire to keep all others under their heel. The difference between a good magus and a bad one is that the former just represses or hides the truth of his being a little better than the latter.". Which actually fits just fine if you consider that magic is almost always basically universal cheatcodes and/or morally repugnant things (case in point, Charm Person AKA mindrape), and is an interesting extension of R. E. Howard and Fritz Lieber's stories where mages tended to be somewhat degenerate sorts at best. If you wanted to do a slightly more positive version of it, I think the best way to make it work would be to simply say magic is just primal, animalistic energy - a Charm Person spell is literally animal magnetism, instead of being a metaphor for it, a telekinesis spell is animal strength and so on. Instead of being enlightened, the mage is base, and at his best basically embodies the archetype of The First Man on Earth or the Noble Savage.
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Nov 25, 2013 21:52
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Really, the fact that humanity has regressed so far is really what makes it a fantasy world and not a sci-fi world. In the real world technology and practical knowledge is very, very rarely lost, even in the face of empires rising and falling, but in fantasy worlds, it's a goddamn constant. It's hard to find a modern fantasy setting that isn't built on the grand ancient empire that was awesome if only you were there to see it oh well too bad. The problem I had with Numanumanumayay is that it has this awesome setting idea and throws it away for generic Eurofantasy. It should be like... Fading Suns or Battletech. Where you have a medieval kingdom and whatnot with knights and kings and queens, yes, but there might be a factory producing arms and armor that nobody quite understands but gives them a massive edge over their neighbors, because they have power armor and death lasers, but they're super-concerned because one of their neighbors found an ancient manual of industrial technologies and is now making RPG-7s from the fabricators they desperately looted from an ancient military base by hiring heroic adventurers to do that. But their neighbors are scared because they don't have enough RPGs to fight off the power armored knights of the kingdom yet so they're sending you guys, the heroes, to find some new ways to defend themselves. And so you go searching through the wastelands, or maybe virtual reality, for some new hidden secrets... ...and in the end you don't get any of that maybe but you do find some recipes for chemical fertilizers and maybe you can figure out how to use this to create peace between the two nations. The most thematic thing about Battletech, to me, isn't so much 'lostech' as it is that there's inconsistent technology. The idea of a businessman who goes out to his office riding a horse, then takes a call on his cell phone because they have plenty of electronics but no real heavy industry. It's not super-realistic but that seemed like a way better direction to take Numanumanuma than 'generic fantasy'. My Numanera would be a world with a lot of powers that are on the cusp of industrialization, and some other old holdouts that keep themselves relevant by having a lot of ancient gear that you can't beat easily, if at all, with industrial stuff. Future gadgetry would be relatively common and easily available but often half-broken and inconsistent-you might have a guy with a regular steel longsword, but wearing a set of fullerene plate armor that was powered once and full of advanced cutting edge sensors and antigravity systems and whatnot, but now is just a heavy 200 kilogram solid mass that the Glaive in question lugs by being a descendant of a genetically engineered supersoldier-or so he thinks. In fact, he's just descended from a vanity project by a very rich corporate family. Etc etc. MJ12 fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Nov 25, 2013 |
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Nov 25, 2013 21:53
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Barudak posted:Edit: Holy mother of god World Tree's cover art is abomnible  I dunno, I find this guy deeply amusing. 
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Nov 26, 2013 00:34
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Barudak posted:On the note of lost knowledge; are there any settings where you live in the current Golden Age of the world? So many fantasy settings are backwards facing and I'm not a big fan of it. That's Eberron, isn't it? The big war that shook the world is over, and now everyone lives in magic super-cities with trains and robots and poo poo.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:38
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Down With People posted:That's Eberron, isn't it? The big war that shook the world is over, and now everyone lives in magic super-cities with trains and robots and poo poo. It may be the golden age of humanity, but the Age of Giants was the true golden age when the most powerful magic and artifacts were created. Even the warforged predate the current age.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:43
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Selachian posted:
I love the inexplicable blue cougar that is either shirtless with one hell of a neck deformity, or the only non-anthropomorphic cover model. As well as the Octopus with eye stalks(?) and the Couatl(???). Down With People posted:That's Eberron, isn't it? The big war that shook the world is over, and now everyone lives in magic super-cities with trains and robots and poo poo. Yeah, there was a 100 year war combined with extraterritorial super-corps that were using funding from every side to develop new and better weapons of war. Surprisingly(for a fictional setting) they also used the fruits of their research for public sector work. Though quite a few technologies only work due to quirks of the setting. For example, Sharn is only possible because it exists in a manifest zone of the Plane of Eternal Sky. The buildings are literally buttressed against the plane of elemental air.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:47
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It'd be an easy house rule for that 'Hit your buddy on a crit fail' to have rivals give you a shot at taking a minimum equal to their last successful roll every so often or people you favor giving you extra dice. That would create two distinct, mechanical effects that are both rewards for taking them.
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Nov 26, 2013 00:50
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oriongates posted:It may be the golden age of humanity, but the Age of Giants was the true golden age when the most powerful magic and artifacts were created. Even the warforged predate the current age. Actually this isn't exactly all that accurate. The thing about all those ancient magics and lost artifacts in Eberron is that by and large they might have been big and flashy but they were often clunky, terribly overwrought, and not very efficient. For example, very early prototype warforged predate the current age, this is true...and when House Cannith got their hands on them they reverse engineered them, and within 50 years had vastly, vastly improved upon the design to the point where they were mass-producing sentient, ensouled warforged far better than anything the Giants had designed. Basically, anything that you find stuck in a ruin or buried in some lost tomb may have value, but that value is less down to "oh man, the ancient civilizations were way better than we are" and more "I can't wait to take this home and figure out how to make more of these without having to sacrifice of a thousand elven slaves during a solar eclipse, I bet we could get by with some candles and 5cc of mouse blood."
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Nov 26, 2013 01:19
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Robindaybird posted:Funny how Baldur's Gate of all things made the best argument against relying on magic in one throwaway line: "So the Wizard said, 'Even if I created a twenty foot high wall of iron, what prevents someone else from making it disappear?'" not enough settings seem to take in mind of the ephemeral nature of magic.
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Nov 26, 2013 03:43
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Zereth posted:Except in D&D that kinda falls down because magic can make a perfectly mundanely created wall of iron disappear too. And the real kicker? The walls of iron a wizard makes are eternal and permanent, not ethereal. So D&D's words aren't applicable to D&D in the first place, either.
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Nov 26, 2013 05:37
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Transient People posted:And the real kicker? The walls of iron a wizard makes are eternal and permanent, not ethereal. So D&D's words aren't applicable to D&D in the first place, either. As a tiny nitpick, Baldur's Gate is mid-to-late-2E, not 3.5E. While I wouldn't stake money on the correctness of my recollection, I believe that wall of iron was indeed subject to dispelling in the particular version of game on which it's based.
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Nov 26, 2013 05:53
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Kai Tave posted:Actually this isn't exactly all that accurate. The thing about all those ancient magics and lost artifacts in Eberron is that by and large they might have been big and flashy but they were often clunky, terribly overwrought, and not very efficient. For example, very early prototype warforged predate the current age, this is true...and when House Cannith got their hands on them they reverse engineered them, and within 50 years had vastly, vastly improved upon the design to the point where they were mass-producing sentient, ensouled warforged far better than anything the Giants had designed. Basically, anything that you find stuck in a ruin or buried in some lost tomb may have value, but that value is less down to "oh man, the ancient civilizations were way better than we are" and more "I can't wait to take this home and figure out how to make more of these without having to sacrifice of a thousand elven slaves during a solar eclipse, I bet we could get by with some candles and 5cc of mouse blood." And, in general, Eberron is meant to draw from the early 20th century - it's a time of rapid magical/technological, social, and political change. Think the Roaring Twenties - a horrific war has just ended, and society and culture are flourishing. It's an unstable time, true, and definitely not a Golden Age in the sense that everything's happy and peaceful, but in a lot of ways civilization has never been so energetic or creative.
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Nov 26, 2013 06:18
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David J Prokopetz posted:As a tiny nitpick, Baldur's Gate is mid-to-late-2E, not 3.5E. While I wouldn't stake money on the correctness of my recollection, I believe that wall of iron was indeed subject to dispelling in the particular version of game on which it's based. That might be a combination of 2e's rules and the limitations of the engine, I'd imagine player who decided to be a dick and just fill up on Wall of Iron and put them down everywhere, rest, and try again would crash the game if they were persistent and indefinite. Though I may be wrong having not played Baldur's Gate.
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Nov 26, 2013 07:22
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Cyphoderus posted:Double Cross: the best Hunter: The Vigil supplement you'll ever buy! I can't be the only person who burst out laughing when I read this. Barudak posted:I quite like this and its how I typically run campaigns minus the divine spark thing. Magic and Technology are two parallel but intertwined fields; modern magic runes require modern smithing techniques as they'd break more poorly constructed materials and ancient fire magics could never have produced the heat necessary for today's smelting practices. Throw in a bunch of dangerously irresponsible creator gods who expressly built the universe to entertain them in to the mix and you've got a nice summation of World Tree! Magic is integrated in to society heavily, mundane skill is very important to magically performing mundane tasks well, and the main flaw with it is that extremist furries might try to hijack the setting for their own ends. Selachian posted:
You should, Orren are pretty much Kender done right. Kurieg posted:I love the inexplicable blue cougar that is either shirtless with one hell of a neck deformity, or the only non-anthropomorphic cover model. As well as the Octopus with eye stalks(?) and the Couatl(???). Those 3 are all non-anthropomorphic and they're all PC races (although the octopus was a monster race that 1 god made a PC race because of in-universe deadlines). Yeah, World Tree is great and I'd do a write-up of it if I didn't already have 3 other games on my plate.
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Nov 26, 2013 13:59
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Barudak posted:We know, via literal design documents, that the Romans constructed odometers for centuries using the same gear design also used in the Antikythera Mechanism and they were definitely metal. The Antikythera Mechanism is fascinating because it was a device that was ridiculously expensive, absolutely cutting edge, and solely intended for personal use*. It is in many ways like built in car-phones; ahead of their time but phased out completely once a modern need for them was developed. Cythereal posted:And, in general, Eberron is meant to draw from the early 20th century - it's a time of rapid magical/technological, social, and political change. Think the Roaring Twenties - a horrific war has just ended, and society and culture are flourishing. It's an unstable time, true, and definitely not a Golden Age in the sense that everything's happy and peaceful, but in a lot of ways civilization has never been so energetic or creative. Transient People posted:And the real kicker? The walls of iron a wizard makes are eternal and permanent, not ethereal. So D&D's words aren't applicable to D&D in the first place, either. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 15:32 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 14:51
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Cyphoderus posted:Other Renegade manifestations Renegade Crystals, at least, are in the Advanced book that just came out. Basically they're a "Trait Lois": you trade one of your permanent lois slots for extra power. Dunno if EX-Renegade items made it in.
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Nov 26, 2013 14:58
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MadScientistWorking posted:You see this is why I like Forgotten Realms because if D&D operated like Forgotten Realms did you'd have a bunch of combat engineers turning said wizard wall into sludge. If they weren't already too busy in the endless lust-laden sex-pits of Elminster, that is.
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Nov 26, 2013 16:01
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MadScientistWorking posted:I wonder if it was a coincidence or intentional in that the first large scale use of robotics during war happens to coincide with the same time period that Eberron is aping from. Most likely intentional. Warforged also do double-duty as conscript soldiers who have been discharged but now have no non-military skills, nowhere to go, and are disliked and distrusted by most civilian populations. It's an interesting time period to draw inspiration from when you go beyond what the splats suggest. My current Eberron game I'm running started at a cabaret show in Karrnath, which also has a flourishing gay and lesbian cultural scene, drawing from the Weimar Republic with the Emerald Claw and Blood of Vol standing in for the freikorps and other ultra-right-wing super-nationalist movements.
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Nov 26, 2013 16:49
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Eberron draws from a bunch of different places rather than just the early 20th century - there's also some Wild West stuff, some Cold War stuff, cyberpunk, the Industrial Revolution and the birth of socialism, etc. That's one of the reasons why it's a really cool setting.
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Nov 26, 2013 17:45
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Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer?
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Nov 26, 2013 20:25
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Majuju posted:Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer? Worse/better (narrowly on the latter), in that order.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:28
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Really, worse than Dark Sun? Different tastes I guess.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:33
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Majuju posted:Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer?
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Nov 26, 2013 20:43
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Majuju posted:Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer? Better. I don't know why this is even a question someone is asking.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:44
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Majuju posted:Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer? Eberron is the superior total setting no question. Necromancer homeland that uses skeleton's for their proper purpose to create a creepy but functionally well off society? Sold even before we get to dinosaur riding planes people or sentient wood robot killing machines with nowhere to go. I have a huge soft spot for Dark Sun but every piece of material after he first one makes the setting crappier and crappier even if I like the idea of a PC race that feeds on Elves. Its worse than just "explains too many details" because with later material gets into "actively undermines the interesting features of the setting." Spelljammer is a total goddamn mess but I'll be damned if I don't like it.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:47
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Majuju posted:Eberron: better or worse than Dark Sun/Spelljammer? Dunno about Spelljammer.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:49
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Lemon Curdistan posted:Better. I don't know why this is even a question someone is asking. This is mostly a personal-taste question: while Eberron goes wild and crazy with unique and exciting ideas it does them in a very different manner for a very different reason than Spelljammer, and its treatment of thematic tie-ins is both more diverse and more deliberate than Dark Sun, which has one really well-defined, overarching tone. This doesn't answer your question, but it explains the premise for mine, and the answers people are giving accordingly.
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Nov 26, 2013 20:50
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Barudak posted:I have a huge soft spot for Dark Sun but every piece of material after he first one makes the setting crappier and crappier even if I like the idea of a PC race that feeds on Elves. Its worse than just "explains too many details" because with later material gets into "actively undermines the interesting features of the setting." MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 21:02
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Eberron is better overall than Dark Sun, although Dark Sun is best at being Dark Sun. I don't know enough about Spelljammer to say for certain, but from what I've seen of the setting, it's more remembered for being super-kitschy rather than because it was a really good setting.
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Nov 26, 2013 21:06
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MadScientistWorking posted:Isn't that just because Dark Sun like most settings of that era had an active metaplot that followed the novel line? For all the amount of complaining about what happened to that setting I wish someone would do a Fatal and Friends of the revised setting because for what little I heard about that hated material it had some interesting ideas. Honestly, I find that more interesting than conventional Dark Sun which is your prototypical apocalyptic story re-flavored as D&D. Its partially that and partially the concept of a limited scope seemed totally alien to the further writers of the setting. "Plant life is so valuable because its a desert and people hate magic because it kills plants to work" is a neat conceit. Then we find out that just over some mountains there is basically a planet of lush tropical jungles. This repeatedly happens over and over in the expanded materials and hilariously the novel characters power of basing her magic off the sun not plants is explicitly denied to players so the metaplot ends up being wholly disconnected from the game its supposedly tied to. The backstory is also really boring "the world before was glorious but we ruined it all and here are a bunch of important names with no actual bearing to the players but THEY ARE IMPORTANT" sort of world. I do like the dead cities module because it explored the setting in an interesting albeit poorly level scaled way where you see what level of depravity people will fall to to maintain life and power on a dying world. This is what Dark Sun nailed overall; not an Apocalypse but a slow march into oblivion and so much of the material tries to change this into a saveable world, a partial collapse, or real sharp fall from civilization. Then there is a module where you go to a hyper advanced city who wants to (and statistically will) suck your brains out of your head but you can also learn to surf in the module like its some sort of 80's beach slasher flick. Barudak fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 21:12
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Tulul posted:Eberron is better overall than Dark Sun, although Dark Sun is best at being Dark Sun. I don't know enough about Spelljammer to say for certain, but from what I've seen of the setting, it's more remembered for being super-kitschy rather than because it was a really good setting. Spelljammer owns because it's basically mainlining 80s into your eyeballs.
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Nov 26, 2013 21:27
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Barudak posted:This is what Dark Sun nailed overall; not an Apocalypse but a slow march into oblivion and so much of the material tries to change this into a saveable world, a partial collapse, or real sharp fall from civilization. This is because no version of D&D ever has been meant to be about tragedy and heroic failure, nor should it be, really. I've never seen Dark Sun as an unsaveable world either, personally. That kind of concept is really better suited to something like Polaris. As for Eberron, I personally don't like it all that much...it's neat on the surface, but it's so 3.5 as gently caress and yet breaks like a twig if you take the 3.5ness to its logical conclusion. It's not really a setting that has cohesiveness, just a ton of gonzo things that are neat to poach for personal campaigns, IMO. (Also, I think we should maybe move this discussion to a D&D General megathread. We're getting sort of offtopic at this point.)
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Nov 26, 2013 21:35
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Forums Terrorist posted:Spelljammer owns because it's basically mainlining 80s into your eyeballs. Mainlining the eighties!...in 1993. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHGz5r-b1do Edit: (This absolutely counts as 'Notably awful RPG stuff'.) unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 21:36
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Transient People posted:
EDIT: We should make a history thread as there are tons of interesting concepts and ideas to steal from. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Nov 26, 2013 |
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Nov 26, 2013 21:45
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Spelljammer was jammed so full of goofy sci-fi and anime references that I couldn't help but love it. Its mechanics were unbelievably awful, but when there are oblique references to Robotech, orcish superweapons gestating in space stations made from the corpses of Gamera's children, and not-Skeksis riding around on Umber Hulks and making an unholy nuisance of the space lanes, it was really hard not to love for its sheer ridiculousness.
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Nov 26, 2013 22:13
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Reminder that the Spelljammer Official Design Themesong was Sledgehammer but with different lyrics.
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Nov 26, 2013 22:16
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Mr. Maltose posted:Reminder that the Spelljammer Official Design Themesong was Sledgehammer but with different lyrics. Which is why I put it JUST narrowly behind Eberron. (Sledgehammer is the best song ever.)
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Nov 26, 2013 23:26
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Transient People posted:(Also, I think we should maybe move this discussion to a D&D General megathread. We're getting sort of offtopic at this point.) This is a good idea, go post this thread.
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Nov 27, 2013 00:03
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