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beccaelizabethI sat down to read Ultimate Campaign again, because I wanted to worldbuild discovering a planet via Stargate and there's exploration rules in there that I can combine with GameMastery and my old Worldbuilders Guide and eventually get a planet.
I ended up distracting myself thinking up a whole setup that currently seems promising.
A bit gross, but, violent game.
Instead of military expeditions through a Stargate (easy to get home, well resourced, probably sending very competent people), a wizard throws a small group of people through a portal. Acts pleased they can breathe, tells them to report back to him when they can. He says to get back they need crystals, which they will find lying around if they go search for them. And they do, mostly near skeletal remains, some buried, some kind of lying around. They find ruins and animals and a lot of weirdness, but initially no other people. Then they find graves, and after that the guy that dug them, and also didnt make it.
Maybe he has a wand, and they've never seen wands before.
He also has his head smashed in.
So they keep going, and eventually find an alive person who can explain what is happening.
Crystals grow in the heads of the local wildlife.
Weirdly fascinating crystals.
You will want to eat the crystals. Do not eat the shiny. That's how they lost their first guy.
So they buried him, but they got desperate for crystals so they unburied him...
... and found the crystal in *his* head.
Just being alive on this planet seems to grow the things. Maybe it's something in the water, maybe it's just ambient magic. And there is magic here, and if they stay long enough they can learn to use it, not just in items they salvage.
To get the portals open you need a matched set of crystals.
Smaller crystals and you need many many more of them.
But the crystals from a team? Those are like overkill. They will open the portal and then some.
... but you don't want to go home. Because now you are the shiny the wizards kill for.
So.
There is a way to absorb the crystals without ending up in a grave, but trial and error is not a good way to discover it.
And crystals help you level up.
So it's like XP. Tiny shiny XP. That you can steal from other people, and use to power magic items.
... I think the Forgotten Realms setting book has rules for using XP to make portals. Pathfinder doesnt do it that way, maybe D&D does? Turn XP into items?
Doesn't need to hold close to other rule sets, obviously.
Ability to level up big if you kill something with lots of XP and ability to get super able if you acquire huge amounts of magic items are both built in to the rules there though.
It also greatly resembles the soul gem trade and ways Outsiders, mostly devils, acquire and swap power from powerful mortals. There's rules around for that too. It's just generally considered an act of evil to even try it.
So it's an open sandbox world that may or may not have other people in, but before you meet them in numbers likely to challenge you, you find out they've all got an incentive to ... take your head and with it your power.
I mean, I'm not very original, but
in Highlander this goes all There Can Be Only One, but that's because they're a secret subset of people, civilisation will keep going around them come what may.
If you're stuck in the wilderness trying to survive, there's some calculations to be made about how much you really need to level up right now, vs how much you need someone awake to keep watch.
I think on the whole people will decide to be civilised, while a small minority will decide to grind.
But the one throwing people through the portal is definitely grinding.
He might not be the only one as well. There might be teams with different ways to call different destinations. That could be fun. Competition. Pit the other end against each other.
The team would only have a single place to resupply though, but they'd have a trade good that their supplier absolutely wants, even if they dont find other neat stuff.
So obviously if I was playing it I'd decide that if I can't go home here is home now and I'd try and trade for ways to upgrade, and instead of being hostile to the next team they'd be new friends, and just generally it'd be kingdom building with random shiny things.
And the wizard would have to work out if he'd rather have an erratic supply from a small number of low level adventurers he's sure he can control, or a steady and potentially luxurious supply from a much larger team that might actually live long enough to challenge him.
And obviously by the time you can challenge him, you know how to absorb the shiny yourself, you've got a lot of incentive to keep the trade going in a more equitable way.
Not sure this setup is as good as it seemed in my head when I wanted to write it down
but
here it is.
I ended up distracting myself thinking up a whole setup that currently seems promising.
A bit gross, but, violent game.
Instead of military expeditions through a Stargate (easy to get home, well resourced, probably sending very competent people), a wizard throws a small group of people through a portal. Acts pleased they can breathe, tells them to report back to him when they can. He says to get back they need crystals, which they will find lying around if they go search for them. And they do, mostly near skeletal remains, some buried, some kind of lying around. They find ruins and animals and a lot of weirdness, but initially no other people. Then they find graves, and after that the guy that dug them, and also didnt make it.
Maybe he has a wand, and they've never seen wands before.
He also has his head smashed in.
So they keep going, and eventually find an alive person who can explain what is happening.
Crystals grow in the heads of the local wildlife.
Weirdly fascinating crystals.
You will want to eat the crystals. Do not eat the shiny. That's how they lost their first guy.
So they buried him, but they got desperate for crystals so they unburied him...
... and found the crystal in *his* head.
Just being alive on this planet seems to grow the things. Maybe it's something in the water, maybe it's just ambient magic. And there is magic here, and if they stay long enough they can learn to use it, not just in items they salvage.
To get the portals open you need a matched set of crystals.
Smaller crystals and you need many many more of them.
But the crystals from a team? Those are like overkill. They will open the portal and then some.
... but you don't want to go home. Because now you are the shiny the wizards kill for.
So.
There is a way to absorb the crystals without ending up in a grave, but trial and error is not a good way to discover it.
And crystals help you level up.
So it's like XP. Tiny shiny XP. That you can steal from other people, and use to power magic items.
... I think the Forgotten Realms setting book has rules for using XP to make portals. Pathfinder doesnt do it that way, maybe D&D does? Turn XP into items?
Doesn't need to hold close to other rule sets, obviously.
Ability to level up big if you kill something with lots of XP and ability to get super able if you acquire huge amounts of magic items are both built in to the rules there though.
It also greatly resembles the soul gem trade and ways Outsiders, mostly devils, acquire and swap power from powerful mortals. There's rules around for that too. It's just generally considered an act of evil to even try it.
So it's an open sandbox world that may or may not have other people in, but before you meet them in numbers likely to challenge you, you find out they've all got an incentive to ... take your head and with it your power.
I mean, I'm not very original, but
in Highlander this goes all There Can Be Only One, but that's because they're a secret subset of people, civilisation will keep going around them come what may.
If you're stuck in the wilderness trying to survive, there's some calculations to be made about how much you really need to level up right now, vs how much you need someone awake to keep watch.
I think on the whole people will decide to be civilised, while a small minority will decide to grind.
But the one throwing people through the portal is definitely grinding.
He might not be the only one as well. There might be teams with different ways to call different destinations. That could be fun. Competition. Pit the other end against each other.
The team would only have a single place to resupply though, but they'd have a trade good that their supplier absolutely wants, even if they dont find other neat stuff.
So obviously if I was playing it I'd decide that if I can't go home here is home now and I'd try and trade for ways to upgrade, and instead of being hostile to the next team they'd be new friends, and just generally it'd be kingdom building with random shiny things.
And the wizard would have to work out if he'd rather have an erratic supply from a small number of low level adventurers he's sure he can control, or a steady and potentially luxurious supply from a much larger team that might actually live long enough to challenge him.
And obviously by the time you can challenge him, you know how to absorb the shiny yourself, you've got a lot of incentive to keep the trade going in a more equitable way.
Not sure this setup is as good as it seemed in my head when I wanted to write it down
but
here it is.
no subject
Date: 2020-08-01 12:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-08-01 11:11 pm (UTC)