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Ferren /
DesignDiarySeptember 7It seems like it's been a long time since I updated anything, but that's because all of my current developments are working offline. I'm busy making NPCs for the PCs to interact with, and we should be good to go for Saturday. August 30I have chapter titles up for the first few campaign chapters - I'm still working to get that map ready. Amazing how far this thing has progressed in 30 days. - mike here. Added some numbers to the specifics, regarding wizards and their spells. August 28So we're past the point of needing much more back story written down, though I'm going to do it anyway just to give myself more campaign ideas. But what I am doing is writing slightly more extensive back stories for those players who've provided me with more - in particular, Boris Amash and Matoya Ganis. Also: I just realized that between Boris, Lupin, and Wolf, we have three character who are named Wolf in this campaign. Therefore, chapter 2 of the southern campaign will be called Mark of the Wolves. This is not negotiable. August 23In more serious news, I'm writing a hell of a lot more back story for the world right now. I have most of it in my head, but I need to keep poking at it and editing it to get all the ideas written down. I think I have three different calendars here: the Seljuk used to base their calendar on the founding of their empire, but when it collapsed, their main anchor point in history is the founding of the Academy, so they have the Academia Era (AE). Uminium, Ferren, and Kyrnheld all trace their national lineage to the conquest of the continent by Garius Drake, which means that they use the Drakken Era (DE). Katun reckons time from when the gnomes made landfall, and I figure that instead of using Limited Edition or Landfall Era, I'd just call it Landfall... August 22待て待てぃ、ルパーン！ August 21The cast of characters and the roll of recent events continues to grow - I think I have a date for Tristan Ferren's death now, and I have a few recent events rolled into Danny's character history. It's great not having to come up with my own plot hooks - every character made gives me more opportunities. It's funny - all the stories I've developed before have sprung from individual scenes that I saw in my head and thought were cool. After that, I built stories around them as setup. Those stories pretty much lost momentum shortly after I had the immediate details. Now, I've created a situation, a society, and a history - and everything else is falling into place. This could be the start of me getting more stories together. August 20I can't sleep, but I'm actually being useful right now by fleshing out some of the noblemen of Ferren, who will be major players for certain plots. The first two I've filled in have been Count Cadmian and Count Ganis, who man the northern passes of the mountains and, more importantly, are directly related to two player characters (Ganis to John's as-yet-unnamed character, Cadmian to Alastair, Cliff's character). I'll keep writing down names and personalities as time goes on. Check out the Cities of Ferren section. August 19Last night, the first characters were made for Ferren, and Ian has agreed to draw up a map some time in the next three weeks. You can see the notes I'm making for the Southern Campaign in the Southern Campaign Characters section. This will turn into a campaign diary as time goes on (and the content will move into a subsection of the Southern Campaign Diary). You guys can fill in your characters as you wish, and I'll add more pertinent back story as I go. Also as a note: The main focus of the southern campaign will be fleshing out the Federation of Katun and the Free Barons of Kyrnheld, while the northern campaign will spend much more time in Uminum and Seljuk. August 16- mike here. Changed language on some things for public consumption. Heard yesterday that the south group is going to be chargen soon. Um. Okay. Dropped a bunch of things for simplicity's sake. Magic lists (banned etc.) updated. Clarified some house rules. Probably need to do more before game actually starts. August 15- mike here. Just put in some bits on Albert's binder idea. I think it's decent, but too powerful for the world as I'm seeing it, especially as the other Sorcerer class ability already gives Level 9 Spells. Still need to polish some things, and wizard staves are in bad need of an overhaul. Problem is making it simple and elegant. I can do a cop-out and provide Spells Known as bounties for captured staves. You have to return them to the Academy to get the new spell. I was working on curricula for the Academy. Gave up on restricting by school groupings; trying a different tack right now. The new lists of banned spells is interesting. Still need a map; things just aren't very concrete in my mind yet. August 14Magic continues to be a great debate, and that's not a matter for me. The discussion area of the History of Ferren section now has a rough timeline, including the discovery of magic and a reason that most of the past is murkily recorded. Edit: Separate from the debate about how magic works, I have created an initial list of what spells are banned by the Academy. Basically, since the Academy exists as a self-regulating body so that the government doesn't have to step in and ironboot everything, there are spells that are not often taught, as well as spells that are outright banned. The spells that would be unreasonable to society include any spell that could kill 20 men without the caster blinking (see Burning Hands, Fireball, etc.), spells that corrupt the free will of people, spells that outright kill (hard to justify disintegrate as self defense), and spells that involve the use of Shadow energy directly on living beings. (I'm creating a rule in society - no Light energy can come directly to bear on the benevolent undead, and no Shadow energy is permissible on living beings). Necromancy has its own category - most necromancy is punishable by death, while higher-level necromancy is punishable not just by death, but by relentless purge of the practitioner and everyone who could possibly have come into contact with the practitioner. August 13Huge progress today - Mike has figured out a satisfactory system on how to make magic work without direct divine intervention (we have spirit intermediaries now, which help explain familiars and animal companions). Albert is going to work on the history and flavor of Katun for me (I described the basic political situation and he fleshed out the whos and whys and hows, which is perfect). In accordance with what Albert has come up with, the gnomish history has been altered a bit. Any volunteers for the other sections? I'm spending this entire week working on the inner workings of Ferren and the history of Old Uminium. So a summary of what's changed: - Classes have changed to include the more common non-core classes (you guys participating in the basic campaign down south, you can ignore some of them if they're a little hard to explain mechanically) What's going on next: - Magic is still in flux. I'm sure Albert and Mike will be hammering that out for some time to some form that makes sense in the flavor. (Or you guys can think about it, and I'll keep thinking about politics). - mike here. I have (what I think is) a good working theory on magic. It entails some crunch changes to the classes (specifically, the wizard getting a step away from Vancian and back towards Tolkien-style, dependence on the wizard's staff. Also taking away the familiar from the wizard, and leaving it to the sorceror, to emphasize that wizards are the odds one out with the whole "companion helping channel magic" idea; also, because spellbooks are basically a money-sink and there's no money in this game, I'm getting rid of spellbooks entirely). - mike again. I put in basic magic theory; mortals can't wield full on magic without an intermediary of some kind. It was going well until I hit the wizard, which was made intentionally different. It's rather messy mechanically, and any help with clean-up would be appreciated. It's on the Magic in Ferren page, and further linked off to its subpage, Specifics. August 11Okay, so I didn't go as far back as the civil war yet - I have, however, added the Opening of Tolesport and the immediate aftermath of the War of the Sea Kings to the History of Ferren section. But what is turning out to be a bigger question that I thought it was is the good/evil crutch, which in turn affects the classes. I've been moving away from good/evil as a mechanical decision, and thus I spent a lot of time fucking with the paladin class to take the Lawful Good crutch off of them, but it might not end up working out. I may just de-emphasize paladins and make them knights errant and crusaders, while the current role of the Paladin will just become fighters and, in the more advanced campaign, the PHB2 Knight. If I did that, the only other thing left mechanically for good/evil would be to figure out how to even out good and evil clerics, which may just be to give clerics of all alignments the same blanket of abilities when it comes to turning and spontaneous casting. I may say "choose" - especially since turning undead is de-emphasized in this campaign, what with the dead being mostly benign ghosts and all. So the Classes of Ferren part is currently in flux thanks to a need to rethink where paladins fit. August 10Well, obviously, the way the world works behind the scenes matters a lot more to Mike than it does to me, so it may be some time before I flesh out the geopolitical situation. Or I'll just ignore it while he spends his time on it, and I'll keep coming up with NPCs and cities, because those are more immediately relevant to getting this campaign off the ground. Check the Discussion areas of most things (not History, though I think I'm gonna work on the history of Old Uminium next) for more evidence of how Mike's design philosophy differs from mine utterly... and a lot of useful stuff, too. mike here again - I agree; you should keep working on the stuff the players will actually truly be interacting with. I'll keep hammering away at the guts, and hopefully tailor enough of it to hold up the details you create. Also: Added notes on who the major players are in a subset of the Geography of Ferren section. August 9Well, that was easy. The classes in Ferren section is pretty much done. The hard parts remaining are filling in more history, filling in the geography with more than generalizations, and writing down how divine and arcane magic work... mike here - added lots of rambling on creation, religion, magic. August 8Well, a couple days later, the Races of Ferren section is pretty much complete. You can find all information on playable races in there (I'm probably going to allow most of the subraces from Races of X, but they're not going to be common enough to matter). August 6The Geography of Ferren section has been updated with some smaller details about the personality and industry of each nation, including a rather major update to Uminum that merits the addition of a History of Ferren section. It goes back about 16 years, and from there it gives a brief description of where the campaign starts. I'm thinking that there won't be proper worship of the various light/dark/worldly forces in my world, too. Sure, those powers will be around and are the forces behind most magic, especially arcane. However, given the way enchantment works in the world, wouldn't it make sense for most people to revere ancient heroes as saint-like figures instead of just fixating on some sort of broad concept of good and evil? August 3I reversed the order of diary entries so that you actually see the newest first. The Geography section has been updated with some more solid guidelines, including brief histories and backgrounds. August 2I spent a lot of time last night thinking about how the religious cosmology will work in Ferren. I know that there will be a lot of low-level divine magic floating around. I'm just wondering what they'll draw from. I don't want religion to be a huge factor, so I'm thinking of going with three basic precepts that people can draw their power from: The Light - a neutral good concept/ideology I may tweak Paladins a bit flavor-wise and and say that their power comes not from a divine patron, but from their own devotion to either king and country or the Light itself. And yes, The Light is taken from Warcraft, but really, what else do you call it? The Good Force? The Up Side? :P August 1Today is mostly an experiment in wiki-editing. In non-trivial news, I'm reading the Complete books, trying to cull what I'll want to use and what I don't like. As with all D&D books, I'm throwing out at least 90% of it, but the feats seem alright, and those 10% of prestige classes do pretty well at filling their role (I can especially see a lot of the Complete Warrior stuff in my world, with Justiciars, Knight Protectors and even Thayan Knights - lower numbers of mages mean that you have a lot more types of specialized warriors). As always, I'm throwing out almost everything that is flavored with Japan or China. About the only one I'd probably keep is the Ronin, which fills the flavor of a disgraced knight nicely. I wonder when my other Complete books will come out from Amazon. Anyway, the Special House Rules section is filled out for now, and the Geography of Ferren section is half-full of the basics. I'll fill in more tomorrow. |