First off, a quick apology. It’s been almost three months since I last wrote something here. I’ve been busy toying with ideas over at my other blog, and doing various other projects, with the Old Crown sat on the back burner whilst things stewed over in my mind. I’ll be resuming regular service soon. Today I’m focusing on some overall setting information that’s been stored up, and I’ll be back to more specific details shortly.
I’ve been toying with converting the setting to FATE but I think that most of that conversion should be handled by player. It shouldn’t just be up to me how different races and powers interact. The Legends of Anglerre has rules for everything from siege warfare to guild political machinations, so I’m sure there’s an easy resource to tap there, when I finish reading it all.
The different flavours of magic in the system have had a bit of a change, and therefore so have some of the adventurer archetypes.
Elementality was the magical style that directly manipulates the classical elements of fire, earth, water and air. I’ve recently been thinking that it made less sense to have Chi representing only the warrior monk archetype, so an idea of Chi being expressed internally and externally formed.
Internally focused Chi is what makes the warrior monk so powerful, making his fists more powerful, his muscles able to leap further or run faster. Externally focused Chi is now the expression of an individual’s connection to the world around them, and is always attuned to one element most strongly (therefore the element there are able to manipulate). The rules I had been working with come from a D&D 4E fan document of an Avatar: the Last Airbender setting, so I might be less stringent and allow multiclassing or hybrids of two elements, but not opposites (no air/earth controllers, no fire/water controller, but certainly space for earth/fire or earth/water etc.)
Next, I think some of the races might need to be culled a bit. Gnomes are gone entirely, since they barely registered at all, as are warforged. I may remove halflings from the Margravate too, but have them mentioned in passing as living in the Northern Imperial Republic, or appear among some crews of trade ships. They were going to include all manner of oddities like the now displaced warforged, mermen and dogmen (I may enjoy the film Treasure Planet a bit too much…)
Since there’s little to no extraplanar contact to any but Ascended beings (at least for the start of any adventures I had in mind), there’s a case for fauna to be touched in other ways. I had thought of any wild animal encounters to be warped by magic in some cases, perhaps dire animals, or perhaps oddities like owlbears or chimerae. I haven’t quite decided how that plays out, though I’ve a feeling I will when I develop the Raethmoore area in more detail.
And that’s it for that update. Next I’m going back to Queenstown to detail Outwall and the poorest parts of the city, and characters all over the place.
jot jot ïota 