A possible idea for a setting has occured to me, based on the default Iron Heroes (a variant D&D 3rd Edition setting and ruleset) setting.

"Once, the world was ruled by mighty Mage-Lords. These godlike and near-immortal beings may or may not have been human, but their powers were almost limitless. They built great cities, summoned servant races from other realms or spawned them in their laboratories, made many powerful magical artifacts, ruled an empire that spanned worlds... And finally, for whatever inscrutable reasons, turned on each other in a war that lasted for generations and left the world a blasted ruin, with the Mage-Lords themselves dead or otherwise vanished.

It is from the ashes of this was that the present day is struggling to rise. Here and there, amidst the ruins of the glorious bygone age, handfuls of people are beginning to rebuild. Groups of vagabonds come together and try to make small islands of security and prosperity amidst the devastation. Intrepid bands of adventurers venture into the ruins, braving the warped and uncontrolled beasts to recover the treasures of bygone days. And a handful of scholars study the few fragments of the Arcane Arts that remain and dream of reclaming the power the Mage-Lords once wielded."

This setting has several advantages.

Firstly, it can use the standard D&D toolset, meaning no waiting for new models or having to make our own.

Secondly, it means we can design the world by increments and not have to worry about anything outside our current area of play. We simply build the initial settlement, then add bits as we go and assume people are slowly exploring outwards. There is no need to think of large countries which we can only see small parts of- what we see is what we have.

Thirdly, it gives a focus for the group as a whole inherent to the setting, which is equally suited to combat and RP. The standard D&D experience system gives XP for combat, so I assume that NWN2 has the same, which means combat wouldf have to come in at some point.

Finally, the fact that Magic is a "lost" art means that there can be a limit on the power of magic using characters placed on the setting, which is something that several people have expressed a preference for.

Opinions?

Another method of limiting magic that I'd thought of- an RP based one- was to require apprenticeship. We have one or more GM-played high level alt characters as the established archmages of the setting. In order to become a magician, a player has to be accepted as an apprentice by one of these characters. Only an apprentice can advance in spellcasting levels. We could also have a High Priest and Acolyte parallel for Clerics. With the masters all being GM-run, this means that a spellcaster can be awarded a chunk of XP for RPing their lessons well.

Having some experience with NWN modules, I tend to disagree. First, you should know that good modellers are very hard to get a hold of and they're usually busy with professional work. This isn't just my opinion - it's pretty much a fact of the world these days. Also, it takes some experience and work to get a model scaled properly in complexity to work well in a game like NWN2. Basically, what I'm saying is that this is a lot of work we're expecting someone we don't even know yet to just suddenly turn up and do for us. My experience is that having a design hinged on something like this is a very bad idea, because it tends to kill the project.

That said, I don't know if you read my post in the custom content thread, but there is likely to be a considerable mass of custom content available in a few months. Most of that is very likely to be fantasy-focussed of course, which is why I think making a sci-fi world is a bit overambitious.

As for the discussion around magic and such, it's interesting, and I have some thoughts and experiences to add to it, but I'd like to keep that for a separate thread. As I said before, this thread was intended as a first broach of topic so that we can home in on what kind of world we want to make.
I'd say alternative history is the choice. Does anyone disagree with that?

[Edit: model, not module.]

Last edited by Ahnion (2006-11-11 20:37:17)

If you want, you can always turn off combat XP (in NWN you can tweak the amout of XP gained from combat  - in Narfell they disallowed combat XP after a certain level for those without the RP token).

At a point in my life I spent a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect MMORPG setting. Here's what I thought of:

1) Settlers in a new world. This would have the same advantages of expansion and focus as Tantavalist's plan. In addition you could explain the new characters popping up regularly by ships carrying new settlers from the old world. The downside is that using medieval imagery in a setting based on the era of great voyages is a bit off.

2) Dream. The point of this idea is to explain the tendency of the player character to vanish from the gameworld on logout. In a shared dream everyone would pop in and out based on their sleep rythms (Darkhawk's character would obviously have been bitten by a tsetse fly).  Also the differences between dream me and real me might be interesting to explore in your RP.

3) We're in a dream. The opposite of the previous idea where humans find out they're in some kind of a matrix thing and are released from it at random intervals (malfunctions in synch with login and logout times). The original idea had a "matrix" based on technology but it could just as well be based on magic.

(Just some ideas. Still not have NWN2...)

Deportation. Australia.

Though admittedly I'm more inspired by a city-scenario, but what the hell.

In any event, we need to get this discussion structured up. Let's move it to a separate thread and make the suggestions a bit more coherent.

I'm going to take it for given that we're going with alternate history. If anyone has issues with that, now is the time to take them up, because ladies and gentlemen, we are moving along.