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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

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[Trekkin]

Sir yes sir! I'm mostly imagining lots of grim, grizzled people in heavy winter coats squinting at each others as their wintry breaths hang thick in the air and numbing fingers fumble for their revolvers.

So like some sort of Frostpunk-flavored Deadlands? I think they actually did a sourcebook on that back in the Classic era. As I recall, Canada had been overcome by an endless spirit-driven winter held back only by magical train tracks.

[Kadzar]

On the subject of D&D magic: the core assumption of the system from the beginning seems to be less that they are made up of fundamental building blocks that you combine and more that they are predefined effects that mages have figured out how to access. The modern internet concept is to think of them as scientists, but it's probably more accurate to think of them as something like Kabbalists or some other form of mystics.

This is most evident from the fact that wizards don't gain great power most easily by tinkering in a lab (as Ars Magika wizards do), but by delving into forgotten places to retrieve the secrets lost in them (aka finding and copying spell scrolls). The reason there aren't rules for mishaps for missing a component of a spell is that spells don't work on the basis of the interaction of different components; it's more like you're inputting a password for one of the fundamental laws of the universe. If you're missing a character, there's no way it's going to work.

Now, true, metamagic messes this view up somewhat. But, 1. it was first introduced in the AD&D 2nd edition supplement "Tome of Magic", which was well beyond the point of D&D's early development; 2. they were originally spells that, when cast, changed how your other spells worked; and 3. ignoring it's origins, metamagic fundamentally can only modify spells, not be used to create new ones. So metamagic can be thought of as more like setting adjustments that rather than rewriting code.

[Egan_BW]

I don't care for "magic system as a list of spells" anyway. One example where you can probably do better than DnD rules.

[Kadzar]

And that's fair. But, yeah, D&D has a weird magic system, and weird things happen when people expect it to conform to magic system from most other works of fiction, but it really doesn't fit well. You either have to accept that or replace it, otherwise it can lead to disappointment.

[Digital Hellhound]

Rime Western sounds pretty great. You could get to some juicy stuff when you start asking what, exactly, the snowflake is expanding into. Some sort of void - but does that void have inhabitants? Untold horrors that hunger for the warmth of our world? Monsters and weird things would make the frontier even more dangerous and unknown. What about the psychological effect of living close to the very real edge of the world? Can you stare into the abyss? Is ’rime madness’ common?

And other stuff... Do areas closer to the center thaw and become warmer, thus making them prime agricultural land? Frontiersmen stake out and fiercely defend patches of frozen tundra because they know they’ll be rich and fertile in a generation. Everybody’s fighting for a better future, if they can just hold on long enough to see it... of course, in the Rime, most don’t. If the expanding areas also have valuable resources hidden in the ice, all the better.

Heat will be a vital resource. I’m imagining coal bandits attacking supply trains from the interior (or firewood caravans, depending on our tech level), communities built around great pyres or fuel storages, cities built on ’the sacred vapors’ used to heat the houses (really a pocket of natural gas they’ve learned to utilize).

I’m generally fond of a ’freezing winter hellscape where people nevertheless survive’ thing or aesthetic, so I kinda love this. Must be from living up north as I do.

[Egan_BW]

The way I saw it, was that the world is a sheet of ice, expanding into a sea of liquid-phase water as things gradually get colder. The reason why you live in the cold parts of the world is that where it's not cold, there's nowhere to stand...
^{_{And sea monsters, of course.}}

Don't ask me how you grow food or whatever on a landmass that's literally just a really big ice sheet. I'm sure something could be worked out.

[Trekkin]

The way I saw it, was that the world is a sheet of ice, expanding into a sea of liquid-phase water as things gradually get colder. The reason why you live in the cold parts of the world is that where it's not cold, there's nowhere to stand...
^{_{And sea monsters, of course.}}

Don't ask me how you grow food or whatever on a landmass that's literally just a really big ice sheet. I'm sure something could be worked out.

One option might be to feed some kind of large mammal from aquaculture at the ice sheet edge and move them inward for distribution. A sea cattle drive, if you will. (Yes, I know manatees are tropical.)

Actually, you could modify the ice sheet idea by having a planet undergo seasonal freeze-thaw cycles over much of its otherwise liquid surface. People could either settle the permafrost and bunker down every winter or move along either the freezing or thawing edge of the sheet where it's both walkable and habitable.

EDIT: Which would probably mean either using whale oil as fuel or inventing some kind of very flammable kelp. The latter might be a good way to keep people out of the warmer oceans and secure a supply of metal at the same time, if we use it as part of a basis for an ecology that supports thermite-breathing undersea dragons and thoroughly armored giant fish for them to eat.

[Digital Hellhound]

Well, the basis for my idea of there being habitable and non-frozen interior regions, with new land gradually 'thawing' as the world expands, is to justify the frontier nature of the Rime. To have a frontier, you need a part of the world that's not frontier. If the whole world's just one ice sheet, you're not talking about a frontier setting anymore, but a sort of... survivalist setting? You move from frontier towns and steadily expanding civilization to nomads just trying to survive.

I like underwater crops and sea cattle as ideas, though, so I dunno. You could merge the two.

[wierd]

Careful use of special farming (think, purposeful muskeg production + permafrost, to produce something approximating farmland*) at the frontier, which is literally just the slowly crystallizing edge of the iceworld, could be an essential part of the economic activities of the ice world. (there being very strong pressures to supply both foodstuffs, AND places to live, for a growing population.)

Central regions of the flake could be ice-tower metropolitan in nature, with food/clothing/fuel production happening in the cultured permafrost settlements just inside the edge of the frontier. (If you examine snowflake morphology, several kinds of flake naturally produce central spire like structures at the center of the flake anyway. the tower could be naturally growing upward, (and downward at the bottom of the flake) just as the edges grow outward.

Spoiler: See CP2b type morphology in this handy table (click to show/hide)

*You cannot grow much on solid ice. However, lichens, mosses, and the like can be convinced to grow in slushy ice, which can then form organic sponge that floats, upon which other things can be grown. This can be the foundation upon which a biosphere can be sustained, allowing civilization and culture. Materials to produce plant fiber based cloth could be produced from more complex plants raised in the floating organic sponge.

[Trekkin]

Well, the basis for my idea of there being habitable and non-frozen interior regions, with new land gradually 'thawing' as the world expands, is to justify the frontier nature of the Rime. To have a frontier, you need a part of the world that's not frontier. If the whole world's just one ice sheet, you're not talking about a frontier setting anymore, but a sort of... survivalist setting? You move from frontier towns and steadily expanding civilization to nomads just trying to survive.

I like underwater crops and sea cattle as ideas, though, so I dunno. You could merge the two.

I had supposed permanently frozen regions to be the not-frontier simply by virtue of being amenable to permanent construction. In the most Earthlike case, these would be circular regions centered on the poles, with the destination of our hypothetical frozen sea cattle drive being a stock shipping point near the edge of the permafrost. The aim of our ice cowboys, then, would be to drive the sea cows north along the receding edge of the ice every spring/summer to reach the edge of the permafrost while it's warm enough for the sea cows to survive, thence to load them onto the trains for delivery all along the ice cap. This would also justify boom town-style construction of anything below the permafrost layer, since it needs to move with the ice -- or float and survive the sea life, the managing of which could give us the feeling of a disappearing frontier.

Alternatively, one could set the orbital parameters so that the freeze-thaw cycle is arbitrarily slow and have the frontier move out from the equator as the world thawed. That might merge the two.

[Jimmy]

Drunken thought of the day:

So, magic users "cast" spells, right?

cast
/kɑːst/
an object made by shaping molten metal or similar material in a mould.
"bronze casts of the sculpture"

What if "casting" a spell is done by pouring a character's magic into a mould?

Each morning a wizard can prepare a certain number of moulds, which break when they pour their molten spellpower into the spell's shape and the spell releases.

A sorcerer instead has a smaller set of sturdy, reusable moulds.

I like this idea.

[IcyTea31]

I always imagined prepared spells as little baggies that you e.g. throw (i.e. cast) or sprinkle at or on the target, perhaps after lighting a fuse or performing some other final step of preparation.

[Mephisto]

I smell a RuneQuest hack.

Cast your runes out of cold iron. Cast those runes at the enemy. If the spell doesn't work, you still threw a hefty chunk of iron with sharp edges at them.

[Mesa]

I was suggested to post this here, coming from the Gaming Block thread.

So there is this style of tabletop play informally called West Marches that I've been somewhat eager to try out running in some fashion or another - while it was coined for D&D play, the general concept seems easy to adapt to almost any theme, setting or system (which highly appeals to me as I'm not really into the idea of running D&D, 5e or otherwise).
The major difference here is that it would be more of a soft sci-fi/space opera campaign, as opposed to a high fantasy one.




Essentially, there's a relatively large group of people (as many as are willing to participate, basically) who organically explore the setting by picking where to go, who to go with and when to go, returning to the town (or space station, or whatever it might be) afterwards, and sharing the loot with the group, both tangible and intangible (rumors, areas to explore further etc.).
Basically, Darkest Dungeon but with (far) less eldritch horror.


"But River, how are you going to run a space campaign in D&D?", you may ask.


I don't, is my answer.
What I want to use instead (tentatively, at least) is either Open Legend or Genesys, though I'm somewhat leaning towards the former as I actually have played it a bit already, and the legally free rules reduces the barrier to entry, and my conscious! Also makes it easier to run the game on something like roll20...)...Or even GURPS, but that seems like a recipe for disaster.


(The reason why I want to go with something generic like OL or GURPS as opposed to say, Starfinder, Star Wars or Stars Without Number, beyond the fact I have no experience with any of those systems and don't feel particularly compelled to try them, is to have greater flexibility, both for players' sake and my own. I'm not the biggest fan of crunch-heavy games, which might be in a bit of a contrast with some of the demographic on here...Maybe?)


On that note, what I wanted to do is use the forums for updates and general OOC stuff, but run the actual sessions in roll20 (if only because I think it'll be better for actually keeping me accountable, and make things progress a bit faster - but also make things like rolling be a bit more fair since I don't know how people usually do rolls when playing PBP games).




Would there be any interest here in such an endeavor?

[smjjames]

Space campaign? Isn’t that what Spelljammer is?

Though really, the rules are the skeleton of it, the details (space campaign or whatnot) are the meat of it, to use a metaphor/analogy.