You're my (Arche)type

That... that's a bad joke. I'm sorry.

Today, I'll elaborate on Archetypes, their use in character creation, and just how broad they are.

As I've stated before, I decided to remove ability scores from the Forbidden Skies game to free up some design space and make more character options valid at all levels of play. Because it's not impossible to roll up a strong, but dumb rogue in any edition of D&D and play him for a while, but the game tends to punish players from straying from the "norm" on the long term. What I strove to do with Archetypes is allow for wizard character to be a physically impressive individual, for a rogue character to be a charming swindler or for a fighter to be a clever tactician without mechanically crippling any of those ideas.

The Mighty, Dauntless, Clever Ones

At the heart of the Archetype concept lies the idea of associating rolls or checks. I like the idea of keywords, and this system allows me to make the connection between skills, and other assorted checks, with keywords relating to the Archetype of a character.

For exemple, right now, the Dauntless Archetype is the one most closely related to dextrous, sneaky stuff. Players who pick it know this from reading the first line in its description. At the bottom of the section that details what the Dauntless hero is, there's a line that basically states : "Whenever you make an [Agility] roll, you get X bonus." [Agility] is what I'm calling an Attribute.

Most of the rolls in Forbidden Skies have an Attribute, and most of these Attributes (well, right now all of them, though I can't be sure what the future holds) relate to at least one Archetype. They are, essentially, the main keywords of the game. Sneaking past a guard is a Stealth [Agility] check, decyphering some arcane hieroglyphs is an Arcana [Cunning] check, breaking down a door is a simple [Might] check, etc.


An unforeseen consequence of working with the concept of Attributes, has been that I started associating them to other, seemingly unrelated, roll types. For exemple, some fighter abilities have Attributes that alter them significantly; either allowing a re-roll to the attack or increasing the potency of a specific rider-effect. This applies to most Attributes, and to all classes. So it's possible for a wizard's spell to have the "Might" attribute, making a "Mighty" wizard a valid, and rewarding concept.

(it also allows me to post up this awesome picture)

Racism

But what about the standard fantasy races? What if I want to play an elf or a dwarf? Those have become Archetypes too! They get similar abilities (yes, there is an [Elf] keyword)

Can't I play a [Mighty] Elf? Sure, but the Archetype you pick is what defines your character the most, so while you might pick the "Mighty" Archetype, you could still write in "Elf" as your race.

The Perks of Being, say, a Dwarf

 Every Archetype offers a set of bonuses that relate to what they represent. Mighty heroes are strong, cunning heroes are smart, mystic heroes are good at magic, etc. Your character also gets access to a suite of talents. Contrary to class talents, these don't range all the way to the end game, instead tapering off at around the middle of the level scale. Finally, your character's Archetype grants you a method of gaining Action Dice, the currency that powers a lot of class (and some Archetypes') abilities. Contrary to Action Dice gained from class abilities (like, say, the wizard's Arcane Meditation), the dices gained from your character's Archetype are untyped, allowing you to power any class abilities you may have gotten from Forbidden Skies' take on multiclassing.

The Weird Ones

There are other, weirder, Archetypes I have in mind. In fact, one came to me as I watered my garden this morning. Perhaps owning a unique magic item could be an Archetype? Or having a faithful companion? I'll probably talk about at least a few of these ideas in a future post, though next time (I can make no promises, but I'll try and get something up by Tuesday), it's going to be Action (Dice) time.

Thank you for reading, have a great day/evening/night,

E.L.F AKA The Choice

P.S. : I don't know the name of the artist behind the picture I posted above, but, whoever it is are, she/he is awesome! Thanks!

A Quick Note

Yesterday, I posted a reply to a message board thread on ENWorld that relates to gender/race/sexual orientation representation in RPGs (specifically in D&D). In one of my postings I included a reference to a webcomic dealing with gender representation in comics. At the time, I could neither find the picture or add it to my post, so, for the sake of completeness, here it is:

This image comes from the Shortpacked! webcomic.

Back...

I don't have an excuse.

Really, I could say that getting flooded stopped me from writing (yeah, we literally had the roof cave in on us at our last apartment. Fun times), or that my day-job or schoolwork got in the way of me working on this blog, but that would be making excuses. The truth is, I got lazy; I planned too far ahead and, when I missed a week's worth of posts, I felt like I was getting buried in a backlog of stuff, and it got overwhelming.

But I'm back...

... in Black

I'll start by saying my favourite ACDC (can't do the lightning bolt, sorry) song is "Highway to Hell", but the whole Back in Black album is probably among the best hard rock records of all time. As an LP, it's pretty much Bon Scott's funeral march, and a promise to keep on rocking after his untimely passing. This post will serve a similar purpose.

In a recent rewrite of the base rules of Forbidden Skies, I've had to say goodbye to a key part of the traditionnal fantasy roleplaying game genre: ability scores. Yeah, they're gone. The reason behind this decision is that, in a game that includes skills, ability scores add a layer of unnecessary complexity. The way traditionnal Dungeons & Dragons does this is even more problematic, with ability scores not equalling their modifier, etc.

This idea came to me as I was reading some articles on mountain climbing I had saved up back when my father went to climb a mountain in South America a few years back. The very act of climbing builds up strength, so tying a "strength" score to a skill that already demands physical power is kind of redundant. It also makes certain character concepts less effective than they ought to be; the rogue (well, thief in editions prior to 3rd) had a "climb" skill that he could increase as he gained levels, and he started out fairly good at it. Post-3rd edition though, he's a fairly poor climber unless he bumps his Strength (which is unlikely considering he still has a Dexterity score to keep up, and his Intelligence dictates how many skill points he gets, so it's important too. And maybe he wants to be a little Charismatic too, so...).

So, Death to Ability Scores. And death to races too...

My thinking went like this: what defines your character the most? And I felt that races and ability scores muddled the picture a bit. So I'm replacing them with what I'm calling "Archetypes" right now.

In the current draft, your Archetype is a key element to describing your character: is he physically powerful? a mystic? an agile daredevil? a sturdy dwarf, or a cunning elf? Your Archetype defines that, and provides your character with some abilities independant from his or her class. Also, different skill uses and basic rolls key off those Archetypes: a Dwarf gets a bonus to a check made against being poisoned, a Mighty hero has an easier time lifting a heavy gate, etc. The "Attributes" (as I call the keywords system for checks in Forbidden Skies) of each roll allows for the same flexibility I wanted from decoupling skills from an asigned ability score, but I feel it will also encourage players to attempt checks they normally would not have tried with a character's weaker ability score modifier.

Along side these archetypes are smaller bonuses currently called Traits that define other areas where your character excels (but that don't define them as precisely). Having elven blood running in your veins or having a slightly better level of education could be considered Traits. I'll write more about this in a future installment.

So, in a sense, I might be burying a part of the original design, but in doing so, I feel I have brought new and interesting concepts to this little project of mine.

... to the Future

And by "future", I mean the past. And by "past" I mean modern... D20 Modern. That came out all wrong.

The D20 Modern experiment proved that the d20 framework developped for D&D did not work when directly ported to a modern, action-oriented setting. It was a valiant effort, but, ultimately, the D&D ruleset of 3rd Edition is not flexible enough to accomodate a wide variety of game genres.

That having been said, D20 Modern had a few interesting elements in its design, namely talents. Talents were abilities your character unlocked as he progressed through his base class. There were few of them, and their use was often limited or downright redundant, but the core mechanic (i.e. choosing among a set of abilities built in a chain or chain-like structure) made sense and it had room to grow.

So talent "trees" (right now, they're more like "bushes" to be honest) are where most of a character's customization will happen. Fighters will get to pick from "weapon mastery" trees, "wizards will have talents that relate to both their spell selection and to how they cast them, rogues will get "skill tricks" that will emphasize skill use in combat, etc. There will also be talents related to your Archetype.

This setup also helps with a problem I had been running into with regards to "multiclass" character concepts. Now, a player may simply pick a talent tree he or she hasn't learned yet and add it to his or her repertoire. Sadly this development also led to me ditching the very (some would say overly) specific ways characters used their abilities.

... in Action

Enter the "Action Dice", a generic term for the resource each character draws upon to use abilities. I feel it deserves its own article, so I won't go into too much detail right now, but I will say that it is just that, a resource for characters. Fighters spend them to hit harder, block incoming attacks or power weapon attacks, wizards burn through them to cast spells, and clerics can use them to cure their comrades of wounds.

While the resource is generic in the sense that all characters use it, there are some variations to it. Wizards gain dice by doing wizard-y things, fighters gain them by doing stuff fighters are famous for, and you can't use a fighter's action dice to power a cleric's prayer or a wizard's cantrip. As I said before, I'll elaborate further in a future blog post.

So that's it. I'm just going to apologize to the three or four people reading this blog who wondered where I had gone to. I won't promise to write up a storm in the next few weeks to make up for it, but at the very least, I'll try to be more regular with the updates.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day,

E.L.F. AKA The Choice

The Adventurer's Toolbox

I believe that, after race and class, one of the most defining aspects of a character is what he carries around, what he chooses to stick in his backpack before going out and adventure.  As such, whatever the RPG book I'm reading, the equipment section is the one I often go to first.  After all, I might not be playing a game with different races or even classes, but all games (that I know of) have gear.

The Three Boxes

There are three large categories of equipment an adventurer might need, in my opinion: weapons, armour, and gear.  Weapons are the tools of the trade for most characters; they might not all wear actual armour, but everybody carries at least a dagger, just in case some slobbering monstrosity gets too close.  Weapons, I've found, also includes the implements of the spellcasters.  In 4th Edition D&D, while they are not listed with other weapons, they act in the same way as weapons for warriors.

The weapons list I'm currently working from is a strange cross between 2nd, 3rd and 4th Edition.  Weapon groups have been kept, mostly as a keyword for abilities that work with or better with a certain type of weapons.  The fighters Slashing Fury ability (in its current form) requires the wielder either use a heavy blade or an axe, while the rogue's Cruelest Cut requires a light blade to be used.

I've also come up with a rough damage expectation for characters and monsters at this point, and it looks like the d8 is going to be the "average" dice for weapon damage.  So the big, classic murder tools, the longsword, the warhammer, the mace and the battleaxe, are probably going to use it as their damage dice.  You might feel removing some of the diversity in damage and in properties will make those weapons bland, but I decided to put some of those into the abilities of the characters using them.  A fighter will use a mace in a very different way than a rogue would, for exemple.

Weapons also come in a variety of materials which alter the way they work.  As of right now, I can't really go into details, but let's just say a fighter who wishes to squeeze the most out of each attack will want to pick up an adamantine axe or something.

I've always felt armour diversity in 4E was anemic, it lacked diversity.  I've decided to bring back some of the previous editions' varieties: studded leather, chainshirt, banded mail, etc.  As it stands, the armour chart has double the varieties of the base 4th Edition one.  I've also added back the tower shield to the game; picking it is costly as it slows you down some, but it is meant mostly as a situational tool.  As for the rest of the armours' stats, I've decided to stick to a simple, 4E-like approach (so your armour will have an AC bonus, a price, a penalty to certain checks, and some will modify your speed).  I am working on a different system for encumbrance, one where you don't have to track every pound of gear you're lugging around.

Armours also get an additional diversity with superior and rare categories.  You can find a piece of cloth armour in pretty much every armour shop in Kyrohn, but only the finest stores in Kelestas will have a robe of feysilk in stock, and a celestial weave mantle can only be found in the dusty ruins of Aurathis.

Finally gear is a problematic category.  We'll all agree that thieve's tools, rations and rope are a crucial part of the fantasy RPG experience, but what about alchemical fire?  Healing salves?  Ladders?

What I've found is that there is a way for both "adventuring gear" and "trade goods" to exist in a single RPG book.  The latter, though, might take too much space within the limited space that can be afforded to equipment, so they will get a sidebar that will help those using the system to adjucate their price and impact in game terms.  A sturdy ladder might cost you a gold crown and make climbing any surface an easy task, while a waterclock will be both harder to find and vastly more expensive.

 The magical stuff

Magic items have a long and prestigious history in the realm of fantasy RPGs and D&D more specifically.  From the lowly healing potion to the mighty Holy Avenger, all of those items strike a particular chord within players or DMs; they are sometimes the object of entire quests or they are everyday commodities for adventurers.

Something that always bugged me (well since the later 2nd Edition era) were +X weapons and armours, and I strove to remove them from Forbidden Skies' system.  Effectively, they've been folded directly into the characters' progression.  As for the rest of the magical items list, I'm currently in the process of whittling down a list of "core" items that will be included in the base system: cloaks of elvenkind, rings of protection, gauntlets of ogre power, winged boots, bags of holding, etc.

I want most magic items to have personality, so I'm toying with a list of traits that can be randomly selected and that can add bits of story to what tends to be just loot. I'm hoping it will make players more attached to what treasure they find. 

And on a final note, while I like the simplicity of the typical D&D coinage (copper, silver, gold and platinum pieces), I also like the idea of either changing the names of those coins to something more setting specific or even introducing competing currency (I highly doubt I'll do the latter one though; too much trouble).

That's about it for now.  I still have a lot of work to do on that specific aspect of the game, but I have a very strong framework on which I can build.  Next time, I'll show you some specifics on one of the key nations in Forbidden Skies and I'll elaborate on my process for creating kingdoms and realms for the setting.

Thank you for reading this, and be well.

E.L.F - AKA The Choice

Dragon's Eye View

Today, I thought I'd take it easy and leave the writing to a guy who knows just about as much of the world of Forbidden Skies as I do.  Ladies and gentlemen, give a hearty welcome to Bhorrel the Dragon Tamer, Keeper of the Iron Tower and Loreseeker extraordinaire!

Kyrohn, an Overview

The land we call Kyrohn as changed much in the past few hundreds of years.  Back when the fallen empire of Rydii still stood, you could walk from Nadjir to the Sunrest Ocean, but the coming of the Gods changed all that; broke the land when they fell, and tore it apart as they warred with each other.  But I feel you are not here for a history lesson, are you?  You want to learn more about the land as it stands now, so I will attempt to paint the clearest picture for you, young explorer.

Kyrohn is now split into three large landmasses.  While it is possible to travel between them in a number of manners, they now stand apart and have developped their own... characters, to put it mildly.   

Raveyn lies furthest to the East, between the Endworld Mountains and the Tear.  It is a land of dark jungles and soaring peaks, and the folk who live there reflect the exotic locales they inhabit.  The Broken Lands of Rydii lie at the Southern end of Raveyn and separate it from Djehram, a land spoken of in many legends and where adventurers bold enough to brave its towering mountains and frightening fauna go to seek treasure buried in alien ruins.  It is a land of mysticism and ancient, forgotten lore.  The scars of war are still fresh here, and the influence of the former Nadjiri overlords still lingers.  Still, the Raveynians have ever been a colourful and eclectic folk and I do not see that changing any time soon.

The middle-lands of Ordalhia lie West of Raveyn and the Tear.  Many kingdoms and nations dot its landscape, and it is often refered to by sages such as myself as "the last bastion of civilization" in Kyrohn.  I use those terms ironically, though; I do not believe the other regions of the known world are as barbaric or as hostile as some in the scholarly community would have you believe.  Its people are as diverse as those from neighbouring Raveyn, but their garb and attitudes seem much more grounded and subdued.  Perhaps it is because they were not as influenced by Rydian culture, in their nations' infancy.  Where eldritch sorcery defines the Eastern Lands, Ordalhia is the land of steel and flame; with rivaling Orlian and Tarecya fighting for technological and commercial supremacy, and the great forges of Mordenhar producing ever deadlier weapons of war.  I foresee many conflicts in the region a quick wit and a strong blade will be able to put right.

The North and Western reaches of Ordalhia are called the Periphery, and while they are not separate geographical entity, they still deserve mention for they have their own character, their own peculiarities.  Cities are rare there and kingdoms rarer still.  Those who would have the power to pull bands of humans, elves, dwarves or other folk together to form nations need to contend with an unforgiving nature and the less than civilized inhabitants of these lands.  Where Tarecya might send a detachment of knights to crush some ogres terrorizing the frontier, people in these parts have no Legion to call upon.  As such, they are rugged individualists, difficult to bring together.  This as made them a resilient lot, but it has also led to much bloodshed and violent tribal rivalries.

To the South of Ordhalia, across the Sea of Flames, Corsiri sits, shrouded in mists.  It is a strange land filled with strange, inscrutable people.  It is where the Last God, Eimroth, the Spelllord, fell, and in Its death, it unleashed a monstrous mystical cataclysm that ravages the land to this day: eldritch storms break out without warning, fiery whirlwinds rise up in blasted plains, at times, the land warps and bubbles beneath your feet, and those who enter a shimmering mist-shrouded moor might come out the other side as scarred, monstrous abominations, their flesh and mind eroded by the magics that permeate the land.  Only a narrow band of the island is densely populated, with walled city-states controlling the surrounding territories.  The North-East portion of Corsiri is home to the last remnants of once mighty minautor realms.  While they are wary of outsiders, they recognize the need to trade with the few rare travellers that brave the mystical storms that wrack the land.  At the heart of the island stand the ruinsof the fabled elven realm of Aurathis, conquered by Eimroth in the Age of Starfall, and ravaged by the god's calamitous death throes.  Adventurers delving into the mystical better be prepared to face doom when they dare enter the blasted halls and haunted streets of Aurathis, for the city is home to magically warped creatures that prey on those foolish enough to venture within the scarred realm.

Beyond the Known World

Many wonders await those who would seek their fortune beyond the lands of Kyrohn.  Across the Endworld Mountains you will find the glimmering sands of Nadjir, its proud desert riders, its cities filled with intrigue and exotic beauties.  It is a nation on the brink of civil war, and cunning heroes could carve themselves a name in its history.  But beware, for the Nadjiri are perceptive and tolerate no insult from outsiders.

Travelling further East, you will find a great kingdom built around a deep crevasse: the glittering realm Huruan, with its misty forests and snow covered peaks.  The sparkling depths of the Zanah, the scar that splits the realm in two, contains many wonders and riches, but it is also home to fiends bound there by mystical chains that have grown fragile in recent years.

As I said earlier, to the South of Kyrohn stands Djehram.  Once, the empire of Rydii extended all the way to it, but when the gods fell and shattered the old empire, our contacts with the locals diminished drastically.  Today, only a small Tarecyan trade outpost stands on its sandy Northern shores and sporadic reports from the region indicates a great tragedy may have occured there during the Age of Starfall.  Rumours speak with reverance and fear of a "Veedrah", and expeditions inland have brought back nothing of substance... when they returned at all.

What lies beyond the Sunrest Ocean, even I cannot tell.  Some say another land waits the sailors brave enough to travel the traitorous sea while others claim that beyond the sea, there is only the starry void, and that those foolish enough to sail there will simply fall to their doom.

---
Well, that was something, wasn't it? Next time, I talk about equipment, gear and the way I want to tackle magic items.

I hope you enjoyed this entry.  Be well.

E.L.F. - AKA The Choice

Power Struggle

(Did I mention I love my mid-to-late 90s/early 2000s rock?  Well, I do.)

How a game presents character options is kind of the central element of gameplay on the player side of the table.  In editions prior to 3rd, Dungeons & Dragons there were no real "active" abilities for non-caster characters (well, outside of lay on hands, maybe), 3rd Edition D&D added feats that could be selected as "features" (some were flat modifiers, some modified some existing abilities, etc.): Power Attack, Expertise, Spring Attack, etc. Fourth Edition brought in the idea of "powers for everyone", and while it was a gigantic step forward for several classes (the poor rogue and fighter benefited from it the most), it came at the price; every class "looks" the same.  Notice how I used "look" and not "feels" or "plays" the same; I've seen dramatic variations of gameplay within a single class that put 3rd Edition characters to shame (it my opinion, the 3.X rogue was the worst example of "every character plays the same").

So the challenge that lay before me when I started design work on classes was this: How do I ensure class mechanical parity while also diversifying the gameplay of each class?  I still haven't come up with a perfect answer, but I'll show you some of my work by contrasting the progress made on the Fighter with the some of the concepts done for the Wizard.

Definition of a Warrior

What makes a fighter a fighter?  What defines the class?  I have to agree with Mike Mearls (at least I believe it was him who said something to that effect) that designing the fighter was tougher than designing the monk.

Fighters are touchy to design; they're a broad archetype with dozens of valid interpretations: from the brawny battlerager to the dashing swashbuckler, the master marksman to the dedicated dwarven defender, all of those are exemples of fighters in various editions of D&D.  Compared to the monk or the ranger, he lacks a singular feature that defines both in combat and in the fiction of the game.  They also face a problem of identification; look at images of fighters in D&D-like games or systems and you'll discover that, at times, it's difficult to tell them apart from paladins, rangers, clerics or even rogues!

So the fighter has a bit of an identity crisis.  Still, there are a few areas where they have a clear place in the greater fiction of the game.

The defining trait for fighters seems to be their rapport to weapons; whenever one is portrayed, he or she is always wielding some sort of implement of war.

The Process

I decided upon three fighter archetypes for the original system document: the "sword-and-board" defender-type fighter, the aggressive, large weapon wielding-type fighter, and a sort of commander/battlefield marshal take on the class.  I then went through the powers list for the class, picking a few from the 4th Edition Warlord's list and began combining them into a sort of branching powers "tree".  The results were... less than satisfactory; it lacked personality and felt like an unoriginal retread of the 4E fighter.  That version got scrapped, and I looked to how Essentials D&D had approached the class.  There again, I found some interesting seed ideas, but nothing that struck me as something I could take up wholesale.

The break I had been looking for came when I began to look at the fighter's polar opposite: the wizard.  I found that, like the wizard, the fighter should have a currency, something that both symbolized its powersource and could become shorthand for its mechanics.  Where I settled on Essence being the wizard's currency, fighters got Bravery.

Once I had this figured out, I ran into another problem.  My process was still flawed, I was still trying to translate the list of 4E powers straight into my new system, applying a cost in Bravery to attack powers and utility powers... the end results sucked!  I was still faced with a bland class that lacked the depth of tactical play that the 4th Edition incarnation of the Fighter had, and because I had so many powers to choose from, I felt frustrated by how narrow I had to constrain myself.  But then it hit me: I'm not designing a new, full edition of D&D, and I should aspire to simply make a good little game that works and develop systems that work within themselves.

Bravery, Stances, Weapon Science, etc.

The core of the Forbidden Skies Fighter is Bravery; there are many ways for a fighter (and other classes I'll write about later) to gain Bravery, but they generally start an encounter with zero, and get more as the fight progresses.  Those points can be spent to trigger a number of different maneuvres that are tied to what weapons he or she is currently wielding and what fighting stance he or she is adopting.  Stances are the basic fighting postures the warrior can choose.  A Fighter might start knowing or mastering a single stance, but as he gains levels, he may choose to learn new ones.  For exemple, the defensive stance makes a fighter more adept at blocking attacks and making him tough to get by, while the aggressive ravager stance allows the fighter to deliver punishing blows and pushing his foes away with vigourous blows.

A Fighter begins his career mastering one specific set of tools.  As he gets more experienced, his mastery grows and he increases his skills with his primary weapons, but also masters other weapon groups.  The mechanics behind this feature closely mimic the 3rd Edition Ranger's favoured enemy ability.

Still, there remained a hole in the system: what about utility powers?  That came later... much later in fact.  And I'll write about this a little later, when things crystalize and take clearer shape.  Next time, I'll start an overview of the world of Forbidden Skies, the lands of Kyrohn.

Thank you again for reading, and be well.

E.L.F. - AKA The Choice

Gods and Monsters

When the Divine Becomes the Reviled

[...] For the gods had grown vain, and bickered amongst themselves like children.
Fearing they might destroy the celestial realms, the Divine Creator cast them low,
falling to Kyrohn as fiery comets.  The coming of the gods heralded great darkness and
misery for the Creator's children.  Thus began the Age of Starfall [...]
The Book of Creation; tome III, Into Shadows

"The gods are dead, and we killed them."

This was the sentence that started it all, that pushed me down the path that I am treading.  It was also one of the most problematic things to conceptualize once you got down to it: who were the gods?  Who killed them?  Why?  How?

For the longest time, I figured the gods were killed by a bunch of heroes who travelled to each of the deities' domains and murdered them, fought them, whatever.  This seemed pedestrian, but it fit with a lot of end-game, epic, D&D stuff.  After all, some of Paizo publishing's own adventure paths ended with the PCs killing an immensely powerful extraplanar entity (Adimarchus from Shackled City, Kyuss from Age of Worms, etc.).  It seemed... in tone with the common D&D mythology.  But once you got down to its core, this idea lacked drama or the potential for "campaign secrets".

The Dungeoncraft Experiment

I'm a big fan of DM/GM advice columns; I'm always looking for new points of view, new perspectives or ideas on how to run games.  One such advice column, the one I often go back to, is Ray Winneger's old Dungeoncraft series.  They used to be published in Dungeon magazine, but you can now find them online fairly easily.  The single best piece of advice from those columns is what he called "The Second Rule of Dungeoncraft": for every major piece of the campaign world, always devise at least one secret related to that piece."

This is great advice from a campaign-building perspective, as it "bakes in" adventure plots and campaign arcs that PCs can latch on to.  From a DM's point of view, it makes the world seem more dangerous and it gives you an ace in the whole to spring on unsuspecting players.  Even when using the collaborative narrative approach presented in the DMG2, this invaluable piece of advice will help make the world come alive by keeping the players guessing and the PCs searching for clues of what is amiss.

So, to create more mystery and make the menace of the gods feel more viceral,they had to have come down to earth as it were, had to have a physical presence that could be killed.  Still, why kill them?  And what secret could hide behind the death of so many divine entities?

The Age of Starfall

So the gods fell to earth for the sin of hubris, cast down by their mighty Creator.  Classic fantasy/mythology trope, right there.  How would the mortals have received them?  As saviours?  Probably not.  If you read the (bad) opening fiction for this entry, you'll see I've described them as "falling... as fiery comets".  The gods literally fell to earth causing untold devastation, destroying an entire country in fact.  So humans and the other races were a little wary at their arrival, and, for a while at least,

I love the Time of Troubles from the old Forgotten Realms storyline ; it's both visceral and mythic in scope, and the consequences for it were felt deeply and over a long period.  When a god died during that event, it mattered, and it rocked the world to its core (well OK, nobody cried when Ibrandul died, but I still shed a tear for fallen Torm, even though he got better).  But the FR deities knew what they had to do to get back.  What would happen if the gods of Forbidden Skies knew they could never go back to their celestial abodes?  How would they react?

The gods of Forbidden Skies are largely based on those that we know from mythology and epic sagas in that they are mostly humanoid and possess flaws that represent human failings.  Contrary to "modern" real-world religions, they are not perfect entities, and their worshippers know as much.  So what would insanely powerful supernatural entities that just so happen to also be jerks do if they were stuck in a place with a bunch of mortals?  If you answered rule over them like god-kings through a combination of fear and awe, you're completely right!

When they first arrived, the gods swore an oath of non-aggression, but soon that pact was broken and they began warring against one another.  At the same time, worshippers close to the gods began to notice how mentally and physically unstable they seemed; their minds seemed gripped with delusions, and their bodies looked warped, sometimes bloated or literally mutating with new limbs sprouting from their torsos.  The deities waged war on each other, and their flock paid the price, left to unadorned graves on battlefields or returning home to see their god demand more extravagant sacrifices from them.  If anything is surprising, it's that the Age of Starfall, from the fall of the gods to their demise, lasted over a thousand years.

Eventually, humanity (and the other free people of Kyrohn) threw off their shackles and turned against their divine masters, who had become monstrous, abomination spewing, creatures who lorded over the masses from cyclopean abodes or ruled vast stretches of land (or sea), hunting down all who dared trespass.  The first to fall was Ourghex, Lord of the Sightless Depths, ruler of the Northern Sea.  Of the hundred or so gods who fell, none remain.

The Current Situation

The gods are coming back; some have already established new domains in the Astral Realms, others, still too weak to ascend, hide amongst the mortal races.  Priests of these new gods are rare, but their numbers are growing daily.  The gods and godesses appear different from their predecessors: more even-tempered, less war-like and demanding of their worshippers.  Arteon, God of the Winds and Lord of the Storms has one of the first large temples, not dedicated to the Divine Creator, in all of Kyrohn, and his faithful wear his sigil without fear of reprisals in most towns and cities.

Still, people fear the return of the gods.  What if the madness and corruption consumes them again?  Could they survive another Age of Starfall?

That about does it for now.  Next time, a look at the "power mechanics" for two classes and a closer observation of the Fighter as a class.

Thank you for reading, and be well!

E.L.F. - AKA The Choice