Birthright in Planescape\spelljammer setting.

[Keytium]

hi me and a group of freinds have been considering doing a birthright campaign in the planescape\spelljammer setting (though we don't expect spelljamming to be a major part we still want it included) when it first came up i though it was going to be easy, but after thinking about it i've realised that it will take alot of planning.

the adventuring will be easy as their will be no change from the normal rules for planescape but the doman rules will be much harder to adapt and so i thought i would ask for advice. some of the problems we've thought of are. can laylines go through portals? should spelljamming be treated as a sort of super trade route? should portals be man-made, only natural portals or both? if man-made are included how do we keep the numbers under contol? what about portals that move what do we do about them? should portals be holdings?( the higher the level the more stable and the bigger ectra) what sorts of extra planar terain should we have? how should we deal with the inherant 3D nature of certain plans (air, earth and limbo for example)?

oh and it's going to be a 3.5e game (srry but i just hate 4th ed) so what do you all think. any ideas or suggestions are welcome.

[Sorontar]

This does sound very interesting. Others have talked about adapting Domain rules for scifi cities before, though I don't think I have heard of Planescape/Spelljammer adaptions. Most references I think were about using Aebrynis in a Ps/Sj campaign.

But how to map Portals etc to Domains....

Spelljamming could be thought of as a ocean trade route. The portal could be thought of as a port. Like a port, it could be managed by anyone but probably a guild. Who controls law around the portal depends on who has a law holding in the "province".

As for placing a limit on number of portals, how about making them require some "energy" from the plane to work. Some provinces have stronger energies than others. This energy would work just like a province level (and probably match it). As the energy level goes up, the source potential goes down.

Or may be you could make it a variation on sources. A source could either be left to run free and be used for realm magic, or it could be harnessed for a portal. So the source regent would have to decide how much of his source domain to devote to his personal power and how much to use to further the trading power of the area. And if he wanted to boast the power of his portal, he would just have to change the portal:magic ratio. He may even want to use more power from other sources using a leyline.

Sorontar, who really knows little about Spelljamming.

[Keytium]

i like the idea of conflicting source/portal level, that would certainly eliminate the problem of too many portals. perhaps (if we are using the idea of portals as holding not ports) have them couting towards the maxium source limit as if they were a source holding so for example in a 5/7 province you could have a level 4 source and a level 3 portal or 2 level 2 portals and a level 1 source.

if useing them as ports their could be problems with how much can realisticaly get through a portal because they could be anything from a small trapdoor to a huge vortex hundreads of miles across.

[Magian]

When you mention portals as holdings what comes to mind for me is the unharness portal that naturally occurs. Harnessing a portal like making a stargate or fading suns like gate around the portal to keep it there, power it, and use it on a more permanent basis would be required before it would be a holding. Or something like that. The gorgon's alliance PC game implies that the neolithic structures of Stonehenge are sources, which could be used as a concept to justify gates or structures to focus and harness energies for the things in question.

Trade routes simply need a route and the traffic to travel that route unimpeded so I think anything is possible regarding Spelljammer trade routes, however I'd think it may be harder to blockade or decree them out of existence as borders are more easily circumvented. So that could be considered when making rules for them.

Again regarding portals I'd suggest a possible shadow taint from the nature of the Shadow world that can allow porting to have a risk of ending up trapped in the shadow world or something to that effect. Just a thought.

Ley lines going through portals? I'd require a focus or holding structure for them on the otherside of the portal. It may take more to maintain such a ley line and maybe even so much so that it's best to keep them as a temporary thing. If you allow domain rules for other planes, then you can have sources and ley lines on the other side as well. Either way though there are just some ideas that come to mind that tend to be Cerilia centric. There is no need to increase or limit ley lines at all if you want this campaign and the domain rules to spread across the multiverse.

The physics of extra-planar terrain has always been fuzzy to me. Applying the domain rules to them should be easy by following the exceptions that have been made in adventures where structures and terrain has been layed out where PCs can function as the 3D creatures they are. (4D if you watch cosmos) Regarding trade routes I'd simply use a planar tag with each type of terrain so when you have forrests or mountains they'd be considered different from Cerilian forrests or mountains or other planar tagged types of parallel terrain. That is to say if water plane mountains were linked to fire plane or Cerilian mountains it'd be considered a different terrain type. Then again that's just using earth physics for these planes, which I've found TSR...oops I mean WOTC doing with adventures and settings in outter planes settings.

Regarding your choice of rules being 3.5 I agree that is a much better choice than 4.

The limit on portals I would suggest being for harnessed portals on the holding level if you like the idea of what I had above. It seems the ideas are taking off here.

[Keytium]

hi thanks for the response. i don't agree that a holding would have to repressent a harnessed portal, at least not at the lower levels a level 0 portal would be a area where the boundries between the two worlds are thiner a level one would be a place that portals apear in a ocasional and chaotic way a level 2 could be a portal that apears on a reliable skedual such as only when the moon is in eclispe or some such thing.

i really like the idea of spelljammer routes being a harder to block verson of a normal trade route i can see that working well.The focus block thing for the leylines also make's sense but as for them being temporary in nature i think that could be hard to make rules for.

the terrain in most of the outerplanes can certainly be explaned away with just calling them Elysium plains or Arcadia hills ectra. but some need more new terrian types like cogland for Mechanus and hills in hades have greatly differnt propaties to normal hills. i think that the only way to do it is to go through each plane and see it as making new terrian types exspecialy in the inner planes because mountains in the positive energy plane can almost certainly support a higher maxium province level then normal mountains.

unfortuatly the idea of shadow tait just doesn't fit the setting as i don't think we'll be setting it in Cerilia (though don't quote me on that as it's liable to change) and in the planscape cosmology you don't go through the shadow plane to get anywhere you go through the etherial plane to get to the inner planes and the astral to get to the outter planes.

[Keytium]

i've been thinking about terrian in this champaign and i've gone through and complied a list of how i think the outer planes should vary from the prime material plan

Elysium:basical the same as prime material plane prehaps themountains of Eronia should have -1 maximum province level because storms keep distroying things?

Beastlands: still the same as prime material but prehaps -1 maximum province level on Karasuthra (except for nocturnal races) for it always being night.

Arborea: i can't think of anything differnt about this plane.

Ysgard: same with this one.

Limbo: wow well i guess you would have areas that are stablised by someones mind and divide them up into whatever terrian the creator saw fit. we don't need rules for uncontroled areas of limbo because the only thing that doesn't need to control an area around in order to survive are limbo's petitioners and the slaadi.as for dealing with the 3D nature of the plane see my note on that at the end.

Pandemonium:i guess the tunels would have to shown onthe map with provences being caverns big enough to support a population. as for dealing with the 3D nature of the plane see my note on that at the end. so for this plane we would need caverns as a new terrian. i think perhaps a maximum province level of 2. (it's a preaty in hospitible place) and a maximum province level of 1 on Cocytus because of the wind their being even worse.

Abyss:everything anything it would depend on what sort of layer was made up by the DM.

Carceri: most layers are mostly normal. you would need rules for dealing with chasms for the layer of Colothys and on the layer of Porphatys you have acid seas which could perhaps be dealt with simply with the removal of the +2 maximum province level for being coastal.

Hades: as most of this plane is mostly open planes which are normaly 8 maximum province level i would think perhaps a blanket -6 maximum province level for the entire plane.

Gehenna:most of the plane would count as mountainous(except maybe Krangath which would tundra) but you would need rules for the volcanic crators which would probaly be uninhabitable (except by fire ristant races)

Baator:well Avernus would be mostly planes but i would think they would have at least a -4 maximum province level. the whole of Dis would have maximum province level of 10 being as it's just one big city. Minauros would just be a normal swamp. Phlegethos would have lava flows whitch could be -5 maximum province level and the lakes of lava could do the same for an province they border. Stygia would be inhospitible enough if the whole place is tundra. i have no idea what to do about Malbolge. Maladominiwould i think be the same as Avernus. Cania should possibly be uninhabitalble unless you have cold resistance. Nessus is another hard one to do i'll think some thing up later.

Acheron: the terrian would be normal but maps would have to be made on nets of 3D shapes.

Mechanus: ummmmm well coglands. i haven't got a clue.

Arcadia: it's pratically the plane of bordom no changes.

Mount Celestia: made up of hill and mountain provances, but yet still has a large population i think +3 to maximum province level would be about right.

Bytopia: no change.

Outlands: i don't know possibly not change (appart from near the spire)

note that i've not made any comments on the source potential of any of the planes i'll edit it as ideas come together for it.

about 3D planes be they ones that you float around in (Air, limbo, areas between orbs in carceri, acheron and any of the layers of the abyss it might aply to) or the ones with tunels (earth, Pandemonium and again of the layers of the abyss it might aply to) you could just make a map for each area of 1 or more joined provinces and then work out a distance to each other place then on the map draw dotted line between each area with a note saying how far away they are from each other. travel between these areas would take time depending on the distance and the propities of the plane (travel would be fastest in the air plane slowest in the earth). thats the best system i can seem to think of feel free to suggest any changes if you think something is wronge.

[bbeau22]

There is a ton to think about on this question.

For Spelljamming I think they should just be treated as ocean trade routes. Harder to block and stop but otherwise they would work the same.

The source to portals makes sense but you could even tie the areas that have weak boundaries to the shadow world as good spots for portals. Their fabric is already weak and more open.

The Birthright land has been very blocked off from the rest of the universe for a very long time. I always accounted this for the will of the gods. They didn't want the people of Birthright visiting other planes. If this boundary is broken then how will the gods react? How did the portals first show up? Maybe Azari had something to do with it as he tried to get himself back into the land. There are a lot of questions to be had.

Another question would be how can certain blooded folks enter into planes with alignments opposite of what the original alignment of the god was. Would that cause problems. A fun example would be a person cursed with an Azari bloodline but still Neutral Good try to enter into Elysium. His tainted evil god bloodline will probably attract the attention of many of those living in that plane.

I would also think that portals should give certain benefits to the province or land that it opens in. If a portal opens in the Imperial city that links to, lets say, the endless forest of Elysium then I can only think that timber would be easy to come across. Perhaps any building of wood would cost half price.

-BB

[AndrewTall]

Are you just using the bloodline and domain rules to expand a planescape game? If so then you can of course vastly increase the number of possible gods - and make god-slaying have some interesting twists.

Limbo could have holdings if a sufficiently powerful mind stabilizes it - just as the shadow world has holdings by the lost.

The domains would be bigger in scope I guess - under such a system you'd have cerila itself as a province for example or possibly anuire/brechtur/rjurik highlands/etc. It depends how epic you are going.


If on the other hand you want 'birthright with expanded plane rules' then the first question is 'can you have domains outside cerila?' and working up from there. A game where the PC's are regents of cerilia who quest across the planes for various reasons (finding the long lost artifiacts of Azrai?) would need far less in terms of changes than a more open game.

Issues you could get are 'freaks in cerilia - a lesson on provincialism and hatred of 'blood-warped atrocities' bigotry for fools from sigil', the impact of a blooded ruler on a realm in the realms/greyhawk etc up against unblooded opponents (do the local gods support the locals? do they oppose this 'upstart godling' from moving in?) Will the PC's go for the 'easy wins' away from cerilia or view their 'foreign sphere' holdings as mere adventures?

It all depends on what you are planning for your game - scope, 'feel' etc.

Trading with spelljammers is a major problem - not because of trade with other crystal spheres, but rather the more commercial view of trading between, say, the city of Anuire and Ariya with just 1 hour travel time... that trade route will make others look like nickel and dime operations with their travel time measured in weeks and months.

[Keytium]

Are you just using the bloodline and domain rules to expand a planescape game? If so then you can of course vastly increase the number of possible gods - and make god-slaying have some interesting twists.

that was sort of more what i had in mind i don't even think cerila will be included in the campaign at least not to start.




The domains would be bigger in scope I guess - under such a system you'd have cerila itself as a province for example or possibly anuire/brechtur/rjurik highlands/etc. It depends how epic you are going.

to be honest if anything it would be on a smaller scale in order to acomidate some of the things in the planes such as the small floating islands of the air plane.


Trading with spelljammers is a major problem - not because of trade with other crystal spheres, but rather the more commercial view of trading between, say, the city of Anuire and Ariya with just 1 hour travel time... that trade route will make others look like nickel and dime operations with their travel time measured in weeks and months
.

yes i agree it should be somehow better than a normal trade route and although the unblocking thing does sound good i think you need something more. it should also cost at least 10 times that of a normal trade route.

bbeau22 i agree that portals should add some thing to provances they are atached to not just boosting prime material provance but a portal between paddeamonium and bytopia should effect both planes but how to put this into rules i don't know. As for a lot of your other suggestions they relate to blooded sicons something which without cerila i don't think i can include unless anyone can think of a way around that?

[AndrewTall]

bbeau22 i agree that portals should add some thing to provances they are atached to not just boosting prime material provance but a portal between paddeamonium and bytopia should effect both planes but how to put this into rules i don't know. As for a lot of your other suggestions they relate to blooded sicons something which without cerila i don't think i can include unless anyone can think of a way around that?

scions are simply people with a small number of magical abilities able to gain regency from ruling holdings - a trace of gods blood. This could as easily come from an ancient godly ancestor (think roman/greek myth) or any number of otherwordly sources.

portals could cause a local hybrid of the planes at each end - a sufficiently powerful individual might even be able to make one plane dominate a small area at the other end of a portal - alternatively the impact could be minor, say +1 pip to fire damage if near a portal to the realm of fire, etc.

[Keytium]

scions are simply people with a small number of magical abilities able to gain regency from ruling holdings - a trace of gods blood. This could as easily come from an ancient godly ancestor (think roman/greek myth) or any number of otherwordly sources.

yes i suppose thats true but the problem is that a campaign set in the planscape world is going to have ALOT of differnt factions it will be like running 5 birthright campaigns at once. So finding ways that even a significant portion of those regents have bloodlines or bloodline like abilities without fundamentaly changing the planscape setting (which isn't our aim) would lead to it being unbeliaveable because if everywhere you look you see an exception to the rule then the players are going to start think why even pretend that bloodlines don't happen much in planscape.

as for the idea with hybridising two planes that could work say you have a portal on from hades to celestia then selestia could get the -6 from hades and hades could get +3 from celstia (see my prevouse post for where that came from.) that would only work with high level portal i would think but it's certainly worth thinking about. this would also mean that the only major provinces in inhospitible planes like the lower planes would grow around portal witch does sort of make sense.

[Keytium]

I was going through the old 2nd edition planscape books for information and i just found this peice of info about how cerilia fits into planescape in the guide to the ethereal plane. this is from the book.


natives of the world cerila call its border the shadow world. The remnants of an evil power's dissolution resonate throughout cerilia, making its border a shadow world in truth. a body (person) sees the adjoining plane in shades of grey and black, and a certain physical chill exists throughout this border are. what's more, the elusive effect known as the seeming permeates the shadow world, and it often distorts a blood's ( person's) perception of what's real and what's not - or maybe it's really changing reality. it's hard to tell sometimes. the seeming has a varying chance to affect anyone attempting to move to and from Cerilia, including those who use such point-to-point transportation methods as teleport withou error. affected cutters (people) find themselves drawn into a shadow world of altered perception. Cerilia's natives believe the shadow world houses creatures of darkness and evil, maybe they have the dark (right) of it. after all, the ethereal is the plane where the intangible spirts of those who've failed to make the journey to the outerplanes linger. moreover, it seems that the shadow world does indeed contain more than it's fair share of haunts and evil spirts, probably due to Azeri's dissolution (the dead power mentioned above).

their you go thought that might be of intrest. when it's talking about border it means the border ethereal. it agrees with magian's ideas about the shadow taint. still think that we'll stear clear of cerilia for now though.

[bigmac]

hi me and a group of freinds have been considering doing a birthright campaign in the planescape\spelljammer setting (though we don't expect spelljamming to be a major part we still want it included) when it first came up i though it was going to be easy, but after thinking about it i've realised that it will take alot of planning.

I might be able to offer a bit of advice on the Spelljammer side of things, but as I haven't posted much at Birthright.net, I'd better introduce myself.

I am one of the moderators of the Spelljammer forum at The Piazza, one of the people trying to add some content to the 3e SJCS conversion*, one of the moderators at the Flickr Spelljammer Image Group and the admin of the Spelljammer Wiki (which is still tiny compared to the great wiki you have for BR over here).

* = I've been very busy recently, so haven't got too much of that done.

I'm a big fan of TSR's out of print campaign settings (in general) but sadly, I had given up playing D&D when Birthright came out and this meant that I missed all the fun. I am interested in learning more about Birthright, but at the moment, I've got very minimal knowledge and would have to ask a ton of questions about it.

If I recall correctly, Spelljammer was long out of print by the time that Birthright was published. I know that there are no references to Birthright in any SJ product that I recal, and I wonder if official policy would have been to sweep SJ under the carpet by the time that BR came out (because, if I was in charge, I wouldn't want to weigh down BR with something that might be seen as a failed idea).

So unless someone knows of some stuff within BR products, I don't think there is any official fan connection between SJ and BR. However, I am a fan of the concept of crossover settings and would love to see a BR/SJ crossover ("Birthspace") or a BR/PS crossover get done.

Anyhoo, here are some general tips on SJ, that can help you decide on how to use spelljamming to enhance an off-world Birthright campaign (and hopefully, to help people like me, bring people from other campaigns and allow them to visit Birthright). In the Spelljammer Universe:


People who live in (or travel through) space call themselves spacefarers.

Spacefarers call people who don't know who to get into space 'groundlings'. Many spacefarers are supposed to look down on groundlings, but technically a lot of so-called spacefarers rarely travel through space and are little different to groundlings. (This 'spacefarer arrogance' seems to be a control mechanism to help explain why spelljamming ships are not found on every street corner. Personally, I'm not a big fan of it, but it is in the canon of SJ.)
Planetary systems are surrounded by shells called "crystal spheres"

The crystal spheres are perfectly spherical and have no gravity. They are almost impossible to break and people need to use spells to pass through them or find a natural portal. Crystal spheres vary in size, but are usually twice the diameter of the orbit of the outer planet.
Crystal spheres all have names and many (but not all) of those names end in the suffix '...space'. Another (less used) alternative type of sphere name is 'The <something> Sphere'.

Examples of other crystal sphere names include: Greyspace (after the City of Greyhawk on Oerth, the World of Greyhawk), Krynnspace (after Krynn - the Dragonlance world) and Realmspace (after Forgotten Realms). Greyspace and Krynnspace make sense from an in-character perspective, but I've never understood the 'Realm' in Realmspace.

For now, I will call your sphere: 'Birthspace', but you will want to pick a better name for it at some point.
Planetary systems can take many forms (including weird things like a gigantic tree) but most of them seem to have a central sun orbited by planets. Planets can even remain still or all orbit in different directions. (However, non-standard planetary systems create extra calculations for the GM.)

So 'Birthspace' can take whatever form fits in with the mythology of BRCS, but I would advise you to stick to a standard set of planets unless you have a good reason to change things. (And if you do change things, be prepared to do extra work.)
The space between the worlds is called 'wildspace'.

(FRCS, calls space 'The Sea of Night', so if there is a BR name for space, I would suggest you stick with that, but 'wildspace' is the generic spacefarer term for space in any crystal sphere, so local spacefarers should use both terms interchangably and spacefarers from elsewhere would just call space 'wildspace' until they learned the local name.)
The space outside the crystal spheres is called 'the phlogiston' (or 'the flow').

Phlogiston is a rainbow sea that the crystal spheres float in. Some parts of the phlogiston are thicker than others and ships can enter these flow rivers to be pulled along at speeds far faster than spelljamming speed. Because it is impossible to see long distances in the flow, it is also impossible to tell how far apart individual crystal spheres are.

This means that to connect 'Birthspace' to the rest of the SJ universe, you need to pick a position for the sphere and connect in a few flow rivers.
The main area in the SJCS is called The Known Spheres. This consists of Krynnspace, Realmspace and Greyspace.

As other SJ products have added more spheres to this, most SJ fans infer that the Known Spheres is actually a central region of somewhere between 20 and 80 crystal spheres.

The 'fact' that Birthright and Spelljammer have not previously had a connection can best be 'explained' away by positioning 'Birthspace' outside the Known Spheres. However, I would not put it 1,000 spheres away, because if someone starts a Birthright campaign, moves into a 'Birthspace' campaign and then wants to take their PCs elsewhere, you should give them the ability to 'discover' the unknown flow river that leads the the Known Spheres (so that the GM can then use all the SJ products as the basis of their extra-Birthspace campaign). (Inventing dozens of new crystal spheres is fairly hard work. Most people who try to do it on their own run out of steam or fail to add a great level of detail to anything.)
The main method of movement in Spelljammer is called 'spelljamming'. A spelljamming helm is a magical seat that absorbs some sort of mystical energy from a person and then uses it to move the ship at impossibly fast speeds. The person who powers or steers a ship is known as a helmsman.

In a planetary atmosphere or when a large object is close by, a spelljamming ship travels at 'tactical speed' (which varies depending on the power of the helm or helmsman), but when it is in the middle of open wildspace it travels at the universally fast 'spelljamming speed'. This is good if you have low level PCs and NPCs as (apart from space combat and take-offs and landing) they can actually move ships as fast as 20th level characters from other settings.
The most common types of spelljamming helms use spells. One is called a Minor Helm and another is called a Major Helm. The Major Helm is 'better' at converting spells into tactical speed, but both helms get better with higher level spellcasters. In the SJ rules all other helms are usually compared to a Minor or Major Helm.

Other helms include a Series Helm (which uses spell-like abilities to power the ship), a Lifejammer (which drains life to move the ship) and a Crown of the Stars (which is a magical crown that links itself to a ship, but otherwise acts as a conventional spelljamming helm).

If there are other mystical forces in Birthright it might fit in with the SJ concepts to create new helm types that can harness that energy.
Large creatures found in wildspace or the phlogiston usually have the ability to spelljam naturally. This means that most of them can swim or fly as fast as a spelljamming ship. Some of them can swim faster than slow spelljamming ships at tactical speed.

BTW: In the zero gravity of wildspace, flying and swimming are pretty much the same thing, but I'd expect flying creatures to work better in the air than swimming creatures. However, the canon of SJ is not totally clear on this and there are a few flying fish in some of the worlds of SJ.
When a spelljamming ship enteres wildspace, it normally takes with it a bubble of air that allows the crew to walk around on an open decked ship.

This means you do not need sci-fi ships to add 'Birthspace' to your game. You can just use the normal ships of Birthright as 'groundling ships' and add a spelljamming helm. The native spacefarers of Birthright could use the normal SJ ships or you could design new ships.
The power of the gods can reach out to the inner surface of the crystal sphere, but the crystal spheres (or the phlogiston) breaks their connection with their clerics. In fact the phologiston makes all planar travel and all plane-using spells fail to work normally. This has multiple effects that I can't really explain simply.

So your BR gods should have power on all the worlds within BR's sphere and the gods of Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and other campaign settings would not (by default) have any power in 'Birthspace'.
Stars are usually bright objects on the inner side of the crystal sphere (and many of them are portals to the Plane of Radiance).

You can change this if you really want to, but unless you have a good reason to (like something in the BR canon) I would leave them alone.
Planets, moons and asteroids have different sizes, but usually have a gravity identical to Earth-gravity.

So I would suggest that you give all 'celestial bodies' in 'Birthspace' the same gravity that the main planet has.
Spelljamming ships are large enough to naturally have their own gravity when in wildspace or the phlogiston.

This means that if you shoot the helmsman, or blow up the helm with a fireball, the crew do not go spinning off into space and the air stays where it is. This is all an 'effect of nature' - not magic. (However, there is nothing to stop you creating magical effects that blow people out into space.)
If people are unlucky enough to fall into space they take a small buble of air with them.

I won't bore you with the game stats, but this basically means that people who fall into space can be rescued before they die. If you have BR creatures with slow metabolisms they can probably last longer before they die and if you have creatures that don't breath then they will last until they die of thirst. Something like a golem or an undead will last forever. (So bear this in mind when picking BR monsters to use in 'floating' encounters. If you have any cool BR undead then a few of them should be drifting in wildspace.)
Clerics have problems contacting their own gods in the phlogiston or a 'foreign' crystal sphere, but there are ways around this within the spheres.

So a cleric of a FR god can come to 'Birthspace' but is automatically restricted in spell use unless he casts a 'Contact Home Power' spell. And if he wants to allow his god to 'break into Birthspace' he needs to build a big temple and keep that temple active and 'consecrated' for more than a year. (This means that a GM can create connections between Birthright and other campaign settings, but SJ has a built in 'one year period' when NPCs can destroy any unwanted outsider temples.)

[bigmac]

I know less about Planescape than I do about Spelljammer, but here are some general pointers for a BR/PS crossover campaign:


People who live on the planes (or who travel between them) call themselves 'planewalkers'.

Planewalkers call people who don't know about the planes, or who don't know how to get onto them 'clueless'. (I think this is a very similar 'control mechanism' as SJ's 'groundling' attitude.)
D&D generally divides the 'multiverse' up into the Material Plane, the Inner Planes, the Transitive Planes and the Outer Planes.

If you look at the Planescape stuff you will see that the Outer Planes are far more hospitable to life than the Inner Planes. Some Inner Planes (like the Positive Energy Plane and the Negative Energy Plane are deadly).

So this means that you will need to pick the planes that you intend to use in your PS/BR crossover. There is no point in putting in a lot of effort to sent PCs to the Elemental Plane of Fire and then instantly cooking them to death!;)
Some early D&D stuff talked of Alternate Prime Material Planes, but later stuff made a single Prime Material Plane.

This means you will get conflicting information from 1st edition AD&D material. Personally, I subscribe to the 'one Material Plane' model of the multiverse and see both wildspace and the phlogiston as places on the same plane. I see the crystal spheres as objects that cut into the Material Plane and 'allow' areas of wildspace to form within them. (SJ also works with an Alternate Material Plane model, but I think it is more poetic to use the one Prime model as PS suggests it.)
During 2nd edition AD&D, TSR moved towards the 'Great Wheel Cosmology' for all campaign settings, but during 3rd edition they moved away from a unified cosmology.

The 3rd edition FRCS created a new bespoke set of Outer Planes for Forgotten Realms. Dragonlance didn't originally have the Great Wheel during 1st edition AD&D and returned to its original cosmology for 3rd edition D&D.

I belive that a lot of the Planewalker fans at Planescape.com stick with the old AD&D arrangement of planes, but I feel that bespoke planes for each campaign setting turn the planes into a maze that prevents direct contact between specific campaign settings and specific Inner, Transitive and Outer Planes.

If Birthright has any fancy planes or any fancy 'barriers' that are not mentioned in other campaign settings, I would strongly suggest building up your own bespoke BR cosmology and using the 'common' connections as the ways in and out of Birthright and using the unique things as things that the gods did to make the Birthright cosmolgy work for them.
The Inner Planes are the Elemental Planes, the Energy Planes (Positive and Negative) and a set of planes that are mixtures of Elements or mixtures of Elements and Energy. Inner Planes seem to be the place where the matter and energy that was used to create the world came from.

You actually get four planes from mixing the existing elemental planes, four planes from mixing the Elemental Planes with positive energy and another four planes from mixing the Elemental Planes with negative energy.

Note that if you play with oriental campaign settings, they can have things like an element of wood, so it is very easy to add new Inner Planes to a campaign setting. I would suggest you get people to search BR canon for any references to special elements.
The Transitive Planes are the Shadow Plane, the Ethereal Plane and the Astral Plane. Transitive planes seem to be the connective planes that separate the Inner Planes and the Outer Planes from each other and from the Material Plane.

The Shadow Plane wasn't actually mentioned much in 2nd edition AD&D and I once thought it was a 3e invention, but if you read the Shadow Walk spell in the 2e PHB you will find it mentioned there. Again, you can easily add in new Transitive Planes, so get people to search the BR canon for mentions of monsters and NPCs who can travel into the borders of the ethereal plane and other places. They will give you clues as to which planes might work differently.
The Outer Planes are the set of planes that the gods and dead souls live on. These are the main planes of Planescape and all of them are associated with specific D&D alignments. The good planes are sometimes called Upper Planes and the evil planes are sometimes called Lower Planes.

If you look through sources, you should see something that tells you where the Birthright gods live. There must be a connection between those planes and the part of the Material Plane where Aebrynis exists. But you don't really 'need' to have any connections to any other Outer Planes. (Those planes would still exist, but with divine worshipers not trying to get to and from them, you could treat them as places that the clueless of Birthright know nothing about.)

[bigmac]

In general, Spelljammer is a campaign setting that joins things together by going out into space and Planescape is a campaign setting that joins things together by using multiple dimensions.

Both settings involve movement in different directions, so you may find it a lot easier to build up one crossover campaign setting and then do the other crossover campaign setting later on.


the adventuring will be easy as their will be no change from the normal rules for planescape but the doman rules will be much harder to adapt and so i thought i would ask for advice. some of the problems we've thought of are.

I can give you advice, but remember that this is just 'one guy's opinion'. For more advice you might want to repeat these questions to other SJ and PS fans over at the SJ forum at The Piazza or the PS forum at Planewalker.com.


can laylines go through portals?

Hmm. I think of different planes as multiple layers of the universe. Each one is actually three dimensional. They all exist in the same space, but are also separated from each other.

Lets flatten the Material Plane and the Inner Planes down to two dimensional planes for a moment, so that I can make a point. Imagine a sheet of paper (the Material Plane) and imagine drawing a circle on it (that is a cross section of Aebrynis, but we will pretend that it is the whole planet). Now stick another sheet of paper on top of of the Material Plane and you have one of the Elemental Planes (Air for argument's sake). Cast a spell while on Aebrynis and you call down an air elemental. So that implies that their is a circular area on the Elemental Plane of Air that corresponds to the position of Aebrynis.

Taking that further, I see a Watery version of Aebrynis, an Earthy version of Aebrynis and so on. And while these would not be mirror images of Aebrynis, there would be places on them that correspond to areas like Cerilia.

I'm not sure if a BR lay line is exactly the same as a lay line in mythology, but they are basically two dimensional lines of power that move across the world. So if there were lay lines on our 'flat Aebrynis', we could probably trace those lines on the Air echo of Aebrynis, the Earth echo of Aebrynis and so on.

Essentially, I would create a set of 'parallel' lay lines that are found in other planes.

(I am not so sure that I would extend lay-lines into wildspace, but if you really want to include them, I suppose that stars could be use as objects of power that generate space lay-lines that spelljamming ships could fly into. However, if you do that, you will be generating a thing that is exclusive to 'Birthspace'. I'm not saying that is a bad thing, but if you create Lay Helms, that take power from lay-lines, they won't work outside the crystal sphere.)

BTW: Because Transitive Planes connect multiple three dimensional planes together and touch them all, I have come to the conclusion that they must be four dimensional planes. You might want to drop that theory next time you bump into a PS fan! :D


should spelljamming be treated as a sort of super trade route?

Spelljammer can be used for many things, but limiting spelljamming to trade routes would be cutting down on all your other options.

I believe that you should be creating BR inspired concepts that can be used to create asteroids, moons and planets that your BR PCs can go and visit. I believe that you should be creating space monsters that take BR concepts and put a new spin on them. I think you should be creating monsters that take SJ monsters and put a BR spin on them and creating monsters that take BR monsters and put a SJ spin on them.

Have you seen the Adlatum Campaign Setting that the Dragonlance fans created? If you haven't, you should check it out. It is really great and should have won an ENnie Award.

Well, 'Birthspace' is your chance to create your own Adlatum. In fact it is your chance to create half a dozen Adlatums. And spelljamming is your way to connect a 'distorted Aebrynis' to the original world.

I'm told that Birthright has rules for mass battle. Well, SJ is a chance for you to have mass space battles.

On a smaller scale, spelljamming is also a great way to do planet-hopping trips from Cerilia to Aduria and Djapar and lots of other places on Aebrynis.


should portals be man-made, only natural portals or both? if man-made are included how do we keep the numbers under contol? what about portals that move what do we do about them? should portals be holdings?( the higher the level the more stable and the bigger ectra)

I would suggest you look through canon sources for clues as to how many portals exist and who might have created them.

If you are playing with 3e rules then check out FRCS to see how another D&D setting (that existed when Birthright did) dealt with this.

IIRC FRCS makes most (if not all) portals man-made. But then this is something that the local gods can control, so it would be perfectly OK to have more divine portals and less man-made portals.

Portals create 'free travel' between two places and despite the fact that some would be dangerous, I think that power groups would stumble onto others and use them for economic benifit.

FRCS has portals from one part of Toril to another part, so you might want to have some portals that link to place on Aduria and Djapar (instead of other planes).


what sorts of extra planar terain should we have? how should we deal with the inherant 3D nature of certain plans (air, earth and limbo for example)?

I suggest you use Planescape instead of reinventing the wheel.

But in general, planes with 3D open spaces (like the Elemental Plane of Air or the Astral Plane) have zero gravity. On some planes, people can use their own mind to will themselves to move.

Planes like the Elemental Plane of Earth are death traps, so unless you have high level PCs who have the ability to 'burrow' I would avoid sending them there.

In some ways, Spelljammer is a lot safer to 'visit' than Planescape, but if you cherry pick a set of 'friendly' planes, there is no reason why you can't use PS.


oh and it's going to be a 3.5e game (srry but i just hate 4th ed) so what do you all think. any ideas or suggestions are welcome.

Well, I personally prefer 3rd edition, but everybody is entitled to play the version of D&D that they prefer. So if someone wants to run an OD&D version of Birthright or a 4th edition version of Birthright or anything in between, I say goodluck to them.

[bigmac]

Spelljamming could be thought of as a ocean trade route. The portal could be thought of as a port. Like a port, it could be managed by anyone but probably a guild. Who controls law around the portal depends on who has a law holding in the "province".

Hmm. Sounds like you have been reading the really distorted discription of a 'spelljammer' that is in the 4e Manual of the Planes.

In 2e (and 3e's Shadows of the Spider Moon) spelljamming is something that allows ships to fly into the sky and then into space. It has nothing to do with the sort of portals that are used to go to other planes.

There are some things called portals in SJ, but these are really holes that let you get through a crystal sphere. From a Birthright point of view, these sorts of portals would be things that let people get into and out of the phlogiston.

You couldn't really control the portals of 'Birthspace' because they are thousands (if not millions) of miles away from the nearest planet. It would be possible for a ship to sit near a portal and try to board any ships that come through, but at some point a fleet of Mind Flayer Nautiloids (or equally nasty ships) would come sailing through the portal and take out a ship sitting there on 'toll duty'.


Sorontar, who really knows little about Spelljamming.

Well, I know little about Birthright, but hope to get enlightened in the next few years.:cool:

[Sorontar]

Birthright works on the premise that there are two planes or worlds that are involved - Aebrynis and the Shadow World. Historically, they were originally one and the same, but now they exist separately. There are loose connections between them at points in Aebrynis where the Darkness or Shadow is strong. Some of these points are permanent, some are temporary. To get from Aebrynis to the SW you either have to be at one of these points (intentionally or accidentally) or have a suitable magical ability (through spells or a natural ability cf. halflings). To teleport etc, you use travel in the SW, even if it is for a fleeting second (see also McCaffrey's Pern dragons and Between).

Given this, I feel that any way of getting out of the Birthsphere has to

go through the Shadow World
be so difficult that it can only be done at certain places or with super-magic

Therefore, a helmsman is not enough. You should need the helmsman to be at the right location (like a SJ source). If such points exist in your campaign, then regents will fight over them. They can be used as "ports", i.e. the start of shipping routes even if the actual routes are never defined. You may call them Portals or portals may be the gateways produced by the helmsman. Portals may or may not be permenantly open. Likewise, the SJ Source may or may not always be useable.

I am not sure how SW and Aebrynis would fit in the Spelljamming idea of what spheres are. Perhaps there are actually two spheres and SWspehere has Aebrynisspere inside it.

Hope that explains my suggestion better.

Sorontar

[Green Knight]

If you're going to combine BR and SJ/PS I really don't see the need to go all out with the 'BR-world cut of from the rest of the multiverse' mantra.

Instead have the Daylight World and the Shadow World coexist, but each has the same relationship to the Astral Plane that a normal game world would.

Spelljamming and planar travel would then function normally.

[bbeau22]

I am with Green Knight on this one. If you are going to go as far as to include Spelljamming with Birthright ... might as well change a few Birthright rules so they match correctly.

I already treat the shadow world like a buffer against the rest of the universe. If you actually want to get to the outerplanes you need to travel through the shadow world (which I make extremely dangerous.)

For Spelljamming, you could say that the planet that Birthright is in is surrounded by a unique wild space that is based off of the shadow world. You have to assume that the the mechanics that keep the people of Birthright on their prime material plane would also stop or slow down other methods to transportation.

-BB

[AndrewTall]

If you use the 'only 1 prime' model then birthright to spelljammer is easy, the birthright setting is a crystal sphere. Off the beaten track spelljammer-wise, within the birthright sphere the only planar connections are to the shadow world, which in turn leads either to the outerplanes or remains self contained.

Trade routes in birthright are part of the domain management system which provides rules for running kingdoms, guild and so on, a spelljammer trade route is mechanically no different from a long sea route, the guild controls one or both ends, and hopes that the ships travel safely. No actual control of crystal sphere portals would be practical, but then you don't patrol every inch of the ocean either.

With spelljammer, like planescape ypu get 'foreign idea' and 'foreigner' issues, but you can rule that "forbidden' powers just don't work or take on local issues, so the non-native human wizard finds they can't safely cast their favourite evocations, and any teleporter gets a taste of the shadow world.

The big sj problem is helm speed for local trading, ariya to daulton in one hour wreaks havoc on the economy, fortunately helms are expensive so a simple rule that they can be damaged by rapid trips in and out of planetary gravity wells or prolonged use within them should avoid the issue.

[Keytium]

Hi i've been gone awhile from this site and i'm sorry i started this thread and then sort of left. Thank you big mac for your extensive imput it's great i did know most of the back ground information you suplied already but i agree with most of your points\ideas i exspecialy like the the name for the sphere "birthspace" suprised i didn't think of it :)

when i said

Spelljamming could be thought of as a ocean trade route. The portal could be thought of as a port. Like a port, it could be managed by anyone but probably a guild. Who controls law around the portal depends on who has a law holding in the "province".

i was not freffering to using spelljammers to go through portals the portal and the spelljammer as sea routes were two different ideas sorry about any confusion.

the issue you raised with the cosmology is one i often think about personaly i tend to prefer useing the one material plane setting idea with the spheres and the phlogiston being in the same three dimensions. also the idea that the transitory planes are 4 dimensionable is arguable they do exist in the same dimensions as the other planes and the 4th dimension you think of is mearly the travel inbetween planes. beacause when you think about it using the planescape cosmology then the planes exist in three dimensions (law-chaos, good-evil and Inner-outer) and in the as transitory planes make up the space inbetween planes they really have 6 dimensions.

the parralel lay lines idea also makes sense when aplied to the inner planes however their is as far as i know no fixed areas that corrispond to particular planets or spheres, because to use an example, the city of brass in the fire
plane is acessed by all the major planescaping worlds just as many other important sites are equaly important to multiple worlds. still the idea of lay lines going through portals is still very confusing and their going through wildspace is also a problem. however as far as i can see if they are mearly flows of magical energy then they could go anywhere. therfore i adress this question to the birthright experts what really are laylines?

the problem with the shadow world i think can easly be resolved by having it take the place of the border etherial like it says in the book. if this was the case then travel to the etherial and the inner planes would be severaly hampered. the outer planes however i would think would be unaffected. the outer planes would be hard to get to anyway because none of the gods in the birthright setting live their and the gods form the link with the outer planes in most settings so without using out of chariter knolage the PCs arn't going to be going their intill they already at another sphere and if their already at annother sphere then the shadow world isn't going to stop them. i also don't think it should in any way block acess to the phlogiston because as it is another plane it can't have any affect in the phlogiston. also you don't really need to explain why not many spelljammers come to birthspace just simply say it is off the beaten track.

the trouble with it ruining the ecconimy is a huge worry and one i can see no way round because although spelljammers are exspensive as soon as theirs one it has a incredibly powerful monopoly. this isn't a new problem with spelljammers though i've seen the example of trading steel with kryn before. steel on kryn is as valuable as gold, so you simply have to ship steel in excange it for gold and then go back to another planet and trade it all for steel. i can see something similar possibly happening here.

thanks for your ideas and again sorry for being gone so long

[AndrewTall]

I think of a ley line as a river of mebhaighl. While rain falls across a forest and trickles downhill into stream and rivers, mebhaighl is created by all life and flows back and forth between areas of strong concentrations, I see leylines as surging with energy as night falls and seasons change with one area gaining or losing 'attraction'.

In canon mebhaighl is not life-force and is generated within Aebrynis the planet - which is why mountains ranges have strong mebhaighl.

Either way a 'ley line' created by a mage is basically the equivalent of a canal - the wizard cuts the path with the create ley line action, and then opens the locks as required to draw mebhaighl from the strong source to the desired location.

[Keytium]

I think of a ley line as a river of mebhaighl.
ahh that does make sense that the leylines are mebhaighl (how do you say that i've always wondered) i had mearly thought of them before this as containing the magic refined from mebhaighl.

In canon mebhaighl is not life-force and is generated within Aebrynis the planet - which is why mountains ranges have strong mebhaighl.

Either way a 'ley line' created by a mage is basically the equivalent of a canal - the wizard cuts the path with the create ley line action, and then opens the locks as required to draw mebhaighl from the strong source to the desired location.
so as mebhaighl is part of the planet it, i would amagine it can not be easerly be taken away from the planet, or if it could then the planet would suffer. as such i would probaly say that laylines should be confined to Aebrynis.

[AndrewTall]

There is an interesting question as to whether depleting mebhaighl by casting domain spells causes damage.

If you consider domain spells to be a zero sum game (i.e. the spell simply concentrates mebhaighl, then uses it to suit the caster's whim allowing the energy to then flow back into the system with no net loss to the system) then by taking the magic entirely from the planet you might have a depletion scenario as opposed to a zero-sum game.

I draw no distinction in power terms between mebhaighl and magic. Or more accurately, I consider magic to be the manifestation of the collection, focus and release of mebhaighl - much like a car's movement is the manifestation of the burning of fossil fuels in the focus of an engine connected to transmission, wheels, etc.

In my own campaign I like to take a Deverry approach to magic - energy is gathered and used to create an astral focus (in this case either a focus between the ShadowWorld and Aebrynnis or a site in the ShadowWorld) which the mage/priest then draws on to cast spells. Of course I tweak the Shadow World more than a little, and wind up with magic that is trivial (drawn from the surrounding life force cf athas) or good/evil/chaos depending on the Shadow World source so I'm hardly canon!

[Birthright-L]

At 06:20 PM 2/24/2009, Keytium wrote:
so as mebhaighl is part of the planet it, i would amagine it can not be easerly be taken away from the planet, or if it could then the planet would suffer. as such i would probaly say that laylines should be confined to Aebrynis.

Ley lines cost more to create given their distance. So, depending on how one viewed the concept of "distance" in planar terms, a ley line would have either a cost of 0 or infinity unless one imagines the "distance" between a Cerilian source holding and, say, Sigil to be measurable in some other way. Personally, I don`t think a source could travel through a normal "gate" in the D&D sense; or, if it could, any closure of that gate, even for just a moment, would disrupt the line enough to destroy it. The only exception to this kind of thing that I think would be appropriate would be some connection between Aebrynis and the Shadow World, but even such a connection should be reserved for very special situations; even the gods might have trouble with such a thing. I picture it being the kind of thing that Azrai tried and that left him vulnerable to a Deismaar type of attack.

According to the BoM, ley lines can`t cross a body of water more than 150 miles across. Even in such a case, I imagine that the magical energy is travelling along the surface of the planet itself, in contact (more or less) with the land from which it comes. That makes me think it would be difficult for them to leave the planet under anything like normal circumstances. A ley line from the BR setting might not be able to exist anywhere but on Aebrynis itself for that reason.

One can create a ley line that is "unanchored" at one end, but for some reason it`s hard for me to imagine a ley line being "unanchored" to somewhere off the planet itself. It just seems like too abstract a reading of the system. The concept of BR "provinces" is tied up with the magic system itself. Sources exist in the context of provinces, population, etc. Other settings aren`t organized along those same lines, and though one might not want to read more into it than that, I personally don`t think other settings have the same basic components. They might very well have their equivalents, but it`s kind of like putting a dogsled on the train tracks. They`re simply two different concepts. Since one can`t really create Cerilian-style sources in other settings, it`s difficult to imagine a wizard connecting up to someplace outside the setting in a way that is fully compatible.

So there are a few reasons to justify a DM ruling that such a thing is impossible.

Gary

[Keytium]

so laylies can't cross large bodies of water i didn't know that. that does somwhat dampen the idea of it crossing the infinity that is the astral sea doesn't it? Birthright-L i must agree with you i think laylines in the sense that they exist in the birthright setting could not exist in an interplanar game.
also i do tend to think of magic as just focusing and realeasing of power as Andrewtall called it a zero-sum game. from what little i know of how magic works in planscape this would appear to hold true but i'm not entirly certain.

[Thelandrin]

Birthright-L is the mailing list account, I believe. You're agreeing with Gary there :)

[Birthright-L]

At 03:20 AM 2/27/2009, you wrote:

>so laylies can`t cross large bodies of water i didn`t know that.
>that does somwhat dampen the idea of it crossing the infinity that
>is the astral sea doesn`t it?

To me, that certainly makes it difficult to justify.... Personally,
I see the Astral Sea as a place composed OF magical energies of a
general kind that are themselves of a sort with the energy that makes
up ley lines. The Astral Sea is already a sort of conduit of
existential energies between the material planes, and people have
figured out how to do travel in that plane in a way they were
"supposed to" given their physical nature. Putting a ley line
through such a plane would be like relocated a creek to the middle of
the ocean. The energies would just disperse into the plane just as
the water of the creek would vanish into the larger body of
water. That`s in addition to the other problems with the concept I noted.

That`s not to say one couldn`t have a similar construct in the PS/SJ
setting. If a visitor from another plane came to Cerilia, got a
bloodline and learned how to create source holdings and ley lines
then travelled back to the planes, I`d think he`d have to invent a
whole new system to do something similar. Such a process would first
probably require coming up with the planar/SJ equivalent of a
bloodline. Some sort of "godspark" or being "chosen" by a
god. There are several different special powers in those settings
that might be used as equivalents. The process that Azrai used to
create The Lost could easily be interpreted as a kind of granted
power. Any god with the will to do so could probably grant a
follower the ability to create some sort of equivalent of a holding
through a magical boon/power. Gods are historically rather jealous
of this kind of power, of course, so it might be something of a
problem to convince one to part with such a power, but that`s another
issue entirely....

A manifestation of source-like power that wasn`t rooted in the plane
of Aebrynis could look like just about anything. It might have
powers that equate to a source holding (RP collection for wizards,
realm spells, etc.) or it might grant any number of other powers and
abilities. I imagine one could draw power from the energies that
escape (or are trapped) by the passage of people through the gates of
Sigil, for example. An extensive domain of Gate(9) holdings might be
what gives the various organizations of that planar city their powers
at the political level.

But it seems to me that the structure of the "domain system" would be
inherently different, and probably unique to each plane of
existence. That is, in Planescape the organization of the population
isn`t into magically infused provinces and holdings, but into a set
of planes and poleis. The city/state seems more likely a way to
break things up in Planescape. Perhaps the various wards of Sigil
might each represent the planar equivalent of provinces. One would
have to consider, of course, that the population numbers are very
different. In BR we have population numbers up to 100,000 (though
many people quickly rationalize or house rule their way around such
numbers) while the population of planar cities are sometimes in the
millions. In the Astral plane, one might have cities like that of
the githyanki lich-queen, but on that plane it`s hard to imagine
something like a source manifestation in the BR style for reasons
already noted. But one could have some sort of "astral energy net"
that could serve a similar function. Shimmer (4) holdings....

There would certainly be the equivalent of holdings in such a
setting. In certain cases, though, one would want to revise the
concept a bit--if nothing else name changes are appropriate. The
concept of law holdings on a chaotic plane, for example, is somewhat
difficult to say without wincing....

>Thelandrin wrote:
>Birthright-L is the mailing list account, I believe. You`re
>agreeing with Gary there :)

Yeah, that was me. I hadn`t changed the email in my birthright.net
account.... Hopefully, it`ll be OK now.

Gary

[Keytium]

your right the source on differnt planes would be very differnt and the scale is completly out of wack. personaly i was never thinking of using any of the major interplaner city just for the reason that you descriped size. i was planing on having different types of source, on the outer planes sources would be granted by gods or be powered by the planes nature (you could drain pure chaos from limbo ectra) the problem with being granted by the gods is where to draw the line between this and a church holding?

the inner planes would be more simple as they would simply represent higher consendrations of elemental energy being taped for example the burning sea in the plane of fire would have a higher source potential then one of the areas of molten land because it is more "fiery" in this way the inner planes would be the same as the standard setting with every terrain type have a source potential witch decreases as you increase habitation (the more buildings their is the less fire their is). the ones that cause a real problem is other spheres.

i've seen threads that surgest things like mage colleages reprsenting sources in high magic settings but the thing is that in these settings magic can be drawn from many sources. in a world that the ilthid inhabit shoulden't their elder brains also count as sources, their is nature magic in these worlds as well, their is necromancy witch would draw power from grave yards and probaly other sources i haven't thought of yet. their is just too many ways you could draw power and each of these should have it's own list of spells ectra. to be honest i wouldn't be able to write a whole new lists of realm spells so what would you reconmend?

[AndrewTall]

I'd suggest that you stick with the plane itself generates mebhaighl in one way or another, but say that the outer planes energy is almost all claimed by the powers of the plane

So in a prime material, you could use the standard rules, in the elemental planes you could have elemental nodes that act as source manifestations and come up with different terrains to simulate climate - on the assumption that most large populations would either require nodes of foreign elements, or have cities, etc which drew upon the energies of the plane in some form - you could again use similar rules to the standard. For an outerplane you could say that only a few rare areas produce sufficient 'excess' energy to be claimed allowing you to set source levels to suit the game.

The downside is that ley-lines never cross a planar boundary, although I suppose you might be able to build gates to permit some kind of transfer. I expect that you'd need to visit a planar domain in order to tap RP too.

In terms of varying realm spells, I'm not sure that a less is more approach wouldn't be better - and your players can always build the spells if they want them saving you the energy.

[Birthright-L]

At 11:26 PM 2/28/2009, Keytium wrote:

>i was planing on having different types of source, on the outer
>planes sources would be granted by gods or be powered by the planes
>nature (you could drain pure chaos from limbo ectra) the problem
>with being granted by the gods is where to draw the line between
>this and a church holding?

Personally, my take on this kind of thing is that the gods themselves
take the power of worship, leadership, divinity, etc. that is all
wrapped up into the concept we call "regency" in BR and gather it up
directly. There are no regents in the outer planes because there is
no need of them, and why would the gods create such beings when they
could just take that power from its source without the need of a
"middle man." In this context, it`s worth noting that even the
presence of intermediaries in BR is rather carefully described as an
accident or byproduct of the setting`s background. None of the gods
intended to create scions; it just happened as a result of their
struggle with Azrai at Deismaar.

So, the question "where should I (as DM) draw the line?" is probably
best answered first by asking "why would to gods draw such a line in
the first place?" In BR, the "why?" is explained by the struggle
between the gods. In Planescape or SJ one needs an explanation for
the "why?" first, and once one gets that then "where?" should fall
into place more easily. One could also start to see "who might gain
such powers?" and "what are those powers?"

One could, for instance, interpret a particular mythology as having a
group of divine intermediaries (like, say, angels) who interact with
divinely favored mortals (saints) who are granted particular powers
based upon their self-sacrifice or abject faith. Such saints might
become the focus of worship themselves as intermediaries between
mortals and the divine, and that worship might take the form of some
sort of regency-like system. Maybe they can use the energy to cast
the equivalent of realm spells that look like miracles to the
faithful. I wouldn`t suggest that one in particular, but it works as
an example. Something more apt to the setting in particular would be better.

In PS, for example, there are the existing organizations in the form
of the factions, and their various incarnations. That seems like the
best starting point for some sort of political level of play for that
setting. The wards of Sigil seem like the most likely size of "provinces."

>to be honest i wouldn`t be able to write a whole new lists of realm
>spells so what would you reconmend?

I`d suggest you use the BR realm spells as a starter, and come up
with realm spells that do similar things but in a much more general
and simple way. That is, instead of a Bless Army spell that adds to
the stats of a particular set of units it should just grant a bonus
to everyone of that faction. Curse the same way. Since the amount
of effort is an issue, they should be expressed as simply as
possible. Cost, requirements and brief description of effects. Example:

BLESS FACTION
Cost: 5 pts. (or what you think is appropriate.)
Requirement: Small faction (a level maybe if that`s how you`re doing it.)
Benefit: All members of the faction gain a +1 to their attack rolls
during their next conflict.

DEFEND FACTION
Cost: 10 pts. (ditto.)
Requirement: Medium faction
Benefit: Your faction headquarters becomes barricaded giving all
factions members a +1 to defend/AC from that position.

Etc.

The cost, requirements and effects of those "realm spells" will, of
course, depend on the features of the "faction level" that you decide
upon, but in general the BR realm spells would serve as a good outline.

Hope that helps.

Gary

[Keytium]

whilst i agree that the gods would have the final say in the outer planes i disagree that regets have to act as their intermediaries. their are planty of examples of places not under the sway of the gods in the outer planes.

the way i see it, any of the godly realms near the PC's realms would be reprsented as factions in their own right they would without a doubt be incredibly powerful but unless provoked they be mostly passsive most of the interaction would be between their vassels, the major PS factions and any inderpentant factions. so if it worked in this way then only half maybe less of the realms in the outer planes would be alinged to any one god.

this leads me away from the why would the gods do this? and back to the question of how does the power work? the problem lies in the variance in the outerplanes the godly portion can be done with little diffculty but everything that anyone belives makes it's way into the outerplanes in some way so although not many people think that hamburgers have the magical propity to rip uot peoples speen somewhere someone does and because of that somewhere in the outerplanes their is a hamburger just waitiing to rip your spleen out.

back onto subject the gods/angles/saints/worshipers idea is a good way of representing a gods power on the outer plane because a god would often have influence far away from their realm such a tiered system would lend it's self perfectly to the vassel system that works so well in birthright.

the factions are problematic because due to their opposing ideologies they are orginised very differntly and in some cases direct vasselship to a central power would be inaproprate such as the xaositects, the revolutionary league or the free league. in other cases a direct vassel system is VERY approprate such as the harmonium.

thats if i'm going with the prefaction war factions. if you go with the post faction war factions then everything is even more unorgonised and some factions are non-existant.

one way of expresing factions is to remove the diplomatic modifications for alignment and replace that with a modifcation for the relationship between the factions. this however isn't a very large factor in gameplay and in PS the factions are a big deal that have far more sway over the political landscape then that. so how should i represent them?

the spells are a good idea if it was taking place on small scale but their no such thing as a small faction in PS. the planes are huge. i think that the factions have to be mearly political factions with no holdings or land but instead have sway over their followers that rule/controll the factions assets. their would be a few exceptions for their headquarters ectra.

thinking about i guess that the spells don't need the amount of revision i had feared i supose that if you make somewhere more profitable then you make it more profitable it dosen't matter if you used fire or the power of Hades (i'm talking about the plane not the god) as long they do the same thing it should be fine. you were right AndrewTall.

the have to be on a plane to collect RP could be very iritating to realms that span multiple planes a varation of the idea might be only RP generated on a plane could be used on that plane. setting up seperation RP accounts as it were none of which could surpass your maximum RP what would you think of that?

as to how much regency you should be able to control i think i would be using the variant rule presented in chapter 8 of the 3.5ed Birthright book to have twice the chariter level as the maximum regency rather then the bloodline score because if not it will give those from cerila an unfair advantage.

[AndrewTall]

Hmm, if the gods are famous for anything, it is for disagreeing about everything.

So if a scion from birthright (or a planar traveler who acquired a bloodline while on Cerilia) traveled to a different plane, they would in effect be a (very) minor god, free to gain worshipers and the like - or be squashed like a zit by an existing god - just like any other spirit which made the leap from elemental/demon/etc spirit to true deity. Whether the gods would empower locals is a different question, with, as Gary notes, the answer being probably 'they wouldn't' but who knows how gods are born and rise?

One easy way to deal with the gods problem is just to eliminate them - if the priests simply worship a temple structure with no self aware being at the center of the structure, you can still justify priestly casting easily enough, with the added bonus that there are no gods to oppose the PCs directly (the priests presumably don't know how the structure and regency work to oppose the PCs either) as the PCs gain regency they probably leech the accumulated power of the god-structures - or become the prayed for gods themselves...

For scale - if each plane is formed of a few hundred 'provinces' tops, then the standard BR scale just doesn't work, but if you take each prime as say 6-12 'provinces' (i.e. the equivalent of a realm in 'standard play') each inner plane as 100-150 provinces (i.e. the equivalent of a 'standard' nation) and each outer plane similar, with the astral/ethereal/shadow planes having a few dozen scattered areas equivalent each to a standard 'realm' (and sigil/concordant opposition being another 'realm') then the scope of the game should stay manageable if suitably epic - it depends how many areas will be 'in-play' - do you expect PCs to set up shop in the Abyss? The Negative quasi-elemental plane?

You probably wind up with a much weaker definition of regency and rulership though - for example if the players play a pantheon of gods have regency represent spiritual leaning rather than actual rule.

As for the different RP pools for different planes, this approach doesn't sound too dis-similar to comments on deities crossing between crystal spheres, although I suppose that if you have a permanent gate between the planes it becomes fairly academic - expect such gates to be either a mixed blessing or hotly contested!

[Keytium]

hi sorry it took me so long to reply.

Hmm, if the gods are famous for anything, it is for disagreeing about everything.
sigh they don't like to make things easy for DM's do they



So if a scion from birthright (or a planar traveler who acquired a bloodline while on Cerilia) traveled to a different plane, they would in effect be a (very) minor god, free to gain worshipers and the like - or be squashed like a zit by an existing god - just like any other spirit which made the leap from elemental/demon/etc spirit to true deity. Whether the gods would empower locals is a different question, with, as Gary notes, the answer being probably 'they wouldn't' but who knows how gods are born and rise?
How gods are born in PS isn't as complicated as other settings they simply need to be believed in this is the reason that the believers of the source ( one of the factions) go around setting up shrines to themselves ectra. Because if they can get enough people to worship them then they become gods. The way that I understand it is that when people in planscape belive something it creates a big pool of this belive power. It doesn't matter whether it be a religion or not this is how you can get atheist clerics. However if it is a religion then it will attempt to make what ever it is being believed in real. This is why any thing that anybody believes in exists in the outerplanes somewhere.

So as the gods are made of this belief power in planscape in order for the birthright setting to fit in with it you would have to say that the gods in cerila were made the same way (the original ones I mean) and so when they died and their power was distributed in the form of blood lines the power of the bloodlines must come from the belief of people centurys dead. Witch while a little bt creepy is kinda cool. All this mean that yes I would have thought that a scion would be much closer to godhood then a normal plannar so if they did set themselves up as a deity they wouldn't have to go as far but I still think it would take a lot of work to reach even the status of a demi-god.



One easy way to deal with the gods problem is just to eliminate them - if the priests simply worship a temple structure with no self aware being at the center of the structure, you can still justify priestly casting easily enough, with the added bonus that there are no gods to oppose the PCs directly (the priests presumably don't know how the structure and regency work to oppose the PCs either) as the PCs gain regency they probably leech the accumulated power of the god-structures - or become the prayed for gods themselves...

I don't think that eliminating the gods is I viable option they are a integral part of the outerplanes however from the descriptions of most of the godly domanins they do tend to let their followers to the day to day runing of their lands, theirfore they could easily be reprsented as a large empire of vassels that the PC's could interact with even if they couldn't possibly defeat them in a war. Other then that I would just say that the gods's them selves are a church fation that has control over every church in their domain.


For scale - if each plane is formed of a few hundred 'provinces' tops, then the standard BR scale just doesn't work, but if you take each prime as say 6-12 'provinces' (i.e. the equivalent of a realm in 'standard play') each inner plane as 100-150 provinces (i.e. the equivalent of a 'standard' nation) and each outer plane similar, with the astral/ethereal/shadow planes having a few dozen scattered areas equivalent each to a standard 'realm' (and sigil/concordant opposition being another 'realm') then the scope of the game should stay manageable if suitably epic - it depends how many areas will be 'in-play' - do you expect PCs to set up shop in the Abyss? The Negative quasi-elemental plane?

I don't think that the birthright scale need to be edited because I don't think that I will be repsenting large areas of the planes. Because the planes are infinite it would be impossible to map the whole of them and also it is quite likely that if two people took two different portals to the same plane that they could be light years apart. Therefore I think that for each area I do I should have maybe 150ish provinces. I could say have one area in the plane of fire near the city of brass and another area on the border to the quasi-plane of radiance. This would allow me to keep it under control without making the primes seem useless.

As for the different RP pools for different planes, this approach doesn't sound too dis-similar to comments on deities crossing between crystal spheres, although I suppose that if you have a permanent gate between the planes it becomes fairly academic - expect such gates to be either a mixed blessing or hotly contested!
yes I suppose that is how it works with crystal sphere isn't it that I think decides it. Different RP pools for different planes, but what about different area on the same plane and what about quasi and para-planes should RP you gain in the plane of water have an effect on the plane of ice? As for the different areas on the same plane I would say that they have pool. But the quasi/para-planes I don't know many not?

[AndrewTall]

How gods are born in PS isn't as complicated as other settings they simply need to be believed in this is the reason that the believers of the source ( one of the factions) go around setting up shrines to themselves ectra. Because if they can get enough people to worship them then they become gods. The way that I understand it is that when people in planscape belive something it creates a big pool of this belive power. It doesn't matter whether it be a religion or not this is how you can get atheist clerics. However if it is a religion then it will attempt to make what ever it is being believed in real. This is why any thing that anybody believes in exists in the outerplanes somewhere.

Hmm, I'd suggest the need for some 'catalyst' to convert a person/thing/place from object of worship into a proto-deity, 2e always had a big split between demon lords, elemental princes, etc and powers of one kind or another.

the 'believe power' you note is all that is required to permit clerical magic, as such from a mortal perspective it is all you need for 'gods' - sentient sapient beings are unnecessary. The gods are then needed only if the outerplanes actually have the beings present in them, I tend not to use the outerplanes in anything other than a McGuffin sense so didn't consider the impact on a scene in which the PCs go to Valhalla to have a few meads with Thor.


I would have thought that a scion would be much closer to godhood then a normal plannar so if they did set themselves up as a deity they wouldn't have to go as far but I still think it would take a lot of work to reach even the status of a demi-god.

Agree, but when their bloodline hits, say, 100 and a hundred provinces answer to their beck and call - how far away is the Gorgon?


I don't think that eliminating the gods is I viable option they are a integral part of the outerplanes however from the descriptions of most of the godly domanins they do tend to let their followers to the day to day runing of their lands, theirfore they could easily be reprsented as a large empire of vassels that the PC's could interact with even if they couldn't possibly defeat them in a war. Other then that I would just say that the gods's them selves are a church fation that has control over every church in their domain.

I see your point - I suggest that the only 'outer planar' areas up for grabs are various 'border lands' between the godly realms, and that, as you suggest, the actual domains in the godly realms are all run by vassals of vassals of vassals of the powers. Of course you never know, a cleric of the right kind might be able to win influence over on the godly vassal realms, assuming that you don't have to be dead to qualify...

I'd remove the god entirely from the running though - except to say that every now and then they dictate an action - pity the warring regents who force Zeus to come down from Mount Olympus to settle their squabble!"


Different RP pools for different planes, but what about different area on the same plane and what about quasi and para-planes should RP you gain in the plane of water have an effect on the plane of ice? As for the different areas on the same plane I would say that they have pool. But the quasi/para-planes I don't know many not?

This could be represented by feats maybe - can you claim a pool that is '1 step', '2 steps' etc away? (No crossing the center for regents in the outer planes!) Technically of course a scion could gather RP in one and rule up their bloodline, then travel to the next plane and burn blood to regenerate the RP so you might want to make that harder.

An alternative is to split RP into 'local' (generated locally) and 'introduced' (summoned from a nearby plane / through a gate / generated by burning bloodline) and have the latter only half as effective as usual. For planar travelers who complain of the exchange rate you could say that if they only have one kind of planar RP forming their bloodline, then it is 'local' to that particular plane...

[Keytium]

Hmm, I'd suggest the need for some 'catalyst' to convert a person/thing/place from object of worship into a proto-deity, 2e always had a big split between demon lords, elemental princes, etc and powers of one kind or another.
i supose their is a huge gap in the power between such things yes but i can't remeber any thing in any planescape books that could justify a 'catalyst'. most mortals who become gods do so through other gods investing them normaly to replace vaccancys in which ever panthion. the belivers of the source haven't had any sucess in elivating themselves to godhood yet. the only ones who i can think of that have are the egyptian pharoes (sorry i have no idea how to spell that) so an empire the size of egypt all devoutly beliving could elivate 0one person every generation or so, thats a lot of belief.
also it should be noted that faith is of more use to the gods the belief. as such the follower on the primes are more valuble because they are beliefing because they know the gods are real but because they have faith in the gods.
all these things combined i think it's hard enough for someone to become a god without any more obsticals being nessary.



I see your point - I suggest that the only 'outer planar' areas up for grabs are various 'border lands' between the godly realms, and that, as you suggest, the actual domains in the godly realms are all run by vassals of vassals of vassals of the powers. Of course you never know, a cleric of the right kind might be able to win influence over on the godly vassal realms, assuming that you don't have to be dead to qualify...
i couldn't agree with the borderlands idea more it would make much more sense that the PC's set up in an area that is not currently under the control of a being that could squash them with a thought. though i supposeyou right if the PC's ever got really close with one of the gods then it might be prudent to include that god's domain as an area.


This could be represented by feats maybe - can you claim a pool that is '1 step', '2 steps' etc away? (No crossing the center for regents in the outer planes!) Technically of course a scion could gather RP in one and rule up their bloodline, then travel to the next plane and burn blood to regenerate the RP so you might want to make that harder.

An alternative is to split RP into 'local' (generated locally) and 'introduced' (summoned from a nearby plane / through a gate / generated by burning bloodline) and have the latter only half as effective as usual. For planar travelers who complain of the exchange rate you could say that if they only have one kind of planar RP forming their bloodline, then it is 'local' to that particular plane...
hmmmm the steps away from each other could work. their is already a model in place for working out how far one plane is from another in tterms of stepos. because every plane that an item is away from it's home plane it loses a point of it's enchantment a plus 4 sword of awesomeness on the plane of water is a standard sword in the grey wastes. a similar system could be pu into place for RP. as for the problem with buying blood and then burning it on another plane i've alredy decided that i'm out of nessesity going to have to keep blood and regency seprate because not everything in the planes can have a counts-as bloodline an so when using twice the chariter level as maxium RP instead of bloodline power they just can't buy blood or burn it.

when you think about why can you buy blood with recency any way. it has to have something to do with the scions connection with their land and the power contained in that land. in another plane that just wouldn't be their. so prehaps buying/selling blood could be used if it was resricted to the birthright crastal sphere.


Agree, but when their bloodline hits, say, 100 and a hundred provinces answer to their beck and call - how far away is the Gorgon?

ok point take he would be even closer but a real demigod would have taken over the world by now not just a significant portion

[kgauck]

The Egyptians did not believe that each new pharaoh was a new god, they believed (or it was promulgated) that each new pharaoh was Ra, the sun god. A better D&D description would be that Egypt was ruled by an avatar of Ra.

[Keytium]

The Egyptians did not believe that each new pharaoh was a new god, they believed (or it was promulgated) that each new pharaoh was Ra, the sun god. A better D&D description would be that Egypt was ruled by an avatar of Ra.
My deep aplogies after looking into the matter i discovered you are right. I mistakenly thought that each pharoh was given a place in the egyptian panthion. Sorry for any confusion caused.
In which case i can think of no major gods to come from mortality to godhood without divine intervention.

[AndrewTall]

My deep aplogies after looking into the matter i discovered you are right. I mistakenly thought that each pharoh was given a place in the egyptian panthion. Sorry for any confusion caused.
In which case i can think of no major gods to come from mortality to godhood without divine intervention.

It depends on quite what you mean by ascension and intervention - and whether you look just at RL myth of modern gaming pantheons.

RL mythology will tend to avoid ascension as it is untidy over the long term, although Imhotep from Egyptian myth is one possible example of divine ascension in RL myth, you get humans to spirits in greek myth, although I can't think of one mortal ascending properly (various offspring of the gods excluded) and most of those had a lot of divine intervention if not outright aid.

In 'modern mythology' was Vecna aided to become a god - or did he twist and turn to win divinity? What about Kyuss? Gord the Rogue? Finder Wyvernspur? Various demon princes?

The origin of the 'spark' to get the initial jump from 'just a mortal' to 'a small god who maybe, just maybe, could become truly divine' is easy in Cerilia - bloodline, in a wider planescape setting there are any number of dead gods from whom the divine spark could have been drawn, similarly champions of the gods imbued with their power who have outlived their patron / turned from grace, not to mention of course the offspring of various gods - was Bhall the only god who got frisky in the realms during the time of troubles? I somehow doubt it...

The issue is really 'how epic do you want it to get' and 'what do the real gods do about upstarts who become noticeable'. I'd suggest that once a 'scion' of whatever flavour gets noticeable either they find a patron fast, or they risk being consumed for their spark of divinity, of course perhaps the end-goal of the campaign is to become a true god in a pantheon, either the patron saint of a city/nation, or perhaps even filling an empty 'slot' cf the time of troubles'.

It could get amusing in Sigil if one 'clicks over' from 'joe scion' to 'mr wild ride to divinity or bust' - the Lady of Pain having issues with foreign gods...

[Keytium]

i'm not really sure that a "divine spark" is the right way to go the idea of someone having to steal or be given divinity does sort of rule out and lafull gods energing, because a lawful chariter would never go out of his way to steal the godhood of another even a dead one. it would be against the order of the universe. i simpley think that enough "belef power" which could be obtained in many ways bloodline godly favour/ heritige, feindish power/heratige, raw belief. important religous artifacts, stealing power directly from gods (probaly dead ones as you pointed out. the live one i amagine would be slightly peeved if you stole their power) it could possibly even be stolen directly from the mortals souls (well that s where the gods power comes from in the first place so why not?)

and so while i think that yes the first "Spark" of divinity wouldn't come from belief it would likly come from something else. i don't think that their should be a differnce between those with a divine spark who can harness belief and those without one who can't

[kgauck]

[T]he idea of someone having to steal or be given divinity does sort of rule out and la[w]full gods e[m]erging, because a lawful char[ac]ter would never go out of his way to steal the godhood of another even a dead one.

Why can't such a thing be a gift or reward? It would seem that lawful forces would prefer the model of recruitment and mentoring in the divine realm, instead of the entrepreneurial approach of self-made divines from the chaotic side.

[Keytium]

i agree completly that it could be given or earned but imagine for a moment that in a crystal sphere somewhere their is a huge unheaval due to the failure of their very left wing leadership because of this people views change dramticaly and now a significant group of people believe that a hierarchy is a nessary part of society because equality leads to entropithy and chaos. now in this sphere thier is no god whoes portfolio covers hierarchys. they would be unlikely to worship gods unaligned to their view points so they have too options 1) create a sub sect of a existing religion or 2) worship a new god. now this emergant deity would be lawful because hierarchys are an inherently lawful thing. but none of the current gods would be willing to give up such are large portion of the population to this new religion and theirfore would be unwilling to raise anyone from mortaility to godhood. so in this instance how would a new lawful deity emerge? The followers of this new religion aren't going to try and create a god. They are going to worship a charismatic figure who will gain godhood from the power of their belief. If however this leader requires a spark then how are they to obtain godhood?

That is only one example of when dieities logicaly should emerge dispite their being no divine spark. most instances of godly birth I would imagine would be caused by a lack of appropriate gods or from old gods falling from favour and new ones being thought up.

[kgauck]

but none of the current gods would be willing to give up such are large portion of the population to this new religion and theirfore would be unwilling to raise anyone from mortaility to godhood. so in this instance how would a new lawful deity emerge?

Why impose this condition? After all, lawful organization gods will look at such a sphere and say, either I need to step up and manage this sphere's emergent hierarchy myself, or I need to delegate it to someone who will. I cannot imagine why such deities would act as you suggest. It is directly opposed to their alignment.

I can see rival powers setting up their own delegates and these new gods being rivals, but I can't see them refusing to either step up or delegate and give the sphere over to more chaos by their own chaotic actions.

Also, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling make your posts easier to read.

[AndrewTall]

I'd say that if you want a lawful faith to have a lawful god then the answer is outsourcing- the chaotic god creates a 'vassal' lawful god to soak up the demand.

However as 'top of the tree' there is nothing to stop a chaotic god ruling a lawful church - they
Faith has lots of rules and hierarchy, the god just makes the rules they like.

Terry Pratchet uses the concept of small gods to reflect 'man made' gods with few worshipers, these grow as they gain followers and eventually gain real power.

I prefer a spark to prevent millions of small gods - one for each schism.

A spark could come from genetics, divine inspiration, or 'elder spirits' of some sort - think fistandantilus/raistlin.

[Keytium]

I'm sorry, but I think you missed the point of the example kgauck, probably due to my lack of punctuation and spelling :) . their is no lawful gods of any similarity to what is required. They either died out over the years of chaotic rule due to lack of worship or the ruling gods could have killed them or whatever the reason is for their absence their is a hole in the pantheon.

what I was basically trying to say was how does the lawful side of the pantheon adress gaps in their portfolio? Just because they are lawful doesn't mean they are hugly altruistic. most gods won't give any significant amount of their power away, because why should they? the demands of a population change dramatically over time and because of this gods die and fade away. Also new cults will form and challenge the older gods

when you are faced with the fact that the gods will eventually die then you need a way to replace them. you can't have the gods as the only source of godhood because otherwise new gods just wouldn't emerge.

also can you think of the number of gods in the forgotten realms setting that cover pretty much the same things. just because a god exists who loosely fits in with your values doesn't mean you are going to worship them over worshipping a newer god. the gods would never invest these new religions with power for two reasons. one because they aren't necessary to fulfil any lacks in the pantheon and two because they would be a direct threat to them. and yet their are plenty of examples of gods that are in open competition. how are these competitors to emerge unless by the power of belief.

AndrewTall raises a valid point about the small gods syndrome, (which is an awesome book “thou shall build shallower steps!” :) ) but the difference between my model and that of Sir terry Pratchett is the amount of belief required to create a god. In small gods any amount of belief causes a god to spontaneously exist. In the version I suggest it would take several thousand to elevate someone to demigodhood and over a hundred thousand to elevate or spontaneously create a fully fledged god. Also I would think that as long as people still think they worship the same god then they should supply power to the same entity. These two things combined would stop millions of small gods from being created but still allow the emergence of minor gods.


'elder spirits' of some sort - think fistandantilus/raistlin.

As far as I knew Raistlin gained his godhood though killing Takhisis as opposed to gaining it from Fistandantilus. yes Fistandantilus was vital in his becoming a god but the power he gained form him was nothing compared to the power he have after he defeated Takhisis. Never mind it doesn't really mater.

So I'm sorry but I'm going to have disagree with both of you I think the “divine spark” idea is just too limiting.

[kgauck]

No, I did follow the point of the example, despite the capitalization and punctuation.

But consider
1) If people are traveling between planes, nothing stops gods from doing so. Why can't Haelyn, for example, pop over to your hypothetical sphere, pick out a promising paragon of things chivalric and bestow on him the necessary minimal divine level?


Just because they are lawful doesn't mean they are hugly altruistic. most gods won't give any significant amount of their power away.

2) Yeah why would any regent ever have a vassal? Answer: because they can't administer all their fiefs by themselves. Same question repeated: Why would a god give away the minimal divine level to elevate someone from worthy paragon to divine status? Answer, because the god understands that creating a friend in this new place means a new friend, who may regard you as a worthy patron for eternity, and advances your ethos. There is no more altruism here than when when any powerful figure delegates any authority. Delegation makes them more powerful, not less.

3) Gods don't die, they simply lose their portfolio. Azrai didn't die at Diesmaar. Saturn didn't die when Jupiter cut him in half with a scyth. Instead he lurked around at the edge of the cosmos. So I don't accept the "gods must die" premise.

4) The situation in the FR has nothing to do with the example you started with. FR has multiple overlapping gods, your original example had no god to turn to.

Hence there is no reason not to argue that a gift or reward is not possible. If you want to argue that not everyone would offer such a gift or reward, I have no argument, all I need for my case is that someone, somewhere, will.

[AndrewTall]

Hmm, anyone powerful enough to kill three pantheons - every god in a sphere - is by definition a god themselves surely?

But whatever works for you, personally I figure that if the gods are willing to allow and encourage new gods to form then divine spark isn't limiting, if they aren't willing then any small god will be exterminated as soon as they become noticeable.

A lot depends on how you want the PCs (who are the potentials I presume) to advance - do they need a patron? To slay an elder demon/ recover the soul of a slain god? If so then sparkage is fine, if they need to build a vast domain and rule up their bloodline then sparkage is counter-productive and distracting.

Hmm, didn't Osiris get more powerful after he was killed? Gods are weird...

[Birthright-L]

At 04:23 AM 3/12/2009, kgauck wrote:

> Yeah why would any regent every have a vassal? Answer: because they can`t administer all their fiefs by themselves. Same question repeated: Why would a god give away the minimal divine level to elevate someone from worthy paragon to divine status? Answer, because the god understands that creating a friend in this new places means a new friend, who may regard you as a worthy patron for eternity, and advances your ethos. There is no more altruism here than when when any powerful figure delegates any authority. Delegation makes them more powerful, not less.


This is really the heart of the matter when it comes to running a BR-like system in PS, and I think the problem is one of the perennial issues that occurs in the BR community all the time--a definition of terms. In this case, the gods would certainly have vassals and a system of organization. But the question is: Does that hierarchy represent something equivalent to the system of vassalage in BR, or do the gods have what we might want to describe as an unlimited ability to collect regency? If the gods` capacity to collect regency is infinite then there would be no need for them to endow subordinates with a fraction of the godly power of a kind that resembles BR`s bloodline system. This is the difference between what we have in the past referred to as a lower case vassal and an upper case Vassal. Of course the gods have vassals... but do they have Vassals who gather up the divine energies of worship by proxy and then pass that along to their god?

From what I can tell the gods` ability to collect regency is unlimited in PS and in BR, so they have no need of Vassals. The logic for that conclusion is simply that in BR we have Deismaar as the rationale for divine power amongst mortals. There are characters who are divinely gifted or who simply have powers and abilities before Deismaar (the Lost, elven immortality) but these things don`t amount to the ability to collect regency. If the gods` ability to collect regency was limited before Deismaar, surely they would have figured out the Vassalage system at some point in the previous millennia and subsequent 1,500 years, wouldn`t they?

Of course, one could come up with some sort of rationalization for the inclusion of BR-like bloodlines in PS, but one has to assume that the ability of the gods to collect their equivalent of regency is capped just as bloodline score is, and that cap must be low enough that the gods would see a need for a system of assalage.

Gary

[Sorontar]

Looking at the BR gods, if they needed a Vassal god, then all they needed to do was mate. The BR gods were not all originally human. Laerme was the child of gods (Erik & Avani) and I have no idea how she got bestowed a portfolio. Was it the decision of her parents? Her worshippers? Herself? She certainly is "allied" to her parents, even if she can occasionally be a rebellious teenager. Likewise Cuiraécen was the child of Haelyn and Nesirie.

So I certainly don't think the Old Gods or the New Gods have any regency link to Aebrynis themselves. So the BR concept of Vassalge doesn't apply to them.

Sorontar.

[kgauck]

After all, lawful organization gods will look at such a sphere and say, either I need to step up and manage this sphere's emergent hierarchy myself, or I need to delegate it to someone who will.

If you don't think a vassal is necessary my argument defaults to the first part, a god can simply step up to fill the gap in the sphere.

I don't presume one is necessary, but the basic premise of the question is about forming new gods, so I address that issue. But I'm happy with the idea that existing gods are sufficient and no new apotheosis is necessary in the first place.