>>9097545
1.) Save Point - The largest city of the game world, named "New Beginning," is centered around the Temple of Save (pronounced "Sah-vee"), an ancient structure from before the Apocalypse which has been repurposed into a holy site for the "goddess" of rebirth. The crystals contained within are able to store a person's "image" as they are at the instant of the "Rebirth Ritual" (which neither the priests conducting it nor the individuals experiencing it understand as a controlled, quasi-technological process - the "mystic crystals of Save" are a storage medium akin to a hard drive and existed long before Save herself did). This allows their soul to return to the Temple at the instant of their death, being "reborn" into a new (cloned) body. No equipment can be copied in this way, however, and those who go a long time between rituals have a problem - any growth or development they've experienced since the time of the ritual is lost. This obviously means a lot of people spend most of their time around the Temple so as to maintain an up-to-date ritual and keep their possessions close to where they will be reborn, and the Temple has thus become the core of a massive megalopolis. Others instead use the Temple's powers to extend their lives, maintaining a single "youthful" image of themselves and returning to it time and time again. Since the recreated image maintains all of the individual's "soul" and thus experiences (though not necessarily all of their *XP,* if they haven't done the ritual in awhile), this results in no clear "mental age" for anyone - some people who've lived lifetimes prefer the appearance of an eight-year-old kid.

>>9097558
2.) Kill 'em All - As a result of the Temple of Save, the death penalty is the most commonly-applied punishment in the game world because it's actually WORSE to imprison someone than it is to simply kill them. Having the guard kill a person in a distant town is equivalent to a fine and "lashings" (or other pain-infliction punishment), while being killed by the guard in New Beginning is almost no punishment at all if they're willing to let you come back and get the stuff off your corpse. Only the most heinous of actions merits more than simple death, and indeed "surrendering" to a town guard or others will often only mean your slaughter is relatively quick.

3.) Air Ships - Actually, powered vehicles of all kinds. Intelligent elementals of all stripes can be enticed/coerced into service as the motive force for various types of craft. Air spirits obviously work best for air ships, water elementals fit sea-going craft most effectively, earth beings are good workers for land-based vehicles such as tanks, and fire-types are decent all-around power sources if you can tame them (they have a reputation for being hard to handle, and having an irate elemental operating the thing you're riding isn't the best of ideas). The best handlers of these elemental-driven creations have a close relationship with their vessels' power source, with some sea-captains being quite literally "married to the sea" (or at least a being born of it).

4.) Big Riding Beast - Giant (and I mean HUGE - the size of buildings) flightless birds known as "Warks" are domesticated for most commercial land transport in-game. They are quasi-intelligent and easy-to-handle (though mischevious), but don't make good war-beasts because they can be easily-downed by attacking their long, thin, exposed legs. Though this also makes them big targets for bandits and other significant predators, typically their own passenger complement is enough to get them by such smaller threats safely.

>>9097573
5.) Magic is Goddamned Everywhere - No one is quite sure why, but it is nonetheless one of the defining characteristics of the world. Magic seeps from every pore of the universe, ready to bend and twist "normality" to the point that "normality" is an aberration itself. While mages and other skilled individuals can guide the mystical energies, "taming" them and using them to structured ends, most magic in the world is untapped and thus "wild." This "wild" magic, if allowed to build up to high levels, starts spontaneously warping reality around it. The trees might grow faces and sing, or the rocks float in the air, or the contents of an abandoned rucksack gain mystical combat powers... pretty much anything is possible, if not necessarily common.

6.) Monsters are Also Goddamned Everywhere - All that latent "wild" magic energy animates, mutates, or simply generates monstrous creatures of every possible variety all over the place whenever it rises to dangerous levels. Grass can become a monster. Mushrooms can become monsters. Cows can become monsters. Rocks can become monsters. While 95% of these beasts are pretty much dumb as dirt (which can ALSO become a monster), and thus present little organized threat to civilization, they are also 95% destructive (even if only playfully so) and thus make the wilderness very dangerous place.

7.) Almost Everyone is an "Adventurer" or Mercenary - There are two major classifications of job in the world: adventurers, and people who make things for adventurers. When the wheat fields can stand up and walk around as wheat MONSTERS, there are no real farmers. There are just people who kill monsters and also plant seeds sometimes. Every job that involves going outside the cities for anything also involves knowing how to hold up in a fight. After all, even if death is only an annoyance it makes it hard to earn a living if it keeps happening to you.

>>9097589
9.) Cities are Safe Havens - If excess "untamed" magic energy results in reality freaking out and monsters appearing from nowhere, the only way to maintain basic civilization is to tame all (or at least the vast majority) of the magic in the area... which means burning it on something. Every collection of individuals which has survived long enough to be considered even a "settlement" thus has SOMETHING at its center consuming all that energy. New Beginning is, obviously, built around the Temple of Save. Other major cities are typically built around teleportation circles left over from before the Apocalypse, though there are exceptions - a few Dwarven holds expand outwards from vast, constantly-running mage-forges, and there is at least one village dependent upon the mage college at its core to protect it. SOMETHING is necessary, however - even the smallest of waypoints has at least an eternal flame in its walls to burn off the surrounding area's magic and prevent everything from descending into madness and chaos.

The good news is, around the largest cities for some distance the ambient amount of magic is reduced - resulting in less-noticable "wild" effects and smaller monstrous beasts. The bad news is, mages can't cast spells of any significance anywhere near one of the "magic sinks." That's the price for safety, however; monsters can't spontaneously generate in areas close to a magic sink, and pairing one with nice sturdy stone walls will keep the vast majority of such nuisances outside where they belong.

>>9097606
10.) There's a Magic Item for Almost Anything - With so much magic in the world, people have developed many useful ways to utilize it for everything from the extraordinary to the mundane. Though some highly-desirable advances have yet to be puzzled out (no one's discovered how to do permanent matter creation or transmutation, for instance), pretty much everyone has several magic items in their home. There are crystal balls for interpersonal communication, "cold lights" for interior illumination, flame-free cauldrons for cooking, and so on and so forth. Indeed, magic in the world has advanced to the point where it is mostly indistinguishable in function from technology. Though these devices use so little mystical energy that they do typically function in cities, they are regardless most reliable and effective as they get further from the magic sink at its center... and, of course, they'll still likely fail if brought directly adjacent to one.

11.) Everybody Shares a Culture - The major metropolises in-game are all connected by teleportation circles, thus giving them a direct link to one-another, and the smaller settlements are generally tied in one way or another to those major cities. Furthermore, world civilization recently had to dig itself out of the Apocalypse and is just now beginning to really come into its own again. As a result of this interconnectedness and necessary cooperation for survival, pretty much everybody shares the same language, currency, and so on. Though the various city-states and racial groups may still come into conflict over traditions, religious beliefs, politics, or other factors... they will all take your money, understand your words, and share basically the same moral standards as your party.

>>9097623
12.) Lost Technology is Everywhere, Yet Remains Lost - The Apocalypse destroyed every past civilization in the world so thoroughly as to literally "bury it alive." The advanced technology of the "ancients" can be found under every hillside and beneath every uprooted tree. Problem is, the vast majority of it is broken... and anyways, no one has the first clue anymore how to repair or even use the things. Even if someone DID succeed at puzzling out what some lost relic actually does when used, likely as not there is already a magic-item equivalent that has been created in the meantime which serves that purpose just as well.

The only exceptions to this rule are the really BIG things, like cloning machines and teleportation devices and mecha. But obviously those aren't quite so ubiquitous as to be found under every patch of earth, and even then... what use is a broken mecha if you don't know how to fix or fuel it?

>>9097640
13.) Guilds are Ridiculously Omnipresent and Powerful - The Smithy's Guild has an official monopoly on all stores which sell armor and armament... even if that's a cloth robe and a wooden staff. The Alchemist's Guild controls all manufacture and sale of non-food consumables... including herbs that would grow wild on their own if left alone. In fact, you won't find a single marked shop in any of the major cities or towns that doesn't have the emblem of their associated Guild over the door. There is even a Thieves' Guild, which sells "insurance" against lost items and also acts as an organized "protection racket," and an Assassin's Guild as well (though the lack of persistent death makes this less heinous to just about everyone - in fact, they're generally hired by city guard representatives to track down criminals who leave town). Individuals who try and break ranks with the guild system will find that they have a wider reach and sometimes even more power than the governments under which they operate. This is aided by the fact that the larger Guilds make use of "bag banks" - magic bag items that work like debit cards off allocated Guild funds and allow any permitted member of the Guild to withdraw as much as they need. Need to buy a rare mystic sword off an adventurer in a tiny, hard-scrabble settlement - or pay to have that adventurer killed? Not a problem.

14.) Inns Can Cure Everything - The Healer's Guild controls all the Inns in civilization (for some inexplicable reason), and part of their Guild Charter requires them to heal those who purchase their services... even if they're just renting a bunk for the night. The Healer's Guild members get grumbly if asked why they don't sell healing potions, instead of the Alchemist's Guild; they likewise don't appreciate being questioned as to why they're stuck running Inns instead. The answer is apparently "stupid politics" that forced a "bad deal" some years ago.

>>9097653
15.) The Clothes Make the Man - One of the universal customs of the world is a belief that it's possible to "borrow" the strength/luck/fated glory of a legendary person by adopting their style of dress. As a result, almost everyone dresses in a very small number of clothing types. Adventurers tend to dress as other powerful adventurers, merchants dress like historically-successful merchants, and so on. In fact, adopting your own style of clothing is generally considered to be indicative of extreme vanity - either you think you don't need the help, or you expect to out-do the heroes of yesteryear with your own deeds.

16.) The Cities are Specialized - One benefit of having every major metropolis linked by instantaneous teleportation transit is that economies of scale can be exploited to ridiculous extremes. Cities on wide fields specialize in the production of food and clothing, cities near (or *in*) mountains mine and smelt ores, and cities in forests harvest lumber and other wild goods. None of them do everything, relying on one-another for that which they themselves do not produce. This structure, organized by the mercantile guilds, keeps the city-state governments from ever descending from bickering into outright war and helps make the most of the limited workforce to produce as comfortable a life as is feasible post-Apocalypse.

The smaller settlements are a bit more varied in production, being forced by slower and less-reliable transit to branch out into little bits of everything, but they simply enough wouldn't exist without some special reason for their founding beyond the large city walls and thus each of THEM tends to also focus almost-wholly on the single purpose which merited their creation.

>>9097672
17.) There are Lots of Weird Races - No one quite knows where they all came from, though there are legends and folk-origins for each individual kind. Certain specific races have been shown through excavation to have existed prior to the Apocalypse, others are believed to have been formed by the rampant wild magic of the years following it (either from other races, animals, plants, inanimate objects, or even nothing at all) before the cities were built and magic sinks implemented, and some don't even know themselves what their true origin happens to be. The sheer QUANTITY of different races prevents a lot of the cultural conflicts that such a thing might otherwise cause, though the three "pure-breeding races" of elves, dwarves, and orcs (all of whom tend more towards racial uniformity than the others) still tend to cluster together into their own racially-segregated areas and almost every race has some negative stereotype applied to it by others.

>>9097678
18.) The "Gods" Physically Exist - Most worshipped "spirits" or "deities" in the game world are physically *IN* the game world... residing in temples or following their worshippers around. Every major city contains a Temple District, where these beings contest with one-another for believers (from which they draw much of their power) and receive the supplication of their followers. This does mean that a "god" can be KILLED - and indeed, they have been in the past. Problem is, killing a spirit's physical form means little if it retains enough believers to have the power necessary to reincarnate itself.

As for why these "gods" are worshipped if they can be fought and killed by a strong enough force? They use the power of belief from their followers to break the rules of existence even more than mages can. Though no individual deity is yet strong enough to cover every event in every place, despite that being a goal for most of them, they are capable of influencing events under their chosen "domain" for a significant radius (including within the magic sinks of cities and towns). A powerful spirit of healing can heal its believers for miles around its "home," and even a minor deity of war can render its followers powerful combatants inside its temple walls. This is enough reason for many to pledge their worship to one or a handful of meaningful spirits with domains important to them - though there are nonetheless a significant population of individuals who don't care one way or the other about the "gods" and even a few who actively dislike them.

rolled 2, 5, 6, 1 = 14

I was initially planning on being a nuisance in your thread, but I must say, from what I've read, I'm impressed.

>>9097729
Okay, those are all the ideas I've had so far. For those wondering, I'm planning to run using the Burning Wheel system. I've reviewed all the "console RPG cliche" lists out there, and these are the non-event, cultural/societal assumptions that most console RPGs seem to make as a part of their play. I may well have missed some, though, so please do let me know.

>>9097792

Looks like you've got pretty much all the bases covered save NPC's that repeat themselves.

>>9097792
hmm, didint see this one.
Disappearing Monsters?
i mean, with beasts just materializing under every bush, tree and small rock there has to be a lot of carcasses left over. Do they melt into the earth, leaving only a few scraps .. and for some reason.. gold?.. behind, or does the thrifty adventurer need to hack them open?

why are the fields not covered in rot and bones?

good god, this is incredible. I need to show this to my DM.

I like the ideas presented, I figured you would make magic "recyclable" in the sense that dead bodies/cast spells/rusting magical items would return to the magic "reserves" of the world. This would mean that the NPC's, and presumably, PC's, were made of magic, or perhaps there is just a magic decomposition that takes place.

Other than that, bravo.

>>9097807
I'm trying to avoid the "broken record" NPCs, if only because that limits true roleplay potential. I may, though, have the priests of Save whose duties involve clothing and organizing the reborn masses be bored, apathetic individuals who have reached the point of simply repeating "welcome back to life, please take a robe and clear a space for new arrivals" in a dull monotone.

>>9097844
Good point! I'm still trying to figure out if I'm actually going to go the "pinata monster" route or not, where killing them just causes them to burst open into fabulous prizes, or if I'm going to be a bit more traditional and simply have the guilds buy up the bits of the various creatures for use in production of goods. After all, every bit of a magic monster is magical - but the problem with that is, so is everything else in the world. I don't have a good solution to this yet.

just go check out tvtropes

>>9097933
>I like the ideas presented, I figured you would make magic "recyclable" in the sense that dead bodies/cast spells/rusting magical items would return to the magic "reserves" of the world.

This is a possible option - that dead things left out in the wild magic zones just don't stay a corpse for long. Either they turn undead, turn into something else, or some other transformational event occurs to render them not a dead body anymore.

Hm... this also gives adventurers reason to take trophy items for resale, as the bodies can disappear relatively quickly and may not be there when you get back.

>>9098078
perhaps giant magical vultures that violently attack anyone who 'muscles in' on their lunch

Okay, here's my brainstorming idea - the "monsters" are either animated, mutated, or otherwise born from a build-up of wild magic, so they're "charged" full of it. When they're destroyed, the stored wild magic soon bursts out of them and disintegrates the monster's corpse in a spray of rainbows, flower petals, and all sorts of other weird shit. That takes care of the disappearing dead body problem, and of course puts forward the typical cliche of "loot the body before it poofs."

>>9098223
Hey, this also potentially allows a dead monster rat to explode into little gold nuggets for no reason from time to time as well. I like it.

Jesus fuck, this is amazing.
I was gonna go to bed, but now I'm glad I stayed up...

>>9098000
You could also have the Guilds all have ritual phrases that they use to identify themselves and/or conclude business deals. For roleplay purposes, they're all individuals, and you can talk to them about anything, but any conversation with a given NPC starts and ends the same way.

Also, Pleasantville has to have a tutorial level.

>>9098270
How's this?

19.) Dead Monsters go "Poof!" - Being as they are created by uncontrolled build-ups of "wild" magical energy, the monsters of the world don't just fall down and rot when they are bested by an adventurer. Instead, the "charge" of magic stored within them becomes unstable. Within a matter of minutes, the creature's mystical build-up explodes outwards in a burst of high-energy randomness. Monsters have been reported vanishing in puffs of smoke, brilliant shimmering lights, sprays of flower petals, gouts of flame, and even sometimes in showers of gold. Of course, there have also been the rare reports of a dead beast actually EXPLODING as well - so adventurers are advised to take what they need from their conquests quickly before retreating from the area. Just in case.

>>9098489
>Also, Pleasantville has to have a tutorial level.

My intention was to start them as newly-reborn individuals in the Temple of Save, only for some reason they've lost their memories beyond "the last thing you remember is a sharp, excruciating pain and a flash of red... fading into black, and then the ambient blue of the room in which you find yourselves."

I figure setting them out from the center of New Beginning gives them a chance to ask questions and be pointed in the proper directions - especially since no one's ever lost their memory from rebirth before, and so the priests of Save are going to be very interested in finding out what happened and trying to help these "unfortunates" (if only to keep quiet what's happened and prevent any rumors from spreading).

That gives them instant plot, plenty of people to ask questions of, and a close respawn point if they proceed to quickly off themselves. No, I don't yet know why they're amnesiacs.

>>9098489
>You could also have the Guilds all have ritual phrases that they use to identify themselves and/or conclude business deals. For roleplay purposes, they're all individuals, and you can talk to them about anything, but any conversation with a given NPC starts and ends the same way.

This isn't a bad idea. I'll make a note of it.

>>9098674
Also, magical constructs set up at the entrance to certain places that utilize a small amount of the ambient magic to continue running. They say halpful but cryptic advice to adventurers entering such places. Advice that will explain how to get past a certain challenge. So, for example, "you need a boat to cross rivers." for a river. or "Flashlights are essential if you're going into the dark!" outside of a cave. That way you can have regular NPCs, but also broken records.

>>9098674
>>9098489
you also need a guild ritual standard garment.

regardless of location all assassins must wear a black wool cloak, and at least one plain steel dagger with a very small amount of engraving.

rogues wear a key on a rope around their necks etc. etc.
---
what about off the wall crazy shit weapons?
quite often the number of weapons is split between 'ancient' weapons of great power and the cutting edge of technology.

if everyone wears more or less the same clothes they need something to set them apart...

you could find that really old rpgworld webcomic and go through it for ideas, it was basically exactly the world youre describing

>>9098674
20.) Everyone Says the Same Damn Things - The various religious groups and commercial guilds are very ritualistic about their membership's activities, as a way of making sure everyone knows how much of their daily lives are dependent upon those entities. Guild shopkeepers, for instance, can be fined or even stripped of their licenses if they don't begin and end sales in set ways that remind their customers that they're buying from the GUILD instead of a single individual. Religious orders can be even more fanatical about such mantras, being as their patron deities depend upon the belief of their followers. The priests of the Temple of Save, for instance, greets every "reborn" person passing through their halls in the name of their goddess and reminds them to repay the "gift of life" with a gift to the temple. Most do, if only so in the future they'll be given such small creature comforts as a robe and sandals instead of being left to wander out into public in the nude.

So why do so many people dress like miserable, poor peasants?

To help themselves achieve miserable, poor peasanthood?

>>9098857
it would probably become custom to wash and return your rebirth robes once you get decent ones of your own.

and a tithe on the weavers guild!!

>>9098857
I HAVE AN IDEA FOR A CHARACTER IN YOUR WORLD.
NUDE EDDIE.
THIS FAGGOT IS AN INCOMPETENT ADVENTURER AND THE BANE OF THE TEMPLE OF SAVE.
HE HAS NEVER DONATED A PENNY, AND RECIEVES THE ROUGHEST LEGAL TREATMENT FROM THE CLERGY. HE SPENDS MUCH OF HIS TIME RUNNING NAKED FROM THE GUARDS, WHO WANT TO KILL HIM FOR HIS NUMEROUS INFRACTIONS OF PUBLIC NUDITY.

>>9098795
>if everyone wears more or less the same clothes they need something to set them apart...

Technically, what you're describing is closer to what happens in the game world than "everyone wears the same clothes." Everyone who wants to be a thief dresses like a famous thief of the past, everyone who wants to be a merchant dresses like a powerful merchant, and so on and so forth. You dress for the role you wish to play, basically, which I think is what you're essentially suggesting.

>>9098896
These people are not guild members, and can thus not afford cushy jobs. Nor are they great adventurers who kill dragons and bring back their body parts to sell for thoudands of [world-standard currency]. These are the downtrodden masses of Pleasantville; the hopeless, the destitute, the unwanted. Life for them is a constant struggle.

>>9098795
>pic
it actually caused me physical pain. I guess some respect is due for the most useless weapons in fantasy.

>>9098946
Regardless, when clothes matter THAT MUCH, people aren't going to put clothes so low on their priority list.

>>9098917
if I ever get a group to play with again I'm running it that way.

and it was more of a contrast to explain all of the off the spike weapons, and I mean, if you get looked down on for not wearing the right clothes you need some form of personal expression.

and I am mildly disappointed that no one caught the pun either...

>>9099009
yes exactly

>>9098981
sorry for the brain pain I downloaded that image many years ago before I knew what a weapon should really look like.

>>9098896
>So why do so many people dress like miserable, poor peasants?

>To help themselves achieve miserable, poor peasanthood?

As I'm trying to extrapolate a universe that's basically designed from the ground up to sustain console RPG adventurers, most people aren't peasants at all. They're adventurers, and dress/act as such. You just don't see them in town because they're out in the fields adventuring, which explains why your "average settlement" appears to only consist of eight or so individuals running the inn, shops, and mayor's house. They're dressed like people who became successful in those fields.

I'm not sure, honestly, where a console RPG actually has a vast population of miserable peasantry. Pretty much every game I can come up with has people dressed in clean, bright colors who never quite seem to be busy with any real manual labor in their days.

>>9099053
>I'm not sure, honestly, where a console RPG actually has a vast population of miserable peasantry.

they don't have very much of that.
when you can harness raw magic out of the air you can fulfill a majority of the personnel needs of a civilization.

need food? get an earth elemental to furrow the ground. need your wheat harvested? get a suitably engineered magical beast to do it.

etc. etc.

>>9099053
Besides, as I stated up above - there's not much for a true peasant to DO in the game world as it exists. The wheat in the fields can and will kick your ass. Same with the fruit trees, fish in the stream, and dirt under the plow. Anything and everything outside the city walls has the possibility of turning into a monstrous creature.

The role normally taken up by the peasantry in medieval society has here been filled by adventurers. You don't farm the fields, you slay them and loot their corpses for grain. You don't harvest lumber, you kill the trees when they come for you. You beat the shit out of your daily bread, and thus get what you have to sell to the merchants and feed your family.

>>9099009
But dressing the part doesn't make you a master thief. Being a master thief makes you a master thief. Dressing the part without qualifications is like wearing nazi garb and expecting all of europe to fall into your lap. Sure, you can wear the same cloak, boots, and poncho that Stealius Maximus, Thief of Legend wore, but if your footsteps make more noise than an Angry Marine at a Twilight convention, you're not gonna become the next master thief.

>>9099191
I wonder what inflation does to the cost of a sword or spear in this setting?

if everyone is either an adventurer or a merchant weapons must be cheap...

Have the guards do the ol' Morrowind deal of "We're watching you, scum"

Hmmm... Maybe something about how Party Members work? Like certain souls, for lack of a better term, 'resonate' with each other, and as a response, these souls are bound by fate to follow each other for an indefinite period of time? This somehow allows them shared access to the abstracted concepts like License Boards or Sphere Grids...

As a result of the insanely high levels of magical energy, every living being is suffused with arcane power. This manifests in certain ways, such as either a force field powered by your will/fighting spirit, or an actual limited ability to reject the damage done to your body (no one bleeds). In addition, whenever a set of conditions have been met (typically mortal peril/high stress levels, but it can be altered to be arbitrary), people can release a burst of wild magic specifically attuned to their soul (overdrives/limit breaks).

>>9099248
>But dressing the part doesn't make you a master thief. Being a master thief makes you a master thief. Dressing the part without qualifications is like wearing nazi garb and expecting all of europe to fall into your lap. Sure, you can wear the same cloak, boots, and poncho that Stealius Maximus, Thief of Legend wore, but if your footsteps make more noise than an Angry Marine at a Twilight convention, you're not gonna become the next master thief.

"Dress for success" is a major social belief in the game world because it's my way of explaining why most NPCs in console RPGs are carbon-copies of one-another and my world is a tongue-in-cheek take on console RPGs with me trying to invent reasons for all the weirdness in those games. Making it a superstition that is widely believed allows me to get away with explaining it in a continent-wide way without resorting to something sillier than I have to.

No, "dressing the part" doesn't *actually* make you any better at what you're doing. But people believe it lets them borrow some of the power of their forerunners, much like cultures with ancestor-worship, and so they do what they think helps them do what they're doing better.

>>9099265
>if everyone is either an adventurer or a merchant weapons must be cheap...

That's the plan. Burning Wheel is pretty fast and loose with the equipment aspects of play, so I can basically get away with going "if you need a basic weapon, you can get one dirt cheap."

>>9099426
I like how you work it, I'm just saying not everyone believes in such things and, if dress for success is a worldwide meme, heroic-looking clothes are going to get very expensive. So there you have another reason for people to dress like peasants.

And I still like my idea of a bunch of subsistence adventurers living the dangerous life, trying to get by on twelve cockatrice feathers a week...

>>9099407
Expanding on the force field thing, when fighting with melee weapons, said weapon becomes an extension of your will, and thus capable of damaging another person's field. However, non-magical ranged weapons have a difficult time doing equivalent damage. While still effective, they are by no means as lethal as they would be without the field's presence.

>>9099352
It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work for my game. My players wind up at each others' throats a lot, and having the "destined party" constantly killing its own members seems a tad silly.

>>9099407
Amusingly enough, the Burning Wheel system itself has an in-built mechanic for "limit break" style stuff in its Artha points.

>>9099527
It's not Destiny, hell, it wouldn't even be -special- just certain ragtag adventurers seems to travel together, even if it doesn't seem they'd be functional.
And of course, actions like betrayal/changing sides is enough to shatter the bond, though not irreparably.

>>9099480
The Burning Wheel combat system is significantly more abstract than most others, so really getting into the nitty-gritty of fighting mechanics is a tad unnecessary because they won't exactly find a use in my campaign due to the system being used.

If you want to try and lay one out for someone else who might be interested in running with the concept, do feel free. Just letting you know that I can't really use it for my campaign.

>>9099191
that is the single most awesome part of this proposed setting.
>You don't farm the fields, you slay them and loot their corpses for grain. You don't harvest lumber, you kill the trees when they come for you. You beat the shit out of your daily bread, and thus get what you have to sell to the merchants and feed your family.

is so defining. Hell thats why I put it in the archive.

>>9099639
I have to agree. I mean that's what pushes this past parody straight into awesome land.

>>9099639
link to archive?

>>9099597
I don't disagree in that it's interesting. My major thing is just that I have one player who is always chaotic stupid in-game and the first thing she'd do with a shared equipment list is steal everybody else's stuff, sell it, and use it to buy shiny things. That would pretty much end the game in an argument/annoyance, and since I can't boot the girl because she's the wife of the guy whose house we play at I'm obligated to avoid the circumstances that would bring that sort of thing about.

If I had better player cohesion I'd try to make "party" rules, but there's no sense in making something I don't expect to use for any length of time.

>>9099639
>>9099652
Glad you guys like it. I figure if /tg/ approves, my players will probably enjoy it.

>>9099751
that is no guarantee

now that I think about it, the 'school of adventuring' that's being discussed in another thread would fit perfectly here..

>>9099710
Ah. That... sucks. And I could see why you'd want to avoid that.

>>9099784
>now that I think about it, the 'school of adventuring' that's being discussed in another thread would fit perfectly here..

I've been thinking about it, honestly, though I really don't know whether to do one unified school or several specialized ones scattered between the specialized cities. Regardless, most people likely wouldn't be able to afford the tuition and would learn their adventuring skills from lessons passed down from elder family members.

>>9098795
Fullblades/Big two handers need to be a popular choice amongst warriors along with dual wielding and double swords. Casters need to be popular with wielding weird shit like chakrams and whips. Rogues/ninjas need giant fuma shurikens

Well, OP here - I'm off to bed, but I'll keep the window open for this for when I wake up and will try to respond to any ideas/suggestions offered at that point. Thank god for the new extra pages to keep this thing alive until then, and thanks for the help from everyone who's given suggestions thus far.

gnight OP, and Save bless you!