@BESW Why were Dragonborn excepted?

Maybe some think that it's a soft idea that led to the fall of Nerath. Others might think that abandoning it is spitting in the face of the noblest empire in the history of the world --perhaps even feeling like the Bastion is on the cusp of becoming New Nerath?

Also I must away to eat lunch. Back soon.

@JonathanHobbs Because Nerath was founded by humans. The last great human nationwas Bael Turath (technically it was led by tieflings, but propaganda had it a human state), and it was destroyed by a dragonborn empire.

So even more than a thousand years later, there's animosity between the two races and when a new human nation rose, dragonborn were made second-class citizens and told to consider themselves lucky.

(When I say "more than a thousand years," there's really no consistency in the dates between the various canon references. My headcanon dates are based on the obvious parallels between the war between Bael Turath and Arkhosia with the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome. Assuming the 'modern' PoL setting is 'today,' that makes Nerath somewhat analogous to the Italian Renaissance and/or the Industrial Revolution.)

(This is one reason I use Nerath as my entry point for Eberron magipunk.)

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I'm curious if you/your group have given this history much thought?

@BESW what?

No, the 1-30 game was in custom world

And my verrrry slow 1-7 game was.... not

It's hardly important to most PoL games, I'm sure.

But I find it really hard to imagine at least some of the developers didn't have the Punic Wars in mind, and that intrigues me. Also makes me wonder if I'm missing the point entirely, because the Imperial Wars and the Punic Wars ended so differently.

As the Eighth Doctor said, "I love humans. Always seeing patterns in things that aren't there."

@BESW I know of neither of these wars so I can't really comment! And I know almost nothing about Bael Turath other than it is That Tiefling City!

@JonathanHobbs Empire, actually. It had cities with even more ridiculous names like Vor Kragal, which is either a Klingon opera or something I can't speculate on without getting an R rating.

@BESW I have always thought of the Bastion this way: its citizens consider it a bastion from the dangers of a world that destroyed their last empire. This place is a place to stay safe. It is only a shadow of Nerath. Its ideals, I think, are more in line with: "We'll be safe here. And one day, we will meet others, and form a new empire elsewhere."

I haven't attributed to them any particular desire to create New Nerath right there, but it would certainly fuel a wave of industrialism: "Let's become the greatest city in the World, and the New Nerath!"

The basic parallels are that both the Imperial War between Bael Turath and Arkhosia, and the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, were conflicts between an older, well-established empire (Arkhosia, Carthage) and a new upstart of a nation with rapidly-expanding borders (Bael Turath, Rome). They each took place in three distinct wars with long downtime between each segment, and they each escalated to really stupid levels of incompetence.

The main difference is that both Arkhosia and Bael Turath were destroyed in the final war, limping on for another few years before each schisms and turned into warring city-states and desperate hamlets, whereas Rome beat Carthage into the ground, salted the earth, and took over as the Greatest Navy Force in the Known World.

Given that Arkhosian art looks really Roman to me...

Anyway, yes. I think that some kind of manifest destiny type deal would do well to justify the sudden industrialism.

Well, there is a pattern there that may be more than a coincidence. :)

@BESW I'll consider it. It would be useful. And it would make sense for the same king who is in love with the fables of war to also be enchanted by the idea of recreating Nerath.

Only, whilst the Manifest Destiny thing is about how humans are destined to spread around the world, I think for him it would definitely be a more multicultural vision, but he is not very sensitive to the way the Elves would like to live.

@JonathanHobbs If you want to draw some Isengard parallels, it's been postulated (and the films definitely went there) that Tolkien's imagery of Isengard is intended to compare industrialization with Hell.

....so maybe the Primordial is mucking about encouraging this line of action.

Also I have told my players that the Points of Light setting is set in a world dominated by uncharted wilderness. This may be headcanon, but I have also told them the wilderness changes, so even if an area was mapped out centuries ago, it may have changed significantly since. This is definitely headcanon though: every area which is not lived in by many people is in a quantum superposition.

@JonathanHobbs I firmly approve of this.

Effectively: an expanse of wilderness could be anything, until someone wanders there and observes it.

And when they leave, it will shortly thereafter return to its superpositioned state. Another traveller could find it a week later and it would be only somewhat similar to the previous traveller's observations.

@JonathanHobbs I would want to keep it fairly consistent over a slightly longer period, just so the party doesn't feel like they're in a randomly generated world, but certainly one generation's map would be nearly useless to the next generation.

@BESW I suppose! I was just thinking it through: if it was too randomly generated, civilians of the world would definitely catch on, after people come from due west variously reporting they have been through a desert, through a forest, or over a narrow sea. The quantum superposition thing would be quite well known.

It's good to reward players for paying attention to the world they're in, and too much random change makes it pointless.

@BESW That is true. I will keep it stable enough, but wilderness with no observers will be nowhere near as stable as the lands occupied by a city full of observers keeping things consistent.

@JonathanHobbs Why are you doing this?

In my place, it would be to emphasize the scary wilderness and make the actual points of light more precious and precarious.

I wouldn't have the environment change for no reason, but I'd have things happen out in the wilderness. A place overrun by kobolds one week might have been overtaken by goblins the next, and then a month later the whole forest is charred to ash because the dragon the kobolds worshipped came back from his hunt and found the goblins feasting on his minions' corpses.

@BESW To ensure the world cannot become a known quantity, that the edges of the map cannot be filled in. To set the tone that the world is an uncertain place beyond the points of light.

The trade ships would have steady routes. Regularly travelled roads would be steady. But the deep wilderness is unknown, and the maps from cities long past are no longer relevant. One cannot obtain, say, a map of the world by simply accumulating maps from places one has been.

Actually, I will drop all that if one of my players is excited enough by the idea of making a map of the world.

It could simply be nobody has tried it before.

@JonathanHobbs You're setting yourself up for an Enchanted Forest, Alice in Wonderland type of deal. I'm resistant to the idea but I'm not sure why yet in a way I can articulate.

I like the goal. I'm just not sure if you might be overdoing it.

It sounds... cataclysmic.

@BESW My descriptions in this chat have been overdoing it, because it is the first time I have gone much beyond "the world is uncharted" and "the wilderness can change, so that maps from centuries past are no longer accurate"

Were it I, I'd be thinking of the massively powerful creatures and groups that might move through the world, and use them to achieve a similar effect, along with a more subtle long-term shifting of the world.

Fair enough. I like the concept.

and that I knew I wanted it to be because the wilderness would be an unsteady place if left... wild.

I really like it, and will probably steal it if I get to run another 4e campaign.

I'd want my land to also have a sense of history.

That although it's been at least a hundred years since anything bigger than a city-state has stood, if you dig you'll find the remains of ancient temples, forgotten nations, and unsung battles in nearly any plot of land.

For me it's like this: You could wander into a forest deep in the wilderness, and find the overrun ruins of an ancient city from centuries ago. You may find maps there, but the coastline will now be different, and some natural landmarks will not be quite the same as they were when the map was made. Our world in real life naturally experiences changes like this, of course, but in the wilderness it is far more rapid and unpredictable. Coast lines don't change much in one millennium in our world.

@JonathanHobbs Almost like time is speeded up, in terms of ecologic and geologic progressions?

@BESW Yes, actually, but with additional things that time itself cannot produce: a new mountain, for instance, in someplace inconsequential (it could not appear beneath the city itself: the city still has too much... inertia)

@JonathanHobbs You're moving away from a standard PoL setting, but in a direction very much parallel to its underlying themes.

@BESW Oh, I know. :)

I'm trying to consider what this is going to mean for your players and their choices.

Flavor-wise it's great.

But let's see.

A mountain would be drastic, though. I am definitely talking more in terms of simply having time speed up. I doubt mountain ranges would appear in anything but wilderness unexplored for thousands of years, by which point there is nothing surprising about finding a mountain there.

It's going to discourage exploration because there won't be lasting reward for geographic knowledge.

It makes Finding Old Maps less exciting, but could present unique opportunities for you to tell stories with them.

If geographic knowledge remains steady for at least a couple of decades, then it should not be too bad.

Actually I'm going to strip this back to its bare bones here:

@JonathanHobbs True, that's definitely workable and might even be to your advantage in encouraging exploration: even if someone else has been there fifty years ago, their maps don't work now.

The main reason I came up with this was to express to my players the world is not a known quantity. The wilderness is dangerous and mysterious. There are no thorough and reliable maps - such a thing would only make the world a known quantity and much less mysterious, which I think works against the themes of the PoL setting.

It will be enough for me if there are simply not expansive maps, perhaps simply because it is so dangerous people do not attempt to make those beyond their locale (like the Nerathian empire had a map of the regions around that, but not further)

I want that lack of the world being known because it leaves the world wild, mysterious, and threatening - the fear of the unknown. There can be anything out there. It was like that before our world had everything mapped out - the Greeks thought the gods lived on Mount Olympus, and Norse mythology believed that way over there may be the border to another plane in their cosmos, before people found out that was just some other place and the top of Mount Olympus just had snow. I want that.

bbl, on Skype with a client

@BESW Righto. :) I'm going to the bank soon!

I love this job. I really do.

Haroom.

@JonathanHobbs That's beautiful, but I think PoL can do one better, especially as you're running it: the world was once known, and safe, and that has been lost. The points of light in the ancient world were expanding, and in the 4e setting they're contracting.

@BESW Alright, I like that way of approaching it. The old world and its remnants are still there, but has been reclaimed by the wilderness. The Bastion is not in the old world of the Empire, and is in someplace there is not so much knowledge about.

@JonathanHobbs The old Empires are overrun, reclaimed by the wild.

@BESW What happened to Nerath? Did it just collapse into ruin?

(the bits that were not already exploded)

@JonathanHobbs Nerath... didn't explode. One of the Bael Turath cities did back in the day.

For Nerath, the demon god Yeenoghu anointed a gnoll to act as his avatar, leading an army of gnolls against the holdings of Nerath.

Nerath fought valiently, but against a rampaging army consisting of all the gnolls of the world, led by a demon-blessed warlord, Nerath slowly gave way and was overrun.

It was literally the savage wild retaking the land that civilization had thought to claim.

@BESW Wow. So it wasn't that the heart of Nerath was destroyed, but the empire was just made to collapse?

@JonathanHobbs The details are sketchy, but it sounds like the gnolls hounded the edges of Nerath, pushing ever inwards over several decades, until they were at the gates of its central cities.

At which point the cities no longer had the military, economic, or agricultural support that let them thrive and grow. They were full of refugees, had no allies and were running out of food. The gnolls made short work of them.

@BESW In that situation the gnolls wouldn't even need to do anything... the city itself would die.

Anything the gnolls did would simply be a coup de grace.

@JonathanHobbs Yup. But gnolls probably aren't patient enough to wait.

A lot of this is my guessing based on what little I've found in the source material and extrapolation from real-world parallels.

At any rate, gnolls aren't city-builders, and once they'd destroyed Nerath and pillaged its ashes they broke apart into squabbling tribes again and scattered, leaving the ruins of the empire to be picked over by the other savage races as the wild reclaimed it.

Alright. Well, at least I know all I need to know: the empire was steadily overrun by Gnolls, and it was brought to the point where collapse was inevitable, whether or not anything actually happened to its city. Nerath itself will be in ruins, and Gnolls will no doubt be the most detested creature in the Bastion.

I theorize that the god of civilization, Erathis, provides each race with a chance at civilization every now and then. Some don't take the chance, some do. Some squander it, some do great things.

Erathis has no interest in if a state is enlightened or tyrannical, simply that each race has the opportunity to build nations.

That makes sense.

I wonder how Erathis feels about the Gnolls. Does she continue to offer civilisation to the destroyers of civilisation?

(Probably!)

If you can't beat them, have them join you!

In my headcanon, the fearful leaders of a few human city-states prayed to Erathis for a boon to protect them from the savage races at their borders, and Erathis said "Hmm. You know, I owe Asmodeus a favor..." and hooked them up with the Ruler of Hell. That's how tieflings came about, and it was the start of Bael Turath.

@JonathanHobbs So yeah, I'm sure Erathis was a little disappointed that the gnolls didn't build a new nation on the ashes of Nerath.

"You're sure? Nice model here to build on? No? Can I tempt you with some lovely trading routes?"

I imagine Erathis thinks gnolls would make a great civilization. It'd be calming for them.

It would! Two birds with one stone.

I love the idea of Erathis.

There's this god who looks at whatever's going on and she thinks, "You know what this needs? Teamwork. Some roads, a little bureaucracy, that'll fix things right up."

To my mind the active intervention of Erathis (and her collaboration with other gods when her efforts fit with their portfolios) is the only reason civilization ever gets much of a chance at all in PoL.

That is probably true! Either that, or other gods' collaboration with Erathis.

Or other gods like Kord thinking: "Right. I need some manpower on the ground here!" - then Erathis leans over their shoulder and says "... what about a viking village that praises feats of strength above all else?"

@JonathanHobbs Hee.

My players are convinced that Kord is the God of Things That Are Awesome, and when his most accomplished followers finally pass into the next life (probably due to an act which started with the phrase "Hold my tankard and watch this") he greets them with a chestbump.

@BESW HAHAHA. Oh man that was funny. ;o

They once dedicated a demon pit to him.

All of these guys (NSFW) are probably going to Kord's special place for awesome people.

heheh.

(and just FYI, almost all of Oglaf is NSFW)

Just to make sure.

@JonathanHobbs I was going to congratulate you on finding one of the few Oglaf comics that's not totally inappropriate.

guys, that isn't even mildly safe.

I mean relative to most of it? Yes. But... no.

Fair enough.

Ah, sorry. I didn't know if it counted or not - I guess I should've played it safe.

It's Olgaf. It's hideously offensive by design.

Anyway. I really like most of the 4e gods.

The previous gods got weird, largely due to having too much confusing history they tried to cram into a few gods and then spreading portfolios too thin in other places.

Wee Jas was a mess.

@BESW yes

@BESW I like my means for generating gods more :)

By the time she was done, her portfolios were death, magic, vanity, and law.

yes. just... um

@BrianBallsun-Stanton What would that be?

docs.google.com/document/d/…

check out the theology part of the doc

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I did some research once and pulled out some really cool bits of her very complicated publication history and made it work, but mostly because I put her as the major god of a city where the other gods weren't interested.

my larp character worshipped her

but it was odd

the gods are archetypal, implemented as aspects of concepts, and each civ takes a different subset

Nice.

I like that 4e gods are one of the only unifying aspects of the different races and civilizations, but I definitely have each one play favorites.

yeah. makes for lovely holy wars

@BESW yeah, I've never liked the monothestic polythesism of D&D

"Wow, there are lots of gods, let's exclusively worshop... this one."

(Arkhosians believe there are only two gods, Bahamut and Tiamat, and all other gods are merely aspects of one or the other.)

they're like hats.

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I never actually found that to be a canon part of any of the D&D lore.

Definitely a common interpretation.

@BESW The whole "cleric" thing

but ... yeah

It's strongly implied by the mechanics

I always played it more like the Greek or Roman pantheon where you pray to the god of the roads when you travel, the god of commerce when you go to market, and so forth.

Yep, but it's amazing how... that gets lost in interpretation

Clerics and paladins in my worlds obey and revere one god above the others because it is the source of their power and in alignment with their goals, but they don't ignore the other gods.

You have priests of Apollo who dedicate their lives to him, but they'd darn well better be nice to Hera too.

@BESW Praying to the god of the roads when you travel in fact has some nice grounding in the 4e books. Avandra has almost no temples, but she has plenty of roadside shrines: if she was a god people stuck with monotheistically, that would not be the case. Sehanine is prayed to by lovers wishing to remain discreet, etc.

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I think it's got to do with most D&D players (and developers) being raised in cultures where the idea of "my god" and "your god" is made out to be an issue of right or wrong.

yes

@JonathanHobbs I always have the roadside shrines of travel gods be little stone one-room houses where you can spend the night if you're in need.

With an assumed protocol that if you're at all able you replenish any supplies you took, or if you're well-off you leave supplies.

(It's based on a real-life tradition that I can't recall where I heard of.)

@BESW That's useful. The Japanese byways have plenty of shrines, but those are just small stone sculptures, whilst the temples (or hotels) serve for accommodation.

@JonathanHobbs The gods may not always be practical, but people usually are.

And in a wilderness like PoL, the shrine to a god of travel is increasingly likely to provide protection from the elements and the wolves.

@CherryQu Hi!!

That sorta makes sense. Only sorta, because that shrine on a roadside could very easily be a place that goblins know will contain a fresh meal every few nights, or could have become a spider's nest.

@JonathanHobbs ADVENTURE

@JonathanHobbs `Which is why it only matters if the god is active.

But... eeh

Heck, cleaning out some shrines and the area around them, perhaps re-enspelling them to keep out vermin, could be a great low-level quest idea.

@BESW I guess so! And @Brian I guess you could have Avandra guarding her shrines, though they couldn't be perfect. I suppose anyone travelling in the first place either has decent protection or an astounding amount of optimism.

Good way to get the party familiar with the local area, invested in keeping it safe, and given them a sense of civic pride.

@JonathanHobbs probably.

oooh, a visitor from TeX

@BESW Oh yeah. Magical warding. I forgot about that.

be especially welcome

@JonathanHobbs Again look at IRL: pilgrims, who might travel hundreds of miles on foot through unknown countryside.

@BESW I am actually going to start out the party in flushing some unsavoury element out from the sewers, which in turn link to catacombs. One of my players mentioned a cult in the sewers so I'm running with it (but I think I'd like to have some opponent other than a cult).

@JonathanHobbs Nothing too high-level, but if your local shaman can't keep the biggest rats out of the grain, what's he good for?

Also I must away for a little while. Back soon.

@BrianBallsun-Stanton Too late!

What's TeX?

@BESW An incredibly powerful typesetting language/program

Wrote my doctoral thesis in ConTeXt

I still bear the scars.

Ah, cool.

@BrianBallsun-Stanton Also, cute.

made some hard things easy and easy things... um... hard

Mmm. I'm having a hard enough time getting InDesign to play nice with our local glottal stop.

[stabs MS Word in the face with a semicolon]

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I'm wading through your Optimization paper (slowly, it's been a while since I've immersed myself in this language style) and I'm starting to understand your approach to my group's PCs better.

@Flamma Hi!

@JonathanHobbs You can always have the "cult" be about as dangerous as modern "wicca" one.

@MartinSojka I love doing that.

I recently had the party uncover a fire cult that was really just a fancy blacksmiths' union.

I take as my model both the many minor cults of Roman civilization, and the proliferation of weird occult dabbling in the mid 1800s to early 1900s.

(Most of the Wicca I know would rather not be called a cult, though.)

@Flamma Yes I did mean Lost rather than Dreaming. Thanks for the catch.

Now that I think about it, the above is another way I try to embed the idea of pantheistic worship in my worlds. "Sure, I drink goat blood in the name of the Nameless God on Saturday evenings, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't take part in the Liturgies of Letherna and the Carnival of Flowers too."

When I build worlds, I develop a rough calendar of holidays and holy days, usually based on the major gods that most people would revere. In 4e it's especially easy because four of the most 'popular' gods explicitly each have a season in their portfolio.

Part of my design for cities and cultures, then is adding or subtracting holy days based on that group's priorities and prejudices. I use these events to further plots, add excitement and interest when things are flagging, and to give a better sense of place and ideology.

Also, I often give holy days small mechanical effects, like it being easier to pass to the Shadowfell during the week of rituals that ensure the safe passage of souls to the afterlife for the coming year.

@BESW cool

@BrianBallsun-Stanton I did a massive copypasta of my calendar to Hobbs a while back, as inspiration for his holidays.

@jonathan sry, mistranslation. "pestering". I keep asking her things and when she gives me answers I ask back until she wants to kill me. But she continues replying and I feel compelled to explain

@SimonGill You're welcome. It made much more sense that way :)

Is there any standardized ruling on this?

Because all I've ever seen is vitriolic forum debate.

Don't know if it's at all supported - but I'd suggest you could cast through either implement as the main implement and the off-hand would be the one you weren't using. More a flexibilty benefit than a straight up damaga benefit.

I'm quite sure that with weapons you're supposed to explicitly designate on your sheet which is off-hand.

@BESW Dunno then. If you can't produce a rule that says either way, it is probably something that needs rules team attention.

I know I've seen builds that assume you can switch which implement's feature your spell gets each time you cast.

It makes sense.

I dunno. Let me check some precedent.

I can't think of any actions that you have to take to swap things between your hands anyway. Not like the 3.x debate where this gets silly.

<insert obligatory "everything in 3.x is silly" jab here>

@BESW I would have said, everything in 3.x eventually gets a reduction ad absurdum argument... plenty of it does make enough sense to use.

Damnit, Wizards, you're in the crack again.

@BESW You've found official precedent for mutually exclusive rulings, haven't you?

Not... yet....

Just the world's least helpful FAQ for the book the feat was originally published in.

Here's the thing: if you can choose which implement is off-hand at your own whim, why do you have to specify which weapon is off-hand for your ranger?

@BESW I suspect because you have different limitations of weapon between on- and off-hand. Another possibility is that it's a simulationist hold over (of course we have to represent people having an off-hand)

"Simulation? In my Fourth Edition? Don't be ridiculous."

You could very well be right.

Most of what I'm getting here is people trying to cheese staves with DIS.

@BESW That was always going to happen though... what's the worst cheese you've seen so far?

@SimonGill Well, staff DIS cheese is two different kinds of rule wibbliness put together.

I dunno, my players do weird things. The warlord/shaman who never attacked himself, but managed to get an extra turn or two worth of attacks into every round by granting them to others. He was pretty astonishing.

But probably the worst cheese so far was the ranger/rogue who knocked prone, slowed, immobilized, and denied teleportation. At-will. Either with two attacks a round to be sure he hit, or in a ranged burst 1 for maximum coverage.

Granted, he didn't do any damage. But he hardly needed to, as even invisible creatures were pretty easy to find and hit when they're magically hogtied in place, prone and utterly unable to move.

The rest of the party just kicked them in the kidneys until they gave up.

@BESW That's definitely quite cheesy.

I've also seen some brutal attack-penalty cheese at very low levels.

"Now, this guy here, he's getting a -4 to his attacks if I miss, and a -8 if I hit."

@BESW I mean, "I'm turning this guy into a mobile wall."

@SimonGill I'm very lucky the party hasn't yet combined penalties to hit and penalties to defense.

"Let's see, who shall we turn into a wibbly pile of impotent rage this fight?"

@BESW Heh... they should be police officers with tactics like that.

If they actually visited CharOp forums, I'd be toast.

French, or melba? :P

I did really tick off and amuse the party once when all the impotent-to-attack NPCs ganged up to Aid Another on one guy.

"By our powers combined, we can... achieve parity!"

@BESW Sounds just like the wonder twins actually

"Form of --reasonable attack bonus!"