Best Laid Plans..
So my Dayjob got suddenly busy and I was sent to work on a project at a client site where I had no Internet access. When I got home I had very little interest in looking at my laptop, let alone working on it, so motivation has been low. Oh, and I got promoted. ;)
All that aside, I've made progress. I worked through the 3.5 Monster Manuals 1 and 2 (because they're easier to flip through than the SRD) and selected which monsters are in the world and which aren't and why. This forced me to give some serious thought as to some of the basic assumptions as to how the world was formed and, frankly, to reduce the amount of redundant monsters. I've thrown out the outer planes and virtually all the centauroid creatures.
The outer planes went out as I want a world that is smaller, where you can't go visit the afterlife and talk to folks, something closer to a "real" world. The only extra planar stuff will be the Elemental Planes, Astral, Ethereal, and the two energy planes. Some would argue that that's still quite large, but that's still smaller than the "Big Wheel" design. This will also require some looking at the various spells that access the outer planes to determine which run as written and which need changing.
The centauroids were dropped because, while appearing in real-world mythology, seem more mad science to me and I don't thing they are practical life forms (I know, I know - seems silly in a fantasy world, but there it is). I'm also thinking of dropping things like harpies and such, but still want to think about that. I probably will drop them.
And yes, I'm building with 3.5 in mind. I may use the Pathfinder RPG that Paizo announced this week or not. I'm going to down load the Alpha PDF and take a look through to see what they're doing. Why 3.5 (or a derivative) and not, say, the Hero System? Ease of use and large market share. As a DM, I find many aspects of 3.5 very useful, if needing some tweaks. No matter what else you can say about it, it is a good toolkit for world building. I may switch to Hero System later (it is my preferred system), but that will take much more number crunching than I want to do right now to avoid getting bogged down.
Gotta run now. I'll post more later today.
Later!
All that aside, I've made progress. I worked through the 3.5 Monster Manuals 1 and 2 (because they're easier to flip through than the SRD) and selected which monsters are in the world and which aren't and why. This forced me to give some serious thought as to some of the basic assumptions as to how the world was formed and, frankly, to reduce the amount of redundant monsters. I've thrown out the outer planes and virtually all the centauroid creatures.
The outer planes went out as I want a world that is smaller, where you can't go visit the afterlife and talk to folks, something closer to a "real" world. The only extra planar stuff will be the Elemental Planes, Astral, Ethereal, and the two energy planes. Some would argue that that's still quite large, but that's still smaller than the "Big Wheel" design. This will also require some looking at the various spells that access the outer planes to determine which run as written and which need changing.
The centauroids were dropped because, while appearing in real-world mythology, seem more mad science to me and I don't thing they are practical life forms (I know, I know - seems silly in a fantasy world, but there it is). I'm also thinking of dropping things like harpies and such, but still want to think about that. I probably will drop them.
And yes, I'm building with 3.5 in mind. I may use the Pathfinder RPG that Paizo announced this week or not. I'm going to down load the Alpha PDF and take a look through to see what they're doing. Why 3.5 (or a derivative) and not, say, the Hero System? Ease of use and large market share. As a DM, I find many aspects of 3.5 very useful, if needing some tweaks. No matter what else you can say about it, it is a good toolkit for world building. I may switch to Hero System later (it is my preferred system), but that will take much more number crunching than I want to do right now to avoid getting bogged down.
Gotta run now. I'll post more later today.
Later!