Amethyst d20 (D&D 3.5/d20Modern) - A possible inspiration for the Urban PlaneScape Project

OK, now my answer is a cautious "no", because I still like it, but obviously there are some things that are untranslatable. Most importantly, there would need to be planes. Attricana and Ixindar for example, could be the different names for Elysium and Hades, respectively, and the only two realms that's known. Secondly, the tech level is too high in some places, and there's no easy answer for that.

I'm sorry, when I look at a setting, my automatic reaction is to see how it would fit into PS. PS being all about mixing cool settings together and this being a PS forum, it's a little too much to ask for people not to consider it.

But why is it stupid? Other than the fact that Amethyst is someone's work and it would be wrong to use it without their permission, I think it would've been a good idea. We did it to Eberron, and now there are two Eberrons: vanilla Eberron and PS Eberron with the PS cosmology. I don't remember the WotC rushing back to the printers to make sure Eberron was consistant with PS. And Eberron wasn't the first and certainly not the last, just look at Dragonlance! Amethyst wouldn't be so different.

And of course, not me, WotC, UPS, or Chris Dias would have any control over what people decide what to and what not to integrate in their own games.

I certainly don't mean to threaten Amethyst with UPS's needs and desires, and I agree that a merger is a bad idea. But it's possible, and I refuse to rule it out.

That's not entirely unique. Shadowrun has a very similar idea.

Actually, in some ways.. that is sorta a part of shadowrun. Cybernetics influences magical ability. The more cybernetics you have, the less magic you have. As a result, you can either be fairly resistant to magical/physical attack, but have no ability outside of your cybernetics, which need expensive repair and maintainance, or use magic, which is cheaper, but leaves you extraordinarily vulnerable to attack.

Um... sorry for being an imperialist?

Oh, I dont know about that. You would be surprised what you can find tucked away in the corners of an infinite number of realities, each of which is infinatly large.

Juts because magic has differant effects there doesn't mean anything. Look at Athas (Dark Sun setting) The Defiler/Preserver magic system is significantly differant from magic on, say, Oerth. Does that make it incompatible? No. It makes it interesting.

And while I believe that Eberron could have been done better, I like a few of the ideas they had. Yes Ive seen the powers of an Artificer be horribly abused by a player, but I've also seen a Warforged villain make a wonderful opponent. (Never before have I heard such... interesting curses as when the party realized that the Warforge could not only be repaired, buy it kept upgrading itself to counter their most often used spells.)

um see thats the thing in PS there is a very easy way to deal with uppity campaigns that have rules like this. cutters just laugh about silly primes thinking that their belief is gona overpower the rest of the multiverse or that they are even special. see there are plenty of material plane worlds where strange things happen but thing is they only happen on that world and in that crystal sphere (I don't particuraly like the crystal sphere part in genaral but that isn't a discussion for here).

That, or just have the magicians from there use magic that way, and the mages from everywhere else work their way. Just like Torillean mages still use the Weave and Shadoweave on the planes, and Athasian still magicians suck out the life of nearby organisms.

And they're all very confused when they run into each other, and the planars smirks knowingly.

Uh... I may be mistaken, but I could have sworn that the Crystal Spheres and Phlogiston were major parts of the setting. I mean, its like saying that you would rather see PS without portals and divine realms. Can it be done? Probably. But it takes away a lot of the setting with it.

I like the phlogiston as a kind of 'hyperspace', but I've always thought the crystal spheres were silly. I think they were only introduced to explain how Krynn's star systems are so weird.

only problem is that there were still plenty of referances to high technology making it not really fantasy in space and such.

Crystal spheres are the only way to include krynn in anything without some very strange mechanisms in place to change the stars around. course in some of the books (late chronicles) it was hinted to that perhaps krynn was supposed to be in a PS setting.

least we can't headbutt each other in the chest.