The War of Many Facets
Being an Adventure on the Inner Planes in which
the Heroes must face Terrible Elements for the sake
of the City of Glass, their own Lives, and all of the Plane of Water.
By: Center of All
Assistance provided by: NeoTiamat
Dear Sir or Ma'am,
I thank you most Humbly for agreeing to deliver my Package
to my Buyer in the City of Glass. I am pleased that I can Entrust such a
valuable Item to your hands. I wish you the gods' Speed and
safe Passage while you deliver my Goods.
I apologize for not being able to accompany you Immediately
to the City of Glass. However, trade Matters require my Attentions
elsewhere. Please meet me in two Days' time at the
Dancing Mermaid Inn on Pearl Street and I shall Furnish
a Reward for your Troubles.
Yours most Sincerely,
Thalivan, Mercane Trader
Greetings, one and all. I am Center of All, aurumach rilmani and sometime Storyteller. Some of you may recognize my name from a few assorted articles on the board, others may have seen my thread about my upcoming Planescape webcomic. It is a pleasure to meet you and I do hope you will find what you see here to your liking.
Thanks to a post on another of the boards, I developed an urge to create a full-length Adventure of my own that involves the Inner Planes. After a few hours' scheming and plotting, I established an outline that is rapidly growing into a full-fledged adventure: The War of Many Facets.
This will be a 4th Edition Planescape game, using the traditional Great Wheel cosmology we have all come to love in Planescape. It will take place before the Faction War, and will occur exclusively on the Inner Planes. Characters will begin play in the City of Glass, and the adventure will escalate from there. This adventure will eventually be compiled into a module that I will publish here on Planewalker for anyone to use.
In order to accommodate Planescape, I will be making a few house rules to both flavor and mechanics. See below for more information.
I will post character creation information in a couple of weeks. This initial post is to gather interest, encourage creativity, and develop character ideas. I am a firm believer in concept before mechanics, hence why I prefer to have character ideas made before the character sheets are drawn up.
I do not have an upper ceiling on how many characters I will accept at the moment, but expect the limit to be around six (6). All are welcome to apply, and if I receive more than six (6) people that wish to play, I will select the six (6) for the game.
Players should be able to post roughly once every two to three days, but every day is preferred most of the time. There will be moments where the game will slow either by necessity or happenstance (I'm a graduate student and that entails a large amount of work at times), but a daily or semi-daily post-rate is expected. The game will hopefully last for the long haul, but a good portion of that depends on you, the players.
You and the other PCs have been hired by a mercane named Thalivan to deliver a package to an associate of his in the City of Glass. Thalivan pays you half of the amount up front and tells you to meet him at the Dancing Mermaid in the City of Glass after you deliver the package to collect the other half. Characters should be good-inclined and definitively nonevil. This does not require a good alignment, but neutral characters should have good tendencies. Since this game will take place entirely on the Inner Planes, I do not expect planes to come into conflict with alignments, so I'm not going to force people to declare their alignments. If you do wish to declare an alignment, please use the old alignment system (LG, NG, CG, etc.).
Players are welcome to conspire on character backgrounds and have their characters know each other prior to the adventure's start. Faction membership is neither discouraged nor encouraged. That is, you may join a Faction if you wish, or you may not. I am not going to enforce it either way. If you do join a Faction, please bear in mind alignment restrictions on this game and remember this takes place pre-Faction War. Also, this game's story does not accommodate all Factions equally. Characters should not be from the following Factions because of conflicts the Faction philosophy will have with the overall adventure: Bleak Cabal, Doomguard, Revolutionary League, and Xaositects. I am hesitant to allow Athar characters unless we do not have Clerics or Paladins in the party.
And now, a few House Rules of note. More will come up after I reveal the character creation information.
- The 4e version of Eladrin are to be retconned as aasimar for the purposes of this game. Aasimar that use the 4e eladrin mechanics are aasimar that are descended from elves, the actual Planescape eladrin, or both.
- The new Mercykillers article has stats for a more generic Aasimar that can be extrapolated. This will be acceptable to use.
- Genasi tentatively will have one and only one manifestation, period. This means the "Extra Manifestation" feat will be unavailable. This is tentative and based in the desire for the more "traditional" genasi rather than those newfangled things 4e released (so I'm a bit nostalgic, sue me
). I realize this closes off one or two paragon paths but if you're dead set on those paths, we'll work something out. - Given the nature of Planescape and the vast variety of races on the planes, any of the races from the back of the 4e Monster Manual are tentatively acceptable for play pending my approval. I need to go over them again and review to see what I will allow.
- Combat will be run rather differently. This is important, so please read. When combat occurs, initiative will not be rolled. Rather, combat will be divided into a PCs' turn and an NPCs/Enemy's turn. After combat begins, there will be a 24-hour window where the PCs may post their actions. Players may go in any order and the order can change from round to round. The only important part is that you post sometime during your 24-hour window. After the window is closed, I will post the NPCs' and Enemies' actions and the next round will start. PCs that fail to post in the 24-hour window will lose their turn -- an event that may have serious consequences for other characters.
- Players that will not be able to post for a time due to extenuating circumstances (busy life, homework, family issues, illness, etc.) will get absentee immunity if you let me know that you will be gone. This means that your characters are effectively invulnerable. They will neither act nor be acted upon if combat or other hostile situations occur. They will be assumed to follow along with the group, though, so if something happens that affects the whole party, the absentee immunity does not protect them here. Again, this immunity only applies if you inform me that you will be gone. If I don't hear from you and you simply stop posting, I won't go out to get your character, but I cannot guarantee your character's safety.
Ooo, I told myself I had taken on more than my share of PBP D&D gaming, but I don't think I can't resist a 4E game set in oldschool Planescape cosmos. Of course, that may have something to do with my own puzzling with 4E for that very purposes.
Let me think about a concept and get back to you.