Thinking of running a Kelewan based Campaign.

[Pheonix-IV]

I'll be finishing up first semester of Uni soon which will leave me with a whole bunch of spare time during mid-term break, since atm i'm not really involved in any frequent DnD games and i feel like DMing i've been considering giving it another shot.

Looking around for inspiration i spied The Empire Triology (by Raymond E. Feist and Janny Wurts) sitting in my bookshelf and thought that Kelewan would be a pretty damn awesome world to set a DnD campaign in; it has some serious untapped story potential and saves me the trouble of having to write an entire world from scratch while still having large swathes of unwritten history to set stories in.
Ovbiously i'd have to make some new races (probably 4, since that's how many live on Kelewan), but that's not hard, and the classes and items can be fairly easily refluffed to fit the Tsurani setting.


So i'm probing for intrest; if i get 3 or more people intrested then i'd be looking to start in about 3 - 4 weeks, depending on exactly how it all pans out.


I'm in Melbourne; Australia, which is a GMT +10 Timezone; this probably means evening games for those if you in America. Sat or Sun my time (Fri or Sat respectively for Americans) would work best, but i can also do Friday if we go a bit earlier (Thurs for Americans. I live in the future), although my schedule will probably become significantly more flexible by the actual start time for the campaign.

In case anyone is wondering i'm a pretty open DM and have loosened up significantly lately, especially in my attitudes towards 4th. I've sunk a fair bit of time into understanding the core systems behind 4th edition and i'm quite comfortable with home-brewing anything from races to items, and i'm also quite ameniable to doing so. I also intend to tweak the combat a bit to make things a wee bit faster by altering monster stats and potentially introducing a recharge system to avoid that annoying unexpected Extended Rest.

We'll see. First step is to see if there are any interested parties.

[Syric]

My 2nd favorite series behind A Song of Ice and Fire!

Definitely interested to hear how it progresses. What timeline of the books are you considering?

[Pheonix-IV]

Still undecided; probably setting it after Mara's rise to Servant of the Empire status but before Wrath of the Mad God (since Kelewan kind of asplodes after that) would be best from an ease of use perspective, as that opens up Cho'ja Arcane\Divine classes to the PC's.

On the other hand, there's probably more story potential in setting it way before the Empire Triology and playing out a major conflict between houses, although this would mean that Cho'ja PC's would be restricted to no magic.


Potentially going back even further and setting it during the time of the Chaos Wars and the migration when the Tsurani originally came to Kelewan could be the overall best; it would require the most work, but it would not only have the most PC options, but i could also have fun with all the various native species of Kelewan that the Tsurani wiped out.


Not sure yet; that's one of the things i'll have to decide if this looks like it'll pick up off the ground.


Although setting it after the Darkwar could work too; the Tsurani struggle to make their new homes on whatever world it was they ended up, although this would mean no Cho'ja, so i'd probably have to distinguish stat boosts by background rather than races.


Actually that could be fun.

[Syric]

Personally I would be more inclined towards the latter options... the political arena is what fascinates me about the Tsurani. Attempting to play a Cho'ja with the hive mind would be pretty difficult imo.

Look forward to seeing what you come up with.

[Suta]

I would like to be a part of this, however I have never read any of the kelewan books, so that could maybe be a problem. But I could think of an excuse as to why my character knows nothing about the world.

[Pheonix-IV]

Probably wouldn't be much of a problem; the outsider character is fairly standard, and there are plenty of legit reasons why your character wouldn't know all the intricacies of Tsurani politics.

Upon further consideration, it would probably work best to restrict PC races to Tsurani and Thuril, the Cho'ja are probably a touch too alien to really work for PC's, and their whole hive mind culture probably wouldn't fit. The Thūn are kind of cool, but there's bugger all information about them and theres no real justification for Thūn in the Empire, while the Thuril do at least trade a little.

With the limited races, 'racial' stats would probably be best decided by background rather than actual race, giving players a sort of 'pick and choose' bonus system, which could be interesting.

I shall need to put more thought into this on wednesday.


Best time period would definitely be some time before the Empire Trilogy. That gives me the widest range of story options with the minimum amount of work; as much as i like writing stuff, i don't really have the time to do an entire novel all by my little lonesome :P