Returning to the Private Sanctuary for another exciting installment of their Create Demiplane series, this week Alex and Anthony discuss all things magic in the demiplane! What does it do? How do people react? Does endure elements invalidate the entire setting? All this and more will be covered in the Private Sanctuary!
Listen Here!
You Decide!
After listening to Episode 269, come back here and vote in the comments section about whether Anthony and Alex should cover the demiplane’s underworld, races on the demiplane, or start designing specific city states. Leave your votes in the comments, and the winning topic will be the subject of the next Create Demiplane!
Create Demiplane Thus Far ….
- A quick summary of our Demiplane after Episode 259.
- “Subartic Plane” – Everything has been frozen over by ice and snow. No sunlight. Think Alaska in the dead of winter, year-round.
- Major Deity — Codename “Flame Deity.” True Neutral. Major Deity. Has the following domains: Community, Healing, Fire, Protection, and SCALYKIN (You Decide winner!).
- Settlements are “fueled” by dragons; their fire keeps the settlements running.
- Primarily Red and Golds. Need mortals to build them shelters because red/gold dragons are vulnerable to cold and would eventually die without a place to retreat to.
- Dragons are seen by mortals as avatars/children of the Major Fire Deity. Governments are theocracies with the settlement’s dragons acting as rulers.
- New settlements are given an egg and a group of clerics to act as the wyrmling’s regents. The clerics have full power over the new settlement until the dragon reaches Adulthood (101 years).
- Dragon flames provide heat and light for living, cooking, and growing food.
- Silver and white dragons are in the setting; don’t know about other colors.
- Dragon Alignment isn’t set in stone; dragons tend towards their bestiary alignments, but their alignment is overall fluid.
- Magma dragons are forces of nature and aren’t commonly used for settlements. One, maybe two known examples. (Thought: Forge city with magma dragon in a massive furnace.)
- Brass dragons are also city dwellers. Together, a brass and a gold dragon might have forced reds into the current symbiotic arrangement.
- Whooly Rhinocerraptors are a major danger. Need to figure out what they eat.
- Less powerful, domestic rhinoceraptors exist. They are primary mounts / modes of travel.
- Cosmic Covenant: Clerics worship gods to get the powers they need to survive, plus have to service dragons.
- Lots of draconic sorcerers and bloodragers.
- Wizardry isn’t necessarily hated, but isn’t well liked. Maybe there’s a city of wizards that is trying to break the status quo?
- Undead have their own cities. Ravener who makes you kill yourself to serve him. Isolationist lich who isn’t having any of your stuff. The cold weather basically insta-mummifies undead for you.
- Ravener Dragon City is bad-ass.
- Mesmerist controlling a young dragon for petty self-indulgence. Occultists often uses draconic implements and are thusly hated. Psychics sort of ignored. Kineticists are either feared (water) or taken by the state (fire).
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Fimbulwinter!
The Sea of Snow
The white desert
A song of ice and freaking more ice
The expanse.
The white wastes
Drakkenhold
Icelandür
Just a few suggestions i came up with for the Demiplane
What if the core of the world is still running? The underdark equivalent could be like a lost world. People don’t go there cause the entrances are hard to find and there is a ice layer preventing conventional mining?
You probably need to establish the non-human races before the city-states. That way you can flesh out any of the states that are run by a non-human (earlier mentioned halfling bad guy).
Loving the podcasts. Had some ideas for plane names.
Frosthüld. (Fraws-thewld)
Icehelm
Frostmourn….wait nvm already in use.
Drift hold. ( I imagine large snow hills similar to the sand dunes of Africa places.)
Love the work you guys do you are a great team keep it up.
I’d love to hear more about the other races on the Demiplane!
Also I think it’d be fun to keep the plane just named demiplane so the name of the segment is totally accurate.
You could limit the spells PCs can choose by where they are. Or what certain gods do and add spells to your spell list based on where your from or restrict what options like arcane discoveries by where they are when they level or make it so all casters from x can make all there attacks deasl half fire or cold. Anyway just ideas. Also endure elements could be a higher level spell. As for names, The Winter Wastes, Arctic Landscapes, the frigid expanse, or frozen steppe.
The lich could be replaced by a ravener. ninja’ed by podcast. HA! HA! Also winterwight =Game of Thrones.
Sorry so many ideas. The ravener could be a dragon who the people didn’t keep him alive so he became an undead and took control.
PS can you edit comments.
The iconic mesmerist is already a halfling, so maybe a gnome they’re also never the bad guys.
Races!
I have a few suggestions.
Magic: Have the dragons encourage a verbal history not writing anything down. Keeping the masses illiterate, thus no Wizards and spontaneous Casters are the norm. Making the reason for the Lich State and it’s Wizards more of a threat and something that encourages the PCs to be from there or search it out.
This type of Segregation would allow the Underground to be a Gunworks/Gearworks manned by Dwarves and Kobolds who might shun magic counting on the fossil fuel to keep them warm.
Scrolls can be done as Pictographs (adding flavor) and maybe it is a crime to read in the Dragon States. This also gives the Dragons another form of Control.
You can also do Archetypes for Hidden Wizard or Hidden Psychic.
Races: Take a look at the Midgard Campaign Setting and how they handle the Dragonkin and the Darakhul races. They might be something to think about. Also if you want a Race that is a Dragon Human crossbred reskin the Nagaji.
Another possibility could be that magic is based on the dragon of the town. It comes from the dragon. Like it’s the towns god which in essence it is. Maybe this would work better for clerical magic. Just a thought since these towns rely on the dragons to live. By the way, keep up the good work!!!
I apologize if this is a long post, i do that sometimes…
i thought of some stuff to handle endure elements in my game when they were in a cold enviroment, i made the blizzard outside the cities inherently magical and malicious, like the earth had been cursed long ago (PLOTS!!!). So to keep casters from blocking the cold, I would make the storm itself try and dispel any active magic going on every hour or so(specifically focusing on anything keeping them from getting harmed by the storm first), and it got stronger the longer they were out there. It would make people mildly suffer for staying out there too long, but would let them for a little bit at minimum.
plan B was doing something like Cumulative upkeep, where you get X tokens an hour(I was thinking a d6), once you have X many(I was thinking double caster lv) your magic protecting you started to collapse or go wonky. (if you couldn’t tell i like numbers…)
I actually remember doing something specific with undead cities once before in that world, it was in an underground cavern and they lived quite peacefully there strangely, it was great for a moral conundrum. which got better when it turned out the necromancer in control of the city was just pulling all these things together so he could control them and invade somewhere else.
something i thought i might add to contribute, especially cause i believe augest is hellgust or something like that… Hell is hot on a lot of floors… you could create a Devil city pretty easily, getting its heat from leaving an open portal to the material plane. i personally would make knowledge that this is a thing quiet, maybe the dragon died and they were desperate now that there heat source suddenly died. or maybe they were all Asmodeans already to begin with. they don’t need a dragon, hellfire works just as good as some scaly lizard breath!
Also i Called my Icy setting Greyrend… I thought it was cool…