Setting notes

[bluegargantua]

Hey,

So last night I had a dream for an interesting RPG setting:

The world was run by magic. It was a literal Utopia. You need food? Go to the magic food vendor. You need a house? Pull out your portable house. Whatever you want, you got. Fun times. It all got run from the central capital. The palace had this huge mandala (a bit like the Pattern in Castle Amber) and the head honcho ran it. Around the world, other places had "substations" essentially that helped direct the main flow of magical energy. Everything was hunky-dory.

Then the central mandala blew up. It might have been deliberate, it might have been a huge accident, no one knows. The problem is that magic went bang and where it wasn't spewing out all over the place turning the land into a twisted nightmare, it went away entirely and whole cities just died on the spot.

So now it's you and a few of your fellow magicians. Your substation still sorta works and you can draw on it for a limited sub-set of magical effects. You probably also have a few magical items that still work. Around you, civilization is a complete wreck. Some places are hunting down mages viciously, in others the mages have set themselves up as kings, in others the mages live on a short leash, it's all a huge mess.

It naturally lends itself to Ars Magica as a ruleset, but I feel there might be better options.

later
Tom

[EDIT -- Also, I really like this idea of Conan's Hyperboria set in the modern world.]

Comments

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away."

Magic is everywhere, fueled by mana, people use it for everything. Turns out mana is a non-renewable resource (kinda like oil?). Societies built on the use of magic crumble, people can't do the simplest things for themselves because they relied on magic to do it for them, etc.

[bluegargantua]

Yeah, I've thought of that. The problem here isn't that magic is gone, it's that the distribution system is completely futzed up.

later
Tom

[mazianni.livejournal.com]

I think either scenario might be fun. In yours there's the possibility of repairing the system. That'd be a decent quest for high level characters.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

You just want to play Thundarr...

[foxtown.livejournal.com]

I was toying around with Ars to do a fantasy world for a while, but was never able to get that level of depth that the traditional game held.

Things like the laws of magic seem likely most fluff at first glance have huge game effects (i.e. all of the corpoem spells are based on the limit of returning to life), and vis vs non-vis spells is huge!

So I agree that Ars might not be the best system, but a cooked version would rock.

[mikecap.livejournal.com]

Hey, if you haven't subscribed to the io9 RSS feeds yet, you may want to check it out. It's got a couple good things to look at each day - for example:

http://io9.com/343640/the-monster-queens-of-england