CATACLYSMIC ECTOPLASMIC PSYCHEDELIC BARBARIC 4E D&D By Ron Edwards It's a unique non-canonical setting built from selected components of rulebook material. I started with races and classes I found most fun to look at – briefly, most of the primals and the psionics. From there I brainstormed a sylvan paradise disrupted by aberrant metaphysical chaos, where cataclysm is the new normal. THE SETTING It's a physically and metaphysically shattered world: not really holding together, and not really meaning anything. Imagine wilderness, ruins, voids, wastelands, ancient battlefields, crystals, vortices, with some surviving strongholds and holdouts. Forget all canonical D&D imagery. I'm talking about serious Ditko-level surrealism, Moebis-art landscapes and mind-shattering voids with barely cohering floating fragments of worlds, phase-isolated echoes of the past or future, and the occasional inability to tell whether you're in some kind of reality or trapped in someone's mind. The vortices provide the "dungeon" in the game title, freaky three-D spherical manifestations – they grow, therefore getting more and more levels/interiors, which is awesome. Tripping yet? Good. This is raw psycho-savage fantasy at the edge of hallucination. Damage will be described in detail. I expect characters to get naked. RACES These are the only player-character races in the setting: Githzerai, Shifter, Minotaur, Shardmind, Wilden We're working only from the abstracted descriptions in the 4E books, so we're using absolutely no content from the canonical settings or any other publications featuring these races. Briefly and generally: githzerai are self-controlled and ruthlessly practical, forged in generations of resistance and suffering; shifters are serene and entirely at home in nature, considering killing fury to be as normal as any other emotion; minotaurs are complex and introspective, struggling to reconcile ritualized logic with unpredictable urges; shardminds are rampant explosions of passion and intellect, to whom thought is matter; and wilden are vibrant and deeply idealistic, but nigh-drunk with newfound agency. Furthermore, these are the only such races in the setting, so all other canonical races simply do not exist. Humans never existed, so they do not provide a racial gold standard. Therefore, for instance, minotaurs do not self-identify as animals in comparison and they struggle against their labyrinthine origins not their bestial "lower" selves, shifters are not a lycanthrope-tainted human offshoot but simply and only their own (two) species, et cetera. Shifters are the remains of the sylvan peoples, wilden and shardminds arose de novo from the cataclysm, Githzerai were the servitor race who rebelled against the new aberrant masters, and minotaurs emerge from the labyrinthine vortices, possibly a distortion of prior sylvan forms. The minotaur affinity for labyrinths is no coincidence; they are native to the vortices, and new ones always already have minotaurs in them conducting bizarre rites. Githzerai and Shifters are the closest equivalent for players who want to play human-like, but they are not human and the differences matter – the text in the Player's Handbook is a big deal. CLASSES Class limitations: Ardent (leader), Battlemind (defender), Monk (striker), Psion (controller) You may play one of those as is or hybridize it with: Ranger (striker), Barbarian (striker), Seeker (controller), Shaman (leader), Warden (defender) But you can't play any straight from the latter list, you can't hybridize classes on the same lists, and there's no multiclassing. It is perfectly OK to hybridize within a role as well as across roles. The concept with races applies here too: it's not just that you can't play clerics, there are no clerics. These are the only classes in the setting. The implication is that non-psionic is a non-starter for significant character purposes. No magic at all - just forces of nature and disciplined minds. Primal & psionic, that's it. The limitations apply to everything, including monsters and especially items. The gods: there are no gods. Even the primal powers are only manifested through the agency of characters like the player-characters and relevant NPCs. Other implications arise from these ideas. For example, if a minotaur, wilden, or shardmind chooses a class or classes with very social features, then the character is probably assimilated into a githzerai or shifter community. So for instance, a minotaur battlemind-barbarian would make more sense to take Silenced Beast as a background, whereas a straight-up battlemind might well have escaped from a vortex and thus have Clan Exile instead. Similarly, it seems perfectly reasonable that a shardmind or wilden might form/grow right in a githzerai monastery. Alignment is merely a character's opinion, with no larger-scale metaphysical importance. It cannot be recognized, is not associated with a language, and has no rules-mechanics impact at all. A player-character is defined as committed to survival and to resistance against chaos in some way. In that context, even Chaotic Evil may have its place as a viable personal world-view. That said, Unaligned is perhaps best understood as nihilistic, arguably the least admirable point of view in this setting – at least everyone else wants to make something of the shattered world. ADVENTURES, STRATEGY, AND GOALS Everything's a dungeon, really, in the sense of a bunch of scattered dangerous set-pieces and a few relatively safe havens in which to recuperate and re-distribute resources. It's not about being in fights so you can proceed through the adventure, it's about being in adventures so you can get into fights. The essence of D&D 4E is managing several resources through separate encounters and the passing of days. Here are the units of events and in-game time. Encounters Rests o Short rests: about an hour of relative inactivity. o Extended rests: at least six hours of actual sleep and no less than twelve hours afterwards before doing anything interesting. Days Although taking an extended rest obviously means the passage of a day, the converse is not true, e.g. if you travel all night or are chained to a wall or something like that. Here are the variables you have to watch. Powers usage. All powers are rated by their usage relative to the fictional time-units. o At-Will o Encounter o Daily Hit points, obviously. You have a value called the Healing Surge, which is how many points you get back if a healer-type character zaps you, and you also have a set number of Healing Surges. o Once per encounter, you can spend a Healing Surge yourself as an action. o During a short rest, you can spend as many Surges as you want. o With an extended rest, you get all your hit points back and all your Surges. Action Points. You have very few, usually just one. o During an encounter, you can spend an Action Point for a free action. o With an extended rest, you lose your current Action Points but begin the next unit of play with one. o If you choose not to take an extended rest after an encounter but rather press on to another, then you add one Action Point to your current total. (This is called a Milestone.) Power Points. You have very few, usually two. o During an encounter, you can spend one or more Power Points to augment a psionic ability. o With a short or extended rest, Power Points are fully refreshed. You are basically deciding at the end of each encounter whether you want to take a rest, and which kind. The less resting, the more your hit points and Power Points are depleted, but the more Action Points you might have depending on whether you've been using them. The more resting, the more Hit Points and Power Points you have, but you'll go into each encounter with only one Action Point. Clearly the game relies on the players exercising a lot of agency over these choices, so the DM cannot have any role in whether characters can or should press on, or over how many encounters they'll have relative to resting and days. The players have to decide whether their characters' current status justifies pressing on. I'm opening up these choices as wide as they can go. My prep sets up more than one conflict going on simultaneously, some of which are simple and others involving many different NPCs with varying priorities. It's up to you which battle to fight in and how to enter it, what items to get or issues to investigate, which NPCs to support or oppose, what particular goal might be sought through a given fight (not the same as what the NPCs might want), and to what degree the player-characters ally or separate based on the conflicts of the moment. However, choosing not to address one or another of these, i.e., not to press on, will sometimes have significant effects in the fictional situation, so the precise quality of a given immediate situation (not just its quantitative rewards and risks) becomes a consideration too. I'm not adjusting the risks to carpenter's-level evenness just prior to fights. Instead, I have built a constellation of encounters and quests for somewhat over one level-up worth of encounters. Therefore which of these actually get addressed is mainly up to your decisions. Maybe in one case or another the player-characters will be over-matched, either because they make unfortunate decisions about getting into that fight, because of bad luck in the middle of it, or because the foes are simply that much better. So you can work to assess potential encounters too, to consider whether you want to take a given one on, this time, or whether you'll do better to garner equipment and items through lesser encounters first.