Setting Design for 4E – Teerna (Part 2 – Races & Classes )

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Welcome to the second installment of my series on a method for taking the core 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons material and paring it down to create a more coherent and tightly focused setting for a campaign.  For this part of the series, I’m looking at what to do about all those pesky races and classes WotC is releasing for 4E.  You can read Part 1 here.

Translating the Theme into Rules

Once you’ve settled on a theme, it’s time to translate that into the decisions about the rules.  The first possibility to look at is the races and classes you are going to make available for the players to choose from.  That’s right, I’m suggesting that you take the core races and classes, and if possible, eliminate those that don’t fit your theme.

Sometimes this will call for some pretty drastic decisions like eliminating an entire power source, which incidentally is one of the easiest ways to create a unique setting.  With the exception of the Martial power source, any of the existing power sources are free game. By eliminating those sources, you eliminate whole groups of playable classes.

• Want a pure fighting, more “realistic” campaign or one in which magic is alien and very rare?  Eliminate everything but the Martial classes for players.  Wham! Instant Conan (NPCs of course might have access to arcane classes to put the “sorcery” back into the Swords & Sorcery genre).
• Want a grittier world?  Eliminate the divine power source.  Suddenly there are no cleric and no raise dead spells.
• Want a world where the gods are much more powerful and important?  Eliminate the arcane and psychic power sources and the divine and primal power sources suddenly becomes the only “magic” game in town.

Obviously the possibilities of mixing and matching are pretty endless and depending on how you spin the actual changes you also get a lot of variation.  For example, players not having access to arcane power might be because magic is extremely rare or something only used by unspeakably evil creatures, or it may simply not exist at all.  A lack of divine powers may be due to the lack of deities or simply that the fact that the gods have abandoned the world (ala Krynn).

You can also tweak you world to fit the theme is to look at the races that are available as playable races, as well as the types of monsters and savage races that the group will face.  Of all the choices, I find paring down the PC races does the most in defining a world because it allows you to focus on a few meaningful cultures rather than trying to incorporate a dozen or more cultures.  It also helps define your world and its cosmology since emphasizing or eliminating certain races can provide a very different feel. For example, focusing the playable races to only those of Fey origins (perhaps converting a few others to also be Fey) makes for a very different setting than something where the Fey mix with those coming from the astral and elemental domains.  It also means you can easily focus on how these cultures interact since you’re not trying to explain the peaceful coexistence of a dozen different races.

Similarly, rather than viewing the monster manuals’ contents as a smörgåsbord of adversaries, you might focus on only a couple of types or simply eliminate certain monsters altogether.  That doesn’t mean you can’t use the stats:  It’s fairly easy to reskin existing monsters.  For example, you might decide to focus on undead creatures and eliminate most other monsters and reskin others (e.g., all the orcs) as variant types of the living dead.

The Example – Teerna

Since the emphasis would be on the forces of nature, we decided that the the various peoples would worship the elemental forces rather than a pantheon of deities.  In fact, although a few of the races worship gods, there are no actual deities.  Obviously this has far reaching ramifications for the people of Teerna, but for our immediate purposes it means that there is no Divine power source:  That’s right, no clerics, paladins, invokers, or avengers exist and thus aren’t available as class choices.  Although it’s a moot point right now, we also decided there would be no Psychic power source either.  While this may seem like an odd, restrictive set of choices, what it did was more narrowly focus the group’s members and helped cut down on some of the pure randomness that comes from having so many choices when it comes to classes.

It also instantly created a world that was far more gritty than the default D&D setting – without clerics to cast healing & curative spells, mortality rates go way up (especially amongst the wealthy) and people once again die of things like cholera and the common cold.  This fits very well with the primitive, wild nature of the islands. We also got the added benefit that what religions/churches do exist can be filled with any type of individuals we want; disreputable, scheming priests can now fill even the most “noble” of temples.

Another major decision about the cosmology of the world has shaped the major races that populate the island. Only 3 planes exist:  The Material World, the Feywild, and the Shadowfell. That means no Astral dominions, no Elemental realms, and no parallel or demi-planes.  The reason for this was pretty simple:  We want to focus our game on the material world, while using the Feywild and the Shadowfell as mysterious places, where creatures alien (and often hostile) to Teerna dwell.  For the most part, the Feywild is exactly as it’s described in the Manual of the Planes (no point in reinventing the wheel), while the Shadowfell is more of a cross between the way the MotP describes it and the Abyss – it is the home to many dark and shadowy creatures, including demons which can take a variety of forms.

This decision has a major knock on effect in terms of races since most extra-planar races  are now off the table.  This also had the added benefit of helping us cull the multitude of races that have cropped up as “core” races with the release of PHB2 and the FR & Eberron campaign settings.  One thing we both agreed upon was that anything Fey in origin was going to be off-limits as a player race:  We want our Fey to be utterly alien to the mortal world and thus Eladrin and Gnomes were out.  After another dozen emails back and forth discussing other possibilities, and we had settled on our six playable races:  Humans, dwarves, halflings (known as Hin), elves, dragonborn, and hobgoblins.  That last choice was a bit of a contentious one between us, but my co-GM had a pretty good concept for them that made them very distinct from the rest of the races, fit in well with the setting, and deviated from the default 4E hobgoblin.  You also might notice that there are no half-elves:  We decided that elves and humans weren’t genetically compatible and thus crossed them off the list.

In terms of major NPC races, we have decided to focus on gnolls, kobolds, and lizardmen as the islands more organized hostiles. The eladrin, gnomes, goblins (which are now fey), and fomorians also have a significant impact on the people of Teerna.  Of course there are also a lot of other monsters roaming the wilds.  This includes a couple of dragons, one of whom has her own island and a cult of kobolds which worship her as a god.  Undead also are present, but they’re powerful and terrifying – thus stuff like hordes of zombie mooks aren’t going to make an appearance.

Up Next

In my next installment I’ll talk about how we took the decisions above and used them to populate the map I had made.