ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

So I'm working on a personal tabletop setting and I think that the classes, spells, and races in this are just absolutely amazing. Would it be ok if I used some in my tabletop game or if I created a separate version of my mechanics to mirror these? It's still very in progress but anyone interested can see the current set up here https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZPe ... HNUsQ/edit

anyone interested in supporting us can back our kickstarter here https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/52 ... ilver-isle

I am not the person to come and talk to about mechanics. So I won't say a word about that. But I am someone with an obsessive interest in setting and world-building! So instead I'll talk about that!

Look, I know it's probably too late to change things for this affair - you've already gotten backers and everything - but, from what little information is provided on your pages, your setting bores me to tears. There are already hundreds, if not thousands, of RPG settings that offer a world of "15th-century Europe but with the encrustations of Gygaxian fantasy added on!" Why not differentiate yourself a bit? I mean, it's certainly worthwhile to use well-known historical eras and well-known fantasy tropes, so as to provide an easy gateway into the world for the players. But what about, instead of 15th-century Europe and Gygaxian fantasy, we do the rise of the Arab Caliphate and the Venus of the pulp era? We might get something like this...

"Atop the volcanic plateau of Ishtar, which alone rises high enough above the putrescent swamps for civilization to flourish, the decadent Empires of the Rhemuloi and the Fersen have waged an eternal war. For centuries, their gleaming cataphractoi - mounted on giant Carnotauruses and armed with terrible energy-lances and plasma-bows - have, with some few interruptions of truce, trundled over the jagged basaltic hills that separate the two great monarchies to besiege and lay waste to the domed cities of the other side. But the latest round of wars has proven to exhaust even the seemingly unquenchable might of these two halves of the civilized world.

In the fetid swamps below, a new prophet arises, preaching a new message of unity and divine favor. Now the tribesmen of the swamps - for millennia looked at with disdain by the 'civilized' men of the plateau - go riding to war on their great Brontotheria, ready to crush the weakened corpses of the degenerate empires and send them into the dustbin of history.

Amid such general chaos and anarchy, what role will your players take? Will they be adherents of the swamp-prophets new faith, eager to conquer for gold, god, and glory? Will they be knights of the decadent empires, wrapped in jeweled armor and robes of heaven-moth damask? Will they be petty inhabitants of one of the great domed cities of the Rhemuloi or Fersen empires, desperate men trying to make a name for themselves amidst the cruelties of a corrupt and byzantine* social structure? Or will they be interlopers from some stranger land - pale men from the cold lands about the terminator line**, eager to serve in the army of whoever will pay them; dark men from one of the plateaus nearer the center of the planet's day-face, coming for trade in dirigibles filled to bursting with gold and exotic spices; or, stranger still, men from some other planet, from Earth or Mars or the burning sands of Mercury, who chanced to arrive on Venus in some odd way, whether through magic, a strange portal, astral travel, or a good-old-fashioned atomic rocket, and must now try and maneuver their way amidst a world of savage violence, political intrigue, and high adventure beyond their wildest dreams!"

See, isn't that a far more novel setting, something that'll really set your brand apart? And you can do this with dozens of other combinations of fantasy genres + historical epochs! The Hellenistic Mediterranean as a space opera! Warring States China set on pulp Mars! A very cyberpunk American Civil War***! A Hyborian-Age take on India under the Raj! The Crisis of the 3rd Century as a Tolkien-esque low fantasy****! An "urban fantasy" version of bronze age Mesopotamia! Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica as seen through the lens of Lovecraft's dreamlands! A sword and sorcery take on the Russian conquest of Siberia! Man, the list of possible combinations is endless, and largely untrodden.



*pun fully intended
**yes, I know Venus isn't tidally locked to the sun, but some people did think so during the pulp era, and it makes for a more exotic setting!
***AIs = slaves & the internet = the western territories, for maximum parallels
****complete with ZENOBIA, QUEEN OF THE DESERT!!!

Changing the setting is a bad idea. Everyone has a quirky and idiomatic setting and most of them kind of suck. You need a lot more worldbuilding and description for a setting that isn't similar to what the audience is already familiar with. Everyone knows generic tolkienesque fantasy settings. The GM is comfortable. The players are comfortable. More people seek comfortable sameness than novelty. The novelty seekers usually write their own settings using existing major game systems.

There is, currently no major mass combat capable RPG except, if you stretch major a little, Battletech. That's a niche to aim for. I don't see enough in the document to know if you're succeeding.

You do have one major design mistake, though: stats. You don't appear to be using every stat, only the integer floor of stat/5. This means you should either only have stats go from 1-5, not 1-20, or use the stat directly for some mechanics. Just because D&D made a mistake is not a reason to repeat it.

You have too many OGL D&D spells as well. A lot of those are huge legacy problems for D&D and Pathfinder and you don't need to repeat that mistake either unless you're trying to make a system that can run adaptations of TSR/WotC/Paizo content.

Yeah, I'm not going to make the setting not euro-centric. I'm planning on setting out more changes from to spells and abilities and such but I started with stuff that could be converted to build up a basic list. I'll see about changing how the stats work, though.

I don't think it's appropriate to link a Kickstarter on someone else's forum, but ... good luck with your Fantasy Heartbreaker.