RoE General > The Bard (IC)

The Domain of the Red Witch

(1/4) > >>

X-Osoerde (Alan):
Designer's Notes:

The task of re-orienting arcane domains to be less focused on a person (the regent) and more on the domain, has been an interesting proposition.  On the one hand, it is counter to the classical approach to wizards, but on the other hand, it is much more fitting to RoE.  To help myself really understand this concept, I begin trying to re-envision one of existing wizardly domains, I choose the Red Witch and the fruits of my musings will be add to this thread over the next month.

Themes
I envisioned this domain with the following themes:


* A domain that while distinct from the population, it should be not separate from the population.
* Domain will have strong political ties to the domains in its sphere
* Domain will draw on Islamic shamanistic traditions, and more broadly shamanism, for inspiration
* Domain should retain the nomadic overtones associated with Binsada
* Domain will serve as one of the spiritual outlets for Binsada
* The old vs. the new will be a prevalent source of angst/conflict for the domain

X-Haelyn's Aegis/RK (Andy):
Actually I think that it fits the classic approach well.  A number of wise-women / sages / etc types who advise local leaders while belonging to a group of some sort with a regent at the head is certainly more interesting and playable than just the regent and a number of examples can be found in fantasy lit.

I'd throw in lots of spirits as well as people (the Red Witch almost begs for the respect of various Djinn and desert spirits), various hermit-types who "recognise the regent's power" even if they don't formally belong to any organisation, people who owe debts of service to the witch, etc - a wide range of people just like in a regular domain.

One issue I see is that the temple domains would oppose source domains much more if the two were rivals for spiritual authority, Binsada's is somewhat crusading from memory as well - unless weakening the temple's authority significantly I'd expect self-preservation to drive the source domains into being careful to avoid offering spiritual authority to a significant degree.

DM B:
I think Andy has severl good points here. Since you're mentioning shamans you almost have to include ties to spirits/djinn (not the DnD monster djinn, but you known, djinn spirits of various sorts).

DM B:
Idea: Perhaps the Red Witche's sources are the strongest where she has the most spirit allies? So where bad civilization/clerics of Laerme is present there are less spirits and consequently weaker sources. Something like that anyway.

X-Haelyn's Aegis/RK (Andy):
I've sometimes wondered if instead of making source levels inverse with population, it should be inverse with temple holdings, to represent the diversion of "free mebhaighl" into godly power, the driving out of spirits (good, bad and indifferent), etc.  In most areas though (sidhe aside) the difference in rules would be fairly academic and in practice I'm not sure why the politicisation of religion should really impact - even where there are no temple domains the people still likely pray and believe.

I think that the normal inverse source:population relationship and common assumption that spirits dwell away from populated areas means that the deserts and other wastes are inevitably the areas with spirits are those without the clerics of Laerme simply because the clerics are where the people are - the villages, towns and cities and not the wastes (hermits and so on aside).

I like the idea though of wizards having advisers, lieutenant's, etc which are desert spirits, house brownies, daydreams / nightmares and other oddities forming some of their court simply because those npc's are so different to the run of the mill grim-tough-guy, wise sage, etc that other regents have - and are bound to be used inventively in a campaign by a keen player.


In my homebrew I've considered if the mechanic shouldn't be to require temples to hold source holdings if they want to cast spells, with source holding level capped at the temple holding level - while it fits in with my personal campaign theme of "all magic is one" in practice it would likely be a major problem for wizards in campaigns where high level magic is possible and it probably doesn't fit RoE where clerical magic is quite distinct from wizardly magic.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page