Designer's Notes



Here are some notes on the design of the Gaia campaign. I'm including influences, design decisions, and
various rants and raves on campaign design in general.

Influences

When I was looking for ideas for the campaign, I sat down and went through the campaigns published by TSR
that I owned. I think that the Dragonlance setting had the most influence on the state of my world.
I definitely like the idea of a large world-changing cataclysm. I also like the idea of having unique
character classes, especially priests. The generic cleric is extremely unexciting, IMHO, and priests in
general should be unique. Why should all priests have to use the same weapons and armor? Or use the same
spells?

I also grabbed some ideas from the Forgotten Realms setting. The city set ups are cool. I looked at
Greyhawk, but I didn't want a truly 'medieval' setting. I got a bunch of names from Tolkein's
_Silmarillion_.

Character Classes

Some notes on how character classes are affected on Gaia.

Warriors

Warriors are pretty much unchanged, except for having non-lawful good paladins. Lawful good is not the
only world view that can push its ideology. I also disagree with TSR's viewpoint in the paladin handbook
on evil paladins. I feel that organized and competant bad guys are much more challenging, and realistic,
than the idea that the bad guys only stay in the race because their numbers counterbalance their incompetance.

Priests

All priests are 'mythos priests', with differing armor, weapon, and spell choices. Druids are available,
and get a nice boost from the _Player's Option:Spells and Magic_ book.

Wizards

Mages and most specialists are available. Wild mages, and wild magic are banned, as are Chronomancers.
Because of the background, the vast majority of wizards are mages.

Rogues

Rogues are pretty much unchanged on Gaia

Others

I've felt from the start that psionics really belongs in a science fiction setting, not in AD&D, so psionics
are banned.

Kits

As might be expected, a lot of kits are limited or banned altogether. I'm probably going to come up with some
new ones.

This page is always under construction

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