>The land is surrounded by a mountain range that almost seems as if it forms a giant caldera.
Player 1: What's outside the mountains?
>All you know is that anyone who attempts to travel over them is not heard from again.
Player 2, making an off-hand joke: I bet that beyond the mountains are each of the elemental planes in a circle around the land
That was exactly what my plan was, and this guy guesses it on session zero. Do I stick with it or come up with something else?
You stop being a GM forever because you're fucking retarded and have no business being in that position.
Either you've gotten predictable or he's read your notes.
So yes, come up with something else. Something that doesn't sound like something a 14 year old would come up with.
Like: There are monsters in the mountains, nasty ones, and they are eating everybody who wanders up there. Ogres work fine here.
Then reveal that they're living in the impact crater caused by some kind of ancient evil getting thrown out of some version of heaven or Olympus by your Zeus equivalent AND HE'S WAKING UP.
Just stick with it you mong.
Stop proposing things that sound like they were made up by a 14 year old.
Fine. Just stick with Ogres in the Mountains then.
I didn't actually include that detail in my notes, and I haven't come up with something this off-the-wall before. It's like he just read my mind or something it's nuts.
Also, can I ask what exactly is so immature about the idea?
I can stay with it and it'll make him happy when he finds out his ridiculous guess was correct, but man it took the wind out of my sails to have it be guessed so early before any of the ACTUAL clues were presented.
Elemental planes have a lot more threatening things than ogres, a few normies are bound to survive ogres and report. Not so likely with not quite sentient flame that can follow intruders tirelessly forever.
Ogres in the mountains are a good idea.
If thats the case then stuff would have destroyed the village already.
Ogres work fine depending on how big the village is and how many people actually try to cross the mountains every year, and how many Ogres there are.
I mean, if it's like fucking Until Dawn meets Bloodborne up there and they only have two or three people stupid enough to try it then of course they're going to get eaten.
>If thats the case then stuff would have destroyed the village already
Not necessarily, the elementals are likely to be happy to just stay in their elemental plane. Or are even weakened outside it.
I always wanted to do a campaign where instead of the real world surrounding little pieces of the fey wilds, there would be islands of "normalcy" surrounded by dense jungles of dreams and forests of nightmares all inhabited with fey.
Kind of a rip off from this book called the Edge Chronicles. Where humans had to hire help from the locals to even walk between the livable areas of civilization less they be eaten / enslaved / turned into gibbering lunatic immortals by the horrors between the "worlds."
So you could still do the "unspeakable worlds" vibe, just with fey or horrors instead of elementals.
Give the Ogres a powerful elemental being they worship as a god from one of the planes
Maybe it can teach them stuff to make them more threatening
>Player guesses any plot point ever via a joke
KEEP IT. This is suppose to be a fun game, it will be a nice story you guys can remember and joke about, plus the player will get to feel smug satisfaction.
That was an oddly specific joke for him to make. You might be playing with a psion.
>tfw the borders of your setting's world are all guarded by massive deific eidolons the prevent passage just by existing
>there's a point in the north it gets so hot that no mortal creature has ever survived, as a result of a 30 foot tall incarnation of fire that literally skates the breadth of the continent every 24 hours, then turns around
>the locals know of this region as the Glass Runner's Road
>similar situation in the south, only with ice
>east and west both end at the coast
>you don't fuck around with the ocean in the east, it's full of enormous orka-sized merfolk that punch holes into ship hulls and then play with the sailors like cats before devouring them
>in the west is where the Star fell. There isn't anything alive in the ocean past a certain point, and then your hair starts to fall out and you have horrible waking night terrors about Teeth and Teeth and Teeth and Teeth and The Lady
The whole thing is a self-contained artificial environment built by the ancestors of the original, immortal elves. The Star killed them, so the whole system is on the verge of collapse, and people have started to worship the caretaker organisms (things in charge of important systems like precipitation distribution, or subterranean pressure) and older eugenics experiments (like elves) as gods.
Furthermore there's some meddling from the gods that makes most explorers disinterested in exploring deep into the mountains, and they ensure those that do go cannot tell the rest of the mortals. I'm trying to decide what exactly that means, if they outright kill them or just remove them from time I'm not sure yet.
Allright you've convinced me, ultimately I knew that was the correct answer. I think ultimately just wanted to complain about clairvoyant players.
>Be DM
>This land was part of the great empire for a millennium, but over the past century or so the empire has dissolved into hundreds of bickering states with a rump empire trying to maintain control.
>"So we're playing fantasy europe after the fall of the Roman Empire?" one of my players asks in a "holy shit this is awfully generic" fashion.
>MFW it's a wuxia game set in a fantasy Spring and Autumn period.
The fool will pay for doubting me.
>I think ultimately just wanted to complain about clairvoyant players.
Thats fine, I dont think theres any player who doesnt live for the GM being a bit bitch at them heh.
This is pretty super common. While I would personally suggest that you've made your simple bed for simple minds and its time to lie in it rather than cheating a wise player out of their satisfaction, here are some alternatives to your common scenario that I have seen be pretty good:
- The entire observable 'planet' is bowl shaped. Logically, there is a somewhat habitable area on the underside of the bowl, but the edges are pretty much impassable as a consequence of the the gravity from the bowls centre of mass pulling everyone back in. Alternatively, if you use flight to bypass this, the outer edge is a blasted and barren hellscape and you are at imminent risk of being killed by having the sun, a large city sized burning orb, run into you.
- The entire caldera is ringed with deadly traps, sentry spells, and intelligent, malevolent weather phenomena that are recognisable, but myriad in number. The entire caldera was erected thousands of years ago using divine power to try and contain the contagion inside, and then fortified significantly by those outside. It suits the watchmen best if noone survives to let civilisation inside know, since their defences could probably be bested if a full blown army with magical support attacked one part of it. The fact that there are people inside the cordon does not imply the contagion has been dealt with, just that it has learned to be subtle as time passed.
This is good.
Bruh that's literally the campaign setting for Exalted
man that's some comfy shit, reminds me of the warcraft planes
This world sounds horrible to live in and I love it
Damnit. I knew I couldn't be the first person to come up with that concept, but I'd never heard of a setting using it before.
It's okay user. Nothing is unique. Don't blame yourself. As long as you can do it well, that's what matters to players.
I mean, neither of those is that much better. Certainly not to the point of warranting being a dick.
This
>I think ultimately just wanted to complain about clairvoyant players.
Fair. I recall my Adeva GM telling me to stop predicticting all his plot twists.
What if you some how tied the elemental plane idea into another thing. So that he can feel good about guessing some of it, but not the whole thing
>Then reveal that they're living in the impact crater caused by some kind of ancient evil getting thrown out of some version of heaven or Olympus by your Zeus equivalent
I would just go with 'massive super-volcano caldera'
The continent this super-volcano used to sit on is gone. The other continents were ravaged by apocalyptically bad weather as a result of the volcano blowing. None of them know that there are any survivors there, and they don't care. The outer slopes of the caldera are brutal, lifeless plains if shattered obsidian, toxic fumes, and dust storms of obsidian grit that will strip the flesh from your bones. Nobody comes back because nobody survives.
The civilization inside the caldera are actual lucky survivors only because when the gods detonated the volcano to try to destroy the ancient evil inside, it shielded itself. Doing so drained it so badly it died, however, and the shield accidentally preserved enough local life for the survivors to rebuild culturally and ecologically, after a hundred generations of strife (now the setting's pre-history).
Congrats, your setting is now post-post-apocalyptic.
I'll bite. Please eleaborate.
Why not both?
The elemental planes are there to contain the evil and destroy anything that tries to leave thinking they are tainted.
Hey I like that idea. I already have a villain of the campaign, maybe he's trying to escape and corrupt the outside? I'll have to workshop that more!
Kek. You can still roll with the idea but add some twist to it.
>I bet that beyond the mountains are each of the elemental planes in a circle around the land
What a fucking roflcopter man, jesus christ, i'm lmaoing like hell right now, what a wacky jokester
The idea is fine, just ignore that guy. As long as your players can have fun playing the campaign, the setting and style are just candy on a sundae.
Mitch, is that you?
No sorry, haha. There's no Mitch in my game.
...
just makes sure it will have some twisted details they won't expect.
I had an old DM named Mitch who also had a bowl-shaped setting. He told us not to go over the mountains because he hadn't figured out what to put in/over them yet.
We only played one session, during which we mostly ground for levels. It was super boring. Then we got cocky and one of the party members died... And respawned. We stopped playing after that.
I always thought that the Edge Chronicles would make a great setting for an RPG.
The mountain passes lead to other planes, not just the elemental ones. It changes according to the seasons and stars in the astral, the will of the gods and so forth. You are not on a prime material, you're on a demiplane.
Is there any way to do elemental planes well? The best alternative I've found is just having them be parts of the planet that are just exceptionally large and not infinite. Like the plane of air being the sky, plane of water the ocean, etc.
Don't worry that guy was just being a fag.
How about intelligent monsters in the mountains that have kept your society running as a food source/entertainment/power trip.
Population center is in the middle, the closer you get to the mountains the more rustic and fearful people get. Maybe the monsters' agents run parts of society from the shadows?
Maybe when the PCs overthrow their masters, some great resource is quickly depleted and their first task as mid-level adventurers is to go out into the untamed wilderness in search of lands for satellite communities or powerful tools to save your people?