Accidently picked up d20 Midnight thinking that it was a Wizards product. However, I have just thought that it would make a great resource for a revitalized campaign set in Iuz. It takes the Book of Vile Darkness and makes the world much darker. Has anyone else done something similar?
Accidently picked up d20 Midnight thinking that it was a Wizards product. However, I have just thought that it would make a great resource for a revitalized campaign set in Iuz. It takes the Book of Vile Darkness and makes the world much darker. Has anyone else done something similar?
I have used the Midnight - Steel Hill supplement to help me flesh out some of Iuz's installations in the Howling Hills. I have drawn material from Steel Hill to detail the Groaning Mines, Kendragund, as well as some of the stat blocks for creatures and NPCs. I htink it makes a great resource to help add atmosphere and detail to the Empire of Iuz and I think you would be well served by it.
Try searching the forums for this topic. It has had a fair amount of discussion, but of course you may wish to expand on it if the results don't satisfy your needs.
Midnight is a very cool setting but the mood is a bit hard to maintain for a prolonged period with the average group of gamers. Most can't deal with, "You've already lost the war before you begin the battle, so your mission is to delay the inevitable." It takes a bit of a masochist and a tragedian to enjoy this dark setting for long. It helps to like horror, tho.
AFAIK: Midnight was the other campaign that made the final cut along with Eberron in WotC's "Design a Campaign World" contest. We all know how that ended though.
Caveat: I have a lot of Midnight supplements, and have read through them all, but haven't run the game yet.
Midnight looks like a tough campaign to run, but I think a lot of it depends on how it's managed, and how the group expectations are set.
You could go hardcore and see how far your characters can survive, or you could turn it into a series of epic quests, each one a small step towards the defeat of Izrador. (coff-coff Silmarillion...)
For those who might not be familiar with it, as Telas suggested with that last comment, Midnight is a very Tolkienish setting, along the lines of "What if Frodo failed?" The setting is very dark, monsters and evil rule the day, and the heros have a long, uphill battle before them as they try to bring goodness back to the land and free the world from the evil overlord.
It would probably make a great resource for the lands of Iuz, and even other places like the Pomarj, some parts of the fallen Great Kingdom (Rauxes and Chathold in particular), and the Bone March. _________________ In a library we are surrounded by many hundreds of dear friends
imprisoned by an enchanter in paper and leathern boxes.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Browsing it in the store, I thought that many of the details on Midnight's Big Bad could be appropriated wholesale for Iuz - his servants, for example. Iuz could be built up as something of a bigger deal than he currently is, if only in the rumors and fears of the commonfolk.
A lot of Midnight seemed to be about variant cultures for demihumans, alterations to character classes, campaign-specific races and locations and so on with no connection to the theme of "an evil dominated world." Some aspects of Midnight are different from Greyhawk or the D&D standard simply because Midnight is not Greyhawk and the designers didn't want it to be a Greyhawk clone, and not because the campaign's themes demanded that they be different in that specific way. Some of these changes might work in Greyhawk if you happened to like them, others would be a challenge to shoehorn in.
Some aspects, like the restrictions to divine spellcasting, go too far to be plausible in even the darkest regions of Oerth.
All in all, I'm sure there are many things that could be pulled into a Greyhawk campaign, but quite a lot of the book would be very difficult to adopt to the Flanaess.
Let me add to the chorus that you really couldn't plug all of Midnight into Greyhawk.
For instance: In Midnight, the gods are separated from the world, except for Izrador, the Dark One. This means no divine magic for any but his worshippers.
The following are outlawed: literacy, money, magic, weapons, armor, education. Some of the critters in Midnight can sniff out magic, so just having a potion of CLW will get you targeted.
Midnight PCs have "heroic paths", which are a class-independent progression of powers and abilities. The average Midnight PC is about two levels more powerful than a D&D PC. (And they need it, too.)
However, certain critters and items would migrate well. Check the sourcebook or some of the modules for those (don't want to give anything away.)
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