Post originally by Ben Ferguson at 2003-03-14 02:50:39
Converted from Phorums BB System

I have really enjoyed reading (and soon to be running) the witchfire trilogy (WFT) books and the Monsternomicon. I held back on starting my campaign using the WFT, awaiting the lock and load character primer book.... but in reality needn't have bothered! I was hoping that they would have though a little more about new classes who would have evolved in this unique setting - developments from the 'Swashbuckling Adventures' by AEG. The new class book from Mongoose 'The Artificer' = a mechanomage, a mage who casts spells through devices, who can create constructs faster than the average mage and also graft on robotic arms., eyes, etc - sort of Frankenstein magic, is where I saw magic evolving in an age like this - bio thaumaturgy. China Mieville's 'Perdido Street Station' was a great inspiration I thought for where magic and science would blend together.

PLUS

Politics? In such an advanced setting, one would hope for this to be reflected in political life - by the early industrial period of the UK in the 1600-1700s, we see the emergence of mercantile capitalism, which in popular culture is seen as the age of high adventure, swashbuckling heroes of the high seas, discovering new lands, evil pirates - but in reality was far darker than that. It was a time of slavery, colonial expansion, the extermination of peoples and their cultures - not necessarily a time of the formalised colonialism of the 19th and early 20th centuries (for the UK - though for Spain and Portugal it already was) - but rather a period of colonialism done via mercenary navies and armies on the behalf of the crown... explorers were tomb raiders, thugs, cultural imperialists, etc... eventually whole peoples were wiped out, some quite recently in history (1860-1890 in the USA)..... but all this messiness from politics is absent - which is a shame.

I was hoping for a bit more of a focus on how humans mess things up. The bad guys are the Skorne not humans. Again making the bad guys into an 'other', something other than human, making it easier for us to kill them - just as today, in modern times, we name our enemies with monstrous titles in order to justify killing them by the truckload.

So - all of this has led me to borrow some of their ideas but create my own setting - darker and more political... which I was hoping to avoid!