Shadows of Reality (AEST)

[Pheonix-IV]

Ok, i'm looking into starting a campaign in my own homebrew universe. I made a post about this awhile back and garnered a surprising amount of intrest. I now have the required experience and materials, so i think i'm probably good to start this off.

First off, the gritty details:

Timezone: I'm in AEST (+10ish) which may or may not limit the timezones of other people joining. I am at Uni however, which means my week is mostly free (monday and wednesday i have stuff at 12:30, tuesday i'm free, thursday i have nothing until 5:30 and friday i have something at 9:30 in the morning, but back by lunchtime.)
Most likely, the campaign would be conducted Open Table, as schedules change and having the time flexible is the best way to get the most people available. (The only campaign i'm in that passed more than a few weeks is Open Table, and it's going great.)

For those of you who don't know, Open Table means somone suggests a time, and then if more than half the players can make that time, we do it. (Of course, if i can't make it, it's out :P)

Ideally, being in AEST or near it would probably work best, but i've had plenty of games with people located in America, the timezones aren't completely incompatible.


Characters, although 'powerful' where they are summoned from, find themselves in a world built from the ground up for adventurers. As such, you'll be starting at level 6.
Yes, this means you can be monster characters, so long as the total level of your monster and it's LA does not exceed 6. (If it does exceed 6 but you really want your Centaur Lancer or something, i'm willing to make compromises.)


The story of SoR is primarily player driven. I as the DM will provide you guys with a world (eight worlds actually) and then i'll leave it up to you as to what you do. Do you want to follow the Avatar's advice and try and save the world? Do you want to take over a small town and build your own private army? I'll leave it up to the players, since i find thats by far the most entertaining kind of story.


Finally, with the rules, i'll be working in the spirit of the rules rather than their literal interpretations, and logic is king. I'm happy to let just about anything in the suppliment books into the campaign, so long as you can explain to me how it fits. There are also a number of homebrew twists i'll be putting on them in the spirit of speed.
The one exceptions to this is the psychic rules. Having read through them, there's a few setups in there that can really screw both the world and the DM over if used right, so psychic PC's are right out.

Really finally, i feel i should press this point. Speed is of the essence, speed and efficiency. Overcomplex rules and simulations will probably be simplified (usually to the PC's benefit) including things like Profession checks for weekly wage, housing ect.

If you have any more questions. Feel free to ask, otherwise i've set the campaign up here, and the story is below.

The story revolves around an average 18 year old male, who in the story is based off me, since i know me well who is pulled from his home and dragged to the top of Mt Olympus. There he confronts the old Gods of ledgend, or what is left of them.

Over the years, belief in the Gods has waned, Gods were made by men, for while individually belief is little more than an emotion, when the combined emotional energies of thousands of people meet, it becomes a very powerful force. Unfortunately, with no more people believing in the Gods, they have slowly been dying, and now face extinction.

In desperation, they place their pure essence into the young man, who becomes the Avatar of the Gods, their physical embodiment. Within him they all merge with his mind, for only within a mortal shell can their essence be protected and survive. The Avatar has a scattering of Gods from all ages and cultures, including Zeus, Isis, Ra, Thor, Quetzalcouatl and a thousand Chinese ancestors.

Over the course of the first few chapters, the Avatar seeks out the remaining Gods and uses their knoweledge to come up with a plan. He consults with the Olympian Godvoices inside him and finds out that the Titans did indeed exist and even now lie chained in the earth, the Avatar seeks their prison out and breaks it open, for he is a mortal, discovering that the Titans too are all but dead. Kronos and Gaia are all that remain, Kronos is alive, but in bad shape, for people still believe in the power of time, and that is just enough to sustain him. Gaia is fine, man still believes in nature in a roundabout way, and thus she has survived.

Kronos submits to the Avatar upon learning what has occured and the Avatar gains the powers of time manipulation, he then uses those to show Gaia what will happen in the future, where Man will eventually consider himself master of nature, and while she will always survive, she will be greatly reduced. Gaia agrees to follow the Avatar, but not join with him, for she does not wish to sacrifice her powers.

The Avatar then uses Kronos's time powers to dimension hop, gathering random people with great potential from all times and places across the multiverse, he then seeks out a 'Shard' universe, a tiny blob of raw matter which lacks the mass or power to become a full universe. Excersizing his powers, he converts the Shard into a small system of planets, a single Sun and three worlds, each positioned to foster life. Gaia breathes life into the worlds and the Avatar opens a portal onto the middle one, which is most like Earth, and transports the people he has gathered to the world, which he names Novus (latin for New).

The next few chapters deal with the initial settlement of Novus, and the Avatar creating hundreds of different races, populating all three worlds with their own unique ecologies and histories, literally creating a world designed to be a perpetual fantasy setting.

Chapter 4 is when things go wrong, named 'Shadows of Thought' one of the lesser Heroes on Novus discovers a great dark rent in reality. After battling strange monsters and fleeing from their power, he alerts the Avatar, who lives amongst the people as a God figure, who finds the rift and seals it, destroying the creatures in the process.

Over the course of the next year, the Avatar discovers that the very fabric of the Shard is unravelling for some reason, he believes that his control over his powers is insufficient, but for reasons i don't want to elaborate on, he discovers this is not the case. Eventually, in a last desperate attempt to prevent the Shard from collapsing, the Avatar reaches out through the multiverse once more and plucks a group of powerful heroes from the infinite, he draws them to Novus and has just enough time to tell them who he is and what he has done before his physical form decays and he ascends to full Godhood.

[Pheonix-IV]

Also, as an addendum. I do have the complete SRD For FGII.

[Pheonix-IV]

Wow. Amazing how things change.