Okay, so the main stats are Size, Strength, Agility, Perception, Knowledge, Charm, Intuition and Drive.
The basic resolution is Stat + Skill + 2d10 vs difficulty.
"Saves" are Stat + Another Stat + 2d10.
So stats and skills should end up on roughly the same scale... probably with zero as the "average" person's ability. Skills should probably max out around double the influence of stats.
Once your Stat + Skill gets to about +10 or more, you've mostly overcome the influence of the dice.
Okay, the stat & skill ranges should probably be limited about like D20's... that is to say, a +5 in a stat is really good and should be rare. A +10 is phenomenal, and should be reserved for really specialized races.
How do we handle damage done? I want Size to influence it... but maybe Size shouldn't be a stat, rather an advantage or disadvantage. So it would normally be equal to your Strength, but some races would push it up or down. Dunno. If I drop it, I'll probably make "Size" into "Constitution" so that there's still 8 stats.
Talked with Sean a bit about his opinions on RPG resolution systems. It kind of nudged me towards the following:
Roll Stat + Skill + 2d10 vs difficulty.
This is pretty similar to the basic Fuzion/D20/Tons-o-games system, but using 2d10 will make it a little less random than D20 and a little more than Fuzion. That gives 80% of its results in the 6-16 range, with an average of 11 (which occurs 10% of the time, 2x as often as it would on a flat d20).
So, a +1 modifier's value will vary, because of the curve. If you'll currently succeed with a roll of 12 or higher and this lowers what you need to 11, then it's a 10% boost. If you need a 20 and this lowers it to 19, you'll get a 2% boost. We should probably assume a nice, even 5% boost for most things, but bear in mind that it could be higher or lower.
The most common language amongst the planes is Dielian. It's a very straightforward, easy to learn language. Not very beautiful or rhythmic, but a very good trade-tongue and widely used.
It was actually invented and promulgated by Lalindiel, before his empire fell, but very few people associate it with the god of Madness and Isolation now. The Lendehar, though... they remember.
There are other languages, though... many are outgrowths of Dielian, and can be interpreted, just with penalties. Others are unrelated and require their own skills to understand.
Sandili is a particularly beautiful tongue used by the blue-skinned folk. It actually grants a minor bonus to attempts to compose song or poetry (or seduction rolls, for that matter) because it's so lyrical. Basically, this language is so beautiful when sung or spoken that even people who don't understand it will tend to find it moving. Perhaps the species should be called the Sandharan?
One of the darker gods in the "nice" pantheon, Evelain is depicted as a beautiful woman with porcelain-white skin and long, pitch-black hair. Her eyes are orange and seem to be filled with a subtle flame.
Like most gods, she's physically enormous, towering over her mortal servants.
Her interests/expertise (for most deities, it's the same thing, since whatever they dedicate their energies toward they become exceedingly good at) basically cover all things done surreptuously, in the shadows. She is commonly invoked by illicit lovers, spies & assassins, and anyone else who performs their activities under cover of darkness and in secrecy.
Her most public avatars are three beautiful, elf-like men whose appearance is similar to her own, although somewhat smaller. It's said that they never make a sound unless they choose to and they are commonly dispatched as messengers, carrying her word from realm to realm in utmost secrecy.
It's rumored that she has another avatar, described by some as a terrible shadow, that she never shows, not even to the other gods. It's exact form is a mystery and rumor and many people believe that it may not be a proper avatar... or might even not exist at all.
The really ancient times are lost in the mists of history. The Endless War has eaten up so many realms that there's little left except for a few tidbits of lore.
Lalindiel the Chronicler was the god of knowledge and wisdom. His angels were called the Wise and his people were the Lendehar, the Learned Folk. Even the oldest records list him as an ancient god, and it's believed that he has now outlived every other deity in existence.
Lalindiel ruled a mighty realm called Choronos, filled with temples and libraries (and most of the temples were libraries). Under his command, the Wise had pacified most of the realms, and the remaining deities served under his relatively benevolent rule. There are references to some demon realms which occasionally caused trouble, but their names are meaningless words now (the K'al'T'al seem to have been particularly feared) and all of their kind seem to be extinct.
His empire did not last. Like all long-lived gods, Lalindiel eventually succumbed to madness. His empire broke apart as his wise policies turned sour and his ineffable judgement began to fail again and again. Only the armies of Wise kept Choronos itself from being torn apart by his rivals. The borders were eventually sealed, and as many portals as possible were destroyed. The Wise became known as the Terrible as they grew ever more violent and fanatical in their defense of their lord.
The fall of Lalindiel's empire of peace marked a bitter struggle for control called the War of Ignorance. All of the lesser deities squabbled and fought amongst themselves. Lalindiel was furious, and began remaking the Lendehar into warriors. Many clans fled to other realms, terrified by the changes that their creator was working upon them. Those who remained were either destroyed or remade into demonic warriors in the service of the Wise.
The War of Subjugation began once Lalindiel's army was complete. They rushed out of his realm, invading those of nearby rivals. Their first goal was the subjugation of the other realms and the destruction of their deities, but the Wise also viciously exterminated any surviving Lendehar that they could find. It's believed that even some of the demon realms that had once been the Empire's enemies ended up allying with Lalindiel's former subjects to resist his attack.
The War of Subjugation slaughtered dozens of deities and destroyed entire realms. It took centuries before his opponents were finally able to break the Wise and scatter their armies, and even then it had more to do with Lalindiel's continued descent into madness and irrationality than their own prowess. In the end, his contradictory and often pointless orders crippled his own forces to the point that the War of Subjugation was finally ended when all of Lalindiel's forces retreated back to Choronos.
He chose to bottle up his surviving forces in Choronos and fortified it heavily. His opponents soon gave up trying to take it and fell back to squabbling amongst themselves. But Lalindiel was too far gone to take advantage of their disorganization; it's believed that he spent the next few centuries inventing new punishments for his subjects, gradually exterminating all of his demonic slaves and turning the Wise into mindless monsters.
Now Choronos is a ruined wasteland filled with the crumbling ruins of ancient temples. What structures survive are mostly monuments to pain and suffering, filled with the ancient remains of Lendehar and other creatures who were tortured to death by their lord. The occasional treasure hunter still ventures here to search among the ruined libraries for ancient lore (it's said that more knowledge was lost with the fall of Choronos than exists in all of the other realms put together), but they must be very careful. While the demon-spawn that replaced the Lendehar have been hunted almost to extinction, the Terrible Ones still guard their master's land. Any intrusion that attracts their attention will bring all of their power, and often the power of Lalindiel himself to bear upon the trespassers.
But so far the Lord of Madness has shown no interest in other realms, and his Terrible Ones never travel elsewhere. It's believed by some that he has gone so far that he has tried to forget the very existence of the other planes and now regards anyone from them as a painful reminder to be expunged as quickly as possible.
The blue-folk were created by Nahura the nature goddess. Their names often have the form L'fleur and such. This is actually a contraction of two words in their tongue, like "Little flower" becoming "L'fleur". Their race name should be a contraction of Nahura's Servants or Children of Nahura or something similar.
Language rules: no language skills as such. Instead, you get a skill in a culture. 5 indicates basic knowledge of that culture/area/realm, including the ability to speak their langage haltingly ("Where bathroom?"). 10 indicates better knowledge and you can speak it well, if obviously accented ("Where be bathroom?"). 15 indicates fluency and lots of knowledge ("Where is the bathroom?"). 20+ indicates that you know it like a native ("Hey, man, where's the restroom?").
Free advancement: use a skill significantly during a session, get an XP in it. At the end of a session, you might get a bonus XP or two, but they have to go in separate skills (they can overlap with freebie points, though). 1-5 costs 1 XP each, 6-10 costs 2, 11-15 costs 3, 16-20 costs 4, 21+ costs 5 XP each.
Oceanus/Ocean/The Great Ocean: watery realm inhabited by the Undines. Air and earth only in great bubbles.
Immolatus/The Sea of Fire: eternally flaming realm inhabited by Salamanders. You better have constant fire magic to survive there. A handful of giant balls of earth, but no air or water.
You get your home culture for free at 20.
Kissing someone in combat as an example action. -5/+5 penalty in order to get under their guard and into close combat. Then a -5 attack (should it be -5/+5 as well? Or just a penalty to your action?) to kiss them instead of hitting them. In close combat, long weapons like swords are at -5 and really long weapons like spears are at -10. Getting out of close combat probably requires another -5/+5 manuever to slip away.
Everyone gets 2 standard actions and a free action per combat turn.
Using a D20-ish system instead of a Pendragon-ish one, you roll Stat + Skill + d20 and compare to the difficulty. Every 10 you beat it by is a crit. Beating it by 1-9 is a success, 10-19 a crit, 20-29 a double crit, 30-39 a triple crit, etc. If it doesn't specify otherwise, just multiply your bonus by the number of crits (so if a backstab gave +5 damage on a crit, you'd get +15 damage on a triple crit).
Scoring a crit is generally worth a +5 bonus on a follow-up action. (eg- score a crit on that combat kiss, you might get +5 to a follow-up seduction roll). Note that you have to succeed by 10 to get a +5 bonus. Making crits based on 20 point intervals might be more balanced (certainly lower-powered), but then you have the Tal problem that you can't score a crit (other than a natural 20) if your skill is less than the difficulty.
Similarly, failing by... 20+ is a botch? I might make critical failures fall under a slower rate.
A natural 20 bumps the results of your roll up by 1 step. A natural 1 drops it by a step. Does that eliminate the Tal problem? Hopefully.
The spindly dudes have 4 eyes, in two pairs one above the other. I'm thinking elongated heads, too, like something out of Jorune. Made by the most insane of current deities.
Devil commonly refers to a mad god. Demon refers to their avatara. Fiend refers to the sort of planesfolk that they make. Similarly, on the "folks you like" scale, it's god, angel and planesfolk.
By the costs above, a 5 costs 5 points, a 10 costs 15, a 15 in some skill costs 30, a 20 costs 50.
Non-natives could divide their 20 between their adopted homeland and their race's native home. So a Menagerie native might have 15 Menagerie and 5 Wherever-my-parents-were-from. Yeah, you lose points this way, since a 20 is so much better than a 5, but I'm not sure that's a big deal.
+5/-5 benefits would probably be way too good for a D20 style game. Actually, you'd almost certainly drop the +5/-5 and just make it a +5 OR a -5. There's no sense adjusting both ratings.
Like D20, your skill will be totally eclipsed by the die roll until you get at least 10 ranks in it. Perhaps it should use a 3d6 or 2d10 roll instead. Or a Pendragon-style roll-under. Dunno.
Need a female warrior blue-folk as an example NPC. Always helps to have a babe in the illustrations/background/flavor-fic. Their males are traditionally more artsy and the females more violent, but it's only a tendency.
I hope I can get back to sleep, finally. My muse has lousy timing.
In the war of the gods, there is only one realm that is neutral territory. XXX, the City of YYY.
Sounds good. 20 words (the exercise on RPG.net recommended 25 or less).
Of course, I still need to fill in XXX and YYY. Planescape used Sigil and Doors.
I was thinking of using Menagerie for the city name, but perhaps I should look for another name.
For its epithet, it could be something like "Wonders", "Horrors", "Ruins" (it would probably be Plane of Ruins instead of City), "Mystery", "Peace", "Freedom", "Life", "Destiny", "Myth", "Sanctuary". "Silence". "Secrets".
Forsaken, the Plane of Ruins?
An amusing Greek term... Hybris (pride, arrogance, destructive pride, rape). Lorn is an archaic spelling of Forlorn.
Hybris, the City of Ruins? Lorn, the Forsaken City?
If I used the Pendragon/BRP "get better by using it" paradigm for normal advancement, I'd probably want to add some sort of "between adventures" major reward, which grants automatic advancement. Here's a possible implementation.
You get to pick from:
If I keep the "Pendragon-ish" basic idea, then the resolution system will just be 1d20, compared to your total skill rating.
Rolling less than or equal to your skill indicates a success. Rolling above your skill, but only by 1-4 points, indicates a partial success. Missing it by 5+ is a failure.
Rolling a 1 is a Crit (improve the quality of your success one step, normally to a critical success). Rolling a 20 is a Botch (reduce the quality by a step, normally to a critical failure).
If you have a skill above 20, every additional point increases your Crit Range by 1. So a skill of 25 adds +5 to your Crit range, so you crit on a 1-6 instead of just a 1.
Similarly, if penalties take your skill to negative numbers, they increase the Botch Range by 1 per. So if your adjusted skill is -2, you botch on an 18, 19 or 20.
Combat will generally involve opposed tests. If you take extra time to perform a task, you get to roll 2d20 and take whichever you want. If you take lots of extra time, you can roll 3d20 and take the best.
Opposed tests have both folks roll and subtract their successes from each other. In the case of a tie, you either leave it as a tie or use a tie-breaker: whichever character made their roll by the most wins.
What sort of effects can you produce with Summoning & Abjuration? The two are closely linked... Summoning is the art of calling things to you while Abjuration is the art of driving things away.
Summoning: the art of drawing creatures towards you. It works best on magical entities, many of which are quite vulnerable to this form of magic. Summoning doesn't have to call living creatures, either. Necromancy is a form of summoning in which the spirit of a dead person is summoned back at the caster's behest.
Abjuration: the art of driving things away. This creates regions where certain creatures or effects cannot pass without first overcoming the strength of the Abjuration. Magical creatures are, again, quite vulnerable to these effects. Some interesting effects are banishing diseases by driving them out of a person or containing a creature inside a pentagram by surrounding them with a barrier of Abjuration which prevents almost all action or movement.
Wards: the art of establishing barriers through which things can pass, but not without the caster sensing it. This can be used to set up "triggered" spells or simple alarms.
Okay... So I've got about 7 major magical arts. I need names for them all, game terms that will determine what the Edges/Skills are called. Naturally, individual mages might call them something else, but this will be the most common name for it.
Abjuration & Summoning:
Nature Magic: Natural Order?
Elementalism:
Divine Magic: Primal magic? Realm? Correspondence? Reality?
Mind-affecting Magic: Sorcery?
Evocation of magical fields: Evocation? That's the D&D term. Psychokinetic.
Sensory Magic/Illusions: Art of the Eye? Apparition. Apparative Magic. Divination & Illusion. Images. Truth & Deception. Divination & Concealment. Obscurance. Visions.
Hm. Well, here are some generic terms that I could assign:
Thaumaturgy, Sorcery, Hermetic Magic. Ritual Magic (doubtful, probably applies to multiple). Wizardry. Witchcraft/Warlockery. Demonology (doubtful). Sympathetic Magic (again, doubtful). Mysticism.
Wizardry: evocation of magical energies
Primal: altering of reality
Sorcery: mind control (ensorcelling people)
Thaumaturgy (miracle working) could cover the Natural Order
These may be too traditional for my tastes. Let's stick to names that I happen to like... that seem to fit the style I'm looking for.
Wizardry seems appropriate for Evocation-style magic. Sorcery is fine for mind-control. Primal seems appropriate for realm-altering magic. Natural Order is a good name for a very broad category of magic. I can live with Elementalism.
That leaves the Abjuration & Summoning and the Sensory Magic. I might just name them as contradictory pairs, a bit like "Green & Purple" magic.
These are all different names for what is basically the same thing. A group of mages all linked to a source of mana.
The most common source is a deity; all of that deity's priests and avatars will generally have a link to it. They can request mana at will, but whether or not the deity chooses to supply it depends how much the deity has available and how much they like the supplicant. For day-to-day things, there's generally an almost unlimited amount of mana available from a god. During emergencies, though (such as a war with a rival power), there may be so many people demanding mana that the deity has to carefully ration it... either only giving out tiny amounts or only answering the calls of its most important agents.
As a general rule, drawing power from the deity multiple times in the same day will often result in at least some cursory attention to determine whether or not you are being wasteful. Most deities know that emergencies happen and will not hesitate to supply someone in desperate straits, but a priest who gets into desperate straits repeatedly had better be on a mission for their deity.
Mages (generally speaking, the only serious difference between a mage and a priest is that the mage isn't subservient to their mana source) have seen the advantages of this and sometimes form their own mana pools. The members of the organization gather together and perform a ritual which unites them spiritually. Each one contributes a certain amount of mana to a great pool of energy that they can all draw upon in need. There's a lot of flexibility in how this gets set up... in some groups, new members are expected to have no access to the pool, but still have to contribute... only after they have been promoted in rank are they allowed to draw upon it.
A Mana Pool must be centered in a physical spot and thus is vulnerable to disruption or "theft" (tapping it without permission of the group). Theoretically, a Mana Pool could be embodied in a specific person, but it's a rare group willing to do that. This is usually attempted as part of trying to become a god; it usually just attracts enough real divine attention to get yourself killed quickly.
Types of mages/magic I want to support...
There are several ways to handle magical "specialties". Basically, I think it boils down to emphasizing Nouns, Verbs or both.
Ars Magica and World Tree use both. You get ratings in each and combine them to produce effects. This is probably a little too "mage centric" for my game.
Shadowforce Archer style magic would basically use Feats for Verbs and then specific Nouns would be skills... ie- you could take a feat in Evocation, then specific skills in throwing Fire, Ice or Electricity. It's not exactly cut-and-dried, though, since you could also take a feat in TK and then skills in throwing objects, creating sounds, making force fields, etc..
D&D and Ironclaw organize spells into tiered schools and let you learn individual spells. Each one is a standalone spell and relatively inflexible. I'd rather have a more flexible magic system than that. Mage magic, on the other hand, is far too flexible for a non-mage-centric setting. I need a decent compromise between them.
I'm probably looking at something closer to the Shadowforce Archer system... you'd take a special ability to throw Magic-type X, then buy specific skills for subsets of it. There are generally at least 3 skills for each type of magic and often more.
Now... if the magic system is flexible, then will the PCs ever be interested in finding "ancient spells" or whatnot? I could see ancient spellbooks letting you learn a new spell-skill inside your existing field, of course. So a Fire mage might be very interested in a book about the legendary "Ice Fire". Or allow people to take skills in specific spells, assuming that this (in some fashion) makes them superior to just forming them on the fly.
So I guess the main things that I have to sort out are what sort of divisions I want between different mages.
I kind of like the idea of having magic broken up into Spheres and Skills. These skills could be limited to specific Spheres (like Shadowforce Archer psi) or they could overlap, like in World of Aden.
So, for example, let's take the Sphere of Evocation (producing energies out of nothing). It might have matching skills like Conjuring Fire, Conjuring Electricity and Conjuring Light. Or... we could have a Sphere of Fire, which (if you take it) allows you to use your Conjuring skill to produce flames. But if you had the Sphere of Electricity, instead, you could still use that same Conjuring skill to throw a lightning bolt.
Basically, these are noun/verb pairs, like so many games use. The question is which should be the skills and which should be advantages/feats. And whether the skills should be very specific and only usable for their matching feat (which enforces specialization), or should be shared between feats (which encourages mages to generalize).
Ugh. No idea which I'd prefer for the setting. I'll have to think about it.
Some likely Spheres/Skills are: Fire, Earth, Air, Water, Planar Magic, and maybe even Wizardry. Wizardry isn't a Sphere as such; rather, it's a collection of specific spells stolen from other Spheres and compiled into a big list of effects. The advantage of Wizardry is being able to cast specific, preset spells that do almost anything... the disadvantage is that you can't create new Wizardry spells unless you can cast them using one of your other Spheres.
I'm figuring on costs like these... depending on how it ends up, they could well be multiplied by 2, 5 or 10 to put them into the right range.
A biggie is Planar Magic. At low levels, it can tell you what the extent of the realm you're in (big, small, nigh infinite) and detect portals (although not always how to open them). At moderate levels it can tell you what's on the other end of a suspect portal. At high levels it can create or expand planes or trap foes in Maze or Prison realms. It's mostly studied by gods, who use it more than anyone else. The really useful spells are all hideously expensive and difficult, so this is a very "bottom loaded" school. It probably doesn't have any trivial spells at all... perhaps something like "make a portal you already know about sparkle more visibly."
No one knows exactly how many deities there are, anymore than anyone knows how many realms there are. A lot of realms are cut off from the others, with portals only opening on rare occasions and often in random locations. There's enough contact for folks to be sure that some of the "lost" realms still exist, but not to get there reliably.
Pantheons can be almost as long lived as demon-gods. The trick is, whenever members of the pantheon start to go mad, you marginalize them and eventually kick them out or destroy them. By regularly (in a cosmological sense) replacing them with younger, saner deities, you can keep the pantheon as a whole going even if the members keep changing. The downside, of course, is that the gods all know this, and sometimes mad gods are pretty good at hiding their madness, so it's not impossible for a mad deity to end up in charge of a particular pantheon, kicking out the saner members and replacing them with more maleable and/or psychotic deities.
At least one of the current demon-gods should be female, probably a goddess of Love now turned to Hate. For all of them, we should probably know what they used to embody... that'll determine what sort of ruins you can find in their realm, since an insane god generally turns against whatever they used to embody, eventually ending up with its opposite. In theory, a mad god might eventually turn sane again and cycle back to "normality", but in practice it hasn't happened yet.
The utterly insane, isolationist demon-god was once a benevolent god of Knowledge and created the Lendehar as his planesfolk. Over time, he started to torment and destroy them... now the remaining Lendehar in their home realm are mindless things often melted into the environment and surviving solely because their lord won't let them die. Perhaps Lalindiel the Mad? The plane was once a giant temple filled with libraries and gardens... now it's an abandoned ruin. A few people occasionally come here to search for lost treasures, but the Soul Eaters are his angels now and they regularly roam the area looking for prey. It's said that if you can defeat a Soul Eater (a kind of mindless but beautiful angel-looking killing machine that babbles nonsense), it will answer one question (with nearly omnipotent precision) before it dies.
Saying that a deity is "god of X" is about like saying that Einstein was a "god of Physics" and ignoring his other qualities. There's always more to their personalities than that. Many were probably mortal themselves once, long, long ago.
How do mortals become gods? Probably by passing some critical threshold of mana. A pantheon could create a demi-god by each providing a portion of their power to the chosen mortal, after which they could grow into full power on their own.
Here are some vague ideas for gods and realms...
Those survived the apparent death of their deity. They're a major reason that the Thalks are still around... some of the remaining angels still protect and teach them. The angels, of course, are largely nuts themselves, overrun with guilt and shame and often in deep denial. They may claim that Arthalcus commanded them to wait for his return, or not seem to be aware of his fall at all.
A few Thalk Angels have come to terms with their loss and found new lives, but not very many and the surviving cult of Arthalcus looks on them with the same hatred that any religion holds for traitorous avatars.
They are planesfolk created by some deity of the hunt. I still need a good name for this race... well, for all the races, really.
There's no such thing as a "good" or "evil" realm. The realms are shifted and shaped (and sometimes created outright) by the gods that inhabit them. Those gods create Avatars and Planesfolk to populate their realm.
An Avatar is a being empowered by the deity and granted innate access to a portion of its might. They can be cast in whatever form the god prefers... generally they're referred to as angels, demons, devils or more specific names but they all share some common traits. Avatars are more powerful than regular planesfolk, but the god has more influence over their thoughts and activities. While a few go rogue and "fall from grace", breaking the connection with their deity, this cuts them off from their ready resupply of mana and makes them a horde of enemies... all of the deity's remaining servants will look on them as traitors deserving extermination.
Planesfolk are just mortals of one sort or another. Most are fairly human-looking, having been created from human template (or even expendable humans), but it varies. It's difficult to create a new species and not have it immediately die out, so most gods just copy one of a few established designs, such as humanity.
Deities use their powers to slowly transform their planes into a form that they like and to fill them with whatever minions they prefer. A given deity can only have a limited number of Avatars at once, because each one is a major drain on its divine resources, but planesfolk can breed on their own and require less attention to keep them going.
One unfortunate fact, however, is that gods tend to go mad over time. All of the relatively benign deities are young ones. Old gods tend to turn into demon-gods... they grow bitter and capricious or filled with scorn and paranoia. They transform their home plane into a hellish landscape to match their inner torment and mold their Avatars into cruel and monstrous forms. Their own worshippers may become their victims over time, tortured and tormented whenever they can't capture enough outsiders to sacrifice in their stead.
At least one major deity is in decline currently. I see a bit of flavor-fiction, where one angel discusses with another...
"Think! When I left, we still wore plain, sky-blue robes, never stained with blood or dirt. Two hundred years ago, he garbed you in armor, like warriors, but at least it was still simple and unadorned. Now look at you... armored like a crab, decorated with spikes and runes. Can't you see? He is descending into madness J'horle... and he'll take you with him."Creating a new pocket universe from scratch is extremely debilitating and often leaves the deity weak and crippled for centuries. As such, they don't like to do it. They'd rather take over an existing realm or steal parts of another one. Great wars are fought over the borderlands between realms, where the victorious deity can shift the border so that more territory falls under his own control."It may be that you are right," the other angel whispered, pain in his eyes.
I thought for a moment that I had reached him.
But then a strange glow appeared in his eyes, and his features twisted cruelly. "But if this be madness," he cried, "then it will be a glorious madness."
And he raised his flaming sword once more.
Pacifistic deities have only a few choices. Hide away in an existing realm, attempt to create a new one from scratch (and risk dissollution if a more aggressive deity catches them in this vulnerable state), or join a pantheon of more aggressive deities and rely on their protection.
Here's one problem. What does the city produce? Where do they get the funds to buy food or where do they grow their won if they're all in a giant city? Let me muse on the possibilities.
We'll definitely want some sort of half-mortal critters, like the tragic tieflings. Possessed of both demon & mortal blood (or devil & mortal blood if I add a demon/devil divide), they get exotic, unnatural looks/deformities (depending on your tastes), some minor powers (often beyond their control) and quickly get pushed to the bottom of the heap socially.
I'm not entirely sure that I want to be really specific. Basically, these are half-breeds... they get mixed appearance (with some elements of their extraplanar parentage) and a few minor powers (major powers may show up, but won't be consciously controllable). But because they look funny and are generally from "unapproved" liasons, they tend to get sold into slavery or kicked out on the streets. They have no support network except for other street scum, usually other "freaks". The big thing is the lack of a support group... generally, neither parent wants them. For the "higher" planes, their mere existence is a sign that one of their upper-plane parent sinned. For the lower planes, the human parent won't want 'em. Their social class will be one step below dirt... folks don't normally bother to throw stuff at dirt.
As far as demons vs devils, I'll probably avoid it. There may be several different types, but it could be hard for outsiders to tell the differences in their beliefs. They mostly serve evil gods, so they're kind of stuck with no free will. I need to think about this further. I'm not sure how much of the whole "good vs evil vs law vs chaos" bit I want to keep. Settings like Cynosure seemed to do okay without any clear divide between good and evil.
The gods are fonts of mana. Magic pours off of them into the environment... they can't help it, it's like sweat to them. The more gods active in a given plane, the more magic there is in the environment.
Menagerie has no gods, but it has mana anyway. Many people believe that this means that Menagerie does have a god, just a hidden one. Certainly, something killed the deity Arthalcus when he took over the city.
Undisturbed, sealed areas usually have more mana than the general environment because it piles up there, unused. Thus, it's possible to "mana mine" isolated areas.
Others are sealed against magic in some fashion, creating an area which magic can't get into... without a resident deity, they simply remain dead zones where all magic must be brought in from outside. This is common in pocket dimensions and hidden realms.
A long time ago, the deity Arthalcus, having lost a struggle with his comrades on his home plane, brought his entire priesthood to Menagerie and seized control of the entire city by force. For a time, his priests ruled absolutely, and mana levels in Menagerie swelled...
Then they plunged to nothing. Arthalcus didn't manifest himself. Earthquakes rocked the city's foundations. Priests who attempted to commune with their deity had the very life sucked out of their bodies. The church fell into disarray with the survivors crying that Arthalcus was dead. They were soon cast out of power.
After a time, mana levels returned to normal once more. Certain enigmatic statements from ancient gods about Menagerie were now reinspected; it seemed likely that this was not the first time that a deity had attempted to make Menagerie their home, and not the first time that they had been destroyed. The gods still keep their distance from the city, considering it a lethal trap.
There are still a few thalks (the common, fairly derogatory term for the remaining worshippers of Arthalcus) left... most of them are a despondent lot, believing that their god is crippled or imprisoned, but will someday return. A few of the most fanatical believe that their god is dead, but that's not a good enough reason for abandoning his worship. The religion attracts the morbid and self-destructive. It has no political power or influence anymore.
So... Clerics vs Wizards...
Wizards will probably be more common. Like Planescape, I'm envisioning a city where the gods can't intervene directly even if they want to. The only deity who has true power there is the Sleeper, who doesn't have a real church anyway, since it eats religions.
But priests should be playable... I'm thinking that they'll basically be wizards whose powers depend upon specific rites, rituals and obeying prohibitions. They have the advantage that when play actually takes them back to their home plane, their powers are greatly increased. But usually they'll be reduced a bit and sometimes they'll be greatly reduced or even completely cut off by entering into an area that their deity can't reach.
Hm. Should their deity provide the mana when they cast spells, or beforehand? This is an important distinction. If they provide the mana beforehand, then a priest can go into a blocked zone and cast spells there, he just can't recover mana. A priest could also turn against his deity's wishes in an emergency, spending mana to oppose his master. And, of course, a fallen priest could keep throwing spells until he ran out.
There might not be any real difference between a mage and a priest. A priest has mana funnelled to them by their deity (who might actually disapprove of them knowing how to extract it from the environment themselves). A mage draws it from the environment via lesser spells and rituals. But on the rare occasions that a mage got the magical support of a deity, they'd be able to use that mana the same way as normal.
So then mages would have to have a skill used to recover mana... and priests might not. They just go to a holy place or cast a simple "Commune with Deity" spell and the deity recharges them appropriately. Mage replenishment would be slower and more troublesome, but at least they don't have to kowtow to some extradimensional entity for their power.
Mana might even be transferable in some fashion... making it into a kind of magical currency. You could only hold a set amount, though, and it probably wouldn't recover on its own. At least not for most races; magically potent races might recover a few points per day just for being alive.
The city is connected to the elemental plane(s) (scholars disagree over whether it's a bunch of separate planes or a single one that merges from one element to the next), so some intelligent elementals do come over and do stuff. I want to try and present them in a unique fashion, though.
Some quick brainstorming...