Discover Your destiny. Become a Legend.

I am looking at making a Setting Ruleset for the world of the Eragon book series, Alagaesia. I would like to see if anyone is interested in this setting and would like to help, play, GM or otherwise. I have a very busy life with kids and travel ball sports, so I will GM, but only have time to run games in PbP forums such as RPoL , RPGCrossing , MythWeavers , Gamersplane, Discord, etc. Mainly I use RPoL, because I was one of the early adopters of that forum.

The original book:
Fifteen-year-old Eragon believes that he is merely a poor farm boy- until his destiny as a Dragon Rider is revealed. Gifted with only an ancient sword, a loyal dragon, and sage advice from an old storyteller, Eragon is soon swept into a dangerous tapestry of magic, glory, and power. Now his choices could save - or destroy- the Empire..

This setting will take place 200 years past the age of Eragon (as it is called in this time period). This will allow for mention of the original characters, but provide all new ones and plenty of new adventures.

Can I help? I've thought about Eragon as a setting as well, and I love tinkering with Genesys. I'd love to help playtest, too. I have zero experience with PBP games, but I'm willing to give it a shot! 😃

What are your plans for the magic system? Talents for each new word a character learns? Or would learning the language be a separate skill, and you'd need the magic skill on top of that? I'm thinking the silver palm mark could be treated as an implement in Terrinoth, with its effects either chosen by player/GM at creation, or it could be based on the color of your dragon? Maybe ranks in a talent that increases your bond with your dragon adds an additional effect slot to the mark? I'm just typing off the top of my head. I look forward to seeing where you go with this!

Of course you can help. I am on vacation at Universal Studios in Orlando. I'll be able dive back into game creation after this weekend.

As far as play by post, the way I compare it is tabletop RPG is like doing a play, playing by post is more like co-writing a novel.

I have been reviewing information for a bit and have thought about magic and classes. I don't like the whole idea in Genesys 'you can only be one class', since that would make Dragon Riders have to be that class from the beginning. Normally they could be very old, someone like Arya didn't become a dragon rider until she was much older (I think hundred years or so if I recall correctly). She was pretty much and elven battle wizard up to the point she became a Dragon Rider. Roran was an apprentice blacksmith, etc. Eragon was an apprentice hunter, and then learned to become a dragon rider.

I am contemplating to allow multiple classes, with separate trees. An additional tree will be expensive as far as XP is concerned. The other option I see is to have something like a latent Dragon Rider class, where you can choose a couple of additional class skills for a sub-class skills to be included). Basically no talent tree for sub-class, just 3 sub-class skills.

As far as magic, I would like to keep it similar to the Alternate Rules listed, but we will have some limitations. Like you have to have a class that has arcane magic (we could probably name that Ancient Magic skill) and knowledge (ancient language) to be able to use magic. Both wizards and dragon riders would use this. They can get talents (Stored magic energy) so they can put energy into objects, like rings, necklaces, etc. and draw strain from those sources without taxing their own and make it use expensive materials (flawless diamonds, rubies, emeralds, etc.) and the more expensive it has, the more stored energy (in the form of strain points) that object can hold. The talent for accessing stored energy would be at a lower tier than actually the ability to store that energy which would be more difficult. So earlier levels they can inherit items that already has stored energy, but it will be much harder to store their own (and expensive as previously mentioned).

Also way up the tier line for talents (I would say 3 or 4) could be using other energy from surroundings to take strain for certain arcane spells that are more powerful. Such as what Eragon learned and used small life & plants and took their energy to cast certain spells. Use of an eldunari would be tier 5, and have to have one given to them or they find one (extremely rare) and have to successfully convince the eldunari's dragon spirit to bond.

The other thing we need to think about is dragons. Do we make them separate characters with another class, or just very powerful NPC's? Maybe allow both.. but would be alot more for a GM to handle such a character.

I've thought about these things as well, but I believe there are some solutions.

1) As far as classes/skills go, we can just make that a Talent. RoT provides several talents that serve as "multi-class" talents. Templar is a tier 1 talent that lets a PC add Divine as a career skill and cast one-spell per encounter with it. Bard is tier 2 and adds Knowledge (Lore) and Verse as career skills. Runic Lore adds Knowledge (Lore) and Runes. There is even Templar (Improved) at tier 2 which removes a setback for wearing heavy armor while casting. I think that a series of tiered or dependent talents (must have X talent to purchase Y talent) would allow smooth character progression without adding another set of mechanics to the game (talent trees).

2) I really like your ideas for magic! Tier 2 talent, call it Silver Palm or something like that, gives a PC Ancient Magic and Knowledge (Ancient Language) as career skills. Maybe create a series of talent to learn some words that add powerful effects to spells? I dunno. Learning new words is a pretty narrative thing, so the GM could just decide to hand out a new word that allows a player to add new effects to their spells. You could just tell the players they start with the basic spells as listed in the GCRB, no added effects. Then, you can let them learn Brisngr and they're able to add Burn and Blast to their Attack spell. It depends on how much control you want over power levels and how expensive you want it to be to become a well-rounded magic user.

If you create a career for Dragon Rider you could just start with the appropriate skills, but be someone whose dragon was slain, and now you long to find another egg to choose you.

I LOVE your idea for the talents to offset strain use, but I think maybe make both drawing and storing strain Tier 4, and you must purchase drawing strain first. This ensures that it will be a while before they can have both talents, as well as makes sure that it isn't one of the first talents a player goes to once they've earned 50 XP. That's only 3-4 sessions of play.

3) As for Dragons, I think we can make all of that the PC's problem to manage by making them mounts. It's an NPC, but one controlled by the player. They worry about the stat block, buy gear, decide on whether to take talents/ranks in skills (Bonded as a career skill, maybe? Put it with the social skills?) The talents can be ones the player buys, the dragon doesn't need their own tree, since dragon and rider are so closely linked with one another. There some example stat blocks of mounts (even a flying mount!) on pages 104-105 in RoT.

A character's career doesn't change, because narratively it's tied to their background and where they've been in life already. Talents like Templar just expand their career skills to reflect their growth as a character. It's become easier to learn these skills because of the kind of person they've developed into and the way they've learned to think/study/react. Any further label you decide to apply is fine, but mechanically is unimportant.

I approve of the idea to make casting at further ranges cost more strain. That's so appropriate for the setting! My only concern regarding tying skill ranks to effects is that might encourage a player to immediately max out that stat, but the nature of this system kind of discourages min-max playing anyway, so maybe it'll fine.

As for Dragon Rider talents, I don't think you need to split XP or even add XP. Again, working off RoT: every player starts the game with a Heroic Ability that they can upgrade as their characters gain XP with Ability Points. They gain 1 point for every 50 XP earned. You could do something similar for the Dragon Mounts. The player then gets to decide if they spend the point on being able to have their dragon learn a new attack (1 point), or increase in size (1 point per level of silhouette). They can get some abilities quickly, but if they really want raw power they have to save those points. I highly encourage you to grab a copy of RoT. It has a LOT of mechanics specific to fantasy settings crammed into a relatively small number of pages. Most of the book is devoted to the lore of the setting and NPC stats, but the rules create great guidelines for building more powerful characters and abilities with relatively small additions to the rules.

I downloaded something from the forums which discusses Heroic abilities pretty well. I can't afford to by another product for now, so I will just have to wing it. I may have Christmas money left over, but not sure I want to cough up $25 just for a new rule or two. I don't want to outright copy everything anyway so I'm sure we can manage something similar. I do like the Heroic Ability for High Fantasy, which Eragon series is definitely that.

Basically Heroic Ability for Dragon Riders, is... bonding with the dragon. Then add to that powers for the dragon at each 50 XP. I like it, that will even out when others that play and decide to become straight wizards, warriors, etc. can have some heroic abilities of their own and be able to take some of the spot light with those. It is basically Signature abilities from SW FFG books, but you can get them a little earlier for a very basic version of the power. Is there a cost to the Heroic ability or is it available at character creation? I like the idea of doing the basic one at character creation so they have a reason to go on epic adventures in the first place.

My concern is that seems limiting the dragon as in the books they grew and could fight on their own quite well. Saphira grew and gained abilities, and prowess (skills) in fighting, flying, etc. There wouldn't be any of that without having skill increases, etc. I don't see how Heroic Abilities could cover all that, especially if it is just spent on growing in size. If the Dragon Rider spent XP to increase skills of his dragon, then if he was caught without his dragon he would be vulnerable because he spent XP for the dragon.

Unless we just have them play the bonded dragon and fast forward until the dragon is fully grown and has the size, skills, and powers of a full dragon. I really wish to avoid that, because that would limit the story to prevent running an apprentice dragon rider with a young dragon and going on some quests before they are fully grown.

I am a fan of starting out the characters before they are fully developed and have them grow into their characters as they grow in power. It is a big problem in PBP, if you start out with fully developed characters and didn't go through conflicts and setbacks first, the players don't feel invested in their character. Games like those fizzle quickly, but I find long running campaigns start off lower level/power characters and develop them into fully rich characters that have deep foundations and real memories of past events that the players & GM have had a hand in.

I will try and work on putting some of this into a setting sheet, and character class for dragon rider as as rough draft with costs and everything and look at what it would cost for the options.

• Knowledge: Ancient Language [Int] - This is the language used to bind magic in order to access it without the dangerous use of thoughts only. Knowing the true names of objects and people in the Ancient Language gives power over them. This ability has to be either taught with someone with knowledge of the Ancient Language with a higher rank than the character acquiring the skill, or found through means of a tome, spirit, scroll, etc. (all of them are rare). Characters get [1 boost] die to their Ancient Magic skill check for each rank of this skill.
• Magic (Ancient) [Int] - Also called Gramarye in the Ancient Language. This allows the character to cast spell-like abilities from the Ancient Language. Requirements : Character must have the same rank with Knowledge: Ancient Language skill that he is attempting to purchase. i.e. if character wants to have 1 rank in Magic(Ancient) he must already have 1 rank of Knowledge: Ancient Language skill . To get rank 2 he needs to already have rank to in Knowledge: AL.
• Magic (Spirit) [Int] - This is the magic used to access or summon spirits to be controlled by certain Sorcerers or desperate Wizards. Summoning a spirit that the user can't control will result in the character becoming a Shade .
• Mental Shielding [Wil] - This skill is used to shield your mind from Arcane mental probing or attacks.
• Telepathy (Wil) - This skill is used to project or connect with another being or creature's mind. Requirements: At least one rank in Knowledge: Ancient Language, and

• Dragon Rider Initiate - [ Tier 2 ] This allows a character to become a Dragon Rider. Pre-req: Dragon Bond Heroic ability. Benefit : Gain class skills for Riding, Magic (Ancient), and Knowledge: Ancient Language.
• Use Stored Magic - [ Tier 2 ] This allows a character to use energy stored in gemstones that transferred their magic energy into an appropriate container. Pre-Req: Magic (Ancient) skill, flawless gemstone or object that can contain life/magic energy. Benefit: Character can used stored energy points from an energy vessel, instead of taking strain. Once the energy points are depleted, character will take strain normally.
• Transfer Magic Energy - [ Tier 4 ] This allows a character to store some of their energy into a vessel of some sort, usually very expensive gemstones. Pre-Req: Magic (Ancient) skill
• Mental Control - [ Tier 3 ] This talent allows a character to access the mind of another creature or species and allows him to control the targets thoughts, and actions. pre-req : character must have at least 1 rank in Mental Shielding and Telepathy skills.
• Herbalist - [ Tier 2 ] This talent allows characters to gain Medicine and Alchemy as career skills.
• Dragon Sight - [ Tier 2 ] Allows the character to see with the vision of his bonded dragon, giving him better sight, increased range and able to see in darkness and obscuring conditions. Pre-req: Bonded dragon.
• Wards - [ Tier 3 ] This allows the character to create an invisible force field around a character or object that protects them by increasing the difficulty of incoming attacks. Requirements : Magic (Ancient)

• Basic ability: They gain a dragon mount/companion, and gains Telepathy as a class skill due to the ability to make a mental connection with their dragon. The dragon begins as a silhouette 1 creature, See Dragon Hatchling in Species and Creatures section. The shining palm ability is gained and this gives the character [1 boost die] when using the Magic (Ancient) skill.
• Improved (1 ability point cost): The character's dragon mount grows in size and power. See Young Dragon in Species and Creatures section.
• Supreme (2 ability point cost): The character's bonded dragon grows again in size and power. See Adult Dragon in Species and Creatures section.

• Empathic Bond - This ability grants the character the ability to detect the emotional state of a specific creature permanently, over a limited distance.

Heroic abilities are standard at character creation in Terrinoth, so there's no cost. The intent is to make the character feel unique and epic at the beginning of play. It costs 2 story points to activate, and it can only be used once per session, although some abilities have some passive benefits (Signature Weapon, for example, operates very differently from most of the abilities).

On 12/5/2018 at 10:40 AM, gm_ordon said:

My concern i  s that seems limiting the dragon as in the books they grew and could fight on their own quite well. Saphira grew and gained abilities, and prowess (skills) in fighting, flying, etc. There wouldn't be any of that without having skill increases, etc. I don't see how Heroic Abilities could cover all that, especially if it is just spent on growing in size. If the Dragon Rider spent XP to increase skills of his dragon, then if he was caught without his dragon he would be vulnerable because he spent XP for the dragon.

This is your setting, so whichever way you decide to handle the progression of dragons' power levels is up to you. My focus is on trying to make things easier to manage from a GM/Player perspective, so I'm less worried about being 100% faithful to the flavor of the source material. If it doesn't seem right to you, go with what you think will work best. My thought was that the upgrades for Silhouette would change the stat block for the dragon. Possibly other upgrades could increase some stats as well. Tying their magic casting trait (I'd go with Cunning for dragons, or maybe Presence since it seems instinctive for them as opposed to something they learn to do) to an upgrade, or any ability score increase to an upgrade, would be an easy way to model the dragon's growth. More XP means more time spent playing, which means more time has passed narratively, and 50 XP is only 3-4 sessions of 4-6 hours. So it's not like the amount of time the player has to wait for these bonuses is going to feel like it's taking forever. That's like 3-4 chapters of a book, or episodes of a TV show, to my way of thinking. I forget though, that you're planning on doing mostly PBP. That can make things feel like it's taking longer.

So again, your setting: your decision. I'm just offering ideas. I promise I'm not going to be upset over a disagreement on how to model things. I just really enjoy thinking about and playing with the tools in Genesys. I'm getting a huge kick out of this whether you take my ideas or not!

I like the setting sheet so far! I have been wondering about other careers aside from Dragon Riders. The only other careers I can think of specific to the setting are Herbalist and maybe Hunter/Tracker? I think the rest of the careers would be more generic fantasy careers (wizard, knight, commoner, etc.). What are your thoughts?

I was going to try and share a screengrab of some of the Heroic Abilities stuff, but I'm having trouble with the file attachment system on here. What's your e-mail?

[email protected]

Sorry I haven't sent that e-mail. I've been working a lot of overtime lately. I did find a few minutes to send you an early Christmas present, though! You should have gotten an e-mail from DriveThruRPG .com. Hope you like it!

Also, have you seen this thread? Click on the "replied to".

Hey, thanks. That was a very nice gift! I've been reading through a bunch of it, especially with the new talents, skills, and races. I can use some of those talents as a guideline for the ones we create for WoA. I haven't delved too deeply, I had dental surgery Thursday afternoon. Still having some pain from that, they had to pull a tooth as well as part of it. I thought my jaw was going to break before the tooth came out.

You mentioned other classes. I believe Wizard will be very similar to others just using Ancient Magic & Knowledge: Ancient Language. Herbalist, Potion making (more of a talent that a profession), Blacksmith, Arcane Warrior, Scout, Aristocrat, etc. Just thinking off the top of my head.

I am thinking of adding an special talent for Elves, so that they can get Ancient Magic & Knowledge: Ancient Language as class skills or just give them that as their racial bonus & lower the starting XP. Since all elves from Elysmira all learn the ancient language from a very young age, they should have them as class skills.

Races will be Dwarves, Elves, Human, Urgals, Kull (NPC only), Werefolk. I don't really remember any others that were considered intelligent from the books.

Can you think of specific classes & races I didn't list?

Glad you liked it! I can't think of any other races, but it has been a long time since I last read the series. I should start reading back through it to refresh it in my memory. I had completely forgotten about the werecats! It's just so long and I work a lot. I'm a Registered Nurse at a local hospital, and I've been working four 12 hour shifts almost every week. The overtime helps with paying off loans, but man am I tired!

I agree with you about the elves. Maybe instead of having Knowledge (Ancient Language) and Ancient Magic as career skills, they can just start with a rank in each? That way they don't get career skills for free (-5 XP cost for each rank), but they do have the ability to use the skills even if their career is something different.

Sorry to hear about the tooth extraction! That hurts. Hope your jaw calms down soon! 🤕

I get why you want to give Urgal a starting Brawn of 4, but it makes maxing out the brawn trivial at character creation with plenty of XP left over to play with. Any other species/archetype capable of maxing out a stat would basically have to max out the starting XP to do it.

I have to agree with @kaosoe . What you have for the Urgal right now is fine for a Rival, but isn't balanced for a PC. If you decide to keep the 4 (which is appropriately balanced with two characterstics of 1) then the starting XP needs to be lower, and maybe a negative racial ability or two, like automatic setback on all social checks. Going by my memory of the GCRB recommendations, the starting XP for the Urgal should be closer to 60 or 70 with what you've got now. The flavor is perfect, though! 👍🏻

Yes, I was thinking that most people would be reluctant to play the species, but that was probably too much. I appreciate the feedback! I just kind of eyeballed it without really doing a balance with XP.

The Urgals are dislked by most races of society, so that would be a negative. I moved back to 3 brawn, gave them more XP and offset their talent with setback die to social checks and gave them 110 XP. When I do the Kull race, I will use the 4 brawn since they will be NPC Rivals. Probably give them intimidating which will add a boost die to Coercion skill checks. I also had the Elf template a little to high in XP, bringing them down to 75 due to the extra 3 in Intellect.

I updated the Setting Worksheet post to include new skills, talents and added Major Classes category for this setting. Please review and let me know what you think. This is just a starting list and not a finished product. I will add some of the talents from Realms of Terrinoth as an option for those that have that setting.

I would love to help, growing up it was one of my favorite series! Where is the Setting worksheet as I've been unable to find it?

Welcome! The more help the better. It is the 9th post of this thread. I don't see a way to link to specific posts, so unless someone has a way to do that, just start on page one and page down until the 9th post. I'm working on getting it close enough for a beta PBP test. Though, slowing down with other things going on like buying Christmas presents and wrapping, etc.

Feel free to submit talents/classes/skills/NPC adversaries/species/etc. you would like to see in this setting or suggest changes/modifications to anything I've posted. I actually do listen and weigh on everyone's input. Especially help on the Magic system of use the Ancient Language. That still requires a bit of more thought to iron it out.

Actually, I find making characters can be the most productive way to actually get the rules hammered out. Talking about it and actually putting into a viable character, at least for me, really gets me to put everything together in my head. We could probably make some characters now, as beginning level, and then use them in a play test.

I've added additional dragons, specifically for Dragon Rider to the Species and Creatures post. The Heroic Ability - Dragon Bonding will start with the Dragon Hatchling . Then you can use an ability point (1 ability point is award for each 50xp awarded) for the bonded dragon to grow in size and abilities. For Improved version, he will become a Young Dragon , and then for the next purchase the bonded dragon will be an Adult Dragon . There will be other Heroic abilities added to the dragon, and can be taken for any stage of the dragon..

Dragon Sight (where the Dragon Rider can see through the prism of his bonded dragon's sight). The mechanical benefit gained is still up for debate. Probably remove up to 1 setback for perception checks for environmental effects (darkness, light cover, smoke, etc.), and upgrade a perception check once when used (with the usually 2 story point spend) until the next round. That's my initial thought for that one.

Other upgrades will be likely to upgrade potency, range for fiery breath, increase damage for claw attacks, etc. each costing an ability point. Hmm, I guess I didn't add bite attacks and tail attack to the list.. I'll have to fix that as well. I'll make the claw, a claw and bite attack to make it easier, and the tail attack will be separate (probably tail (Brawl, Damage [various based on dragon stage 5-7], Critical 4, Range [Engaged], Disorient [2 to 3 based on stage], Knockdown at young adult and Adult dragon stage)

Here is more details on the WoA specific talents.. I'm sure we will end up adding more as we go, but this is a good start. I'm working on trying to make a character or three to test.