Friday, January 27, 2012

Unfocused Thoughts on Uz

I've been trying to coalesce a few Uz related thoughts into a coherent post.  I've failed, so I'm going to do what I always do when I fail at that...
  • What the Dark Country is to Doom Metal, Uz is to Space Rock.
  • Uz takes place in Earth's very very very distant future.  Some of the humanoids (morlocks, deros, etc.) are degenerate humans.  Others (reptoids, greys, etc.) are the remnants of alien invasions that succeeded and failed at various points in the planets past.
  • The biggest influences are: HPL, CAS (particularly the Zothique cycle, Atomic Horror movies, Coast to Coast AM, and the Old Testament. 
  • I need to go back and remake the Priest class.  I still like the idea of them mutating hideously as they get higher in level, but I'm not sure how big to make there spell lists.  I'm also not sure if I should make different spell lists for each god or one big one they all draw from.
  • If I can nail down Priests good enough, then I'll probably get rid of MUs.  That'd mean there would only be three character types: Fighter, Specialist, and Priest.
  • No demi-human characters.  Well... maybe Reptoids.  That would be kinda cool.
  • Psionics and tech stuff taken from Carcosa.  Also a bunch of monsters.
  • No magic items, just ray guns.
  • No alignment.  Hell, there won't really be any metaphysical forces at all.  "Gods" are killable (with probably only like 15 - 20 HD) super-aliens who have strong enough psionic powers to give mortal spells.  Theres probably really powerful ones like Azathoth, but most are what CoC would classify as Great Old Ones, and pretty weak ones too.
  • Two types of ruins/dungeon: high tech and low tech.  Low tech ruins are structures that became ruined after the deluge.  High tech ruins usually became ruined before the deluge, but some priests/sorcerers/whatever that survived the flood remembered crazy super-magic-science long enough to pass it on to other enterprising young demons.
  • Gods are Moloch (a sentient patch of radiation), Dagon (exactly what it sounds like), Mot (mass of swirling, decaying flesh with awful Ghoul Priests), Kothar (Yog-Sothoth in a disconcerting, humanoid form), and a few others.  I want to include Lilith, but I'm not sure how to treat her yet.
  • The Sun has turned a deep shade of red.  Most of the world is desert with rain forests trapped in little valleys.
That's it for now.  I might post more later on this crap later.


7 comments:

  1. "Priest class. .. mutating hideously as they get higher in level"

    This is 100% full-on badass.

    Also, check out Gene Wolfe's New Sun books.

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  2. Lilth is the Reptoid Queen, obvs.

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  3. Uz? Where are the (RQ) Dark trolls?

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  4. What Job as in biblical Job? Didn't know that. Makes Dark Trolls even funnier then.

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  5. I second Michael's recommendation - Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is full of little bits that could fit in well with your random thoughts. Hell, I submit that Wolfe has something for every campaign.

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  6. In addition to +1ing the Wolfe recommendation, I really feel like The Night Land would be great inspiration for this sort of thing.

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