As important as rules are for a role-playing game, they are only the skeleton. Its the stories told using those rules that make for fun and memorable games, and every story needs a world in which to told. Whether you like to create your own worlds from scratch, have an existing setting that you want to convert, or want to start from the beginning with a brand new universe, Realm of Runes is ready and able to facilitate it all.
While the rulebook tries to keep itself as setting agnostic as possible to be inclusive to as many different settings as possible, there are always some aspects that have the sorts of mechanical implications that they must be reflected in the rules to some extent. Divine spellcasters must have their patron deities, planar travel has to take you somewhere, and creatures and ancestries do not evolve in a vacuum. Even beyond these rules constructs, when pre-written adventures for Realm of Runes are ready to go, there has to be places for those adventures to explore.
DEITIES
Perhaps the first aspect of a setting that new players experience is the deities that create and shape that universe. With two classes that always gain power from deities, and more than can opt into it through class feats or multiclassing, deific personal intervention into the lives of player characters takes place before characters even enter the world. Realm of Runes includes a pantheon of 20 new deities, ready to use, complete with inter-deity relationship dynamics and distinct personalities. If you like to make your own, or prefer to play in a pre-existing universe, the rulebook section that discusses deities contains everything you need to make sure your deities interface mechanically with those that gain divine power.
Each deity in Realm of Runes has a description, and a stat block containing important information for clerics, paladins and anyone else that follows that deity, with or without gaining power from the relationship. Realm of Runes includes 32 different domains, areas of divine influence, and most deities offer five of them to their followers. Less powerful entities might offer fewer, and the total number of domains is a good indicator of that deity's relative power compared to others. The Source and The Void, enigmatic engines of perpetual creation and destruction, offer more domains than other deity in the core pantheon.
Each deity also lists the alignments it allows for its followers. While anyone can venerate a divine being regardless of alignment, only those with an allowed alignment can gain power as a result. Some deities in the core pantheon are very choosy about who they give power to, while others don't care and give power to any that seek it. Each deity also lists its opposition alignments, which are those alignments that it has especial antipathy toward. Curiously, some deities have overlap between their allowed alignments and opposition alignments. Deities also have several signature spells, which are available as divine spells to their followers, even though those spells are not normally divine or are difficult to come by otherwise. Deities also list acts that are anathema to its ethos, and those followers that perform those acts are immediately cut off from its power. Some deities have very strict anathema conditions while others care so little for mortals that nothing you could do would take you out of their favor, such as it is.
YOUR PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE
Even if your character never leaves its home region throughout its entire career, having an idea of what else is out there helps to lend perspective on scale and stakes. The setting in Realm of Runes is a naturalistic place overall, though warped by the very real inclusion of magic. This magic leaks into reality from other planes of existence, from the elemental planes that provide the building blocks of reality to the more esoteric planes that are paradoxically formed from and have power over normally intangible aspects of reality like moral alignments. The material plane itself, despite its strange construction, is a vast universe of possibility with natural processes recognizable, yet magically stretched. Science in Realm of Runes must account for and study magic in addition to nature, but can still be used for analysis and prediction.
Despite the vastness of space, most adventures exist entirely on one "home" world that serves as a reference point and bastion of "normal life" that can be related to. For Realm of Runes, that world is Rimukyr. It's a diverse place adrift in a mostly hostile universe, and more about it will be discovered through the adventures that take place there. Next time we'll take a closer look at monster and NPC creation in Realm of Runes, and how it makes coming up with, using, and converting challenges from other systems quick and easy.
Comments