Starting a new RPG Campaign

[Korto]

Due to the irreversible and quite inarguable inability of the longest-serving player in my D&D game to make any more games, and since the campaign we were playing was pretty well centred around him (he was the prince attempting to inherit the throne over the competition of his siblings, and the other players were his henchmen), I've decided to end my long-running Middle Kingdoms world for at least a lengthy break, and start something completely different.
When I say long-running, it's probably approaching 20 years.

Anyway, I'm imagining a world that exists as a (balance? expression?) of ten different (realms? spheres? forces?). These forces consist of the six elements - earth, air, fire, water, mind, life (the last two are there because (a) I'm using an elemental magic system, and adding in mind and life gives a lot more flexibility, and (b) it allows me to use d6's instead of dCaltrops. While I don't mind the old d4, they are a bit of a pain, and not just in the foot); but also four 'lenses' - Secular, Divine, Heroic, and Fey.
The Secular lens is the scientific one, rational. Everything happens for a reason, cause and effect, technology, logic. The real world as we know it.
The Divine; gods, devils, and miracles exist. Witches and undead, with the Church the light fighting the darkness.
The Heroic is Hercules and Odysseus, Cú Chulainn and Samson. Conan. Human heroes with superhuman ability.
And the Fey is the magical realm where the rational world holds no sway at all, such as the Irish Fey realm, or the Aboriginal Dreamtime.

For the world to be stable, these ten realms orbit and interact smoothly and freely with each other, but sometimes the lenses in particular get "stuck". This is what happened some time ago (many centuries, to us)--the secular lens got stuck, slowly engulfing reality and forcing the other three further and further away. In that time, science and technology has flourished, and great advancements have been made; however, instability has set in and is growing increasingly worse.
The instability causes the elemetal forces to orbit erratically, approaching and receding more and more wildly. This, through a secular lens, gets expressed as heat waves and cold-snaps, loss of soil fertility, cancer clusters, unusually high hurricane activity, global warming, earthquakes, increasing rates of mental illness--unfortunate, but all quite explicable.
As the situation builds to a crescendo, the disasters worsen--fire storms, pandemics, famine, homicidal cults, the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts, super-tsunamis pound coastlines.
Resources vanish; for instance, large proven oil deposits peter out. With the secular lens still holding, it turns out that the original surveys of the deposit sizes were either honestly mistaken, or deliberately fraudulent. It's not all bad, new deposits get found in areas thought searched before, but somehow missed. (Mind you, new deposits are nice and all, but it takes time to set up to exploit them, and the world is reeling from the sudden loss of huge deposits of oil, coal, gas... etc, right now. All in the middle of increasingly apocalyptic disasters.)
Finally, the dam bursts, and the other three lenses appear on the scene, expressing themselves in the world. Tiny enclaves and huge swathes of the world where reality now follows different rules, depending upon the lens. This is the world the characters find themselves in.

I'm thinking of starting off using Gurps rules, with 200 point characters. The advantage of Gurps being the players can create a character from any of the lenses or elements (I've decided that an elemental character with be like a comic-book super, based on the element), so if they want to make a witchhunter, a special forces guy, or a wizard, they can. Over time, I mean to migrate them to some rpg rules I'm creating--something easy to explain in-game as reality warps and slowly changes around them. I've worked out part of the combat rules, and they seem to work well. Certainly more fun than the old D&D rules.

Going to base it in Australia. I've long felt a bit cliche and stereotypical white in that all my gaming was set in European-style settings, so I'm going to set this in Australia, god damn it. This means that a lot of the Fey will be the Dreamtime. I know very little about Dreamtime myths, but seems like a great time to learn.

I'll tell you something that amuses me though. Made my day when I thought of this. OK, post-apocalyptic world, breakdown of order and authority, oil deposits, Australia... Remind anyone of anything?

[Simon_Jester]

It's fairly easy to visualize how the world works in the parts dominated by the Secular Lens*, since it's more or less the way the world works in real life.

It's fairly easy to conceptualize how the world works in places dominated by the Fey Lens- a twisting netherworld of strange, illogical happenings where reality is the plaything of whichever entities have the strongest willpower.

But what about the Heroic Lens? Under the influence of the Heroic Lens you presumably get larger-than-life individuals worthy of mythology, who battle on behalf of human (or non-human) culture against the forces of the 'other,' whatever that other may be. Individual mettle and grit matter more than organization and technology or godlike powers and supernatural knowledge.

But how does that work, exactly? What happens when our newfound Conan strides boldly into the Fey realm? What kind of society exists in such a context? Does magic exist in the heroic realm? Do deities and miracles exist? Or do they only exist as an interaction between the Heroic Lens and the Divine Lens?

The Divine Lens is tricky too- we can easily visualize what it means in the context of Judeo-Christian religion, but what about India, where their mythology actually lends itself pretty well to a 'heroic' concept and has a rich background of heroic mythology much as ancient Greece and Rome did?
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*Capitalizing it because these are fundamental forces of the cosmos and can reasonably be thought of as proper nouns.

[Korto]

With the Heroic, I'm seeing small city-states warring amongst themselves for glory and honour (and slaves. Mustn't forget the slaves.) These city-states were originally small towns and city suburbs, before they got "translated". They have their champions, and their common soldiers. Bit of an Ancient Greece feel.
The Divine, more kind of Transylvania--black forests, lonely castles, witch-hunters, vampires, and dingoes howling in the night (we don't have wolves). Other religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would indeed pose a bit of a problem for me--I don't know much at all about them, but I don't think they're so black-v-white as the Abrahamic faiths, but it's a problem I can hopefully avoid by just not having the PCs go anywhere where the problem would arise.

Each Lens is to have its own schtick; Fey has magic, Secular has technology, Divine has miracles/faith power, and Heroic has super-human ability, and each schtick may or may not work in another lens (checked per scene and per person). I'll describe this using technology.

Technology is Secular's thing (technology here is considered to only include that using real scientific principles, and not 'magitech' or divine force of anything like that), so any technology, of any level of sophistication, will work there. Using Gurps scale, they're currently level 7 / 8, but if aliens dropped a Tech level 12 raygun, it would work just fine (note-there are no aliens. This wont happen).

The Divine is Tech Level 4 (Age of Sail, Renaissance). Anything TL 4 or less will work fine, anything higher than TL 4, then for each 'scene' you try to use the device, you have to roll 1d6+ the Tech Level (4), and roll higher than the tech level of the device. If you succeed, it will work for that scene. If you fail, it and any similar-purpose device you possess will not work at this point (for anyone).

Heroic is Bronze Age, TL 1. The Fey is Stone Age, TL 0. This makes technology a bit difficult there.
There is still a chance to use TL 7 or higher devices in these places. On a roll of a '6', you may roll again, and on a roll of 4+, you may add one to your original roll, and you may keep on trying to roll 4+ to add one for as long as you succeed (as soon as you roll less than four, rolling stops)
This effect also affects things like electronic communications passing through--radio broadcasts just vanish as soon as they hit the affected areas, fibre-optics go dead. Also, people from lower TL lenses literally cannot learn how to use higher TL devices, no matter how simple they are. Even when it doesn't make sense that they can't learn to just push the bloody button, stupid! Or maybe, even when used correctly, they just don't work.

The other three schticks are treated the same way--each lens will allow any use of its own special power, but has a varying chance of other powers working, depending upon the nature of the lens. For instance, in the Secular, superhuman powers have a reasonable chance of working (since they don't appear too outlandish), but outright magic has a really shit chance.

At least, that's how it'll work for NPCs. I had decided to inflict the same system on players, make them worry--will my gun work this time?--and think fast, but I do have a concern that might not work for the game. Having a player spend points on some great magic and then have it consistently fail on them may, strangely, not be considered fun. I may have to say that anything the players have paid character points on just works, because the players are special.
There may be other "special" people out there, too...

[Adam Reynolds]

Are you using the GURPS TL scale with the present day? Because with that system, the modern world is firmly TL8 rather than TL7/8. Some elements are even approaching TL9.

I believe old editions did have the present at TL7, but those were more than 20 years ago. In 4E TL8 started in 1980.

[Korto]

Yeah, you're right. I'll put it down to memories of the previous edition. I was actually going to check the tech levels, although that was more due to a suspicion that Gurps had underestimated the pace of progress. As it is, from their charts we're solidly TL 8, and affectionately nuzzling TL 9.
This isn't a problem. I'll keep the roll required the same as I'm not really concerned about people not being able to use their ipads, it's the guns I want to keep a lid on.