Hi,
I got Nyambe after learning that it connected to Northern Crown. I like what I have read so far (especially the N'anga clerics and their farasi activities) but had a few mechanical concerns. When used with Northern Crown, would the Nyambe cultures need specific culture bonuses to be balanced with cultures in Northern Crown? What would be the reccommended bonuses for each culture?
On the spellcasting Prestige classes, would it be unbalancing to let levels in the PrC count as caster levels and spells per day for their old core classes like other spellcasting classes do? Or letting the levels stack for caster level related effects only?
Hi there. Doug and Chris may want to speak up, but as the editor of both Northern Crown and Nyambe I thought I'd put in my 2 cents ...
Doug and I actually talked about game balance between NC and Nyambe when we introduced the culture bonuses ... part of the design of NC required that Nyamban elements be compatible with it, without making any changes to Nyambe's mechanics or setting. We both felt that things like Sanguar made the Nyamban classes able to stand up to the culture bonuses, should a Nyamban somehow find himself in NC.
That said, Cimarrons DO have culture bonuses. If you feel you'd like to add them to Nyamban characters, the Cimarron entry on page 26 of New World Adventures is a good place to start. Anything that balances with that should work fine.
As for prestige classes, I've seen lots of them that advance or stack with levels in a previous spellcasting core class, but I don't think I've seen any core classes that specifically say that levels in spellcasting prestige classes count for core class effects, unless it specifically says something like "all arcane spellcasting levels" or something. I'd think it would be unbalancing, but this is probably a question to ask someone at www.wizards.com . Good luck!
I would just add that if native Nyambans came to Northern Crown in search of adventure, I don't think that lack of a culture bonus would put them at a particular disadvantage, but with a little effort, you could come up with a set of culture bonuses for each Nyamban ethnic group described in African Adventures. Chris already has appropriate classes and appropriate feats listed for each culture, so half the work would be done for you!
Doug, I had some questions for using the book in NC.
Would you use the demi humans in Nyambe? What about the map? Would you use the IRL map of Africa and "place" the Nyambe map around the Sahara? Where are most of the Uropan slavers raiding Nyambe at?
For a Northern Crown campaign, I would flip Nyambe around to orient it like the real Africa. I imagine the Nyambe of Chris Dolunt's book to be in the distant past compared to the time NC is set in. In the meantime, most of the demihumans in Nyambe, just as in Uropa, have retreated, gone underground, or just vanished, leaving only legends. Just as there are still dwarves and gnomes hiding in remote regions of Uropa, you could probably find demihumans in Nyambe if you looked hard enough, but they wouldn't be PC races anymore.
As for Uropan slavers, Bashar'ka and Taumau-Boha were hardest hit. The Nyambans have banded together to defend against the slavers, but occasional raids are still made against isolated coastal settlements. I don't think there are any "slave castles" or other permanent Uropan settlements on the Nyamban coast as there were in west Africa during the analogous period in our history.
Northern Crown characters who travel to Nyambe will probably come as diplomats, scientists, and treasure-seekers. I can think of tons of possible adventure ideas:
--capturing a legendary cameleopard (giraffe) and bringing it back to the zoological gardens at Sophia (this would work for any Nyamban creature)
--making a transect across the continent sheerly for purposes of exploration
--looking for "lost" cities in the true H. Rider Haggard/ER Burroughs tradition
After reading this thread yesterday, I played some SW and imagined how cool the game would be with nowadays technology, and the sticky bombs were the first thing that came to my mind .
