Subsystems
Death
In the crossroads setting, death and revival follows slightly different rules. When a living creature dies, its soul leaves the body and moves to the spirit world, which is described in detail below. While on the spirit world, the soul can choose to pass to the Beyond, a mysterious afterlife that no soul returns from, at any time. The soul can remain on the spirit world for a number of days equal to its hit dice, during which time it can be returned to the body. When this time limit runs out, it must make a will save (DC 20) or pass on immediately. If the soul remains on the spirit world after the time period, it becomes a permanent resident, and can no longer be revived. To be revived, a creature’s body must be recovered or recreated, then healed of all hit point damage and all ability damage: only then can the soul be called back to the body and returned to life. Some higher-level spells allow the entire process to be completed as a single action.
Flight
In the crossroads setting, there is no player-available flight, due to the obvious, immediate, and completely unpredictable changes that flight would make in areas of battle, travel, exploration, and dozens of other areas. There are no spells that grant flight on any spell lists in the crossroads world. There are animals and monsters that can fly and some may even be able to carry a human’s weight, but they are universally unsuitable for training or domestication, being either too unintelligent to follow commands, impossible to restrain or contain, or simply too aggressive and dangerous to work with. Magic Magic in the crossroads setting is significantly different than the magic of other worlds. For the most part, it works the same, but many spells are different, absent, or interact differently with the world. A full version of the modified spell lists will be described in the Player Options post, but there are a few overarching changes that those who use the system should be aware of.
Teleportation
The usual spells that allow characters to teleport instantly from one location to another one some extreme distance away do not exist in the crossroads setting, as they would dramatically alter a wide variety of areas. Instead, there are spots called ‘Links’, temporary places that can be opened by spellcasters to allow them (and relatively small numbers of travelers) to move through them to a set end-point. Links are one-way only, they only appear for relatively short periods of time, and they can sometimes drop you somewhere unexpected. Links are organized into networks known as ‘spirals’, which occupy distinct geographical areas, graphed around the central ‘nexus’ link by how easy they are to open, how frequently they appear, and how common they are. There’s only one nexus link in each spiral, which is the easiest to use and the most frequently activating, whereas there are a handful of ‘first ring’ links, which are slightly harder to use and slightly less often active. Links become more common, more difficult to use, and more infrequently active as the link’s ring number increases, until only the most powerful spellcasters can make use of 5th-ring links. Typically links open to some other point in the same spiral, though as the ring number increases, they are more likely to take you somewhere else.
Communication
Almost all long-distance instant communication spells have been removed, and there are no longer spells that allow you to freely communicate regardless of language barriers. Long-distance communication has a variety of implications on the world as a whole, allowing for news to travel instantly, commanders to change orders on the fly, and makes it impossible to intercept many of the most important messages. As such, they have too much potential to drastically alter the course of history, and have been removed. There are some spells that allow you to speak new languages for a certain period of time, or to communicate directly with another person without needing to speak, but being able to totally ignore language barriers makes first-contact situations much too easy