The birth of a new campaign

[Orius]

Well, I've been wavering for a while between revamping my old 3e campaign and coming up with a new one. I'd alternate between dragging my old campaign notes out, thinking of how to redo some elements of it and just creating stuff for a new campaign.

With 4e coming out, I think I'll just build the new campaign instead. Some of the stuff I've been reading sounds like some of the ideas I've been working on, though a lot of my ideas are based on elements not just from 3e, but 2e and older editions as well as lots of different things that inspired the game back in the old days. One thing in particular that made me start coming up with a new campaign is that my previous campaign, although strong, was rooted a bit too strongly in real world cultures and it was starting to stifle my creativity. What I really want is a campaign world that feels more like the old pulp fantasy fiction that inspired much of the early game, and I want to be able to stick stuff in from books, movies, video games and the like that just look or feel cool. I really felt like I couldn't do that in my old game.

Anyway, my old campaign was pretty good though, and I recycled some parts of its history and most of its pantheon. I added in some material from a campaign I ran back in the 2e days that was definitely more rough edged, but I like the ideas and now that I have more experience, I can put things together better.

 

[Orius]

I'm going to start out with the history I've fleshed out. Much of it is pretty much recycled from older campaigns, and there's plenty of stuff that's liberally ripped off from older D&D material. Basically, I'm taking the game's internal mythology and putting my own interpretation on it for my particular world. I'm starting with primordial history.

The Eldest Age

The Eldest Age begins with the birth of the Elder Gods. The Elder Gods are beings of the Far Realm, and the create the multiverse in a pocket of the Far Realm. They start by separating the Inner Planes and then craft the Material Plane out of their essense.

The main Elder Gods:

The Ouroboris: a mighty serpentine entity of great power. He (she? it?)'s pretty central to the cosmology, and there's more below.

Tharizdun: yeah, I pretty much ripped him off from Greyhawk, always thought he was cool, but I'm putting my own spin on things. He's sort of the origin of evil, or more accurately everything that's wrong with the multiverse. He always causes trouble for the other Elder Gods, and when something goes wrong, they blame him for it. He never accepts blame or denies responsibility for anything, and enjoys being blamed for something even when it's not his doing. The mad and crazed cultists of the campaign worship him.

The Lady of Pain: placed in this category for the times I might want to use the old Planescape material, but she might get dropped with the 4e cosmology, should I choose to follow it.

Panzuriel: I never really payed much attention to him in Monster Mythology, until I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. I'm sure everyone sees where I'm going with this; he's going to be used as a rather blatant rip-off of Davey Jones, as an evil primordial sea god that uses the creatures of the deep and pirate zombies as his minions.

Other Elder Gods are basically the deities of many cold-blooded and invertebrate D&D races: Ilsensine, the Great Mother, Blibdoolpoolp, Juiblex, etc. There are also undefined dead gods in the category as well.

 

[Orius]

The History of the Elder Age:

After the world is created, the Ouroboris creates the rules of the Language Primeval, the source of magic, and uses it to become the ruler of the Elder Gods. The other Elder Gods people the world with the Elder Races: the illithids, beholders, kuo-toa, lizardfolk, yuan-ti, and other similar races. There are a number of Elder Races which are either now extinct or forgotten (or both).

As a joke, one of the Elder Gods creates humans. Some say humans were made to mock the powerful races made by the gods as their favorites. Others say instead that Tharizdun secretly created humans as part of some devious plot. Whatever the truth, the gods are not amused, and the Elder Races quickly enslave humans.

As the Elder Races develop and grow, their beliefs cause the Outer Planes to coalesce, and the concepts of good, evil, chaos, and law emerge. New races are born on these Outer Planes, the guardinals stride out of the mists of Elysium, Primus arises on Mechanus and shapes the modrons, the Spawning Stone is spat out of the choas of Limbo and produces the slaadi, and a dark power creates the baern in the Grey Waste (many believe Tharizdun is responsible).

Almost immediately, conflict among the alignments erupts, and new Outer Planes emerge, birthing their own races. Dismayed by this conflict, the Ouroboris creates the rilmani to restore harmony. Meanwhile, the baern purge the law and chaos tainting the early yugoloths, and placing these taints into larvae, drive them into Baator and the Abyss.

The rilmani fail to stabilize the alignments and the Ouroboris fragments into seperate beings: Jazirian, Asmodeus, Merrshalk, and (an unnamed entity of chaotic good alignment). The remaining portion of the Ouroboris' original essense becomes the Serpent, the master of the secrets of the Language Primeval, and sometimes seen as the source of all magic.

Asmodeus falls into ancient Baator, and forms the Nine Hells. He immediately plots to take back control of the multiverse and forms the devil races of the baatezu from the law-tained larvae to serve as his minions. The original inhabitats of Baator are brutally dominated by the baatezu.

Then many wars erupt anong the Elder Gods, the Elder Races, and the races of the planes. Some of these wars have names that will log be part of the most ancient legends: the Blood War, Gith's Rebellion, and the Vaati's war against the Queen of Chaos and Mishka the Wolf-Spider.

These wars destroy the civilizations of the Elder Races. Some of the races are destroyed, while others never recover and decline. Some races are pushed out of the Material Plane to remote parts of the multivarse, while others retreat to the Underdark. Humans begin to evolve into many of the new humanoid races, since many of them were warped by alien magics or science. The Elder Age ends.

Yeah, a lot of this is pretty much adapted from old-school D&D, but I want to make sure the traditional background is there and woven together into a cohesive whole, rather than the original piecemeal ideas it came from.