But, let’s talk about the story aspects of D&D 4E. Because that was another aspect I really loved. There was a very richly defined world in D&D 4E – in the CORE PRODUCTS – unlike any other default D&D world. Most editions of D&D take the “everything fantasy and the kitchen sink” approach and they treat all canon as equal.
That is to say, there are no REAL rules for undeath in the DEFAULT world of 3.5. World rules. There’s no explanation. Or rather, there’s hundreds of explanations. Every specific undead creature rises or gets created or whatever for its own reasons written into its lore entries. In D&D 4E, though, there’s some very specific rules and ideas that were decided pretty early on. If you look back in the preview book Worlds and Monsters, which was basically just a bunch of design essays about 4E, you’ll see that they had come up with this idea of “body, soul, and animus” that explained the different kinds of undead and why they existed. And, while it wasn’t really spelled out until the Open Grave supplement, all the core undead monsters (and necromantic) fit together consistently. You could piece together some of the rules if you really wanted to.
Demons and devils had specific origins that informed how they worked. Demons were elemental beings, corrupted by a seed of pure evil to become purely destructive. Devils were the servants of a dead god, mysteriously forgotten, who followed the rebellious angel Asmodeus. Of course, humanity lacks a creator god, but is very prone to corruption by Asmodeus, as we see in the origin of the tiefling race. So, which god got killed by Asmodeus? Was it maybe the patron of humanity? And are humans prone to corruption because that god was a god of ambition whose angels themselves got a little too ambitious?
There are hints of ancient wizarding orders and tactical schools sprinkled throughout the rules, details that implied a backstory that never fully got shared. And that was to its credit. Because a creative, world-building GM could take those hooks and fill in the backstory their own way. Those details were all consistent with SOMETHING, but we didn’t know what. But whatever we filled in the blanks with, it would create a consistently detailed world.
The idea of a world with a backstory and an origin story and very specific details is nothing new. But the idea of only sharing bits and pieces of the backstory to create blanks in the world so the GM can create a consistent backstory, I think that’s brilliant. I’m not sure if that’s what they intended. I think they only wanted to make sure the details of the game were consistent NOT JUST mechanically BUT ALSO thematically. But it became a sort of lore treasure hunt. It rewarded buying all the books because each offered more glimpses of the true story of the world.
In fact, I got SO ATTACHED to my own answer to all of those questions about the backstory of the world that, for the first time, I used the default D&D setting exclusively and built up my own lore around it. In fact, that’s the world I STILL run my games in. My current D&D game is set in the same world that I built out of the 4E lore.
Compared to that – and I hate to say this – 5E feels really soulless. In terms of world lore built into the core of the game, 5E is sparser than 3E. There’s no real sense of world in the books beyond what is required to describe characters. That is, we know what the races and classes are. And that’s it. There aren’t even gods in the book. Just a spreadsheet in the appendix. How sad.
