D&D General Let's Share Our Alternate Lore

[cbwjm]

For my world I have a mythic age which had elemental, giant, and dragons living on a world of elemental power and eventually going to war. They crafted their footsoldiers: genasi, giant-kin, and dragonborn to fight in this three way war. After an age of fighting, the gods arrived. They cast the elementals and their primordial rulers back to the elemental planes; banished their divine children, the titan rulers of the giants to a prison plane; and sent the elder dragons to sleep beneath the earth. It should be noted that the gods could be matched by the more powerful rulers, but the constant war weakened them allowing the gods to remove them.

I don't use a set timeline, I just use roughly defined ages like Mythic Age, and Recent History.

The gods live in the upper planes much like in 4e and are all served by angels no matter their alignment. They brought divine magic with them (though their titan children, still trapped are learning to tap into this power and grant it to their remaining followers, who knows what will happen next - I have literally no idea). I have my own pantheon which are, I think, 15 gods that are worshipped by the people of the world, each race or culture placing greater importance on some gods over others (the dragonborn have 5 gods of high importance, the rest are known collectively as the low gods, still revered but as a 2nd tier of gods). Gods don't need worship, though they have many worshippers, they just exist as they have always existed.

The lower planes, known as the abyss, the hells, the pit are where all of the fiends exist, there is no separation between the various planes though more powerful fiends carve out their own fiefdom.

Arkhosia exists as the remains of the dragonborn empire, it slowly dwindled and now is no larger than a small kingdom, they live with kobolds who are their dragon brothers and co-exist peacefully with lizardmen. Yuanti are the enemy and are slain when found lest their dark powers threaten the kingdom.

Also phase spiders. They are native to the Feywild, they have a natural ability to shift between the prime and the feywild in places where the barriers between two planes are weakened. Basically I wanted a fey-enchanted woodland with teleporting spiders and phase spiders fit the bill.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I’ve got lots of things I’ve changed, tweeked, repurposed and so forth over the decades, for all kinds of campaign settings (not all D&D):

1) Dwarves became Anthro snapping turtles known as Riverfolk. To make them more "turtley", I switched dwarves stonecunning with an innate ability to navigate and toughened them with good natural armor. Their swim speed was equal to their land speed, but could hold their breath MUCH longer than most terrestrial creatures. Their wizards had their spellbooks etched into their shells, meaning they could never be lost (but the mirrors required to READ them could be).

2) Warforged became The Inheritors, mobile constructs made to house the brains of psionic Dwarves.

3) crash landed alien Greys whose use of solid holography, stasis tech and multidimensional, non-Euclidean architecture gave rise to the legends of the Elves of Underhill

Spoiler: The Zeelee

Gray "Elves": The Zeelee Court of Underhill

Zeelee, a.k.a. "Grays," a race of extraterrestrial beings, roam the galaxy on missions of exploration and occasionally war.

Many thousands of years ago, one of their warships crash-landed upon insert name of your fantasy campaign world here, and the survivors were forced to make the best of things.

First, Commander Orbron and his First officer Titahija decreed that they build themselves a sanctuary, and followed that up with exploration of the world that was to be their new home...only to find it inhabited by strange and powerful beings.

Using their advanced technologies, they shifted their sanctuary out of phase with the world behind a barrier rendering it invisible and intangible in another dimension, where time ran more slowly. They hoped that they would be able to survive behind that barrier until help could arrive to rescue them.

Then they developed a technology that allowed them to move about the world freely, disguised as idealized versions of the creatures they saw around them. Legends accumulated around the strange beings...

Some told tales of rooms bigger inside than out, or how they appeared out of nowhere, and then dissapeared without a trace save for circles in the grass or dirt...some even told tales of how they spent a day enjoying the hospitality of the "Seelie Court" only to leave and find that years had passed...

Their slender builds, the slanted eyes, their aloofness, their great "magics"...and their vulnerability to cold iron and silver...

Mankind called them Elves...

4) Alternity’s Seshayans became former rulers of a feared Underdark Empire that fell into degeneracy and became lost.

5) axebeaks became riding raptors for a people based on Plains Indian culture.

6) I did a version of Thri-Kreen that were size S and incredibly dexterous and powerful fliers- essentially, sentient dragonflies- whose smaller, lighter weapons didn't do much damage. Hard to hit, though...

7) aquatic elves who had used ancient magic to permanently add both chromatophores (to change colors like Cephalopods) and nematocysts (to sting like Cnidarians) to their bodies.

8) Drow who were drawn to the black widow spiders more than any others, and were EXTREMELY matriarchal. And cannibalistic.

See also the link in my sig about campaign ideas.

 

[Lanefan]

See also the link in my dog about campaign ideas.

OK, that's the best typo I've seen in a while...

Either that, or you've got one hell of an interesting pet.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

DAMN YOU AUTOCORRECT!

(The typo, like my dogs, is fixed.)

 

[jeffh]

"Elemental" in the phrase Temple of Elemental Evil doesn't, or at least didn't originally, have anything to do with the classical elements, but was meant in the sense of "most basic or fundamental". It was originally a disturbingly crazy death cult dedicated to bringing about the end of the world by putting Tharizdun aka the Elder Elemental Eye back into circulation, in the mad belief that its adherents would have a favoured place in whatever replaced the current multiverse.

The version we know now is mostly the work of much later poseurs with no connection to the original, unwittingly manipulated by Lolth (as per Gygax's original intention; Zuggtmoy never had anything to do with either version). Lolth misunderstands the original just as badly as everyone else. When the ruse started working she brought in some powerful but not terribly bright schmucks from the elemental planes and dubbed them the Elemental Princes of Evil to make it even more convincing, bribing them with a small share of the resulting font of divine power.

The original version still exists, lurking patiently in the shadows, running a thugee-like cult of its own and laughing at the rubes who've stolen their original identity, who as far as they're concerned, are a very convenient lightning rod. As a result of Lolth's version's relative success, even most of the gods don't know the originals are still out there.

 

[Bitbrain]

"Elemental" in the phrase Temple of Elemental Evil doesn't, or at least didn't originally, have anything to do with the classical elements, but was meant in the sense of "most basic or fundamental". It was originally a disturbingly crazy death cult dedicated to bringing about the end of the world by putting Tharizdun aka the Elder Elemental Eye back into circulation, in the mad belief that its adherents would have a favoured place in whatever replaced the current multiverse.

The version we know now is mostly the work of much later poseurs with no connection to the original, unwittingly manipulated by Lolth (as per Gygax's original intention; Zuggtmoy never had anything to do with either version). Lolth misunderstands the original just as badly as everyone else. When the ruse started working she brought in some powerful but not terribly bright schmucks from the elemental planes and dubbed them the Elemental Princes of Evil to make it even more convincing, bribing them with a small share of the resulting font of divine power.

The original version still exists, lurking patiently in the shadows, running a thugee-like cult of its own and laughing at the rubes who've stolen their original identity, who as far as they're concerned, are a very convenient lightning rod. As a result of Lolth's version's relative success, even most of the gods don't know the originals are still out there.

This is one of the best uses of cosmic horror I’ve ever seen. Very well done!

 

[Cobalt Meridian]

The only vaguely interesting lore I have is that Tieflings were , until relatively recently Humans. They were afflicted by a curse from Orcus (so a demonic origin, not a devilish one). Of course, curses can be broken and my players may have just found out how to do this...

 

[Reynard]

In my long (20+ years) running campaign world dopplegangers are the servants of a elder god like entity. In this world, which was started using 2E had 9 gods, one for each alignment. The world went through cycles of destruction, rebirth, ascendance and destruction again, with the so called 10th God an entity from beyond time and space that was responsible for the destruction. One of the 10th God's most useful tools were the dopplegangers, which it used to sew chaos and disorder from the lowest to the highest rungs of society.

Interestingly, dooplegangers bled purple so the setting (via the players) developed "blooding" as a sign of truth. You cut your hand or pricked your finger to prove you were not a doppleganger.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

For a HERO game set in the campaign world of Space:1889, I used the overall plot from Man With The Golden Gun along with elements from The Babbage Engine.

 

[77IM]

Trolls are male Hags.

Ninja'd! I use this too.


In most campaigns, I treat the Feywild and the Shadowfell as the same plane, the Otherworld. The bright parts are like the Feywild, the dark parts are like Shadowfell. The Otherworld is coterminous with the material plane: you can just walk there, if you know the hidden pathways.


Dwarves are as generous as they are greedy. Wealth means a lot to them so when they give sincere gifts they are gifts of great wealth.


Lizardfolk live by the credo, "You are what you eat." They hunt and eat monsters to grow strong, eat elves to get smart, etc. To the lizardfolk, humanoids are soft and brown/beige because they eat too much bread. The highest honor a lizardfolk can pay to a deceased comrade is to eat them.


Goblinoid social structure is a mockery of human social structure. The hobgoblins all consider themselves lords and ladies and knights, and dress in fancy clothes (which are old, disheveled and dirty -- think Skeksis), and administer courts of law. The goblins form "guilds" and consider themselves fantastic merchants, bankers, and craftspeople, when in fact they kind of suck at these things and mostly wind up making a mess and killing each other (think Gremlins 2 but not as hyper). The bugbears are the priestly class, solemnly prostheletizing murder, vengeance, and selfishness.


Dragons are all one species and can interbreed. Many dragons of one color/metal bear minor characteristics of another, such as a silver dragon with bronze-tinted wings or a blue dragon with the curling horns of a black. I sometimes change up the breath weapons or lair actions to reflect their ancestry. I give dragons a wide variety of alignment and personality, although they still tend towards their MM listed alignments. For example, the party might find a true neutral green dragon who craves power but doesn't especially want to hurt anyone, or a lawful evil red dragon who is more prone to scheming than rampaging.