Since I never paid much attention to the "official" lore in the old days, a lot of what my friends and I made up instead just sort of became ossified as fact in my games. (Keep in mind that I don't play WotC D&D* at all, so I'm either running AD&D1 or OD&D2 — usually the latter — when I implement these lore changes.)
• No great wheel cosmology. Instead, the multiverse is imagined as concentric "onion layers" of realities, with the center being a rigidly fixed point of pure Order and the outermost reaches being a howling void of empty and meaningless Chaos. From the outside in, the planes are: The Void of Chaos, the Surface of Limbo, the Veil of Shadow (i.e. the Outer Ætheric Plane), the Prime Material (i.e. the Physical Universe or Universes), the Realm of Faerie (i.e. the Inner Ætheric Plane), the Platonic Astral Sea, and finally the Empyrean Center of All Being.
• Only planar beings have an alignment, and alignment does nothing more than signify a creature's plane of origin, so possible alignments include Chaos, Shadow, Balance, Faerie, and Order (with Balance reserved for "planar" beings that are native to the Prime Material—elementals, genies, nature spirits, and the like).
• The only reason the multiverse exists at all is because of a random fluctuation in the Void of Chaos that somehow stuck around and wouldn't go away. Chaos is constantly at war with Orderly reality, trying to swallow it up again, and this manifests as a constant onslaught of demons (which are fundamentally nothing more than psychotic Boltzmann brains) being spawned by the Void and trying to batter their way through the Veil and thereby infiltrate the Prime Material Plane. Demons are usually classified by their size: imps (small), fiends (human-sized), or devils (huge).
• There are only two kinds of dragons: firedrakes and murkwyrms. Firedrakes are the ordinary sort of evil: greedy, gold-coveting bullies. Murkwyrms are
supernaturally evil, having been cursed with the taint of Chaos long ago. If a Dark Lord or a Demon Prince or a Chaos Wizard were to try and raise up a Chaos Army to attack civilization, the odds are fifty–fifty that a firedrake would tell the Big Bad either "Sure, if you pay me enough gold," or "Nah, eff off, looser." Whereas a murkwyrm would be
compelled to serve Chaos (and hate themselves and their master the whole time for doing it—but they'll hate heroes and innocent people
more).
• The only true lycanthropes that exist are
werewolves, and your average ignorant peasant is unlikely to be able to tell a werewolf apart from a different sort of therianthrope (like a skin-changer, a skin-walker, or a skin-wearer), a vampire, a wolfman, or a hexbeast.
• Clerical magic doesn't come directly from gods. Instead, it's hermetic or theurgical magic, secrets of the universe which have been divined from analysis of sacred texts via such cabalistic methods as numerology and deciphering the names of holy beings. When a cleric or druid memorizes a divine spell, the spell itself is an impersonal and rather benign energy-pattern stored in the caster's memory. Not so with arcane spells: arcane spells are literally conscious entities, basically minor spirits, which must be
persuaded to serve a mage or an illusionist as a "spell." Memorizing an arcane spell is fundamentally an act of bargaining, which temporarily traps a minor spirit within a "mental cage" in some dark corner of the caster's psyche. If an arcane magic-user is ever killed with spells still memorized, it's…
not good for anyone who happens to be standing close by.
• I have some very different takes on humanoids and demihumans in my settings:
— Four "standard" nonhuman types which are playable: elves (wood elves to be specific: they're mortal servants of the immortal High Elves, tasked with keeping tabs on the world of men, and they're an entire race of hedonistic, thrill-seeking adventure-junkies); dwarfs (sensible, pastoral, down-to-earth: pretty much halflings without the furry feet); goblins (miners and smiths under the mountain, they're less "doughty warriors" and more "conniving tinkers" who have a plutocratic and Machiavellian society where the clan with the most wealth rules by default, lots of wheeling and dealing and backstabbing); and ogres (big green honorable tribal warriors, folk of gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, nobody better to have at your side in a brawl).
—Lots more non-standard "races" (actually called "kindreds" in-universe): gnomes, fays, fauns, centaurs, merrows, lamias, arachnes, scyllas, leprechauns, harpies, hobgoblins (which, in keeping with folklore, are
smaller than goblins), drachen (dragon-men), wilder (wolf-men), leshonky (ent saplings), clockwork automata (auto-mechs, clockwork men, and "skin-job" replicants), and living constructs (straw men, tin men, and wicker men).
—And then there are the creatures of chaos, many of which are explicitly not sentient. The shadowspawn (or beastmen) come in a variety of types and sizes: cowardly and ratlike
scavers (½ HD), doglike
mogrels (1−1 HD), porcine
gruuchs (1 HD), feline
flynds (1+1 HD), goat-headed
durlocks (2 HD), stealthy reptilian
khshlaaa (2+1 HD), aquatic
sahuagin (2+1 HD), and hulking ursine
bugannes (3+1 HD). If there isn't an evil intellgience (like a Dark Lord or a Prince of Hell) in the world organizing them into a Chaos Army, they have only animal intelligence and can't even manage simple tools or proto-language. Larger, fiercer creatures may also serve in a Chaos Army: ettins (6+3 HD, these are the "greater trolls") and minotaurs are not evil by nature but may sometimes be persuaded into the service of evil; whereas true trolls (4+1 HD, they don't regenerate but they
will turn to stone in sunlight), rísir (i.e. troll mages or
oni), and draugr (which are the true
þyrs or
orcneas, haunting the moors like Grendel; stats as the thoul) are gleefully all-in on evil and chaos.
• A different scale of undead. Classic D&D gives us: 1 HD skeletons, 2 HD zombies, 2 HD ghouls, 3 HD wights, 4 HD wraiths, 5 HD mummies, 6 HD spectres, 7–9 HD vampires. In my campaigns:
— There are are four "classes" of undead: Cadaver, Ghost, Revenant, and Animus.
— The Cavader class includes the walking dead (the ½ HD "drybones", a simple and mindless skeleton; the 1−1 HD "shambler", your basic zombie corpse; and the 1 HD "rotter", a zombie
but juicy and also quite diseased), the 2 HD ghoul, the 3+1 HD skeleton (true skeletons are intelligent, very annoying, they like to insult you as they fight, pluck out their own bones and throw them, and they
regenerate), the 6 HD mummy, and the 10 HD
sah-hotep (greater mummy or mummy priest).
— The Ghost class includes the 1 HD apparition (a not-quite-harmless psychic impression of a dead person that terrifies those who see it and which cannot be destroyed without putting to rest its unfinished business), the 4 HD geist (replaces the wight: a geist is a restless spirit that can only haunt the place where it was buried and attacks by animating its own remains; behaves very much like a deadite from
Evil Dead); the 5 HD phantom (replaces the wraith: a phantom is a more powerful evil ghost, capable of forming a misty body out of pure ectoplasm and haunting an entire location), and the 7 HD spectre (a free-willed and free-roaming ghost, spectres are semi-solid and able to travel anywhere, like to ride upon night mares, and are known for teleporting, breathing fire, and throwing chains around—Scorpion by way of Angmar, basically).
— The Revenant Class includes the 8 HD vampire, 11 HD death knight, 12 HD nosferatu, and 16 HD lich lord, all pretty standard to D&D lore. The Animus Class includes a variety of evil spirits that ride the line between a ghost and a demon: the 9 HD grimwraith (or "grey philosopher"), the 13 HD reaper of souls, and the 21 HD legion of the damned (if a geist is one deadite, the legion is the Evil Dead—
all of them—or maybe that cloud of spectral energy that the
jerkwad bad guy unwittingly created in that one episode of
The Real Ghostbusers; point is, big cloud of evil in the sky that can possess people on the ground and which is
very difficult to mount an opposition to).
Just one entry and one line man! It's all that's needed!
