D&D General Assumed Lore/Sacred Cows you've changed +

[Uta-napishti]

• I tend to like a game of political intrigue and geographical and cultural exploration rather than a heavy emphasis on magic and the supernatural. Yes it's still D&D but...
• Magic is rare and hard to master (no automatic learning of spells when you level, you have to be taught, or practice, or research new magic), but what does exist has been worked into the economy, society deeply where it makes sense. The houses of city folk where a wizard college is located are frequently lit by continual flame lanterns. Ships rely on weather magic to make good time (thanks Earthsea). Religions and Churches will sell the populace a whole belief system and cosmology, but are mostly economically a social caste + and internally a brotherhood sharing magical secrets with each other.
• Haven't run this yet, but hope to introduce soon that there is no mechanical difference between divine and arcane magic in possible spell effects / lists, only in how the caster sources / channels the power (INT/WIS/CHA) and who this means they can learn from. Likely will build all casters on the wizard chassis.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I forgot a few.

• The entire Planescape cosmology doesn't exist. What does exist depends on the setting, but in my current FR game the prime material plane works like space, essentially, but it is sort of combined with the Astral Sea. When you are in space, you can transition to Astral Realms, the Elemental Chaos and elemental realms within it, etc much more easily.
• The Feywild and Shadowfell are one place with many realms. It is often called Otherworld, Faerie, The Fae, etc. Shadar-kai are separate from Elves, but are sort of the "elf" of the shadow realms of the Otherworld, in that they are very different from humans but look very similar to them, and think very differently.
• Tiamat and Lolth have their own divine realms, rather than being trapped in fiend prisons. Tiamat is one of the primary gods, mother of monsters and of gods, and eventual doom of the world.

 

[TwoSix]

• 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.

I like this. Order v Chaos is a classic D&Dism that should get more play in the general cosmology. It's much more compelling than Good v Evil.

 

[TwoSix]

I don't use the standard Great Wheel much, but when I do, I use this version of it. [Let's Revamp] Planescape - a thematic / oppositional look at the Great Ring

Basically, rearranges some planes and their tropes so that the evil planes are "evil twin" versions of the good plane across the L-C axis (Mt Celestia and the Nine Hells, for example), and planes directly opposed (like Mt Celestia and the Abyss) are opposites of each other.

 

[cbwjm]

Ahem....this is from my Chromatic Dungeons project, the weapon table: Just one entry and one line man! It's all that's needed!

View attachment 136535

I've thought about doing this for all weapons in 5e, something like listing the weapon stats as:

martial melee weapon. Damage d8, versatile (d10). Choose B/S/P. Examples: warhammer, longsword, battleaxe.​

A lot of the time I think the weapon lists are a bit redundant and things like weight/cost differences aren't enough of an issue to really worry about in game.

 

[Minigiant]

• Only outsiders for aligned planes have alignment.
• There is nonmagical fantasy science and a nonmagical science class. At level 20 you invent so 21st century item in a crude form. There is a epic level dude with a bunker of light machine guns in front of an unstable gate to Hell.
• Dragons both love and hate "dragon reproduction". They also have envious of other dragons, especial pureblood dragons. Because of this, dragons rarely mate with their one kind to not have more pure offspring. Colors are all mixed up and no longer color coded for alignment and element.
• There are more magical spears than swords as spears are the preferred weapon of the ancient empires.
• Drow aren't evil. Elves split up because they are old fashioned and didn't research primogeniture by the time the Elf King died. Drow are just followers of an Elf Princess who inherited all the Elven titles underground. She got hosed and is really angry. The High-Drow wars is a war over claims.
• Underdark beings are different colored because of something the Mindflayers did. "Why?" doesn't make any sense because they are aberrations and use weird logic. Making people brown, black, grey, purple, yellow, and white furthers their goals somehow. Aboleths are involved somehow as well.
• Actual "Dungeons" were almost all created by beholders. That's why they don't make sense existing and are full of oozes.

 

[The Glen]

As somebody trying to get rid of a large number of the continuity errors in Mystara, a ton of rewrites.

• Atruaghin Clans got an entire new book where stuff actually happens and the clans themselves get actual descriptions of their NPCs, cities, and everything else that got left out of that rush job.
• Mystara was cut off from the Dawn War by the Great Barrier, an invisible energy field that keeps out gods, archfiends, Inevitables, etc but allows for Immortals and Archfey to rule instead. Also explains why Mystara doesn't have the extraplanar creatures common in other settings.
• Upgraded Oberon and his court to Archfey, on par with Immortals but generating their power from myth and legend rather than worship.
• Completely rewrote the events of 1010 so the war doesn't destroy Alfheim and Alphatia, keeping the cold war vibe that drove the setting originally.
• Had the shadow elves take over the Broken Lands instead of Alfheim, having two rival elven kingdoms within miles of each other with a neutral nation separating them for another diplomatic standoff.
• Presented the gods as greedy and selfish, as they want the worship of the souls of those inside the barrier, as is their right.
• Created the Knights of Ebony, a religious organization devoted to keeping extraplanar from influencing Mystara. They hunt down anyone trying to spread the worship of gods, and hunting down races like the gith, illithid and similar dangerous creatures.
• Revised the half-elves as their own race rather than a hybrid, created by the Red Curse which warped anyone who had elf and human ancestry into a new race. Ended up with a Brazilian feel for some reason.
• Revised the Thyatian and Alphatian militaries to even the mix. Alphatia has lots of wizards, but incompetent leadership. Thyatis gained far more competent generals, even without the magical powers.
• Guns are far more available from the Red Coast, though not widespread. Biggest problem is the embargo on smokepowder makes getting ammunition ridiculously expensive and difficult. Might have all the gold you want, still only 10 shots available for sale.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Have pretty much ignored alignment since the late 80s.

I also don’t require a player to choose an alignment and don’t apply it to NPCs.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Off the top of my head:

• Orcs and goblins are green. Orcs are generally the hereditary enemy, as like and as opposed to where the PCs come from as those border raiders from the other side of the border - or have a Hatfield/McCoy style rivalry going on with humans. No one knows who started it, everyone knows orcs and humans can interbreed, and a lot of diplomatic effort is spent by older and slower breeding races (especially elves and dwarves) to make sure that the orcs and the humans feud rather than team up to turn on them.
• Alignment is a suggestion. Put whatever ideals you follow in that part of your character sheet. Possible exceptions for certain outsiders.
• I don't use the default Greyhawk or Realms Great Wheel approaches to pantheons.
  • The pantheons are 4e style embattled and uneasy allies against what is Out There and even the evil deities (with rare exceptions) are ones you want inside the tent pissing out not outside pissing in. It's more order vs chaos than good vs evil (and who knows which side Erathis is on on good vs evil?)
  • The pantheons are Eberron-style might not exist.
  • What even is a god anyway? Any sufficiently powerful spellcaster can empower a Warlock as a minion with a simple Wish spell (that won't prevent them casting Wish again but imposes the other exhaustion disadvantages). To start to empower clerics requires three simultaneous wish spells of which one must come from the patron and one from one of their warlocks.
• Spell components are a type of spell focus and different groups of wizards might use different ones for the same spell
• I don't use both the Underdark and the Shadowfell. They have similar thematic resonances and most underdark creatures fit in the Shadowfell with Shadar-Ki meaning exactly the same thing as drow.
• Drow are elves, end of story.
  • If there's no Underdark or Shadowfell then the drow are a network of secret societies within the elves who believe they have the right to do what they like with the "lesser races". It takes a member of one of these societies or an entire "peaceful" trading ship about an hour to "drop the mask" and assume drow guise, allowing plausible deniability. Most elves don't know about this and either think or claim to think the drow are an entirely separate group.
  • The drow were on the losing side of an Elven Civil War. Of course the good guys won and the bad guys lost. (I haven't yet done this to make them Confederate-analogs).

 

[TwoSix]

[*]What even is a god anyway? Any sufficiently powerful spellcaster can empower a Warlock as a minion with a simple Wish spell (that won't prevent them casting Wish again but imposes the other exhaustion disadvantages). To start to empower clerics requires three simultaneous wish spells of which one must come from the patron and one from one of their warlocks.

Holy crap, I'm stealing that. That's amazing.