I was reading through my copies of the original Dungeoncraft articles, and decided to take things a little bit out of order. Ray has the development of the mythology/cosmology and religion a few steps into the RWDM, but because one element of my hook is based specifically on that (the archfiends as gods) I think that step of campaign development is crying out to be done immediately. Keeping in mind the 1st rule of Dungeoncraft: Never create more than you have to, I'm gonna just touch on some mythology/cosmology at fairly high level, not develop it in great detail. I also haven't mentioned the 2nd rule of Dungeoncraft yet; for every campaign element you develop, create a corresponding secret. However, I clearly need to get off my arse and start populating the world with secrets too. I've had some great ideas for some based on what's already there, but I'll probably defer secret creation until my next post.
So. I don't need to identify the gods of the setting, because TSR, Wizards of the Coast, and Green Ronin have helpfully done that for me: the archfiends are fairly well-known already. Green Ronin's Book of Fiends is probably the most useful source; it came up with an entirely cosmology of demon lords and assigned them domains and minor rituals that spellcasting classes (such as the cleric) would need to do daily to recover their spells. I can come up with some quick and dirty details of religious observance later; for now it's sufficient for me to simply say that the archfiends take the place of the gods, and that clerics can only be clerics of them, not of gods, not of ideals, etc. In fact, for simplicity's sake, I'm tempted to merely say that all clerics serve the entire pantheon of archfiends, so that domain and favored weapon selection can be more in the hands of the player. Players will be encouraged, after picking their domains, to try and map them to a particular patron or favored deity, but it won't be strictly necessary. The only thing here, is that clerics absolutely DO NOT have access to the Good domain, which is unsurprising. Other divine spellcasters, such as Favored Souls, etc. also get the powers from these archfiends, and indirectly, for that matter so do guys like druids and rangers, although their "worship" of the archfiends is, at best, indirect. This begs the question of whether or not the paladin has a place in this campaign setting. I think the role is interesting, but who/what is powering their spells? For that reason, I think the paladin has to come off the list of classes that are available. If a player wants to play the paladin role, they should use another class instead (maybe the Knight, Samurai or simply the Fighter) and roleplay it as a paladin.
How in the world does a D&D style world get to be in such a dire pickle anyway (I'd like to see someone stat out a Dire Pickle…) where there are no gods of good, and the only gods are equated to the Archfiends? And what are some other ramifications of having a world presided over by archfiends? Let's answer that second question first.
Alignment probably plays a slightly different role in this game. While any good individuals probably stand out more starkly in a world such as this, the major ongoing battle between good and evil can't be a feature of the campaign in the same sense that it is in a normal campaign. For the most part, that battle's already been fought and won, and evil was apparently triumphant. I also think that the law/chaos axis is useful as a quick shorthand before you've got more fleshed out personalities defined for characters, but as a major philosophical underpinning of a campaign setting, I find it somewhat lacking. So, I will de-emphasize alignment to a great degree. This will have broad implications for the cosmology, since fiends will no longer be defined by their classic divisions (of D&D anyway) between devils and demons. While the rules and what not will, of course, be the same, the relationship between the various groups of fiends is not. A fiend is a fiend is a fiend. Particular demons and devils could share a homeplane, and be close allies. In fact, all the fiends are in congress with each other a fair amount, and fiend in this sense simply means "evil outsider." This would include such diverse groups as tanar'ri, baatezu, obyriths, yugoloths, demodands, oni (from Oriental Adventures and Creatures of Rokugan) and others, and for that matter probably includes creatures which are not traditionally classed as fiends, like slaadi and efreet. So the pantheon includes the major demon lords, detailed in such sources as The Book of FiendsThe Fiendish Codes I: Hordes of the Abyss and The Book of Vile Darkness (not to mention the forthcoming book Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells and any theoretical Fiendish Codex III book, if one ever comes out.) This can also include the slaad lords, and for fun, why not the Cthulhuian "pantheon" as well?
Each of these beings live in worlds (I've never really liked the word "plane") that are not necessarily different from their Great Wheel analog, except in the following area--they are not layered. Therefore, separate layers become actual unique planes in this cosmology. This will, of course, present a cosmology that is a bewildering layout of planes, which I will have "orbit" the material plane. I'll also combine a few of them; for instance, the layer of Hell called Phlegethos is already redundant in most respects to the Elemental Plane of Fire, and I don't care too much for the concept of Elemental planes anyway. So the City of Brass and the efreet are now placed firmly in Phlegethos, and it becomes the archtypical "fiery" plane. To use one example. Others will come up, no doubt, in play. Few have every tried to map this cosmology, and certainly no one has done so completely, but as few ever try to travel to the planes anyway, that's probably a moot point. To get to these planes, a traveler would have to enter the transitive plane. The normal cosmology has three such planes: the Astral Plane, the Ethereal Plane and the Plane of Shadow. To be honest with you, I have little interest in the Astral or Ethereal plane, so I'm going to completely ignore them. Spells that depend on them still work (which the exception of a few obvious spells that cause you to travel to/through them) but at no point will anyone ever enter them; for all intents and purposes they don't exist. So the Plane of Shadow becomes the sole transitive plane; the one through which you must travel to enter any of the other planes, and it is coterminous with all other planes.
Furthermore, the Shadowlands (an easier name for it than the Plane of Shadow) weren't always as they are today; it is the victory of the fiends over their good counterparts that has tainted them and turned them into the dark and fearsome place that they are. As a matter of fact, the good planes, which are completely unknown to the world today, still exist and are still coterminous with the Shadowlands too, they are just locked out of access to the Shadowlands (and hence to the Material plane as well) and are under constant seige by fiends. This suggests that one possible high level campaign goal can be to restore access to the good domains by breaking at least one of the sieges and cracking open the firm lock that the fiends have on access to the Material plane. This victory of the fiends is recorded somewhat in the various mythologies on the Material plane as one generation of gods replacing another, not unlike the Greek myth of the gods replacing the titans. However, few (if any) suspect the true nature of the conflict, and that the displaced gods were "good" or benevolent in relation to their replacements. Most, in fact, suspect the opposite to be true; that the current gods are as benevolent as mortals have any right to expect and that the former gods were even worse.
