NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6425232" data-attributes="member: 37579">Okay, story time. (And because it's a story, I'm totally counting this against my NaNoWriMo word count for the day. Well… depending on how much else I can write today.)I'm a worldbuilder at heart and love creating fantasy worlds. I've created a half-dozen campaign settings over the years and it's building a world or aspect of a world is typically my project du jour. When 4th Edition was announced I decided to create a new world using the concepts and assumptions of 4e, reimagining one of my older worlds. When I reimagined the world, I put the bulk of the orcs in one part of the world and the gnolls in another. I didn't think too much about the placement as, at that time, I didn't think of D&D as D&D, just thinking of it a rule set to be tapped. The history and established lore didn't really mean much to me. It was there there, I knew a little bit, and "meh". The lore in the 4e MM showed me I was wrong in multiple different ways. I'd never seen gnolls as demonic-inclined, despite them always being referenced as such. That aspect never clicked with me, so I had much more civilized and mercenary gnolls. The earlier art might have been a big part, as my concept of gnolls goes back to Tony DiTerlizzi, and his gnoll in the Monstrous Manual just looked calm and collected. And his orc looked much more like what we'd view as a goblinoid. The lore in the 4e MM painted gnolls as feral and demonic, and the images of the gnolls really drove that home. Gnolls were not one of the monsters that changed, but the art and emphasis of the flavour changed how I saw them. Reading that  lore also reminded me I had neglected to include creatures such as demon lords in my cosmology. It was a reminder of an absence, an idea something I had not considered. (Oh, and the changes to lore I did like helped me realize that D&D was more than just rules and got me interested in learning the "canon" of the game.)I'm currently updating that world to 5e, keeping as much of the lore as I can and primarily cleaning the text. And adjusting things based on the actions of my players during my 4e campaign. While reconciling the world with my superior comfort with D&D lore, I realized I had the orcs and gnolls in the wrong places in the world; I'd put orcs in one location because they were the bigger "name" in the time following LotR, but gnolls fit that part of the world so much better. The climate better suited gnolls, the tone required of the region fits them better, and the history of events just worked with gnolls. So I swapped the two races. Now, there's no reason in my campaign world that orcs couldn't be more feral and savage warriors raiding without cause and purpose across veldts and deserts. It's fine as orc's sunlight sensitivity went away in 4e. And it worked just fine for the campaign I ran. But moving the gnolls to the savanna makes it a better D&D campaign world rather than just a generic fantasy campaign world. It works better for anyone who has played D&D in the past 40 years who might say "hey, aren't orcs nocturnal and/or underdark predators who hate the sun?" The thing is, my orcs are different. They have a different history and origin than other orcs. However, the reasons they're different is unrelated to their habitat, and putting them in a curious habitat draws attention to that difference and away from the other differences. I want to focus on the intended changes, not the accidental changes. In that regard, changing the lore should be like changing the rules. It should be done on purpose, for a reason, and with thought given to the benefits and complications resulting from the change. It's significantly easier to change the lore, as it does not affect balance in the game, but it still cannot be done carelessly or on a whim. There are also player expectations to consider. Ideally, you should communicate to your players the changes between your world and the base D&D settings, but getting that much of an infodump to players is tricky: they're unlikely to read a massive player's guide or spend too much time skimming a wiki. Really, unless your players are experienced gamers who are eminently familiar with D&D lore, you also need to communicate how all monsters in the game - both modified and unmodified - are different from common pop culture representations. The lore in the books is helpful as that's lore you as the DM don't need to write: you can just read the text or pass over an older edition's Monster Manual. Not changing monster lore means you do not have to fight expectations, distribute the changed lore, and can focus on communicating essential information on the world.</blockquote>

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