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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Templetroll" data-source="post: 2873529" data-attributes="member: 2201">When I started out most of the players in the group (usually between 8 and 12 players) had their own homebrews.  I thought it expected that I would do the same.N's - A world where much was not as it seemed.  I loved the tricky, shapechanging, illusion-using, disguise-wearing types and the idea that the power may be behind the throne.  Comments from my players at various times:  "Paranoia is a survival trait in your world.", "You have the nicest evil people I've ever met!" (that player had his PC treated better by an evil wizard than most of the PCs had treated him.) I had set out to be able to include anything from any D&D campaign setting that I liked, just translated so it fit in my world.  I also wanted to have explanations for why there were magic items all over the place and a means to deal with players who can't make a game session.  I used an ancient massive empire that used magic extensively to build its empire.  In the first DMG there were comments about magic having been of the 10th level and above, etc and this empire had that.  Then, 'something happened'.  That caused a drop of magic worldwide to where spells were maxed at 9th level.  This also caused most of the magical arms and armor to lose their enchantments and thus allowed the oppressed peoples to rise up and destroy their oppressors, the Empire.  When this began the Empire tried to retreat back to the homeland, which also helped to spread the remaining magic items all over the place!  The same Empire had been ruled by a powerful spellcaster who was thought to have been destroyed long ago.  at one point someone in the party was struck by an odd bolt of lightning; when they returned the same way they had a strange tale to tell: They had been summoned to the court of The Emperor!  He seemed interested in just talking to the person and provided food and lodging for them in the upper reaches of the ruined palace.  The PC knew better than to leave as they saw at least one dragon flying around the city.  This summoning only occurred when a player was not available for the game; anyone missing a session had their character spend some time up at the palace for the amount of time the adventure took.  a couple of players tried to find out why this was occurring, so I came up with an ingame reason for them to try and puzzle out.   They did work out that eventually they could try to take on The Emperor, but they didn't think much of their chances, even if they were high levels.  Now, we have Epic levels and it actually would be fun to give it a go.Another thing I did was set up two druidic faiths, one northern celtic with a male god and another southern faith based on the Lady of the Forest, a diety from Sumeria, I think it was.  It was in the Deities and Demi-gods book from way back when.   I also had the Temple of Our Lady of the One True Way.  This was a human faith that spanned the area of the world I planned on running in and it accepted clerics of all alignments that were not N/N.  The Temple had an interest in suppressing the celtic druidic faith, with it's male god and bolstering the other faith so they could later incorporate the female deity into their mythos as an aspect of Our Lady.  This temple also allowed me to use alignment languages; that concept was that when someone spoke of the dogma of OLotOTW in their alignment tongue they said it in ways the other alignments would find offensive, or heretical.  Also, after my world had been running for about 5 or 6 years the party met a bardic god on a planar adventure.  He told them a Word of Power that would explain much about the nature of their world if pronounced with the name of the world.  That Word was Joh.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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