D&D General Influence of official D&D lore on your home games?

[RoughCoronet0]

I voted a fair bit myself. I do like using a lot of the official lore for D&D, but that lore comes from bits and pieces from various editions and sources. 4e's Dawn Wars, 3e's dragon lore from the Draconomicon, 4e Dragonborn lore, Eberron concepts for magictek, Theros's piety system, various bits from different Dragon magazines and obscure bits of lore all around.

However, I love mixing things up as well. My pantheon is all my own making, as the gods abandoned what they thought was a ruined world after the Dawn Wars. The powerful god-like beings that were left behind took over the mantle of gods and work to keep the plane stable and keep the forces that govern the world running. There is no outer plane or inner plane, the Ethereal plane has been melded with parts of the Astral Sea and Elemental chaos and the god-like beings created their own demiplanes in the Ether to reside when they aren't physically walking on the material plane (because giant kaiju god creatures are awesome). I also have various monsters identical to their official counterparts and several that are very different and unique.

 

[J-H]

I usually have an Underdark, and most (but not all) races usually follow the general D&D lore conceptually.

 

[Malmuria]

Playing with new players has made me realize how many dnd-isms are lodged in my brain. For example, I know not to mix extradimensional-space magic items, but the new player does not. There are other areas where my assumption is old and it doesn't work that way anymore in 5e, and this is always confusing (can you charm undead now? really?).

As a dm, I might take inspiration from this or that but I always change it.

 

[el-remmen]

All lore is just stuff to steal from for your home game - but there is no "correct" lore as far as I am concerned. If someone is running a Realms game and it turns out in that campaign Elminster is an evil creep - it is still an FR game. "Official" only means something until it is in your hands. Or at least, that is how I see it.

 

[J.Quondam]

Playing with new players has made me realize how many dnd-isms are lodged in my brain. For example, I know not to mix extradimensional-space magic items, but the new player does not. There are other areas where my assumption is old and it doesn't work that way anymore in 5e, and this is always confusing (can you charm undead now? really?).

As a dm, I might take inspiration from this or that but I always change it.

If I'm being completely honest with myself?
Yeah... I'd kinda LOVE to see the shock & confusion on the faces of new players when they try to double-up extradimensional containers.

 

[el-remmen]

(can you charm undead now? really?).

As a dm, I might take inspiration from this or that but I always change it.

As far as I am concerned Monster abilities are generally unknown until you encounter them (though some knowledge skills could shed light ahead of time). If someone tried to tell me that undead are susceptible to charm (or stunning or unconsciousness) because that is what it is in the book - all I can do is shrug my shoulders and say, "Apparently, not these."

 

[Norton]

I voted a fair bit mostly because FR lore is so quickly available and adds depth and flesh to my campaigns in an instant. I will change absolutely anything if it makes my homebrew narrative tidier, of course.

There's also a bit of me that thinks the players immersion is more intact if I stick close to established lore. It's like I owe it to them to stick to it as tightly as I can. I think more than a few feel they're playing "real D&D" if I do.

 

[Puddles]

I was going to vote “a lot” because in my homebrew setting I use the Monster Manual for most creatures and I use the PHB for races with only a few minor tweaks (such as Tieflings not being inherently evil), but it seems from the responses in this thread that others associate ‘lore’ more with the history and mythology of the setting, such as the pantheon and the origin of the races, in which case I use virtually none of it.

 

[jdrakeh]

Just a little but that's because I stick to settings that are very lightly fleshed out (e.g. original Greyhawk folio, Pelinore as published in Imagine, Irilian from White Dwarf) or my own homebrew stuff.

 

[pemerton]

I was going to vote “a lot” because in my homebrew setting I use the Monster Manual for most creatures and I use the PHB for races with only a few minor tweaks (such as Tieflings not being inherently evil), but it seems from the responses in this thread that others associate ‘lore’ more with the history and mythology of the setting, such as the pantheon and the origin of the races, in which case I use virtually none of it.

I had in mind both the categories that you point to in making my self-assessment of "a fair bit". Eg when I included nagas in my GH-set BW game, adapted to BW terms from the AD&D MM, I think of that as a use of D&D lore.

Playing with new players has made me realize how many dnd-isms are lodged in my brain. For example, I know not to mix extradimensional-space magic items, but the new player does not.

Some of the most basic ones here, I think, are D&D-generated assumptions about architecture, and that it should matter and how it should matter. Everything from thinking about secret doors, to drawing and using maps, to concerns about ceiling height, etc. Whereas, for instance, we don't normally get or care about the style of pillars/columns (eg are the plinths square or rounded) nor do we normally talk about the colour or texture of surfaces.

I find a lot of discussions about RPGing are made complicated because some of these D&D-isms aren't noticed, by all the discussants, as being distinctive to D&D and allied RPGs. Which also means that, in a survey like this, they probably aren't being included as influences of D&D lore on home games.