D&D General List the 3 Coolest Parts of Your Homebrew World

[DeviousQuail]

1. Shard Realms: Think oblivion gates meets Dragon Age Inquisition. They are mostly random in appearance, occurring when two or more worlds "overlap" each other. The different magics create dangerous places full of the weird and impossible. They wither away over time and my plan is to use them as the explanation for the weirder stuff across the worlds.

2. Shards: Found in the heart of a shard realm, the shard is a twisted object of pure potential magic. Using 5e, any spell that has a GP cost uses shards instead (you might also need the items listed in the components but the cost for those is greatly reduced). They are also required for all those great workings of magic not contained in the spell list. This includes enchanted objects.

3. Species not Races: I posted about these in another thread already but I dropped the 5e races and came up with a list of playable species instead. Human, Wolv, Verdan, Drakken, Elemental (4 subspecies), Riven, Kothan, and Witch. Each one has their own creature type (humanoid, beast, plant, wyrm, etc) and interactions with the core rules of 5e. For example, Elementals (except water) and Riven are not healed by healing spells or potions.

 

[steeldragons]

huh. Three? Do you go with nations? Religions? Deities? Species? Geological/-graphic regions? Cultures? Languages? Classes? Organziations? ...or...or...or...

Well, it's my setting, so I think ALL of it's cool. hahaha. This is hard....So, hmmm...I'll try to go in different directions.

1. Location: The "Lost Sands," a.k.a. the Thelitian Desert, a.k.a. "The Seven Sands," a.k.a. the Empire of Thel. A region of magical "fallout" from the calamity of the Godswar. Currently the expansive deserts (seven different desert regions, in all) that constitutes the Empire of Thel ("Thelitia" to those outside the deserts). Magic there is chaotic. "Wild magic," in the 5e vernacular, for anyone not native to those realms. Only those born and raised (taught and trained) in the desert environments are capable of reliable, "proper," spellcasting. This makes the mages of the indigenous Thellic humans extraordinarily powerful within Thel. The other species of the sands: a felinoid people of the border grasslands, and salamanders who inhabit/"rule" (insofar as anyone can rule anything there) the Flame Desert, are also able to cast normally. Outsider mages are at a severe disadvantage within the realms of Thel.

2. Biology: True dragons are in decline. They have more and more difficulty producing wyrm/"true" dragon offspring. More often than not, the majority of a clutch of eggs (if not the entire clutch, in recent years), viable offspring are mutated 'draconic" creatures: hydrae (four limbs, multi-heads, possible breath weapon), behirs (serpentine, many limbs, no wings, breath weapons), linnorms (serpentine, two clawed forelimbs, no wings, venomous bite), wyverns (two rear limbs, wings, venomous tail, no breath weapon), dragonnes, and such like. So, that is where those kinds of creatures come from...and they are increasing. The number of actual "D&D dragons" is slimmer and slimmer. Gemstone dragons, specifically, are singular individuals. True wyrms are dismayed and at a loss for a remedy.

3. Organization: maybe not "the coolest" one, there are an awful lot of organizations across my setting. But, a particular favorite of mine, is the Riv Chaliir ("rihv sha-leer"). Translated from [my world's] elvish as the "Leaf Dancers." A mystic order of my world's largest "high elf" kingdom/realm. The Riv Chaliir are sacred archer-monks who are trained to the perfection of their arts for the express purpose of being assigned to defend the high elves' premiere council of sorcerers (the most powerful mages among the high elfin folk, tasked with the caretaking and protection of the magic of the world).

 

[Older Beholder]

3 things about my homebrew setting Labrynthia:

The cities:

Most cities are built in and/or around massive ancient labyrinths that act as city states (see image below). Civilization clings to these mysterious structures. The great labyrinthine cities each have a titan that acts as protector, such as a Dragon, Empyrean, etc...

The world:

The world is just an island nation named Brynth, it has belonged to various worlds over the eons, having been dragged into the Abyss and Nine Hells on separate occasions only to be returned to a random world on the prime material plane each time upon liberation.

The multiverse:

Time is running out across the multiverse, many planes have merged with each other and/or collapsed completely.

Here's an example of a city:

 

[Lanefan]

Unusual things about my current homebrew world, in many ways a typical "kitchen sink" medieval fantasy setting:

1. The world has, in the distant past, (a) sent travellers into space (b) received visitors from space and (c) received invaders from space. The PCs have found direct evidence of (a) via discovering three* still-functional spacecraft at different times and having conversed with the long-hidden culture that originally built them, direct evidence of (b) by finding a fourth spaceship of a much different design unknown by anyone, and found (and also missed!) indirect evidence of (c) in various different ways, means, and times.

* - of which two remain; the PCs somehow managed to get the first one they found into the air before they knew what they had, and of course they crashed it. The PCs survived. The spaceship most certainly did not.

2. The solar system is artificial. It once was real, until a deity decided to rearrange the planets' locations to better suit her followers (ancient Hobgoblins). Now the PCs' home planet is one half of a tidally-locked binary held artificially close together. This is all becoming unstable.

3. Mind Flayers and their overlords (ultimately, the Great Old Ones???) have kidnapped a major Elvish deity and corrupted much of His mortal worship; and have used this position of influence to - over a very long time - provoke much of Elvish society into trying to take over the world.

2 and 3 above were providing most of the main-story adventuring pre-covid, and doubtless will again.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ooh, only three things? Hmmm...gotta be choosy then.

1. A cosmology that explains why devils and demons are Always Evil and yet still, maybe, sometimes, possibly redeemable...maybe. (I've mentioned this one a lot, so people are probably familiar with it.)

Spoiler: On the Origin and Motives of Fiends

Being brief: according to one cosmology, which is difficult or impossible to corroborate independently, the One created the universe long ago and populated it with many different kinds of life, including Servants (celestials), Guardians (not yet identified in-story), and mortals. Servants and Guardians were forbidden to use compulsion or coercion to follow the Divine Plan--they could mete justice, but could not make people obey. Some Servants rebelled, saying it was dumb and wasteful to let mortals hurt each other or damage the world when they could just prevent it from happening in the first place. This caused the War in Heaven, which to ordinary mortals was over in an instant, but lasted an infinitely long span of time for those who participated. Though two factions started out--the loyal Servants and the Rebels--three factions came out, with the third being essentially Anarchists from both sides who had come to revel in the violence and destruction. As a result of that infinitely-long conflict, the Rebels became Devils: former celestials now bound by the rules they wished to visit on mortals, living under ironclad contracts and unyielding hierarchies. And the Anarchists became Demons: former celestials ruled by their gnawing hungers and unslakeable thirsts, ever empty inside and unable to be quenched. Each faction tends to see this as a win for their side, so it's a matter of furious debate who actually won.

As a result of the above, though, there's an extremely good reason you can almost always presume fiends are evil. If they could've been persuaded with an argument a mortal can come up with, they would've been, because they had infinite time to be persuaded. It takes something more, something truly special that couldn't possibly have occurred within that enclosed spacetime bubble, for them to be redeemed--but it can happen. Our party's bard is a double tiefling, descended from an unknown powerful devil on his father's side, and with a succubus as a direct matrilineal ancestor. That succubus has since ceased to be a "succubus" proper and is now...something else, because she redeemed herself through various actions she's taken over her life. She gave away her remaining succubus powers to our bard, who is now essentially half-human, half-devil, half-demon because MAGIC, and great-gramma-succubus now hopes to die a mortal death and rejoin her husband in the afterlife.

2. A history which extends back over 2000 years, connecting to several key events that have led to most of the Huge Problems of this world.

Spoiler: On the Historical Origins of Villainy

Nearly every major threat of my campaign can be traced back to its historical origins, though the history is murky and hard to follow at times. There's a good reason for every major event, and many of them are linked together. I haven't nailed down all the details yet so it's hard to say too much without potentially restricting myself too much, but here's a shortlist.
Long ago, the genies ruled the world; the celestials claim genies and other elementally-aligned beings (like dragons) were essentially uplifted from ordinary mortal existence to help shape and maintain the world and its inhabitants. These uplifted individuals have sometimes gone astray...like the genies.
The genie-rajahs mostly ruled with tyrannical indifference, if that makes sense. They kept mortal races as slaves, some treated their slaves well, others treated them very poorly, but in general humans(/etc.) weren't allowed to independently own property, couldn't marry without their master's permission, and just overall had really restricted lives.
Mortals living outside the cities have a hardscrabble life, but the Kahina--druids and shamans--help them survive, even thrive out in the desert. This raises them to a position of great prominence, and some of the modern Nomad tribes are still ruled by druid (or, more rarely, shaman) chiefs. This also makes the Kahina rather more politically and socially active than the usual perception of druids.
Some terrible event happens. This fundamentally changes the world. The powerful ancestors of the elves, whom the people of today call the "El-Adrin," departed from the world and took their cities with them in order to avoid this change. The genies also departed, but left their stuff behind, and remain accessible in the elemental otherworld, called Akirah; their country is called Jinnistan. This is also--not coincidentally--around the time that evidence of the mad Cult of the Burning Eye begins to appear.
The First Sultan, a mythic figure that some believe didn't really exist, but the party has evidence that he did, rose up sometime after the terrible event, but before the genie exodus, and played a pivotal role in taking genie cities and encouraging a thorough exodus. The party has learned that he had three wives: a human wife (from whom many of the modern-day merchant class descend), an orc wife (from whom many of the modern-day Nomads descend), and a genie (specifically an air genie) wife, whose descendants are not yet known.
Around this time, the celestials also completely depart the world, and the Safiqi Priesthood comes into existence. As mortals take over the now-abandoned genie cities, the Waziri mage order comes into being, and the Kahina slowly lose prominence as city life becomes much more common than nomad life.
A heretical group--originally part of the "internal police" branch of the Safiqi priesthood--breaks off sometime about 2-4 centuries after the genie exodus. They become the Zil-al-Ghurab, the Raven-Shadows, who believe that true enlightenment can only be obtained through taking someone's life when they don't expect it. The Safiqi have tried to stamp them out ever since, and every time it seems like they've succeeded, the Raven-Shadows pop back up again a few generations later.
Much more recently, about 400 years ago, a rift occurs among the druids (but not shamans): wishing to reclaim their former prominence, they begin using powers attuned to the Sun and the Moon, and a internecine conflict breaks out between these warring factions. A druid of the moon falls in love with a druid of the sun, and the two of them have a secret romance and produce a child, hoping he will be the great uniter of their two disciplines...unfortunately, their son cracks under the strain and runs away, only to later return as a dark and twisted being leading the Shadow Druids, who revere death and decay and want to transform the region from semi-arid to swamp so they can exist forever beyond the boundary of life and death.
Around that same time, a black dragon secretly immigrates to this area from their homeland, running away from good dragons hunting them. They have slowly built up their power, intending to rule the largest city of the area as their "hoard." This went unnoticed by the people of their homeland until very recently, and the hunt is now on.

There are of course puppetmasters and manipulators behind the scenes,

3. Justifications for the world being overall tolerant and open, but still having conservative/absolutist/intolerant groups or factions that sometimes gain power but can never truly hold onto it forever.

Spoiler: On the Merit and Efficacy of Tolerance

In Jewel of the Desert, mortal races generally needed to band together in order to survive outside the controlling, enslaving genie-rajahs who ruled this region of the world long ago. This means that many races who are normally considered monstrous, like orcs, ogres, tieflings, and minotaurs are just as much part of society as humans, elves, and dwarves--you couldn't be choosy about what allies you accepted in the ancient days, and that has continued to the present day. Further, the main religion, the Safiqi Priesthood, maximally embraces difference and variance, because their monotheistic deity, the One, can only be understood in Their divine simplicity through an infinitude of facets, so each person's perspective is vital for coming to understand the Divine better. But, of course, there are always those who fear difference or variance, and when things to very wrong (as they occasionally do at historical scales) sometimes intolerant or oppressive voices gain power through fearmongering or in response to serious injustice...but the triple forces of money, power, and tradition never let that hold away forever. The world in general is bright, but often at risk of going astray, and that's where heroes come in: not to totally fix a broken world, but to prevent a generally good one from going bad.

 

[Redwizard007]

Top 3? Nah. Just the top 1. Funeral customs.

Each major religion, ethnic group and social class has different ways to treat their dead, and there is a number of taboos and traditions that overlap and/or contradict one another. Each racial/cultural origin story has an elemental tie in, such as the 1st Dwarves being cut from stone or the Orcs having weakness burned from their bodies, that influences treatment of the dead.

Dwarves wish to be returned to the stone, ideally a stone sarcophagus deep underground but poorer dwarves may have to settle for cremation and having their ashes set in a niche cut into paupers' tunnels. Surface dwelling Dwarves might build stone mausoleums with the poor digging a rocky grave or a small cairn of piled stones. Gods forbid a dwarf corpse be left in the open where the winds can batter the soul about and keep it from reaching the afterlife.

Orcs, having already had the weakness burned from their body both by their creator and then again in their coming of age ritual, see the burning of corpses as the greatest insult and taboo. The body of an orc, or someone honored by an orc, should be left on the field of battle for the scavengers who carry the spirit to the afterlife. A trophy may be taken from the fallen by the victor, and this is a great honor for both of them. The heads of great warriors are taken and either dried and preserved intact or boiled down to just the skull. Lesser, but respected foes, may give up an ear, finger, or weapon. These trophies are either worn by the victor, attached to a battle standard, kept by the tribe's shaman or victor, or even used to mark the borders of a tribe's territory. A respected orc who dies outside combat is placed on a platform of wood exposed to the vultures and crows, while one of little renown is heaved somewhere out of sight.

I won't clog the thread up with more, but stuff like that.

 

[Scott Christian]

For me, it's - logical consistency of the timeline and feeling of the continent. This equates to:
- The mechanics system for characters
(which spills into)
- The geographical, racial, and cultural pinning of an area
(which spills into)
- the magic and creature system

 

[HammerMan]

1) Mordo Burnheart, the undead emperor of the shadowlands is a 'strahd' look alike at first, with vampire brides and vampire children... BUT he is the hero in his own right. He already helped slay and lock away 2 great evils before he took on his vampire curse. He was a druid with a gift of 'the sight' that allowed him to see the future...but unlike any before (or until recently since) he could see hundreds of possible futures at once, and what happen if you did X or Y... this is why he become immortal, this is why he has locked down the part of the world he has... why he mixes his cruel and nice tendencies... because he knows a great evil is coming, and if the people of the world are not ready, they all die... sometimes he has to trade a town, or even someone he loves just to keep on the golden path... the only path that leads to the world not ending.

2) Morgonson, the Envoy of the end, long ago a barbarian demi(half) god Goliath made a pact with a being from outside our reality. Using the power and knowledge he almost took over the world 5 times... each time a great hero stopped him. He however survived and recuperated sleeping away sometime centuries. The last time he was sure he would succeed but a Vampire Druid stopped him. However even he secretly fears his own powers, and the thing he made a deal with years ago

3)The upside down. If you travel deep enough into the caves, you will find gravity reverses. You will also find if you keep going (up I guess from that POV) another land with a black sun and a golden moon (literally the sun gives off purple/black light, and the golden orb moon reflects it) Down there lives the Shadar Kai, the Drow, and a race of half drow/half shadar kai...

 

[Richards]

Campaign: "RAIDERS OF THE OVERREACH" (D&D 3.5)

This is my son Logan's campaign, in which I'm a player. (He and I swapped roles from our other campaign.) I'd say the three coolest parts of his campaign are as follows:

1. We started out - literally at character creation - knowing whatever PCs we came up with would start out the campaign as slaves in a drow city. The other four players built surface-race PCs who had just been captured during a series of drow raids immediately before the start of the campaign, while I decided I'd be running a lizardfolk PC whose egg had been stolen from the surface and who had thus lived his entire life as a slave to the drow. This "campaign starting status" is unlike any other we've experienced before and has made for a unique campaign.

2. As a result of the drow-centric premise, this campaign has gotten a lot more involved in political scheming than any other campaign any of us has ever participated in. The city of Overreach has its Eight Noble Houses, of which the House of our drow masters was the third in line. Over the course of the campaign (thus far; we're at 15th level) we've seen Houses been destroyed and taken over by other rival Houses, been involved in conspiracies with other Houses, and fought off a drow matron who declared herself the Mortal Queen of all drow on the Material Plane and thus second only to Lolth Herself.

3. By far the coolest part of this campaign (in my eyes) is the fact that it is not only taking place in the same homebrew campaign world as Logan's previous campaign ("The Durnhill Conscripts"), but it's also taking place over the exact same span of time as the previous campaign. Logan's managed to interweave plots from the first campaign into this one and set things up such that the actions we've taken in this campaign have retroactively been the cause of things going the way they did in the previous campaign. Case in point: one of the major enemies we fought as the Durnhill Conscripts was the Mithral Mage, who had somehow broken out of Dwarven Hell where he'd been imprisoned. In this campaign, one of the potential ways to prevent a world-ending event (involving the Dying One, the severed head of an illithid Elder God still eking away an existence in the Far Realm) was for our PCs to break the Mithral Mage out of Dwarven Hell...so we did it, with these PCs having no idea how much grief we were giving our previous PCs by doing so.

Johnathan

 

[jgsugden]

1.) Simplified Cosmology- I simplified the cosmology back in the 1980s and have kept it simple. Prime, Positve, Negative, Astral, Ethereal (which started out a lot more like the Far Realm exists today), Heaven (a finite space with 7 Realms), Hell (an infinte space with the 9 Hell Regions of Asmodeus surrounded by an infinte expanse of Demonic Realms controlled by Demon Lords), Elemental (just 1 Elemental plane - with pockets of different types of elements - the City of Brass is located at a juncture of the primary 4 elements), and a vast array of Pocket Deimensions. Since then I added Shadowfell, Feywild, and Far Realm, but they all fit seamlessly. My prime world is massive in size (12 times Earth in surface area), and has a Dyson Sphere style 'Underdark Surface' that has been widely entertaining. Truly new players have a much easier time understanding my 'Moderate Wheel' cosmology, and experinced players adapt to it quickly. The simplification has proven to be a powerful tool in making extraplanar adventures easier to relate to the campaigns.

2.) Spelljamming in the Astral - When you get to the teen levels you'll likely find a good amount of the game involving travel through the Astral Sea. My Astral Sea has my version of Sigil, as well as countless pocket dimensions and portals toplaces in other planes. It is a great way to keep the 'Exploration' elements of the game alive as PCs attain higher level magics. While parties can use magic to move themselves between planes, storylines in the teen levels often revolve around massive amounts of things being transported through the Astral.

3.) My 5 Magics- There are 5 types of magic in my world. 3 of them are built upon the Weave, while 2 of them are not. The Weave begins at the Heart of the Positive Energy Plane andstretches through everything to reach the Heart of the Negative Energy Plane. Nature Magic used by druids and rangers is pulled from these Hearts of the Energy Planes. Divine Magic travels along the weave, but it is pushed from Divine Beings to the clerics and paladins that use it. Arcane Magic is built from the leftover 'radiation' in the weave that is gathered, crafter and pushed out by Wizards and Sorcerers. Psychic Magic does not rely upon the weave, but is generated within the creature and exerted out. Supernatural Magic (confusingly called Elemental Magic within the world more often than Supernatural Magic) is a bit of a catchall covering Primordial Ancient Magics, Ghosts, Technology, and anything else that is miraculous, but not inherently Natural, Divine, Arcane or Psychic.

I've had these features in my primary setting for nearly 40 years now. Although they've evolved, they've also settled in quite deeply into the roots of my setting and each has thousands of implications that have played out over the years.