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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7263557" data-attributes="member: 996">I created my first, most elaborate, campaign world for D&D as a teenager, it was quite derivative, of course.  It was created by The Gods from a formless primordial chaos, separating the 4 classic elements (plus Light & Darkness as elements), and shaping them into flat world, about the size of Europe, in total, with a sun and moon circling it, closely, (the sun rising in the west and setting in the east for no reason I can remember, now), the whole enclosed in an iron sphere dotted with stars.  The Gods who created the world made a Pact that none of them would enter or directly interfere with their creation.  They also inadvertently trapped beings that had existed in the primordial chaos within the sphere, giving me some Lovecraftian monsters to play with. The first inhabitant of the world were the Elves, formed of three of the four elements (lacking fire), who invented metalurgy & magic, and after eons of idylic existance, eventually started a civil war, in the course of that conflict, 'High Order' (6th+ level) spells were created, the elves differentiated into their various strains, and using alchemy, created Dragons (from raw elements), orcs (from captured grey elves, by infusing them with an excess of fire) and humans (from captured drow elves, but with a balance of the 4 elements) as warrior-races to continue the conflict long after the elves' slow reproduction would have left them whiped them out by attrition.  After devastating much of the world, and sealing the drow behind a prismatic wall, the elves swore off the mighty magics of the war (thus the elven magic-user level limit of 11), and released their human soldiers into the recovering areas of the world, while keeping the few pristine primeval forests for  themselves, and leaving the irrevocably-devastated accursed  'Wasted Land' to the remnants of the Drow's orc soldiers.(Dwarves, BTW, somehow dug their way into the world from an alternate prime material plane, they were an earth/water race, didn't even need to breath, for instance, and dwarven patriarchs were each legendary crafters who carved their clans from living rock (settling the old dwarven women & beards debate - the dwarves were genderless).  I don't recall if I ever decided where gnomes & kobolds came from... Halfings were created by a solitary wizard as companions and servants, and inherited his idylic land after he passed - someone pointed out to me that it sounded like the Smurphs' origin.)Much later I came up with a world inspired by 3.0, I left it  open whether it was flat or an actual planet, and this time it was the Dragons who were the first sentient beings on the world.  They grew in arcane knowledge, size, power, and individuality.  Eventually, each created a sentient race to serve it (the 'elder races' - including Mind Flayers, Giants almost certainly elves, and possibly kobolds & gnomes), and they went to war until few Dragons, and few of their elder races remained.  Then, legends get contradictory.  One version of the story is that the last, greatest of the primordial dragons created the youngest elder race, or oldest young race, and left the world to them.  Another is that the Gods came to the world and created the first young races (including humans & gnolls, orcs, goblinoids, and possibly gnomes & kobolds). The upshot is that the 'young races' can worship gods and gain levels in classes like Paladin or Cleric - and, indeed, most humans in the setting could become 'initiates,' regardless of class, and get a Domain like a Cleric - and Elder races (and elder-blooded humans called Sorcerers) tended to use arcane magic.I also ran a weird little game in a setting of a distant galaxy, the 'Dark Wheele,' colonized by some quite eccentric humans who mis-jumped, and created some strange cultures as they spread themselves thinly over the galaxy.  The central theme was that the humans in question were exiled (perhaps by choice) from a technological/corporate cyperpunk dystopia of some kind.   They're religion was reminiscent of the Dune Butlerian Jihad, computers & robots were taboo.  They also practiced an almost insane from of rugged individualism, eschewing mass production and most forms of trade - if you needed something, you literally made it for yourself, and only used it, yourself.  There were variations on where the line was drawn between the personal and 'commodities' that could be traded.  One consistent point: weapons that could kill.  Most people used nominally-non-lethal weapons, from clubs to stunners, and the original colonists had left behind equipment to make 'blasters,' arguably less-lethal, but not good to get hit with a lot, which were considered a 'commodity' for some reason.  Being able to make & use a lethal weapon conferred a special status, a 'Master of Death,' - and, if you could also heal in some way, 'Master of Life.'  The whole thing was a sort of melting-pot spoof/homage of different sci-fi, comics, & games.Then there was my Champions! campaign, an alternate Earth that diverged in 1908 when a meteorite bearing a mysterious element, Radium-X, hit Siberia and set off a chain reaction of human mutation and proto-nuclear super-science, and, again, when King Arthur 'brought magic back into the world' when he returned from Avalon to repel a WWI invasion of England. Thus the 20th century was 'The Age of Heroes.'</blockquote>

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