PH proper names in non-GH campaigns

Quasqueton

First Post
For those of you running or playing in home brew campaigns worlds:

Do you use the PH gods? (Pelor, Hextor, Vecna, etc.)

Who are the individuals named in the spell lists? (Mordenkainen, Tenser, Melf, etc.)

How about those of you who use published (but not-Greyhawk) campaigns? Do you use/accept the PH gods and wizard names?

Just curious if you address this in your campaigns, or if you just "erase" them from the game for your world.

Quasqueton
 

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When I do non adventurous homebrews the named spells are from wizards from a time that has long since passed. I might or might not use the deities. If I don't use the PHB deities I use my own.

If I am running a FR campaign or a Kalamar or Dragonlance campaign I don't use the PH gods. If someone else does do this in a game I am playing (using both FR & GH deities) I find it highly disturbing.
 
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Quasqueton said:
For those of you running or playing in home brew campaigns worlds:

Do you use the PH gods? (Pelor, Hextor, Vecna, etc.)
Nope. UMBRAGIA: Volume IV is nearly done and describes the system I use for deities in my campaign.

Quasqueton said:
Who are the individuals named in the spell lists? (Mordenkainen, Tenser, Melf, etc.)
Gone and the names of the spells were changed to match the proper names of characters in my game-world's history. See UMBRAGIA: Volume III for details.

Quasqueton said:
How about those of you who use published (but not-Greyhawk) campaigns? Do you use/accept the PH gods and wizard names?
Need to ask someone else. I mine published campaign worlds -- I do not play them.

Quasqueton said:
Just curious if you address this in your campaigns, or if you just "erase" them from the game for your world.
Erase them. Always.
 

Both our games use the non-human gods in the PHB, just because the 1e Deities & Demigods and Unearthed Arcana are the sources for most of the religions.

In one of the games it's at least possible that a player could pick one of the Greyhawk gods (or from FR some other world), as the gods are simply the methods people use to deal with an all-encompasing divine force rather than actual beings. The mythologies are an afterthought rather than part of the history and creation of the world, so the DM is willing to consider introducing a god if the player really wants, providing they can work out some way it would make sense within what's established. For instance, when I was putting together my druid character she said we could work in Obad-Hai and/or Ehllona if I wanted to as a part of a druidic cult structure separate from the dominant religions of the colony it takes place in. I decided I didn't want to, but I can see how cults for several of the PHB gods be worked into the setting.

As for the wizard names, we do use them. The DMs and most of the players are really only intellectually aware of Greyhawk's existence. I'm not sure if anyone has actually played in or paid much attention to it, so the names don't have any sort of emotional charge connecting them with the setting. However, since we'll be putting together our own PHB for one of the games, we'll have to either have to drop or replace them with adjectives or the DM's similarly-alphabetized wizards to keep things inline with the OGL.
 
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It kind of depends on how the planes settings are set up. In FR, if you worship a deity who doesn't have a portfolio, you won't get spells (if you are a Cleric), & you won't be designated to their plane when you die.
 

I play a homebrew with it's own gods and have dropped the wizards names from their spells. When I used to run Forgotten Realms campaigns (in 2e) we used FR gods but I can't remember whether or not we dropped the GH wizards names from the spells.

I don't mind the Greyhawk gods in the PHB as I fugure they're just examples to use if you don't have something more approriate. But I wish they'd drop the wizards name from the spells and just use the generic names in the SRD.
 

i do the same as Mr. Ladage -- homebrewed gods replace the PHB gods, and i use homebrewed wizard names from the campaign world that start with the same letter as those used in spells, to keep them in alphabetical order.

i'm interested to hear what the "official" line is for FR. does Elminster cast a Mordenkainen's disjunction, or is called something different there?
 

Gods: Homebrew, but some similarities of course (only so many forms of "Evil Lich God" that can be used)

Spells: Named after the PC or NPC in my gaming world that discovers them. The players love this, they race to invent various "named" spells and will adventure to gain the materials/xp to do so. Since spells are often lost over time for various reasons (their possessors don't always share them, civilizations fall, the rules of magic are "shifted" by the gods), when they are "created" again they are named after the person who discovered them. Thus the named spells retain the flavor of being unique or unusual and not part of a core set needed to base other spells upon.
 

For my upcoming homebrew-world campaign I started making some homebrew gods. But I finally decided on just using the PH gods. No one in my group (other than myself) is familiar with Greyhawk. So far as they are concerned, the PH gods are just generic.

And I'll just say the wizard names in the spells are just names from far back in history. Again, my players don't know the names anyway.

Quasqueton
 

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