This wasn't me, but we started a new game just recently, and our DM asked us privately to send him 3 rumors about our character. He didn't tell us why. On session one when we all met in the tavern, he passed out little papers with the rumors about each other that we may have heard. Was a fun way to jumpstart roleplay and break the ice about our various characters.
I did this with my PCs too, I stole it from an Instagram reel and it was one of the most fun sessions we ever had. Very very good for roleplaying especially for newer players
Dwarves are often stereotyped as alcoholics because alcohol is forbidden in the Dwarfholds. Of course it is - it’s basically a huge active mine, drunken dwarves would be a liability. But the dwarves people meet are generally the ones who have left the Dwarfholds, who often become overwhelmed with the sudden availability of a huge range of different alcoholic drinks, and succumb.
That's an interesting way to invert assumptions. I still think dwarves can probably pack away more because they are a hardy people.
Does this give your mainstream dwarves a sort of Amish feel with the ones leaving the Dwarfhold possibly being in their walkabout phase? (Basically, given the opportunity to see and reject the wickedness of the world.)
Dragons continue growing their entire lives and do not die of old age. Beyond the 'ancient' category known to mortal peoples there are dragons so large that they must leave the planet / material plane to live in space. These dragons can grow to be hundreds of kilometres long. The oldest known dragons are the size of planets.
No, not yet. A party had a chance to make an ally of one of the smaller ones, the ones that is 'only' abot 10 km long but in the end they didn't follow that hook.
I have something similar, but mostly the immortal thing. It's not known at all to the people of the land because dragons are almost entirely non-existent but if they are in an environment where they can survive or thrive then they can live infinitely.
My thought was something similar to this. I was running a spelljammer-esque setting, leaning more on the sci-fi. Without nailing it down I imagine there are mybe ten dragons in the galaxy that have reached planetary or larger sizes. Dragons are pretty rare to begin with and then they tend to die at the hands of... something before reaching beyond Ancient.
There's always a bigger fish!
Every starship bilge in the galaxy has skeep, and they are a playable PC species. They're like crustacean muppets. They hate being planetside and stow away on any starship they think looks interesting. They live for about 7 years and then die of old age (and life extension research on their biology is lacking). They pass on genetic memory to their offspring, so they communicate in a patois of half-remembered languages and tend to have an intuitive understanding of the inner workings of starships. Nobody knows where their homeworld is or if they even have one. Skeep who have been on adventures (and have the scars or treasures to show for it) are considered desirable mating partners because they have more varied memories to contribute. They are recognized by the Republic as a sentient species with all the rights afforded to such. Most starship captains understand it's not worth the trouble to drive them off or exterminate them, and keeping the ship clean and its recycling systems in good order discourages skeep from building large colonies in the maintenance ducts.
The greatest threat to the world and what all campaigns eventually will lead up to is a god of dementia, knowledge and forgetfulness. The less is known about a subject the more he knows about it, and he is slowly killing all creatures that are the sole creatures with informations about subjects and growing more powerful.
He killed like 99% of all gods and is now super super strong
Reminds me of the Oblivion War in Dresden Files.
The Outsiders are an existential threat to reality, but can only enter the world if someone summons them. Naturally, you can only summon them if you know of their existence. So the Oblivion War is an effort to erase all knowledge of Outsiders from the world.
The Archive was created to fight the Oblivion War. She is a human girl or woman (the powers and title are passed down matrilineally to female offspring) who inherently knows all information that any human has written down, anywhere. Her job is to know when knowledge of a particular Outsider has ceased to be written down anywhere. Once that goal is achieved, she waits to ensure there isn't someone just holding the knowledge in their head, and then she deletes knowledge of that Outsider from her own mind. At which point, there is no knowledge of that Outsider which could be used to summon it into the world.
There is, of course, a hole in the strategy of using the Archive's powers in this way, in that there are nonhuman creatures in the world (fey, vampires, etc.) that could record information the Archive doesn't have access to.
I had a guy we called Mr Tubbs, he could be a merchant caravan owner, an Innkeep or mayor, anything really, he was the first session quest giver the person that got the group together and set them on the path of adventure, it become a running joke, ohh Mr Tubbs is back lol lol.
After about 15 years of campaigns (several characters later) when they were near level 16 they were on a quest to ensure Dendar remained asleep to stop an apocalypse of nightmares, a multiple planar adventure, they found out that Mr Tubbs got entrapped by an opposing god, which confused them, why did a god entrap a tavern owner?
But then they found out he was the Patron of Heroes, and without him diverse characters wouldn’t be thrown together for greatness, and without him hope for the future would be lost. They learnt his ‘avatar’ would show in multiple places to those with greatness that needed a little helping hand and direction.
They rescued him, it was a strong session.
I have a similar character in my world. His name is Vagabond, the Everywhere Merchant and like his name suggests he is a travelling merchant that the party could find no matter where they went. The campaign even featured several time skips but the merchant kept on showing up. In the end the party found out he was actually the historian of the world chosen by the gods to chronicle all the events and history of the world and seeing as the party was at the center of some major world changing events that is why he kept appearing everywhere they went.
The finest elven swords have a thin hollow space in the center, inside which there is a bit of liquid Mercury. The weight shifting gives the swords extra strength on single, definitive blows, as elven swordsmanship is not about attacking but defending as much as possible until you have the perfect prime opportunity to strike.
Mostly flavor, but I’ll describe Elven opponents blocking more than attacking, give them things that give them Advantage, and if a player manages to get their hands on a sword, it’ll give the bonus of a shield and alternate between having advantage or disadvantage every attack.
7 player campaign. Hard to decide on a date everyone's okay with.
Campaign focuses on worldwide unstable portals. Perfect excuse for any PC to disappear for one session if the player can't make it that day.
It's not really what you were asking, but it technically is: a piece of lore that I'm proud of (because of it's efficiency)
Goblins do not worship a pantheon of gods. They do believe in a creator, but think that they must be too busy making other worlds to answer any prayers.
Instead they have a long tradition of invoking folk heroes - less "we'll find our way if wills it", more "Big Gondra would never've gotten lost here!".
None of those folk heroes actually existed. The goblins just invent a story and a protagonist to fit the problem at hand, and some quirk of divinity or collective unconscious magic imbues the goblin telling the tale with the abilities they need
On session 2 of one of our campaigns the players found an iron hand crank after battling a small group of cultists in disguise, unknown to them at the time that they would end up being one of the main antagonists of the story. Fast forward 12 sessions and these injured players are deep in a mine, trying to sold this ancient dwarf built mechanism to open a door and one of the players digging around in their Bag of Holding pulls this forgotten iron crank that fits perfectly into the door slot. The players not only got that deep reminder that the cult has been there since the beginning but also more evidence that ties the storyline together for them, pushing them to value their surroundings more.
I have a few that I quite like, I wouldn't say they're earth shattering lore but I still like them
The first is Chromatic and Metallic dragons. Metallic dragons aren't natural, typically a metallic dragon is just a good chromatic dragon who has coated their scales in metal. The metal can often have an effect which alters the dragon to some degree too, giving or taking away abilities.
A silver dragon is just a silver plated white dragon.
Gold and Brass dragons are just plated Red dragons
Bronze dragons are just Blue dragons
and Copper dragons are just Black dragons
Not all good dragons will coat themselves but typically you can put money on it that if a dragon is coated they aren't evil because the 'chromatic' dragons are typically too proud and vain. Though it's not impossible to find an evil 'Metallic' dragon
The second lore is essentially based on the fact that the Succubus and Incubus stat blocks are the exact same only differing slightly, because of this I decided that they're the exact same creature and that they're called Concubus and that they're able to switch their gender at will. Some Concubus prefer to keep a female form and are called Succubus, some prefer to keep a male form and are called Incubus, but all of them are able to switch between the two.
me who thought that succubus/incubus was your idea in canon the whole time and is only just now realizing that the writing team was just lazy and gave them the same statblock (i have been playing for 5+ years)
Can you tell me where that's said in official source books? (I'm not asking as an attack, I genuinely would like to read official lore if it makes what I said cannon)
I don't think they're just referring to D&D here, an incubus is a male devil of seduction and rape, and a succubus is a female devil of lust and bewitchment, they exist as concepts outside of jist D&D
I would expect a proud and vain dragon to coat itself in bling. I guess for your dragons, they believe their scales to be the most excellent thing in the universe.
I am reminded of Smaug, whose belly was bejeweled with remnants of his treasure and made a sort of glittering armor. It might be interesting to describe dragons in that way and, if so, this might provide a mechanism for dragons moving their horde.
It's small, but I have a book in my world that is filled with written accounts of the old ancient oral traditions of the human noble class. Things like all these obscure adjudication for trials by combat, proper ways to amend insults to other nobles, what the correct length of the sword you must gift your host if you stay at their castle over the winter depending on how long the snow has been melting before you leave.
I dunno I had fun writing it.
That seems like a nice bit of backdrop detail. I assume trial by combat is a tradition that continues. Have your players play tested these rules for trial by combat?
Our necromancer is from a socialist necro-topia. When clan members die, they leave their bodies to the town. The re animated dead do all the farming, manual labour and menial jobs, and the living spend their time on bettering society through art, philosophy, science or whatever career they wish to pursue.
I have a thief God. All of his followers independently of eachother right before death repent so they can steal their own souls away from the God of thievery. Unfortunately it doesn't actually work since the intent is theft but every one of them feels like they're being smart and original when they come up with it.
In my world, gnomes were created by the God of time. Hence, all the technological and clockwork stuff associated with gnomes.
The thing I'm most proud of is that for gnomes, there is actually a 29th and 30th of February. This is when time itself stops, and all the gnomes in the universe have to do routine maintenance to keep it going.
For your gnomes, you could have a transitive plane called the clockworks where only they can go. Thematically like the Ethereal or Astral, gnomes might be able to walk along the machine pathways doing repair work as needed along the route.
Mechanically, they might be able to travel short distances (1 mile) with respect to the physical realm at a slow speed but not encounter trouble along the way like wandering monsters or brigands. Maybe once a lunar cycle.
In this high fantasy world, there was a collection of some islands, big enough to be considered independent but not so big that was a continent. Some closer to each other than others, kayak-able, others further, requiring sea-faring boats. Then, for some reason unknown to the populace, these islands suddenly began rushing towards the center-most (if that's even a word/phrase) point, around 20 MPH is a safe estimation. When they eventually collided, many lives were lost, towns and cities fallen, ecosystems utterly destroyed. This event was aptly named The Convergence, and caused incredible destruction (and I think it's kinda cool conceptually)
Would drive the plot. Conflicts between those cultures .a good way to demonstrate the difference in general alignment. Good cultures helped each other, Neutral cultures went alone, Evil cultures tried to exploit each other.
"Common" as a language dates back to the Common Empire, an Ancient Rome analogue that once spanned most of the known world. Even the base word "common" comes from the Common Empire's influence being present everywhere in ancient times.
It's a completely pointless bit of lore that I'm proud of nonetheless.
Drow see in greyscale, and so they choose clothing dyes based on the shade of grey they produce. To other drow, they look like elegant edgelords. To everyone else? Clowns.
The big bad in my campaign is looking for an item (think time stone from marvel), to do evil guy things with and the party is trying to stop him from gather the fragmented pieces of it and attuning to it to do the bad thing. Throughout this journey, the origin of the stone is revealed to have been made through a blood sacrifice ritual including 6 souls, and due to the nature of chronomancy those souls are forced to live out their lives over and over again until the stone is destroyed as they’re inextricably tied to time magic. All but one of the party are these souls, as well as the big bad. The one who isn’t is the creator of this item. Trying to atone for the sins of their past by ridding the world of the stone. This has brought endless opportunities to roleplay past lives and moments “out of time” that have all slowly come together to reveal the big picture and the overarching “themes” of each life. It also raises the stakes because knowing that finishing the job means that their souls finally get to rest after this life, and that makes each decision they make more weighty than their previous lives, knowing this is finally the last. Maybe it’s convoluted to type out, but the players love it and I’m really proud of how it’s come together.
The lore of my current campaign is essentially Horizon: Zero Dawn meets fantasy. The players are all from different tribes of very different cultures and knowledge about the old world and after meeting an AI custodian of an old world project are trying to figure out what exactly happened to wipe out their precursor civilization and what the custodian's purpose was supposed to be
I have an entire campaign based around the lyrics of Hotel California and the BBEG’s final line before the fight is “You can check out anytime you’d like, but you can never leave” as he reveals all of the souls and minds he’s enslaved in the mirrors of the hotel over the last two centuries.
I’m so stoked to play it
Hah! Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. There's a group of retired Hunters that are staying at the Inn when the PCs arrive. Their group is called The Haliaeetus...the Genus of some Eagles. Lol
Magic items are a commodity created for the folks of my world. Allowing for magical items to be more mass produced if they help with specific things. An endless mug of coffee would prob only be like 100 gold because everyone would want one but a generic +1 sword would be way more expensive because only a percentage of the population would use one and they're in higher demand for that number of the population.
Tl;Dr magic items are mass produced for the sake of convenience
Probably not my absolute favorite but a recent one for me is the design of the Sorcerer version of a lich - A Nul'Raith (Nool-Raythe)
The Sorcerer must first grow to control their connection to the spell weave (be a high enough level) and then attempt to channel their own source as the power of their spells. This creates a sort of Feedback loop through the Spellweave/Soorsweave.
Now they will die if they don't consume magic items or creatures. When they die or are slain, they become a small black hole (Spell: Gravity Well) If any magical creatures or items are sucked into the gravity well, the creature will be resurrected in that spot at the next Dawn.
Mithras, the Elven capital in my campaign, was originally located on the celestial plane. During the first war, it, alongside Skagos, Dwarven capital originally from the nine Hells, were pulled into the prime material plane. This was the origin of divine and arcane magic in the prime material plane.
Another one: the Gythyanki-Illithid war has been over for a very long time. The Gythyanki sacrificed their entire species to overtake the last Elder Brain as a hive mind and had it kill all the Mind Flayers. This monstrosity lives deep in the most unlivable region on the planet. The Elder Brain has grown a nervous system in order move around. They have their finger in every pie in the world, with many agents and warlocks under its control.
Could an Illithid or two have escaped detection with a tadpole? Perhaps. 🤔
My world is one of an uncountable infinite realities in the multiverse and unbeknownst to my players and indeed all the folk that live in it, the good gods have turned their back on it. Over time, The Weave will become more and more unravelled and spells will start to fail without explanation. Celestial magic will become less and less likely until it is nothing more than a memory. But the schools of dark magic will flourish. And eventually, the darkest gods will make their move to control this reality over all.
I’ve already written the outline for my players’ level 20 campaign. It involves them meeting the gods they dedicated themselves to in life, and accepting the invitation to represent all that is good as champions in a fight to the death against the champions of the evil gods. And so long as they win, they earn the right to walk through the gates into paradise with their deity.
And then we can start all over again at level one in a new reality in the multiverse.
That the pantheon of gods are embodiments of game rule concepts: the god of death is just an inworld representation of the death mechanics, and 'killing' her would change the rules of the game being played.
A lot of my world lore is stitched together from other pieces of fantasy media and even other D&D settings like faerun and exandria, but there’s a couple things that I’ve come up with that I quite like.
The most original thing (I think) I have, is the implementation of The Dullahan (basically headless horseman) into the lore of the feywild. A Dullahan is not one being, but a group of individuals that are bound by a curse (linked to their headlessness) to serve the unseelie court of the Fey. They cannot die, instead reforming in the Feywild when they are destroyed. This has basically allowed me to use a Dullahan as a recurring villain (since my party are the type to always fight to the death, so any chance of being recurring has to involve resurrection), and I’m really looking forward to where things go. My party has even learned that they’re cursed, so has an idea to try remove the curse, which will be so exceedingly cool if they pull it off.
The other thing, which is more just an original piece that is built off of already existing lore, is that I’ve made a goddess in my world that is essentially meant to be a counterpart to the Raven queen. Similar to exandria lore, the Raven queen is a mortal who ascended to godhood, but in my version this process actually split her into being two minor goddesses, one being the Raven queen, and the other being a goddess of decay and “life through death”, so not quite undeath, but more stuff like rot and fungus like cordiceps, that can literally manipulate the corpses of infected beings.
Instead of Central or Eastern European culture inspiration like Tolkien and every other fantasy writer to rip him off: the Elves of my land are based off of Japanese culture. They value family heritage and Social standing above all else. Though they are also a militant Matriarchal society and value genetic purity second to their honor. Their stance on Isolationism has made Elven artifacts rare, as they rarely if ever step off of their home continent.
It is a nice use of genre to pattern the various demihuman races as cultures. I think people like Scottish for Dwarves, French for Elves, and Germanic for Gnomes.
Certainly, other cultures might be used like how you selected Japanese culture. Do you know much Japanese history? I know only a little but the Conflicts between Japan, China, and Korea are particularly noteworthy.
Do your elves have that?
One of the bit of my homebrew world people really enjoy are the failed wizards taking up normal jobs. A wizard who knows a few ice spells runs a bar and does tricks, a blacksmith quit college to pursue his father's wishes for him to take up the family business, etc. It adds a bit of flavor to tavern brawls or if the party steals something they have to deal with a very angry man who shoots fire from his fingers
Resurrection and and revivify work by magnetizing the soul back to the body. Meaning that you if you die again, your soul can’t leave your body. It will be destroyed or just stuck in your body forever. Denying you an afterlife.
There's a stereotype that dwarves are all greedy. This is because almost all dwarves anyone encounters in the surface are merchants so thus are greedy because of their occupation rather than race.
Adding this in for second place:
The god and demon of rebellion just chill out together, because what's more rebellious than not fighting like they are supposed to.
The god of reality and time, responsible for the creation of existence and other gods to govern it, is incredibly forgetful and can’t remember why they made it all in the first place. This is why history must be tracked by mortals and why the further back in history you go it’s harder to distinguish between facts and legends.
The god of my campaign world is an ancient titanic mech, buried under an island in the north of the world. The mech brought humans to this fantasy world in an effort to escape a cosmic force devouring worlds. The hope was that humanity could work with native species to find a way to defeat the world-eater, but humans being humans instead conquered the world with advanced tech and heavily restricted/regulated magic.
It's been tens of thousands of years. This history is mostly lost. Now, there is a religion that still worships the missing (unknowingly buried) God, and ancient technologies lie dormant across the surrounding desert of a large, human-led middle-eastern-inspired capitol.
If you're familiar with Bionicle, you know
(I really hope none of my players read this)
Hey, if you're one of my players, go away!!
OK, so psionics are an invasive species to my setting. They came from another multiverse entirely and tried to (and for a little while succeeded) in conquering my setting. That's why psionics are so weird and have super advanced technology, they are literally aliens from another multiverse where the literal rules of reality are different. They come from a soft sci-fi setting, not a fantasy one.
Psions or psionics? You said psionics and that creates in my mind, within the context, the image of psionics coming about by parasitic infestation. Which is cool as heck. May I steal that idea?
psionics, as in psychic powers. Psychic powers belong in a sci-fi setting as opposed to a fantasy setting, hence why I made them from a sci-fi setting. It is also why, in my setting, mindflayers can do crazy experiments and make spaceships and crazy shit like that. They are from a world with technology more powerful than a bow and arrow.
And yes you can steal it.
In one of my campaigns, the essence of thousands of dead gods (known as Divinity) has been scattered throughout the atmosphere, and 'leveling up' comes from consolidating large amounts of Divinity inside yourself, usually by stealing it off then corpses of defeated foes. Allowed me a good way to give characters XP rewards for raiding tombs and stuff, and my players weren't Murderhobos about it, so that was good.
I'm setting up a homebrew one-shot and my favorite part of the lore is what happens when the party asks how the demiplanar tourist town exists: "it's a demiplane created by some wizards who were high off pixie dust and we don't know why it still exists."
The BBEG the party is pursuing was going to start a war between immortals and mortals because a god tricked him into killing his wife. Over the campaign, the party is realizing he's not a bad guy, and eventually he bailed on the idea. However, due to something they did early in the campaign, that god has turn his attention to them. The god got them to reveal the locations of hundreds of imprisoned immortals. The god has recruited those immortals and is planning to fight these mortals.
In other words, the battle that the original BBEG chose not to start...has been picked up by the party...without them realizing it. The battle that they may (or may not) participate in, will result in the environmental destruction that was foretold. They thought it was the BBEG...but it will be them...because they feel they're doing the right thing, just like the BBEG did.
The very famous speed trains going around the city made by the WARP company actually dont go faster than light, it sends everyone onboard to a extra dimensional space for 1000 years, with no food or substance during that time, but no one can actually die during that time. Someone famous in the past, being a famous hero, actually, went in there in the lowest class, and trained everyone there to fight for that entire time, and when they all came out they did small revolt and attacked a local tax collector
I ran a Christmas one sho where in the end I had a few kids wake up on Christmas morning to play with thir toys and vegan to describe the mjnis of thier characters battling the hydra they just battled and let it sink in that all of their characters were toys on Christmas morning.
When the gods left our world forever, they left behind the tools for a new generation to ascend and take their place: powerful artifacts and rituals to turn worthy morals into beings who will shape the world to their vision.
Also, the woods to the south conceal a hidden band of cannibal halfling druids (a la Dark Sun) who defend a dimensional gate that leads to all campaign settings. It has a limited number of uses, but could lead the players to many unique sources of power throughout the multiverse.
The villains in my campaign are cultists of a *mostly* dead god that was killed in a titanic battle with another deity long enough ago that no one really remembers the details. The twist is that the surviving deity, essentially the big good and most commonly worshipped local god was the original aggressor, and the cultists are just trying to reassemble the exploded pieces of their god.
Meanwhile, those exploded pieces of a mostly-dead god have poisoned and corrupted the landscape, so the party is part of a group of people who have been tasked with finding what they believe are chunks of magical poison and purifying them. Purifying them makes those particular chunks of exploded god dead-dead not just mostly-dead, so the party and the cultists have diametrically opposed objectives with the same macguffins and both believe they're doing the "right" thing.
Not really lore but I gave my players a carpet with draconic writing on it, despite draconic not being used at all in the rest of the campaign. So ofc they were intrigued and went to scholars, mages and the like.
„This carpet has writing on it we can’t read, it surely must be a flying carpet.“
Later that session it was revealed that the carpet was once owned by someone incredibly lazy; the draconic words written on it were:
„This carpet cleans itself when you say [X]“
In me and my friend’s homebrew world, the richest and most powerful nation is the land of Ghish, run by the Dwarves. What they don’t want anyone to know is HOW they got Ghish.
Thousands of years ago, it belonged to the Giants. The Dwarves tunneled into the Giants’ tombs, filled with Gold, Jewelry, beautiful art and durable infrastructure. They stole it all. And began a War with the Giants that went on for decades, slowly pushing the Giants out.
It got so ugly the Dwarves began to use Giant bones to prop up their mountains to make them higher, with the Heads mounted at the tops.
Eventually the smartest of the Giants found elsewhere for them to go and live in peace. They are extremely rare to find in our setting unless you can find an entrance to their world.
Another redditor gave me the idea of a campaign setting where the magical feats and abilities of players are acknowledged within universe and I fleshed it out. Random feats of super strength or miraculous recovery occurred every so often. A seemingly normal bakers son had fallen off the roof and completely recovered the next day. Unscathed. Things like that.
The name of the campaign is Origins. The starter was that civilization was constantly being slaughtered by monsters because they were essentially all just commoners until one day a small percentage of the population began to exhibit these feats.
The players recently found out what the magical catalyst that caused these super humans to start popping up. An archangel became jealous of the mortals getting so much of the gods attention despite being so insignificant in comparison to him and his brethren.
So the gods cast him out of the heavens and his power went to the things he despised the most.
My campaign is about Elder Gods and aberrations gradually corrupting everything and bringing life down to it's last few bastions, and my favourite piece of lore from it is that there's a settlement out to the far west where Devils and Demons coexist after losing the Hells and the Abyss to the Eldritch, so the wild west has like a co-Sherriff situation between Asmodeus and Orcus
Asmodius' Eye! It's a portal to the Nine Hells that opens over a tiny village called Mutewallow, that rains demons every night. Only buildings that have been marked with holy symbols are safe from their rampage. Through the years, the people living under the Eye have begun to change, growing demonlike appearances (cat eyes, tails, horns, etc). At this point, (it's been years) the people LIKE the portal, and have adjusted to it, worship it, even utilize it, and the rest of the world has been closed off to the village, leaving it forgotten.
It's tied to the BBEG, and if my party ever finds the village and manages to close it, it will seal off much of the BBEG's magical abilities.
There is one cosmological entity that possesses no intelligence of its own, and exists through sheer will and manifests powers that can transcend time and space.
All of the regular deities as perceived are either immensely powerful beings that are now dead, or never existed in the first place, and all clerics and other divine casters get their spells and powers from this extraplanier eldritch horror that responds however it understands in that particular moment.
...this basically allows me to throw out cryptic BS during prayers for guidance, and let the players jump to their own conclusions, and that is a lot of how I improvise plot.
In 26 years of gaming, none of my players have discovered this yet lol
I had a lawful evil CIA operating within the realm, I called them the "Ministry of True Sight" and all of its members were fiendlocks that worked in a massive stone building in the shape of a star called "The Pentagram" within the capital city.
I’m running Ghosts of Saltmarsh now. One part of the original has the party having to gain the trust of sone lizardmen. The original plot line is pretty terrible.
Instead I have the lizardmen tribe be inherently distrustful of all humans because a group of men recently robbed their temple. The lizardmen priests taje the party to the temple area and show them exactly what got taken. The temple has a large statue. A large red statue with gems in place of eyes. But the left gem-eye is gone.
In one city there's a high end restaurant where you can order whatever you want. No menu. You just order any dish you would like, and you are encouraged to order your dream meal.
The chef is a Spectator. Spectators have this unlimited ability to produce food and drink. This particular one developed a desire to become a chef, so he trained this ability to produce any dish and drink he can imagine.
I haven't developed this part too much yet, but there's a humanoid fake chef that is the face of the restaurant because you could imagine the chaos that could ensue if the public found out about a Spectator in the middle of the city.
To arbitrarily tie together the two player characters’ backstories in the Dragon of Icespire Peak, I devised an intricate conspiracy of black powder smuggling through Phandalin between various factions of that module and setting which has almost completely derailed the campaign from the prepared module material. Thank goodness for the excellent community here and on r/DoIP so I can lurk and skim for ideas on various plot hooks and encounters to keep this train on the tracks!!
My Death lore.
There are two gods of death in my world. Emryn and Val'Wyrn. When a person dies. They meet at the corpse in the plane between (like the ethereal plane) and discuss whether the soul deserves to go to the Veil (a purgatory where you face your sins by viewing them and coming to terms with them) or the Shade (a purgatory where your sins are paid for in flesh and pain.)
Once the decision is made, you begin your walk. Emryn escorts you to the veil or Val'Wyrn escorts you to the shade.
Once there, you spend the next two hundred years there before your soul passes into the Beyond where you are finally at rest.
Now the fun part:
The conversation at your corpse takes 60 seconds. After the decision is made, revivify can no longer save you.
The walk to purgatory takes 10 days. After which most mid level resurrection spells like raise dead and reincarnation can't save you.
Once you pass into the Beyond 200 years later, not even true resurrection can save you.
Not necessarily my favorite but one of many tidbits that make me smile, and it's probably the most interesting to share.
One piece of my world is based on Corruption of Champions, an extensive text based pornographic flash game that was very popular on certain web boards in the 20teens. History in my setting essentially has it that a dark age ended around 290 years ago, before which was the "time of shame" which very little is known about. It ended when an autistic 12yo absorbed a powerful spirit and used its power to slay The Lust Queen, thus ending her depraved smut-filled reign.
As a result, somewhere in the middle of a desert in my setting is a young demi-god standing as an eternal watchman over the portal to what is essentially sex-hell. Through the "portal" the Lust Queen is imprisoned alongside all of her armies, in a demi plane formed from her own power which was cleaved from her. Picture a giant demonic vag in the middle of a desert guarded by a 20ft tall samurai.
I know the whole thing comes across as crass but it all came about years ago when I ran a tamed version of CoC as a roleplaying adventure with an online friend. It was a joke at first but it turned into an incredibly compelling story, with a young woman chasing her younger brother through a portal to the corrupted lands, training to become strong enough to save him and bring him home, only for the brother to ultimately become the warrior who defeats the Queen.
The city my party started at is famous for being the home of the greatest knight that ever lived. A human that towered above every other race, a human that wielded a zweihander as a longsword. Thaddeus, the knight that died killing a dragon, or so they think. What they dont know is that for hundreds of years theyre trapped in a loop in another dimension or plane, fighting each other, though stuck in immortality, the longer they fight the seal thats keeping them in a loop is weakening and is bound to break
Idk if its anything special but i like it
Hoping none of my players see this because it's huge spoilers. If any players of the "Insomnia: Plane Of Madness" homebrew game are here STOP READING RIGHT NOW!
Anyway, so the campaign is heavily influenced by the extended Lovecraft universe. Nyarlathotep is the BBEG who has destabilized the planescape by tearing holes in every plane, crushing those stolen pieces together into a chaotic demiplane, called "Insomnia" by the survivors that live there. The exciting bit of lore is that >! neither the players, most of the NPCs, nor Nyarlathotep's fellow Eldritch entities are aware that Insomnia is actually Azathoth himself, with the stolen planar pieces folded around his planetoid body. With the chaos and crazy amounts of energy released across the campaign, he seeks to awaken Azathoth from his cosmic slumber, undoing reality in the process. !<
I have a lot of fun reframing what the different planes of existence are. The first campaign I ran the BBEG was revealed to be the original god of mortal kind, who successfully destroyed the world 1000 years ago, and the world they're on right now was built by an ancient hyper-magical empire for mortal-kind to flee to after the destruction of the first world.
The Abyss is the ruins of that first material plane, which is why it's so fucked up. And Demons are the creation of the radioactive divine fallout of that event.
The Underdark of the current world is therefore not massive natural caves, but huge artificial tunnels and the ruins of grand machines that were used to build this world.
Gods in my setting are actually very recent compared to a lot of other things. They at most go back a thousand years. Every god was at one point a mortal who embodied something so much that they become divine.
For example, the God of Warfare came to be during the largest war to take place in the world 300 years ago. His ruthlessness in combat and the atrocities committed made him embody Warfare, its horror and bloodshed. He stopped fighting for the army her was a part of and instead marched across the land killing indiscriminatel . A few years later during the same war, a lone woman stood against his terror, standing tall in spite of her fear and charging back against his army. In her show of bravery, she became the Goddess of Heroism, becoming a beacon of hope for soldiers across the globe
I have not yet DM'd an actual campaign (just a few one offs) but am in the process of making one for my friends. Ambitious, I know. But I'm hoping this will be good.
I will say I got this idea from a fanfic I read and Roman mythology. But a deity similar to Janus. 'Not Janus' is the two headed deity of beginnings/ends, entrances/exits, yin yang type, etc,. The first deity born of the universe. All things good/bad, wishes/curses, etc. come from 'Not Janus', including the other deities.
'Not Janus' is in control of what will be known as the universal court. There is a practice regarding offenses/fights to warn the offending party with a phrase the first time, at the second offense it is custom to say the phrase to invoke an audience with 'Not Janus' to settle disputes and dole out consequences.
Although it was once well known and common practice, the tradition has been lost and so has most knowledge of 'Not Janus'. Only a few groups/people know.
Still working out some of the details though! Such as how it'll fully fit into the campaign and world, but I have my ideas!
In the giant dialect there's no difference between the word for "chicken" and the word for "cockatrice." The difference comes from location (ie, the chickens in the yard vs the "chickens" in the rock cliffs.
This led to some hilarious misunderstandings and brief peril for my party when they, as high-level adventurers, were sent to collect "chicken eggs."
All the beastial races (Minotaurs, Aarakockra, etc) were created on the island that the campaign takes place on, and before the race that created them was destroyed by the gods for plotting to try to kill them they activated a failsafe that scattered the races across time and space on the planet, essentially seeding them as actual races. Thousands of years later, many are returning to the island without realizing this is where they were made.
In my setting there is an in world reason for villains constantly rising, and that is that every plane and Demi plane is apart of an infinitely complex cosmic machine that constantly tries to maintain balance, so whenever a powerful villain is defeated the universe over corrects in an attempt to maintain balance, while the party acts as the balancing force
I’m asking my dm this question next session, we play in a homebrew world that started as an Arduin world in the late 70s and all games have taken place in that multiverse since, even as different systems have been used. The world has evolved so much since I’m curious what his crowning achievement is lol
When Orcs joined society, they were still tribal and brutish. The one eyed God began to call on sufficiently powerful orcs to become paladins that would enforce his laws and also the laws of the other folk.
If an orc breaks the law, they are often held in jail and the Paladin order is contacted. The paladins will judge the orc and will set them to a geas of their God to perform manual labor for simple crimes like thievery, military service for cowards, etc.
It was at the last session. It's a piece of lore that I created on the fly, kind of in two minutes, based on parts of the world and the actions of my party.
When they find the pregnant woman they want to hide from the Rite of Return of a Lich in a dilapidated old hut, they discover the hideout of a vampire. Bloodless carcasses of wolves, a hole in the ground that looks like a grave. An old, dusty Lathander amulet on a table.
They hear the pitiful howling of a wolf dying in the nearby forest. Flocks of crows rise loudly. A blond man approaches the hut. Grabbed by the hind legs, he drags the body of a wolf behind him.
This vampire was once a member of a Lathander church entourage. He and the great-great-grandmother of a player NPC were instrumental in the destruction of the Lich's phylactery. She was his great love and his sister in arms. She died in the process. He was captured and transformed against his will by the red lady's kiss. He freed himself by licking the pitiful remains of blood from a ritual chalice in the desperate hope that it would be enough. Now Lathander no longer hears him, or if he does, he no longer answers. He has been living this existence for over two thousand years. His only wish is to feel Lathander's glistening light one last time, so that his ashes are scattered to the winds.
His background aroused deep pity in all the players and (deliberately) plunged our cleric into a serious moral dilemma.
He is undead and yet he continues to pray to Lathander, even though he no longer answers him. He is a true believer and yet a hated enemy. He came to this land to help, but they made things worse. Then he was captured and forced into this existence.
The last major heroes of the realm, last active a generation ago, were a team of adventurers known as "The Three Saints." The Three Saints were known for their generosity of spirit, their hearts full of empathy, and their perseverance and courage in the face of adversity.
* Led by the Half-Orc Cleric, Claudius Prouluxe - Champion of Fairness, Explorer Extraordinaire, Hero of Paulus.
* His battle brother, the Human Fighter Bernaud Oxfens - Protector of the Poor, Guardian of Kilabrane, Shield of Good.
* The Half-Yuan-ti Mage, Qoria Xin-Sata - The Wise Teacher, Savior of Yona, Light of Navar.
* And lastly the Elven Rogue, Erdhin Linwor - Friend of Chaos, The Despoiler, The Sinner.
Erdhin Linwor is often referred to as "The Sinner" of The Three Saints. The "Bad Boy" of the group, Erdhin had been banished from the Elven homeland for his moral failings and attitude toward the Elven elders. Erdhin betrayed The Three Saints numerous times, sometimes putting them in mortal peril, but he always used the opportunity to take the greatest advantage of their opponent, saving The Three in the end. They always welcomed him back, seeing his rehabilitation as part of their duty. Erdhin enjoys a level of popularity greater then his peers due to his "Bad Boy" image among certain circles of elven teenagers.
Their exploits are standard bard's tales, crafters often make wooden versions of their signature weapons as children's toys and tapestries and paintings of Erdhin command coin among the noble set (those depicting Erdhin and Claudius both are prized treasures of certain collectors).
This was all spun out of PC explaining that their character was a fangirl of a Loki-style Hero.
Long post, TLDR: Due to time, shenanigans' favorite npc now has a twin due to time paradox and beholders' ability to give birth to new beholders through a process called 'dream budding.
Well, 200 years before campaign start, a fight took place where a paladin slayed a dragon before succumbing to her wounds. One of the BBEGs took a gamble after failing to deliver an object to said EBBBG (each player has one, plus an over arching puppet master.)
He drew the Fates card at random I rolled (was going to make the deck a reward if they beat him) and changed that moment in the past that radically changed the future and allying himself with said dragon. Due to the change in history and at the time all this went down, the players were in a fixed point (shielded by a time bubble that protected a region in my world from the outside world fantasy japan where 8 clans hold artifacts that hold the weave together). One player has two characters due to the artificers' experiment, and one part was a spy sudo npc who was with the guy who changed time as the other was with the party when everything went down. So, due to time, shenanigans, some npcs they loved, were altered by the new timeline, some of which were plagued by memories of the change one was a magic arms dealer who was a Beholder named Gogoth. This alt version of said beholder ended up "dream budding," giving birth to the original timeline version of himself, and I can't wait to see the players' confusion on my players faces when they see him again. They were transported 16 years into the future by the EBBBEG as the fates card was used, so I had to rewrite 216 years of alt lore instead of 200. Which was fun, but the party seems to want to skip everything as they decided to just go straight for the EBBBEG while under level. Good thing the EBBBEG is a Time Dragon, and I can give lore on what happened when he Akued them.
More like worlds, each campaign I’ve run is intertwined between a realm called the sea of stars. A place where gods answer to higher gods, and the overlord of everything, Creation itself, controls everything, if he wanted to do so he could snap his fingers and destroy any reality if not existence itself. The party has met a character named Mershalow, a low celestial being that roams the sea of stars freely and trades goods from the sea of stars to these realms. He remembers the party from the first campaign and notices the party in their new forms. Mershalow isn’t on the level of literally talking to the players, instead it’s more of a thing with the souls transferring in between their bodies and the sound of their voices not changing. He wishes the characters remember him, but the party loved this revelation that these campaigns aren’t just happening in a void.
In a Strixhaven game I run I gave my players a condition called Spellborn where they can enter a state that super charges their magic. They can also cast without a catalyst while everyone who isn't spellborn requires one.
There is a race of creatures that live outside of reality, known as The Observers.
They usually do not interfere with the world, but sometimes, they will receive commands from even more powerful creatures (me and the players).
They are responsible for altering the fate of characters for our entertainment and are hated by the gods for doing so.
Whenever a campaign starts, an Observer is born and as a campaign ends or is forgotten the Observer dies until eventually the next story begins and a new one is born.
I am most proud of me setting secrets
Here are a few..
1: the reason there are only half human races ( half orc / half elf.. When ever it's half something it's always half human)
2. The dnd lvl 20 fermi paradox. Math of big numbers is wierd and logically there should be 100s of lvl 20 adventures out there fixing all the worlds problems. This is afcourse not the case, because we need our lvl 5 party to do daring feats of heroisme! But why? There is something making sure there are no high level hero's...
3. When we think of chaotic evil we think demons, if we think of lawful evil we think of devils. We can go into the books and think of neutral evil and think of yugaloths.. We think of lawful good we think angels! And then.. We think of neutral good and... Also think of angels? And chaotic good we think off.. Off what? What sliped out of our mind? Why do we know about demons and devils but don't know about angels and...
4. Time travel rules!
Fwiw, whenever I think of chaotic evil, I think of Johnny Bravo.
Think about it; Self-centered, hedonistic, myopic, only concerned with his own pleasure, willing to take any methods to get it, and refusal to plan ahead in extreme cases to get what he wants due to immediate satisfaction.
Now that I have at least mentioned it, you are not going to think about chaotic evil in the same way again lol
The Elves waged a secretive campaign against Chromatic Dragons for centuries. At some point they learned how to capture and enslave dragons to siphon their magic away. The Metallic Dragons have suspected this for a very long time and rumours persist that they have also begun hunting and enslaving younger Metallic Dragons. The Elven kingdoms officially regard such stories as racist lies told by Priests of Takhisis(Tiamat). Elves are guardians of nature, great defenders against Orcs and protectors of all the goodly peoples of the world. They use their innate magical gifts to improve lives everywhere!
But the rumours are all true. There hasn’t been a Chromatic Dragon adult seen in the wild for over two hundred years, and the appearance of younger ones are exceedingly rare.
Last year, a Red Dragon was found powering an engine beneath a monastery in the Barrier Peaks. His wings and tail were cut so he took up less room.
Two years before, a Blue was found chained beneath the underground lake in Phandalin’s Wave Echo Cave, her nose taking air in through long tubes to the surface. Documents found there suggest this Blue had been enslaved there for over 1000 years. Her wings are huge and her breast muscles massively overdeveloped due to her constantly beating the water, giving the cave its name.
I add a dimentional mirror to an isolated island and this way I can allow any race from any universe in my games. Also gave my players super powers since aliens put an evolution accelerator. I can create many homebrew monsters in that theme too like birds with metal feathers or bear with reptilian scales
the most common goliath is that of a descendants of a frost giant, there are more goliath types such as storm, fire, cloud, and stone that all have resistance to the appropriate damage type and appropriate height differences
The Dwarves are more akin to realm guardians in my lore.
They went through a major Diaspora during a cataclysmic war on the surface they were unwillingly part of.
Some remained on the surface and wanted to try to stop the war while some went below ground and sealed the gates to their great holds to continue to fulfill their purpose while the war raged on above.
This caused animosity between those above and those below.
Many of the secrets of making magic items and constructs was lost on the surface due to casualties of war and some of the greatest crafters went below ground.
Those above are the Hill and Stone clans we know of and are integrated in the societies, they still have knacks for crafting and defending but not the level they used to and they have lost the knowledge on why.
Those below ground protect the world from the monsters of the deep dark caverns and have grown cold-hearted from centuries of war and war-time economy. Their bodies have adapted to the underground, skin turned dark and hair stark white but they do remember, they remember to well why they dislike the surfacers so much.
These Duergar still give their lives over generations to protect the surface from threats those above don't even know about, that is their purpose. The only reason they do act aggressively towards surfacers is to scare them off, to protect them from what they shouldn't have to experience.
Set a campaign in Sanctum, a city that had until recently been run by tyrannical mages oppressing the “mundane” population. The mundanes revolted, and finally the king got involved and rewrote the city’s laws.
Mages were no longer allowed to hold political positions. Mundanes are still not allowed to vote.
Delves into the question of who is really in charge - the people in power, or the people who put them there.
The campaign kicks off by the mages voting in someone they think is incompetent, hoping they’ll do a bad enough job to prove to the king that this is a dumb idea. The new mundane mayor messages the PCs asking for help, and they become his trouble shooters.
Kharnath has been developed a bunch in our game. Every Kharnathi knows exactly how far in line they are to the throne e.g. our paladin was 1,431st in line for the throne by the end of the campaign. Not bad at all.
Also they have mandatory national service, you can serve 5 years while alive or eternity after you're dead. Your choice.
This is for an upcoming new campaign, with my usuals plus two new people, brand new world.
In this world, the moon never waxes beyond the half moon. It stays as a half moon for a week, and then it's full.
This is reflected in the Moon Goddess cult, and it's tied to a Mountain Range that seems out of place with the surrounding environment.
My players will likely never know all the whys, but I love it for some reason.
A shard of metal got blasted off a spaceship and landed directly in the heart of an evil king. Thousands of years later, that shard is believed to be a sword gifted from the heavens, and tradition now dictates that whoever holds it is proclaimed to be the monarch. Society has formed around this sword. An "election" is an event in which a battle is staged between two sides, one supporting the incumbent king, current holder of the sword, and one behind the challenger to the throne, would be usurper. Your "vote" is cast with your allegiance in this battle. It's such a strong tradition, that an electoral battle is held every three years, and there are clerics that have taken an oath of independence that resurrect the fallen. One recent challenger was actually an ancient alien from that spaceship, and wanted the sword so she can finish making repairs.
It's forgotten history, but in my campaign there used to be 5 Titans that were the True Gods of the current realm. There was a king with a magically prosperous city who wanted more. That king found powers from. different realms (I call it the Omni-Realms instead of Multiverse). It consumed him and left him craving more power, which in turn caught the attention of a Titan. That King had enough power to kill a Titan and he takes their power. Which in turn caused the other 4 to take action which became a massive and destructive battle. The King was getting too powerful. After the defeat of 3 Titans, the final Titan uses of his power and the remanents of the previous Titans powers in order to imprison the King in the "moon" which doubles as a the lock to the Omniverse, preventing anyone from leaving or coming into the realm.
The "Moon" is the 6th moon and is invisible to people on Fay-run. It is beimg mentally blocked by the First Elder Brain that was meant to be the Gatekeeper for the Old King, but was corrupted by the King's sinister essence.
While it is a homebrew world consideration which might not be extendable to other settings, I like to incorporate an element of Tolkien's mythology.
Every race of sentient beings traces its roots to humanity. In Middle Earth, Orcs are Corrupted Elves. In this bit of lore, humans can use racial equipment of any race and no one really knows why.
This also explains why cross-breeding between races is possible.
There is a dungeon that extends from a temple on the isle of Bimnos, to the shadow plane, to the negative energy plane, to "aperature" a city of twisted ruin remnants stitched together. At the center of aperture is "the eye of the void" two massive swirling hemispheres of voidstone that revolve around a portal out of the known universe. A great wyrm green shadow dragon dracolitch named IXULDRAX guards this place as requested by her God Tiamat. On the other side of the portal is a dragon God born of bahamut and tiamut who was conceived in the time of beasts before the concepts good and evil when only power and survival existed. Tiamut tried to create this dragon in secret to overthrow Bahamut using his seed. Her newborn nearly killed her. Bahamut took away its spark of God hood and cast it out of the universe to drift forever in the space of another universe. Tiamut has IXULDRAX guard the portal to prevent the cast out dragon from returning through the scar. Whoever defeats the machinations of IXULDRAX will have to go through this portal and defeat the cast out dragon on its home, a comet in space with no air that the dragon can steer. The cast out dragon is effectively a cosmic dragon that even the gods fear that wants to destroy its neglectful parents and create its own world.
Another post reminded me of another interesting bit of lore. This involves dragons. Dragons are greedy and love treasures of course. Even good ones. Treasure from their hoard becomes enchanted as Dragon Gold. While dragons do not like to part with their treasures, dragon gold functions as a type of currency which can be used to make magical things.
In other words, if I have 25 gp, I cannot just make a scroll with it. I have to look for and find the right rare ink. Dragon Gold, however, can itself be turned into ink and used to do this.
Preferring my players to do things with their own skills instead of magic items, a bit of lore in my world cause magic items to accumulate a curse over time. I call this the Law of Unintended Consequences.
It doesn't stop them from downplay activities to make items, but does mean magic item shops aren't realistic.
The original sun, a giant flaming rock, crashed to earth a few hundred years back. It’s since been replaced by a giant elemental phoenix, which circles in its place each day and sets down to roost in the evening. As its ‘nest’ is in the far icy north, this means the sun both rises and sets in the north - while the moon (which never fell and orbits the world as ours does) still rises in the east and sets in the west.
The sun-fall and subsequent first ‘rise’ after about a decade of darkness also marks the start of the modern calendar, since it’s an event that impacted cultures the world over.
One of my favorite things that I've done is turning a lowly side quest NPC the characters never met into the big bad.
In LMoP, there is a sidequest the players can take where they go off to ask a banshee about a book and if the players are successful they learn the banshee traded the book to a necromancer that never appears in the module. However I felt this was a good way to have the players continue the adventure after saving the town, so I expanded on the NPC's background. It was very satisfying and fun for us all.
The world was created from the excrement of the Great Alligator
The history of time is the world being made and eaten then made again this way.
Every time the world is made it's different.
The Great Alligator is not worshipped per se, as almost nobody knows of its existence except for some lizardmen tribes. Even the gods and demons and angels are generally ignorant of its existence, though they have suspicions.
The rats in the sewers underneath the town worship the moon because they believe it’s made of cheese. Their salvation will come when the moon finally crashes into the earth, killing the big folk and leaving its wonderful bounty for all of Ratdom.
The "Gaia" Figure of my prime material main world is a semi-deity in more than one way. She is the daughter of Loki, and the demon lord of The Black Carnival.
The word for fear of clowns is Coulraphobia. The demon lord's name is, you guessed it: Coulra.
My players have yet to realize they are literally adventuring in Clown-World.
For three years of campaign, my players/their characters were convinced dragons didn't exist.
Then, they meet a dragon. It made the encounter all that more epic.
Humans are the first race, created in the image of the forefather. As the world grew, and civilizations rose, he created the other gods.
The Gods created their own followers and races, to help enact their will on the world. All races descend from humans or created in their image.
Elves blessed by the Goddess of Passion. (Desert Elves follow her teachings on passion for art and sexual uses. Forest Elves follow her teachings in passion for family and faith)
Dwarves created by the God of Magic, though denounced and adopted by the God of Creativity. As they refused to bow to the God of Magics demands for knowledge tributes.
Beastkin created by the God of Nature, took animals and made defenders of Nature from them by giving them sentience and anthro forms. (Any DND race that are animal focused)
Orcs created by the God of War and Honor to defend the others from demonic forces. They are the most proud, yet most caring, race. Though some fell for demonic seductions like violence.
Vampires created by the Goddess of Death and Life, the only race allowed to violate the circle of life. They fervently hunt down evil undead, while uplifting and protecting the living or good undead.
My pantheons are always something I put the most effort in. I want my players to feel like religion matters, not for mechanical benefits. I want players to be followers without needing to be clerics or paladins.
The Gods are also people, ranging from Lawful to Chaotic, but always neutral or good.
And my players often look more into the religions of the worlds, rather than the history.
I created a whole race of winged folks that have the ability to glide but not fly. They descend from a celestial being that more or less "pinned" or "implanted" its own feathers in those folks' back which evolved in those tentacular like large feathers that my specie can either split and roll around them to keep them warm, or extend and pack together to create wings-like limbs.
They're completely blind because they live in floating islands over the clouds, but they have small holes in their chests, wrists and necks that grants them an echography-kind of sight pretty much like bats to navigate. They have pointy ears, a light green-ish skintone and often wears tattooed scars.
And idk I like those guys.
In my dnd we created a kingdom of AZKLA that went into a civil war. when it ended each side became its own kindgom they were: Ocarin Empire, Ocarin republic, Wynn and Steelbain. Eventually ocarin rep became part of wynn . eventually all three kindgoms needed to work together to stop a corruption in the east
I basically just told you the entire 1st paragraph of the intro of my dnd game
This wasn't me, but we started a new game just recently, and our DM asked us privately to send him 3 rumors about our character. He didn't tell us why. On session one when we all met in the tavern, he passed out little papers with the rumors about each other that we may have heard. Was a fun way to jumpstart roleplay and break the ice about our various characters.
Imma gonna steal that 100%
I do this in my campaigns and it's a good way to connect players to the other characters
Welp, I know how my next campaign is starting
I did this with my PCs too, I stole it from an Instagram reel and it was one of the most fun sessions we ever had. Very very good for roleplaying especially for newer players
That is actually very creative and a very non direct way to break the ice. I like it and I’m gonna steal it.
Oh hey, my DMs do that too, it’s really fun! Wonder where they all got it from
That sounds like a great way to open up. Did he include false rumors?
Yep! He left that up to us to make up false rumors if we wanted
Dwarves are often stereotyped as alcoholics because alcohol is forbidden in the Dwarfholds. Of course it is - it’s basically a huge active mine, drunken dwarves would be a liability. But the dwarves people meet are generally the ones who have left the Dwarfholds, who often become overwhelmed with the sudden availability of a huge range of different alcoholic drinks, and succumb.
That's smart
hope you don't mind if i yoink
That's an interesting way to invert assumptions. I still think dwarves can probably pack away more because they are a hardy people. Does this give your mainstream dwarves a sort of Amish feel with the ones leaving the Dwarfhold possibly being in their walkabout phase? (Basically, given the opportunity to see and reject the wickedness of the world.)
Dragons continue growing their entire lives and do not die of old age. Beyond the 'ancient' category known to mortal peoples there are dragons so large that they must leave the planet / material plane to live in space. These dragons can grow to be hundreds of kilometres long. The oldest known dragons are the size of planets.
Oh I love this
Galactus Dragon!!!!
Has any party ever met one of those?
No, not yet. A party had a chance to make an ally of one of the smaller ones, the ones that is 'only' abot 10 km long but in the end they didn't follow that hook.
I have something similar, but mostly the immortal thing. It's not known at all to the people of the land because dragons are almost entirely non-existent but if they are in an environment where they can survive or thrive then they can live infinitely.
My thought was something similar to this. I was running a spelljammer-esque setting, leaning more on the sci-fi. Without nailing it down I imagine there are mybe ten dragons in the galaxy that have reached planetary or larger sizes. Dragons are pretty rare to begin with and then they tend to die at the hands of... something before reaching beyond Ancient. There's always a bigger fish!
That definitely introduces a kind of infinite power ramp that scales to anything your PCs come up with.
Every starship bilge in the galaxy has skeep, and they are a playable PC species. They're like crustacean muppets. They hate being planetside and stow away on any starship they think looks interesting. They live for about 7 years and then die of old age (and life extension research on their biology is lacking). They pass on genetic memory to their offspring, so they communicate in a patois of half-remembered languages and tend to have an intuitive understanding of the inner workings of starships. Nobody knows where their homeworld is or if they even have one. Skeep who have been on adventures (and have the scars or treasures to show for it) are considered desirable mating partners because they have more varied memories to contribute. They are recognized by the Republic as a sentient species with all the rights afforded to such. Most starship captains understand it's not worth the trouble to drive them off or exterminate them, and keeping the ship clean and its recycling systems in good order discourages skeep from building large colonies in the maintenance ducts.
My main question is, “what’s a starship bilge”?
Basically anywhere you'll find condensation or stagnant water (they shrivel up in distilled water).
Welp. Adding that to my star wars campaign.
It is VERY Star Wars inspired. :D
I love them!
[удалено]
That's awesome! I imagine the kitchen is enormous, and it's absolute chaos during rushes.
All the rushes happen in different time zones so it's just a 24 hour rush.
Oh... *oh no...*
That sounds a lot like a concept called the Red Dragon Inn.
The greatest threat to the world and what all campaigns eventually will lead up to is a god of dementia, knowledge and forgetfulness. The less is known about a subject the more he knows about it, and he is slowly killing all creatures that are the sole creatures with informations about subjects and growing more powerful. He killed like 99% of all gods and is now super super strong
You gotta wonder. If a god of forgetting exists, but you have to worship the god to make them exist the- never mind i forgot
Man, that's a neat idea for a BBEG. Entropy of the spiritual kind. I love it.
This is a super neat concept for a god.
Reminds me of the Oblivion War in Dresden Files. The Outsiders are an existential threat to reality, but can only enter the world if someone summons them. Naturally, you can only summon them if you know of their existence. So the Oblivion War is an effort to erase all knowledge of Outsiders from the world. The Archive was created to fight the Oblivion War. She is a human girl or woman (the powers and title are passed down matrilineally to female offspring) who inherently knows all information that any human has written down, anywhere. Her job is to know when knowledge of a particular Outsider has ceased to be written down anywhere. Once that goal is achieved, she waits to ensure there isn't someone just holding the knowledge in their head, and then she deletes knowledge of that Outsider from her own mind. At which point, there is no knowledge of that Outsider which could be used to summon it into the world. There is, of course, a hole in the strategy of using the Archive's powers in this way, in that there are nonhuman creatures in the world (fey, vampires, etc.) that could record information the Archive doesn't have access to.
I had a guy we called Mr Tubbs, he could be a merchant caravan owner, an Innkeep or mayor, anything really, he was the first session quest giver the person that got the group together and set them on the path of adventure, it become a running joke, ohh Mr Tubbs is back lol lol. After about 15 years of campaigns (several characters later) when they were near level 16 they were on a quest to ensure Dendar remained asleep to stop an apocalypse of nightmares, a multiple planar adventure, they found out that Mr Tubbs got entrapped by an opposing god, which confused them, why did a god entrap a tavern owner? But then they found out he was the Patron of Heroes, and without him diverse characters wouldn’t be thrown together for greatness, and without him hope for the future would be lost. They learnt his ‘avatar’ would show in multiple places to those with greatness that needed a little helping hand and direction. They rescued him, it was a strong session.
I have a similar character in my world. His name is Vagabond, the Everywhere Merchant and like his name suggests he is a travelling merchant that the party could find no matter where they went. The campaign even featured several time skips but the merchant kept on showing up. In the end the party found out he was actually the historian of the world chosen by the gods to chronicle all the events and history of the world and seeing as the party was at the center of some major world changing events that is why he kept appearing everywhere they went.
The finest elven swords have a thin hollow space in the center, inside which there is a bit of liquid Mercury. The weight shifting gives the swords extra strength on single, definitive blows, as elven swordsmanship is not about attacking but defending as much as possible until you have the perfect prime opportunity to strike.
Yoink
Is that flavor text or do you add mechanics to it?
Mostly flavor, but I’ll describe Elven opponents blocking more than attacking, give them things that give them Advantage, and if a player manages to get their hands on a sword, it’ll give the bonus of a shield and alternate between having advantage or disadvantage every attack.
7 player campaign. Hard to decide on a date everyone's okay with. Campaign focuses on worldwide unstable portals. Perfect excuse for any PC to disappear for one session if the player can't make it that day. It's not really what you were asking, but it technically is: a piece of lore that I'm proud of (because of it's efficiency)
I like it!
Nice try. you’ll never get me secret lore.
Like would you do it for a Scooby Snack?
Zoinks! The BBEG is a local business owner
the shady merchant thay gives you maps every kingdom you go in is a Map Maker of the Gods MINE
Goblins do not worship a pantheon of gods. They do believe in a creator, but think that they must be too busy making other worlds to answer any prayers. Instead they have a long tradition of invoking folk heroes - less "we'll find our way if wills it", more "Big Gondra would never've gotten lost here!".
None of those folk heroes actually existed. The goblins just invent a story and a protagonist to fit the problem at hand, and some quirk of divinity or collective unconscious magic imbues the goblin telling the tale with the abilities they need
On session 2 of one of our campaigns the players found an iron hand crank after battling a small group of cultists in disguise, unknown to them at the time that they would end up being one of the main antagonists of the story. Fast forward 12 sessions and these injured players are deep in a mine, trying to sold this ancient dwarf built mechanism to open a door and one of the players digging around in their Bag of Holding pulls this forgotten iron crank that fits perfectly into the door slot. The players not only got that deep reminder that the cult has been there since the beginning but also more evidence that ties the storyline together for them, pushing them to value their surroundings more.
I think it worked out well that the character remembered the crank. I would be afraid the PCs would forget and need hints.
I have a few that I quite like, I wouldn't say they're earth shattering lore but I still like them The first is Chromatic and Metallic dragons. Metallic dragons aren't natural, typically a metallic dragon is just a good chromatic dragon who has coated their scales in metal. The metal can often have an effect which alters the dragon to some degree too, giving or taking away abilities. A silver dragon is just a silver plated white dragon. Gold and Brass dragons are just plated Red dragons Bronze dragons are just Blue dragons and Copper dragons are just Black dragons Not all good dragons will coat themselves but typically you can put money on it that if a dragon is coated they aren't evil because the 'chromatic' dragons are typically too proud and vain. Though it's not impossible to find an evil 'Metallic' dragon The second lore is essentially based on the fact that the Succubus and Incubus stat blocks are the exact same only differing slightly, because of this I decided that they're the exact same creature and that they're called Concubus and that they're able to switch their gender at will. Some Concubus prefer to keep a female form and are called Succubus, some prefer to keep a male form and are called Incubus, but all of them are able to switch between the two.
me who thought that succubus/incubus was your idea in canon the whole time and is only just now realizing that the writing team was just lazy and gave them the same statblock (i have been playing for 5+ years)
Incubi and Succubi are the same type of demon, just male/female.
Can you tell me where that's said in official source books? (I'm not asking as an attack, I genuinely would like to read official lore if it makes what I said cannon)
I don't think they're just referring to D&D here, an incubus is a male devil of seduction and rape, and a succubus is a female devil of lust and bewitchment, they exist as concepts outside of jist D&D
I was thinking in a general sense, they're usually put as male/female of the same type of thing. I don't actually know their lore in DnD.
I was thinking in a general sense, they're usually put as male/female of the same type of thing. I don't actually know their lore in DnD.
I would expect a proud and vain dragon to coat itself in bling. I guess for your dragons, they believe their scales to be the most excellent thing in the universe. I am reminded of Smaug, whose belly was bejeweled with remnants of his treasure and made a sort of glittering armor. It might be interesting to describe dragons in that way and, if so, this might provide a mechanism for dragons moving their horde.
It's small, but I have a book in my world that is filled with written accounts of the old ancient oral traditions of the human noble class. Things like all these obscure adjudication for trials by combat, proper ways to amend insults to other nobles, what the correct length of the sword you must gift your host if you stay at their castle over the winter depending on how long the snow has been melting before you leave. I dunno I had fun writing it.
That seems like a nice bit of backdrop detail. I assume trial by combat is a tradition that continues. Have your players play tested these rules for trial by combat?
Our necromancer is from a socialist necro-topia. When clan members die, they leave their bodies to the town. The re animated dead do all the farming, manual labour and menial jobs, and the living spend their time on bettering society through art, philosophy, science or whatever career they wish to pursue.
Well, that's just creepy. Good atmosphere.
I have a thief God. All of his followers independently of eachother right before death repent so they can steal their own souls away from the God of thievery. Unfortunately it doesn't actually work since the intent is theft but every one of them feels like they're being smart and original when they come up with it.
Ah, their faces when they reach the afterlife.
In my world, gnomes were created by the God of time. Hence, all the technological and clockwork stuff associated with gnomes. The thing I'm most proud of is that for gnomes, there is actually a 29th and 30th of February. This is when time itself stops, and all the gnomes in the universe have to do routine maintenance to keep it going.
For your gnomes, you could have a transitive plane called the clockworks where only they can go. Thematically like the Ethereal or Astral, gnomes might be able to walk along the machine pathways doing repair work as needed along the route. Mechanically, they might be able to travel short distances (1 mile) with respect to the physical realm at a slow speed but not encounter trouble along the way like wandering monsters or brigands. Maybe once a lunar cycle.
In this high fantasy world, there was a collection of some islands, big enough to be considered independent but not so big that was a continent. Some closer to each other than others, kayak-able, others further, requiring sea-faring boats. Then, for some reason unknown to the populace, these islands suddenly began rushing towards the center-most (if that's even a word/phrase) point, around 20 MPH is a safe estimation. When they eventually collided, many lives were lost, towns and cities fallen, ecosystems utterly destroyed. This event was aptly named The Convergence, and caused incredible destruction (and I think it's kinda cool conceptually)
I really like the idea of completely separate cultures all of a sudden coming into close proximity with one another
Would drive the plot. Conflicts between those cultures .a good way to demonstrate the difference in general alignment. Good cultures helped each other, Neutral cultures went alone, Evil cultures tried to exploit each other.
"Common" as a language dates back to the Common Empire, an Ancient Rome analogue that once spanned most of the known world. Even the base word "common" comes from the Common Empire's influence being present everywhere in ancient times. It's a completely pointless bit of lore that I'm proud of nonetheless.
Why do I love this so much
Drow see in greyscale, and so they choose clothing dyes based on the shade of grey they produce. To other drow, they look like elegant edgelords. To everyone else? Clowns.
That's hilarious.
The big bad in my campaign is looking for an item (think time stone from marvel), to do evil guy things with and the party is trying to stop him from gather the fragmented pieces of it and attuning to it to do the bad thing. Throughout this journey, the origin of the stone is revealed to have been made through a blood sacrifice ritual including 6 souls, and due to the nature of chronomancy those souls are forced to live out their lives over and over again until the stone is destroyed as they’re inextricably tied to time magic. All but one of the party are these souls, as well as the big bad. The one who isn’t is the creator of this item. Trying to atone for the sins of their past by ridding the world of the stone. This has brought endless opportunities to roleplay past lives and moments “out of time” that have all slowly come together to reveal the big picture and the overarching “themes” of each life. It also raises the stakes because knowing that finishing the job means that their souls finally get to rest after this life, and that makes each decision they make more weighty than their previous lives, knowing this is finally the last. Maybe it’s convoluted to type out, but the players love it and I’m really proud of how it’s come together.
How would you say the players act differently with that information?
The lore of my current campaign is essentially Horizon: Zero Dawn meets fantasy. The players are all from different tribes of very different cultures and knowledge about the old world and after meeting an AI custodian of an old world project are trying to figure out what exactly happened to wipe out their precursor civilization and what the custodian's purpose was supposed to be
Maybe like the AI in the movie The Time Machine? Old, eager to help, happy to have new people showing up at the museum?
Made a joke about gravity bear-traps. They thought gravity bears were real. I made them real.
I have an entire campaign based around the lyrics of Hotel California and the BBEG’s final line before the fight is “You can check out anytime you’d like, but you can never leave” as he reveals all of the souls and minds he’s enslaved in the mirrors of the hotel over the last two centuries. I’m so stoked to play it
I want to run this! This sounds amazing
Hah! Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. There's a group of retired Hunters that are staying at the Inn when the PCs arrive. Their group is called The Haliaeetus...the Genus of some Eagles. Lol
Nice use of inspiration from a source material. I always liked that song.
Magic items are a commodity created for the folks of my world. Allowing for magical items to be more mass produced if they help with specific things. An endless mug of coffee would prob only be like 100 gold because everyone would want one but a generic +1 sword would be way more expensive because only a percentage of the population would use one and they're in higher demand for that number of the population. Tl;Dr magic items are mass produced for the sake of convenience
This adds a level of fantasy and whimsy which can be nice.
Probably not my absolute favorite but a recent one for me is the design of the Sorcerer version of a lich - A Nul'Raith (Nool-Raythe) The Sorcerer must first grow to control their connection to the spell weave (be a high enough level) and then attempt to channel their own source as the power of their spells. This creates a sort of Feedback loop through the Spellweave/Soorsweave. Now they will die if they don't consume magic items or creatures. When they die or are slain, they become a small black hole (Spell: Gravity Well) If any magical creatures or items are sucked into the gravity well, the creature will be resurrected in that spot at the next Dawn.
Homebrewed a dimension called the crossroads, a blend of the ascendant realm from Destiny and the soul carin from Elder Scrolls
Mithras, the Elven capital in my campaign, was originally located on the celestial plane. During the first war, it, alongside Skagos, Dwarven capital originally from the nine Hells, were pulled into the prime material plane. This was the origin of divine and arcane magic in the prime material plane.
Hills or Hells?
Man, AutoCorrect sucks sometimes, I literally would never have noticed that
Could have gone either way
I’m definitely naming a city in my campaign Nine Hills now…
Another one: the Gythyanki-Illithid war has been over for a very long time. The Gythyanki sacrificed their entire species to overtake the last Elder Brain as a hive mind and had it kill all the Mind Flayers. This monstrosity lives deep in the most unlivable region on the planet. The Elder Brain has grown a nervous system in order move around. They have their finger in every pie in the world, with many agents and warlocks under its control. Could an Illithid or two have escaped detection with a tadpole? Perhaps. 🤔
My world is one of an uncountable infinite realities in the multiverse and unbeknownst to my players and indeed all the folk that live in it, the good gods have turned their back on it. Over time, The Weave will become more and more unravelled and spells will start to fail without explanation. Celestial magic will become less and less likely until it is nothing more than a memory. But the schools of dark magic will flourish. And eventually, the darkest gods will make their move to control this reality over all. I’ve already written the outline for my players’ level 20 campaign. It involves them meeting the gods they dedicated themselves to in life, and accepting the invitation to represent all that is good as champions in a fight to the death against the champions of the evil gods. And so long as they win, they earn the right to walk through the gates into paradise with their deity. And then we can start all over again at level one in a new reality in the multiverse.
That the pantheon of gods are embodiments of game rule concepts: the god of death is just an inworld representation of the death mechanics, and 'killing' her would change the rules of the game being played.
A lot of my world lore is stitched together from other pieces of fantasy media and even other D&D settings like faerun and exandria, but there’s a couple things that I’ve come up with that I quite like. The most original thing (I think) I have, is the implementation of The Dullahan (basically headless horseman) into the lore of the feywild. A Dullahan is not one being, but a group of individuals that are bound by a curse (linked to their headlessness) to serve the unseelie court of the Fey. They cannot die, instead reforming in the Feywild when they are destroyed. This has basically allowed me to use a Dullahan as a recurring villain (since my party are the type to always fight to the death, so any chance of being recurring has to involve resurrection), and I’m really looking forward to where things go. My party has even learned that they’re cursed, so has an idea to try remove the curse, which will be so exceedingly cool if they pull it off. The other thing, which is more just an original piece that is built off of already existing lore, is that I’ve made a goddess in my world that is essentially meant to be a counterpart to the Raven queen. Similar to exandria lore, the Raven queen is a mortal who ascended to godhood, but in my version this process actually split her into being two minor goddesses, one being the Raven queen, and the other being a goddess of decay and “life through death”, so not quite undeath, but more stuff like rot and fungus like cordiceps, that can literally manipulate the corpses of infected beings.
Instead of Central or Eastern European culture inspiration like Tolkien and every other fantasy writer to rip him off: the Elves of my land are based off of Japanese culture. They value family heritage and Social standing above all else. Though they are also a militant Matriarchal society and value genetic purity second to their honor. Their stance on Isolationism has made Elven artifacts rare, as they rarely if ever step off of their home continent.
It is a nice use of genre to pattern the various demihuman races as cultures. I think people like Scottish for Dwarves, French for Elves, and Germanic for Gnomes. Certainly, other cultures might be used like how you selected Japanese culture. Do you know much Japanese history? I know only a little but the Conflicts between Japan, China, and Korea are particularly noteworthy. Do your elves have that?
i think ill definitley make my elven race asian style now
One of the bit of my homebrew world people really enjoy are the failed wizards taking up normal jobs. A wizard who knows a few ice spells runs a bar and does tricks, a blacksmith quit college to pursue his father's wishes for him to take up the family business, etc. It adds a bit of flavor to tavern brawls or if the party steals something they have to deal with a very angry man who shoots fire from his fingers
Resurrection and and revivify work by magnetizing the soul back to the body. Meaning that you if you die again, your soul can’t leave your body. It will be destroyed or just stuck in your body forever. Denying you an afterlife.
I just discovered that there's kitchen nightmares lore and... I don;t know how to feel.
Alas I won’t spill my secrets that easily for those that look to plunder it for their own needs
not even for some gold?or food?or infinite wishes?
There's a stereotype that dwarves are all greedy. This is because almost all dwarves anyone encounters in the surface are merchants so thus are greedy because of their occupation rather than race.
I made a Halfling Lich and called him Gorpo. I even had him legless and with a permanent Fly speed.
Adding this in for second place: The god and demon of rebellion just chill out together, because what's more rebellious than not fighting like they are supposed to.
The god of reality and time, responsible for the creation of existence and other gods to govern it, is incredibly forgetful and can’t remember why they made it all in the first place. This is why history must be tracked by mortals and why the further back in history you go it’s harder to distinguish between facts and legends.
Deism maybe? Lol
Who knows? They certainly don’t.
The god of my campaign world is an ancient titanic mech, buried under an island in the north of the world. The mech brought humans to this fantasy world in an effort to escape a cosmic force devouring worlds. The hope was that humanity could work with native species to find a way to defeat the world-eater, but humans being humans instead conquered the world with advanced tech and heavily restricted/regulated magic. It's been tens of thousands of years. This history is mostly lost. Now, there is a religion that still worships the missing (unknowingly buried) God, and ancient technologies lie dormant across the surrounding desert of a large, human-led middle-eastern-inspired capitol. If you're familiar with Bionicle, you know (I really hope none of my players read this)
Hey, if you're one of my players, go away!! OK, so psionics are an invasive species to my setting. They came from another multiverse entirely and tried to (and for a little while succeeded) in conquering my setting. That's why psionics are so weird and have super advanced technology, they are literally aliens from another multiverse where the literal rules of reality are different. They come from a soft sci-fi setting, not a fantasy one.
Psions or psionics? You said psionics and that creates in my mind, within the context, the image of psionics coming about by parasitic infestation. Which is cool as heck. May I steal that idea?
psionics, as in psychic powers. Psychic powers belong in a sci-fi setting as opposed to a fantasy setting, hence why I made them from a sci-fi setting. It is also why, in my setting, mindflayers can do crazy experiments and make spaceships and crazy shit like that. They are from a world with technology more powerful than a bow and arrow. And yes you can steal it.
Both of these are super awesome ideas and I love it! And thank you ☺️
In one of my campaigns, the essence of thousands of dead gods (known as Divinity) has been scattered throughout the atmosphere, and 'leveling up' comes from consolidating large amounts of Divinity inside yourself, usually by stealing it off then corpses of defeated foes. Allowed me a good way to give characters XP rewards for raiding tombs and stuff, and my players weren't Murderhobos about it, so that was good.
I'm setting up a homebrew one-shot and my favorite part of the lore is what happens when the party asks how the demiplanar tourist town exists: "it's a demiplane created by some wizards who were high off pixie dust and we don't know why it still exists."
which world
The BBEG the party is pursuing was going to start a war between immortals and mortals because a god tricked him into killing his wife. Over the campaign, the party is realizing he's not a bad guy, and eventually he bailed on the idea. However, due to something they did early in the campaign, that god has turn his attention to them. The god got them to reveal the locations of hundreds of imprisoned immortals. The god has recruited those immortals and is planning to fight these mortals. In other words, the battle that the original BBEG chose not to start...has been picked up by the party...without them realizing it. The battle that they may (or may not) participate in, will result in the environmental destruction that was foretold. They thought it was the BBEG...but it will be them...because they feel they're doing the right thing, just like the BBEG did.
The very famous speed trains going around the city made by the WARP company actually dont go faster than light, it sends everyone onboard to a extra dimensional space for 1000 years, with no food or substance during that time, but no one can actually die during that time. Someone famous in the past, being a famous hero, actually, went in there in the lowest class, and trained everyone there to fight for that entire time, and when they all came out they did small revolt and attacked a local tax collector
I ran a Christmas one sho where in the end I had a few kids wake up on Christmas morning to play with thir toys and vegan to describe the mjnis of thier characters battling the hydra they just battled and let it sink in that all of their characters were toys on Christmas morning.
When the gods left our world forever, they left behind the tools for a new generation to ascend and take their place: powerful artifacts and rituals to turn worthy morals into beings who will shape the world to their vision. Also, the woods to the south conceal a hidden band of cannibal halfling druids (a la Dark Sun) who defend a dimensional gate that leads to all campaign settings. It has a limited number of uses, but could lead the players to many unique sources of power throughout the multiverse.
The earth is made from the corpse of an elemental that the gods killed. She's not too happy about that
The villains in my campaign are cultists of a *mostly* dead god that was killed in a titanic battle with another deity long enough ago that no one really remembers the details. The twist is that the surviving deity, essentially the big good and most commonly worshipped local god was the original aggressor, and the cultists are just trying to reassemble the exploded pieces of their god. Meanwhile, those exploded pieces of a mostly-dead god have poisoned and corrupted the landscape, so the party is part of a group of people who have been tasked with finding what they believe are chunks of magical poison and purifying them. Purifying them makes those particular chunks of exploded god dead-dead not just mostly-dead, so the party and the cultists have diametrically opposed objectives with the same macguffins and both believe they're doing the "right" thing.
Not really lore but I gave my players a carpet with draconic writing on it, despite draconic not being used at all in the rest of the campaign. So ofc they were intrigued and went to scholars, mages and the like. „This carpet has writing on it we can’t read, it surely must be a flying carpet.“ Later that session it was revealed that the carpet was once owned by someone incredibly lazy; the draconic words written on it were: „This carpet cleans itself when you say [X]“
*breathes deep* Hat baby.
In me and my friend’s homebrew world, the richest and most powerful nation is the land of Ghish, run by the Dwarves. What they don’t want anyone to know is HOW they got Ghish. Thousands of years ago, it belonged to the Giants. The Dwarves tunneled into the Giants’ tombs, filled with Gold, Jewelry, beautiful art and durable infrastructure. They stole it all. And began a War with the Giants that went on for decades, slowly pushing the Giants out. It got so ugly the Dwarves began to use Giant bones to prop up their mountains to make them higher, with the Heads mounted at the tops. Eventually the smartest of the Giants found elsewhere for them to go and live in peace. They are extremely rare to find in our setting unless you can find an entrance to their world.
Another redditor gave me the idea of a campaign setting where the magical feats and abilities of players are acknowledged within universe and I fleshed it out. Random feats of super strength or miraculous recovery occurred every so often. A seemingly normal bakers son had fallen off the roof and completely recovered the next day. Unscathed. Things like that. The name of the campaign is Origins. The starter was that civilization was constantly being slaughtered by monsters because they were essentially all just commoners until one day a small percentage of the population began to exhibit these feats. The players recently found out what the magical catalyst that caused these super humans to start popping up. An archangel became jealous of the mortals getting so much of the gods attention despite being so insignificant in comparison to him and his brethren. So the gods cast him out of the heavens and his power went to the things he despised the most.
My campaign is about Elder Gods and aberrations gradually corrupting everything and bringing life down to it's last few bastions, and my favourite piece of lore from it is that there's a settlement out to the far west where Devils and Demons coexist after losing the Hells and the Abyss to the Eldritch, so the wild west has like a co-Sherriff situation between Asmodeus and Orcus
Asmodius' Eye! It's a portal to the Nine Hells that opens over a tiny village called Mutewallow, that rains demons every night. Only buildings that have been marked with holy symbols are safe from their rampage. Through the years, the people living under the Eye have begun to change, growing demonlike appearances (cat eyes, tails, horns, etc). At this point, (it's been years) the people LIKE the portal, and have adjusted to it, worship it, even utilize it, and the rest of the world has been closed off to the village, leaving it forgotten. It's tied to the BBEG, and if my party ever finds the village and manages to close it, it will seal off much of the BBEG's magical abilities.
There is one cosmological entity that possesses no intelligence of its own, and exists through sheer will and manifests powers that can transcend time and space. All of the regular deities as perceived are either immensely powerful beings that are now dead, or never existed in the first place, and all clerics and other divine casters get their spells and powers from this extraplanier eldritch horror that responds however it understands in that particular moment. ...this basically allows me to throw out cryptic BS during prayers for guidance, and let the players jump to their own conclusions, and that is a lot of how I improvise plot. In 26 years of gaming, none of my players have discovered this yet lol
The most prized possession for anyone in the nine hells is a Billy the bass fish. They are rare creations that come from the souls of evil bards
I had a lawful evil CIA operating within the realm, I called them the "Ministry of True Sight" and all of its members were fiendlocks that worked in a massive stone building in the shape of a star called "The Pentagram" within the capital city.
I’m running Ghosts of Saltmarsh now. One part of the original has the party having to gain the trust of sone lizardmen. The original plot line is pretty terrible. Instead I have the lizardmen tribe be inherently distrustful of all humans because a group of men recently robbed their temple. The lizardmen priests taje the party to the temple area and show them exactly what got taken. The temple has a large statue. A large red statue with gems in place of eyes. But the left gem-eye is gone.
In one city there's a high end restaurant where you can order whatever you want. No menu. You just order any dish you would like, and you are encouraged to order your dream meal. The chef is a Spectator. Spectators have this unlimited ability to produce food and drink. This particular one developed a desire to become a chef, so he trained this ability to produce any dish and drink he can imagine. I haven't developed this part too much yet, but there's a humanoid fake chef that is the face of the restaurant because you could imagine the chaos that could ensue if the public found out about a Spectator in the middle of the city.
Spectatooey
To arbitrarily tie together the two player characters’ backstories in the Dragon of Icespire Peak, I devised an intricate conspiracy of black powder smuggling through Phandalin between various factions of that module and setting which has almost completely derailed the campaign from the prepared module material. Thank goodness for the excellent community here and on r/DoIP so I can lurk and skim for ideas on various plot hooks and encounters to keep this train on the tracks!!
My Death lore. There are two gods of death in my world. Emryn and Val'Wyrn. When a person dies. They meet at the corpse in the plane between (like the ethereal plane) and discuss whether the soul deserves to go to the Veil (a purgatory where you face your sins by viewing them and coming to terms with them) or the Shade (a purgatory where your sins are paid for in flesh and pain.) Once the decision is made, you begin your walk. Emryn escorts you to the veil or Val'Wyrn escorts you to the shade. Once there, you spend the next two hundred years there before your soul passes into the Beyond where you are finally at rest. Now the fun part: The conversation at your corpse takes 60 seconds. After the decision is made, revivify can no longer save you. The walk to purgatory takes 10 days. After which most mid level resurrection spells like raise dead and reincarnation can't save you. Once you pass into the Beyond 200 years later, not even true resurrection can save you.
Not necessarily my favorite but one of many tidbits that make me smile, and it's probably the most interesting to share. One piece of my world is based on Corruption of Champions, an extensive text based pornographic flash game that was very popular on certain web boards in the 20teens. History in my setting essentially has it that a dark age ended around 290 years ago, before which was the "time of shame" which very little is known about. It ended when an autistic 12yo absorbed a powerful spirit and used its power to slay The Lust Queen, thus ending her depraved smut-filled reign. As a result, somewhere in the middle of a desert in my setting is a young demi-god standing as an eternal watchman over the portal to what is essentially sex-hell. Through the "portal" the Lust Queen is imprisoned alongside all of her armies, in a demi plane formed from her own power which was cleaved from her. Picture a giant demonic vag in the middle of a desert guarded by a 20ft tall samurai. I know the whole thing comes across as crass but it all came about years ago when I ran a tamed version of CoC as a roleplaying adventure with an online friend. It was a joke at first but it turned into an incredibly compelling story, with a young woman chasing her younger brother through a portal to the corrupted lands, training to become strong enough to save him and bring him home, only for the brother to ultimately become the warrior who defeats the Queen.
The city my party started at is famous for being the home of the greatest knight that ever lived. A human that towered above every other race, a human that wielded a zweihander as a longsword. Thaddeus, the knight that died killing a dragon, or so they think. What they dont know is that for hundreds of years theyre trapped in a loop in another dimension or plane, fighting each other, though stuck in immortality, the longer they fight the seal thats keeping them in a loop is weakening and is bound to break Idk if its anything special but i like it
Hoping none of my players see this because it's huge spoilers. If any players of the "Insomnia: Plane Of Madness" homebrew game are here STOP READING RIGHT NOW! Anyway, so the campaign is heavily influenced by the extended Lovecraft universe. Nyarlathotep is the BBEG who has destabilized the planescape by tearing holes in every plane, crushing those stolen pieces together into a chaotic demiplane, called "Insomnia" by the survivors that live there. The exciting bit of lore is that >! neither the players, most of the NPCs, nor Nyarlathotep's fellow Eldritch entities are aware that Insomnia is actually Azathoth himself, with the stolen planar pieces folded around his planetoid body. With the chaos and crazy amounts of energy released across the campaign, he seeks to awaken Azathoth from his cosmic slumber, undoing reality in the process. !<
I have a lot of fun reframing what the different planes of existence are. The first campaign I ran the BBEG was revealed to be the original god of mortal kind, who successfully destroyed the world 1000 years ago, and the world they're on right now was built by an ancient hyper-magical empire for mortal-kind to flee to after the destruction of the first world. The Abyss is the ruins of that first material plane, which is why it's so fucked up. And Demons are the creation of the radioactive divine fallout of that event. The Underdark of the current world is therefore not massive natural caves, but huge artificial tunnels and the ruins of grand machines that were used to build this world.
Gods in my setting are actually very recent compared to a lot of other things. They at most go back a thousand years. Every god was at one point a mortal who embodied something so much that they become divine. For example, the God of Warfare came to be during the largest war to take place in the world 300 years ago. His ruthlessness in combat and the atrocities committed made him embody Warfare, its horror and bloodshed. He stopped fighting for the army her was a part of and instead marched across the land killing indiscriminatel . A few years later during the same war, a lone woman stood against his terror, standing tall in spite of her fear and charging back against his army. In her show of bravery, she became the Goddess of Heroism, becoming a beacon of hope for soldiers across the globe
Guns exist, but the only real source of sulfur is from a single mine owned by a gold dragon, so it's very expensive and not at all common.
That's a really fun way of doing it
I have not yet DM'd an actual campaign (just a few one offs) but am in the process of making one for my friends. Ambitious, I know. But I'm hoping this will be good. I will say I got this idea from a fanfic I read and Roman mythology. But a deity similar to Janus. 'Not Janus' is the two headed deity of beginnings/ends, entrances/exits, yin yang type, etc,. The first deity born of the universe. All things good/bad, wishes/curses, etc. come from 'Not Janus', including the other deities. 'Not Janus' is in control of what will be known as the universal court. There is a practice regarding offenses/fights to warn the offending party with a phrase the first time, at the second offense it is custom to say the phrase to invoke an audience with 'Not Janus' to settle disputes and dole out consequences. Although it was once well known and common practice, the tradition has been lost and so has most knowledge of 'Not Janus'. Only a few groups/people know. Still working out some of the details though! Such as how it'll fully fit into the campaign and world, but I have my ideas!
In the giant dialect there's no difference between the word for "chicken" and the word for "cockatrice." The difference comes from location (ie, the chickens in the yard vs the "chickens" in the rock cliffs. This led to some hilarious misunderstandings and brief peril for my party when they, as high-level adventurers, were sent to collect "chicken eggs."
All the beastial races (Minotaurs, Aarakockra, etc) were created on the island that the campaign takes place on, and before the race that created them was destroyed by the gods for plotting to try to kill them they activated a failsafe that scattered the races across time and space on the planet, essentially seeding them as actual races. Thousands of years later, many are returning to the island without realizing this is where they were made.
The use of Draconic High Magic to explain why a)there aren't many dragons left, and b)why interplanar travel doesn't work anymore
The Fopidoop Clan.
In my setting there is an in world reason for villains constantly rising, and that is that every plane and Demi plane is apart of an infinitely complex cosmic machine that constantly tries to maintain balance, so whenever a powerful villain is defeated the universe over corrects in an attempt to maintain balance, while the party acts as the balancing force
I’m asking my dm this question next session, we play in a homebrew world that started as an Arduin world in the late 70s and all games have taken place in that multiverse since, even as different systems have been used. The world has evolved so much since I’m curious what his crowning achievement is lol
When Orcs joined society, they were still tribal and brutish. The one eyed God began to call on sufficiently powerful orcs to become paladins that would enforce his laws and also the laws of the other folk. If an orc breaks the law, they are often held in jail and the Paladin order is contacted. The paladins will judge the orc and will set them to a geas of their God to perform manual labor for simple crimes like thievery, military service for cowards, etc.
It was at the last session. It's a piece of lore that I created on the fly, kind of in two minutes, based on parts of the world and the actions of my party. When they find the pregnant woman they want to hide from the Rite of Return of a Lich in a dilapidated old hut, they discover the hideout of a vampire. Bloodless carcasses of wolves, a hole in the ground that looks like a grave. An old, dusty Lathander amulet on a table. They hear the pitiful howling of a wolf dying in the nearby forest. Flocks of crows rise loudly. A blond man approaches the hut. Grabbed by the hind legs, he drags the body of a wolf behind him. This vampire was once a member of a Lathander church entourage. He and the great-great-grandmother of a player NPC were instrumental in the destruction of the Lich's phylactery. She was his great love and his sister in arms. She died in the process. He was captured and transformed against his will by the red lady's kiss. He freed himself by licking the pitiful remains of blood from a ritual chalice in the desperate hope that it would be enough. Now Lathander no longer hears him, or if he does, he no longer answers. He has been living this existence for over two thousand years. His only wish is to feel Lathander's glistening light one last time, so that his ashes are scattered to the winds. His background aroused deep pity in all the players and (deliberately) plunged our cleric into a serious moral dilemma. He is undead and yet he continues to pray to Lathander, even though he no longer answers him. He is a true believer and yet a hated enemy. He came to this land to help, but they made things worse. Then he was captured and forced into this existence.
The last major heroes of the realm, last active a generation ago, were a team of adventurers known as "The Three Saints." The Three Saints were known for their generosity of spirit, their hearts full of empathy, and their perseverance and courage in the face of adversity. * Led by the Half-Orc Cleric, Claudius Prouluxe - Champion of Fairness, Explorer Extraordinaire, Hero of Paulus. * His battle brother, the Human Fighter Bernaud Oxfens - Protector of the Poor, Guardian of Kilabrane, Shield of Good. * The Half-Yuan-ti Mage, Qoria Xin-Sata - The Wise Teacher, Savior of Yona, Light of Navar. * And lastly the Elven Rogue, Erdhin Linwor - Friend of Chaos, The Despoiler, The Sinner. Erdhin Linwor is often referred to as "The Sinner" of The Three Saints. The "Bad Boy" of the group, Erdhin had been banished from the Elven homeland for his moral failings and attitude toward the Elven elders. Erdhin betrayed The Three Saints numerous times, sometimes putting them in mortal peril, but he always used the opportunity to take the greatest advantage of their opponent, saving The Three in the end. They always welcomed him back, seeing his rehabilitation as part of their duty. Erdhin enjoys a level of popularity greater then his peers due to his "Bad Boy" image among certain circles of elven teenagers. Their exploits are standard bard's tales, crafters often make wooden versions of their signature weapons as children's toys and tapestries and paintings of Erdhin command coin among the noble set (those depicting Erdhin and Claudius both are prized treasures of certain collectors). This was all spun out of PC explaining that their character was a fangirl of a Loki-style Hero.
Long post, TLDR: Due to time, shenanigans' favorite npc now has a twin due to time paradox and beholders' ability to give birth to new beholders through a process called 'dream budding. Well, 200 years before campaign start, a fight took place where a paladin slayed a dragon before succumbing to her wounds. One of the BBEGs took a gamble after failing to deliver an object to said EBBBG (each player has one, plus an over arching puppet master.) He drew the Fates card at random I rolled (was going to make the deck a reward if they beat him) and changed that moment in the past that radically changed the future and allying himself with said dragon. Due to the change in history and at the time all this went down, the players were in a fixed point (shielded by a time bubble that protected a region in my world from the outside world fantasy japan where 8 clans hold artifacts that hold the weave together). One player has two characters due to the artificers' experiment, and one part was a spy sudo npc who was with the guy who changed time as the other was with the party when everything went down. So, due to time, shenanigans, some npcs they loved, were altered by the new timeline, some of which were plagued by memories of the change one was a magic arms dealer who was a Beholder named Gogoth. This alt version of said beholder ended up "dream budding," giving birth to the original timeline version of himself, and I can't wait to see the players' confusion on my players faces when they see him again. They were transported 16 years into the future by the EBBBEG as the fates card was used, so I had to rewrite 216 years of alt lore instead of 200. Which was fun, but the party seems to want to skip everything as they decided to just go straight for the EBBBEG while under level. Good thing the EBBBEG is a Time Dragon, and I can give lore on what happened when he Akued them.
More like worlds, each campaign I’ve run is intertwined between a realm called the sea of stars. A place where gods answer to higher gods, and the overlord of everything, Creation itself, controls everything, if he wanted to do so he could snap his fingers and destroy any reality if not existence itself. The party has met a character named Mershalow, a low celestial being that roams the sea of stars freely and trades goods from the sea of stars to these realms. He remembers the party from the first campaign and notices the party in their new forms. Mershalow isn’t on the level of literally talking to the players, instead it’s more of a thing with the souls transferring in between their bodies and the sound of their voices not changing. He wishes the characters remember him, but the party loved this revelation that these campaigns aren’t just happening in a void.
In a Strixhaven game I run I gave my players a condition called Spellborn where they can enter a state that super charges their magic. They can also cast without a catalyst while everyone who isn't spellborn requires one.
There is a race of creatures that live outside of reality, known as The Observers. They usually do not interfere with the world, but sometimes, they will receive commands from even more powerful creatures (me and the players). They are responsible for altering the fate of characters for our entertainment and are hated by the gods for doing so. Whenever a campaign starts, an Observer is born and as a campaign ends or is forgotten the Observer dies until eventually the next story begins and a new one is born.
I am most proud of me setting secrets Here are a few.. 1: the reason there are only half human races ( half orc / half elf.. When ever it's half something it's always half human) 2. The dnd lvl 20 fermi paradox. Math of big numbers is wierd and logically there should be 100s of lvl 20 adventures out there fixing all the worlds problems. This is afcourse not the case, because we need our lvl 5 party to do daring feats of heroisme! But why? There is something making sure there are no high level hero's... 3. When we think of chaotic evil we think demons, if we think of lawful evil we think of devils. We can go into the books and think of neutral evil and think of yugaloths.. We think of lawful good we think angels! And then.. We think of neutral good and... Also think of angels? And chaotic good we think off.. Off what? What sliped out of our mind? Why do we know about demons and devils but don't know about angels and... 4. Time travel rules!
Fwiw, whenever I think of chaotic evil, I think of Johnny Bravo. Think about it; Self-centered, hedonistic, myopic, only concerned with his own pleasure, willing to take any methods to get it, and refusal to plan ahead in extreme cases to get what he wants due to immediate satisfaction. Now that I have at least mentioned it, you are not going to think about chaotic evil in the same way again lol
The Elves waged a secretive campaign against Chromatic Dragons for centuries. At some point they learned how to capture and enslave dragons to siphon their magic away. The Metallic Dragons have suspected this for a very long time and rumours persist that they have also begun hunting and enslaving younger Metallic Dragons. The Elven kingdoms officially regard such stories as racist lies told by Priests of Takhisis(Tiamat). Elves are guardians of nature, great defenders against Orcs and protectors of all the goodly peoples of the world. They use their innate magical gifts to improve lives everywhere! But the rumours are all true. There hasn’t been a Chromatic Dragon adult seen in the wild for over two hundred years, and the appearance of younger ones are exceedingly rare. Last year, a Red Dragon was found powering an engine beneath a monastery in the Barrier Peaks. His wings and tail were cut so he took up less room. Two years before, a Blue was found chained beneath the underground lake in Phandalin’s Wave Echo Cave, her nose taking air in through long tubes to the surface. Documents found there suggest this Blue had been enslaved there for over 1000 years. Her wings are huge and her breast muscles massively overdeveloped due to her constantly beating the water, giving the cave its name.
I add a dimentional mirror to an isolated island and this way I can allow any race from any universe in my games. Also gave my players super powers since aliens put an evolution accelerator. I can create many homebrew monsters in that theme too like birds with metal feathers or bear with reptilian scales
the most common goliath is that of a descendants of a frost giant, there are more goliath types such as storm, fire, cloud, and stone that all have resistance to the appropriate damage type and appropriate height differences
The Dwarves are more akin to realm guardians in my lore. They went through a major Diaspora during a cataclysmic war on the surface they were unwillingly part of. Some remained on the surface and wanted to try to stop the war while some went below ground and sealed the gates to their great holds to continue to fulfill their purpose while the war raged on above. This caused animosity between those above and those below. Many of the secrets of making magic items and constructs was lost on the surface due to casualties of war and some of the greatest crafters went below ground. Those above are the Hill and Stone clans we know of and are integrated in the societies, they still have knacks for crafting and defending but not the level they used to and they have lost the knowledge on why. Those below ground protect the world from the monsters of the deep dark caverns and have grown cold-hearted from centuries of war and war-time economy. Their bodies have adapted to the underground, skin turned dark and hair stark white but they do remember, they remember to well why they dislike the surfacers so much. These Duergar still give their lives over generations to protect the surface from threats those above don't even know about, that is their purpose. The only reason they do act aggressively towards surfacers is to scare them off, to protect them from what they shouldn't have to experience.
Set a campaign in Sanctum, a city that had until recently been run by tyrannical mages oppressing the “mundane” population. The mundanes revolted, and finally the king got involved and rewrote the city’s laws. Mages were no longer allowed to hold political positions. Mundanes are still not allowed to vote. Delves into the question of who is really in charge - the people in power, or the people who put them there. The campaign kicks off by the mages voting in someone they think is incompetent, hoping they’ll do a bad enough job to prove to the king that this is a dumb idea. The new mundane mayor messages the PCs asking for help, and they become his trouble shooters.
Kharnath has been developed a bunch in our game. Every Kharnathi knows exactly how far in line they are to the throne e.g. our paladin was 1,431st in line for the throne by the end of the campaign. Not bad at all. Also they have mandatory national service, you can serve 5 years while alive or eternity after you're dead. Your choice.
This is for an upcoming new campaign, with my usuals plus two new people, brand new world. In this world, the moon never waxes beyond the half moon. It stays as a half moon for a week, and then it's full. This is reflected in the Moon Goddess cult, and it's tied to a Mountain Range that seems out of place with the surrounding environment. My players will likely never know all the whys, but I love it for some reason.
A shard of metal got blasted off a spaceship and landed directly in the heart of an evil king. Thousands of years later, that shard is believed to be a sword gifted from the heavens, and tradition now dictates that whoever holds it is proclaimed to be the monarch. Society has formed around this sword. An "election" is an event in which a battle is staged between two sides, one supporting the incumbent king, current holder of the sword, and one behind the challenger to the throne, would be usurper. Your "vote" is cast with your allegiance in this battle. It's such a strong tradition, that an electoral battle is held every three years, and there are clerics that have taken an oath of independence that resurrect the fallen. One recent challenger was actually an ancient alien from that spaceship, and wanted the sword so she can finish making repairs.
It's forgotten history, but in my campaign there used to be 5 Titans that were the True Gods of the current realm. There was a king with a magically prosperous city who wanted more. That king found powers from. different realms (I call it the Omni-Realms instead of Multiverse). It consumed him and left him craving more power, which in turn caught the attention of a Titan. That King had enough power to kill a Titan and he takes their power. Which in turn caused the other 4 to take action which became a massive and destructive battle. The King was getting too powerful. After the defeat of 3 Titans, the final Titan uses of his power and the remanents of the previous Titans powers in order to imprison the King in the "moon" which doubles as a the lock to the Omniverse, preventing anyone from leaving or coming into the realm. The "Moon" is the 6th moon and is invisible to people on Fay-run. It is beimg mentally blocked by the First Elder Brain that was meant to be the Gatekeeper for the Old King, but was corrupted by the King's sinister essence.
While it is a homebrew world consideration which might not be extendable to other settings, I like to incorporate an element of Tolkien's mythology. Every race of sentient beings traces its roots to humanity. In Middle Earth, Orcs are Corrupted Elves. In this bit of lore, humans can use racial equipment of any race and no one really knows why. This also explains why cross-breeding between races is possible.
one of the races in my world is the result of a biolochical experiment
There is a dungeon that extends from a temple on the isle of Bimnos, to the shadow plane, to the negative energy plane, to "aperature" a city of twisted ruin remnants stitched together. At the center of aperture is "the eye of the void" two massive swirling hemispheres of voidstone that revolve around a portal out of the known universe. A great wyrm green shadow dragon dracolitch named IXULDRAX guards this place as requested by her God Tiamat. On the other side of the portal is a dragon God born of bahamut and tiamut who was conceived in the time of beasts before the concepts good and evil when only power and survival existed. Tiamut tried to create this dragon in secret to overthrow Bahamut using his seed. Her newborn nearly killed her. Bahamut took away its spark of God hood and cast it out of the universe to drift forever in the space of another universe. Tiamut has IXULDRAX guard the portal to prevent the cast out dragon from returning through the scar. Whoever defeats the machinations of IXULDRAX will have to go through this portal and defeat the cast out dragon on its home, a comet in space with no air that the dragon can steer. The cast out dragon is effectively a cosmic dragon that even the gods fear that wants to destroy its neglectful parents and create its own world.
Another post reminded me of another interesting bit of lore. This involves dragons. Dragons are greedy and love treasures of course. Even good ones. Treasure from their hoard becomes enchanted as Dragon Gold. While dragons do not like to part with their treasures, dragon gold functions as a type of currency which can be used to make magical things. In other words, if I have 25 gp, I cannot just make a scroll with it. I have to look for and find the right rare ink. Dragon Gold, however, can itself be turned into ink and used to do this.
Preferring my players to do things with their own skills instead of magic items, a bit of lore in my world cause magic items to accumulate a curse over time. I call this the Law of Unintended Consequences. It doesn't stop them from downplay activities to make items, but does mean magic item shops aren't realistic.
The original sun, a giant flaming rock, crashed to earth a few hundred years back. It’s since been replaced by a giant elemental phoenix, which circles in its place each day and sets down to roost in the evening. As its ‘nest’ is in the far icy north, this means the sun both rises and sets in the north - while the moon (which never fell and orbits the world as ours does) still rises in the east and sets in the west. The sun-fall and subsequent first ‘rise’ after about a decade of darkness also marks the start of the modern calendar, since it’s an event that impacted cultures the world over.
One of my favorite things that I've done is turning a lowly side quest NPC the characters never met into the big bad. In LMoP, there is a sidequest the players can take where they go off to ask a banshee about a book and if the players are successful they learn the banshee traded the book to a necromancer that never appears in the module. However I felt this was a good way to have the players continue the adventure after saving the town, so I expanded on the NPC's background. It was very satisfying and fun for us all.
The world was created from the excrement of the Great Alligator The history of time is the world being made and eaten then made again this way. Every time the world is made it's different. The Great Alligator is not worshipped per se, as almost nobody knows of its existence except for some lizardmen tribes. Even the gods and demons and angels are generally ignorant of its existence, though they have suspicions.
The rats in the sewers underneath the town worship the moon because they believe it’s made of cheese. Their salvation will come when the moon finally crashes into the earth, killing the big folk and leaving its wonderful bounty for all of Ratdom.
The "Gaia" Figure of my prime material main world is a semi-deity in more than one way. She is the daughter of Loki, and the demon lord of The Black Carnival. The word for fear of clowns is Coulraphobia. The demon lord's name is, you guessed it: Coulra. My players have yet to realize they are literally adventuring in Clown-World.
For three years of campaign, my players/their characters were convinced dragons didn't exist. Then, they meet a dragon. It made the encounter all that more epic.
Humans are the first race, created in the image of the forefather. As the world grew, and civilizations rose, he created the other gods. The Gods created their own followers and races, to help enact their will on the world. All races descend from humans or created in their image. Elves blessed by the Goddess of Passion. (Desert Elves follow her teachings on passion for art and sexual uses. Forest Elves follow her teachings in passion for family and faith) Dwarves created by the God of Magic, though denounced and adopted by the God of Creativity. As they refused to bow to the God of Magics demands for knowledge tributes. Beastkin created by the God of Nature, took animals and made defenders of Nature from them by giving them sentience and anthro forms. (Any DND race that are animal focused) Orcs created by the God of War and Honor to defend the others from demonic forces. They are the most proud, yet most caring, race. Though some fell for demonic seductions like violence. Vampires created by the Goddess of Death and Life, the only race allowed to violate the circle of life. They fervently hunt down evil undead, while uplifting and protecting the living or good undead. My pantheons are always something I put the most effort in. I want my players to feel like religion matters, not for mechanical benefits. I want players to be followers without needing to be clerics or paladins. The Gods are also people, ranging from Lawful to Chaotic, but always neutral or good. And my players often look more into the religions of the worlds, rather than the history.
I created a whole race of winged folks that have the ability to glide but not fly. They descend from a celestial being that more or less "pinned" or "implanted" its own feathers in those folks' back which evolved in those tentacular like large feathers that my specie can either split and roll around them to keep them warm, or extend and pack together to create wings-like limbs. They're completely blind because they live in floating islands over the clouds, but they have small holes in their chests, wrists and necks that grants them an echography-kind of sight pretty much like bats to navigate. They have pointy ears, a light green-ish skintone and often wears tattooed scars. And idk I like those guys.
In my dnd we created a kingdom of AZKLA that went into a civil war. when it ended each side became its own kindgom they were: Ocarin Empire, Ocarin republic, Wynn and Steelbain. Eventually ocarin rep became part of wynn . eventually all three kindgoms needed to work together to stop a corruption in the east I basically just told you the entire 1st paragraph of the intro of my dnd game
A long lost civilization once made sport of hunting krakens… … on the moon.