DnD Head Canons

[Grey Watcher]

I have always been a fan of the "Pelor: the Burning Hate" theory, to the point of currently playing a Blackguard of Pelor in my current 3.5 campaign.

Oh man, I have an idea for a 5E character I've wanted to play for a while now. A fallen Cleric of Pelor who buys into the Burning Hate Heresy and is now a Celestial Warlock. His patron claims to be an angel who has also discovered the truth and needs a mortal agent to help expose Pelor and eventually take him down.

Whether or not any of it is true (the Heresy, his patron's identity, or any of the rest) I'd leave up to the DM.

Bonus points if it takes place in Matt Mercer's campaign setting. Haven't you ever wondered why there are two sun gods? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE! (Yes, I know, I know. It's because they switched from the Pathfinder pantheon to the Standard Issue D&D pantheon when they changed from a private home game to a streaming show, but they didn't want to change Ashley's character's god because that would just be a weird and awkward retcon. But just leaving it at that is not how crackpot headcanon theories work, you see.)

The other major headcanon I hold unwavering loyalty to is the Great Modron Marketing Survey (https://critical-hits.com/blog/2014/09/27/fiat-magic-reagents-the-god-of-the-market-and-modrons/).

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I'll be honest, The Burning Hate headcanon has always bothered me. It's kind of a pizza-cutter (all edge and no point) of an idea, trying too hard to be cynical and I don't get why it's caught on so strongly with D&D players...

[a_flemish_guy]

*There are two forms of the Infernal language. A highly exact, restricted, and deficient Newspeak like form for day to day use, and a flowery, highly metaphorical, easily misinterpreted version for contracts etc.

*Souls sent to Baator are literally assigned genders. And it's deliberately chosen to be the one that will cause them the most trouble

adding to this: in exact infernal names are more like descriptions of a person rather then a constant referal to an entity, also those descriptions are very precise: [had 2 eyes but lost the right one] sounds nothing like [naturally one-eyed]
also in exact infernal a word has exactly one specific meaning

[LibraryOgre]

I'll be honest, The Burning Hate headcanon has always bothered me. It's kind of a pizza-cutter (all edge and no point) of an idea, trying too hard to be cynical and I don't get why it's caught on so strongly with D&D players...

Partially, I think, because it stems from the rules-based nitpicking that drives discussion of D&D. In AD&D, it wouldn't make sense, because "evil" spells were "you better have a damned good reason", not "are completely unavailable".

[Grey Watcher]

I'll be honest, The Burning Hate headcanon has always bothered me. It's kind of a pizza-cutter (all edge and no point) of an idea, trying too hard to be cynical and I don't get why it's caught on so strongly with D&D players...

I can see the appeal from a DM perspective: if you think your campaign is going to get near or all the way to level 20 (or whatever the equivalent in your system of choice is), it's a decent hook. Unless your whole table are completely new to the game and its attendant lore, you don't have to waste time explaining who Pelor is. And having a what TV Tropes so succinctly calls a Villain With Good Publicity gives a good reason why you can't call in the proverbial cavalry of more powerful entities: everyone's either been suckered by the ruse or is in on it.

Alternatively, it being so wildly incorrect and absurd can be a great world building detail. Your setting's answer to flat earthers. I guess that's what I would want to play with with the character I described. In character, he's thoroughly convinced, but until at best the very end of the campaign, you'd never really know. The end of his arc would be either triumphant validation or a bitter disillusionment.

I guess I'm not 100% on board with buying into it as true per se, but I certainly like it as an idea that's out there in the setting's culture. The fact that it does rely on such flimsy evidence, involves heaping load of Begging the Question, and runs entirely on confirmation bias isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Though I do think plenty of people readily do accept, even IRL, that that's what the character is meant to be. I think that tendency speaks to something well beyond the game. Maybe because we're so used to mortal authorities using a righteous facade to hide unscrupulous behavior that we're inclined to assume the same of gods. Maybe it's just a tendency in the modern world towards iconoclasm: look around the internet and you can find plenty of blogs, articles, and whathaveyous detailing how this or that figure who's widely regarded as heroic or a role model has done awful things. So, again, maybe there's an inclination to assume that a god must be the same way. Therefore, as soon as someone posts a silly joke about deliberately parsing everything in the worst way and leaping on editing errors as evidence, everyone loves it and it goes all viral and stuff.

Like I said, I think it's best used as an in-universe plot element or setting detail, with the truth of the matter only established if the campaign is specifically geared towards that (whether by the DM's original intent or whether driven there by the player). And honestly, maybe not even then.

EDIT: Oh, and speaking of the in-universe world-building, plot hook uses, it's also a decent way to do the "dangerous underground cult" thing without having to have everyone worshipping the Dark God of Wedgies and Obvious Ironic Comeuppance. I mean, you can only have so many people buy into the Original Position fallacy before it starts to just get a bit stale.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I think that tendency speaks to something well beyond the game. Maybe because we're so used to mortal authorities using a righteous facade to hide unscrupulous behavior that we're inclined to assume the same of gods. Maybe it's just a tendency in the modern world towards iconoclasm: look around the internet and you can find plenty of blogs, articles, and whathaveyous detailing how this or that figure who's widely regarded as heroic or a role model has done awful things. So, again, maybe there's an inclination to assume that a god must be the same way. Therefore, as soon as someone posts a silly joke about deliberately parsing everything in the worst way and leaping on editing errors as evidence, everyone loves it and it goes all viral and stuff.

I'd say it's probably three factors working together. First is the one you mention here; in any alignment debate or "How good is Good?" discussion you'll see people conflating D&D morality with real-life morality because it's a common reference point, even though there's a big difference between the two both socially and cosmically.

Second, there's tons of Good-aligned stuff in the game (monsters, classed NPCs, items...) that rarely gets used in an antagonistic capacity because comparatively few games involve evil PCs. A group that's already seen a lot of (and gotten used to the standard flavor and tactics of) demons, devils, evil cults, and so forth can find a squadron of Pelorite paladins mounted on pegasi with some Radiant Servants of Lathander support to be a refreshing change of pace against which a lot of standard tactics and gear prove ineffective. That's probably why the Burning Hate more frequently shows up in the context of DMs wanting to throw something different into their next campaign rather than PCs wanting to play clerics of evil!Pelor.

Third, a lot of settings have Evil (or sketchy-leaning Neutral) gods among the most common pantheon(s), and authors and DMs tend to have to go to some trouble to explain why people would put up with churches of evil gods in polite society at all--Umberlee the Sea B*tch is worshiped to keep her away from shipping, Bane is all about civic order (or else!), gods of death can be worshiped as gods of "please let my dead grandpa stay dead and not spontaneously animate as an undead creature" if you squint, and so on--which also happens to make the gods feel more three-dimensional and make the setting feel more immersive since real-life gods are rarely God Of This One Particular Thing and tend to be more multifaceted. Fleshing out some Good gods and giving them closet skeletons like Zeus's dalliances, Thor's anger problems, and the like can give you more verisimilitude in the same way.

(And, as a side effect, it can help turn Neutral gods from "Why the heck would you ever fence-sit between obvious Good and obvious Evil!?" to more of "Well, the Evil gods aren't all puppy-kicking jerks and the Good gods aren't all sweetness and light, so at least the Neutral gods aren't putting a big PR spin on things," which adds yet more believability and also opens up more Neutral antagonist options.)

[Grey Watcher]

adding to this: in exact infernal names are more like descriptions of a person rather then a constant referal to an entity, also those descriptions are very precise: [had 2 eyes but lost the right one] sounds nothing like [naturally one-eyed]
also in exact infernal a word has exactly one specific meaning

I actually have a more elaborate (and therefore more useless in actual play) one for Infernal.

Infernal isn't actually the language of Devils. At least, not the one they use when talking to each other. It's a highly simplified version specifically for use with mortals, possibly literally a constructed language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language). When Devils talk to each other, there are hugely complicated and very, very precise rules dictating what speech patterns, grammar, vocabulary, and sometimes even entire dialects, you're supposed to use with a given other Devil, depending on your relative ranks in the hierarchy and some other factors (eg there's a subset of rules for what happens when a Devil assigned to tempting mortals is talking with another one who's working in Hell's military legions). If you don't want to handicap a player that took Infernal too hard, you might say that for-mortals Infernal can at least get the gist of a conversation you might be eavesdropping on. But there's probably a lot of information passing between them about rank, role, station, ambitions, etc. that a mortal who just speaks "Infernal" is going to completely miss.

It's not impossible for a mortal to learn to speak Infernal like a native, but it'd take decades of research, lessons, and probably first hand experience living in Hell to get even passable at it. And most Devils know that mortals using Simplified Infernal is fine (only so much can be expected of such limited creatures after all). But if you don't know exactly what you're doing, trying to speak fully-fledged Infernal is arguably more dangerous. You do not address a Lord of one of the Circles of Hell the same way you would address just any Pit Fiend, and accidentally using rules for "speaking to Asmodeus himself" when speaking to anyone else would be literally seen as open treason or rebellion. And if you're speaking non-simplified Infernal, you're expected to know better, so if you want to claim it was a mistake, you better have a sky high Persuasion check on top of a natural 20 too back out of that gaffe.

[Sniccups]

Dwarves are Norse, dammit, not Scottish.


I've been playing recently in a world where the dwarves are Swiss. As in, they work as bankers and mercenaries, and live in a land surrounded by mountains.

[Azuresun]

Choosing a patron deity in the Forgotten Realms is approached much like investing in the stock market. Deities like Chauntea or Grumbar are stable, low-risk investments, whereas gods like Bane or Torm who tend to get into fights and tangled up in divine soap opera are higher risk.

Mystra is in a risk category of her own.

[Scots Dragon]

St. Cuthbert speaks with a Scottish or Northern English accent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert).

Wee Jas has the voice of Grey DeLisle.

Most of the worst stuff of the Spellplague in the Forgotten Realms actually didn't happen at all, and the 'restored to normal' of 5th Edition was literally just people realising that rather than listening to tall tales. I personally blame Volothamp Geddarm.

Literally all of the cosmological models from the Great Wheel to the World Axis are have varying degrees of truth and falsehood, and rather than being the actual intrinsic structure of the universe they're an attempt by very limited mortal minds to comprehend things that just aren't actually completely possible to comprehend.

Golarion is pretty much part of the D&D multiverse, since it's closer to the standard than even some major settings like Dark Sun and Dragonlance.

Due to the links between universes that have kind of been hinted at repeatedly through various spells, characters meeting one-another, and the whole concept of Planescape, there are a whole bunch of interloper deities shared between settings even beyond the elven, dwarven, etc. pantheons. Some Faerûnians worship Boccob, for instance.

EDIT: the Wall of the Faithless does not actually exist

[Archpaladin Zousha]

Wee Jas has the voice of Grey DeLisle.
Huh...I always imagined her more as Natalie Portman. Her art kind of even LOOKS like her (Grey DeLisle still works though, after all, she DID voice Padme in the animated Clone Wars)!

[Sniccups]

I actually have a more elaborate (and therefore more useless in actual play) one for Infernal.

Infernal isn't actually the language of Devils. At least, not the one they use when talking to each other. It's a highly simplified version specifically for use with mortals, possibly literally a constructed language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language). When Devils talk to each other, there are hugely complicated and very, very precise rules dictating what speech patterns, grammar, vocabulary, and sometimes even entire dialects, you're supposed to use with a given other Devil, depending on your relative ranks in the hierarchy and some other factors (eg there's a subset of rules for what happens when a Devil assigned to tempting mortals is talking with another one who's working in Hell's military legions). If you don't want to handicap a player that took Infernal too hard, you might say that for-mortals Infernal can at least get the gist of a conversation you might be eavesdropping on. But there's probably a lot of information passing between them about rank, role, station, ambitions, etc. that a mortal who just speaks "Infernal" is going to completely miss.

It's not impossible for a mortal to learn to speak Infernal like a native, but it'd take decades of research, lessons, and probably first hand experience living in Hell to get even passable at it. And most Devils know that mortals using Simplified Infernal is fine (only so much can be expected of such limited creatures after all). But if you don't know exactly what you're doing, trying to speak fully-fledged Infernal is arguably more dangerous. You do not address a Lord of one of the Circles of Hell the same way you would address just any Pit Fiend, and accidentally using rules for "speaking to Asmodeus himself" when speaking to anyone else would be literally seen as open treason or rebellion. And if you're speaking non-simplified Infernal, you're expected to know better, so if you want to claim it was a mistake, you better have a sky high Persuasion check on top of a natural 20 too back out of that gaffe.

I love this idea.


The githyanki remind me more of the Alternian trolls from "Homestuck". Given the whole thing where they live their adult lives on the astral plane but grow up on material planets, they have psychic powers, they lay eggs, and they are rules by a sadistic queen with formidable supernatural powers

This is a good idea, but I think it kind of falls apart when you try to integrate Doc Scratch and Lord English.

[Belac93]

Most of the traditional races evolved to be distance hunters, like humans. However, humans came out on top in the civilization game.

Elves beat out humans by being fast and having to sleep less; even though they might have to rest more often, they don't need to rest as long. They got out-competed because of low birth rates.

Orcs tried to beat humans by being overall tougher, able to run for longer. However, they are much more dependant on eating meat, and other races developed agriculture, so they weren't able to create stable large societies.

Halflings are small and energy efficient, allowing them to eat less and travel in larger groups. They invented agriculture early, but a racial lack of ambition (similar to the neanderthal's lack of wanderlust and curiosity) made them less inclined to build more than necessary.

Dwarves don't fit into this, because they're actually carrion-eaters, with extra constitution, resistance to poison, and a slower speed. Their alcohol is a byproduct of fermented mushrooms which they eat to pad out their diets when there isn't enough meat to go around. Also, the rare dwarven hunter is basically a trapdoor spider with handaxes that hunts deer.

[martixy]

The astral plane is an explosion of color and light, everything being in sharp clarity and vibrant, while the ethereal plane is muted and dry, all objects warped and indistinct. This is because the astral plane connects to the planes that exemplify and expand on material plane phenomena and ideas, and the ethereal plane connects to planes that are syntheses of material ideas, like the core elements.

Random note:
Those already exist. They are called the Plane of Shadow and the Plane of Radiance [Dr. 321].

So... when is it some random head-canon and when is it just your own personal homebrew cosmology? Cuz I could rant a lot about the latter. A lot.

For the smaller stuff...
I don't do monoculture races, so this does not apply universally, but I like completely ridiculous combinations such as
- Drow that sound like russian immigrants
- Minotaurs that sound like posh british butlers
- Redneck orcs, etc.

P.S. Is there any word on why Sigil is called the Cage? Someone mentioned the idea of it being a prison for Her Serenity, and that name fits rather well, so how much of actual canon could we have there?

[Bohandas]

Random note:
Those already exist. They are called the Plane of Shadow and the Plane of Radiance [Dr. 321].

IIRC there's actually TWO planes of radiance. The Demiplane of Radiance and the Quasielemental Plane of Radiance

[Beleriphon]

P.S. Is there any word on why Sigil is called the Cage? Someone mentioned the idea of it being a prison for Her Serenity, and that name fits rather well, so how much of actual canon could we have there?

Everybody knows that the Lady of Pain is a canonically five psionic squirrels in fancy dress with a magic item.

[SunderedWorldDM]

Demons are responsible for the worst crimes of the multiverse. The Abyss is their divine prison, and the devils are their jailers. The Blood War is simply quelling a jailbreak. Yugoloths play both sides as the god that made them was infamously one who double crossed people and played both sides in the divine conflict.

[LibraryOgre]

Everybody knows that the Lady of Pain is a canonically five psionic squirrels in fancy dress with a magic item.

And since squirrels are just fancy rats, the Lady of Pain is a cranium rat.

[Scots Dragon]

Everybody knows that the Lady of Pain is a canonically five psionic squirrels in fancy dress with a magic item.


And since squirrels are just fancy rats, the Lady of Pain is a cranium rat.

Ah, but this is kinda backwards.

All rodents are avatars and aspects of the Lady of Pain.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Everybody knows that the Lady of Pain is a canonically five psionic squirrels in fancy dress with a magic item.

I really wish people would stop making up ridiculous "facts" like that about beloved Planescape NPCs.

She's six, non-psionic squirrels (https://annex.fandom.com/wiki/Lady_of_Pain#Planescape:_Torment_bestiary_entry), geez. Get it right. :smalltongue:

[LibraryOgre]

Ah, but this is kinda backwards.

All rodents are avatars and aspects of the Lady of Pain.

... she's also unbeatable.

I just figured out the Lady of Pain. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs493Gi4CaI)

[Belac93]

The lady of pain is obviously a mass delusion. Everyone is actually seeing Mr. Scruffles, a perfectly normal cat that the zeitgeist of the city is going to incredible lengths to protect.

As for the disappearances and mazes and anti-god stuff, the city just kinda does that.

[No brains]

The Lady of Pain is a contrivance that allows the Planescape setting to exist. I mean, that's what she is in world. Somebody brought up that it would be cool if Planescape existed and all of the gods kind of murmured in lukewarm agreement and are all insisting that there is totally a Lady of Pain who can stop gods. All this so they could hear Homer Simpson voice a modron.

[Lord Torath]

The Crimson Sphere (the crystal sphere containing Athas and the Dark Sun Campaign) is located in a space where all phlogiston rivers flow away from it. You can exit the sphere, but you can't come back (except through a portal at the center of a flame ring in Krynnspace that dumps your now-ruined ship in the upper atmosphere of Athas).

[Luccan]

The Crimson Sphere (the crystal sphere containing Athas and the Dark Sun Campaign) is located in a space where all phlogiston rivers flow away from it. You can exit the sphere, but you can't come back (except through a portal at the center of a flame ring in Krynnspace that dumps your now-ruined ship in the upper atmosphere of Athas).

To be fair, I think most people in the setting would be happy with a one-way ticket out. I hear the other spheres have water.

[Scots Dragon]

To be fair, I think most people in the setting would be happy with a one-way ticket out. I hear the other spheres have water.

Therefore it's actually the other way around.

You can get trapped on Athas very easily. Escaping? Not so much.

[Azuresun]

Given the German / Russian influences on Karrnath, I now imagine this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvS351QKFV4) being their national anthem.

[Beleriphon]

Given the German / Russian influences on Karrnath, I now imagine this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvS351QKFV4) being their national anthem.

But with Zombies doing the dance?

[Azuresun]

In hextor's land, to make the people work more, they increased the lenght of the week. There is still only one sunday. Every once in a while, a leader will add another day to the week.
Currently they have 23 days, and counting. The extra days are all called monday, because everyone hates mondays.


https://i.imgur.com/gW9dstal.png

https://i.imgur.com/hQYZpRJl.png

https://i.imgur.com/SUb6RVDl.png

[a_flemish_guy]

Therefore it's actually the other way around.

You can get trapped on Athas very easily. Escaping? Not so much.

additional thinking: when the githyanki stuck their noses out of their portals on athas and looked around at the endless dessert, psionic superhuman population, immortal sorceror kings and souped-up dragon they not only decided that they had someplace more important to be but also that they'd rather these guys didn't get out and actively blocked of any means of creating portals

[LibraryOgre]

additional thinking: when the githyanki stuck their noses out of their portals on athas and looked around at the endless dessert, psionic superhuman population, immortal sorceror kings and souped-up dragon they not only decided that they had someplace more important to be but also that they'd rather these guys didn't get out and actively blocked of any means of creating portals

The Gith (not Githyanki, just Gith) are actually a fairly common enemy on Athas.

[Lord Torath]

The Gith (not Githyanki, just Gith) are actually a fairly common enemy on Athas.Not to be confused with the Pirate Gith that sail around Wildspace. Pirate Gith are supposed to be an offshoot of the Githyanki/Githzerai race that fled into Wildspace instead of the Astral plane when the big split happened.

I think Athasian Gith might be distantly related to the other Gith, but I don't really remember how.

[LibraryOgre]

Not to be confused with the Pirate Gith that sail around Wildspace. Pirate Gith are supposed to be an offshoot of the Githyanki/Githzerai race that fled into Wildspace instead of the Astral plane when the big split happened.

I think Athasian Gith might be distantly related to the other Gith, but I don't really remember how.

I always figured they were Gith who got stuck... like, they looked for a Prime world to raise their kids on, and then realized they couldn't leave. So you have this group of incredibly inbred gith, stuck on the Prime Material.

[noob]

additional thinking: when the githyanki stuck their noses out of their portals on athas and looked around at the endless dessert, psionic superhuman population, immortal sorceror kings and souped-up dragon they not only decided that they had someplace more important to be but also that they'd rather these guys didn't get out and actively blocked of any means of creating portals

They live in dessert?
I did not know that.

[Lord Torath]

They live in dessert?
I did not know that.Their homes are made of Sandies (https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/19207/sandies/). :smallwink:

[Dr paradox]

Necromancy is the art of soul manipulation.

This may seem obvious, but it has specific ramifications for Animate Dead, and the many proponents of the "Good Necromancer."

See, Golems and other animated objects don't use necromancy. They all use Conjuration or Transmutation. So there's got to be something specific about animating corpses that sets it apart from binding elementals or sewing movement into a suit of armor. To me, the answer is that when a skeleton is animated, the soul that once inhabited it is torn from its final rest, in whole or in part, and bound to the decaying remains, forced to carry out the caster's wishes. They are subjected to metaphysical torture until their release.

This is why necromancy, and animating the dead in particular, is evil.

(I guess the way to test this theory would be to cast "Clone," die, then attempt to animate your own corpse? RAW, I believe that works fine, so there's evidence against my theory...)

[noob]

Necromancy is the art of soul manipulation.

This may seem obvious, but it has specific ramifications for Animate Dead, and the many proponents of the "Good Necromancer."

See, Golems and other animated objects don't use necromancy. They all use Conjuration or Transmutation. So there's got to be something specific about animating corpses that sets it apart from binding elementals or sewing movement into a suit of armor. To me, the answer is that when a skeleton is animated, the soul that once inhabited it is torn from its final rest, in whole or in part, and bound to the decaying remains, forced to carry out the caster's wishes. They are subjected to metaphysical torture until their release.

This is why necromancy, and animating the dead in particular, is evil.

(I guess the way to test this theory would be to cast "Clone," die, then attempt to animate your own corpse? RAW, I believe that works fine, so there's evidence against my theory...)
Does it means that when I cast animate deathless on a rat it takes the soul of the rat and use it to animate the deathless?
Does it means that rat souls are as much valuable as any other soul?

[Dr paradox]

Does it means that when I cast animate deathless on a rat it takes the soul of the rat and use it to animate the deathless?
Does it means that rat souls are as much valuable as any other soul?

Er. Doing some quick research.

So, deathless are a positive energy equivalent to undead from the Eberron setting specifically, and "Animate Deathless" is a homebrew spell from this forum, posted about six years ago?

That's... kind of its own headcanon, isn't it?

To answer your question, I would say that a rat soul is as valuable as a rat deathless. Given that the homebrew spell in question both excludes sapient creatures and produces a notably weaker creature than Create Deathless does, it seems to indicate that a rat soul would be weaker than other souls.

That said, I'm not sure how one would judge the relative strength of souls.

[noob]

Er. Doing some quick research.

So, deathless are a positive energy equivalent to undead from the Eberron setting specifically, and "Animate Deathless" is a homebrew spell from this forum, posted about six years ago?

That's... kind of its own headcanon, isn't it?

To answer your question, I would say that a rat soul is as valuable as a rat deathless. Given that the homebrew spell in question both excludes sapient creatures and produces a notably weaker creature than Create Deathless does, it seems to indicate that a rat soul would be weaker than other souls.

That said, I'm not sure how one would judge the relative strength of souls.

I am sorry I meant create deathless which is not homebrew but from the book Eberron campaign setting.
Create deathless have no restriction on what it can animate and always create the same kind of creature.

[JBPuffin]

Ioun, patron goddess of librarians (and of magic if you’re like me and use the Dawn War pantheon as your go-to), is an ascended mortal; she took on the mantle of “goddess of magic” when the old god of that domain was slain. She found his spellbook, copied the spells into hers, and ascended as an unintentional side effect, making her one of the more approachable deities in the pantheon.

Shardminds aren’t the products of some “Living Gate” falling apart, but what happens when the crystalline stars fall to earth. Their natural psionic resonance collects memories, language data, and such from passers-by until the combination creates a sort of identity construct which it then embodies.

There are no giraffes on any of the normal Primes because they are, in fact, Far Realm brings domesticated by nature deities - you know, the kind that are kept out of meetings because they “smell” and “might bring another hydra to the meeting” and “don’t understand why clothes are a common decency” and so on. Most Primes simply don’t have the required gods for the task of creating a stable breeding population.

[Dr paradox]

I am sorry I meant create deathless which is not homebrew but from the book Eberron campaign setting.
Create deathless have no restriction on what it can animate and always create the same kind of creature.

I don't know that the "Strength" of a given soul is strictly relevant to the headcanon. More interesting is that Deathless retain the memories they had in life, suggesting that there is indeed a connection between their present state and the soul they had in life.

Aside from that, Deathless are a part of Eberron specific lore, and not D&D lore generally.

[Kelb_Panthera]

I don't know that the "Strength" of a given soul is strictly relevant to the headcanon. More interesting is that Deathless retain the memories they had in life, suggesting that there is indeed a connection between their present state and the soul they had in life.

Aside from that, Deathless are a part of Eberron specific lore, and not D&D lore generally.

In point of fact, deathless were introduced in the 3e Book of Exalted Deeds well before the ones in the 3e Eberron Campaign Setting. At least that's the earliest incarnation that I'm aware of. That and a few Eberron books are the only places they were printed though so it's certainly an understandable error.

[Dr paradox]

In point of fact, deathless were introduced in the 3e Book of Exalted Deeds well before the ones in the 3e Eberron Campaign Setting. At least that's the earliest incarnation that I'm aware of. That and a few Eberron books are the only places they were printed though so it's certainly an understandable error.

Well, shut my mouth!

It's certainly fair that there's plenty of material to contradict my headcanon. It's mostly the thing that makes sense for the often stated position that Necromancy is evil, plus the thematics that eem more potent that way (Death is the natural order, defying death is an act of mortal hubris, death is larger than ourselves, the undead as a symbol of a decrepit and monstrous past, relying on undead labor as visual metaphor for slavery).

[lightningcat]

All Cure spells and other similar healing spells are in the Necromancy school.

As they always hould have been. And as they were back in the older editions.

[Avigor]

The Human racial deity (possibly now a vestige, such as Amon, Balam, Naberius, or Orthos) developed the ambition to attempt to contact what some Athar now refer to as the Great Unknown, and the other deities absolutely panicked, believing that if such a thing did exist that if it were made aware of them that it would destroy them (or at least ruin their fun), so they attempted to wipe the human deity out of existence (with questionable success). They allow the modern Athar, who may have been inspired by an old legend of this event, to exist only because they don't have access to the sheer, ridiculous power required to attempt the ludicrous 13th level spell/ritual (borrowing from what I've heard of old concepts of epic magic that afaik were far beyond 3.5 "epic magic") that the original attempt entailed.

[noob]

I don't know that the "Strength" of a given soul is strictly relevant to the headcanon. More interesting is that Deathless retain the memories they had in life, suggesting that there is indeed a connection between their present state and the soul they had in life.

Aside from that, Deathless are a part of Eberron specific lore, and not D&D lore generally.

Value != strength.
I talked about soul value.
Not about soul strength.
Any soul is valuable through the ability to be turned into the soul of a deathless if you consider necromancy puts the soul of the corpse within the created creature.
Essentially any soul of a dead creature can suddenly become a good aligned soul full of good intentions.

[LibraryOgre]

All Cure spells and other similar healing spells are in the Necromancy school.

As they always hould have been. And as they were back in the older editions.

Related: "Necromancy" concerns positive and negative energy. If the spell involves that, it's at least part necromancy.

[Scots Dragon]

In point of fact, deathless were introduced in the 3e Book of Exalted Deeds well before the ones in the 3e Eberron Campaign Setting. At least that's the earliest incarnation that I'm aware of. That and a few Eberron books are the only places they were printed though so it's certainly an understandable error.

Adding into this, though they were never clarified as 'Deathless' as such, since they precede the term, the Forgotten Realms has had something similar floating about for ages.

There are elven pseudo-liches called Baelnorns (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Baelnorn_lich), which cannot be turned and serve as powerful lorekeepers and protectors of ancient elven secrets. They are generally lawful good, and date back to the AD&D days.

[hamishspence]

The FR also had plenty of nonevil human liches, who were usually referred to as archliches.

[Spriteless]

The Ring of Sybiris was built to keep the Dal Quor from infecting other realities' dreams.

Or to seal away whatever weapon the Giants used to break their predecessors.

[Leon]

*Trolls eat a lot because their regenerative abilities are metabolically taxing. This, combined with their poor mental abilities and lack of discipline leand to them attacking livestock, which leads to altervations with ranchers, which leads to their regeneration being needed, which turns into a vicious cycle

When the Iron Kingdoms Monsternomicon came out it had Dire Trolls listed as CE, it was later noted to be not the case as while the people who have lost everything to rampaging Trolls might see them as Evil they are actually Chaotic Hungry.

[RedMage125]

Necromancy is the art of soul manipulation.

This may seem obvious, but it has specific ramifications for Animate Dead, and the many proponents of the "Good Necromancer."

See, Golems and other animated objects don't use necromancy. They all use Conjuration or Transmutation. So there's got to be something specific about animating corpses that sets it apart from binding elementals or sewing movement into a suit of armor. To me, the answer is that when a skeleton is animated, the soul that once inhabited it is torn from its final rest, in whole or in part, and bound to the decaying remains, forced to carry out the caster's wishes. They are subjected to metaphysical torture until their release.

This is why necromancy, and animating the dead in particular, is evil.
So...this is actually backed up in some quasi-canonical sources. In the Dragon magazine #350 article "Core Beliefs: Wee Jas", it states:
"Her focus is on the spirits of the dead, not their bodies, and thus she tolerates necromancy-especially if the subject is willing (although she frowns on stealing lawfully-buried bodies). Because she guards the spirits of the dead, she is displeased when these spirits are involuntarily summoned back to the mortal world and corrupted into undead (again, voluntray corruption into undead-bodied or bodiless-does not disturb her). Her belief in the sanctity of death is so strong that her clergy are forbidden from raising the dead by any means without first consulting her (whether directly via commune or indirectly through a divine messenger)."
"Wee Jas does not appreciate the use of Suel spirits for creating undead, and any arcane spellcaster bent on creating undead should be careful about what sort of spirit his spell draws to the Material Plane. In most cases, undead-creating spell (including animate dead) can be adjusted as they are cast to avoid contacting the remnant of a Suel spirit, and doing so does not alter their casting or effects in any way. A few spells, however, specifically draw on the soul that once inhabited the target body (often intended as a punishment for the dead person)..."

So the spirit that animates an undead creature is apparently a mortal soul.

Also, to wit: If your buddy is killed, and you take a finger from his body to take back to town to get a Resurrection, but some necromancer turns that body into a zombie in the meantime? No resurrection. His body could be disintegrated and True Resurrection would work, but make him a zombie, and lock that zombie in a lead-lined box with a permanent Nondetection and Dimensional Anchor on it, drop it in the ocean? No mortal magic can bring your friend back to life, and you're gonna have to find that box manually to kill the zombie. So there is SOME connection between the soul of the person who passed and the undead creature.



(I guess the way to test this theory would be to cast "Clone," die, then attempt to animate your own corpse? RAW, I believe that works fine, so there's evidence against my theory...)
That is, of course, the crux. No one's clear on what happens then. Presumably, you're fine, and you get an undead version of you, but what happens when your cloned body is killed? Does that undead need to be killed before you can be resurrected?


All Cure spells and other similar healing spells are in the Necromancy school.

As they always hould have been. And as they were back in the older editions.

I make mention of that in a little fun mental exercise I was working on (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?576080-Elemental-Affinities-for-Schools-of-Magic).

[Bohandas]

Also, to wit: If your buddy is killed, and you take a finger from his body to take back to town to get a Resurrection, but some necromancer turns that body into a zombie in the meantime? No resurrection. His body could be disintegrated and True Resurrection would work, but make him a zombie, and lock that zombie in a lead-lined box with a permanent Nondetection and Dimensional Anchor on it, drop it in the ocean? No mortal magic can bring your friend back to life, and you're gonna have to find that box manually to kill the zombie. So there is SOME connection between the soul of the person who passed and the undead creature.

Yes, but if you do it in the reverse order it works fine.

[Grey Watcher]

...

That is, of course, the crux. No one's clear on what happens then. Presumably, you're fine, and you get an undead version of you, but what happens when your cloned body is killed? Does that undead need to be killed before you can be resurrected?

Why would Animate Dead work on an unused clone? In 5e, the clone is "inert" not dead. And if memory serves l, 3e had similar language.

[RedMage125]

Why would Animate Dead work on an unused clone? In 5e, the clone is "inert" not dead. And if memory serves l, 3e had similar language.

I meant the new, cloned body that you are curently using. If and when you die again.

So...
Prime Body: Dead, now a zombie. Caster's consciousness is in Clone
Clone: Now also dead. Can this person be brought back with Raise Dead? Or does the zombie of Prime Body need to be killed first? The way the RAW are worded is unclear.

[Grey Watcher]

I meant the new, cloned body that you are curently using. If and when you die again.

So...
Prime Body: Dead, now a zombie. Caster's consciousness is in Clone
Clone: Now also dead. Can this person be brought back with Raise Dead? Or does the zombie of Prime Body need to be killed first? The way the RAW are worded is unclear.

Sorry about that. I think I somehow skipped over a word in there (specifically the word "die").

I think by 5e RAW you should end up alive in your clone body with your original body as a pet zombie. (A really disturbing pet....) The rules don't bar it and RAW never spells out the metaphysics, so it's not like it's there to draw inference from.

[No brains]

The apparent disconnect between class starting age and the ability to multiclass on a whim comes from the schedule of basic training for all classes. All classes are going to need to learn how to jog for several miles, carry a heavy pack, hold their breath absurdly long, and do other elementary system functions. It's just that a wizard doesn't prioritize those and makes slower progress getting to the level 1 competency stage of doing those things. Barbarians and sorcerers have precious little else to do but learn those, so they start adventuring earlier.

[RedMage125]

Sorry about that. I think I somehow skipped over a word in there (specifically the word "die").

I think by 5e RAW you should end up alive in your clone body with your original body as a pet zombie. (A really disturbing pet....) The rules don't bar it and RAW never spells out the metaphysics, so it's not like it's there to draw inference from.

You're still missing the last half. After that, if you die AGAIN in your cloned body, does the zombie of your original body need to be destroyed in order to resurrect you? The Clone spell carries with it no rules that say how it interacts with spells that resurrect a player that has been turned into an undead, but ONLY if the undead creature is destroyed first.

[Jay R]

It is my opinion that elves mature at the same rate that humans do, and in the same way. When they are in the range from 20-80 years, they are mostly concerned with sex, politics, football, and role-playing games, just like humans are. The difference is that an elf isn't considered mature until he or she grows out of it. Humans, unfortunately, don't live long enough to grow out of this unfortunate time of life.

This is also why elves generally look down on humans.

[Eldan]

That's pretty much how Tolkien wrote it, I think. Elves dont' age much slower than humans until they are in their mid 20s or so, at which point they stop aging. At least until either their fiery soul gets too hot for their body or their soul accumulates too many negative emotions and they just die.

They didn't look any different from humans either, though.

[Bohandas]

Zagyg's castle is capable of completely reconfiguring its interior, that's why every Castle Greyhawk/Castle Zagyg adventure has had a different layout

[PairO'Dice Lost]

On the subject of elf maturation rates, here's a 3e headcanon/joke I've referenced a few times:


It's really quite simple. Elves are perfectionists, and the 3e rules bear out the aging discrepancies.

In 3e, anything you can do is a skill or ability check. "Notice something large in plain sight" is a DC 0 Spot check, for instance--a check that cannot be failed by anyone with at least 10 Wis and no distractions, even if they're untrained, but a skill check nonetheless. Most of the time, you can ignore those checks, because they're impossible to fail, so humans and halflings and dwarves and all the rest simply take 10 on them. However, elves cannot abide doing anything less than perfectly, so they take 20 on every single check, which takes 20 times as long as making the check normally.

Every. Single. Check. Walking? DC 0 Balance check. Talking? DC 0 Diplomacy check. Eating? DC 0 Dex check. Using the bathroom? Er, you get the idea. That's why everyone sees elves as being the most beautiful, most awesome, etc. beings out there. Eating a sandwich will take them an hour where it would take a human 3 minutes, but by Corellon it'll be the most-gracefully-eaten sandwich you ever did see!

Now, this only applies when actually taking actions, so while elves trance they're taking no actions and therefore acting at "normal" speed. As well, it's very impolite to interrupt others while they're being awesome, and elves are very fair and equal-minded people, so they spend half their time being awesome at things and half their time patiently watching other elves be awesome at things. So for 1/6 of any given day they're trancing, and for 3/6 of any given day they're not taking any actions, and for the remaining 2/6 of any given day they're taking normal actions but taking 20 times as long to do them. (15 years to reach adulthood * 2/6 of the time taking actions * 20 "take 20" penalty) + (15 years to reach adulthood * 4/6 of the time not taking actions * 1 normal time) = 110 years on the dot.

When an elf leaves home, of course, he realizes that the terribly uncouth and uncultured non-elves don't tolerate such a thing or appreciate his awesomeness, so he has to get by with taking 10 on everything, and essentially starts living life on a human scale. This explains why non-adventuring elves are the mythically beautiful and graceful and awesome elves of legends, while adventuring elves are much more down-to-earth and seem a lot more like humans with pointy ears. The only chance they have to really indulge themselves is while they're out on an adventure--elves trance for 4 hours while his companions sleep for 8, so an elf has 4 hours per day to be the elfiest elf he can possibly be while no non-elves are there to watch and judge him.

According to the DMG, we can assume that there is a 10% chance of having a wandering monster/random encounter per hour. This means that there is a (1 - .9^4) chance that a random encounter happens while an elf is being elfy during the 4 hours he has to himself, or a 30% chance rounding to one significant figure. So he has roughly a 70% chance to be elfy for 1/6 of the day without interruption (sometimes much less, sometimes much more, depending on when he's interrupted, but we can assume it balances out), meaning he acts elfy roughly 1/8.5 of the time. Thus, while humans take 20 years to get from adulthood to middle age, elves take (20 years to reach middle age * 1/8.5 of the time taking elfy actions * 20 "take 20" penalty) + (20 years to reach adulthood * 7.5/8.5 of the time taking human-y actions * 1 normal time) = ~65 years to do so, which puts them at middle age at ~175 years, exactly what it says on the chart.
Conclusion: Given 3e RAW, elves must age at the given rates. So there. :smallcool: Yes, I put way too much thought into this. I was very bored.

[KillianHawkeye]

Zagyg's castle is capable of completely reconfiguring its interior, that's why every Castle Greyhawk/Castle Zagyg adventure has had a different layout

Dracula must have gotten his castle from the same place. :smallwink:

[Scots Dragon]

Zagyg's castle is capable of completely reconfiguring its interior, that's why every Castle Greyhawk/Castle Zagyg adventure has had a different layout

This actually applies to most dungeons. Not all of them do change layout, but most of them are capable of it.

[Matuka]

Just as angels are capable of falling, demons are capable of rising.

Angels (and demons) are not literally cast out of there respective locations. When either stops being the alignment of there home realm, they "fall" or "rise" in dimensional frequency. This drops them off at the dimensional middle ground, the material plane.

Necromancy is the manipulation of an energy that flows throughout the worlds. Souls and spirits naturally form from this energy through eggs/wombs. They can also form due to great events/locations (immense forests spawn nature spirits, and so on). Yes there are evil necromancers, but there are always evil users of any magic.

Lastly, butter is flammable. I have no idea if it really is that way but it came up in my dnd campaign, we all said it was that way so now it is that way, in my world anyway.

[Lord Torath]

Lastly, butter is flammable. I have no idea if it really is that way but it came up in my dnd campaign, we all said it was that way so now it is that way, in my world anyway.I don't know that I'd call it "flammable", but I suspect if you stuck a wick in a stick of butter you could have a butter candle. (Turns out: you can! (https://www.instructables.com/id/Make-a-Butter-Candle-Emergency-Candle-McGyver-St/))

[Bohandas]

The Abyssal language uses the same word for both "artist" and "serial killer"

[Spriteless]

The Abyssal language uses the same word for both "artist" and "serial killer"

Oh man, how boring and repetitive their art must be.

[lightningcat]

The Abyssal language uses the same word for both "artist" and "serial killer"

Torturer should be in there as well.

[Bohandas]

Dracula must have gotten his castle from the same place. :smallwink:

Dracula, or Strahd? Because Strahd's castle explicitly does this

"...others believe that Strahd's magic causes the crypts to shift and move around each time mortals dare enter them" -Castle Ravenloft Boardgame, Rulebook, page 5, paragraph 1

[RedMage125]

Dracula, or Strahd? Because Strahd's castle explicitly does this

"...others believe that Strahd's magic causes the crypts to shift and move around each time mortals dare enter them" -Castle Ravenloft Boardgame, Rulebook, page 5, paragraph 1

Castlevania lore about the castle shifting itself pre-date the Ravenloft Board Game.

[Bohandas]

*The specific actions required to prepare a given spell vary both from person to person, and from place to place and day to day according to current local magical conditions. The writing in a wizard's spellbook changes itself to reflect current magical conditions and what they mean for its specific owner. The variation from person to person is why a wizard can't simply prepare a spell from any other wizard's spellbook. The changing writing in a spellbook is the part that makes it so expensive and necessitates the weird materials.

*Xoriat is not a plane. It is a gaping hole in Eberron's multiverse through which things come in from outside



So the spirit that animates an undead creature is apparently a mortal soul.

That's not controversial. The question is its relevance, to wit, whether zombies and skeletons have a spirit at all

[Spore]

Castlevania lore about the castle shifting itself pre-date the Ravenloft Board Game.

The dark realms as a whole are in a kinda of timeless featureless limbo of sorts in my head anyway. After all it is meant as purgatory for the Dark Lords. Time does not move the same for all inhabitants. Of course Strahd or Dracula only has direct control over his castle, otherwise the heroes defeating him are kind of pointless. Once you are inside, once you have found his chambers, it is on.

[AlignmentDebate]

Like some other people said, elves are idiots who take over 100 years to attain basic competence in anything.

Also, from reading the linked thread just now:



If anyone has read forgotten realms literature, you will know that most species of Elves spend their first century learning about their culture and their interests. For example, the drow of Faerun send their young to academies for many years before they are a true part of society.

You know, drow society suddenly makes a lot more sense when you realize that they all spent decades in high school.

[Luccan]

All the impractical exotic weapons in D&D are almost universally of elvish design. The elves, of course, have decades to centuries to master these weapons, letting them develop unpredictable techniques that all but the most dedicated of other races just don't have the time for when a sword or axe will usually do just as well.

Those of extra planar design are usually just born into the minds of their wielders, creating an instinctual ability to use them, formed by a travelling psychic intelligence obsessed with battle.

[Bohandas]

The drow are not dark-skinned, their skin is bruised all over. When the first drow attacked Corellon and his followers, Corellon stomped them so hard that even their descendents had bruises.

[lightningcat]

The drow are not dark-skinned, their skin is bruised all over. When the first drow attacked Corellon and his followers, Corellon stomped them so hard that even their descendents had bruises.

Iirc, an older canon was that he lit them all on fire, and the dark skin was from the charred flesh.

[Sam113097]

Trolls regenerate so quickly by incorporating the bones, muscles, and structures of the creatures they consume, so trolls are shambling, misshapen masses with too many joints, limbs that move at strange angles, and claws made of broken bones from creatures they have eaten. I described a troll like this to my players, and it made it a memorable and disgusting encounter, especially when the troll grew a new hand made out of the bones of a guard it ate.

[Bohandas]

The exact means of preparing a given wizard spell shifts from day to day, from place to place, and from person to person (due to a variety of reasons relating to ley lines, weather, individual physiology, etc.)

A wizard's spellbook is a minor magic item which constantly updates itself to reflect what its owner needs to do to prepare a spell at the current time and place.

This is the reason why it takes special materials to write a spell into one's spellbook, why a spell from someone else's spellbook can't be easily prepared or copied, and why a wizard who prepares the same spell every day still can't prepare it from memory.

[D&D_Fan]

Modrons speak in a coding language, like C and Java, and their speech is really just commands, and If you speak modron, you can control them to some degree.

The mind flayers were originally Gith.

The Far Realm is actually an alternate universe, or the space between universes. Also the D&D universe might exist, but it has vastly different rules than our own universe.

There are monsters more powerful than CR30. One example is Daurgothoth who is thought to be CR50.

[SunderedWorldDM]

The mind flayers were originally Gith.

Woah, that's cool! Could you shed more light on that one?

[Bohandas]

The mind flayers were originally Gith.

The Far Realm is actually...the space between universes.

Both of these are headcanons that I have as well

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The exact means of preparing a given wizard spell shifts from day to day, from place to place, and from person to person (due to a variety of reasons relating to ley lines, weather, individual physiology, etc.)

The Magicians series by Lev Grossman uses similar fluff for magic:


[Learning magic] turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.


"You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think"—[Professor Mayakovsky's] accent made it theenk—"that you have been studying magic....You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?"

It popped out automatically. "Altitude, Age, Position of the Pleiades, Phase of the Moon, Nearest Body of Water."

"Very good," he said sarcastically. "Magnificent. You are a genius."
[...]
"You have been studying magic the way a parrot studies Shakespeare. You recite it like you are saying the Pledge of Allegiance. But you do not understand it...You cannot study magic. You cannot learn it. You must ingest it. Digest it. You must merge with it. And it with you.

"When a magician casts a spell, he does not first mentally review the Major, Minor, Tertiary, and Quaternary Circumstances. He does not search his soul to determine the phase of the moon, and the nearest body of water, and the last time he wiped his ass. When he wishes to cast a spell he simply casts it. When he wishes to fly, he simply flies. When he wants the dishes done, they simply are."

The man muttered something, tapped once resonantly on the table, and the dishes began noisily arranging themselves into stacks as if they were magnetized.

"You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart."

It's not my preferred explanation for how spell preparation work, but it's definitely good for in-character magibabble.


A wizard's spellbook is a minor magic item which constantly updates itself to reflect what its owner needs to do to prepare a spell at the current time and place. [...] This is the reason why[...]a wizard who prepares the same spell every day still can't prepare it from memory.

Since D&D magic is, canonically, heavily centered around spoken and written magical language (power words, true names, Words of Creation, spell scrolls, runes, sigils, glyphs...), the flavor I usually use to explain the use of spellbooks is that spell preparation involves the parts of the brain related to reading and language much more than the parts relating to visualization, willpower, or whatever. Thus, even if a wizard can rattle off all the details of a spell from memory, the physical act of reading a spell's writeup in a spellbook makes it much faster and easier to prepare the spell by engaging those parts of the brain automatically and subconsciously. It's much like how memorizing a speech or remembering something someone said or the like takes some effort, but you don't need to think about reading things, you just do it, or how e.g. an expert juggler can try to constantly and consciously think of all six balls he's juggling but it's much easier to rely mostly on muscle memory to keep everything flowing smoothly.

The special inks and such, then, are there to give different visual, tactile, and maybe even olfactory properties to the text for more efficient information storage, to engage slightly different parts of the brain, and to convey metatextual information, much like how if you've been on this forum for a while you "hear" blue text as sarcasm because that totally makes sense, without someone having to add a bunch of qualifiers to get the tone across.

We know the spellbook is at least partially just a mnemonic aid, as it's entirely possible to prepare spells without the spellbook, from the basic read magic spell every wizard can prepare from memory to Spell Mastery that lets a wizard focus on a few spells and internalize them without needing the shortcuts. But it's quite difficult beyond a certain point (the Eidetic Spellcaster ACF requires a wizard to use literal mind-altering substances to form connections between the language and visualization portions of the brain to get the same benefits normally gained by simply reading a spellbook), hence why most wizards just stick with spellbooks.


Also the D&D universe might exist, but it has vastly different rules than our own universe.

Actually, canonically Earth exists in D&D as one of many Material Plane worlds, and the lack of magic and difficulty in accessing other planes is just a quirk of the local physics like any other sealed crystal sphere.

Many of the gods and peoples in the Forgotten Realms originated on Earth (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Earth), one of the two reasons for the setting's name being that supposedly there were lots of connections between Earth and Toril thousands to hundreds of years ago, and the connections to the foreign realms have faded and been forgotten as various creatures left Earth; various settings (such as d20 Past) and modules (such as The Immortal Storm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immortal_Storm_(module))) take place on, or send people to, alternate Earths; and Mordenkainen of Oerth, Elminster of Toril, Dalamar of Krynn, and Ed Greenwood of Earth used to get together for the occasional chat, as recorded in the Wizards Three (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/The_Wizards_Three) articles in Dragon Magazine.

[a_flemish_guy]

The mind flayers were originally Gith.


ooh, that's even better then my idea that the mindflayers would come about as a direct consequence of gith actions

[Luccan]

I've recently come to the idea that kobolds have a limited racial memory. Every kobold, even one hatched alone and raised by badgers, knows it is a kobold and knows what that means relative to the rest of the world. They also all have a singular inborn fear of something. Usually, this is identical within a tribe: the Wristbite tribe all fears water too deep to stand in, for instance. Some scholars theorize this is tied to their racial memory: one of their ancestors died so horrifically to whatever they fear that it's stained into the tribes memory until something equally terrible happens in to another kobold and changes its descendants' fear.

[Bohandas]

It occurs to me that the souls and corporeal undead issue from the past few pages could be solved by adding the hun-soul/po-soul distinction from the game Exalted

EDIT:

On an unrelated note, everyone in Elysium acts like they're high all the time, and everyone in Hades spends all their time rolling around on the ground sobbing uncontrollably

[Eldan]

It occurs to me that the souls and corporeal undead issue from the past few pages could be solved by adding the hun-soul/po-soul distinction from the game Exalted

EDIT:

On an unrelated note, everyone in Elysium acts like they're high all the time, and everyone in Hades spends all their time rolling around on the ground sobbing uncontrollably

Similar concepts, but I used a simplified version of the Egyptian five-part soul.

[Esprit15]

The natural gods don’t care about how many followers they have - their divinity is an aspect of their existence just as much as having lungs is for us. The few that seek worship normally only do so to further their own ends, rather than because they need it to exist.

The ascended gods on the other hand do gain their power from the faith of their followers, which is why they are often far more aggressive in recruitment.

[No brains]

There are so many ways for paladins to become evil, (blackguards, oathbreaker, death knight, narzugon) that I speculate that paladin powers came from a source that was originally evil. Then through some tomfoolery, the powers of good appropriated the paladin for their ends. Now paladins are either struggling to kludge their class to run off a good power source or that they are all sleeper agents placed to go off where they can inflict the most harm.

[Spriteless]

There are so many ways for paladins to become evil, (blackguards, oathbreaker, death knight, narzugon) that I speculate that paladin powers came from a source that was originally evil. Then through some tomfoolery, the powers of good appropriated the paladin for their ends. Now paladins are either struggling to kludge their class to run off a good power source or that they are all sleeper agents placed to go off where they can inflict the most harm.

I don't normally like alignment, but this makes sense of it. It ties into how evil gods don't give their followers free will. Why do palis have such restrictive oaths? Because they've tapped into power keyed to control its users. So now they can choose to revert to their powers' original master.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I don't normally like alignment, but this makes sense of it. It ties into how evil gods don't give their followers free will.

A comparative lack of free will isn't an "evil gods" thing at all, it's a matter of extremity in any direction (and if it were associated with a certain alignment, it would be Law, not Evil). The more someone devotes themselves to a god or alignment principle(s), the closer their values, thoughts, and actions are required to align with those of their patron; classes with strict codes of conduct, divine casters who can lose their power for displeasing a god, and the like exist for every alignment and religion. On the low end, a generic LG fighter and a generic CE fighter have roughly the same (lack of) constraints on behavior as one another despite their wildly opposed alignments, and on the high end an exalted paladin of honor and a vile paladin of slaughter are forced into stereotypical/archetypal molds to similarly degrees.

Which implies something interesting in conjunction with the "paladins' power source is secretly of evil origin" thing. You'd expect exaltedness and vileness to look very similar in degree of constraint on behavior but totally different in what those strictures actually entail, yet it's a common complaint that a lot of stuff from BoED is basically the same stuff from BoVD but with the alignment flipped and nonsensical exceptions carved out--diseases are evil and despicable to use, but ravages are totally hunky dory because reasons, for instance. However, paladins are the poster children for exalted characters, and if exalted material literally originated in-character as evil things that were palette-swapped to good things by force (a la sanctify the wicked on a much grander scale) then that suddenly makes a horrifying kind of sense.

[Spriteless]

Dice I only meant the story reason for why Orks are no longer playable.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Dice I only meant the story reason for why Orks are no longer playable.

Were you suggesting that "evil gods don't allow their followers free will" is your headcanon for that, then? 'Cause "no longer playable" implies you're talking about 5e and I don't see anything about that in the 5e MM. In that case, yeah, that's a good way to do things if you want to justify orcs being non-playable and kill-on-sight.

That's pretty similar to how they retconned 5e gnolls, though, and I'd say having two "totally normal savage humanoid that's secretly basically a demon with no conscience or morals" races is at least one such race too many, if not two. If they want to make hyena-like demons and boar-like demons, they should do that, not turn classic races into sorta-kinda-demons and nuke all the relevant lore and history.

[Millstone85]

Ghaunadaur can restore the intellect of oozes as easily as it took that intellect away.
That Which Lurks, true to its name, is just lying low on the faith-o-meter until the time is right.This is a copy-paste of my post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=23799884&postcount=3).

[Khedrac]

This is a copy-paste of my post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=23799884&postcount=3).

This is a known tactic of Bots (to make their posts look relevant), in which case the best option is to report the post, something I am about to do.

[vasilidor]

Does anyone mind if i pillage this thread for ideas?
also my personal headcanon for DnD etc: the "alignment system" was a contrivance of the gods whom are now sincerely regretting there choices (for those old enough to remember when it was set up).
also every gnome dreams of one day having a cannon for a head.

[Bohandas]

My headcanon for the alignment system is that it's inconsistent in-world. And the reason it's inconsistent is because the outer planes are shaped by belief, and people's beliefs are inconsistent.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Does anyone mind if i pillage this thread for ideas?

That's what it's here for!


also my personal headcanon for DnD etc: the "alignment system" was a contrivance of the gods whom are now sincerely regretting there choices (for those old enough to remember when it was set up).


My headcanon for the alignment system is that it's inconsistent in-world. And the reason it's inconsistent is because the outer planes are shaped by belief, and people's beliefs are inconsistent.

Canonically speaking, alignment actually predates the gods, because it arose during the War of Law and Chaos before gods and most mortal races were a thing. And as fundamental cosmic forces, alignments had very little to with humanoid morality and ethics originally:

Law is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have a fixed existence and operate everywhere and everywhen according to certain fundamental laws" (hence e.g. the Great Wheel's rigid shape and structure even on the "chaotic" side, since Law won the war, and Mechanus being the engine keeping the rest of the multiverse running smoothly).
Chaos is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have no fixed existence and should work differently everywhere and everywhen" (hence e.g. chaotic outsiders and aberrations often having un-fixed forms and no apparent relation to other creatures, and the Abyss being wonky in multiple ways)
Good is basically the cosmic force of "Law and Chaos can both coexist on roughly equal terms in the same multiverse" (hence e.g. angels coming in all three Good alignments equally).
Evil is basically the cosmic force of "Law and Chaos cannot coexist, one must prevail over the other" (hence e.g. the Blood War picking up where the War of Law and Chaos left off).
Neutrality is basically the cosmic force of "existence itself is a compromise and is incompatible with any one alignment completely dominating the others" (hence e.g. early druids being "actively neutral" and trying to shut down overreaches of Good and Law as much as Evil and Chaos).
The gods are no more arbiters of morality and ethics than they are sources of divine power, they're merely conduits/lenses/etc. of greater cosmic forces that definitely don't have the same views of "goodness" and "chaos" that mortal creatures do; it would be reasonable for the gods to not particularly like the alignment system, since it wasn't their doing and there's nothing they can really do about it.

Mortal alignment isn't inconsistent so much as it is insufficiently specific when applied to mortals; that is, there are e.g. three different planes of Lawful Goodness representing L(N)G, LG, and LG(N)--and a hypothetical fourth cordant plane representing L(N)G(N) as well--so three or four different mortals labeled as "lawful good" can reasonably have a variety of different takes on a given moral or ethical issue before you even get into philosophical/religious/etc. disagreements within one (sub-)alignment.

[Millstone85]

Law is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have a fixed existence and operate everywhere and everywhen according to certain fundamental laws" (hence e.g. the Great Wheel's rigid shape and structure even on the "chaotic" side, since Law won the war, and Mechanus being the engine keeping the rest of the multiverse running smoothly).Another testament of Law's victory is found on the very plane of Chaos. Indeed, the "chaos-stuff" of Limbo can be shaped, and given relative permanence, by sufficiently disciplined minds such as the githzerai. This trait of the plane comes from a piece of Mechanus that is floating through it. The piece is known as the Spawning Stone for it is also the origin of the slaadi, at least in their modern and suspiciously uniform appearance.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Another testament of Law's victory is found on the very plane of Chaos. Indeed, the "chaos-stuff" of Limbo can be shaped, and given relative permanence, by sufficiently disciplined minds such as the githzerai. This trait of the plane comes from a piece of Mechanus that is floating through it. The piece is known as the Spawning Stone for it is also the origin of the slaadi, at least in their modern and suspiciously uniform appearance.

Note that the Spawning Stone being a part of Mechanus and/or creation of Primus is a 5e retcon. Originally, the Spawning Stone was simply a natural feature of the slaad life cycle, which was later altered by the Slaad Lords (all of which were unique beings of great power who came in a wide variety of forms) to ensure that no slaad would ever arise thereafter who could be as powerful as they were and could challenge them for dominance. This fixed the slaad into a certain set of forms with defined life cycles because, essentially, the best way to weaken exemplars of Chaos is to impose Law upon them.

Limbo being able to be shaped and stabilized, meanwhile, is an intrinsic quality of the plane, a side effect of the fact that even the "pure Chaos" of Limbo is more of a "lowercase-c chaos" constrained by the Law of the Great Wheel compared to the Chaos that came before and thus "wants" to be ordered as much as any other chaotic plane does/is.


Regarding the actual thread topic, my particular headcanon about Limbo-shaping is that it functions by exactly the same mechanism as gods being able to shape Divinely Morphic planes. Every Outer Plane can be shaped via belief by any being, in theory, but each has a certain metaphysical resistance to being shaped based on how Lawful it is, how defined its structure is, how many gods have their realms on that plane (as the realms serve as "anchors" of sorts, imparting some of the metaphysical weight of the gods' defined natures on the plane itself), and so on.

Gods have willpower and belief in spades, so they can shape almost any plane almost anywhere, barring other divine realms where other gods override them and a few scattered places even the gods find too fixed to easily alter, and most planes are fixed enough that they actually require that level of willpower and belief to shape (at least to any reasonable degree in any reasonable amount of time).

Limbo, however--as the least-Lawful and least-structured plane, the plane with the fewest gods (a grand total of three, as I recall), and a plane whose very nature says that any structure (such as that of divine realms) is quite localized--has a low enough metaphysical resistance that any beings can shape it as easily as gods, the only difference being that gods don't need to consciously focus on it because to them shaping a mass of "spiritual matter" like that of which their bodies are made is as easy as a human maintaining their balance while standing.

Hence why the divine realms on Limbo are just Susanowo's big ball of water and storms, Agni's big ball of fire, and Indra's big floating island, like supersized versions of things that any mortal Limbo-shaper could create, and why the planar perinarch spell (lets the caster shape a Divinely Morphic plane) is an extension of the perinarch spell (makes the caster better at shaping Limbo).

[Millstone85]

Note that the Spawning Stone being a part of Mechanus and/or creation of Primus is a 5e retcon.Calling it a piece of Mechanus may have been an exaggeration on my part. The 5e MM says that Primus created "a gigantic, geometrically complex stone imbued with the power of law", which I imagine would make visitors think of Mechanus until they come across a stream of chaos-stuff or a bunch of slaadi.


Originally, the Spawning Stone was simply a natural feature of the slaad life cycle, which was later altered by the Slaad Lords (all of which were unique beings of great power who came in a wide variety of forms) to ensure that no slaad would ever arise thereafter who could be as powerful as they were and could challenge them for dominance.I think the two backstories could be reconciled to an extent, with the current form of the Spawning Stone being the result of a pact between the Slaad Lords and Primus.

And now I am imagining a bunch of things about the Spawning Stone:

Contrary to what the MM says, there is one last modron enclave in Limbo. Deep under the surface of the Spawning Stone are chambers guarded by constructs that specialize in extracting the control gem from a slaad's body, as well as by the many slaadi they have thus enslaved.
The Spawning Stone is a major stage of the Great Modron March, which not only involves many low-level modrons but also high-level ones, inevitables (also linked to Primus in 5e), and War-of-the-Worlds tripods (just because).
Further into the depths of the Spawning Stone are refineries where chaos-stuff is permanently transformed into elemental power, and used to maintain the balance of the Elemental Planes. This level is mainly guarded by elemental myrmidons of modron design.

[Bohandas]

*When we hear about slain outsiders merging with their plane, that's in the sense of literally turning into a partnof the landscape that wasn;t there before, like slain primordial deities in many mythologies, or like the hag countess when Asmodues killed her. It just happens on a smaller scale. They might turn into a tree or a building or something (edit: or even an object)

*Inevitables are responsible for multiverse-wide price-fixing that keeps prices largely the same no matter where you are and keeps coins largely interchangable. (they're also somehow responsible for why you can't conjure gold and gems and stuff and why the method for making the philosopher's stone is lost; they suppress the knowledge of how to do that stuff)

*Every type of environment has it's own type of inevitable dedicated to maintaining it, comparable to the Anhydrut (see Sandstorm) and its place making sure that deserts keep being deserts. Lawful Neutral drhids work heavily with these inevitables

*The weave is not the source of magic in Faerun/Toril/Abeir-Toril/Realmspace, but merely stabilizes that place's naturally wild magic and makes it safely usable

[PairO'Dice Lost]

*The weave is not the source of magic in Faerun/Toril/Abeir-Toril/Realmspace, but merely stabilizes that place's naturally wild magic and makes it safely usable

That's canonical, actually. Regarding the "the Weave is just the interface" part:


Mortals cannot directly shape raw magic. Instead, most who wield magic make use of the Weave. The Weave is the manifestation of raw magic, a kind of interface between the will of a spellcaster and the stuff of raw magic. Without the weave, raw magic is locked away and inaccessible--an archmage can't light a candle in a dead magic zone.
[...]
The Weave is the conduit spellcasters use to channel magical energy for their spells, both arcane and divine. Finally, the Weave is the fabric of esoteric rules and formulas that comprises the Art (arcane spellcasting) and the Power (divine spellcasting).

And regarding the "wild magic" part, well, the actual goddess of magic in Realmspace is (meant to be) Lurue (https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Lurue). Hints and tidbits of that have shown up in FR novels and some splatbooks (mostly AD&D ones) over the years, and Ed Greenwood has expanded on that several times in interviews, such as:


Originally, Lurue WAS magic—before Julia Martin added the name “Weave” to my GenCon explanations of ‘the great web of magic that’s everywhere in Toril, binds Toril together, and IS Toril,’ Lurue was the embodiment of the Weave.
[...]
The TSR designers quite rightly (given the humanocentric core of that version of AD&D, with its level and power limits on non-humans) wanted human gods to be front and center and of the greatest power and importance, so Mystra (most important to intelligent creatures trying to USE magic) became also the Guardian or Mother of the Weave, and Lurue sort of . . . danced sideways. To become the awe-inspiring mystery she is now.

[Bohandas]

Much of the items and architecture in the Abyss just appears. A lot of the dark fortresses and stuff weren't built by anyone.

[aj77]

Night hags are an alternate form (a different caste, or just the female equivalent) of baernaloths.

[Bohandas]

Night hags are an alternate form (a different caste, or just the female equivalent) of baernaloths.

I think you mean Yugoloths. "Baernaloth" refers specifically to Yugoloth archfiends (and specifically the most ancient Yugoloth archfiends, the ones who date to the time of the baatorans and obryiths)

EDIT:
Strike that. Apparently there's multiple canons and sometimes they're just an ancient caste of regular yugoloths

[Bohandas]

Clever diviners will learn at least one language that uses compounding rules similar to German. That way the one word answer allotted to many divinations can be something like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübert ragungsgesetz" that crams an entire sentence into a single word

[Yora]

Japanese also works really well for that.

[Bohandas]

Based on what I know about hyenas, I've come to the conclusion that Yeenoghu is actually female

[Luccan]

Based on what I know about hyenas, I've come to the conclusion that Yeenoghu is actually female

Alternately, if you want to set Gnolls as a not inherently evil race; Yeenoghu is male, but he's a usurper. Gnolls do have a real deity, in fact a whole pantheon, but the head deity is female.

[Eldan]

Clever diviners will learn at least one language that uses compounding rules similar to German. That way the one word answer allotted to many divinations can be something like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübert ragungsgesetz" that crams an entire sentence into a single word

Playing in German, I in fact do know players who have tried that. Like, spending half an hour making up new compound words to put a longer message into the twenty-something words you can send with some spells. And then arguing with the DM whether Bad-guy-lair-map-coordinate and things-discovered-by-the-expeditionary-archer-corps-that-we-sent-west and event-in-which-our-main-fighter-died-to-a-poison-arrow-shot-by-insert-name-here are one word or not.

[LibraryOgre]

Playing in German, I in fact do know players who have tried that. Like, spending half an hour making up new compound words to put a longer message into the twenty-something words you can send with some spells. And then arguing with the DM whether Bad-guy-lair-map-coordinate and things-discovered-by-the-expeditionary-archer-corps-that-we-sent-west and event-in-which-our-main-fighter-died-to-a-poison-arrow-shot-by-insert-name-here are one word or not.

This makes me indescribably happy.

[SunderedWorldDM]

Radiant damage is literally radiation. Gods are entities of great cosmic and universal power, so it makes sense that they would be nightmares of irradiation. Divine healing is using targeted bursts of radiation to take care of infections and problems to allow the wounds to heal significantly faster and with much less risk. Radiation is dangerous to most creatures, but undead in particular are susceptible, as their bodies are already withered- a blast of radiation would do irreparable damage. The Abyss might be the gods blasting the place with their energy, demons being the mutated spawn of the radiation-scoured landscape.

(If I got any facts wrong, please let me know. I'm far from an expert on the matter, and I haven't done research to back up these comparisons yet!)

[Luccan]

Radiant damage is literally radiation. Gods are entities of great cosmic and universal power, so it makes sense that they would be nightmares of irradiation. Divine healing is using targeted bursts of radiation to take care of infections and problems to allow the wounds to heal significantly faster and with much less risk. Radiation is dangerous to most creatures, but undead in particular are susceptible, as their bodies are already withered- a blast of radiation would do irreparable damage. The Abyss might be the gods blasting the place with their energy, demons being the mutated spawn of the radiation-scoured landscape.

(If I got any facts wrong, please let me know. I'm far from an expert on the matter, and I haven't done research to back up these comparisons yet!)

Isn't radiation generally dangerous due to the damage it does to living cells? How would that be more dangerous to undead?

[SunderedWorldDM]

Isn't radiation generally dangerous due to the damage it does to living cells? How would that be more dangerous to undead?

Yeah, that was a stretch. I think that perhaps the undead can't replicate cells, so if the ones they have are damaged, they're done- they need to keep what they got going.

[Luccan]

Yeah, that was a stretch. I think that perhaps the undead can't replicate cells, so if the ones they have are damaged, they're done- they need to keep what they got going.

I suppose that could work. You could say undead cells are actually pretty close to living cells, but non-replicating and theoretically immortal (if you don't finish the undead off). So they don't fall apart on their own, but can't heal without magic. Then of course regenerating undead are already clearly more magical than zombies or skeletons and the like. Hmm... if Undeath is a sort of biological change, that could explain why it generally turns you evil. It's changing how everything, even your brain, works.

[RedMage125]

Alternately, if you want to set Gnolls as a not inherently evil race; Yeenoghu is male, but he's a usurper. Gnolls do have a real deity, in fact a whole pantheon, but the head deity is female.

I like this. I do something different in my world, but this is still neat.

In my world, I leave it as an unanswered mystery. Yeenoghu-worshipping gnolls (called "the Butcher's Brood" by other gnolls) make up about 25% of gnolls. And with the advent of 5e's Volo's Guide, I decided that they can, in fact, reproduce in that fashion, but those gnolls are also sterile.

The rest of gnolls in my world tend to be more close to nature. A lot of Primal classes (Rangers and Druids) among them. They hold that Yeenoghu corrupted several tribes of gnolls in the past and that they are a naturally occurring race. These gnolls can breed normally. Now, keep in mind, that most of these gnolls (about 70%), even though they are not demon-worshippers, are still Evil. Their most typical patron deity is Ragashak, the Chaotic Evil deity of Beasts, Slaughter, and Winter. But their druids are still part of Druid society, still welcome at Druid Moots, and so on. But they hate the Butcher's Brood with a passion.

A small number of gnolls (maybe 5% of the total population) are more Primal-class focused and worship non-evil forces (either Neutral nature deities, or just revere Nature like a standard druid). But these tribes tend to be paranoid and xenophobic, namely because most non-gnolls will be quick to blame them for the works of their evil kin.

While no one knows the truth (if the Primal gnolls somehow broke free of Yeenoghu or if their story is correct), evidence seems to point in the direction of the Primal gnolls' story, as even if one of their kin falls to worship of Yeenoghu, they will start being able to create more gnolls in the fashion of the Butcher's Brood. It is basically a mark that stains their soul. Yeenoghu asserts that all gnolls are his by right, and seeks to corrupt as many other gnolls as he can into his worship.

[Bohandas]

Number of deeds affects alignment significantly more than the magnitude of those deeds. This rectifies some of alignment's aparent contradictions, such as the lizardfolk in Book of Lairs being neutral despite engaging in premeditated murder, and yet humans being evenly divided between alignments, despite nowhere near a third of the population doing anything so heinous.

[Luccan]

In addition to generally low birthrates, the vast majority of longer-lived races die relatively young, compared to their full lifespans. The longer you live, the more likely you are to die of disease, accidents, violence, etc. This is part of the reason the nigh immortal races aren't in charge of everything, at least for humanoids: they aren't good enough at not dying of everything else for it to be too significant an advantage.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5a6wrJpxP4

[Bohandas]

Clever diviners will learn at least one language that uses compounding rules similar to German. That way the one word answer allotted to many divinations can be something like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübert ragungsgesetz" that crams an entire sentence into a single word

It just occurred to me that you could do a version of this using proper nouns as well. Like you could buy a bunch of animals and name them after commonly used phrases. Like a cross between those weird long names that racehorses tend to have combined with that one old Geico commercial with the collect phonecalls.

[No brains]

Attempting to cheat the word limitations on divinations is the origin of at least one variety of Inevitable. They act as the Fantasy Commune Commission to regulate ethereal contact with gods. :smallbiggrin:

[ideasmith]

Blink dogs and worgs actually speak the same language. It simply has two different names, since blink dogs refuse to call the language they speak 'worg' and worgs refuse to call the language they speak 'blink dog'.

[martixy]

Isn't radiation generally dangerous due to the damage it does to living cells? How would that be more dangerous to undead?

When normal people think radiation, what they're referring to is usually "ionizing radiation" which is a type of radiation which can knock electrons out of their molecules, altering their chemical properties and ability to participate in chemical reactions. In living cells that can result in damage as the basic chemistry life relies on gets gets disrupted - this can result in DNA and protein damage and a whole host of other effects.

But radiation is more than just that. You rely on radiation to see. The cones in your eyes are stimulated by very particular wavelenghts of radiation in the 400-700 nm range. Your oven relies on radiation to cook your dinner. And no, I am not talking about microwave ovens, although that applies equally. No, your normal oven uses infrared radiation emmited from the heating elements. Wifi is also radiation you can use to carry data (because of its longer wavelenght it isn't as impeded by obstacles as much).

That said, radiant damage could easily be some kind of funky magic radiation that disrupts whatever process keeps undead going. Or counter that energy, returning them to a neutral un-animated state. Since you generally need an energy gradient for things to happen. So if we were to theorize the mechanics of the undead, a flow of energy from the material plane to the negative energy plane could be one way to power an automaton. Another would be a flow of energy from the positive energy plane to the material.

Which actually brings me to my headcanon - long winded as it is - healing is a direct counter to undead. If undead are removing energy from the world, healing adds energy, helping maintain a kind of balance. So clerics get 2 ways to help maintain balance:
1. Stop the drain of energy.
2. Offset the drain of energy by adding more.

[Xuc Xac]

Blink dogs and worgs actually speak the same language. It simply has two different names, since blink dogs refuse to call the language they speak 'worg' and worgs refuse to call the language they speak 'blink dog'.

Kind of like North and South Korea. They both speak the same language, but North Korea calls it "choson-mal" and South Korea calls it "hanguk-mal" because Korea had a lot of names and they both picked a different one.

[Bohandas]

*There is greater than normal malice between gnolls and hellhounds

*Elves' long lifespan leads to a much greater part of their population being able to train as adepts, experts, and magewrights. This leads to a higher quality of life in elven settlements. This, in turn, leads to their haughtiness elsewhere.

*Elves talent with longswords and bows is totally instinctual. They can pick one up and use it without having ever seen one before.

*Elves' long lifespans make multi-generational feuds impracticable among elves

[Bohandas]

Improved evasion represents duck-and-covering and this is also why Olidammara has the armadillo as his sacred animal

[Xuc Xac]

Elves reach maturity at the same rate as humans. They grow up, learn a trade, get married, have children, sing songs, have grandchildren, and teach their trades to their descendants. Once their grandchildren finish their apprenticeships, the elf's obligations to society are fulfilled and they are free to do risky things that might get them killed.

An elf over a century old starts adventuring at 1st level because they haven't learned much that's useful for an adventurer. They spent decades making shoes, singing songs, and enjoying leisurely three-hour liquid lunches with their friends. Adventuring is their retirement hobby.

[ideasmith]

Since I feel the need to explain why anyone would choose to gain a level in an NPC class:

Characters with no levels in PC classes can gain levels without adventuring. Also, Characters who do have levels in PC classes are infertile, although magic can bypass this.

[KillianHawkeye]

Since I feel the need to explain why anyone would choose to gain a level in an NPC class:

Characters with no levels in PC classes can gain levels without adventuring. Also, Characters who do have levels in PC classes are infertile, although magic can bypass this.


Characters who do have levels in PC classes are infertile, although magic can bypass this.


Characters who do have levels in PC classes are infertile

WTF? :smalleek: Why, tho? :smallconfused:

[Luccan]

WTF? :smalleek: Why, tho? :smallconfused:

Off the top of my head: "Yes my new fighter, Leonardo Viginti, is a direct descendant of my last 20 characters, what of it?" Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I could see how the wrong players might make that annoying. Don't know if that's the reason for it though.

[Bohandas]

Since I feel the need to explain why anyone would choose to gain a level in an NPC class:

Characters with no levels in PC classes can gain levels without adventuring. Also, Characters who do have levels in PC classes are infertile, although magic can bypass this.

Isn't there sort of a consensus that adept and magewright are superior to the martial classes though>

[Luccan]

Isn't there sort of a consensus that adept and magewright are superior to the martial classes though>

Only sort of. If you look at the retiering threads, Magewright ranks below a number of "bad" martial classes, both rank under ToB classes and several other martials. Adept specifically is generally (and I use the word loosely because people will die fighting for 3.X fighters to be considered equal to casters) considered better than the "mundane" martials, in terms of ability to deal with the game as a whole. It's also probably better than any of the martials in core besides Rogue just because most of the martials best stuff is outside it. Magewright is actually pretty bad and is only "saved" by the fact that it gets to abuse Animate Dead... several levels after everyone else who can cast that spell gets it.

Oh, and I cast protection from thread derailment for my action.

[Silly Name]

Back on headcanons: on Krynn, the gods were actually preoccupied with some terrible extraplanar threat after the Cataclysm, because the whole "the gods abandoned Krynn but actually it was the people who abandoned the gods because they didn't answer prayers but that was because..." ordeal is ridiculous. It works if the gods are like Greek Olympians and are cruel and don't care about mortals, but at least some of them are supposed to be Good.

So the gods were actually forced to turn away from Krynn while defending it from Chtulhu or whatever it was, and when they were done they found out people had stopped worshipping them and so had to work through Goldmoon and friends to get people to believe in them again, instead of behaving like abusive partners.

[ideasmith]

WTF? :smalleek: Why, tho? :smallconfused:
In addition to the reason stated, this allows ducking various subjects a group may find it pleasant or prudent to duck.

Off the top of my head: "Yes my new fighter, Leonardo Viginti, is a direct descendant of my last 20 characters, what of it?"
Those 20 characters would have had access to magic. They are, after all, characters in a D&D world. The lack of official pregnancy magic gives the DM a lot of leeway when adding/designing such. Hiring an Adept to cast lesser stork call is only difficult if the DM wants it to be.

Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but I could see how the wrong players might make that annoying. Don't know if that's the reason for it though.
That is part of the reason.

[Silly Name]

Those 20 characters would have had access to magic. They are, after all, characters in a D&D world. The lack of official pregnancy magic gives the DM a lot of leeway when adding/designing such. Hiring an Adept to cast lesser stork call is only difficult if the DM wants it to be.


Are people in your world actually aware of classes and levels? Like, the characters themselves know they're an 8th level Fighter or a 12th level Rogue or whatever?

Because in most worlds that's not a thing. People don't "level up", they naturally accrue experience - the game aspect of levelling up is an abstraction of this process, not a tangible, quantifiable thing in-universe. A Wizard doesn't consciously take her fifth wizard level to access 3rd level spells, she masters the arcane incantations and meditative disciplines necessary to access more powerful spells.

Likewise, a farmer never decides to "take levels" in Commoner: he was born in a farmhouse and will live and die there, never getting to swing a sword or try to cast a spell and thus having zero access to the skills and training necessary to become something else. Or maybe he simply never cared for that. The Commoner class exists to give those people stat blocks if the need be, to represent completely average people with no formal training or innate supernatural talents - those are for special people (PCs and their opposition), not James the innkeeper or Mary the cook.

I don't think I've ever come across a campaign setting (that wasn't explicitely comedic and riffing on those things) whose inhabitants acknowledged ideas like "class levels", "feats" and "skill points" as real.

[ideasmith]

Are people in your world actually aware of classes and levels? Like, the characters themselves know they're an 8th level Fighter or a 12th level Rogue or whatever?

Because in most worlds that's not a thing. People don't "level up", they naturally accrue experience - the game aspect of levelling up is an abstraction of this process, not a tangible, quantifiable thing in-universe. A Wizard doesn't consciously take her fifth wizard level to access 3rd level spells, she masters the arcane incantations and meditative disciplines necessary to access more powerful spells.

Likewise, a farmer never decides to "take levels" in Commoner: he was born in a farmhouse and will live and die there, never getting to swing a sword or try to cast a spell and thus having zero access to the skills and training necessary to become something else. Or maybe he simply never cared for that. The Commoner class exists to give those people stat blocks if the need be, to represent completely average people with no formal training or innate supernatural talents - those are for special people (PCs and their opposition), not James the innkeeper or Mary the cook.

I don't think I've ever come across a campaign setting (that wasn't explicitely comedic and riffing on those things) whose inhabitants acknowledged ideas like "class levels", "feats" and "skill points" as real.


While characters are not aware of game terms, they are aware of the abilities that the terms are abstractions of. So while a first level cleric would not be aware of classes and levels as such she would be aware that she had different abilities than her ranger pal, that she was going to be able to cure diseases before she became able to raise the dead, and that she was not yet able to do either.

And that farmer you described would be aware that if he stayed a farmer, he wouldn’t learn to fight or cast spells.

Your suggestion that he doesn’t leave the farm because he can’t - and that all the other characters with NPC classes are similarly stuck - is a valid head cannon. As it happens, I have enjoyed imaginary worlds that used this idea in the past and will certainly enjoy such worlds in the future. It is not, however my preferred head cannon for D&D and it was therefore not what I chose to post in this thread.

[vasilidor]

none of the gods of krynn are actually good.

[Avista]

Eldritch abominations like the beholder are aliens, and the Gith are space elves.

Nothing can convince me otherwise.

[ideasmith]

Most spellcasters are surprised when (if) they learn that most rainbows don't detect as magical.

Quite a few simply don't believe it until they've tried it themselves. If then.

[el minster]

Pelor is evil

[vasilidor]

the moment a fiend or similar stops being evil, they stop being a fiend. similarly, the moment a celestial stops being good, they stop being a celestial.

[Bohandas]

All matter in the D&D world is negative mass compared to matter in the real world. This is why pholgiston, which is basically the negation of oxygen, acts as an oxidizer.

[Stattick]

Bards and druids were once the same thing. That's why druids used memorize epic poems that took hours to recite. But once writing was invented, one group of Druids decided that all that memorization crap was unnecessary and a waste of time - just write it down. They dedicated themselves to nature and balance. The splinter faction thought that stories, poem, and song were important, and dedicated themselves to preserving it, so it wouldn't die, since writing was so time consuming and expensive, that only the most important of important things ever got written and preserved. Druids and Bards have disliked each other ever since the schism.

The Ur-Druids above were the first mortals to use magic. Their most powerful verses led to the belief that gave rise to the first gods. Naturally, this contradicts what priests, religions, and gods say. But you can't trust them, they have a vested interest in wanting people to believe what they say, as opposed to what everyone else says.

You know how some religions and occultic philosophies have a symbol of a tree with a big, branching canopy, and a similar big, branching root system beneath the tree? This is a good example of history. The trunk, near the ground, seems to be one solid thing. But as you move upward, there are more and more branches - different possible paths the future might take. The past is like the tree's root system. Many different possibilities that lead to the same trunk. Where you find major discrepancies in myth or historical accounts, or just remember some childhood incident completely differently than your sister, it's not that one story is true and the other false. They're both true. Things are remembered differently, because they happened differently for some people.

[Stattick]

Souls aren't eternal. As the centuries pass, the dead slowly loose their identity and memory, then joining and become part of the god or god's realm where the soul resides. In a sense, the Gods eat the dead. Mortals, as the food of the gods, choose who or what to feed by becoming worshipers of that thing.

[Xuc Xac]

the moment a fiend or similar stops being evil, they stop being a fiend. similarly, the moment a celestial stops being good, they stop being a celestial.

Isn't that already canon?


Bards and druids were once the same thing.

Yeah, in 1E. The bard in AD&D was basically the first prestige class they had to be Fighter-Thief-Druids to qualify as a bard.

[vasilidor]

[QUOTE=Xuc Xac;24616777]Isn't that already canon?


no, not that i am aware of.

[Yuki Akuma]

Eldritch abominations like the beholder are aliens, and the Gith are space elves.

Nothing can convince me otherwise.

I think canonically Gith are closer to space humans.

[Xuc Xac]

"A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn't tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil."--PHB 122

[ebarde]

Because Elminster can do all sorts of interdimensional travel shenanigans, he has been mostly shielded from all the retcons and weird magical nonesense that happened between editions. This means he still has access to all OP mechanics from earlier editions of the game, while everyone else has been severely nerfed

[vasilidor]

"A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn't tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil."--PHB 122

this, i think, is one of those things that varies by edition. for me this is a thing that i would have carry across all editions.

[vasilidor]

also: head canons are a gnomish weapon. never really caught on, even amongst gnomes.

[Enixon]

this, i think, is one of those things that varies by edition. for me this is a thing that i would have carry across all editions.

Yeah, in 3.5 one of Wizards' free adventure modules had the party rescue a Succubus Paladin. Granted this adventures was made because "Succubus Paladin" won a "Weird Monster" Poll so I don't know how "canon" you'd treat that.

What was interesting about her though was that she had all four alignment subtypes and would detect as such. IIRC the idea was that she still had the [Chaos] and [Evil] tags because as a demon her body was still essentially "made" of the stuff even though she had long since stopped being Chaotic Evil, [Law] and [Good] because as a Paladin Lawful Good was her actual alignment.

[Millstone85]

"A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn't tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil."--PHB 122
this, i think, is one of those things that varies by edition. for me this is a thing that i would have carry across all editions.
Yeah, in 3.5 one of Wizards' free adventure modules had the party rescue a Succubus Paladin. Granted this adventures was made because "Succubus Paladin" won a "Weird Monster" Poll so I don't know how "canon" you'd treat that.As it happens, on the 5e forum, I just made a post (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24619920&postcount=25) that mentions these things.

I didn't know that Eludecia was the result of a poll. What about Felthis ap Jerran, the ultroloth ruler of Ecstasy?

[Man on Fire]

Auriel and Umbrelee are lovers

Ao had stripped Vecna from his godhood, this is why the guy jumped to Exadia to try ascend to godhood again.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I miss Eludecia. She was awesome. :smallfrown:

[Bohandas]

The Use Magic Device skill consists of making up convincing sounding technobabble. That's why it's based on charisma rather than intelligence or wisdom

[Wizard_Lizard]

the moment a fiend or similar stops being evil, they stop being a fiend. similarly, the moment a celestial stops being good, they stop being a celestial.
I mean The radiant idol is an evil celestial... and empyreans can be, but I see your point.

[Bohandas]

Most non-adventuring wizards don't typically prepare spells. They spend the extra 15 minutes to cast the spell they need on an ad hoc basis

[noob]

Most non-adventuring wizards don't typically prepare spells. They spend the extra 15 minutes to cast the spell they need on an ad hoc basis

I actually do keep a bunch of free spell slots for this kind of occasions.
It is just that non adventuring wizards are often much lower level and thus does not have many spell slots to keep prepared so they might as well only have free spell slots for last moment spell preparing (takes 15 minutes but if you except to cast few spells per day it is not a huge problem)

[Luccan]

Being naturally resistant to poison and prone towards physical labor, dwarves value beer more for caloric intake than its ability to get them drunk. In fact, it's very hard to get a dwarf truly brick-faced and a dwarf in a more integrated community or who pursues a non-physical career is no more likely to value beer than anyone else. On top of that, the actual preferred form of alcohol amongst "stereotypical" dwarves varies by region

However, dwarven alcohol brewed for the purpose of revelry is very strong and most people of even somewhat higher tolerance will find themselves quiet easily inebriated by it.

[Bohandas]

The true leaders of the Rilmani are not the Aurumachs, but rather a hidden secret caste known as the Aluminati

EDIT:
And I like that dwarven beer thing.

In regard to the last part about their actual recreational liquors having to be extra strong, I have a similar headcanon about demons. Only in the case of the demons it's much more extreme, and many of the more powerful tanar'ri intoxicants double as chemical weapons of mass destruction. Some of their condiments double as chemical weapons as well, including the use of mustard gas as a substitute for mustard.

EDIT:

I mean The radiant idol is an evil celestial...

Radiant Idols CAN be evil, but according to the Eberron wiki they don;t have to be (https://eberron.fandom.com/wiki/Radiant_idol). Also, they're not the same creature as they were when they were a celestial; for one thing they have a different aura

[PairO'Dice Lost]

The true leaders of the Rilmani are not the Aurumachs, but rather a hidden secret caste known as the Aluminati

I ran a Planescape campaign many years ago in which the Rilmani were a somewhat prominent faction. To emphasize their balance-focused nature, I 'brewed up three more rilmani subraces so they'd have nine total (three threes) to fit better with the Rule of Three. The party ran into the new low caste and the new middle caste pretty early on, but went most of the campaign without discovering the new high caste and were wondering what their deal was.

When I finally revealed that the highest caste was the Alumach and their ruling council was, in fact, the Aluminati, the round of facepalms around the table was quite satisfying indeed. :smallbiggrin:

[LibraryOgre]

All editions after 2nd edition are, in fact, games played by people otherwise existing in 2nd edition. ;-)

[No brains]

If you want a recipe for hazardous dwarven booze in 5e, consider this:

The drinker rolls a DC11 constitution save. On a failure, they take two poison damage. On a success, they take 1 poison damage. If they take any poison damage, they are poisoned until they finish a long rest.

The beauty of this is that over half the time a dwarf drinks this, their poison resistance keeps this from doing anything to them since a save with advantage and resistance rounds this down to 0 damage. For others, they instantly get drunk and commoners could die after having seconds.

Though Yuan-ti purebloods are still the champion competitive drinkers. Them and other poison immune creatures probably drink something that does acid or necrotic damage and inflicts exhaustion for kicks.

[KillianHawkeye]

Though Yuan-ti purebloods are still the champion competitive drinkers. Them and other poison immune creatures probably drink something that does acid or necrotic damage and inflicts exhaustion for kicks.

Wow, necromantic liquor? :smalleek:

This talk of magical booze is making me want to play a dwarven wizard who specializes in potions and alchemy. Or a Pathfinder alchemist, maybe.

[Bohandas]

The Power Words are "Ni" "Peng" and "Nee-Wom"

[Draconi Redfir]

Goblins are the ones who invent Black Powder, and/or Gunpowder.

It was however Hobgoblins who refined the substance into firearm use.

Dwarves or Gnomes probably took it a step further and made modern bullets.

[Enixon]

All editions after 2nd edition are, in fact, games played by people otherwise existing in 2nd edition. ;-)


Many of them dwarves that longed to be wizards or other demihumans barred from their dream job by racial class restrictions.

[LibraryOgre]

Many of them dwarves that longed to be wizards or other demihumans barred from their dream job by racial class restrictions.

"Godsdammit, I *know* I am a halfling, but I want to be a ****ing paladin!"

[Batcathat]

"Godsdammit, I *know* I am a halfling, but I want to be a ****ing paladin!"

That reminds me of Mazzy in Baldur's Gate 2 who's pretty much the ideal paladin, except she's a halfling so she can't be one. I always suspect she was created by some developer who wanted to lampshade the weird class restrictions.

[LibraryOgre]

That reminds me of Mazzy in Baldur's Gate 2 who's pretty much the ideal paladin, except she's a halfling so she can't be one. I always suspect she was created by some developer who wanted to lampshade the weird class restrictions.

There's a conversation later where they do just that... she and Aerie discuss her not being a paladin, and Mazzy speculates that halflings might become paladins in some future edition.

[Spore]

There's a conversation later where they do just that... she and Aerie discuss her not being a paladin, and Mazzy speculates that halflings might become paladins in some future edition.

I mean, Baldur's Gate 2 was VERY late in the life cycle of AD&D, so that was likely just some teaser anyhow.

[Hellpyre]

I like to believe that the Hex Warrior feature in 5e consists of replacing your pants/fauld/cuisse/what-have-you with a leather thong, and the damage and to-hit bonuses come from mesmerizing opponents just enough to make an easier fight.

[Starlit Dragon]

Most aberrations came from the sea.
Some came from other planes.
Some were created when the Far Realm brushed against the world.
None came from the Far Realm itself, or if they were, the have been changed by this world so completely to be almost one of us.

[Bohandas]

*Ascended mortals who become deities know more about divinity than older established born deities. For roughly the same reason why a person who designs SONAR equipment might be assumed to have a greater technical understanding of echolocation better than a dolphin or a bat does.

*Like tree shrews, elven toilets are grown from a specialized species of pitcher plant

[ixrisor]

Tree shrews are grown from a type of pitcher plant? Today I learned.

[Bohandas]

No, they use pitcher plants as toilets.

EDIT:
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-coolest-carnivorous-plant-toilet-plant-youll-see-this-week

[Azuresun]

I like to believe that the Hex Warrior feature in 5e consists of replacing your pants/fauld/cuisse/what-have-you with a leather thong, and the damage and to-hit bonuses come from mesmerizing opponents just enough to make an easier fight.

I always imagined it as fighting like Randy Savage, Hulk Hogan, the Ultimate Warrior, or some other really flamboyant wrestler from the 80's or 90's. But I really like your suggestion as well. :smallbiggrin:

[Spriteless]

A material plane doesn't need to have all 4 classical elements, but you do need them all for most mortal life. The gods create many such planes, or bring balance to uninhabitable planes, to cultivate mortal souls. There are some material planes where the balance happens naturally by chance without gods, like Athas, but then the balance is delicate and easy for mortals to destroy. As they have...

There are beings that can exist with less elements. The Aboleths can live in 'worlds' of cold, sunless waters, and have done so long before mortals existed. This is how they know such dark secrets...

[LibraryOgre]

A material plane doesn't need to have all 4 classical elements, but you do need them all for most mortal life. The gods create many such planes, or bring balance to uninhabitable planes, to cultivate mortal souls. There are some material planes where the balance happens naturally by chance without gods, like Athas, but then the balance is delicate and easy for mortals to destroy. As they have...


My slight tweak on that is that all will have all 4 elements... to at least some extent. Athas, for example, is close to Earth and Fire, far from water, and "low"... closer to Negative than Positive energy plane. However, it has also WANDERED in its history... Blue Age Athas was obviously closer to the Plane of Water, and rhul-than lifeshaping means it may have been close to the positive plane. The Pristine Tower may have, among other things, moved Athas through the material planes.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

My slight tweak on that is that all will have all 4 elements... to at least some extent. Athas, for example, is close to Earth and Fire, far from water, and "low"... closer to Negative than Positive energy plane. However, it has also WANDERED in its history... Blue Age Athas was obviously closer to the Plane of Water, and rhul-than lifeshaping means it may have been close to the positive plane. The Pristine Tower may have, among other things, moved Athas through the material planes.

To take this idea a bit further...in the Variant Cosmologies section of MotP there's an Orrery Cosmology where the elemental planes "orbit" the Material Plane and take turns being ascendant (and thus more influential on and accessible to the material world), in a proto-Eberron sort of way. In that case each plane gets one season, but one could posit that Athas has something similar on the order of millennia to tens of millennia, with the movement of the planes driving events on Athas and being driven by them in turn.

The Blue Age, as you said, was Water-dominant (not just because of the planet-wide ocean but because water is associated with life and so forth). The Green Age could be seen as a time of Air dominance, with all civilizations leaning heavily on flying vehicles and architecture (Giustenal's flying platforms, Carsys's skyships, ogrish floating fortresses, and so on), long-distance travel being common and widespread, and the anaerobic Brown Tide giving way to lush forests. The Cleansing Wars and Brown Age would be Fire-dominant, of course: cities razed, races put to the torch, magma-spewing gates opened, seas evaporated into silt, and the heat of a vast red sun beating down on endless deserts. And a hypothetical overthrow of the Sorcerer-Kings and a cleansing and renewal of the land would be Earth-dominant, with growth, fertility, and rebirth being the dominant themes.

We know that the Blue Age has ~500 years of recorded history, the Green Age ~10,000, and the Brown Age ~3500, so each plane's dominance being around 10,000 years long (with the Blue Age we know being the tail end of the era of Water and the Brown Age being not even halfway into the era of Fire) would make sense. For shorter timescales and a more optimistic outlook for Athas, one could posit that the Green Age actually spanned two eras (with Water still being dominant for a good portion of it and the oceans being lowered "early" via the Pristine Tower), that each plane is dominant for closer to 4,000-5,000 years, and that the Brown Age perhaps might be coming to an end in a mere few centuries.


Regardless of exact timing, this cycle might also explain why Athas' local paraelemental (demi)planes are different from the Great Wheel's: each "paraelemental" plane is actually a mixture of two adjacent elements plus the currently-dominant element, and the planes change in nature with the change in eras--we don't actually know that the planes were the same pre-Cleansing Wars when elemental priests were still a new phenomenon, after all, and few records survive from that time to say either way.

Seen in this light, the odd paraelemental planes make perfect sense: earth plus double fire gives a Plane of Magma that might be even hotter than the normal Paraelemental Plane of Magma; air plus fire gives a warm and heat-haze-y Smoke, and adding fire again gives the hot and even-more-heat-haze-y Plane of Sun; air plus water gives Ice, and adding fire melts that ice to give Rain; and water plus earth gives Ooze, and adding fire dries out that ooze into a dusty choking Silt. Perhaps back in the Blue Age the paraelemental planes were instead Ice, Silt (in the standard "river-carried sediment" meaning), Obsidian (Magma quenched in water, and a possible reason for the prevalence of obsidian-based psiotech in the later Green Age), and Steam (hot wet vapor instead of Smoke's hot dry particulates), and with the turning of another Age perhaps they will change once again.


Where do the Positive and Negative Energy Planes fit in? They don't, and that's why defiling happens. As per the 1e DMG explanation of how spellcasting works, magic involves channeling power from various other planes, and in particular prepared spells (and expendable magic items and so on) are "charged" with positive energy which is later released to bridge the planar gap and perform the spell's effect, with some amount of energy "backflow" occurring as negative energy destroys any material components, the air exhaled by verbal components, and so on and released positive energy flows back to the Positive Energy plane (or vice versa, with a negative energy source and backflow and components being infused with positive energy).

In most planes of the Great Wheel, this obviously means pulling energy from the Positive and Negative Energy Planes, and energy can transfer back and forth between them freely and easily. In Athas, though, where there is no connection to either plane and no local source of positive energy (like Eberron's plane of Irian)? Why, the only source of positive energy available is that which is bound up in nearby living things, of course, and the lifeless black dust-like ash left behind by defiling certainly looks like earth infused with negative energy (and, indeed, two of the Negative quasielemental planes are Ash and Dust). We know the reverse reaction occurs in the Gray, where wizards can draw power from incorporeal undead instead of plants and where the Deep Gray is suffused with large amounts of negative energy (likely the backflow of centuries' worth of Athasian defiling).

And finally, we see the sun used as a great power source for all sorts of world-spanning magic in Athas but not on other worlds because sunlight (and all other light, really) is quasielemental Radiance, which is a combination of fire and positive energy, so Athas's sun is basically a big ol' positive energy battery that its epic magic-users are forced to use in lieu of natural connections to the Positive Energy Plane.

[LibraryOgre]

To take this idea a bit further...in the Variant Cosmologies section of MotP there's an Orrery Cosmology where the elemental planes "orbit" the Material Plane and take turns being ascendant (and thus more influential on and accessible to the material world), in a proto-Eberron sort of way. In that case each plane gets one season, but one could posit that Athas has something similar on the order of millennia to tens of millennia, with the movement of the planes driving events on Athas and being driven by them in turn.


This is AMAZING and I love it ENTIRELY. If you're not on Dragonsfoot, do you mind if I post it there? Or to the Dark Sun Facebook group? I started this conversation both places, but I love this idea a LOT.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

This is AMAZING and I love it ENTIRELY. If you're not on Dragonsfoot, do you mind if I post it there? Or to the Dark Sun Facebook group? I started this conversation both places, but I love this idea a LOT.

Glad you like it. :smallbiggrin: Feel free to post it wherever so long as you credit me for it. And I'd love to get a link to the mentioned threads/pages, I'm always down for more Dark Sun theorizing.

[LibraryOgre]

Glad you like it. :smallbiggrin: Feel free to post it wherever so long as you credit me for it. And I'd love to get a link to the mentioned threads/pages, I'm always down for more Dark Sun theorizing.

PM sent, but something I thought about when talking about timescale: Dragaera and the Cycle (https://dragaera.fandom.com/wiki/Cycle).

So, the Great Cycle is this huge stone wheel in the afterlife (which is also a physical location you can go if you are crazy enough) and, when it turns, it marks the change of control from one house to another. When Phoenix is at the top, Jhereg is at the bottom. Whether this change of control is caused by the Cycle, or the Cycle moves in response to a change in control isn't entirely clear... but a given "phase" of the cycle isn't set in time (save that it will in some way be divisible by 17, and no less than 17 squared and no more than 17 cubed... Dragaera is weird). No Teckla revolt will succeed if there isn't an Orca on the throne... it simply cannot happen by the laws of the universe.

But, then we have this cosmology. The Blue Age continued for an undetermined amount of time. The Green Age for 10,000 years. The Brown Age has been shorter than that, so we might think that ~10,000 years is how long it will last... but what if it's more like the Cycle, and less like seasons? The Brown Age might end at any time... if the PCs can "change the season", as it were.

[Luccan]

While it ultimately destroys what makes Dark Sun special, I think a renewed Athas could be an interesting setting to play in. Though slightly deviating on PairO'Dice's ideas, what if the next age is when everything has died... at least on the surface. The age closely associated with the plane of Earth begins with the final death of the (current) sun, forcing remaining peoples into the earth itself. The Dragon-Sorcerers are dead, with nothing left to sustain them, but life in the tunnels and caves still proves difficult for the inhabitants of Athas. The only reason to go up to the frozen, dead surface is to pick through the scraps of scraps left by the "great" cities of the Brown Age. I'd probably call this the Grey Age or something similar that sounds appropriately lifeless. The question, of course, is what new horrors and magic restrictions can you cook up to inflict on the hapless people of Athas?

Para-elemental planes shifting to be in line with Earth becoming a dominant element is also an interesting idea.

Earth+Earth: Metal? Iron? Ore? Sounds good to the metal-deficient Athas, but when everyone lives in the ground word of a new vein travels fast and you get a bloody, violent ore-rush. Ore priests tend to hold a great deal of power in their communities, but often succumb to greed

Earth+Fire: Doing Magma again seems less interesting, unless you can turn it in someway, so I submit Meteor. Another danger as the Prime Material finally dies is celestial bodies crashing into Athas. But similar to Ore, this can be valuable in the right hands. Meteor priests are often seen as madmen and are some of the most likely to take trips to the surface.

Earth+Water: Mud?

Earth+Air: Not sure about this one. Dust feels too similar to Silt.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

But, then we have this cosmology. The Blue Age continued for an undetermined amount of time. The Green Age for 10,000 years. The Brown Age has been shorter than that, so we might think that ~10,000 years is how long it will last... but what if it's more like the Cycle, and less like seasons? The Brown Age might end at any time... if the PCs can "change the season", as it were.

That's kind of what I was getting at with the second timing suggestion, where the Green Age overlaps two eras. The planar orbits aren't a known and obvious phenomenon, and Dark Sun isn't the kind of setting where you can do one thing and yay, everything's fixed now!, so having eras change at the flip of a switch upon completion of an adventure doesn't really work...but having the PCs' actions and events in the larger world "nudge" the eras to come sooner or later than they otherwise would (perhaps by a significant margin) would certainly work.

It's like how global temperature changes have affected the seasons over the past few years in the real world. It was never the case that on June 19th it was full-on spring with mild breezes and a bit of rain while on June 20th it was full-on summer with cloudless skies and scorching heat, "spring" to "summer" is an artificial change of labels applied to a gradual natural transition...but now with the higher temperatures, it feels like spring and summer are a bit muddled, everything gets hotter earlier, and summer kinda feels like it stretches into autumn a bit and full-on winter never really manages to get here. So an adventuring party couldn't fix things right now, but they can push the timetable up a few decades or centuries and that might make all the difference.


While it ultimately destroys what makes Dark Sun special, I think a renewed Athas could be an interesting setting to play in.

It definitely can be, especially because renewing Athas doesn't suddenly mean all the defiled land is healed or that defiling stops being a thing. Defilers are hated in the present, when the world is obviously dying and there's nothing anyone feels they can do about it; how much more reviled would they be when there's finally a hope for Athas again and the defilers are going around visibly killing that hope? The Sorcerer-Kings hoarded lore about defiling magic and managed to maintain their tyranny in a blasted wasteland; how long would it take for greedy usurpers to try to uncover that lore and become a new set of tyrants, how much worse would inter-city-state fighting be when more resources make it easier to raise and supply standing armies, and how much more devastating could psionic enchantments be with whole forests' worth of life to defile?

Just those two plot points could drive a whole neo-Athasian campaign, but there are a ton more things to explore in such a setting. Now that the Silt Sea could be irrigated into a normal sea once more, what kinds of ancient ruins and artifacts might be uncovered from its depths? Now that the land is flourishing, might whatever drove the thri-kreen out of the Crimson Savannah finally choose to follow them into the Tablelands? Now that the atmosphere is much more humid and the winds less chaotic, what effect might that have on the eternal Cerulean Storm, and what effect might the Storm's growth and/or movement have on the surrounding lands? Now that Athas isn't a desolate wasteland that kills unwary travelers, what threats--or potential allies!--might emerge from the Planar Gate or the Crimson Monolith?


Though slightly deviating on PairO'Dice's ideas, what if the next age is when everything has died... at least on the surface. The age closely associated with the plane of Earth begins with the final death of the (current) sun, forcing remaining peoples into the earth itself. The Dragon-Sorcerers are dead, with nothing left to sustain them, but life in the tunnels and caves still proves difficult for the inhabitants of Athas. The only reason to go up to the frozen, dead surface is to pick through the scraps of scraps left by the "great" cities of the Brown Age. I'd probably call this the Grey Age or something similar that sounds appropriately lifeless. The question, of course, is what new horrors and magic restrictions can you cook up to inflict on the hapless people of Athas?

This can still fit in with my idea, since for life to survive simply hiding in the earth wouldn't be enough, the planet's core would cool eventually and they'd need to do something to restart the sun to survive beyond that. And once you [plot hook] the [plot device] to cast the [plot spell] to reignite the sun, the brand-new bright blue sun would melt the frozen surface, flooding the world with water and swinging things from Earth-dominance back to Water-dominance to bring a new Blue Age. :smallcool:


Para-elemental planes shifting to be in line with Earth becoming a dominant element is also an interesting idea.

Earth+Earth: Metal? Iron? Ore? Sounds good to the metal-deficient Athas, but when everyone lives in the ground word of a new vein travels fast and you get a bloody, violent ore-rush. Ore priests tend to hold a great deal of power in their communities, but often succumb to greed

Earth+Fire: Doing Magma again seems less interesting, unless you can turn it in someway, so I submit Meteor. Another danger as the Prime Material finally dies is celestial bodies crashing into Athas. But similar to Ore, this can be valuable in the right hands. Meteor priests are often seen as madmen and are some of the most likely to take trips to the surface.

Earth+Water: Mud?

Earth+Air: Not sure about this one. Dust feels too similar to Silt.

I'd say something like Double Earth + Fire would be Metal (earth for ores, fire for smelting it), Double Earth + Water would indeed be mud (as it's earthier than river silt), Air + Water+ Earth would be Wood in the "renewed Athas" scenario (soil plus water plus CO2 giving rise to plant life) or Ice in the "snowball Athas" scenario (Ice, but specifically covering Earth), and Air + Fire + Earth would be...hmm, Dust would work in the "snowball Athas" scenario as the temperature gradients cause massive windstorms that whip up the Silt Sea into finer airborne grit to scour the world, but I can't think of anything offhand that fits in the "renewed Athas" scenario.

Either way, this matches the Blue-Age-2.0 idea nicely, since early Athas had plenty of iron and steel before it was all mined out (Metal) and the Mud Palace and surrounding mud flats are an iconic Athas location from the ancient era (Mud), so bringing those into focus makes it feel like things are coming full circle.

[Bohandas]

and Air + Fire + Earth would be...hmm

Maybe a dust explosion

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Somewhat inspired by the "and then Athas dies" scenario but otherwise totally unrelated to Dark Sun, I just thought of something regarding Tharizdun: the reason he's so incredibly powerful relative to other gods (still being an Intermediate deity even while imprisoned and requiring an entire pantheon to imprison because they weren't able to destroy him) is that he's running on entirely different rules of "divine physics" from the rest of the gods...because he's a remnant of the pre-Great Wheel Mystaran cosmology and is, effectively, the incarnation of the Sphere of Entropy.

So, in BECMI, all Immortals belonged to one of the five Spheres of Power that made up the multiverse: Matter, Energy, Time, Thought, and Entropy. These spheres (and associated planes) don't exactly map to the structure of the Great Wheel, but four of them kind of correlate to it, with ephemeral Thought, solid Matter, intense Energy, and flowing Time being respectively strongly associated with Air, Earth, Fire, and Water; with structured Matter, steady Time, and dynamic Energy being respectively strongly associated with Law, Neutrality, and Chaos; and Matter, Energy, Thought, and Time kinda sorta mapping to the Elemental Planes (made of "stuff," even things like solid air and liquid fire), Energy Planes (self-evident), Outer Planes (everything is shaped by emotion and belief), and Transitive Planes (time passes differently and physics is wonky).

But that mapping leaves out Entropy, because Entropy was an outlier in the Mystaran cosmology. The multiverse supposedly functioned best when all five Spheres were balanced, but Entropy explicitly opposed all the other Spheres and "If one should ever gain an overwhelming dominance over the others, only Entropy would win, for balance between all the Spheres is necessary for harmony." Entropy was also called the Sphere of Death and had no associated element, and was explicitly called "Evil" when Good and Evil did not exist as alignments in BECMI.

This brings us to the Great Wheel...which doesn't actually have entropy as a concept, when you stop to think about it. In Mystara, all the Immortals knew that the Sphere of Entropy wanted to destroy everything and would do so if any side ever grew too strong or weak, and fully expected Entropy to win in the end; and in the real world we have concepts like "the heat death of the universe" or the Big Crunch, or other ways that the universe will ultimately come to an end; but that's not at all the case in the Great Wheel.
"Entropy" in the sense of ultimate destruction kinda sorta maps to negative energy (hence e.g. Entropic creatures coming from the Negative Energy Plane), but sages don't worry about "the negative energy death of the universe" or whatever because the multiverse isn't trending towards a state of uniform negative energy; rather, the Negative Energy Plane is like one terminal of a gigantic cosmic battery along with the Positive Energy Plane, and the Wheel turns with the clockwork regularity of Mechanus. Negative energy is an equal and fundamental building block along with positive energy and the four elements, and there's no sense that the multiverse will slow down or die or end or anything like that as a natural part of its existence.
"Entropy" in the sense of uncertainty or randomness kinda sorta maps to chaos (hence e.g. entropic shield being a random deflector), but the Chaos of the great wheel isn't trying to erode the structure of the Wheel or anything like that; rather, Chaos in the Wheel is a polite, tamed, leashed form of Chaos left over after it lost the War of Law and Chaos, and even Limbo and the Abyss are pretty orderly places in the big picture. That kind of entropy is more a trait of the Far Realm, which is outside the Wheel entirely.
"Entropy" in the sense of the direction of time sorta kinda maps to Temporal Prime, but "time's arrow" in the Wheel is more of a guideline than a law: temporal magic is plentiful, backwards time travel is...well, not easy, but definitely doable, and there are a full three canonical planes or realms dealing with time (Temporal Prime, the Temporal Energy Plane, and the Demiplane of Time).
So what happened to entropy as a concept and Entropy as a cosmic force between the death of the old cosmology and the birth of the new? In a word, Tharizdun.

We know that the Mystaran cosmology would end in a victory for Entropy if and only if any one of the Spheres gained dominance, so if that cosmology imploded then the strongest force at that time (and the only force left around to "turn the lights off" at the end, so to speak) would obviously be Entropy. Tharizdun is possibly, and even likely, the embodiment of that Entropy:
Tharizdun is Neutral Evil, the alignment one would have if you were able to add Evil--but not the full nine alignments--into BECMI's alignment axis, where most "destroy everyone"-type beings in the Wheel end up as Chaotic Evil (demon princes, Erythnul, Talos, etc.).
Tharizdun does not take a humanoid shape, or in fact the shape of any being native to the Wheel, as even other edgy gods of doom and gloom like Shar and Eythnul do; instead, he takes on a "dark, amorphous form reminiscent of a sentient sphere of annihilation"...and the Blackball (Umbral Blot in 3e), a classic Mystaran monster often associated with the Sphere of Entropy, is basically a sentient sphere of annihilation.
Tharizdun is the only god with Entropy in its portfolio. Certainly, other gods in various settings with themes of "want to destroy everything" and/or "hate all life" have related portfolio elements like Loss (Shar), Destruction (Talos), Malice (Beltar), Death (Nerull), and so on, but Entropy is Tharizdun's alone.
Tharizdun is described as a "primordial" deity in many sources and is said to be "a malevolent being being from some other reality, an incredibly powerful invader" in the description of the Demiplane of Imprisonment in Dragon #353, supporting the idea that he came from a previous multiverse.
This neatly explains why Tharizdun is easily more powerful than a whole pantheon containing bunches of Greater Gods: he is an embodiment of at least one-fifth of the entire cosmic mojo of a collapsed multiverse (much more than that if he consumed the power of the other Spheres at the end), comparable to a Great Wheel deity who was the ultimate embodiment of Good, Evil, Law, Chaos, or Neutrality above and beyond any gods with those alignments in their portfolios. Heck, even if one regards the Twin Serpents myth as completely true and Jazirian and Asmodeus are primordial powers of Law on a similar level, they still had to split the power of Ultimate Cosmic Law between themselves while Tharizdun gets Entropy (Ultimate Cosmic Evil, if you will) all to himself.

And this theory even explains why Tharizdun (a god of destroying everything) acts through the aspect of the Elder Elemental Eye and its servants the Princes of Elemental Evil (planar lords of fundamentally creative forces): in the context of the Great Wheel the Inner Plane elements and the Outer Plane alignments are largely separate and there's not much of a thematic interplay between them to justify that relationship (there are fiery and icy layers of Hell, for instance, but they're not Elemental Fire or Paraelemental Ice), but the Elder Elemental Eye corrupting the four elements to evil and exerting hidden influence through apparently-innocuous elemental cults is a blatant recapitulation of Entropy undermining and consuming the four other Spheres of Power and winning even when one of the other Spheres appears to be supreme. If the embodiment of Entropy retained dominion over its defeated foes in one multiverse, of course it would retain some measure of control over its foes' successors in the next even if some of the underlying rules change.


So, in short, Tharizdun is such a powerhouse and such a big problem for the gods of the multiverse because he's one big honkin' Outside-Context Problem (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OutsideContextProblem) who is the multiverse's sole embodiment of a fundamental concept and whose essence is anathema to the very fabric of reality. Given all that, far from wondering why he couldn't simply be defeated once and for all, one has to applaud the gods who imprisoned him merely for doing even as well as they did against him.

[hamishspence]

Entropy was also called the Sphere of Death and had no associated element, and was explicitly called "Evil" when Good and Evil did not exist as alignments in BECMI.


They might not have been alignments, but they were "ways of describing beings" - in Rules Cyclopedia.

Hydrax (page 187)

"Although the hydrax are Lawful in behaviour, most are evil"

Djinni (page 166)

"Djinn are basically good-hearted, in spite of their Chaotic alignment"

Helion (page 184) - Lawful

"Helions are extremely good, and shun violence"

Undine (page 210)

"Undines are Chaotic in behaviour, but (similar to djinn) have very good intentions and despise evil"

Lich (page 188)

"It looks like a skeleton wearing fine garments, and was once an evil and chaotic magic user of level 21 or greater"

Horde (page 185) - Lawful

"When a horde needs more room, it will simply try to take it, without regard for other creatures; thus, they are considered evil"

Efreet (page 174) - Chaotic

"Efreet are irritable and often evil"

Metamorph (page 195)

"Most are Chaotic (though Neutral and Lawful ones do exist) but few are noticeably evil or good"

Drake (page 173)

"They may be evil or good (50% chance of each) but, except for Elemental forms, are always very Chaotic"




It even mattered mechanically in some cases. Spirits for example, were immune to all spells except those that could harm evil.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

They might not have been alignments, but they were "ways of describing beings" - in Rules Cyclopedia.
[...]
It even mattered mechanically in some cases. Spirits for example, were immune to all spells except those that could harm evil.

Yep, BECMI had spells like detect evil and dispel evil, artifacts that were "evilly enchanted" (almost all of which were Entropy-associated), and so on. The point I was getting at was emphasizing that Entropy feels like the odd Sphere out among the five, because Matter/Time/Energy were described in terms of Law/Neutrality/Chaos and Thought was "composed of all alignments," with no mention of good or evil, and then Entropy was described as evil with no mention of Law/Neutrality/Chaos (not even "any of the three alignments, but tilted towards evil" or something) as if it existed outside the alignment system altogether like it did with the elements system.

[hamishspence]

I don't know about dispel evil, but their version of detect evil was more like "detect hostility" - it only detected those who mean harm to you.

A Chaotic (evil-leaning) cleric sneaking around a fortress occupied by their Lawful (good-leaning) enemies, could use it to see if there were enemies nearby, and it would work.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I don't know about dispel evil, but their version of detect evil was more like "detect hostility" - it only detected those who mean harm to you.

A Chaotic (evil-leaning) cleric sneaking around a fortress occupied by their Lawful (good-leaning) enemies, could use it to see if there were enemies nearby, and it would work.

This is true, and dispel evil was also less concrete, given the lack of an explicit evil alignment, but the writeups weren't entirely alignment-agnostic. For reference:


When this spell is cast, the cleric will see evilly enchanted objects within 120' glow. It will also cause creatures that want to harm the cleric to glow when they are within range. [...] Remember that a Chaotic alignment does not automatically mean Evil, although many Chaotic monsters have evil intentions.


This spell may affect all undead and enchanted (summoned, controlled, and animated) monsters within range.
[...]
This spell will also remove the curse from any one cursed item, or may be used to remove the influence of any magical charm.

"Evilly enchanted" is a specific category that doesn't just mean "enchanted to an alignment opposed to the user" (the sample artifact, the mask of Bacraeus, is themed after a medusa cult and tagged with Entropy and Evil), detect evil calls out "evil intentions" (and only for Chaotic creatures, not Lawful ones, there's that Chainmail bias showing), and curses and charms are considered evil by dispel evil. So the description of Entropy as "evil" was definitely intended to mean more than just "opposed to the other Spheres in a morally-neutral way."

[Bohandas]

Speaking of alignments and of ages of the world, I believe that the current medieval stagnation started around the time of the Battle of Pesh. In addition to empowering law, the pact primeval also disempowered chaos by using the power of the gods of law to shackle the world to a small selection of societies and technologies and prevent progress. Prior to this was an advanced society in constant flux, flux which was tied sympathetically to the demons who tore each old order down and the eladrins who simultaneously built the replacement societies up

[PhoenixPhyre]

As far as the far realms being the space between cosmologies

I like the idea of it being the space between multiverses. In fact, it's an established thing in my setting. All fictional settings (and even earth, maybe) are dreams of Far Realms (which I call the Dreaming Dark) entities known as Dreamers. These dreams may be huge (in fact infinite) or they may be small (my setting, including all the planes, is only about 4 AU in radius). The standard D&D cosmology/Great Wheel is one of these Dreams, shared between a bunch of Dreamers who all went in on it. As is the MtG planar structure, all the weird ones like Dark Sun, Eberron, etc.

There's a concept of "conceptual distance" that governs the Far Realm--things that are similar are close together. Things that are different are further apart. But it's a realm of pure thought, so for most creature of the more structured Dreams, it's really hostile by its very nature. They go insane or dead.

I also posit that there are things out there that are hostile to the dreams, so most surviving universes have some form of barrier to keep those things out. Whether pure distance (you have to go infinitely far into the Astral to get there) or an active defense mechanism, or whatever. This makes travel through the Dark to other cosmologies quite dangerous.

The first Dreamers arose when the Dark itself dreamed of self. The existence of self implies the existence of non-self, so by dreaming of self, it also dreamt the other, the Dreamers into existence.

One other head canon--dragons and giants get most of their "food" (ie energy input) from things other than food. Otherwise the ecology just doesn't work. Can't have enough to maintain a breeding population without scouring the land bare. Sure, they eat regular food, but that's more for taste than for sustenance.

For dragons, they tap into the natural/elemental magic via their hoards. That's why they get so pissy about theft--you're literally starving them. Gathering their hoard is literally about ensuring their energy source.

Giants I've always seen associated with runes, so they have runes embedded in them that tap into the natural magic and keep them going. Hill giants are too dumb to realize they don't need to eat normally. Things like trolls and ogres are failed giants--they're always hungry because their bodies are sized for this extra energy source that isn't working.


To take this idea a bit further...in the Variant Cosmologies section of MotP there's an Orrery Cosmology where the elemental planes "orbit" the Material Plane and take turns being ascendant (and thus more influential on and accessible to the material world), in a proto-Eberron sort of way.

I actually like the reverse--the planets orbit through the (fixed) influence of the elemental planes. My own setting has 12 elemental planes (3 each of the primaries, representing 2 mixtures with adjacent elements + 1 "pure" plane). Basically promoting the quasi-elementals to pure status. Each of those gets a month.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Speaking of alignments and of ages of the world, I believe that the current medieval stagnation started around the time of the Battle of Pesh. In addition to empowering law, the pact primeval also disempowered chaos by using the power of the gods of law to shackle the world to a small selection of societies and technologies and prevent progress. Prior to this was an advanced society in constant flux, flux which was tied sympathetically to the demons who tore each old order down and the eladrins who simultaneously built the replacement societies up

You know, it's interesting that people characterize D&D settings as being in Medieval Stasis (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis), because it's not actually the case that they've been basically the same for thousands of years. Rather, in every setting there's a constant flux of advanced civilizations rising and falling due to various minor apocalypses (Suel and the Rain of Colorless Fire, Baklun and the Invoked Devastation, Ishtar and the Cataclysm, Imaskar and the Mulhorandi rebellion, Netheril and Karsus' Folly, Jhaamdath and the Nikerymath tidal wave...and those are only the big human civilizations!), and the world is never more than ~1800 years (the approximate combined length of the Medieval and Renaissance eras from which D&D draws its aesthetics and technology levels) from the last big cataclysm: Greyhawk's Twin Cataclysms happened 175 years before the "present" (as of 3e), FR's Avatar Crisis happened 17 years ago (or, if you don't count that as an apocalypse, the Fall of Netheril happened 1714 years ago), Dragonlance's Cataclysm and Second Cataclysm happened 813 and 430 years ago, and so on.

So, if anything, D&D isn't in Medieval Stasis, it's in Constant-Post-Apocalypse Stasis, with any civilizations making it past a pseudo-Renaissance tech level being hard-reset by the latest apocalypse in a manner similar to the eladrins-and-demons cycle you mentioned. Which is exactly the kind of scenario you want to have, if you want there to be lots of ruins to dungeon-crawl through and ancient artifacts to unearth, but not exactly fun for the world's inhabitants.

---

On that subject, though, my personal theory on the comparative lack of technology compared to magic isn't the usual "If people can shoot fireballs and fly, why make cannons or planes?" thing (since that ignores the benefit of technology for the non-magic-using public) or the "Gond makes smokepowder not function throughout the Realms except for his priests" thing (because divine meddling doesn't apply to every setting), but rather an issue of supply lines and infrastructure.

It's a common thought experiment to wonder whether you could, say, send a modern person back to the pre-Medieval era and have them kickstart the Industrial Revolution by introducing gunpowder and advanced metallurgy and such, but the conclusion that eventually results is that no one can really do that on their own: you can't just make advanced technology from scratch, you have to build the tools that let you build the tools that let you build the tools that let you build modern tech, and you need large numbers of people moving vast arrays of diverse resources from far-off places to get anywhere meaningful.

Cut to D&D, where someone trying to invent a flintlock rifle or a steam train in Toril has all the problems of a time traveler trying to do the same in Medieval England, plus the fact that the wilderness is chock-full of monsters and other hazards. You want to supply a rifle corps? Better hope there are no kobolds in the saltpeter mines. You want to build a railway between Neverwinter and Waterdeep? Better make sure your wood-and-iron railroad is as dragon- and rust monster-proof as a plan stone road...and that it doesn't go through any forests with fey who would object to you harvesting lots of wood and putting lots of iron in the middle of their home.

So magic wins out over technology on a societal level because magic use is personal and infrastructure-independent while technology is communal and infrastructure-dependent, and the only civilizations powerful enough to get the ball rolling on non-magical technological progress to benefit the common folk are those with enough magic coming out their ears that the common folk are already benefiting from magical equivalents anyway.


I actually like the reverse--the planets orbit through the (fixed) influence of the elemental planes. My own setting has 12 elemental planes (3 each of the primaries, representing 2 mixtures with adjacent elements + 1 "pure" plane). Basically promoting the quasi-elementals to pure status. Each of those gets a month.

I posited that the planes orbit Athas because that's the way it works in the Orrery and Eberron cosmologies, but it might equally be the case that Athas moves relative to fixed planes. There's really no way for an Athasian scholar to tell the difference, much like there's no real way for one to tell whether Athas orbits its sun or vice versa because there are no other planets in Darkspace to use as reference points. A spelljamming scholar might be able to determine the truth from their privileged vantage point, of course.

[PhoenixPhyre]

So, if anything, D&D isn't in Medieval Stasis, it's in Constant-Post-Apocalypse Stasis, with any civilizations making it past a pseudo-Renaissance tech level being hard-reset by the latest apocalypse in a manner similar to the eladrins-and-demons cycle you mentioned. Which is exactly the kind of scenario you want to have, if you want there to be lots of ruins to dungeon-crawl through and ancient artifacts to unearth, but not exactly fun for the world's inhabitants.


Exactly. D&D as post-apocalyptic fiction has always made the most sense to me. It's not stasis, it's yo-yo, with games mostly set in the "medieval + anachronisms" portion of the yo-yo cycle, because "everyone scrabbling to survive without the time to raise their heads" is a different genre.

And nothing else really explains having all those ruins sitting around. Stable cultures would have looted them long ago.

I threw in (forward only) time-travel shenanigans in my setting--there's a way of basically cutting a chunk of terrain and its contents off from the flow of time and space (the world heals up around it as if it had never been there). Some random time later, it rejoins. Within the bubble, some small amount of time passed. Outside, maybe centuries. This lets me have "fresh" ruins or areas belonging to earlier epochs sitting around, conveniently when adventurers are going adventuring.

[Bohandas]

You know, it's interesting that people characterize D&D settings as being in Medieval Stasis (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MedievalStasis), because it's not actually the case that they've been basically the same for thousands of years. Rather, in every setting there's a constant flux of advanced civilizations rising and falling due to various minor apocalypses (Suel and the Rain of Colorless Fire, Baklun and the Invoked Devastation, Ishtar and the Cataclysm, Imaskar and the Mulhorandi rebellion, Netheril and Karsus' Folly, Jhaamdath and the Nikerymath tidal wave...and those are only the big human civilizations!), and the world is never more than ~1800 years (the approximate combined length of the Medieval and Renaissance eras from which D&D draws its aesthetics and technology levels) from the last big cataclysm: Greyhawk's Twin Cataclysms happened 175 years before the "present" (as of 3e), FR's Avatar Crisis happened 17 years ago (or, if you don't count that as an apocalypse, the Fall of Netheril happened 1714 years ago), Dragonlance's Cataclysm and Second Cataclysm happened 813 and 430 years ago, and so on.

So, if anything, D&D isn't in Medieval Stasis, it's in Constant-Post-Apocalypse Stasis, with any civilizations making it past a pseudo-Renaissance tech level being hard-reset by the latest apocalypse in a manner similar to the eladrins-and-demons cycle you mentioned. Which is exactly the kind of scenario you want to have, if you want there to be lots of ruins to dungeon-crawl through and ancient artifacts to unearth, but not exactly fun for the world's inhabitants.

---

On that subject, though, my personal theory on the comparative lack of technology compared to magic isn't the usual "If people can shoot fireballs and fly, why make cannons or planes?" thing (since that ignores the benefit of technology for the non-magic-using public) or the "Gond makes smokepowder not function throughout the Realms except for his priests" thing (because divine meddling doesn't apply to every setting), but rather an issue of supply lines and infrastructure.

It's a common thought experiment to wonder whether you could, say, send a modern person back to the pre-Medieval era and have them kickstart the Industrial Revolution by introducing gunpowder and advanced metallurgy and such, but the conclusion that eventually results is that no one can really do that on their own: you can't just make advanced technology from scratch, you have to build the tools that let you build the tools that let you build the tools that let you build modern tech, and you need large numbers of people moving vast arrays of diverse resources from far-off places to get anywhere meaningful.

Cut to D&D, where someone trying to invent a flintlock rifle or a steam train in Toril has all the problems of a time traveler trying to do the same in Medieval England, plus the fact that the wilderness is chock-full of monsters and other hazards. You want to supply a rifle corps? Better hope there are no kobolds in the saltpeter mines. You want to build a railway between Neverwinter and Waterdeep? Better make sure your wood-and-iron railroad is as dragon- and rust monster-proof as a plan stone road...and that it doesn't go through any forests with fey who would object to you harvesting lots of wood and putting lots of iron in the middle of their home.

So magic wins out over technology on a societal level because magic use is personal and infrastructure-independent while technology is communal and infrastructure-dependent, and the only civilizations powerful enough to get the ball rolling on non-magical technological progress to benefit the common folk are those with enough magic coming out their ears that the common folk are already benefiting from magical equivalents anyway.

The thing is that I imagine the gods as being an infrastructure. At the very least, with the gods squabbling the way they generally do in D&D, they ought to be at least re-arming their followers almost immediately.

Also, the methods of mining and working steel, mithril, and adamantine don't seem to be lost, so materials don't seem to be the issue.

Additionally, it happens even when there hasn't been an apocalypse. IIRC the time of the Company of Seven was like 300 years before the time 1e was set. The paladins of Heironeous ought to have AK-47s by now instead of just sometimes occasionally a handgun of the same model that Murlynd originally recovered from Boot Hill all those centuries ago.

And there's evidence of much greater empires prior to these great ancient empires. IIRC Netheril never managed to copy the nether scrolls.

Which leads to the main point that this theory addresses. Why can't you just copy the Nether Scrolls? Why can't you conjure up mithril and adamantine? Why do the gods generally speak in riddles instead of communicating clearly? Why, in the context of the game world, should any of these things be the case?

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Also, the methods of mining and working steel, mithril, and adamantine don't seem to be lost, so materials don't seem to be the issue.

Additionally, it happens even when there hasn't been an apocalypse. IIRC the time of the Company of Seven was like 300 years before the time 1e was set. The paladins of Heironeous ought to have AK-47s by now instead of just sometimes occasionally a handgun of the same model that Murlynd originally recovered from Boot Hill all those centuries ago.

"Like 300 years" doesn't delineate a defined amount of technological progress. Compare the 300-year period between 1700 and 2000 with the period between 1640 and 1940--the two starting years have basically the same tech level for all intents and purposes, being in the tail end of the Renaissance, whereas the gap between 1940s tech and 2000s tech is absolutely massive. Compare either one to the period between 1720 and 2020 and you end up with yet more massive technological leaps.

And remember, technology doesn't follow a "tech tree" model in the real world where technology steps through through a fixed and known set of advancements at a fixed and reliable pace:

1) One technology doesn't necessarily follow another: Ancient China invented gunpowder in 850 and didn't do anything with it beyond fireworks and primitive rocket weapons, whereas Europe discovered gunpowder in the late 1200s and developed the first handheld firearms in the 1360s. Totally different contexts (a long-dominant empire vs. kingdoms at war, to massively oversimplify) and totally different uses cases lead to totally different outcomes, and a post-apocalyptic D&D world would be yet a third context and use case.

2) The next technology is not always obvious: Early firearms were very inaccurate, and every gunsmith wanted to find a way to improve their accuracy, yet it wasn't until 1498 that rifling was invented. Nearly a century and a half to develop what seems to be an obvious invention (because most inventions seem obvious in retrospect), and that's with many experts working on the problem from many angles over a long period of time. Start with a few ancient one-of-a-kind revolvers (which might have been lost, stolen, corroded into uselessness, not allowed to be disassembled for study because they're holy relics, etc.) with no existing tech base or expertise (i.e. having to reverse-engineer gunpowder, needing to invent standardized parts manufacturing, etc.) and there's no guarantee that a prospective gunsmith would make any useful progress before giving the endeavor up as a lost cause.

Both of those factors go double for a world with functioning and widespread magic, which all of the published D&D settings are (except debateably Dark Sun, and in that case the raw materials for technological alternatives simply don't exist), where the kingdom may never invest in rocketry research when wands of fireball are capable of filling the "make all those people over there explode" role just fine and where primitive guns may not measure up to existing weapons (not even magic ones, just arbalests and such) well enough to justify continuing down an obviously-dead-end route.


The thing is that I imagine the gods as being an infrastructure. At the very least, with the gods squabbling the way they generally do in D&D, they ought to be at least re-arming their followers almost immediately.

Even putting aside the fact that gods have a limited ability to act on the Prime (which we'll get to in a minute), you forget that even if a given god helps out their own followers (A) they can only really act in a way that fits with their portfolio and (B) other gods can act to prevent or meddle with their help.

For instance, in the Forgotten Realms, it is flat-out impossible for anyone to make gunpowder because Gond, god of technology, has decreed it so. You can try to make smokepowder, an alchemical substance with similar properties, but only if you're a priest of Gond, otherwise it's flat-out impossible because Gond has decreed it so. No amount of innovation over any amount of time will get you from revolvers to AK-47s while on Toril, and those revolvers would themselves stop working the moment you took them into Realmspace.

Now, this unilateral decree is allowed because the other gods agree that everyone getting their hands on gunpowder would be...suboptimal...and so let his ban go by without issue. But if Gond started arming all of his followers with tons of gunpowder weapons while still barring it to other gods' followers, you can bet your last copper that Torm would be arming his own followers with ballistas while making siege weapons not work for any other gods' followers, Umberlee would be giving her followers ships while sinking any ships used by other gods' followers, and so forth...at which point all the many and varied servants of Mystra from novice priests to her Chosen stomp everyone flat because they've got magic coming out their ears and no one else can cast the simplest cantrip.

(None of which would actually happen because of Ao's rules to the contrary, of course, but that scenario is why those rules exist.)

This scenario isn't exactly analogous in every setting (gunpowder obviously works just fine on Oerth, and we have no reason to believe it wouldn't on other worlds), but the general principle stands that wherever there are active gods there are constraints on those gods' behavior to avoid too much interference (either positive or negative) with mortals.



And there's evidence of much greater empires prior to these great ancient empires. IIRC Netheril never managed to copy the nether scrolls.

Which leads to the main point that this theory addresses. Why can't you just copy the Nether Scrolls?

It's an artifact. By definition, artifacts and relics are magic items whose means of (re)creation are unknown.

As a point of clarification, you can just copy the Nether Scrolls in the sense of writing down what they say; writing down the teachings on magical theory and spreading them around is precisely how Netheril ended up with tons of powerful wizards, and you can copy spells out of them like you can a regular scroll. You just can't Xerox a set of Nether Scrolls and get a copy with the artifact-level powers the originals possess.


Why can't you conjure up mithril and adamantine?

You can. Major creation will do it temporarily and true creation or reality revision/wish will do it permanently. The problem, of course, is that those are 5th and 8th/9th level spells and powers, the former lasts only a few rounds, and the latter costs large amounts of XP, so mining for it is much more time- and cost-effective than conjuring it.

If you mean "Why does it require such a high-level spell and a large XP cost to permanently conjure up mithral and adamantine," well, it's the same reason why raise dead and teleport are 5th level: in-game because that magical effect is hard and complex to achieve, out-of-game because certain magical effects "come online" at different levels as the game changes in scope and PC capabilities expand.


Why do the gods generally speak in riddles instead of communicating clearly? Why, in the context of the game world, should any of these things be the case?

Because the gods all agreed (http://www.rilmani.org/timaresh/Divine_Compact) that directly meddling in the lives of mortals would have majorly bad consequences and are thus in the midst of a metaphysical and philosophical cold war, and things like limiting the revelations they give their followers fits into that.

As for why they would come to such an agreement in-game, well, lots of real-world pantheons have a myth about how one pantheon got its collective butt handed to it by a different pantheon and then was slain/imprisoned/etc.--Apsu and Tiamat by Marduk and the other Babylonian gods, the Titans by the Olympians, the Vanir by the Aesir and then the Jotnar by the Aesir and Vanir, and so on--and the D&D multiverse started with the War of Law and Chaos in which lots of primordial beings got their butts kicked by other primordial beings, so it's not a big stretch for the gods to want to avoid suffering the same fate.

[noob]

Because the gods all agreed (http://www.rilmani.org/timaresh/Divine_Compact) that directly meddling in the lives of mortals would have majorly bad consequences and are thus in the midst of a metaphysical and philosophical cold war, and things like limiting the revelations they give their followers fits into that.

As for why they would come to such an agreement in-game, well, lots of real-world pantheons have a myth about how one pantheon got its collective butt handed to it by a different pantheon and then was slain/imprisoned/etc.--Apsu and Tiamat by Marduk and the other Babylonian gods, the Titans by the Olympians, the Vanir by the Aesir and then the Jotnar by the Aesir and Vanir, and so on--and the D&D multiverse started with the War of Law and Chaos in which lots of primordial beings got their butts kicked by other primordial beings, so it's not a big stretch for the gods to want to avoid suffering the same fate.

It still does not makes sense for them to make their predictions cryptic: by doing a cryptic prediction they just get it to be read by someone intelligent enough to understand it which then can explain it and if the prediction is not intentionally ambiguous to the point of uselessness then they granted information and interfered.

So they should just not send predictions if the goal was non interference.

Especially since in most published adventures and campaigns the "cryptic" predictions are so obvious and non ambiguous monkeys could understand them just fine (because they want all the playtesters even the one who is just sitting at the table and not listening because it is where their friends are to understand the prediction)
So there is no real point in making them cryptic if you use the amount of cryptic used in published campaigns.

[LibraryOgre]

Another point I like to make about Medieval Stasis is allocation of resources.

In most worlds and their cultures, smart people go into magic. High Int, you should be a wizard apprentice. And wizards mostly learn how magic works, not mundane physics or chemistry, so they're less likely to make leaps that lead to gunpowder or cartridge rifles.

Now, this does not mean the entire world is stupid, but it will slow the technological process, especially when many needs that might be met with science are instead met with magic. Do they practice three field agriculture, if you can use Plant Growth to do the same thing? Do they study epidemiology if Cure Disease is always at someone's fingertips? What about Meterology when a Gust of Wind spell seven hundred miles away leads to the entire model falling apart? Magic throws a lot of sciences into disarray, even assuming they would work like they do in the real world (Forgotten Realms, for example, long held that gunpowder simply did not work in the setting; you had to use smokepowder, which was functionally identical, but prevented people from whipping up a cannon every time they faced a gorn.)

[Bohandas]

I just thought of something. The city of Sigil itself is probably a portal to somewhere. The largest and most prominent bounded space in the city is the center of the torus.


Now, this does not mean the entire world is stupid, but it will slow the technological process, especially when many needs that might be met with science are instead met with magic. Do they practice three field agriculture, if you can use Plant Growth to do the same thing? Do they study epidemiology if Cure Disease is always at someone's fingertips? What about Meterology when a Gust of Wind spell seven hundred miles away leads to the entire model falling apart? Magic throws a lot of sciences into disarray, even assuming they would work like they do in the real world (Forgotten Realms, for example, long held that gunpowder simply did not work in the setting; you had to use smokepowder, which was functionally identical, but prevented people from whipping up a cannon every time they faced a gorn.)

Why not study those things when divination magic is at their fingertips?

Also, gunpowder not working doesn't really matter. There are plenty of other things in D&D that could produce similar explosive reaction. In 1e you could do create an explosion by mixing two magic potions of the correct types together (DMG p.119). It would be a simple matter to store small samples of the correct liquids in small glass capsules that could be smashed by a hammer operated by the trigger and thereby allowed to intermix.

EDIT:
And furthermore, in a more general sense, not working the same way as in the real world is not the same as not working

[noob]

I just thought of something. The city of Sigil itself is probably a portal to somewhere. The largest and most prominent bounded space in the city is the center of the torus.



Why not study those things when divination magic is at their fingertips?

Also, gunpowder not working doesn't really matter. There are plenty of other things in D&D that could produce similar explosive reaction. In 1e you could do create an explosion by mixing two magic potions of the correct types together (DMG p.119). It would be a simple matter to store small samples of the correct liquids in small glass capsules that could be smashed by a hammer operated by the trigger and thereby allowed to intermix.

EDIT:
And furthermore, in a more general sense, not working the same way as in the real world is not the same as not working
Does not works because gond magically makes the writers of that setting unable to realise the fact that guns are not solely the result of gunpowder but instead the result of being able to get high amount of energy under the form of short bursts.

I mean it is among the least consistent settings do not try to find logic in it.

[Bohandas]

"Like 300 years" doesn't delineate a defined amount of technological progress. Compare the 300-year period between 1700 and 2000 with the period between 1640 and 1940--the two starting years have basically the same tech level for all intents and purposes, being in the tail end of the Renaissance, whereas the gap between 1940s tech and 2000s tech is absolutely massive. Compare either one to the period between 1720 and 2020 and you end up with yet more massive technological leaps.

And remember, technology doesn't follow a "tech tree" model in the real world where technology steps through through a fixed and known set of advancements at a fixed and reliable pace:

1) One technology doesn't necessarily follow another: Ancient China invented gunpowder in 850 and didn't do anything with it beyond fireworks and primitive rocket weapons, whereas Europe discovered gunpowder in the late 1200s and developed the first handheld firearms in the 1360s. Totally different contexts (a long-dominant empire vs. kingdoms at war, to massively oversimplify) and totally different uses cases lead to totally different outcomes, and a post-apocalyptic D&D world would be yet a third context and use case.

2) The next technology is not always obvious: Early firearms were very inaccurate, and every gunsmith wanted to find a way to improve their accuracy, yet it wasn't until 1498 that rifling was invented. Nearly a century and a half to develop what seems to be an obvious invention (because most inventions seem obvious in retrospect), and that's with many experts working on the problem from many angles over a long period of time. Start with a few ancient one-of-a-kind revolvers (which might have been lost, stolen, corroded into uselessness, not allowed to be disassembled for study because they're holy relics, etc.) with no existing tech base or expertise (i.e. having to reverse-engineer gunpowder, needing to invent standardized parts manufacturing, etc.) and there's no guarantee that a prospective gunsmith would make any useful progress before giving the endeavor up as a lost cause.

Both of those factors go double for a world with functioning and widespread magic, which all of the published D&D settings are (except debateably Dark Sun, and in that case the raw materials for technological alternatives simply don't exist), where the kingdom may never invest in rocketry research when wands of fireball are capable of filling the "make all those people over there explode" role just fine and where primitive guns may not measure up to existing weapons (not even magic ones, just arbalests and such) well enough to justify continuing down an obviously-dead-end route.


It's an artifact. By definition, artifacts and relics are magic items whose means of (re)creation are unknown.

As a point of clarification, you can just copy the Nether Scrolls in the sense of writing down what they say; writing down the teachings on magical theory and spreading them around is precisely how Netheril ended up with tons of powerful wizards, and you can copy spells out of them like you can a regular scroll. You just can't Xerox a set of Nether Scrolls and get a copy with the artifact-level powers the originals possess.

It's not just technology though. As you yourself have pointed outed about artifacts, it's magic as well. Magic doesn't stay advanced, and there's evidence of a past time so advanced that even Netheril, which is generally an exception to this, couldn't replicate its achievements.

Also I brought up Murlynd specifically because he's a combination of immortal, brilliant, rich, and specifically interested in firearms technology. Because of him alone it should have advanced.


You can. Major creation will do it temporarily and true creation or reality revision/wish will do it permanently. The problem, of course, is that those are 5th and 8th/9th level spells and powers, the former lasts only a few rounds, and the latter costs large amounts of XP, so mining for it is much more time- and cost-effective than conjuring it.

If you mean "Why does it require such a high-level spell and a large XP cost to permanently conjure up mithral and adamantine," well, it's the same reason why raise dead and teleport are 5th level: in-game because that magical effect is hard and complex to achieve, out-of-game because certain magical effects "come online" at different levels as the game changes in scope and PC capabilities expand.

Yeah, but IIRC True Creation is 2 levels higher than raise dead. And Major Creation can't create cold iron (I think that may have been what I was thinking of in my original post


Even putting aside the fact that gods have a limited ability to act on the Prime (which we'll get to in a minute), you forget that even if a given god helps out their own followers (A) they can only really act in a way that fits with their portfolio and (B) other gods can act to prevent or meddle with their help.

For instance, in the Forgotten Realms, it is flat-out impossible for anyone to make gunpowder because Gond, god of technology, has decreed it so. You can try to make smokepowder, an alchemical substance with similar properties, but only if you're a priest of Gond, otherwise it's flat-out impossible because Gond has decreed it so. No amount of innovation over any amount of time will get you from revolvers to AK-47s while on Toril, and those revolvers would themselves stop working the moment you took them into Realmspace.

Now, this unilateral decree is allowed because the other gods agree that everyone getting their hands on gunpowder would be...suboptimal...and so let his ban go by without issue. But if Gond started arming all of his followers with tons of gunpowder weapons while still barring it to other gods' followers, you can bet your last copper that Torm would be arming his own followers with ballistas while making siege weapons not work for any other gods' followers, Umberlee would be giving her followers ships while sinking any ships used by other gods' followers, and so forth...at which point all the many and varied servants of Mystra from novice priests to her Chosen stomp everyone flat because they've got magic coming out their ears and no one else can cast the simplest cantrip.

(None of which would actually happen because of Ao's rules to the contrary, of course, but that scenario is why those rules exist.)

This scenario isn't exactly analogous in every setting (gunpowder obviously works just fine on Oerth, and we have no reason to believe it wouldn't on other worlds), but the general principle stands that wherever there are active gods there are constraints on those gods' behavior to avoid too much interference (either positive or negative) with mortals.

Because the gods all agreed (http://www.rilmani.org/timaresh/Divine_Compact) that directly meddling in the lives of mortals would have majorly bad consequences and are thus in the midst of a metaphysical and philosophical cold war, and things like limiting the revelations they give their followers fits into that.

I'm not sure if something like Gond's ban is even possible in other crystal spheres. Usually (individual) gods' power in D&D doesn't seem to be quite so absolute. It may be dependent on either the weave or Ao to hold (Or failing that it may have required a very long term project to cover the whole sphere in interdiction effects, or possibly a single interdiction zone that slowly grows). (And even if the power of the gods was that absolute in general, it would still be possible for any other god of technology to cancel it)

In any case, I don't really see the chaotic and evil deities (and especially the chaotic evil deities) willingly agreeing to this*, and actually intending to honor the bargain, and reliably sticking to that intent. (Or, for that matter, not forum shopping and paying off the Lords of Woe to issue rulings in their favor that have nothing to do with the Compact;s actual terms). It would have to be forced on them somehow.

*(as in any of it. The pact, the ban, any of it)

[NigelWalmsley]

Honestly, D&Dland probably isn't so much in Medieval Status as locked into a cycle of repeating apocalypses. You can summon demons that can destroy mid-sized kingdoms, and there are literal slaughter cults that can summon those demons and who want nothing more than to destroy anything they can find. This is not a setup that produces a stable equilibrium. So realistically, the reason that everything is medieval is the same one invoked in The Stormlight Archive during the Desolations: it's really hard to hold on to technology, let alone advance, when the world ends every couple generations.


Yeah, but IIRC True Creation is 2 levels higher than raise dead. And Major Creation can't create cold iron (I think that may have been what I was thinking of in my original post

Three, actually (at least in 3e). And a good sight rarer, as the former is a Domain spell, while the latter is known to literally every single Cleric.

[noob]

Honestly, D&Dland probably isn't so much in Medieval Status as locked into a cycle of repeating apocalypses. You can summon demons that can destroy mid-sized kingdoms, and there are literal slaughter cults that can summon those demons and who want nothing more than to destroy anything they can find. This is not a setup that produces a stable equilibrium. So realistically, the reason that everything is medieval is the same one invoked in The Stormlight Archive during the Desolations: it's really hard to hold on to technology, let alone advance, when the world ends every couple generations.



Three, actually (at least in 3e). And a good sight rarer, as the former is a Domain spell, while the latter is known to literally every single Cleric.
we were talking about forgotten realms which is not the same thing as dnd land.
There is so many dnd settings with all their own reasons for stagnation.
Some even have no medieval stasis and have tech that does absolutely everything provided someone skilled enough designs it(ravenloft) but are awful because everything is wrong.

[Bohandas]

Honestly, D&Dland probably isn't so much in Medieval Status as locked into a cycle of repeating apocalypses. You can summon demons that can destroy mid-sized kingdoms, and there are literal slaughter cults that can summon those demons and who want nothing more than to destroy anything they can find. This is not a setup that produces a stable equilibrium.

It's still static in the same way that the society in the first act of Gurren Lagaan was static. Continuing the Gurren Lagaan metaphor, the version of the Age Before Ages and early Blood War that I'm imagining is somewhat similar to the later acts of Gurren Lagaan, where there is destruction on a cosmic scale, but things continue on regardless (edit: I think at one point in the movie the entire universe is destroyed and even that doesn't end the fight).

Another possible metaphor for what I'm imagining in the Eldar empire from WH40K. The entire empire was overrun my mass murder, mass mayhem, mass destruction, and widespread degeneracy and corruption, and being a serial killer was considered a legitimate artform, but due to its magical and technological might it was in no danger of being destroyed by these things directly (it did eventually end them indirectly when the Eldar's souls eventually collapsed into a singularity of pure chaos due to hundreds of reincarnation cycles of being exposed to this society, but it was in no danher of destroying them directly is my point)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

It still does not makes sense for them to make their predictions cryptic: by doing a cryptic prediction they just get it to be read by someone intelligent enough to understand it which then can explain it and if the prediction is not intentionally ambiguous to the point of uselessness then they granted information and interfered.

So they should just not send predictions if the goal was non interference.

Especially since in most published adventures and campaigns the "cryptic" predictions are so obvious and non ambiguous monkeys could understand them just fine (because they want all the playtesters even the one who is just sitting at the table and not listening because it is where their friends are to understand the prediction)
So there is no real point in making them cryptic if you use the amount of cryptic used in published campaigns.

The best reason to make cryptic pronouncements is a letter of the law/spirit of the law issue. If the Divine Compact says "Thou shalt not tell your followers how to do X" and you make a big stone tablet appear in some random place with a riddle on it, well, you're not breaking the rules, are you? You just created a thing (which your followers happened to stumble across) that could, perhaps, be interpreted to imply how to do X, which is totally a different thing.

Look at commune and contact other plane, the most direct way a priest has to communicate with his patron or a wizard has to communicate with a planar lord. One gives yes/no answers, or a five-words-or-fewer phrase "in cases where a one-word answer would be misleading or contrary to the deity’s interests," while the other gives any single-word answers. Why are those spells so constrained, when one has to be a powerful caster already to be able to cast them so their usage is pretty limited? Presumably because the Divine Compact says so. Why are the two spells so open-ended in what they can communicate in edges cases? Possibly so the gods can cheat like hell around the exact wording of the Divine Compact.

(The out-of-game reasons for vague divinations are totally unrelated, of course, but vague-but-easily-decipherable pronouncements show up in mythology all the time so there's plenty of precedent.)


Also, gunpowder not working doesn't really matter. There are plenty of other things in D&D that could produce similar explosive reaction. In 1e you could do create an explosion by mixing two magic potions of the correct types together (DMG p.119). It would be a simple matter to store small samples of the correct liquids in small glass capsules that could be smashed by a hammer operated by the trigger and thereby allowed to intermix.

Does not works because gond magically makes the writers of that setting unable to realise the fact that guns are not solely the result of gunpowder but instead the result of being able to get high amount of energy under the form of short bursts.

You're both coming at the issue from the perspective of wanting to invent guns and trying to reverse-engineer a way for magic-users to develop them, either justifying the invention of gunpowder or finding an equivalent alchemical or magical substance to use as a substitute. But a magic-user isn't going to look at a potion explosion, think that's something that could be weaponized, save a bunch of samples, and start researching how to stick it in a metal tube to let commoners chuck tiny bits of metal at each other, he's going to go "Oh no, my potion of flight and elixir of fire breath have just reacted poorly with one another, utterly ruining two powerful and valuable potions spell! Damn you, Ioulaum's Theorem of Potion Miscibility, damn you straight to Baator!"

If an arcanist wanted to make a non-wand projectile weapon of some sort, and if he wanted to do so without simply enchanting a crossbow with an object-launching spell or the like, and if he wanted to base the weapon on unknown principles of an entirely new area of research, and if he didn't think that doing things with exploding powders was a job better suited to an alchemist, and if a bunch of other caveats, then yes, any magic-user likely has the Int score, the resources, and the creativity to invent guns and gunpowder. But there's nothing inevitable about guns and there's a ton of baggage both cultural and personal pushing magic-users in a bunch of other directions to make their development quite unlikely.


It's not just technology though. As you yourself have pointed outed about artifacts, it's magic as well. Magic doesn't stay advanced, and there's evidence of a past time so advanced that even Netheril, which is generally an exception to this, couldn't replicate its achievements.

This is true, every advanced magical civilization has its own form of advanced magic on which its civilization is built (Batrachi dimensional shenanigans for the Imaskari, 10th+ level spells and mythallars for the Netherese, teachable psionics and udoxia for the Jhaamdathi, ubiquitous bound demons and Things Man Was Not Meant To Know for the Nar, circle magic and place magic for the Raumathari, and so on). But every one of those magical civilizations started from the same baseline of low-level magics that survived the previous civilizations' falls, and none of them branched off in radically different directions because they were focused on recovering secrets of the past and honing their own unique specialties.


Also I brought up Murlynd specifically because he's a combination of immortal, brilliant, rich, and specifically interested in firearms technology. Because of him alone it should have advanced.

Technology doesn't advance because of one person's interests, no matter how rich and eccentric they may be. Henry Ford didn't invent cars and interstates, Thomas Edison didn't invent batteries and the national electric grid, Elon Musk didn't invent rocketry and flying drones. All that Murlynd tinkering with guns for a few centuries might do is ensure that he has a bunch of advanced firearms, all of which would basically be strange artifacts just like his original enchanted revolvers, because one hobbyist does not a field of industry make.

Even if we stipulate that Murlynd opened Murlynd's Academy of Teaching People to Build and Shoot Guns and started trying to spread his love for and knowledge of guns, there's no guarantee it would take off. It might be banned by local rulers who find it a threat to their rule, shunned by other wizards who consider it beneath them, attacked by demons who don't want cold-iron-bullet-chucking weapons to be more common, and so on--and even if Murlynd can deal with all of those things because he's a badass, it's not great for his PR and wouldn't necessarily attract a lot of adherents if everyone's ganging up on him for it.

And note that that's something he didn't do, instead ascending to be the Hero-Deity of Magical Technology--magical technology, not plain ol' normal technology--and then giving his priests and only his priests access to firebrands (magical equivalents of firearms, not actual firearms) to use to aid the common people. The one guy best placed to do what you propose explicitly didn't do that, and instead set himself up as a bottleneck and arbiter of technological development on Oerth, just like Gond did in Toril.


Yeah, but IIRC True Creation is 2 levels higher than raise dead. And Major Creation can't create cold iron (I think that may have been what I was thinking of in my original post

Cold iron indeed can't be created by magic, because it's a magic-resistant metal whose properties derive from it originating in specific places and being subject to specific manipulation. It makes plenty of sense that you can't create a magic-resistant metal with magic and have it retain its properties, and that you can't create "iron mined in the Underdark" by magic (because conjured iron and other materials are pulled from the Inner Planes) in the same way that Joe Wizard can't create "silver conjured by Bob the Sorcerer," because it's a contradiction in terms.


In any case, I don't really see the chaotic and evil deities (and especially the chaotic evil deities) willingly agreeing to this*, and actually intending to honor the bargain, and reliably sticking to that intent. (Or, for that matter, not forum shopping and paying off the Lords of Woe to issue rulings in their favor that have nothing to do with the Compact;s actual terms). It would have to be forced on them somehow.

*(as in any of it. The pact, the ban, any of it)

Being Chaotic and Evil doesn't mean refusing to enter agreements or being unable to abide by them; Chaotic does not mean Insane or Arbitrarily Contrary and Evil does not mean Psychopathic or Compulsively Antisocial.

It is, in fact, in the best interests of Chaotic and/or Evil powers-that-be to agree to a bargain that limits divine interference on the Material Plane across the board. If anyone can pop on down to the Prime in person at any time to do what they want, Chaotic and/or Evil gods are going to get stomped by Lawful and/or Good ones because Law and Good are good at cooperating against common enemies (Law won the War of Law and Chaos, after all, and Good is all about playing nice with others) and Chaos and Evil manifestly are not. If anyone can empower any number of followers and avatars to mess around on the Prime, Lawful and/or Good gods can afford to spend their power on that because they have allies to watch their backs on their nice and safe home planes while Chaotic and/or Evil gods can't afford to weaken themselves like that because they'll get ganked by their minions, other gods, demon princes, etc. while their backs are turned. And so on.

If, on the other hand, only indirect action is possible, then that's great for Chaotic and/or Evil gods! A Chaotic god can get tons of mileage out of empowering one high priest to go poison a bunch of water supplies in one kingdom and frame a neighboring kingdom for it to kickstart a war, and an Evil church can tempt tons of mortals into giving in to their base impulses for power and slowly corrupt them until their souls are headed for the Abyss. Good gods, meanwhile, get to empower one high priest who has to go around foiling evil plans and saving orphans from burning buildings and such, and what the heck is a Lawful god going to "tempt" people with, tax deductions? :smallamused:

[Xuc Xac]

But a magic-user isn't going to look at a potion explosion, think that's something that could be weaponized, save a bunch of samples, and start researching how to stick it in a metal tube to let commoners chuck tiny bits of metal at each other...

That's literally what happened in the real world. Chinese alchemists tried to make a potion of longevity and ended up making gunpowder by accident instead. They used it to make rockets and guns.

[noob]

You're both coming at the issue from the perspective of wanting to invent guns and trying to reverse-engineer a way for magic-users to develop them, either justifying the invention of gunpowder or finding an equivalent alchemical or magical substance to use as a substitute. But a magic-user isn't going to look at a potion explosion, think that's something that could be weaponized, save a bunch of samples, and start researching how to stick it in a metal tube to let commoners chuck tiny bits of metal at each other, he's going to go "Oh no, my potion of flight and elixir of fire breath have just reacted poorly with one another, utterly ruining two powerful and valuable potions spell! Damn you, Ioulaum's Theorem of Potion Miscibility, damn you straight to Baator!"

If an arcanist wanted to make a non-wand projectile weapon of some sort, and if he wanted to do so without simply enchanting a crossbow with an object-launching spell or the like, and if he wanted to base the weapon on unknown principles of an entirely new area of research, and if he didn't think that doing things with exploding powders was a job better suited to an alchemist, and if a bunch of other caveats, then yes, any magic-user likely has the Int score, the resources, and the creativity to invent guns and gunpowder. But there's nothing inevitable about guns and there's a ton of baggage both cultural and personal pushing magic-users in a bunch of other directions to make their development quite unlikely.


Not only did gond give basic firearms to their followers thus making non initiate realise it is doable and know what it is after killing an initiate(only the powder is impossible to do for non gond followers) but there is also a story of cost reduction.
You need to do a basic magic missile wand to spend a full 750 gold.
That is huge in fact and it does not provide a lot of firepower and can not hit targets that are in antimagic zones.
So if you find an alternate way to do your magic missile wand cheaper or significantly more powerful(ex: make the projectile non magical and propelled by magic as an intermediary step to guns) of course you will use it and then it will spread.
Magical items being ridiculously expensive to make are a huge motivating factor to seek cheaper or better non magical alternatives.
Even more since you can just cast fabricate to make instantly any non magical item.
So clearly gond mind controls people to make them not take his gun designs and use something else than his copyrighted powder.

[Bohandas]

Being Chaotic and Evil doesn't mean refusing to enter agreements or being unable to abide by them; Chaotic does not mean Insane or Arbitrarily Contrary and Evil does not mean Psychopathic or Compulsively Antisocial.

Itmdoes generally imply that they have no honor though, and I would point out that many of the CE deities are indeed portrayed as just full on psycho (Erythnul and Urdlen come to mind)

[NigelWalmsley]

I mean, alignment doesn't make any sense to begin with, but Erythnul's issues may have more to do with being the god of concepts like "Hate" and "Malice". Drow apparently manage to have an extremely complicated society despite being chaotic and evil (though, of course, that's one of the parts of alignment that doesn't make any sense).

[Bohandas]

You're both coming at the issue from the perspective of wanting to invent guns and trying to reverse-engineer a way for magic-users to develop them, either justifying the invention of gunpowder or finding an equivalent alchemical or magical substance to use as a substitute. But a magic-user isn't going to look at a potion explosion, think that's something that could be weaponized, save a bunch of samples, and start researching how to stick it in a metal tube to let commoners chuck tiny bits of metal at each other, he's going to go "Oh no, my potion of flight and elixir of fire breath have just reacted poorly with one another, utterly ruining two powerful and valuable potions spell! Damn you, Ioulaum's Theorem of Potion Miscibility, damn you straight to Baator!"

Yeah. Admittedly he'd probably simply be making a bomb for 1/3 the price (of a 1 use sound burst item) instead. Well, maybe not from those potions specifically, but from two level 1 potions

[noob]

It is true that they might not do guns and instead do grenade launchers and explosive shell siege weapons but if you start doing this kind of things and that you have crossbows then guns are not very far from being invented.

[RedMage125]

I mean, alignment doesn't make any sense to begin with, but Erythnul's issues may have more to do with being the god of concepts like "Hate" and "Malice". Drow apparently manage to have an extremely complicated society despite being chaotic and evil (though, of course, that's one of the parts of alignment that doesn't make any sense).

That's because you're taking a very narrow view of alignment. It's ALWAYS been true that alignment is not an absolute barometer of action nor affiliation.

The War of the Spider Queen series is actually quite clear on Lolth's tendency towards Chaos, and how her children -the drow- do not fully appreciate and embrace it. To Lolth, Chaos is a crucible. One become stronger by fully embracing chaos. To the drow, Chaos is a means to an end. They attempt to harness Chaos, to direct and use it for their advantage. They don't fully surrender to the ebb and flow of Chaos, and Lolth believes it holds them back.

Erythnul, OTOH, is a savage, almost animalistic god of slaughter. He is Chaotic because he acts upon every savage whim and impulse.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

That's literally what happened in the real world. Chinese alchemists tried to make a potion of longevity and ended up making gunpowder by accident instead. They used it to make rockets and guns.

The major difference here, of course, being that the Chinese alchemists were (A) experimenting with unknown materials and procedures to (B) try to create a hypothetical substance but (C) ended up accidentally inventing a novel substance which (D) had a lot of new and interesting applications, whereas a magic-user brewing potions who caused an explosion via potion miscibility was (A) working through a standard procedure with standard ingredients to (B) create a standard potion that's been known about for thousands of years but (C) ended up accidentally generating one of a bunch of random effects that don't depend on the input materials at all [because potion miscibility results don't depend on which potions were used, just that multiple potions were used at all] which (D) had zero usefulness compared to the panoply of magical effects that he could already generate.

It's like the difference between a Bronze Age person accidentally stumbling across iron smelting (by e.g. picking up a rock containing iron ore, accidentally dropping it into a forge, noticing an interesting result, and going from there) versus a Medieval smith working on forging an iron sword and accidentally getting a chunk of bronze in the molten iron. The former could lead to a major serendipitous advancement in metalworking, the latter is a mistake that messed up what he was already working on to no real effect.


Yeah. Admittedly he'd probably simply be making a bomb for 1/3 the price (of a 1 use sound burst item) instead. Well, maybe not from those potions specifically, but from two level 1 potions


It is true that they might not do guns and instead do grenade launchers and explosive shell siege weapons but if you start doing this kind of things and that you have crossbows then guns are not very far from being invented.

For the umpteenth time, bombs and guns are not an inevitable advancement, especially when the world already has magic weapons!

Seriously, early firearms sucked. Big, heavy, slow to load, slow to fire, short-ranged, unpredictably timed, weak, inaccurate, and pretty much pathetic in every way compared to bows and crossbows. The gun eventually overtook the crossbow (around 600 years after the gun was invented) because it had been slowly increasing in accuracy and range and decreasing in weight and reload times while the crossbow had improved at a much slower rate...but in D&D settings, there are two major advantages to an enchanted crossbow compared to a gun:

1) Ease of creation. A reasonably handy peasant can make a crossbow himself with access to common materials, and then a spellcaster can enchant it himself, or a sufficiently handy spellcaster can do the whole thing himself. A usable gun, however, requires a lot more precision in its creation than a usable crossbow, and it involves more materials for the gun itself, rare materials and special expertise for the powder, and so on, so you need more people involved to create it and it's unlikely a spellcaster would be able to do the whole job himself. An adventurer or researcher or hobbyist wouldn't care, they're willing to go to some length to make or fund one, but a king trying to outfit his army is going to care about the expense and difficulty of creation and a village trying to equip its militia is going to care about the skill floor and difficulty of sourcing materials.

2) Cost-effectiveness. Someone used to enchanted crossbows is used to weapons that, once enchanted, can shoot flaming bolts (or exploding bolts or sleep bolts or whatever) forever with needing to be re-enchanted, making the only ongoing cost that of the bolts, which can be created by peasants relatively easily and cheaply. A gun already has a higher upfront cost than a crossbow, but then you add on the fact that the bullets are more expensive and harder to make, and then you add on the fact that every shot consumes gunpowder for an additional cost. Again, an individual might not care about the cost, but it would definitely hamper widespread adoption.

In the real world, guns provided a quantitatively different kind of projectile weapon and were worth investigating because firearm technology was something entirely novel. In D&D settings, primitive guns are strictly inferior to weapons they already have and don't provide any novel benefits.

The only ways in which guns are possibly superior to enchanted crossbows are (A) when comparing enchanted guns to enchanted crossbows, but to get to that point you have to have guns already, and (B) if you want the populace to be able to make their own weapons without being reliant on spellcasters, and I say possibly superior here because there's a really good chance that all the people who might otherwise research guns would have as patrons rulers who don't want the masses to get their hands on any better weapons than they already have, and so they would discourage such research even if they thought it might provide benefits over enchanted crossbows. But again, that's possibility, not inevitability.


Not only did gond give basic firearms to their followers thus making non initiate realise it is doable and know what it is after killing an initiate(only the powder is impossible to do for non gond followers) but there is also a story of cost reduction.
You need to do a basic magic missile wand to spend a full 750 gold.

Why would you compare a gun to a wand of magic missile? A much more direct comparison would be to a heavy crossbow, and not even an enchanted one.

As per the DMG, a musket deals 1d12 damage (x3 crit) with a range increment of 50 feet, weighs 10 lbs, and takes a full-round action to reload, while a heavy crossbow deals 1d10 damage (19-20/x2 crit) with a range increment of 120 feet, weighs 8 lbs, and takes a standard action to reload. A musket costs 500 gp upfront and costs 1.4 gp to fire (0.3 gp per bullet, 1.1 gp per measure of gunpowder), while a heavy crossbow costs 50 gp upfront and costs 0.1 gp to loose (0.1 gp per bolt). The only dimensions along which the musket isn't equal to, equivalent to, or strictly worse than the heavy crossbow are the damage (and 1 point on average is trivial) and reload time (and full-round vs. standard only gives you better mobility, it doesn't let you fire any faster).

And if you do compare the gun to a wand of magic missile? Well, firstly, the wand has a bunch of advantages: automatically hits, can hit incorporeal creatures, ignores DR, weighs practically nothing, requires no ammunition, and has no reload time. (And, if you craft one with a higher CL, you get things like multi-targeting, better single-target damage, longer range, etc., but we're just talking the basic version.) Yes, there are edge cases like fighting in dead magic zones, but lots of settings have "that one enclave of weird and secretive tinker gnomes experimenting with clockwork and alchemy" somewhere on the map where magic is less common or less than reliable, and if dead magic or wild magic is common enough for anyone to need to take that into account when picking weapons, you're dealing with a "DM's poor attempt at a low-magic setting" situation where all the standard assumptions go out the window anyway.

And secondly, the cost isn't actually that exorbitant, comparatively: a CL 1 wand of magic missile is 750 gp for 50 charges, while a musket is 570 gp for 50 shots (500 gp musket + 50 * 1.4 gp ammo), so it's not like you'd get a half-dozen guns for the cost of one wand, you don't even get two guns for the cost of one wand--but you can get 13 heavy crossbows (50 gp crossbow + 50 * 0.1 gp ammo) for the cost of 1 wand, or 10 crossbows for the cost of 1 gun. Certainly, over time the gun gets comparatively cheaper since you don't need to buy a new musket every 50 shots like you do a wand, but (A) it's not the kind of drastic price difference that would make the initial investment choice obviously in favor of the gun over the wand and (B) if you're considering arming your rank-and-file soldiers with wands of anything at all, you have enough magic at your disposal to do much more impressive things than make guns or crossbows.


Itmdoes generally imply that they have no honor though, and I would point out that many of the CE deities are indeed portrayed as just full on psycho (Erythnul and Urdlen come to mind)

You don't need to be honorable, or adhere to any rules of behavior at all, to make a deal and then hold to it if you believe that holding to it is in your best interests; that's basic game theory. And of course we see that Chaotic and/or Evil gods do try to cheat around the Divine Compact all the time--whenever you have a "the cult of [god] is trying to summon [god/god's avatar/etc.] to the Material Plane" plot or a "the followers of [god] is the followers of [god's rival] on a large scale" plot or similar, like the entire basis for the Red Hand of Doom adventure path--it's just that whenever they try it they get their butts handed to them by adventurers so the other gods are incentivized not to try that again for a while.


I mean, alignment doesn't make any sense to begin with, but Erythnul's issues may have more to do with being the god of concepts like "Hate" and "Malice". Drow apparently manage to have an extremely complicated society despite being chaotic and evil (though, of course, that's one of the parts of alignment that doesn't make any sense).

Drow society makes perfect sense with the alignment system if you recall that (A) having a baroque social structure doesn't mean valuing a baroque social structure (drow society is imposed on them by Lolth for kicks and giggles and they do their best to cope within it, as RedMage noted) and (B) that whole thing is just a facade. To quote myself from an earlier thread on the topic:


People like to complain about drow society being "obviously" LE with its strict rules and hierarchy when drow themselves are CE, so drow should really be LE instead, but the whole point is that the drow [I]don't follow any of their own supposed rules.

Lesser Houses absolutely aren't allowed to wage wars against their betters...but they do anyway and no one cares unless they get caught, in which case they're punished not because they broke the rules but because they were incompetent enough to not cover their tracks well enough and the Greater Houses just like punishing rivals when they know no one's going to object. All priestesses are absolutely unified under Lolth and follow a strict hierarchy of favor where lesser priestesses defer to greater ones...but yochlol go around actively sowing dissent among the priestesshood and any priestess who schemes against a rival on her own and manages to depose said rival is immediately recognized and rewarded for it. Males are absolutely not allowed to hold any positions of power and are supposed to be utterly disposable for the needs of the priestesshood...but many powerful archmages rival or exceed priestesses in power, and house mothers often protect favored males from their sisters' schemes (or cede power to them outright).

The drow have instituted a superficially-complex web (heh) of laws and rules and commandments, but they don't actually believe in any of it. All of the rules go out the window the moment someone either thinks they can get away with something that will improve their standing without getting caught or is ordered by Lolth to do a particular thing. No one actually respects the law itself or trusts that anyone else respects the law--especially since "the law" is basically "whatever the Matron Mother feels like doing at the moment"--but solely focuses on how they can do whatever they want despite the law.

There's only one commandment, "Thou shalt not go against Lolth," and that's less a "commandment" and more a handy piece of advice like "Don't go near a rabid dog" or "Don't piss off a hungry tiger."

[noob]

The major difference here, of course, being that the Chinese alchemists were (A) experimenting with unknown materials and procedures to (B) try to create a hypothetical substance but (C) ended up accidentally inventing a novel substance which (D) had a lot of new and interesting applications, whereas a magic-user brewing potions who caused an explosion via potion miscibility was (A) working through a standard procedure with standard ingredients to (B) create a standard potion that's been known about for thousands of years but (C) ended up accidentally generating one of a bunch of random effects that don't depend on the input materials at all [because potion miscibility results don't depend on which potions were used, just that multiple potions were used at all] which (D) had zero usefulness compared to the panoply of magical effects that he could already generate.

It's like the difference between a Bronze Age person accidentally stumbling across iron smelting (by e.g. picking up a rock containing iron ore, accidentally dropping it into a forge, noticing an interesting result, and going from there) versus a Medieval smith working on forging an iron sword and accidentally getting a chunk of bronze in the molten iron. The former could lead to a major serendipitous advancement in metalworking, the latter is a mistake that messed up what he was already working on to no real effect.

For the umpteenth time, bombs and guns are not an inevitable advancement, especially when the world already has magic weapons!

Seriously, early firearms sucked. Big, heavy, slow to load, slow to fire, short-ranged, unpredictably timed, weak, inaccurate, and pretty much pathetic in every way compared to bows and crossbows. The gun eventually overtook the crossbow (around 600 years after the gun was invented) because it had been slowly increasing in accuracy and range and decreasing in weight and reload times while the crossbow had improved at a much slower rate...but in D&D settings, there are two major advantages to an enchanted crossbow compared to a gun:

1) Ease of creation. A reasonably handy peasant can make a crossbow himself with access to common materials, and then a spellcaster can enchant it himself, or a sufficiently handy spellcaster can do the whole thing himself. A usable gun, however, requires a lot more precision in its creation than a usable crossbow, and it involves more materials for the gun itself, rare materials and special expertise for the powder, and so on, so you need more people involved to create it and it's unlikely a spellcaster would be able to do the whole job himself. An adventurer or researcher or hobbyist wouldn't care, they're willing to go to some length to make or fund one, but a king trying to outfit his army is going to care about the expense and difficulty of creation and a village trying to equip its militia is going to care about the skill floor and difficulty of sourcing materials.

2) Cost-effectiveness. Someone used to enchanted crossbows is used to weapons that, once enchanted, can shoot flaming bolts (or exploding bolts or sleep bolts or whatever) forever with needing to be re-enchanted, making the only ongoing cost that of the bolts, which can be created by peasants relatively easily and cheaply. A gun already has a higher upfront cost than a crossbow, but then you add on the fact that the bullets are more expensive and harder to make, and then you add on the fact that every shot consumes gunpowder for an additional cost. Again, an individual might not care about the cost, but it would definitely hamper widespread adoption.

In the real world, guns provided a quantitatively different kind of projectile weapon and were worth investigating because firearm technology was something entirely novel. In D&D settings, primitive guns are strictly inferior to weapons they already have and don't provide any novel benefits.

The only ways in which guns are possibly superior to enchanted crossbows are (A) when comparing enchanted guns to enchanted crossbows, but to get to that point you have to have guns already, and (B) if you want the populace to be able to make their own weapons without being reliant on spellcasters, and I say possibly superior here because there's a really good chance that all the people who might otherwise research guns would have as patrons rulers who don't want the masses to get their hands on any better weapons than they already have, and so they would discourage such research even if they thought it might provide benefits over enchanted crossbows. But again, that's possibility, not inevitability.



Why would you compare a gun to a wand of magic missile? A much more direct comparison would be to a heavy crossbow, and not even an enchanted one.

As per the DMG, a musket deals 1d10 damage (x3 crit) with a range increment of 50 feet, weighs 10 lbs, and takes a full-round action to reload, while a heavy crossbow deals 1d10 damage (19-20/x2 crit) with a range increment of 120 feet, weighs 8 lbs, and takes a standard action to reload. A musket costs 500 gp upfront and costs 1.4 gp to fire (0.3 gp per bullet, 1.1 gp per measure of gunpowder), while a heavy crossbow costs 50 gp upfront and costs 0.1 gp to loose (0.1 gp per bolt). The only dimension along which the musket isn't equal to, equivalent to, or strictly worse than the heavy crossbow is the reload time, and full-round vs. standard only gives you better mobility, it doesn't let you fire any faster.

And if you do compare the gun to a wand of magic missile? Well, firstly, the wand has a bunch of advantages: automatically hits, can hit incorporeal creatures, ignores DR, weighs practically nothing, requires no ammunition, and has no reload time. (And, if you craft one with a higher CL, you get things like multi-targeting, better single-target damage, longer range, etc., but we're just talking the basic version.) Yes, there are edge cases like fighting in dead magic zones, but lots of settings have "that one enclave of weird and secretive tinker gnomes experimenting with clockwork and alchemy" somewhere on the map where magic is less common or less than reliable, and if dead magic or wild magic is common enough for anyone to need to take that into account when picking weapons, you're dealing with a "DM's poor attempt at a low-magic setting" situation where all the standard assumptions go out the window anyway.

And secondly, the cost isn't actually that exorbitant, comparatively: a CL 1 wand of magic missile is 750 gp for 50 charges, while a musket is 570 gp for 50 shots (500 gp musket + 50 * 1.4 gp ammo), so it's not like you'd get a half-dozen guns for the cost of one wand, you don't even get two guns for the cost of one wand--but you can get 13 heavy crossbows (50 gp crossbow + 50 * 0.1 gp ammo) for the cost of 1 wand, or 10 crossbows for the cost of 1 gun. Certainly, over time the gun gets comparatively cheaper since you don't need to buy a new musket every 50 shots like you do a wand, but (A) it's not the kind of drastic price difference that would make the initial investment choice obviously in favor of the gun over the wand and (B) if you're considering arming your rank-and-file soldiers with wands of anything at all, you have enough magic at your disposal to do much more impressive things than make guns or crossbows.



You don't need to be honorable, or adhere to any rules of behavior at all, to make a deal and then hold to it if you believe that holding to it is in your best interests; that's basic game theory. And of course we see that Chaotic and/or Evil gods do try to cheat around the Divine Compact all the time--whenever you have a "the cult of [god] is trying to summon [god/god's avatar/etc.] to the Material Plane" plot or a "the followers of [god] is the followers of [god's rival] on a large scale" plot or similar, like the entire basis for the Red Hand of Doom adventure path--it's just that whenever they try it they get their butts handed to them by adventurers so the other gods are incentivized not to try that again for a while.



Drow society makes perfect sense with the alignment system if you recall that (A) [I]having a baroque social structure doesn't mean valuing a baroque social structure (drow society is imposed on them by Lolth for kicks and giggles and they do their best to cope within it, as RedMage noted) and (B) that whole thing is just a facade. To quote myself from an earlier thread on the topic:

The problem is that you used the dungeon master manual stats which were intended to balance firearms with regular ranged weapons and did not include any of the advantages of early firearms such as armour piercing (except against bullet proof armour that is close to being masterwork plate armour since basically the smith makes a full plate armour and tests if the torso blocks a bullet by firing at it and if it does not then the plate armour is not bullet proof) or being easier to use than a crossbow at point blank range.
Guns progressively improved over time because there was people using them and/or developing them despite the fact they were not yet superior to crossbows and bows in real life so saying "crossbows and bows are superior in dnd" is not a good argument since it did not work in real life.
Also when comparing to a magic missile wand you are using the costs instead of the cost/3 which is wrong since a high level wizard comparing making guns and making magic missile wands knows the existence of fabricate which would allow them to make a whole bunch of guns at 1/3 of the written cost in a single cast and would not take weeks. (because when making 50 magic missile wands you spend 50 days while for making 50 guns it takes a single cast of fabricate)

The existence of fabricate makes non magical things vastly easier to produce than magical things.

As for damage everyone knows that in real life we can scale up guns firepower and weight until they kill the target it is intended to kill and the fact it is possible to do is easy to realise when you see how guns works.
You could literally make guns that kills elephants on a good hit with late era blackpowder guns that were wearable by humans in 1850(so a critical strike with 104 damage in dnd terms)

The possibility of scaling up firepower is extremely interesting seeing how many big dangerous creatures there is in dnd or just adventurers with way too many hp.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

You might want to delete the block quote and only quote the portion that you're responding to, makes things shorter and easier to read.


The problem is that you used the dungeon master manual stats which were intended to balance firearms with regular ranged weapons and did not include any of the advantages of early firearms such as armour piercing (except against bullet proof armour that is close to being masterwork plate armour since basically the smith makes a full plate armour and tests if the torso blocks a bullet by firing at it and if it does not then the plate armour is not bullet proof) or being easier to use than a crossbow at point blank range.

None of that is true.

1) The DMG stats are generally balanced with non-firearm weapons, but they weren't "nerfed" to fit in or anything; early firearms actually were on par with contemporary weapons, and the modern and futuristic weapon stats are indeed stronger than Renaissance firearms, as you'd expect.

2) Early pistols were basically ineffective against contemporary plate armor, and longarms were ineffective at battlefield ranges, hence why firearms and plate coexisted for about 200 years. The first firearms were quite effective against shoddy, mass-produced plate armor, which then drove the development of better forms of plate armor that could resist bullets fairly easily (at the cost of being heavier and more expensive). It wasn't until massed arquebus fire became a thing that plate really started to go obsolete.

3) Early firearms were not easier to use than crossbows. Crossbows require either a four-step process (load bolt, pull back cord, aim, fire) for lighter ones or a six-step process (attach winch, winch back cord, detach winch, load bolt, aim, fire) for heavier ones, while even the simpler muskets required a twelve- to fourteen-step process and were much harder to aim (the flash pan got in the way and could blind you momentarily when it fired) and fire (the pricker or match was fairly unreliable).

The assumption you're making, once again, is that the inventor of firearms in a given setting would jump right from "what's a firearm?" to "1700s-level firearms," skipping decades of knowledge and refinement and ignoring any corresponding defensive advancements. Sure, if a mid-level wizard cast summon flintlock rifle from 18th century Earth and got such a gun it would be very effective, but that's not how the development process works.


Guns progressively improved over time because there was people using them and/or developing them despite the fact they were not yet superior to crossbows and bows in real life so saying "crossbows and bows are superior in dnd" is not a good argument since it did not work in real life.

People worked on developing guns because they had a large psychological effect and gunpowder was already being used in bombards and other siege weapons so the logistics were already in place, but neither of those apply in D&D (blasting spells and flaming/thundering bolts are already effective psychological weapons and there's no infrastructure in place).


Also when comparing to a magic missile wand you are using the costs instead of the cost/3 which is wrong since a high level wizard comparing making a gun and making a magic missile wand knows the existence of fabricate which would allow them to make a whole bunch of guns at 1/3 of the written cost in a single cast and would not take weeks. (because when making 50 magic missile wands you spend 50 days while for making 50 guns it takes a single cast of fabricate)

Firstly, a wizard who can fabricate a bunch of muskets can do the same for heavy crossbows, which as noted before still have several advantages even if you remove the cost...assuming, of course, that the wizard has the Craft ranks to make the gun, the gunpowder, and the bullets, which isn't guaranteed given that bows have their own Craft subskill and so guns might as well, gunpowder might be considered alchemical and require Craft (Alchemy), and so forth.

Secondly, wands can be crafted starting at 5th level, so there's actually a 4-level range in which a wizard can craft a wand of magic missile but not fabricate guns or crossbows. And given the demographics rules, every Large Town can have wizards making wands but you need to be in a Small City to have a chance to have fabricating wizards or a Large City to guarantee it, which runs into the issue of logistics and infrastructure again.


As for damage everyone knows that in real life we can scale up guns firepower and weight until they kill the target it is intended to kill and the fact it is possible to do is easy to realise when you see how guns works.
You could literally make guns that kills elephants on a good hit with late era blackpowder guns that were wearable by humans in 1850(so a critical strike with 104 damage in dnd terms)

The possibility of scaling up firepower is extremely interesting seeing how many big dangerous creatures there is in dnd or just adventurers with way too many hp.

Actually, it would only need to be 50 damage if the elephant fails the massive damage Fort save, meaning ~17 average damage before a x3 crit multiplier; not all that impressive.

But that aside, yes, you can kill stronger people with big explosions. You may have heard of this convenient spell called fireball and wands thereof? :smallamused:

Early forays into grenades and bombs were, as with guns, unreliable and heavy and inaccurate and so on and so forth. Given the choice between that and a nice, reliable, safe-to-the-caster, lethal-to-his-enemies, very-long-range, no-crater-making fireball, there's once again very little reason to detour into bomb development.

EDIT: The gunpowder derail has gone on for almost a full page. If anyone wants to continue the discussion I'd be happy to make a new thread for that, but we should probably get back from head cannons to headcanons at this point.

[noob]

You might want to delete the block quote and only quote the portion that you're responding to, makes things shorter and easier to read.



None of that is true.

1) The DMG stats are generally balanced with non-firearm weapons, but they weren't "nerfed" to fit in or anything; early firearms actually were on par with contemporary weapons, and the modern and futuristic weapon stats are indeed stronger than Renaissance firearms, as you'd expect.

2) Early pistols were basically ineffective against contemporary plate armor, and longarms were ineffective at battlefield ranges, hence why firearms and plate coexisted for about 200 years. The first firearms were quite effective against shoddy, mass-produced plate armor, which then drove the development of better forms of plate armor that could resist bullets fairly easily (at the cost of being heavier and more expensive). It wasn't until massed arquebus fire became a thing that plate really started to go obsolete.

3) Early firearms were not easier to use than crossbows. Crossbows require either a four-step process (load bolt, pull back cord, aim, fire) for lighter ones or a six-step process (attach winch, winch back cord, detach winch, load bolt, aim, fire) for heavier ones, while even the simpler muskets required a twelve- to fourteen-step process and were much harder to aim (the flash pan got in the way and could blind you momentarily when it fired) and fire (the pricker or match was fairly unreliable).

The assumption you're making, once again, is that the inventor of firearms in a given setting would jump right from "what's a firearm?" to "1700s-level firearms," skipping decades of knowledge and refinement and ignoring any corresponding defensive advancements. Sure, if a mid-level wizard cast summon flintlock rifle from 18th century Earth and got such a gun it would be very effective, but that's not how the development process works.



People worked on developing guns because they had a large psychological effect and gunpowder was already being used in bombards and other siege weapons so the logistics were already in place, but neither of those apply in D&D (blasting spells and flaming/thundering bolts are already effective psychological weapons and there's no infrastructure in place).



Firstly, a wizard who can fabricate a bunch of muskets can do the same for heavy crossbows, which as noted before still have several advantages even if you remove the cost...assuming, of course, that the wizard has the Craft ranks to make the gun, the gunpowder, and the bullets, which isn't guaranteed given that bows have their own Craft subskill and so guns might as well, gunpowder might be considered alchemical and require Craft (Alchemy), and so forth.

Secondly, wands can be crafted starting at 5th level, so there's actually a 4-level range in which a wizard can craft a wand of magic missile but not fabricate guns or crossbows. And given the demographics rules, every Large Town can have wizards making wands but you need to be in a Small City to have a chance to have fabricating wizards or a Large City to guarantee it, which runs into the issue of logistics and infrastructure again.



Actually, it would only need to be 50 damage if the elephant fails the massive damage Fort save, meaning ~17 average damage before a x3 crit multiplier; not all that impressive.

But that aside, yes, you can kill stronger people with big explosions. You may have heard of this convenient spell called fireball and wands thereof? :smallamused:

Early forays into grenades and bombs were, as with guns, unreliable and heavy and inaccurate and so on and so forth. Given the choice between that and a nice, reliable, safe-to-the-caster, lethal-to-his-enemies, very-long-range, no-crater-making fireball, there's once again very little reason to detour into bomb development.

You are wrong on the 50 damage: the thing is that a shot in the head that enters the brain does not just cause 50 damage nor does the death corresponds to massive damage.(else elephants that have a bullet enter the head would have only 15% chance to die)
I think that a bullet entering the head of the elephant is quite definitively a one hit kill critical rather than massive damage death since massive damage death corresponds more to the traumatic shock causing death while it could have not killed and the odds of a bullet in the brain of the elephant not killing it are not 85% which is what it would be if it was massive damage rules.
They did not say "after a fortitude save the location of the hit retroactively changes" which is the only way to make it be excessive damage death and consistent with the odds of the elephant dying from a shot in the brain.
Also early fireballs were unreliable and lethal to the caster in early dnd: fireballs progressively became less and less dangerous to the caster with the editions (like how it can not bounce back anymore nor kill you with flame returns when used in a corridor and so on) so it fits exactly the same progress pattern: people would understand "seeing how fireballs progressed in all odds bombs will probably become safe to use too after a bunch of tinkerings"

Also you did nor read well I told "early firearms are easier to use point blank" and you did think I meant "early firearms are easier to use" which is not the same thing: it was common for people to fire a firearm at point blank then switch to a melee weapon which is hard to do with a crossbow but there is no dnd rule saying that firearms does not provoke aoo when shot at point blank range while it hardly opens any aoo opportunities (not more than a sword swing).

[Stattick]

I shoot my gunsword at him. Then I swing my gunsword at him. Gunswords are great.

[Spore]

I shoot my gunsword at him. Then I swing my gunsword at him. Gunswords are great.

I mean there is also the faction that thinks gunblades and similar fantasy constructs are horrible and bad. Like in WH 40k, someone who has a chainsaw sword, when the enemy has long range ray cannons, or weaponized disease.

Sometimes suspension of disbelief kicks in, sometimes it does not. Gunblades are very viable in a weird Final Fantasy style game, but make little or no sense in other media such as sword and sorcery that just happens to mull over into the industrial revolution (ala Arcanum, if you know the game).

But then again, this game's gadgeteer class has much much less believable trinkets.

[NigelWalmsley]

Having a weapon that is both a melee weapon and a gun isn't a "fantasy construct". That's just a bayonet, something that has existed for basically as long as guns have. Certainly you could imagine fantasy bayonets that were physically implausible, but so are the absurdly giant swords of fantasy.

That said, I don't really understand the hangup on guns specifically. There probably should be more guns in fantasy, on the basis that the Powder Mage books are cool, but in-world there's way more low-hanging fruit.


having[/I] a baroque social structure doesn't mean valuing a baroque social structure (drow society is imposed on them by Lolth for kicks and giggles and they do their best to cope within it, as RedMage noted) and (B) that whole thing is just a facade. To quote myself from an earlier thread on the topic:

Then why is Lolth pushing the baroque social structure? It doesn't really matter if she's imposing a Lawful social structure because she thinks it's fun. You've still lost any predictive power alignment might have had when one baroque backstabbing nightmare is "Lawful" and another is "Chaotic".

[hamishspence]

Having a weapon that is both a melee weapon and a gun isn't a "fantasy construct". That's just a bayonet, something that has existed for basically as long as guns have. Certainly you could imagine fantasy bayonets that were physically implausible, but so are the absurdly giant swords of fantasy.

I believe people are thinking more of "swords with built-in guns" Which are also historical:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_sword

[Khedrac]

Then why is Lolth pushing the baroque social structure? It doesn't really matter if she's imposing a Lawful social structure because she thinks it's fun. You've still lost any predictive power alignment might have had when one baroque backstabbing nightmare is "Lawful" and another is "Chaotic".
It doesn't have to just be Lolth. From the look of things a lot of powerful chaotic beings will impose a very rigid/lawful structure on the society they head in an attempt to control it - they don't see the laws as applying to them. (Also, lots of people in the struture will support it for similar reasons.)

Conversely people who are innately lawful may have a much more chaotic society because they don't see the need for rules...

[RedMage125]

Then why is Lolth pushing the baroque social structure? It doesn't really matter if she's imposing a Lawful social structure because she thinks it's fun. You've still lost any predictive power alignment might have had when one baroque backstabbing nightmare is "Lawful" and another is "Chaotic".

Did you not even read what I responded? Drow society is an imperfect reflection of what Lolth teaches.

Can this thread get back to "D&D Head Canons"?

[KillianHawkeye]

I shoot my gunsword at him. Then I swing my gunsword at him. Gunswords are great.

This actually makes me want to play like a crazy gnomish rogue who uses a big swiss army knife contraption that has a sword part and a hammer part and a built in crossbow and thieves' tools and whatever else all attached to it. Like a gnome hook hammer, but with just everything he owns stuck on.

I have no idea how that would work in an actual game, but it would be amazing and hilarious. :smallbiggrin:

[Bohandas]

This actually makes me want to play like a crazy gnomish rogue who uses a big swiss army knife contraption that has a sword part and a hammer part and a built in crossbow and thieves' tools and whatever else all attached to it. Like a gnome hook hammer, but with just everything he owns stuck on.

I have no idea how that would work in an actual game, but it would be amazing and hilarious. :smallbiggrin:


That's actually an item in the videogame Dungeons of Dredmor

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-hTzZNEP5VzQ/V92FxyBtK3I/AAAAAAAAL0k/0aWZokJvJw89z66BuJ7fX8UYahyPNKrBQCLcB/s1600/lai03.JPG

[Bohandas]

Then why is Lolth pushing the baroque social structure? It doesn't really matter if she's imposing a Lawful social structure because she thinks it's fun. You've still lost any predictive power alignment might have had when one baroque backstabbing nightmare is "Lawful" and another is "Chaotic".

I think it's possibly like the difference between a Baatezu courtroom, vs the Abyssal courtroom layer Woeful Escarand. The baator court is going to be cruel but it's going to follow the rule of law, whereas the abyssal court exists as a mockery of the rule of law and is openly corrupt.

[Stattick]

Headcannon: There are very few battleaxes out there that only do slashing damage. For that, you'd need a battleaxe that has an axeblade on both sides of the shaft, and that's just silly. What you want, is an axeblade on one side of the shaft, and either a pick on the other side of the shaft, or a hammer. Or you start with a pick on the side opposite of the hammer, and then when you snap off the spike in someone's head, take it to the blacksmith and have him grind it down and affix a bludgeon in the place of the spike. Hell, for that matter, who even uses an axe? Put a bludgeon on one side of the shaft and a spike on the otherside.

Oh, that isn't supported in the official weapon's list? So, if you want that, you'd need a GM that'll say "yes" and let you spend an extra 2d10 GP on your melee weapons? Sure. I mean, what else is a warrior gonna spend his coin on?

[Xuc Xac]

Hell, for that matter, who even uses an axe? Put a bludgeon on one side of the shaft and a spike on the otherside. Oh, that isn't supported in the official weapon's list?

That's a warhammer. If you look at images of actual medieval warhammers instead of game illustrations of sledgehammers labeled "warhammer", you can see a lot of examples of them.

[KoDT69]

I have a head cannon to share. Since I've played most editions up to 3.5, this is how I see it all as being the same world. Basically as time passes, the laws of magic and whatever it is that governs the powers available to the living people/creatures changes and evolved over time. That would explain how even PC classes started with minimal capabilities and we're very limited in power, then developed immunities, resistances, faster actions, etc.
The timeline as I see it:
OD&D - Early Dark Ages
AD&D 1E - Transition of Dark Ages to Early Renaissance
AD&D 2E - Early Renaissance
D&D 3.0-3.5 - Mid Renaissance
D&D 4E - NEVER HAPPENED - or possibly a past timeline off of the d20 Modern setting
D&D 5E - After Renaissance, maybe just before what would have been our Industrial Revolution
*Eberron in play is like adding the Industrial Revolution to the edition's timeline

I've been considering converting some older edition magic items but making them with no change if possible and tagging them as "Heirloom" or "Ancient" just to see how it goes.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Then why is Lolth pushing the baroque social structure? It doesn't really matter if she's imposing a Lawful social structure because she thinks it's fun. You've still lost any predictive power alignment might have had when one baroque backstabbing nightmare is "Lawful" and another is "Chaotic".


I think it's possibly like the difference between a Baatezu courtroom, vs the Abyssal courtroom layer Woeful Escarand. The baator court is going to be cruel but it's going to follow the rule of law, whereas the abyssal court exists as a mockery of the rule of law and is openly corrupt.

Pretty much this. It's the age-old question of Who are you when no one is watching?, that is, if you take a bunch of drow out of Menzoberranzan or remove Lolth's influence on their society (permanently and in a way that they all know it's the case, not temporarily and in a way that her priestesses try to cover it up like during Lolth's Silence), what does their new society look like?

This is actually something that happens in-setting, with Chaotic-but-not-quite-so-Evil drow leaving the Underdark and joining with followers of Eilistraee, a CG goddess. The Church of Eilistraee is still a matriarchal theocracy, but it has a very flat hierarchy, different settlements (and groups within those settlements) are only loosely interlinked, and male and female drow can take on any desired role (and males can lead, though mostly they don't), a far cry from the traditional strict hierarchy with strict House associations and strict gender roles--so, much closer to other Chaotic societies like the moon elven cities or orc tribes than the byzantine Lolthian drow culture.


I have a head cannon to share. Since I've played most editions up to 3.5, this is how I see it all as being the same world. Basically as time passes, the laws of magic and whatever it is that governs the powers available to the living people/creatures changes and evolved over time. That would explain how even PC classes started with minimal capabilities and we're very limited in power, then developed immunities, resistances, faster actions, etc.
The timeline as I see it:
OD&D - Early Dark Ages
AD&D 1E - Transition of Dark Ages to Early Renaissance
AD&D 2E - Early Renaissance
D&D 3.0-3.5 - Mid Renaissance
D&D 4E - NEVER HAPPENED - or possibly a past timeline off of the d20 Modern setting
D&D 5E - After Renaissance, maybe just before what would have been our Industrial Revolution
*Eberron in play is like adding the Industrial Revolution to the edition's timeline

I've been considering converting some older edition magic items but making them with no change if possible and tagging them as "Heirloom" or "Ancient" just to see how it goes.

I do something similar in my games. For instance, the thing where 1e psionics only involved random wild talents, 2e psionics had classes but required some innate talent, and 3e psionics allowed anyone to train in psionic classes, and in AD&D psionics was different from magic by default but in 3e they're transparent by default? In several of my long-running settings that survived long enough to go through edition changes (and under my own take on FR's history), the former is due to psionicists reverse-engineering and codifying psionics in the same way that wizardry was first developed and the latter is due to research collaboration between psionicists and arcanists to unify their magical traditions. Scholars in-setting know that psionics used to work differently and will talk about So-and-So's early experiments in awakening psionic potential or Such-and-Such's Theory of Thoughtform Universality or the like when discussing the history of magic/psonics interactions.

Several of my longer campaigns have involved time travel to some extent (either short jaunts into the past or areas that were brought forward in time), and when that happens I've broken out older-edition rules for a few sessions and/or converted things to newer edition rules to hammer home the difference. The very first time I did this, I secretly converted all my player's characters from 3e to 2e beforehand in preparation for an upcoming temporal jaunt; when they stepped through a time portal (thinking it was a regular portal) and one of them asked to make a Knowledge (Planes) check to see if they could figure out where the portal sent them, with a perfectly straight face I responded "There's no such non-weapon proficiency; perhaps you mean Portal Feel or Planar Survival?" while handing over their 2e sheets, and it really drove home the "we're not in Kansas anymore" feel of the adventure.

[noob]

Pretty much this. It's the age-old question of Who are you when no one is watching?, that is, if you take a bunch of drow out of Menzoberranzan or remove Lolth's influence on their society (permanently and in a way that they all know it's the case, not temporarily and in a way that her priestesses try to cover it up like during Lolth's Silence), what does their new society look like?

This is actually something that happens in-setting, with Chaotic-but-not-quite-so-Evil drow leaving the Underdark and joining with followers of Eilistraee, a CG goddess. The Church of Eilistraee is still a matriarchal theocracy, but it has a very flat hierarchy, different settlements (and groups within those settlements) are only loosely interlinked, and male and female drow can take on any desired role (and males can lead, though mostly they don't), a far cry from the traditional strict hierarchy with strict House associations and strict gender roles--so, much closer to other Chaotic societies like the moon elven cities or orc tribes than the byzantine Lolthian drow culture.



I do something similar in my games. For instance, the thing where 1e psionics only involved random wild talents, 2e psionics had classes but required some innate talent, and 3e psionics allowed anyone to train in psionic classes, and in AD&D psionics was different from magic by default but in 3e they're transparent by default? In several of my long-running settings that survived long enough to go through edition changes (and under my own take on FR's history), the former is due to psionicists reverse-engineering and codifying psionics in the same way that wizardry was first developed and the latter is due to research collaboration between psionicists and arcanists to unify their magical traditions. Scholars in-setting know that psionics used to work differently and will talk about So-and-So's early experiments in awakening psionic potential or Such-and-Such's Theory of Thoughtform Universality or the like when discussing the history of magic/psonics interactions.

Several of my longer campaigns have involved time travel to some extent (either short jaunts into the past or areas that were brought forward in time), and when that happens I've broken out older-edition rules for a few sessions and/or converted things to newer edition rules to hammer home the difference. The very first time I did this, I secretly converted all my player's characters from 3e to 2e beforehand in preparation for an upcoming temporal jaunt; when they stepped through a time portal (thinking it was a regular portal) and one of them asked to make a Knowledge (Planes) check to see if they could figure out where the portal sent them, with a perfectly straight face I responded "There's no such non-weapon proficiency; perhaps you mean Portal Feel or Planar Survival?" while handing over their 2e sheets, and it really drove home the "we're not in Kansas anymore" feel of the adventure.

2e and 1e are not so far from 3e and 5e in terms of classes but multiclassing worked very differently(there was dual classing and some other form of multiclassing and classes and multiclassings allowed depends on the race) so if 3e/5e characters were multiclassed it could make the conversion to earlier editions painfully complex to do.(and it is odd to see your dwarf something suddenly lose a bunch of levels "because they were above the class level cap for a dwarf" but that is kind of excepted when changing editions)
And for converting a 4e caster to any other edition you need to do a lot of complicated stuff.(because spells works massively differently between this edition and the others)

[PairO'Dice Lost]

2e and 1e are not so far from 3e and 5e in terms of classes but multiclassing worked very differently(there was dual classing and some other form of multiclassing and classes and multiclassings allowed depends on the race) so if 3e/5e characters were multiclassed it could make the conversion to earlier editions painfully complex to do.(and it is odd to see your dwarf something suddenly lose a bunch of levels "because they were above the class level cap for a dwarf" but that is kind of excepted when changing editions)

Yes, I'm well aware of how AD&D multiclassing and dual-classing work. I did all the conversions to preserve capabilities as closely as possible, not just looking at levels and going "Welp, he's a Dwarf Fighter 5 in 3e so he gets what a Dwarf Fighter 5 gets in AD&D." Certainly there's no way to figure out arbitrary conversions between AD&D and 3e, but converting individual characters is quite easy if you know both editions, especially if you're going between 2e and 3e and are willing to dip into Player's Options stuff.


And for converting a 4e caster to any other edition you need to do a lot of complicated stuff.(because spells works massively differently between this edition and the others)

You can't time travel between 3e and 4e, as 4e is obviously an alternate Mirror Universe timeline where all the PCs' equivalents wear goatees, and said timeline is rightfully stricken from existence by the end of the adventure. :smallamused:

[Bohandas]

You can't time travel between 3e and 4e, as 4e is obviously an alternate Mirror Universe timeline where all the PCs' equivalents wear goatees, and said timeline is rightfully stricken from existence by the end of the adventure. :smallamused:

On a related note, one of my headcanons is that the Abyss contains chaotic evil alternate versions of all the other planes

[KillianHawkeye]

On a related note, one of my headcanons is that the Abyss contains chaotic evil alternate versions of all the other planes

It is recursive? Is there another entire alternate Abyss inside the Abyss?

[noob]

It is recursive? Is there another entire alternate Abyss inside the Abyss?

it is called the layers of the abyss I guess.
each layer of the abyss is the abyss within itself?
Is the abyss a layered cake made of abysses?

[Millstone85]

Is the abyss a layered cake made of abysses?Well now, you made this classic image (https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/4e-planescape/images/2/26/GreatWheelMap.jpg) look yummy yummy.

[noob]

Well now, you made this classic image (https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/4e-planescape/images/2/26/GreatWheelMap.jpg) look yummy yummy.

Just flip the image and it is a layered cake.
I can confirm.

[Wizard_Lizard]

it is called the layers of the abyss I guess.
each layer of the abyss is the abyss within itself?
Is the abyss a layered cake made of abysses?

It would explain why the abyss has infinite layers.

[KillianHawkeye]

It's Abysses all the way down. :smallamused:

[Bohandas]

The Athar's "Great Unknown" is either the DM or Gary Gygax

[Bohandas]

It just occurred to me that the reason why low level adventures haven't already been solved by higher level heroes is because high level heroes teleport everywhere and are never in the small out of the way villiages that low level adventures happen in

[Yora]

There is only a single dwarf in existence. He is an alcoholic racist miner who speaks with a Scottish accent and exist in many places and times, and even in multiple universes at the same time.

[LibraryOgre]

There is only a single dwarf in existence. He is an alcoholic racist miner who speaks with a Scottish accent and exist in many places and times, and even in multiple universes at the same time.

...ok, this makes the dwarven orgy I was at last week REALLY weird.

[Cicciograna]

There is only a single dwarf in existence. He is an alcoholic racist miner who speaks with a Scottish accent and exist in many places and times, and even in multiple universes at the same time.

I assume you are familiar with this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe

[Millstone85]

I assume you are familiar with this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universeI still have to watch Tenet, but...
Yoichiro Nambu later applied it to all production and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs, stating that "the eventual creation and annihilation of pairs that may occur now and then, is no creation nor annihilation, but only a change of directions of moving particles, from past to future, or from future to past." sounds a lot like what I read about it.

[Bohandas]

Have I suggested yet that Truespeak sounds like modem noise

[Hellpyre]

Have I suggested yet that Truespeak sounds like modem noise

As if Truespeaking didn't have enough problems already - now no one wants to be in the same room while you do your thing.

[noob]

Truespeaking warps things through warping their names in such a way creatures from the far realms are terrified of those who use truespeak for the fear they might actually understand their names and pronounce those so bad they would become three dimensional creatures.
Because seriously true-speak checks reach the realms of nonsense like 180 at which point basically anything could be possible.
When you think about how reality is bent by a high skill check in a mundane skill a high truespeak check would bend reality supremely.

[Velaryon]

There is only a single dwarf in existence. He is an alcoholic racist miner who speaks with a Scottish accent and exist in many places and times, and even in multiple universes at the same time.

Can confirm; I have met this dwarf several times across multiple campaigns and multiple DMs. He is inescapable.