Post your crazy RPG theories!

[Inevitability]

Everyone has them: weird theories on what the Lady of Pain really is, or what really happened on the Day of Mourning. This is the place to post them!

I'll start:

The feywild, material plane, and shadowfell are the same place, just different places in time. The exact chronological order is material --> fey --> shadow.

First, there is the material plane, the 'day'. Magic is present, but not omnipresent. Wildlife is mundane, but supernatural creatures exist.

Then, there is the feywild, the 'evening'. In this age, magic is everywhere. Nonmagical creatures have been driven to extinction by their supernatural brethren, and so have the less magical races. It should be noted that elves and gnomes, both races associated with magic, are prevalent in the feywild. The fey are former humanoids who have transcended their mortal bodies with powerful magic.

The fey's chaotic nature and decadent lifestyle, however, eventually causes their cities to crumble. When that happens, the Shadowfell is born, a realm of eternal night where only the undead survive.

More evidence: owlbears, allegedly created by a wizard on the material plane, have been around in the feywild for ages, according to that world's residents. The various planes also share major landmarks, just twisted by the magic prevalent in that time.

[Hopeless]

Exalted.
Galactus-like entity arrived devoured the Earth however a portion survives inside merging with remains of other worlds that was devoured.
The previous Elders of the resulting society convert members of the various races into suitable servitors creating the vampires, chaotic faerie, lycanthrope, etc however the first human Vampire goes very badly wrong creating the first Exalted leading to the inevitable epoch shattering war that ended up killing most of the Primordial elders and creating the current regime.
That first Exalted turned down becoming the Solar Exalted God, but did so because he figured out a way to counter the curse... Unfortunately the other exalted refuse to relinquish their positions of power to put the regular non-exalted to replace them... thus bringing on the downfall of the Solar Exalted as the Sidereals remain blind to what's really going on!

[OldTrees1]

1)
There are 26 inner planes (not my theory but one I have adopted):
6 primary: Air, Earth, Fire, Water, Positive, Negative
12 secondary (bordered by 2 primary)
8 tertiary (bordered by 3 secondary)

These 26 planes form a shell. But what is caged inside & why?

2)
There is the planes of the great wheel, the outlands, & the planes connecting the wheel to the outlands (mildly neutral planes). However that would give us a topless cylinder shape. What is the missing plane that is located on the other side of sigil from the outlands?

[Amaril]

Don't Rest Your Head is really a game about mental illness. The Mad City and the Nightmares aren't real at all--it's all just a delusion brought on by sleep deprivation, and whatever stress or trauma caused said sleep deprivation. To "win" and escape the Nightmares, you have to face whatever is troubling you and overcome it, at which point you manage to regain your hold on reality and are free of your Awakening.

(Maybe not the most out-there theory--I think the book itself actually suggests this as a possibility somewhere--but I still think it counts.)

[JeenLeen]

In oWoD Mage, belief shapes even the most fundamental actions. Walking was once a Correspondence teleportation spell; having a two-story house was once a Correspondence 5 stacking location ability.

Evidence: basic stuff like fire or weaving clothes together doesn't work in at least one umbral realm. Pointy sticks don't either, I think, though a club does. Whose to say it didn't a while before walking became more than magic?

[nedz]

The number of planes of chaos (Limbo) is non-deterministic - it's just that most of them are very small.

[UndeadArcanist]

the githzerai and githyanki are actually elves twisted by the illthids. This is why they both have high dexterity, high wisdom or intelligence, thin frames, high cheekbones, pointed ears, and long lifespans. This, of course, brings up the question of what, if anything, happened to the enslaved drow?

[ExLibrisMortis]

In 3.5:
The elemental planes are arranged around the material like the faces of a cube, rather than a circle.
Opposed faces are like the the positive and negative poles of a battery. Fire versus water, air versus earth, and positive versus negative. These currents cross in the material plane, which is balanced, but different outer planes have different amounts of various currents. Deities use the currents closest to them; the orientation of their outer plane is important in the 'economy of power'.
Like electrical motors, you can run a living being 'backwards', which is what an undead creature is. I suppose you could do the same thing with, say, fire element creatures, but I don't know a matching template for that.
Ascending to godhood requires you to create a new outer plane (or kill a deity and take over); this got progressively harder as more outer planes were added, because the connection of each outer plane to the inner plane power sources got thinner with each new outer plane, reducing the benefit of having such a plane.
The first outer plane wrapped all around the inner and material planes; the second pushed the first aside, and started the first struggle over the inner plane power currents.
This first struggle just happened to be aligned across the positive/negative axis, which is also what the first created species were fuelled by, respectively. This is why negative energy is considered 'evil' and positive 'good', at least by living creatures, even though the planes themselves are neutral. There are negative energy planets where it's the reverse. It's all cosmological politics. Later planes have divided up this struggle, but the fire/water and air/earth struggles just never got as serious, after the first two deities took their positions.
Fire and air get along fairly well, as do water and earth; they more or less represent the chaotic/lawful axis (although that is an in-universe cultural construct, like the good/evil axis).

Eh... it's got it snags and holes, but I'm still working on it.

[RazorChain]

I am a player character in the game Humans & Households, that makes you forumites only minor NPC's.

[Kami2awa]

The Deep Ones in Call of Cthulhu and humans are the same species, and humans are the "axolotl" form.

They can interbreed with each other, with the offspring eventually becoming more Deep Ones. The act of interbreeding activates otherwise dormant genes in the offspring that leads them to develop fully into Deep Ones. This means that, given the right stimulus, any human might mature into a deep one.

[Misereor]

I am a player character in the game Humans & Households, that makes you forumites only minor NPC's.

So as another player I'm curious. Does my real crappy "Casual Sex with Supermodels" stat reflect the campaign tone or just an unlucky character creation roll?

[Kami2awa]

I am a player character in the game Humans & Households, that makes you forumites only minor NPC's.

To turn this around, all the D&D worlds are actually within a hyper-realistic VR setting in the future. This explains many of idiosyncrasies of the game (abstract hp, Vancian casting, colour-coded dragons, NPCs being statted completely differently to PCs in some editions) which are simply programmed into the world because the programmers (or their marketing committee) wanted them.

[BayardSPSR]

So as another player I'm curious. Does my real crappy "Casual Sex with Supermodels" stat reflect the campaign tone or just an unlucky character creation roll?

Don't worry, it's a dump stat.

[2D8HP]

My theories aren't crazy at all!
Just because those blind fools at the Mages Guild roll their eyes, and won't admit the truth!
I'll show them! All show them all!

First, the half-elves, and half-orcs among us show that elves, humans, and orcs are in fact the same species!
Humans are actually descendents of long ago Elves and Orcs.
Don't walk away! In your hart you know it's true!

Also the reason Elves have low light vision like Dwarves and Gnomes, is because they too originally lived underground. Clearly these rumors of "Dark Elves", sometimes called "Drow", point towards the inescapable conclusion that "surface" Elves are in fact descended from Elves who were exiled from the Underdark because they were insufficiently badass! And in fact the day star bleached them! That is why Wood Elves who lived under the shade of their forest homes are darker hued. Either that or the reliance on magic among the so called "high elves", makes them both lazy and pasty!

In fact this overuse of Magic by some may doom us all!
The ruins of the Ancients all around, in the wastelands and underground shows the truth!
Long ago the Elves
used up all the magic causing the fall of their civilization!

Overuse of Magic in one place leeches the Mana from the Earh, leaving desolate wastelands in it's absence!
The ancestors of the Elves having squandered all the magic fled underground, with a few remnants learning to survive in a world without magic. Yes humans and orcs! The Orcs who infest the ruins are the savage descendents of the Elves too stupid to leave. We humans are the descendents of those who didn't hide underground, or stupidly stay amongst the ruins, but instead pioneered new lands and made new tools.
Why else would it be humans who invented the crossbow, the plow, sailing ships, and windmills? Only in times without Magic would anyone bother to build such things! That's why so many of us still toil on the land and in our smithies, instead of just learning Wizardry, were not too stupid to learn Spellcraft! Nay, deep in our souls we feel the warning that it can't last!

That is why these tomb robbing Adventurer's have lately been finding magic items littering the ruins. For centuries there was insufficient environmental Mana for those items to be worth picking up!
That is why there are Sorcerers now born among us when previous generations had none!
The return of Magic to the wastelands is why suddenly all these magicsl monsters now infect our lands! Do you think our ancestors could have survived long if they'd always existed?

We have forgotten and grown soft!
We must conserve what Magic is left and learn from the Gnomes ways to make wonders without the Arcane arts. Too much reliance on and use of Wizardry will doom us!

We must learn to grow our on food and distill water, without relying on Create Food and Water Spells, and if these Magic-User's continue to waste the Magic away in trivial goals, we must learn to fight off without spells, the bears, wolves and other beasts that threaten us, else we fall to claws and fangs!

Take these pamphlets and spread the word before it's too late!

[bulbaquil]

The real world is a persistent campaign setting. The first game was actually set during Charlemagne's time, and it involved elves, dwarves, dragons, etc., the standard fantasy tropes; all history prior to that point is simply in-world lore created as a backdrop for that campaign and the future campaigns in the same setting (which spanned most of medieval times). However, fairly recently the group expressed interest in playing in a James Bond-style modern espionage game (not Shadowrun), which requires a somewhat modern world. The GM thought it would be cool to have it take place in the future of the same setting, so he bumped the timeline forward (this is also the reason why we didn't industrialize sooner - we were still NPCs in a medieval fantasy world!).

Where are the elves, dwarves, etc. now? Well, as part of the modern update, during the chaos of the Thirty Years' War, the elves all packed up and used a teleportation circle to get to Tau Ceti, having decided that it would be best to leave the world before the humans obliterated it and to come back later. As part of their "leaving no trace" policy, they identified and magically hid all the evidence of supernatural creatures (including fossils etc.); the "dinosaur from the Jurassic" you see in the museum was actually a dragon slain by a knight in 1297. (Magic does weird things to time, carbon dating, and the like, and as magic can only be detected by magic rather than by technology...)

Currently we are gearing up for a gritty post-apoc-style game to be set in 2115. We are part of the historical backstory of the game.

[Inevitability]

Like electrical motors, you can run a living being 'backwards', which is what an undead creature is. I suppose you could do the same thing with, say, fire element creatures, but I don't know a matching template for that.

3.5 had the necromental template in Libris Mortis. It sounds like it'd fit.

[ExLibrisMortis]

3.5 had the necromental template in Libris Mortis. It sounds like it'd fit.

Huh, I thought a necromental was an elemental infused with negative energy, but that's not actually what it says - it's literally an 'undead elemental', without any reference to positive/negative energy (although the Undead type means it's healed by negative energy, rather than cold, as would be appropriate). Nice find!

[Max_Killjoy]

The elemental planes are arranged around the material like the faces of a cube, rather than a circle.
Opposed faces are like the the positive and negative poles of a battery. Fire versus water, air versus earth, and positive versus negative. These currents cross in the material plane, which is balanced, but different outer planes have different amounts of various currents. Deities use the currents closest to them; the orientation of their outer plane is important in the 'economy of power'.
Like electrical motors, you can run a living being 'backwards', which is what an undead creature is. I suppose you could do the same thing with, say, fire element creatures, but I don't know a matching template for that.

I really like that -- at the very least as a "three-dimensional metaphor" for non-Euclidean interplanar mechanics, it works FAR better than the wheel or circle or stack layers, I think.

[Telwar]

Primarily for 3.5, but works in 4e, 5e, and previous editions too:

Fireballs (and other AoE spells) are not actually explosions.

Evidence: Take your average 10' radius fireball. Put a 15 x 15 creature on one side with all 9 of its squares in the blast radius. Then, take its identical twin sibling and place only one square of its base in the "explosion." They both take the same amount of damage, despite the variance in exposure to the "blast."

Argument: Clearly, if this were an actual explosion, the target fully engulfed would take far more harm from the "explosion" than the other target that was much less exposed.

Therefore, the AoE "explosion" is not an explosion. Instead, I posit, when the spell reaches the target coordinates, it automatically surveys the area in its detection radius, and forms an attacking penetrator for each valid target in its radius. The nature of this mechanism is unclear; it may be a nearly-physical item, it may be a gate to an appropriate dimension whose physics match the aesthetics of the spell, it may be nano-gnomes in appropriately-colored hats flinging themselves and their underpants at the target, whatever. In any event, instead of having an undodgeable wavefront, you have a spread of "attacks" that automatically hit no matter how fast you are, unless you're preternaturally able to avoid these "attacks" (i.e. have evasion). The "explosion" or "blast" is merely a special effect used to overawe the masses.

The targeting mechanism for this effect can be hacked using metamagics, and also can have parts pulled out and used on their own (such as a true seeing spell, which uses part of the targeting matrix to nearly unerringly identify anything despite effects the target is using to hide.

[Honest Tiefling]

For some reason, Bane, the Lawful Evil god of Tryanny, Fear and Strife and general BBEG of the Forgotten Realms Pantheon lets a shrine of Tymora have a shrine in his most holy and controlled of cities. She's not a literal goddess of freedom, but she does support a large and powerful organization devoted to overthrowing tyrants, you know, like all of Bane's followers.

Why does he do this? He's got a thing for blondes. Sure, her sister is hotter but she'll probably max out all of the divine credit cards and has white hair. I believe that in 4th edition, he ends up marrying Loviatar, who is another blonde. The succubus who fathered his child was probably also a blonde.

Gentlemen prefer blondes, even when they're evil, apparently.

[THEChanger]

My all time favorite conspiracy is the Burning Hate Conspiracy from 3.5.

[BayardSPSR]

Therefore, the AoE "explosion" is not an explosion. Instead, I posit, when the spell reaches the target coordinates, it automatically surveys the area in its detection radius, and forms an attacking penetrator for each valid target in its radius. The nature of this mechanism is unclear; it may be a nearly-physical item, it may be a gate to an appropriate dimension whose physics match the aesthetics of the spell, it may be nano-gnomes in appropriately-colored hats flinging themselves and their underpants at the target, whatever. In any event, instead of having an undodgeable wavefront, you have a spread of "attacks" that automatically hit no matter how fast you are, unless you're preternaturally able to avoid these "attacks" (i.e. have evasion). The "explosion" or "blast" is merely a special effect used to overawe the masses.

Ah, so basically a precision-guided EFP cluster munition, labeled as HE to evade arms treaties.

[Telonius]

My pet theory: Vows of Poverty were originally thought up by a Falxugon. The victim would swear loyalty to Baator, and give over all their material possessions, for a bunch of stuff that looks exciting at first but turns out to leave them worse off than before. The idea was shot down by his commander, on the grounds that nobody would be dumb enough to take that kind of a deal. In a fit of mischief, the Falxugon put the idea in the suggestion box of a Lawful Good temple.

[Belac93]

Why are healing spells evocation school? Because they are literally taking the reverse effect of the damage, and applying it. So when they cast cure wounds on someone who was damaged with a fireball spell, they are taking the residual magic in the air, and applying it to healing. That is why you can't affect someone who is at full hit points. There is no energy to heal them with.

[Jay R]

Gods and Creation in my current world:

Spoiler: Spoilered for length

Show

There are two gods called together The Uncreated. Separately, they are The Lord and The Lady, and nothing is known about them.

Their first children were the sun, the earth, the oceans, and the winds. These four are either the creators of our world, or the stuff of which it was created - it's not clear which. They are, of course, the essence of the four earthly elements, the embodiment of the elemental planes, and the structure of the world. There is a fifth one, representing the quintessence, but since that cannot exist on our changeable and imperfect world, he/she has no influence here.

They have an abundance of names. The Sun God, for instance, is known as Apollo, Aten, Ra, Tonatiuh, Surya, Helios and many others. Similarly, every earth goddess is known to be the true earth, born of The Lord and The Lady - even those with known other parents, or those with no parents, like Gaea. Attempts to question the logic of this are met with the sacred chant, "Hakuna heigh-ho fragilistic bibbidy chim-cheree," which has been variously translated as, "It is not wise to question these mysteries, which are beyond the knowledge of our world," or "Die, you heathen scum, die!" In practice, there is no significant difference between the two translations.

The children/creations of these four are the only gods who will answer prayers or interact with the world directly. They include all the pantheons that have ever existed.
Except Lovecraft.

The Lord and The Lady have been identified as the embodiments of Good and Evil, or Law and Chaos, or Male and Female, or Light and Darkness, or any other opposing concepts.

Wars have been fought between those who believe they represent Good and Evil, and those who insist on Law and Chaos.

Wars have been fought between those who believe The Lord and The Lady hate each other with a hatred surpassing any passion on earth, and those who believe that they love each other with a love more true than any mortal could ever know.

Wars have been fought between those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Good and The Lady is Evil, and those who know beyond all doubt that The Lord is Evil and The Lady is Good.

All of the above will be available knowledge to the players. Here is what they will not know.

No arcane or divine magic will successfully find out any fact about The Lord and The Lady. I have three answers, all completely true, and mutually incompatible.

1. The Lord is Fate, and The Lady is Luck. Neither can exist without the other, and each action in the world, from a sneeze to the fall of an empire, is a victory of one of them over the other.
2. They are Yin and Yang, and the heart of each beats in the breast of the other. They represent complementary, not opposing, forces. Each is in fact all of the universe except the other, but neither one represents any specific principle (not even male and female), and whichever one represents goodness in one situation might be the evil in another. Together, they represent wholeness and balance
3. They are the Creators - the mother and father of the world, which they birthed and/or created for some great purpose which is not yet fulfilled.

No mortal can comprehend the true nature of any god. Therefore the image, history, and culture of any god are the simple stories people tell themselves about the gods, to comfort themselves into believing they know something.

Do you believe that your god is a Norse, hammer-throwing warlike thunder god with a red beard? Then that's what you see in your visualizations, and those are the aspects that your god shows to you.

So do you create the gods by your belief, or does the god who most closely resembles your belief respond to your prayers in the form you expect, or are they merely your own hallucinations that always occur as a side effect when invoking divine magic? One wise sage, Chicxulub the Philosophical, actually asked this question. He is said to have discovered the true answer after sixty years of study, prayer, and meditation, on March 23, in the year 643.

Incidentally, the largest impact crater ever discovered is the Chicxulub crater, which appeared on March 23, in the year 643. (Many have entered this crater to explore it. None have returned.)

Oh yes, and the fifth child of The Lord and The Lady, representing the Fifth Element? It turns out that he's not the stuff of the heavens, but of the hells. His children and descendants are all the demons, devils, and daemons. His creations are the evil spirits of the underworld. No, he's not out to conquer the world or destroy it or anything of that sort. He just likes to see war, strife, and pain.

[nedz]

Why are healing spells evocation school? Because they are literally taking the reverse effect of the damage, and applying it. So when they cast cure wounds on someone who was damaged with a fireball spell, they are taking the residual magic in the air, and applying it to healing. That is why you can't affect someone who is at full hit points. There is no energy to heal them with.

Surely they are evoking Positive Energy? Seriously you can fluff almost any spell as being in almost any school.

[KillianHawkeye]

Vampires and their vulnerability to the classic wooden stake.

Well in D&D 3.5, a Vampire's damage reduction is only penetrated by silver weapons. A small piece of wood couldn't possibly actually hurt one. Wouldn't it be funny if this wooden stake "vulnerability" was really the result of a massive campaign of misinformation perpetrated by the vampires and their mind-controlled servants? Garlic and running water probably don't do anything to vampires either, but after the humans bought the wooden stake thing, they wanted to see how much farther they could take it.

[OldTrees1]

Surely they are evoking Positive Energy? Seriously you can fluff almost any spell as being in almost any school.

For example:
Abjuration: ???
Conjuration: Conjure Positive Energy
Divination: ???
Enchantment: Make you think you are healthier (warning, not effective on some subjects)
Evocation: Create Positive Energy
Illusion: Make reality pretend you are healthier (warning, lower efficiency and does not work on self)
Necromancy: *Cough* *Cough* Control over life & death remember?
Transmutation: Minor short duration regeneration
Universal: ???

[nedz]

Abjuration: Endure Pain; Protection from Bleeding / Infection (OK this one's a hard sell)
Conjuration: Conjure Positive Energy *Cough* *Cough* 3.5
Divination: Improved First Aid
Enchantment: Make you think you are healthier (warning, not effective on some subjects) - HP are an abstraction, also Hypnotism
Evocation: Create Positive Energy
Illusion: Make reality pretend you are healthier (warning, lower efficiency and does not work on self) - Shadow magic - you can do Shadow Conjuration so this is possible in 3.5
Necromancy: *Cough* *Cough* Control over life & death remember?
*Cough* *Cough* in AD&D all healing spells were Necromantic
Transmutation: Minor short duration regeneration
Universal: See above

[Honest Tiefling]

There's some sort of spirit or curse that keeps whisking away the shirts of the male iconics in Golarion, that's why in some releases no one with a Y chromsome appears with one despite the fact that their female couterparts seem to have mastered this strange shirt-based tecnology. Valeros is too drunk to either care or notice.