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Thread: DnD Head Canons
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2021-03-30, 01:20 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Technically, half of Golarion's creation myth would be straight from my setting, because I did my setting workup back in 2006ish before Golarion was a thing. On the Campaign Builder's Guild, if anyone remembers that site before they migrated and lost all the old material. Ah, the good ol' days for homebrew.
But in general, the "different races have very different origins instead of being humans in different hats" thing isn't all that novel. Elves, dwarves, and gnomes being somehow special (in-game because they have their own racial pantheons doing their own thing, out of game because they have more of a fantasy pedigree than halflings and PC-side orcs and goblins and such) has been done for a while, and in fact "elves come from a different planet" was done in Forgotten Realms and "dwarves were forged by a god" was done in Dragonlance long before most spinoff or homebrew settings existed. Meanwhile, the "different evolutionary line" explanation came up a lot when orcs and kobolds looked more obviously pig-like and dog-like, respectively, and lots of the early monstrous humanoids were basically half-animal people (lizardfolk and hyena-people [gnolls] and fish-people [sahuagin and kuo-toa] and so forth), and one of the reason OSR products are full of frog people and snake people is because they're going for the same "humanoid monsters are more primordial/prototypical creatures than the modern races" angle.
What would be novel is headcanonizing an explicit origin for humans that doesn't just put them as the "mix of all the other races"/"collaboration between gods" race, since everyone likes to play around with the various demihumans but nearly always leave humans alone.
EDIT: Actually, along those lines...
Originally Posted by Asmotherion
1) They can breed with basically anything. Part-human planetouched are everywhere (compared to part-other-race planetouched, which are more rare and only come in specific combinations) and near-humans like rilkan and illumians are plentiful, and half-[elves/orcs/dwarves/etc.] are a thing while e.g. orc/dwarves and gnome/elves aren't. Half-dragon and draconic creatures are everywhere, and there are even true-breeding part-dragon offshoots like chimerae and dragon turtles.
2) They come in different colors. Dragons obviously have their very colorful metallic, chromatic, and gem dragon families plus a bunch of one-offs (shadow dragons, planar dragons, etc.) in a rainbow of colors, but humans are also pretty colorful in that they're nearly always the only race in a setting to come in a wide variety of skin tones for a single race; even elves tend to only come in pale/brown/black for high/wood/drow elves, with any other subraces fitting in those general categories.
3) They're disruptive to the status quo. Most settings have some backstory element along the lines of "elves and dwarves and giants and other really old and really-long lived races were chilling for a few thousand years, and then bam, humans came along and in less than a few centuries they're everywhere and running everything," and out of all the monsters out there, dragons are the most likely to just swoop in out of nowhere, burn down a few towns, and take over the area.
4) They're highly changeable and adaptable. All metallic and several other kinds of dragons have some sort of innate shapechanging capability, and all true dragons have distinct age categories that grant them different capabilities over time, while humans are generally the most adaptable PCs (in AD&D they could dual-class instead of multiclass and had no class or level restrictions, in 3e and later they have generalist ability score boosts and fewer or no multiclassing restrictions)
What other race can breed with anything, comes in a bunch of colors, disrupt everything they come in contact with, and are known for their mutations?
Slaad.
Positing that, like slaad, humans and dragons are creatures of innate chaos would put an interesting twist on a setting. It explains why humans burst onto the scene and took charge from the other humanoid races after they'd been chugging along in an orderly fashion for millennia, why it's always the humans that are setting up crazy-powerful empires that are constantly rising and falling and having major side effects on the setting, why (in earlier editions) humans work so differently from the other races mechanically and flavor-wise, and so on.
It would also give you a good opportunity to flip the usual implicit "Law is better than Chaos" assumption a bunch of people have. Make Paladins of Freedom the default paladin and all the good theocracies CG instead of LG! Toss the Law-leaning monarchies and empires with their feudalism and massive armies and such and fill the continent with Chaos-leaning city-states and federations with bands ofadventurersprivateers instead of standing armies! Paint the archons and devils as the truly alien and inscrutable beings that they are and paint the eladrin and demons as having more relatable and human-like motivations! Instead of emphasizing the Chaotic-ish weirdness and uniqueness of aberrations, emphasize the unnatural Lawfulness of illithid/elder brain hive minds and thrall-keeping aboleths and beholders!
And sure, there are lawful dragons and humans and they appear to average out to neutrality on a race-wide level, but everyone knows they're really all a bit chaotic where it counts. Even the naturally-Chaotic slaad churn out naturally-Lawful gormeels every so often.Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2021-03-30 at 01:58 PM.
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2021-03-30, 02:16 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Would "artificially created out of hobgoblins via magical genetic engineering" (along with orcs, just by different sets of elves) count? Because that's how my setting handles humans. And since hobgoblins are temporary forced-mutations of goblins (when a tribe has excess group psychic energy, they pump it into a member and create a hobgoblin, and the process is reversible), that makes humans technically descended from goblins.
Heck, none of the gods even existed as such until well after most of the current races were in place and in general had little or nothing to do with creating races.Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-03-30, 11:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I've seen both "humans are magically-/alchemically-/genetically-modified X" and "goblinoids are all one race that Pokévolve into different forms with time/combat experience/environmental pressures/etc." several times before, and of course the collective-tribal-psychic-energy thing sounds a bit like 40K orks, but all three things together with the reversibility is definitely a novel combination with a lot of plot hook potential.
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2021-03-31, 09:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Oh, and I forgot to mention that goblins have a form of unconsious collective memory within a tribe. In fact, a tribeless goblin is basically a human intellect cat, except without more than the most basic object permanence. So tribes kinda work as swarms and individualized thought is doable but not natural.
Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-04-05, 10:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
It would also give you a good opportunity to flip the usual implicit "Law is better than Chaos" assumption a bunch of people have. Make Paladins of Freedom the default paladin and all the good theocracies CG instead of LG!
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2021-04-06, 10:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Well, at least for all the settings that are part of the Great Wheel, Law is the more natural/default force than Chaos (in-game because Law won the War of Law and Chaos and got to set up the multiverse as it wanted, out-of-game because a lot of early writers equated Law with Good and Chaos with Evil), hence why the Chaotic planes are shoved into the same ordered framework as the Lawful ones, slaad and demons and such have the same neatly categorized sets of forms that modrons and devils and such do, and so forth...and as I pointed out in a post a few pages back, the concept of "entropy" doesn't really exist in the Wheel in the same sense as it does in the real world. So Chaos = natural and Law = unnatural doesn't quite work.
But for a homebrew world using a variant cosmology, or for a campaign that takes the basic Wheel setup and drops the AD&D/Planescape lore? Yeah, making Chaos the "natural" alignment instead of True Neutral would be a nice twist on things, and would work nicely for a campaign with a "magic vs. technology" or "good wilderness vs. bad industrialization" theme. It even almost works with the Wheel as-is, with CG being fairly nature-y (eladrin are animalistic, the Court of Stars are elflike, and Elysium, the Beastlands, Arborea are a pastoral paradise, full of animals, and exaggerated natural terrain, respectively) and the Abyss having a bunch of nature-themed layers (spiders in the Demonweb Pits, snakes in Smargard, the Brine Flats, etc.).
It's more "reflavoring" than "headcanon," granted, but here's a quick stab at how you could make some minor tweaks to the Outer Planes to whip up an alternate Great Wheel emphasizing the "nature vs. artificiality" theme. On the Chaos side:- Elysium: Removed as the NG plane, though one could add an "Elysium" back as a new layer of Arborea.
- Beastlands, Arborea: No change.
- Ysgard: Its name becomes Vanaheim, and rather than focusing on humanoid warriors fighting each other, it's about all sorts of living beings hunting one another, in a "nature red in tooth and claw" kind of way.
- Limbo: Its title changes from "Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo" to "Primordial Ooze of Limbo," the morphic traits lineup goes from a purely elemental air/earth/fire/water to a more swamp-y wood/earth/storm/water, and the slaad take on all sorts of reptilian and amphibious forms, not just froglike ones.
- Pandemonium: Drop the insanity-inducing wind and focus on the fact that it's a maze of endless tunnels, the Underdark writ large.
- Abyss: Remove or change any layers that aren't obviously themed around "nature gone bad."
- Carceri: Its name becomes Faerie, and it changes from "six prison planets you physically can't leave" to "six faerie courts that the rulers don't want to let you leave," which works nicely because the bog/jungle/desert environments of the first three layers and barren mountains/cold ocean/ice environments of the last three layers already fit into a classic Summer/Winter setup.
- Hades: Removed as the NE plane, though one could add it back as a new middle layer of Faerie to provide a gradient between Summer desert and Winter mountains.
And on the Law side:- Bytopia: Make Dothion more urban and Shurrock as settled as Dothion is now, so the layer dichotomy goes from "settled half vs. wild half" to "place for people who like to live where it's settled vs. people who want to go out and do the settling."
- Celestia: Its title changes from "Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia" to "Sevenfold Citadel of Celestia," and Celestia itself changes from a mountain to a tower--specifically a fortress-monastery of sorts--with the Silver Sea becoming a Silver Moat.
- Arcadia, Mechanus, Acheron: No changes.
- Baator: Add cities or fortresses to Stygia and Malbolge to complete the "diabolical city/fortress surrounded by a Captain Planet villain's dream environment" theme.
- Gehenna: The volcanoes belching lava are now strip-mined mountaintops belching smog.
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2021-04-14, 11:50 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The Kalashtar are habitually late, habitually forget to get dressed, and various other dream cliches
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2021-04-14, 05:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-04-14, 06:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The Cranky Gamer
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2021-04-14, 09:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2021-05-01, 01:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The main causes of death for trolls are stomach diseases and cancer, both of which are unimpeded by the trolls' regeneration
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2021-05-01, 08:27 AM (ISO 8601)
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2021-05-01, 04:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The Curse of the House of Rookwood: Supernatural horror and family drama.
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2021-05-01, 06:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
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2021-05-01, 06:11 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
yo
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2021-05-01, 06:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
My setting has trolls that don't have a natural age limit. At least...unless they've ever been injured. Because their regeneration means that for every time they have to heal, a little more grows than should. So trolls get progressively more and more knobbly and distorted each time they regenerate, until they suffocate under the weight of their regrown flesh. And since this regeneration takes energy, trolls are always hungry. Which makes them get injured trying to acquire food (usually from something that'd rather not be eaten)...
Dawn of Hope: a 5e setting. http://wiki.admiralbenbo.org
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2021-05-01, 08:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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2021-05-01, 10:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
I think when a troll gets cancer, it should grow out of control until it becomes the monster from Akira.
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2021-05-02, 02:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
OMG, I just realized that Deadpool is a troll.
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2021-05-03, 03:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The entire elven race is being manipulated by mind flayers, and drow were a mind flayer experiment. The elven gods are secretly a cabal of mind flayers.
alternatively all subraces are the cause of mindflayer manipulation!
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2021-05-04, 10:30 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The axes of draconic alignment are not good/evil and order/chaos. Draconic alignment fluctuates between sated/hungry and asleep/awake.
Scale color and resistances are sympathetic reactions to their environment, not species-level traits. A dragon with a volcanic lair that moves to an arctic ice cavern will change from red to white the next time she molts (which could be months or years; the specifics of draconic lifecycles are still poorly understood, and individual dragons have some degree of conscious control over the process).
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Re: DnD Head Canons
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Re: DnD Head Canons
The Cranky Gamer
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude; the appearance of truth within the framework of the game.
*Picard management tip: Debate honestly. The goal is to arrive at the truth, not at your preconception.
*Mutant Dawn for Savage Worlds!
*The One Deck Engine: Gaming on a budget
Written by Me on DriveThru RPG
There are almost 400,000 threads on this site. If you need me to address a thread as a moderator, include a link.
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2021-05-04, 07:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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2021-05-16, 08:04 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Sammaster is a distant relative to the members of the Wyvernspur family to explain why Flattery Wyvernspur (a clone of Finder) looks almost identical to him.
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2021-05-17, 03:52 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Not a head canon but my own setting Humans are interesting.
Since all gods were once mortals in setting. The setting implies evolution as some of the dragon gods remember proto-humans and talk about how the divergence between humans and the elves was caused when they settled the fey and the material with the elves then offshooting repeatedly post that into the various types.
The head of the dwarven pantheon it is assumed was well a dwarf who magically granted his descendants the same special abilities he had leading to the divergence of dwarves.
Well the head of the orc pantheon took a collection of humans and dwarves who would become the orcs.
Halflings are a modern off shoot of humans. Goblins are a similar offshoot but to orcs. Gnomes are a similar offshoot but to elves.
Tritons are early humans who adapted to the plane of water without infusing elemental energy. With the sea elves being a interbreeding of them and elves.
Centaurs are assumed to be a mage who granted a nomad clans wish to forever be apart of their horses. And would develop into the culture you later see, along with some druids messing around leading to off-shots like elven centaurs who would eventually develop deer traits.
Minotaurs are implied to be the sons of the first centaur god after he shagged a herd of cows. Others say the first minotaur shagged a group of horses and made centaurs. Because the two are one deity.
Kitsune are the descendants of humans and folk spirits becoming their own distinct lineage both fox spirit and not.
Catfolk no one knows some guess they were a mages attempt to prove evolution with cats. But that would raise the question then why do dog folk have a deity but cats don't. Or why the rabbit and otter folk both also don't have a god.
Merfolk are suspected to be tritons and/or sea elves who modified themselves or magically conceived with sea life
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2021-06-08, 09:22 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: DnD Head Canons
Industrization, assembly lines, etc. are among the forbidden secrets that turn you into an allip.
"If you want to understand biology don't think about vibrant throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology" -Richard Dawkins
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