DnD Head Canons

[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/pla...-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.

[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. 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. 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.

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.

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 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, 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, 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 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 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.)