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Thread: DnD Head Canons

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    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    The mind flayers were originally Gith.
    Woah, that's cool! Could you shed more light on that one?
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    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    The mind flayers were originally Gith.
    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    The Far Realm is actually...the space between universes.
    Both of these are headcanons that I have as well
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    Default Re: DnD Head Canons

    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    The exact means of preparing a given wizard spell shifts from day to day, from place to place, and from person to person (due to a variety of reasons relating to ley lines, weather, individual physiology, etc.)
    The Magicians series by Lev Grossman uses similar fluff for magic:

    Quote Originally Posted by The Magicians, p.131
    [Learning magic] turned out to be about as tedious as it was possible for the study of powerful and mysterious supernatural forces to be. The same way a verb has to agree with its subject, it turned out, even the simplest spell had to be modified and tweaked and inflected to agree with the time of day, the phase of the moon, the intention and purpose and precise circumstances of its casting, and a hundred other factors, all of which were tabulated in volumes of tables and charts and diagrams printed in microscopic jewel type on huge yellowing elephant-folio pages. And half of each page was taken up with footnotes listing the exceptions and irregularities and special cases, all of which had to be committed to memory, too. Magic was a lot wonkier than Quentin thought it would be.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Magicians, p.335
    "You are here to internalize the essential mechanisms of magic. You think"—[Professor Mayakovsky's] accent made it theenk—"that you have been studying magic....You have practiced your Popper and memorized your conjugations and declensions and modifications. What are the five Tertiary Circumstances?"

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

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

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

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

    "You need to do more than memorize, Quentin. You must learn the principles of magic with more than your head. You must learn them with your bones, with your blood, your liver, your heart."
    It's not my preferred explanation for how spell preparation work, but it's definitely good for in-character magibabble.

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

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

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

    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    Also the D&D universe might exist, but it has vastly different rules than our own universe.
    Actually, canonically Earth exists in D&D as one of many Material Plane worlds, and the lack of magic and difficulty in accessing other planes is just a quirk of the local physics like any other sealed crystal sphere.

    Many of the gods and peoples in the Forgotten Realms originated on Earth, one of the two reasons for the setting's name being that supposedly there were lots of connections between Earth and Toril thousands to hundreds of years ago, and the connections to the foreign realms have faded and been forgotten as various creatures left Earth; various settings (such as d20 Past) and modules (such as The Immortal Storm) take place on, or send people to, alternate Earths; and Mordenkainen of Oerth, Elminster of Toril, Dalamar of Krynn, and Ed Greenwood of Earth used to get together for the occasional chat, as recorded in the Wizards Three articles in Dragon Magazine.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
    Darn you PoDL for making me care about a bunch of NPC Commoners!
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    I'm pretty sure turning Waterdeep into a sheet of glass wasn't the best win condition for that fight. We lived though!
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    Quote Originally Posted by D&D_Fan View Post
    The mind flayers were originally Gith.
    ooh, that's even better then my idea that the mindflayers would come about as a direct consequence of gith actions

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    I've recently come to the idea that kobolds have a limited racial memory. Every kobold, even one hatched alone and raised by badgers, knows it is a kobold and knows what that means relative to the rest of the world. They also all have a singular inborn fear of something. Usually, this is identical within a tribe: the Wristbite tribe all fears water too deep to stand in, for instance. Some scholars theorize this is tied to their racial memory: one of their ancestors died so horrifically to whatever they fear that it's stained into the tribes memory until something equally terrible happens in to another kobold and changes its descendants' fear.
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    It occurs to me that the souls and corporeal undead issue from the past few pages could be solved by adding the hun-soul/po-soul distinction from the game Exalted

    EDIT:

    On an unrelated note, everyone in Elysium acts like they're high all the time, and everyone in Hades spends all their time rolling around on the ground sobbing uncontrollably
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-04-20 at 11:51 PM.
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    Default Re: DnD Head Canons

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

    EDIT:

    On an unrelated note, everyone in Elysium acts like they're high all the time, and everyone in Hades spends all their time rolling around on the ground sobbing uncontrollably
    Similar concepts, but I used a simplified version of the Egyptian five-part soul.
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    The natural gods don’t care about how many followers they have - their divinity is an aspect of their existence just as much as having lungs is for us. The few that seek worship normally only do so to further their own ends, rather than because they need it to exist.

    The ascended gods on the other hand do gain their power from the faith of their followers, which is why they are often far more aggressive in recruitment.
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    There are so many ways for paladins to become evil, (blackguards, oathbreaker, death knight, narzugon) that I speculate that paladin powers came from a source that was originally evil. Then through some tomfoolery, the powers of good appropriated the paladin for their ends. Now paladins are either struggling to kludge their class to run off a good power source or that they are all sleeper agents placed to go off where they can inflict the most harm.
    Quote Originally Posted by No brains View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by No brains View Post
    There are so many ways for paladins to become evil, (blackguards, oathbreaker, death knight, narzugon) that I speculate that paladin powers came from a source that was originally evil. Then through some tomfoolery, the powers of good appropriated the paladin for their ends. Now paladins are either struggling to kludge their class to run off a good power source or that they are all sleeper agents placed to go off where they can inflict the most harm.
    I don't normally like alignment, but this makes sense of it. It ties into how evil gods don't give their followers free will. Why do palis have such restrictive oaths? Because they've tapped into power keyed to control its users. So now they can choose to revert to their powers' original master.
    yo

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

    Which implies something interesting in conjunction with the "paladins' power source is secretly of evil origin" thing. You'd expect exaltedness and vileness to look very similar in degree of constraint on behavior but totally different in what those strictures actually entail, yet it's a common complaint that a lot of stuff from BoED is basically the same stuff from BoVD but with the alignment flipped and nonsensical exceptions carved out--diseases are evil and despicable to use, but ravages are totally hunky dory because reasons, for instance. However, paladins are the poster children for exalted characters, and if exalted material literally originated in-character as evil things that were palette-swapped to good things by force (a la sanctify the wicked on a much grander scale) then that suddenly makes a horrifying kind of sense.
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    Dice I only meant the story reason for why Orks are no longer playable.
    yo

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

    That's pretty similar to how they retconned 5e gnolls, though, and I'd say having two "totally normal savage humanoid that's secretly basically a demon with no conscience or morals" races is at least one such race too many, if not two. If they want to make hyena-like demons and boar-like demons, they should do that, not turn classic races into sorta-kinda-demons and nuke all the relevant lore and history.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kevin View Post
    Ghaunadaur can restore the intellect of oozes as easily as it took that intellect away.
    That Which Lurks, true to its name, is just lying low on the faith-o-meter until the time is right.
    This is a copy-paste of my post.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Millstone85 View Post
    This is a copy-paste of my post.
    This is a known tactic of Bots (to make their posts look relevant), in which case the best option is to report the post, something I am about to do.

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    Does anyone mind if i pillage this thread for ideas?
    also my personal headcanon for DnD etc: the "alignment system" was a contrivance of the gods whom are now sincerely regretting there choices (for those old enough to remember when it was set up).
    also every gnome dreams of one day having a cannon for a head.
    the first half of the meaning of life is that there isn't one.

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    My headcanon for the alignment system is that it's inconsistent in-world. And the reason it's inconsistent is because the outer planes are shaped by belief, and people's beliefs are inconsistent.
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    Quote Originally Posted by vasilidor View Post
    Does anyone mind if i pillage this thread for ideas?
    That's what it's here for!

    Quote Originally Posted by vasilidor
    also my personal headcanon for DnD etc: the "alignment system" was a contrivance of the gods whom are now sincerely regretting there choices (for those old enough to remember when it was set up).
    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    My headcanon for the alignment system is that it's inconsistent in-world. And the reason it's inconsistent is because the outer planes are shaped by belief, and people's beliefs are inconsistent.
    Canonically speaking, alignment actually predates the gods, because it arose during the War of Law and Chaos before gods and most mortal races were a thing. And as fundamental cosmic forces, alignments had very little to with humanoid morality and ethics originally:
    • Law is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have a fixed existence and operate everywhere and everywhen according to certain fundamental laws" (hence e.g. the Great Wheel's rigid shape and structure even on the "chaotic" side, since Law won the war, and Mechanus being the engine keeping the rest of the multiverse running smoothly).
    • Chaos is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have no fixed existence and should work differently everywhere and everywhen" (hence e.g. chaotic outsiders and aberrations often having un-fixed forms and no apparent relation to other creatures, and the Abyss being wonky in multiple ways)
    • Good is basically the cosmic force of "Law and Chaos can both coexist on roughly equal terms in the same multiverse" (hence e.g. angels coming in all three Good alignments equally).
    • Evil is basically the cosmic force of "Law and Chaos cannot coexist, one must prevail over the other" (hence e.g. the Blood War picking up where the War of Law and Chaos left off).
    • Neutrality is basically the cosmic force of "existence itself is a compromise and is incompatible with any one alignment completely dominating the others" (hence e.g. early druids being "actively neutral" and trying to shut down overreaches of Good and Law as much as Evil and Chaos).

    The gods are no more arbiters of morality and ethics than they are sources of divine power, they're merely conduits/lenses/etc. of greater cosmic forces that definitely don't have the same views of "goodness" and "chaos" that mortal creatures do; it would be reasonable for the gods to not particularly like the alignment system, since it wasn't their doing and there's nothing they can really do about it.

    Mortal alignment isn't inconsistent so much as it is insufficiently specific when applied to mortals; that is, there are e.g. three different planes of Lawful Goodness representing L(N)G, LG, and LG(N)--and a hypothetical fourth cordant plane representing L(N)G(N) as well--so three or four different mortals labeled as "lawful good" can reasonably have a variety of different takes on a given moral or ethical issue before you even get into philosophical/religious/etc. disagreements within one (sub-)alignment.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Law is basically the cosmic force of "the multiverse should have a fixed existence and operate everywhere and everywhen according to certain fundamental laws" (hence e.g. the Great Wheel's rigid shape and structure even on the "chaotic" side, since Law won the war, and Mechanus being the engine keeping the rest of the multiverse running smoothly).
    Another testament of Law's victory is found on the very plane of Chaos. Indeed, the "chaos-stuff" of Limbo can be shaped, and given relative permanence, by sufficiently disciplined minds such as the githzerai. This trait of the plane comes from a piece of Mechanus that is floating through it. The piece is known as the Spawning Stone for it is also the origin of the slaadi, at least in their modern and suspiciously uniform appearance.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Millstone85 View Post
    Another testament of Law's victory is found on the very plane of Chaos. Indeed, the "chaos-stuff" of Limbo can be shaped, and given relative permanence, by sufficiently disciplined minds such as the githzerai. This trait of the plane comes from a piece of Mechanus that is floating through it. The piece is known as the Spawning Stone for it is also the origin of the slaadi, at least in their modern and suspiciously uniform appearance.
    Note that the Spawning Stone being a part of Mechanus and/or creation of Primus is a 5e retcon. Originally, the Spawning Stone was simply a natural feature of the slaad life cycle, which was later altered by the Slaad Lords (all of which were unique beings of great power who came in a wide variety of forms) to ensure that no slaad would ever arise thereafter who could be as powerful as they were and could challenge them for dominance. This fixed the slaad into a certain set of forms with defined life cycles because, essentially, the best way to weaken exemplars of Chaos is to impose Law upon them.

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


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

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

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

    Hence why the divine realms on Limbo are just Susanowo's big ball of water and storms, Agni's big ball of fire, and Indra's big floating island, like supersized versions of things that any mortal Limbo-shaper could create, and why the planar perinarch spell (lets the caster shape a Divinely Morphic plane) is an extension of the perinarch spell (makes the caster better at shaping Limbo).
    Last edited by PairO'Dice Lost; 2020-05-01 at 01:28 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by abadguy View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by Chambers View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by PairO'Dice Lost View Post
    Note that the Spawning Stone being a part of Mechanus and/or creation of Primus is a 5e retcon.
    Calling it a piece of Mechanus may have been an exaggeration on my part. The 5e MM says that Primus created "a gigantic, geometrically complex stone imbued with the power of law", which I imagine would make visitors think of Mechanus until they come across a stream of chaos-stuff or a bunch of slaadi.

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

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

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

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

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

    *The weave is not the source of magic in Faerun/Toril/Abeir-Toril/Realmspace, but merely stabilizes that place's naturally wild magic and makes it safely usable
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-05-05 at 02:18 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    *The weave is not the source of magic in Faerun/Toril/Abeir-Toril/Realmspace, but merely stabilizes that place's naturally wild magic and makes it safely usable
    That's canonical, actually. Regarding the "the Weave is just the interface" part:

    Quote Originally Posted by 3e FRCS, The Weave
    Mortals cannot directly shape raw magic. Instead, most who wield magic make use of the Weave. The Weave is the manifestation of raw magic, a kind of interface between the will of a spellcaster and the stuff of raw magic. Without the weave, raw magic is locked away and inaccessible--an archmage can't light a candle in a dead magic zone.
    [...]
    The Weave is the conduit spellcasters use to channel magical energy for their spells, both arcane and divine. Finally, the Weave is the fabric of esoteric rules and formulas that comprises the Art (arcane spellcasting) and the Power (divine spellcasting).
    And regarding the "wild magic" part, well, the actual goddess of magic in Realmspace is (meant to be) Lurue. Hints and tidbits of that have shown up in FR novels and some splatbooks (mostly AD&D ones) over the years, and Ed Greenwood has expanded on that several times in interviews, such as:

    Quote Originally Posted by Ed Greenwood, GenCon Interview
    Originally, Lurue WAS magic—before Julia Martin added the name “Weave” to my GenCon explanations of ‘the great web of magic that’s everywhere in Toril, binds Toril together, and IS Toril,’ Lurue was the embodiment of the Weave.
    [...]
    The TSR designers quite rightly (given the humanocentric core of that version of AD&D, with its level and power limits on non-humans) wanted human gods to be front and center and of the greatest power and importance, so Mystra (most important to intelligent creatures trying to USE magic) became also the Guardian or Mother of the Weave, and Lurue sort of . . . danced sideways. To become the awe-inspiring mystery she is now.
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    Much of the items and architecture in the Abyss just appears. A lot of the dark fortresses and stuff weren't built by anyone.
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-05-10 at 11:15 AM.
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    Default Re: DnD Head Canons

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

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    Quote Originally Posted by aj77 View Post
    Night hags are an alternate form (a different caste, or just the female equivalent) of baernaloths.
    I think you mean Yugoloths. "Baernaloth" refers specifically to Yugoloth archfiends (and specifically the most ancient Yugoloth archfiends, the ones who date to the time of the baatorans and obryiths)

    EDIT:
    Strike that. Apparently there's multiple canons and sometimes they're just an ancient caste of regular yugoloths
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-05-15 at 12:18 AM.
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    Clever diviners will learn at least one language that uses compounding rules similar to German. That way the one word answer allotted to many divinations can be something like "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenüber tragungsgesetz" that crams an entire sentence into a single word
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    Japanese also works really well for that.
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    Based on what I know about hyenas, I've come to the conclusion that Yeenoghu is actually female
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2020-05-27 at 02:33 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    Based on what I know about hyenas, I've come to the conclusion that Yeenoghu is actually female
    Alternately, if you want to set Gnolls as a not inherently evil race; Yeenoghu is male, but he's a usurper. Gnolls do have a real deity, in fact a whole pantheon, but the head deity is female.
    Last edited by Luccan; 2020-05-27 at 09:28 PM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Nifft View Post
    All Roads Lead to Gnome.

    I for one support the Gnoman Empire.
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