Dungeons & Dragons lore!

Thought I'd start a separate topic focusing on Dungeons & Dragons lore because the other thread is mostly about playing the game

Anyway,most interesting thing I learned recently is that Mindflayers have a patron deity called Ilsensine who is the god of Mental Domination and Magic,also they had another God called Maanzecorian who was their god of Knowledge and Philosophy until he was killed by a demon prince called Orcus

"Deity" may be the wrong term. Lords of Madness (3.5th Edition) explains that Illithids are too egotistical to worship anything, at most they revere Ilsensine as an ideal that an Elder Brain may attain after eons of growth, an all-seeing and all-knowing entity not unlike a giant brain of pure thought whose ganglia extend across space and time, which views mind flayers as the pinnacle of existence and may respond to their entreaties for aid or favor. Volo's Guide to Monsters (5th Edition) explicitly states that Ilsensine and Maanzecorian aren't true deities, but concepts or philosophical ideals that mind flayers sometimes meditate upon. Which raises the question of what exactly Orcus killed during his spree of deicide prior to 3rd Edition.

It's consistently noted that illithids don't have much use for religion because 1) they're just that arrogant and 2) they have no concerns about what happens after death, since their brains are extracted from their corpses and deposited in the Elder Brain's pool to fuse with it. Though Lords of Madness also mentions that mind flayers believe that their individual consciousness survives this fusion, which is completely false (a misconception the Elder Brains see no reason to correct).

Though there are the Mind Flayers of Thoon (Monster Manual V, 3.5th Edition) that encountered something in the Far Realm they know follow with religious zeal, though no one is sure whether it's a proper god, eldritch horror, or alien philosophy. All its adherents will say is that "Thoon is Thoon and Thoon is all!"

Edited by Tacitus on Aug 23rd 2020 at 2:39:55 PM

I don't think it is inaccurate,even if Mindflayers are so arrogant that they don't recognise that their veneration of such figures amounts to worship,maybe cult of personalty is the proper term.

Meanwhile aboleths don't so much worship the closest thing they have to gods, the Elder Evils, as just kind of try to stay out of their way.

Its news to me that even aboleths have gods

I think it's fair to say in Dungeons and Dragons everybody has a God of some kind

Aboleths aren't religious, they're Naytheists. The gods quite evidently exist, and can clearly influence the mortal world through clerics, but since the aboleths predate the divinities worshiped by other, lesser races, they have no reason to worship such beings. And the fact that the aboleths still exist means that those deities can't be all-powerful, either.

The Elder Evils aren't gods, either, they're timeless entities older than even the aboleths, barely notice the Material Plane, and will continue to exist long after its destruction. Even Piscaethces, the "Blood Queen" thought to have spawned the aboleth race, did so accidentally, and takes no further interest in her progeny. The Elder Evils simply act on their own unknowable agendas, interacting with the Material Plane as their whims take them. But they are old, and they are powerful, so the aboleths respect them, and acknowledge them in the architecture of their sunken cities - a red crystal dome representing Piscaethces, purple witchfires to honor Y'chak, the Violet Flame, roofless structures and open spaces to represent Bolothamogg, Him Who Watches from Beyond the Stars, and so forth.

Yes, these Elder Evils are shameless expies of the Outer Gods from the Cthulhu Mythos.

It'd be a cult of personality without an actual "person" at the center of it, going by current lore. On the other hand, given the nature of belief in the setting, with enough worshipers/acknowledgers/adherents of Ilsensine, a giant spectral brain might indeed show up beneath Outland.

Lore question: what would a +90% Dragonborn city-state look like?

I want to shake up the multicultural cities my troupe usually encounters for something rarely seen, and having a Dragonborn player who is usually the odd one out wherever they travel, I wanted to give him the pleasant surprise of being the one who fits in.

A lot is going to depend on how dragonborn operate in your specific world: their preferred diets, their specific cultures, and so on. Spitballing using the ones in the Players' Handbook:

• Clan is important to them, so I could see the city being divided up along those lines - instead of having mercantile districts and the like, each clan has its best attempt at a self-sufficient district, with its own shops, its own farming territory outside the city, and so on. The city leadership could be a council of clans, with the leader either that of the strongest clan, elected by the majority vote of the council, or even an outsider (a dragonborn leader would probably favour their clan, so they might appoint someone with no loyalty to any of them). They might even have their own decorative systems: maybe the Drachedandions paint their doors red and wear a red sash, while the Yarjerit favour a white moon pattern, for example.
• Naturally, the flipside of this clan loyalty is inter-clan rivalries. Some hulking dragonborn assuming you're loyal to a rival clan because you happened to wear green could be a minor challenge for the adventurers to get past, or they might see a street fight between two groups of young hotheads or a bar fight that started with an insult to someone's clan. Those stripped of clan membership probably have a very hard life. Non-dragonborn might be expected to strive for membership in some clan or other if they intend to stay.
• PHB dragonborn are naturally stronger than equivalently built humans, so things are probably built to be a little heavier and sturdier - the door to a dragonborn house is probably going to be surprisingly weighty. They probably favour stone over wood for most construction; wood is too vulnerable to their breath weapons.
• On that note, I would expect to see a bias toward classes that work well with dragonborn stats - there are probably more sorcerers than wizards, you're more likely to see a paladin in a religious role than a cleric, and so on. They still have every class, just more of some than others in comparison to a human-dominated city or one with a diverse population of fantasy races.
• If they lay eggs, like dragons do, that's going to influence how they design their homes and cities. They might have an incubation chamber in each house that is always kept warm, or a central hatchery at the heart of each district where the eggs are looked after full-time.
• There might be a preference for scaly pets: big monitor lizards and snakes instead of dogs, smaller lizards in cages like mice and so on.
• Similarly, they may have different food traditions. A lot of reptiles use their mouths for both taste and smell, so perhaps their cookery tries to maximise aroma rather than taste specifically, for example.

(furiously taking notes) thank you!

I've got a home-brew setting, the tl;dr is it's a world very similar to the Underdark / Elemental plane of earth. No sun, sky, and few open spaces. So there's a low key discrimination against races without Darkvision, I'd envisaged this city as an effort by wealthy & poor Dragonborn from various other towns and cities banding together to make a place they aren't made to feel inferior. So there's going to be an immigrant vs. "founding family" dynamic thrown into the mix as well.

It actually came as news to me that dragonborn didn't have darkvision (to be fair, in 5e, nearly everyone seems to), but that sounds really cool!

To be fair who needs dark vision when they're cable of breathing fire so they practically have a built in torch

Well, that's true for Reds and Golds, and to a lesser extent electrics. Those with icy, acid and poison breath are kinda outa luck.

It does surprise me too that they don't have it. Maybe it's a holdover from 4e, where they had this massive surface empire and didn't need to be subterranean?

Once I had an idea for an Infinite Material Plane. It stretched forever in every direction on a flat plane. Most of it is standard D&D fair, though some areas have steampunk or guns or some such, kept mostly isolated from other places by sheer distance.

There is one sun in the sky but it’s never quite the same sun. At night, the worlds of other settings appear in the sky as huge moons, orbited by their own moons.

So since I've made multiple rants about this to my (non curse of strahd) players, I figured out I should ask this here:

Does anyone find Ravenloft's status quo especially annoying?

Like I in general find D&D's "iconic villains and important characters can't die or you are running homebrew" language regarding status quo annoying* but with Ravenloft's case, I'm annoyed of how many time Curse of Strahd lures players into thinking they did something to change things in barovia(module does actually allow you to do things that should logically change the status quo), only to go in epilogue that curse returns few months later with strahd returning back to life, after everyone in barovia has gotten taste of hope :P I mean, what is point of curse coming back if players' free Tatiyana's soul to heaven? Strahd would have even less ways to past time since his only hobbies are brooding, hunting Tatiyana's latest reincarnation and bullying adventurers.

*(they never use language that says, for example, "If you want to, you can have Tiamat defeated permanently in your campaign", no they always use language that says something like "And Tiamat gets banished back to Hell for 100 years. Tiamat can't be killed permanently." or etc)

Edited by SpookyMask on Sep 20th 2020 at 8:28:44 PM

I do understand your grievances with the Status Quo thing, and I do agree with some of that.

Then again, I do see why they do that. The Watsonian explanation is that Ravenloft is Strahd's personal hell created by the Dark Powers: just because a bunch of adventures want (and succeed in) an escape doesn't mean they should grant Strahd release from his eternal torment. The Doylist explanation is that Strahd is a recognizable part of D&D's brand and killing him off canonically would technically render him unusable in a future product. This is something that has probably only heightened with the dark horse status of Curse of Strahd among the fifth edition modules.

Edited by Xeroop on Sep 21st 2020 at 1:32:12 PM

Acererak has no excuse though.

Seriously, fuck that guy and BOTH his dungeons.

Like I don't even mind iconic villains "canonically" living, I mind how tight control over IP Wizard of the Coast has in D&D regarding home games. I'd be fine with it if they just included single sentence on "if you want this module to end differently for your campaign setting" in any of their adventures featuring iconic villains.

That said Strahd also has the problem of the curse not really being a punishment. I mean, in Curse of Strahd he is pretty much just going through motions and avoiding boredom by tormenting player characters and natives of Barovia. It.. Really doesn't feel curse targetting Strahd(Instead of Barovia as whole) since it seems only bad things for Strahd is his obsession(which's objective you can permanently remove), boredom and being stuck in single country.

But yeah, Acecerak doesn't even have excuse That said, I haven't read tomb of annihilation. So for all I know its like Iggwilv and "she always has clone prepared somewhere else"

Edited by SpookyMask on Sep 21st 2020 at 4:26:26 PM

To be fair, necromaners are logically hard to kill. I have a similar character in my setting who basically can’t die permanently for complicated reasons (it can take centuries between resurrections though), literally even she wanted to (and she kind of does). I’ve wondered if that was BS, but then I realized she was the leader of a vast empire of necromancers. She shouldn’t be able to stay dead for 10 minutes, let alone decades or centuries.

In my head-cannon, Strahd is hiding Vampire: The Masquerade levels of angst and torment over always being on the short stick side of the MacGuffin Delivery Service re: his reincarnating wife. But that again is just trying to shore up that particular hole.

It really is a lot like the situation Imhotep was in in The Mummy. Sure, horrible pain for a while, but then you get immortality and eternal life... and it's everyone else who suffers rather than you. Old school cursers usually don't care that much about negative fallout to third parties, it seems.

This reminds me of one the big debates regarding Vampire: The Requiem over Masquerade. The former (which I still prefer) ditched the metaplot in favor of resource books. So no overarching plot, with the tradeoff of more work sandboxing things at your table. But at least new supplements usually always added things you could use rather than having half of a book be voided because your players / group succeeded at something like freeing New York or killing a rival big bad.

Speaking of the Status Quo, do you justify Medieval Stasis in anyway?

In my personal homebrew world, it's a side effect of a dozen different kinds of esoteric effects. From the nations of the world mostly being stolen from medieval time periods, to magic allowing for much simpler expressions of what would otherwise require modern technology, to a sentient hurricane that teleports in and murders people whenever they get too far from the ideal world it wants to set up.

No, it seemed kind of unnecessary, and stylistically I think we all wanted a break. Most of my setting is around Renaissance era tech, and the visual / wardrobe aesthetic closer to Industrial Revolution. The really high tech groups have (logistically) difficult to mass produce 19th Century Tech. This last mostly so if players want to have Artificers, they can come in as DaVinci style inventors.

Plus, of course, airships... and ground-ships, lovely drilling engines that dive through the Earth.

If all goes well and they want to continue with another campaign in the same setting, they'll find out their kindness to a bunch of demonic-artifact created automata (specifically, saving the few non-evil ones and arranging for sanctuary with a Unicorn) will kick start the creation of the Warforged Race. Pretty much book-standard, but their core will be of living rosewood around a soul-housing crystal rather than the original evil creation.

Mine was that a lot of prototypes were made with bits of stolen unreality taken from the Far Plane which may have memetically infected the concept of individual inventions and successor models, thereby making mass production impossible but occasionally individuals touched with madness and genius may recreate new, unique specimens.

I just avert Medieval Stasis, to be honest. My first campaign was a homebrew setting with a tech level on par with early 17th century europe, so there was lots of guns and cannons and such, but people were still using armor and swords and such. My second campaign was more of a medieval Crusades-era based setting, but I still envisioned it as having progressed from past eras in terms of tech and scientific knowledge and such.

If you want to justify a Medieval Stasis, then it could be done by pointing out how some things work just fine due to magic being widespread enough, so many real-world technological advancements aren't necessary. Magic can be both a solution to many mundane problems, as well as a cause for many new issues that have to be solved with more magic. It can be made into a situation like the arms-race seen in superhero-comics, where supervillainy forces law inforcement to use weird solutions for a weird problem, which in this case is magic. Then again, the issues caused by magic-users abusing their powers might be the impetus for technological advancements, such as guns to even the playing-field for muggles.

As far as existing settings go, I feel that Pillars of Eternity offers a good variety of seeming Medieval Stasis, while also averting it. IIRC firearms are a relatively new invention, that pushes the setting into a general Renaissance-equivalent type of era, which is at times commented on. The presence of magic, psychic abilities and soul-based technology also allows for equivalents of much older societies to exist, side-by-side with the things that fit into a 16-th century context. For instance, the Glanfathans are pretty much Roman-era Celts that have survived through equivalents of the Bronze Age Collapse, Roman occupation and Saxon invasion, while still being culturally distinct outsiders.

Then there is always the option of handwaving things, if you want a homebrew setting like Darkest Dungeon, with crusaders and vikings co-existing with flintlock guns and people in powdered wigs. The game never reflects on how weird and historically vague the setting is; just introducing things that are cool.