Dungeons & Dragons lore!

Mulhorand is based on actual Ancient Egypt with a rich fascinating culture, classes, history, and religion.

Thay is a bunch of cackling evil sorcerers ruling over a vast slave empire.

I had previously thought that the name Thay came from "Cathay", so I assumed it to be based on Yellow Peril views of East Asia, with a more negatively Oriental feel to it.

My D&Derivative (Gnomes)

My take on Gnomes, while also my take on Dwarves, since I didn't feel like we needed two races named for earth spirits when one would do, and I felt like playing with D&D gnome tropes was easier than D&D dwarf tropes.

More than just about any other stock fantasy race, gnomes are all over the place when it comes to what they are like. The only two things all gnomes seem to have in common is that they're very small and very strange.

also they have pointy hats and live in and around forests but sometimes they're like dwarfs and live in caves and guard treasure.

Gnomes are just halflings with engineering degrees, much like how dwarves are just halflings on steroids.

I think of the various demihumans from a more pseudo-naturalistic viewpoint, that the short species have a common ancestor that diverged into distinct forms due to different environments. Plus magical radiation, divine influence, and other fantasy-things making them even more different from each other.

One of the few neat things about Gnomes is they're of fey origin, so it's like you have 3 similar looking peoples, and one is a fakeout that instead of a common ancestor actually comes from another plane of existence! It's like Mork & Mindy in fantasy.

I feel like Gnomes are basically "forest Halflings", instead of roiding up and studying engineering, they're that one cousin from Europe who isn't actually related to you at all, and who decided to join a hippy commune and took mechanical engineering degrees as part of an obsession with stage magic.

In aforementioned D&Derivative, I might phase halflings part of the way out. More succinctly, I am strongly considering re-naming them "brownies", the sneaky, homebody spirits. Brownies, The Forgotten People.

Between them, gnomes and goblins (The Spindly Ones ??), I believe I have all the short-folk that I need. And for tallfolk, you have humans (The Mongrels), elves (The People Of The Forest) and orcs (The Heated ??), who line up nicely.

D&D also has the svirfneblin aka Deep Gnomes. For whatever reason they live in the Underdark.

Unlike most other D&D gnomes, the Deep Gnomes were cynical, paranoid, and overall quite grim. But given who their neighbors are, that's pretty understandable. The Deep Gnomes also stood out as one of the only denizens of the Underdark who aren't a ridiculously evil society.

Aye, I find that a little dull. So I went with combining that with fun-loving illusionary gnomes who live in neon cities deep underground, and who nevertheless live very strict and formal lives.

there's probably underwater gnomes too called the deep,deep deep gnomes

badum tish

In a vacuum they're pretty boring. But they are interesting as a contrast to other gnomes.

It also emphasizes just how shitty life in the Underdark is. Even gnomes can't stay chipper down there.

And yet, they haven't let the general awfulness of their lives be an excuse to ditch their moral compass entirely unlike, say, the Drow.

Edited by M84 on Jul 13th 2023 at 4:53:44 PM

Oh, I also just find that version of the Underdark dull and instead make it into a kind of untameable frontier.

The "hat" that Drow (The People Of The Mushroom Forests) is a cowboy hat. Most of them. There are, in fact, some distinct sub-cultures for the drow. Some of them wear pinstripe trilbies! Mind, these tend to be the above-ground drow.

D&D Underdark by contrast is a settled frontier of sorts. It's still a hostile environment with very dangerous wildlife...but several "civilizations" have taken root. And they are by far the greater threats to any unlucky visitor.

The scary thing is that Drow arguably aren't the worst denizens down there. At least Drow don't eat your brain.

I was gonna lean into it being a mostly unsettled wilderness, in part because of various fantastical apocalypses depopulating the place, in part because of its eldritch weirdness causing it rearrange itself at times or have multiple tunnels and caves overlap each other in the same three dimensional space but still exist separately.

There are settlements down there. They are weird and horrible and grim, they're survivors living out in the middle of nowhere, either prospecting the untamed tunnels for the riches it might hold or looking for an isolated homestead to wile your time away from the rest of the world.

Seems more like 4E Underdark than the more familiar one that's existed in the Realms since forever. In 4E from my understanding, you go far down enough, the bloody Shadowfell starts seeping into the cracks of reality... Which is VERY bad indeed.

The Underdark in the Realms at the very least don't deposit you into the Abyss... On purpose anyway.

Typo, they aren't weird and horrible and grim.

They are still survivors and prospectors.

The impression I want to convey is "Wild West" not "Silent Hill".

Maybe "Fallout" at its very worst.

For what it's worth, most of the evil races that live in the Underdark (drow, duergar, derro, mind flayers) aren't terrible because they live there. They live there because they're terrible and would be rejected from the surface world.

And drow, deurgar and derro all have long, storied histories of past racial strife and worship of evil gods. Aside from the token "good drow" example, duergar raised outside of their nihilistic capitalist society could just as easily be good/neutral/whatever, and derro are mostly implied to be violently insane due to past torture at the hands of the mind flayers (which is also what shaped the duergar).

So setting stories where the Underdark is strange and wild but not full of horrors isn't that far removed from canon, really.

Plus, there's always Flumphs.

Like I said, the worst part of the Underdark isn't the natural horrors that live there. It's the "civilizations" that call the place home.

Edit:

And these three aren't even the worst of the Underdark's denizens. Better them than running into an illithid or an aboleth.

Edited by M84 on Jul 19th 2023 at 2:07:46 AM

NVM accidental double post

Edited by M84 on Jul 19th 2023 at 2:07:35 AM

Drow, specifically, I want to make into cowgirl elves that live in mushroom forests riding giant spiders. They're not evil slavers, though they are aggressive and territorial- they don't take too kindly to strangers in these here underparts.

So basically the usual characterization of wood elves, but underground and riding spiders.

There isn't that much difference between The Fair Folk-style xenophobic Elves and Hillbilly Horrors, beyond Elves usually being much prettier than backwoods hicks. At least the Wood Elves in Warhammer are such a vicious take on them, that it would not be out of place to have in the background some sinister banjo-music when playing them.

Edited by Mara999 on Jul 19th 2023 at 9:29:23 PM

Certainly possible, but not the default. As I imagine it, it should be possible to visit some of their towns and enclaves and only be met with distrust rather than outright hostility.

They travel up to the surface to conduct trade under the stars, selling the rare goods that they've excavated from deep beneath the earth. These caravans tend to be pulled by horses or more exotic pack lizards. The giant riding spiders are normally kept at home in the tunnels where they can crawl along the ceiling and scare the shit out of visitors and intruders.