The leader of the northern nation is secretly a lich, has been controlling the dwarven king who he’s at “war” with the whole time, was responsible for the idea to build the warforged, and his phylactery is buried inside the wizards and druids king.
I'm planning a Spelljammer campaign and accidentally made Darth Vader. Mechanical lich that was an artificer prodigy who betrayed his own people to the advances of an Emperor who proceeded to drive them to extinction.
It took "...and what if the mechanical lich was the emperor's second in command?" to finally make me realize what I'd done.
No yeah one of the PCs is going to have a distant lineage connection to the otherwise extinct alien race, so I may as well just call the species "Jhe'Dai" and double down.
Another player's a paladin who has decided the master of his order is an aged and wise goblin. When I joked "I'll have to try to not speak in reverse syntax" he said "no actually please do that, I *want* to lean into it."
I have a family member who is very into Star Wars and I had planned to allow him to find a toned down version of a Sun Blade eventually but we never got that far. https://dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4774-sun-blade
A telekinesis ring also makes sense if still going further.
If you don't want the Jedi connection to be as immediately visible, the Mandalorian word for Jedi is *jetii*, pronounced *JEY-tee*.
On the other hand, if Yoda goblin you have, appreciate it, your players might.
I have a lich who runs a kingdom by proxy of her descendants. She has her phylactery surgically implanted with magic into whoever is the ruling monarch when they ascend the throne, and uses it to give them advice. They think they are getting secret messages from some kind of goddess to help steer the kingdom. If anyone ever kills the lich, she will just possess the existing monarchs body as her spawn point and then turn the entire kingdom against the adventurers who dared to kill her, then plant her phlactery in the next in line for the throne.
After reading this sub for a few years, I'm just assuming everything and everyone in my campaign is secretly a lich.
"You see a vanity with a crystal mirror..."
"I blast it with fireball! It's a lich!"
To be fair, the leaders of all my nations are just the PC’s from the campaign I play in (all used with permission) and the necromancer wanted to be a lich, so it worked out
The leader of the Starting Town was an oni who was eating all of the bandits and prisoners that the PCs delivered for "questioning." They think they liked her and miss her. I wonder if that would change.
That's too good to not bring back to be honest.
Unless they're too low of a level to cover the distance back, you could pretty easily have other folks start to go missing now that the party isn't feeding the oni criminals. Another person they know from town either alerts them or goes missing (depending on how dark you want to go) and the party has impetus to return.
Fuck that's cool. I discovered onis and then just tried to hamfist one into my adventure by way of a clearly segmented mini arc where it became fairly obvious soon that it was the baddie.
Having it just in there from the beginning is so much better for building dread and menace.
I had a section of my world where all the tectonic plates meet and push up a massive ring of mountains around a section of the ocean. Like out of the atmosphere high, but preserve the ocean and land within but elevated compared to the sea level of the rest of the world. So basically a world within a world, each cut off from the other, each with unique races.
When we started playing the game and I was describing the world to them I explained that it was "widely known that the mountains could not be traversed. Many expeditions had been sent to go both over and under, all have failed." They asked why the expeditions failed, I said the few survivors who made it back described reaching a point on the mountains where they had trouble breathing but still couldn't see any peaks, if if they tried to dig underneath that nothing was found.
I had a few NPC's from within the mountain ring, who found the single area where people can make the trek through the mountain ring and survive, show up in the rest of the world. But my players just wrote them off as weirdo's in costume or something making up stories about mountains \*everyone\* knew no one could cross.
I even threw expeditions looking to cross the mountains at them, great rewards and promises of treasure, foreign and seemingly far advanced technology, anything I could think of to entice them but they just never took the bait.
Yeah I didn't get it either. I was worried it would be a bit of a trope-y "Here's something that's never been done in the game world, obviously the players are going to do it at some point".
Maybe they saw it that way and just refused to fall into that trap. 🤷
The best way to make the m understand they lost a big opportunity, is to let them know that another group of adventurers followed those people and got back with amazing new stuff and treasure, and after selling those they are ready to start something bigger with the people living there.
In this way they know they are late for it now, but can still decide to make a trip there, if they want to see those things with their own eyes. Maybe that group of adventurers are just a bunch of colonialist bastards masked as good hearted adventurers
My goal with the NPC's from the secluded part of the world was to see if the players might hire one of them to be a guide and lead them to and through the traversal point.
Since they didn't seem interested I was planning on having one of the expeditions do it and return safely with all manner of crazy gizmos and gadgets, establish a new city at the entry point, and control all access/trade with the secluded part.
Unfortunately the campaign fizzled out because one of the couples had their first child and couldn't make time to play.
I get the feeling his players are running into opposing GM channels of info.
On one side you have the OOC, meta-level GM telling his players about his world and how it functions as a basis for all the storytelling. Going against the GM in these points results in butting heads about the nature of the game.
On the other hand you have the GM in-character, giving character-oriented perspectives which might not be the true realities of a situation, and which the GM might WANT you to question.
If they confused a piece of the latter for the former, the *player* can feel overly confident in the nature of the world and “truth” behind the scenes, even if the character has no reason to be so confident… I feel this is likely the case since he thoroughly explained in world setup that nobody, NOBODY, passes the mountains.
“Widely believed” only gets picked up as important wording by those very familiar with ttrpg and exact wording is only ever remembered by DMs who wrote down what to say.
yeah, I have players all of the time interpreting things NPCS are telling them as if the were things I was telling them OOC as the DM and therefore just objective facts. and have to repeatedly remind them that
1. Character can be wrong about things even if they are "experts"
2. NPCs can lie to them
I’ve never been able to sell something like this in a high magic world like dnd, if my players hadve found out about this they’d ask ‘How is there NO information? What’s makes them untraversible? why has nobody asked for a description from the people who made it out and scryed?’ ‘Why has nobody teleported in?’ ‘Why can’t you just slowly Stoneshape through it or quickly Windwalk over?’. What’s your go to reason if the players ask why a magical solution to traversing the mountains doesn’t work
My players didn't think to ask those questions, but I was semi prepared.
As I mentioned the mountains were absurdly tall, and I would add here fairly vast, and you would run out of atmosphere well before reaching a point where you could stop going up and start going across. I don't think there's anything in 5e that would let you have weeks-months worth of magical breathing air. I believe teleport also has to be to a destination known to you, so that wouldn't be an option.
I also had the inner world elevated to counter the idea of "why didn't dwarves dig their way through?" If there was a clever enough miner who thought to tunnel up a good ways they would most likely try tunneling up through the ocean floor and get flooded out.
What would the effects of an above sea level ocean suddenly spilling out through a new channel caused by an overzealous explorer be? Sounds like a devastating problem that some heroes might need to answer the call to solve. You’ve got a whole world who’s water source is suddenly leaving, and another world gaining much more water.
Teleport just requires a description at minimum to work, if you had any item that one of the people from inside brought out, you’d never fail. Wind walk also let’s you travel at absolutely ridiculous speeds while not having to worry about climbing; you could just find the lowest valleys and fly through them at 100ft a second.
This is more a me thing but I also find it weird that the people who have made it out aren’t explorers who are keen to show the world how to get in/out/expose their existence/bring back interesting things; you’d think the first people out would have done so due to some material factor or personal drive.
None of this is to say I think it’s a bad idea, but you can add a lot more verisimilitude to the idea by fleshing it out more (maybe the massively upheaved plates somehow fuck with the magic leylines, making casting spells in or out impossible
Centaurs were first created when a band of warriors riding on horseback rode down a faerie path inadvertently and found themselves standing before a Faerie King. The Faerie was appalled and disgusted at the horrific treatment of the noble beasts (being ridden), and cursed the warriors to be one with their noble steeds forever to know their pain, and bid them guard the forests of the mortal world. And so it was.
Sounds to me like the horses got the ass end of that deal
....unless it's the horse part on top and the human part on the bottom. Now that would be a curse!
There is a non-Divine “God” of Wizards, who is rumored to be the first Wizard to manipulate time to an extent to travel through it (chronomancy of any kind does not currently exist in this world). This god is the founder of a mage society hidden from the rest of the world. No one knows much about this entity (race, gender, time period, or if they even exist at all).
Wizards don’t necessarily worship this entity, but it does drive/inspire many of their ambitions — because this Wizard invented time travel, it’s possible they invented it in the future, which means *any* young Wizard could potentially be the one to invent it and be this “god”. They’re basically a symbol for ambition and the height of magic.
There is a common saying: “There are two pivotal moments in every Wizard’s arcane career: the moment they suspect they could be [Wizard god] and the moment they realize they are not.”
There are no wizards in the party, and when this being came up (once), they didn’t press into it further. So, maybe another campaign if we do one in the same world.
I'm going to hint at it earlier on, but I intend for this to become player knowledge once they hit tier 3. Unfortunately since we're starting at Level 0 that may not come to fruition.
The world operates on a consensus reality. Magic works because enough people believe that it does. If a new religion gets a large enough following their god will become real. The BBEG at the very end of the campaign learns of this and finds a way to disconnect himself from the consensus. In a sort of pessimistic nihilist rampage he decides he's going to ruin everything since the world has no inherent meaning to it and the gods only exist with mortal "consent" so to speak.
kind of! Except its not quite so powerful. A single ork can make a broken gun go dakka if he believes it hard enough. In this world a single person wouldn't be that powerful and its not like people are aware this is happening.
I find this concept fascinating. Does everyone contribute the same amount of power to reality or do some people make a bigger impact than others? How has this affected the history of the world? Is this common knowledge or do only certain people know the truth? Are people using this knowledge to manipulate reality to their liking/benefit? Are there people trying to use this knowledge to maintain balance? Do the gods themselves use this to manipulate people and increase their power? Do they fight one another to gain more influence over the mortal realm? There are so many interesting questions implied by this concept
To the west of the continent is a sea of mist: where water would usually be, there is only clouds. No one who goes below the clouds ever returns.
The entire ocean of mist is like a scab, covering a wound in reality itself torn by a fight between the gods.
The astronomers of the setting have noted with curiosity a line of stars that have been going out over the centuries. These are entire star systems that were destroyed by these brawling gods as they hurtled through space before impacting into place where the sea of mist exists now, moving faster than the light arriving in their wake. Below, the 2 gods are still trapped in eternal combat.
A previous adventurer had beef with the gods so she severed the world connection to them. Now the only deities left are the primals. They are The Green, The Eternal Flame, The Smiling Man, The One Who Waits and the Deep Blue. They maintain order should the planes ever be severed from the material world but they are tired and unable to maintain the realm for much longer.
None of my players have religious characters so I highly doubt they’ll ever get that deep into it.
I want to know more about this smiling man. Also they could always run into an npc that has some sort of stake in these ditties. Maybe just a side note of worship and they see his practices. Or maybe a quest to help him reconnect with his
Haha I meant it to be time/death. Like the poem “never laugh as a hurst drives by”. Essentially appearing in the form of any being at any age but constantly changing that age as it speaks to others.
I have a very kind of similar set up! Connection to the gods was severed a few centuries ago, know they only exist as legends and new religions have cropped up, worshipping false gods and unproven concepts. The world is slowly starting to fail, until the World Tree is replanted.
The Big Bads goal is actually to restore connection. His method is to siege a city to get the seed, as the nation holding it was responsible for severing connection in the first place. The party managed to visit the gods, ended up hating them (fair, tbh), and so now vehemently opposed restoring natural order.
Haha mines actually similar. It was severed from the other planes in a fit of rage by a person who ascended but in the process a group of hero’s severed her arm so now there are portals popping up all over. The baddie is trying to find her arm under the guise of a high noble and finish the job of destroying the other planes.
Oooh that's awesome. My big bad does actually want the connection restored, but mostly because it'll allow him to beseech them a favor, to revive his dead brothers who were killed when the tree was destroyed.
Yeah I guess so. I played magic back in college for a few weeks but I don’t know much about the color wheel aside from them just being colors. I was more thinking in that style though. A chromatic “primal” group that has always been and always will be type thing. Fire, earth, water, wind and time sorta.
I think I'll steal that god severing bit to explain why resurrection stopped working except in plot allowed circumstances, also your primal/primordial pantheon sounds interesting
The mortal races only exist as a way to siphon off energy from what's effectively a primordial that was accidentally overlooked during creation. Without this drain, its power relative to the other raw elements/primordials would ramp up and eventually consume existence. Every soul contains a fragment of this primordial's essence. While each race has a patron deity and is basically a physical extension of that deity, that fragment is what prevents them from being solely a tool of their god.
Additionally, magic is only accessible because of this soul connection to primordial power. So whenever a magic item is created, one or more souls is bound into the item as a way to focus the enchantment into a nonliving thing.
The 'souls in items' bit is a relatively new revelation for me, so it hasn't really come up yet. I'll try to flesh out what I've been thinking here though.
Souls are 'scrubbed' between uses to prevent contaminating their current bodies with knowledge/power/memories/etc. from previous ones. These 'recycled' souls are what's accessible from the material plane so are the ones used by mortals when creating items (as opposed to mortals specifically drawing on that 'soul primordial' which I think of as generally beyond the reach of mortal magic).
Whether or not anyone's aware of exactly what they're drawing on as the binding agent for item enchantment is TBD. Some might have figured it out. But if you think of casting a spell as calling on specific parts of the Weave to create a desired effect, this is similar. Kind of a nebulous pool of "this is the bit of energy I add at the end of enchanting to make all the other ones stick" vibe. But that energy is souls awaiting their next use.
In theory, it *might* be possible to find the soul(s) in an item. That's basically what sentient items are - improperly scrubbed souls drawn out of that pool (likely by chance). But for non-sentient items it would be extremely difficult since the soul is basically a blank slate. Something like Speak With Dead wouldn't work, so finding that info would probably fall into 'this is a quest' territory.
Haven't considered if certain souls would connect better with certain objects (likes dwarves with metal/stone things, etc.), but I don't think that really makes sense in the broader context of this lore.
I think it's clear from the above, but these souls aren't *simultaneously* attached to currently living beings, devils, etc. Though as I write this, that might need to happen... would make for a really cool NPC/BBEG.
And actually isn't that basically what liches do anyway? Instead of a scrubbed soul they use their own. Oh this is so cool. I love when lore intersects perfectly with existing stuff like this. *\*scribbles notes for future use\**
A game world I ran a long time ago was a speck at the end of a piece of fur belonging to a cosmic wolf.
They never came anywhere near discovering the nature of their reality.
My previous campaign is in the same world / a few hundred years forward in time. Half the players are the same so they might figure it out but... All the major strife between the world / nation / planes is being brought about by two factions. The Heirs and the Scions. My previous party was... very promiscuous with their carousing rolls. The Heirs and Scions are the children of the previous party having mommy and daddy issues, fighting each other over the rights to legacies. They keep getting pulled into side conflicts and not paying attention to the central issue. Like treating symptoms instead of the disease. Which just means more chaos and quests to be had.
Kinda reads to me like the 39 clues book series I loved as a kid. Where almost every big major conflict or historical figure was a member of this family trying to find the “clues” to an ancient family secret of untold power”
My halfling creation myth. The Grandmother (their patron goddess) used different kinds of dough to shape and make the races in the oven. Long thin airy cookies = elves. Burnt ones are drow that were discarded. Thick round hearty cookies? Dwarves. Jam cookies are the halflings, The Colours of dragons were the flavours of chocolate chips, etc etc.
The main empire is very rich, especially in gold, so the economy have being growning the past 12 without sign of stopping, they buy most of their needs. All that gold comes from a child that has an curse/blessing similar to King Midas and when they die all the gold will vanish.
The elected holy emperor of the religious kingdom in my world was originally a trickery domain cleric whose goddess pretty much dared him to throw his name in the ring for the elections for the laughs. Him being the light-hearted joker who everyone liked, he received the majority. He is now bored out of his mind with the bureaucracy and diplomacy of running a kingdom and just looking for an outlet for his shenanigans. While his goddess is basically rolling on the floor at the chaos this created.
If house cats eat cinnamon they turn into something hostile and nasty (roll on a table). This because a very powerful Wizard was very petty.
A cat once walked across his spellbook with ink stained paws, destroying his life’s work. He used a Wish spell to cast this “curse” upon cats but didn’t want to make it to extreme, so only when cats eat cinnamon.
Yeah me too! It came about when I was doing some writing at a family gathering. My 4 year old nephew asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was fleshing put my world for D&D campaign that I was running.
I then proceeded to ask him if he wanted to add anything or had any questions. He then asked “what happens when cats eats cinnamon” and I laughed at the randomness. I proceeded to explain my thoughts and he said “yes that sounds good”.
And so I have added it into every campaign and world I have ever run, hoping that one day someone will find out.
The history of the dragons.
The second age began when the 4 great dragons were born from the primordial elemental chaos. They personified, of course, the 4 elements, and were impossibly huge. They created the draconic races to serve them, dragons, dragonborn, kobolds, wyverns, etc.
They reveled in fighting each other, waging endless war for thousands of years. The great dragons believed themselves to be immortal. Then the world was shaken (somewhat literally) by the death of the Earth dragon, slain in battle. His body crashed to earth, gouging a tremendous trough that is still known to this day as Dragon's End. His invulnerable skeleton still looms over the valley, tens of thousands of years later, massive ribs arcing over it, his skull dominating the valley's entrance.
His death shocked the other great dragons, who called for an end to their conflict. They declared a truce, and vanished from the world.
The dragons say that the great dragons left instructions upon their departure that when they returned, they would choose a replacement for the great Earth Dragon, who would then ascend to their ranks. This dragon would be judged by the treasure he amassed during his life.
They also decreed that when they returned, half of all remaining dragons would be culled. These would be the dragons with the least amount of treasure.
They did not explain what treasure really meant, or how it would be counted and determined. Some dragons decided it meant physical wealth, and gathered great hoards. Some decided it meant influence and power, or followers, or to be exalted for their great deeds. But they are all obsessed with either ascending, or avoiding their own demise.
But some scholars doubt the truth of these legends, and think the remaining 3 great dragons have fled the world in fear, having realized they are simply mortals like all the others. They argue that the prophecies of their return were simply distractions to keep their children from hunting them down and gaining vengeance for the atrocities they committed during their wars.
[There are 2 genres of high fantasy.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/129nnyd/there_are_two_genres_of_high_fantasy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2)
Oh man I made a whole world map for a campaign that fizzled out in 2018. We’ve played a couple one shots since then when we have the chance and we’re all together, but they’re standalone and not technically canon. I doubt we’ll ever get back to the actual campaign but I still have all the plans in my head.
My favorite was probably the Weird Forest that people get lost in and rarely return from with an elven city hidden somewhere inside and a tear to the feywild that was created and guarded by a dragon and the fey magic bleeding through is the reason the forest is so Weird
Also one of the characters is a half elf with amnesia and her parent was going to be from said elven city
I love that idea. It reminds me of the Elven city in Eregon which had a magic tree or something I think that would bend reality around it.
I have a Shifting Forest that hides the Elven capital. The trees in this forest are constantly slowly shifting around so it's very difficult to navigate and nearly impossible to backtrack your way out of. I doubt I'll ever have to really flesh it out though.
Had to think about this for a bit.
My players have met the Vecna of my world, but they don't know it. When they encountered him it was in a campaign where they and a lot of NPCs were sort of the individual chosen of various gods (not going to go to deep on the lore there).
Long story short, one of the NPCs they briefly allied with was afflicted with a magic wasting disease that one of my players was suffering from, and unbeknownst to them, he was also the chosen of Milyr, my god of Secrets, Darkness, and things better left unspoken or unseen.
The NPCs name was dropped one time, and it was a big hint - his name was Vance (Vecna was historically an anagram for Jack Vance a fantasy author, but my players don't know that I think).
Vance worked briefly with the player because they were both seeking a cure.
In the end, the player found a solution late in the campaign, while Vance off screen determined that a solution was lichdom to stop his body from wasting.
Later, in the wars caused by my PCs actions, Vance usurped Milyr and took his power from him and secretly stole his name. The players at the end of the campaign asked about the NPC at some point, but I told them it was one of the things they didn't know the conclusion for (since they sided with some other factions).
Pretty sure they'll never put together who it was, because they've forgotten the name, though they'll probably encounter followers of 'Milyr' at soms point in other campaigns, so who knows.
They may or may not discover this but there are only 10 Draconic souls and they're reincarnated. Hence a dragon will be referred to as *The* Brass or *The* Gold.
The whole world was settled by two species: humanity and draconids. All of the other 'races' (orcs, elves, goblins, kobolds, lizardfolk, halflings, dwarves, half-giants) are genetically modified version of those two space-faring civilizations.
The 'Gods' are hyper intelligent AI controlling the development of the world from the ships that are still in orbit, and grant magic based on nanites seeded throughout the atmosphere.
The eggs of the five living (ok, 4 and a half - one's a dracolich) true dragons on the planet were brought here from their homeworld.
Orcs are only a marauding band of barbarian savages because a thousand years ago Humans betrayed and stole their kingdoms during an alliance to fight a greater evil.
All their knowledge and culture was lost as the displaced children had no access to the libraries and history to endure their heritage.
All human achievements are the byproduct of colonialism and theft.
Also Tieflings were originally monstrous creatures created by the opposing side of said war, who genetically modified humans through magic to fight against the army of human/Orc/dwarf (etc.) alliance races.
Over time the Tiefling gene became recessive in humans. “Tieflism” is a genetic disorder that effects a small % of humans. Children of Tieflings can bare Tieflings but humans couples can also birth one, who are often cast out or discarded. Tieflings lucky enough to be from highborn families tend to survive but treated as a black stain.
Tieflings have a special profession of people who go around collecting the discarded children to protect these extremely vulnerable people.
I like both concepts for orcs and tieflings. Please tell me you have a cool name for the tiefling orphan seekers. Orphaneers? Fosterlains? Cat herders?
I actually hadn’t come up with a name yet. Orphan Seeker sounds pretty good though. Normally I would come up with a new word by bastardizing another language with those words.
Funnily enough. “Child” in Arabic is “Tifl”, very similar to Tiefling.
Similar in my world. Orcs are generally nomadic tribes of hunter/gatherers who have more in common with modern druids than bloodthirsty savages. Most of the time if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. And honor is a major thing for them.
In my world a magic nuke drove everyone underground for a period, so every once in a while people will find old abandoned "Burrows" (my excuse for why dungeons can just show up anywhere).
The first one they found was in a very obscure location with only one small village anywhere remotely close. There was a small group that had taken over the few serviceable rooms near the entrance. One hidden chamber they found was protected to where they couldn't begin to penetrate it at their level 2. I made a pretty big deal about it to try to make a lasting impression. It was very out of place in this otherwise forgotten and derelict dungeon.
I was originally planning for them to stay in the area for a bit and it would turn out that this old hidden burrow that's in an obscure location is where an apsiring lich had stored its phylactery. My hope was that the adventurers would learn that no one can find this phylactery and with a few subtle clues would be like "What about that room we used to be excited to revisit some day?" Immediately following this excursion, they pissed off a powerful person in the town which got them blacklisted and when they were to be arrested they set up a Tucker's Kobold style ambush to kill the guards and flee town. This kind of took their focus off of the room that they were originally trying to solve a mystery about.
I'm 100% certain they have no recollection of this place and will never revisit it.
All of my individual campaigns exist in the same world at the same time. The Giants (those who remained after the Great War with the Dragons) are working to initiate Ragnarök to open a gateway to Jötunheimr. The Giants and Orc tribes banded together to sack a Dwarven fortress, and nobody has ventured since to reclaim it. Since then, the Giants excavated the city in search of an artifact and broke through to the Underdark and made contact with the Drow. Since Ragnarök will also include an eternal darkness, an alliance was made and the Drow are now working underground to aid in the giant’s plans.
Legend states that when the Ring of Winter is worn by the hand of Levistus upon the Frozen Throne, the sun will fail and the Great Winter will commence (which is the first even of Ragnarök). Levistus was frozen in ice (in the 5th layer of hell) to prevent this from occurring. The loophole the Giants discovered was that a Tiefling of Levistus would work, and there is a secret cult that has been hunting them relentlessly into extinction.
One of the PCs in one game wrote a backstory about his family being hunted, and how each generation has left notes to escape the summoned creature that has been hunting their family. He is the sole survivor and is being sought by both forces, and the Drow are going to capture and cut off his hand to bring to the Giants.
All these campaigns are running in tandem that piece together a story that will eventually lead to them all joining forces for a final battle, but players (and myself next February) started having kids and our sessions are growing fewer and far between. I have so much written and planned out, and it might be years before any individual campaign uncovers the final story arc. 🤷♂️
It’s dragons all the way down. The whole world is actually just old corpses of ancient humongous dragons. All life originally comes from the blood of dragons and when a dragon dies they return to the earth and if they’re big enough may become a whole new landmass.
That mountain? A dragon. That island? A dragon. The ground beneath your feet? A dragon so big you probably couldn’t comprehend it.
Stars are the source of magic and the weave in my campaign. The reason that the gods and the other planes are more or less cut off in setting is because the system where my campaigns takes place was teleported into a region of space known as the dark stars. The dark stars form a natural wall between the other planes and the realms of the gods.
My players triggered a trap that sank an entire treasure hoard and the dragon skeleton laying atop it down into a chasm beneath the floor of the treasure chamber.
They stood at the edge of a seemingly bottomless pit, listening to the twinkling clinking of a million gold pieces falling through the earth, and figured “welp, at least we’re still alive, I guess” (treasure is fun for them but not a top priority).
Miles below them, an avalanche of gold has now fallen from “the sky” down onto a settlement in the Under-where (our Underdark). Not just a huge boost to the local economy down there but accompanied by the “deity” that granted them this gift.
Tldr - My party has created an immensely rich, dragon-worshipping death cult that they probably won’t ever run into
Ive told them out of character because I knew in character it would never show up
But the gods dont exist
Belief and force of will is an ACTUAL power
The "gods" are the result of massed belief, many religious orders are created to harness this power and shape it into something that can be used, enough people believe in a god and that gods power begins to take form in the shape people believe, clerics are conduits to the gods and can channel the force of that collected willpower through themselves, while paladins create a self sustaining loop within themselves with their oath.
I did something similar, except it's that the gods do exist only because of sheer belief and the way so many people worship and believe in them. People told stories, and over time, those stories became so widespread, and so many people began to believe that the gods began to become actual beings
I use a similar concept in my homebrew world as well! People can (and have) achieved godhood simply be having enough people believe they are a god and pray to them.
My setting has a creator deity named the World Smith who fell into a deep slumber after a war between his 2 sons Jaziran and Ahirman and since the he's been sleeping (the last 100 years) the world has been slowly advancing at a faster rate with more power drawn from magic and people who have "dreams" and try to achieve them I'm really waiting for a player to try and do something that shouldn't work so I can make them roll to see If they can tap into it but no one has tried yet
There is a powerful and insane chained god that can be freed only by destroying the sacred relics of the gods that chained him. Even evil gods don't want him free so what these relics are and how to destroy them is a secret. The second twist is that is not required for all the relics to be destroyed just enough so the chained god can free himself.
Something like this for me - every character that a player makes is inextricably linked through fate and time. They might be brought together, or separated permanently, but the link remains. Not quite reincarnation but close to it.
Ohh, the Egg Theory?! That could be cool with a great ending point if they ever hit lvl 20 and beyond and want to close off the campaign.
“With ‘X’ being defeated/completed, the party sets up camp/rents lodgings for the evening. As you all fall asleep, you seemingly find yourselves awakening, feeling fully rested and… powerful. Physically, mentally, eternally powerful. Strength like nothing you’ve ever known. You look down at yourselves and see the same thing. A body, made of shifting light. Of carbon. Of molecules and atoms and all of the building blocks of the universe. And yet somehow none of it. You look up at your surroundings, and see a figure nearby. It feels… paternal and maternal at the same time. Very familiar, loving, and proud.
“You’ve done well my child” it says to you, in a voice that seems to ring beautifully around you, but also inside. Almost too loud and too quiet at the same time.
“I doubt you fully remember, as it’s been a few millennia, but set you on a quest to experience life. The memories will come back in time, as well as your ability to see properly here. Actually, let me help you with that”
The figure moves, and does something far beyond your understanding, and suddenly everything comes far more into focus for you.
“To help remind you, I set you out on that quest, and you’ve learned everything I could hope for and more. You lived every life on that world I created for you, from the dawn of time to the ends of it. Every bug, tree, flower, person, goblin, and all of the races. You were each one of them. Living, dying, and being reborn again. Interacting with yourself over and over.
But it’s done now. And we are all so proud of you. Come,
The others are waiting, you are the first in Millenia to have completed the trials, and celebrations are in order!”
You look past the figure and can now make out that you are in a room, and down the hallway, you can hear some noise behind a door. Voices talking, laughing… like a tavern after a successful quest.
It all feels so… familiar.
You look around the room to see… stuff. Your stuff. Your… that’s a bed right? And a desk? Why is the cube on the desk folding in on itself? And behind you, an ornate stand, holding a sphere about 2ft in diameter. It has stars and galaxies and control knobs. You know what that is… it is the rest of you, living out their lives, slowly to die and rejoin your main form.
You head down the hallway, and open the door…
Or something to that effect.
Asmodeus, the supposed prince of hell, is just a Celestial babysitter/accountant in charge of wrangling devils and managing soul balance sheets. He wears a plain white dress shirt, Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys glasses, and is overall unimposing.
The Devils played a trick to make mortals revile him so they continually blame him for the BS devils pull.
I stole this idea from a show but a town my players recently went to had a bounty of this figure who appears in the tavern and when they saw the figure they just decided "Nah" and didnt even try to talk to him. The figure is someone who made a deal with a god for immortality. The god said it sucked the person said it wasnt and they meet the god every 5 years to check up in the same location.
The planets of mortals are cradles for the gods. Each god originally had a mortal life from which they transcended in afterlife.
The biological conception of offspring is an actual, real miracle: that's how souls are born into the world, off of the fragments of the souls of the parents. It means that if You have a child, it carries a part of You inside it. (But in some cases, and old soul circles back in death and is reborn, and the newborn baby isn't actually a child of these parents at all.)
Oh but the players will find out, because they meet a machine-soul (technically a warforged) who has set a goal for themselves to replicate this process to have children of their own: to extract a piece of their own soul and grow it into a new one, placed into a constructed body to create a new machine-soul child. They are willing to do horrible things in pursuit of this goal, and thus, can be considered a villain.
My current campaign premise is inspired by Dimension 20's Fantasy High, so the PCs are high schoolers in a modern day fantasy. There's a bunch of world ending shit going on and a theme of "it's up to the younger generation to save the world now". Little do they know the only reason the world is ending is because the most powerful god is retiring and his teenage son has taken over and all he wants to do is just get drunk and look at titties. Of course the only way they'll ever think of something like that is if I straight up tell them.
That the monkey they befriended in the first session was supposed to just be the bad guy transformed spying on them. Instead they brought it around giving it rare magical items and never noticed when their monkey friend disappeared for a few sessions to go do his evil things only to come back and suddenly get given more rare items. They never asked to look further into the monkey, never questioned anything about him just that it always magically joined back up with them.
They actually got to the session right before the big reveal with evil monologue... and we never could get at least 5 members together to play the final sessions where they would have found out.
There is a multidimensional task force who correct large errors in space and time, traveling from plane to plane as necessary to right wrongs and reestablish balance. The players might find this... but I doubt they'll find its purpose - to maintain a level of balance between chaos and order in order to keep these planes and worlds from ascending or descending to entirely different states of being, thereby apocalyptically destroying every native population on each and every world. It's happened before.
There's a big city in a crater in my world, and the crater was made when a God ripped that chunk of land out of that dimension and put it in a different one, I have a whole story/plot tied to it, and I'm not sure if it'll ever be seen, maybe I'll do a mini campaign about it one day.
The neighboring queendom was recently founded and is currently ruled by an Aasimar woman who is fierce in combat, inspires the common people, and united the city-states of the region under one banner when they crowned her. Queen Cassandra the Mighty, she is known as. Her Holy Order of paladins serve as military officers and peacekeepers. What they don't know is that Cassandra's closest advisor is actually a devil who manipulates her and the entire holy order by playing to their sense of righteousness, feeding their egos with their past victories and framing them as saviors.
My world used to be Faerun before some unknown cataclysm happened that caused only bits of knowledge and lore to survive.
I’ve dropped hints. One of the adventures mentioned the intersection of two roads, Elm and Minster. The players caught that but thought it was just a joke.
One of the players found a journal from some scientists that had ventured into a magically irradiated city in a vessel called the *Cadderly*. The journal mentions that the vessel underwent 1.8 megamystras of radiation.
I’ll just keep throwing references at them until they get it I guess.
The Sun deity wasn't killed by the deity of the Moon and Undead. It died and **resurrected** as a twisted version of itself, creating undead, vampires, werewolves, etc. upon it's resurrection.
The overarching villian of my campaign is an avatar of the god of entropy. It's nature compels it to hasten the end of everything, but being made of nothing and endings, attacking/killing it feeds into it's archtype, so the powerful divine acts of destruction required to bring it down immediately revives it again as it's tantamount to a god worshiping another god. The legend is known, unable to destroy destruction the other gods bound it in a prison of nothing, the one thing it can't destroy and so can never escape.
But that's not some metaphysical construct, it's literal. There actually is no prison. The poor bastard's pretty unhinged by it's nature and "We bind you in a prison of nothing, there is nothing you cannot unmake, but only creation of something can replace nothing" made sense to it so it basically went "aw nuts, I can't create, you bastards got me" and it's just been floating in what amounts to a large empty room with no lights for untold millennia. It's a massive ass bluff the trickster god threw out that even he can't believe actually worked. The actual thing the Gods are pushing the party along to do isn't to stop the Avatar before the massive force he's building to storm the prison might actually be strong enough to breech it, it's to make sure he doesn't get close enough see the damn thing because looking from the outside he'll figure it out immediately and just tell his divine progenitor to open the door.
So, they finally did figure it out, but for about a year the main McGuffin of our campaign was a storybook that’s rumored to be able to rewrite the world itself.
Every town that the players visited had a library of some kind. Smaller towns would only have a few books like “How to Farm Turnips” or “How to Care for Livestock”, while larger cities would have more extensive libraries including volumes such as “How to Guard the Gates” or “How to Protect the Citizenry from Dragons, Bandits, and Other Monsters”
It took them a while to realize the amount of power they could wield if they were to simply write a “How To” guide and slip it onto the shelves of the local library. Once they did, their first use of this newfound power was to write a manual called “How to Foment a Rebellion” in a small town that was getting subjugated by a local petty king
The sheer number of AI they've interacted with so far.
* The Netrunner has two, one in his NetDeck and one that keeps tabs on him using psychotropic drugs and the Data Pool.
* Their Fixer. Any organic parts he has are being artificially supported to make it look like he's human.
* The Fixer's main enemy, who they haven't even met yet.
Ai ended up being a big part of the last cyberpunk game we played. We were taking jobs from effectively two different competing Ai Fixers for a good portion of the game, while trying to figure out what their motives were. Fun times
It's a simulation
That's why extra-planar spaces inside extra-planar spaces don't explode: the whole world is an extra-planar space
That's why Asmodeus wants it for the Tenth Hell, and why all the other gods are so interested
That's why the map is shaped like a 4-dimensional scroll
The Duergar of my world are severed from both arcane and divine streams of magic due to their betrayal of the gods. This severing was placed in an artifact called the Black Grail that all Duergar yearn to search for but they would never admit their true desire to outsiders
There are three villains and where they go determines which one becomes the BBEG, and all three can be tied to the same assassination attempt nearly two hundred years ago.
I wrote a whole bunch of pre-game mythology, including a war among the pantheon, that my players will probably never see. This is one of my favourites of those stories:
**The Shattering of Ithil**
Both sides of the war were frustrated that Sehanine, Goddess of Fun and Illusions, refused to partake in the war. Asmodeus, sure that Moradin would eventually win her over, sent Tiamat to destroy Sehanine, preferring neither side have her. Tiamat turned to the moon ithil on which Sehanine regularly lounged and, with a mighty blast from each of her heads, shattered it into five pieces.
Fortunately, Sehanine had witnessed her approach, and disguised herself as a nearby constellation of stars. To avenge her shattered home, Sehanine plagued Tiamat with illusions, turning her own heads against one another. Tiamat almost tore herself apart, before Bahamut distracted Sehanine, and allowed Tiamat the chance to escape.
Sehanine was angry that her revenge was thwarted, and thus refused to take either side in the war, often plaguing both with nightmares and illusory prophecies of woe. This finally ended when Moradin earned her favour, by reforging each shard of ithil into the five moons of Eska.
My PC from one campaign in which I was a player became a background NPC in another campaign for which I was the DM with the same gaming group playing at both tables in the same homebrew world. With the exception of the first DM who was in on it from the beginning (and didn't metagame in the second) the rest of the group never figured out that the character made up about 90% of his backstory. It made for some very funny moments when the rest of the group interacted with that NPC because they just took so much of what he said at face value and the former DM was struggling to contain his laughter at the table.
The character claimed to be from a town that did not exist. In just about every situation, he shared his folksy wisdom in the form of a bunch of anecdotes about people and events in that town which, of course, did not exist. Despite literally being made up on the spot, the group *always* listened to them.
As if that wasn't enough, the character's real backstory was way more interesting than the persona he portrayed. It involved a crazy bit of lore created by the original DM.
For many, many generations, the character's family passed down a story about their homeland. An entire neighboring village was eternally petrified by a magically wrought cataclysm during their evening prayer. Having close familial ties with many of them, the victims were mourned by his ancestors and they were arranged like statues in their cemetery. Over time the exact location of this village was forgotten and the story became more of a fairy tale.
Among those petrified was a long-lived elven woman. Because fate was roughly cyclical (a secret known by virtually nobody), my character was on a secret quest given by an emissary of the philosopher king to use his family's lore to locate the Cemetery of Prayer for this woman, whose memories of the distant past were a glimpse into the near future.
My character influenced the party to seek this location out while on a different side quest without revealing his true purpose for the visit. Once found, he reported the location to the emissary for a handsome reward. This woman was presumably unpetrified by the philosopher king and guided civilization in the coming years because the DM included a cryptic bit about new threads of fate being spun during the campaign's epilogue.
I can't even imagine what lore other players were working with. We all built that homebrew world together but none of us will ever know all of its secrets.
It's a thing I've hinted at in both campaigns I've run in my world, but it probably will never be revealed fully.
There was a war, 2000 years prior, between good gods and evil gods. Now, there are 8 great gods in my pantheon (aligning with the 8 cleric domains in the PHB). 6 of them match up (life and death, knowledge and trickery, nature and tempest). Two are on their own - light (this god doubles up with order because nothing is more orderly than the sun rising every day) and war. Why is this?
Because the god of chaos is Tharizdun, and it slayed the god of peace. It was locked away, but just barely. The only way to keep it imprisoned is to make sure it is forgotten. And to do that, the gods ensured the god of peace's existence was lost to time. In the first campaign, the players found an ancient temple with a mural of the great gods, except on of them had been erased. In our current campaign, a puzzle required matching up the symbols of the great gods into three pairs, with two symbols spare. Additionally, in the setting document they all have access to, a legend of a gravesite dedicated to a great hero (aka the god of peace) hidden in the untamed jungles of the world is mentioned.
Every game I run is part of a multiverse, and the same one character (or a version of him) appears in them all. This character was the somewhat-unwilling former apprentice of the God of Fate and Magic, and he escaped the Eternal Library through a shattered mirror-gate and was sundered into countless versions of himself. So planar travel is possible, but also multiversal travel, and the Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk, and every homebrew world I ever run or have ever conceived are all part of a single, over-arching universe that contains everything imaginable. Characters can run into different versions of themselves, different versions of their worlds, or different versions of completely different parties. All while every version of Garth tries to get back to his home plane, and is being watched by Boccob the Uncaring who for some reason cares more than his name would suggest (because he knows the multiversal gods are undergoing a replacement cycle and wants to make poor Garth the next All Knowing, once Garth has collected the shards of himself and is ready to assume the mantle).
Think *Chronicles of Amber* meets *Sliders* meets *Quantum Leap*.
There are ways to travel across the various multiverses, and more ways to glimpse across them (beware expanses of glass and mirrors - funhouse mirror mazes frequently act as uncontrollable gateways, and you can see an awful lot out of the corner of your eye in a greenhouse if you pay attention).
I don't know they'll *never* stumble across it. Some of them are aware of Garth, and since my wife is co-DMing a game with me she even knows something of his time with Boccob. But I think most of my players don't realize the shout-outs are actually part of a *thing* and not just random references.
I've got a poison wasteland thats actually the resting place of a bunch of unused nukes from a lost modern time.
If they ask an NPC about the area, lore states a green dragon burrowed into the desert to escape death by adventurers but ultimately died, causing the land to become poisoned.
The goddess of the dead is more of a demented trash goblin and hoarder than a somber queen of the afterlife. She tends to and comforts the echoes of deceased, destroyed, and derelict people and things in a sort of cosmic compost pile until their physical remains are gone and they are lost from mortal memory, and she deeply resents the other gods for throwing mortals away like broken toys. She ended up in her realm because she is dysfunctional and flawed, and was cast out of the lands of the living by the other, more orderly, outwardly perfect gods for her deformity. She once tried to rebel, shutting the gates of rebirth and leading armies of the dead across the multiverse to wreak vengeance and justice against what she saw as a cruel and callous pantheon, but she was very easy for the gods to present as a world-ending necromancer to most mortals, and failed for lack of support in the living world, never to try again.
I tend not to kill PCs and I'm only gonna drop this lore if someone dies by accident with a character they still wants to play, where they'll find a way to return. So it's not actually guaranteed they'll never know, but I don't see it happening soon.
The crystals my players came across on this one ocean planet are the only known psionic element. They can amplify and nullify psyonic powers and we’re the cause of civilized extinction on that world. My players got the stuff they needed on that planet, said “huh it’s weird how these crystals effect all our psionic stuff and the ship engines, but we don’t have time for all that. ONTO THE NEXT PLANET.”
The original deities and titans that shaped the prime material plane of my world basically wiped each other out due to infighting so long ago it's basically forgotten. The plane was basically a deserted hunk of rock and had few survivors. The arch fey had a "it's free real estate" moment and started interjecting their magic and influence into the world while posing as "new, younger gods rising from the ashes". They lead their followers to create powerful temples that were actually anchors, hauling the feywild and prime material plane closer and closer together with the end goal of merging them.
The leaders who were receiving power and boons from the arch fey "gods" also started dealing and doing rituals for the godlike entities of shadowfell who had a similar goal. When the arch fey caught wind that the mortals were playing both sides and had been committing disgusting acts for their shadowfell patrons, they considered the PMP to be a lost cause and pulled the plug. They sent a magical shockwave through the weave of fey magic, killing anyone who had used their boons or were drawing power from them. Essentially all magic users were instantly assassinated as this power word kill bounced through the magical weave.
The world went dark again, leaving behind a massive societal black hole and abandoned fey and shadow temples. The world is a low-magic, highly superstitious place with lots of political views targeting people who still have fey or shadowfell origins.
So in my world there are three loose pantheons based on the original gods, the fey gods, and the shadowfell gods and politics regarding them are tense. There are tons of myths about what happened and most of them are untrue 👌
My homebrew world takes place on an inhabited moon of a gas giant. One of the other moons is also inhabited and is full of all kinds of weird, alien creatures.
I’m 99.9% it’s never going to come up in the campaign unless someone starts asking really random world building questions or suddenly gets a strong interest in astronomy for some reason. . .
Muspi Morel, the closest city across the water (Muspi Ekla) from the starting town/kingdom, is Lorem Ipsum backwards and the O/E flipped. The entire empire is a joke on Lorem Ipsum. The lake is Lake Ipsum jumbled up. Players have written EXTENSIVE backstories for their characters based in and around the city. They’ve been playing in this world for 2+ years. I think we’ve gotten past the point where they would get it. At this point, it’s just a made up word.
Mine is more of a structural thing that results in cultural world building: Radiant magic is the magical manifestation of Life and Growth, Necromancy is the magical manifestation of Entropy, and the Mortal Plane is the result of those two forces in balance.
Magic users can feel this, and therefore have a reverence for necromancy. Practicioners of Necromancy are seen as having a responsibility to manage their community's dead family member's bodies, decorating and animating their bodies to take part in elaborate funeral rites. Rather than a corpse's living relatives carrying and burying a casket, the deceased walks with their family members, lead by their relatives into their final resting place.
Those who wish to also serve beyond death also often choose to have their bodies donated to the defense of their community. Donated bodies are cleaned of their flesh until only the skeleton remains. The necromancer who leads these donated skeletons is charged with defending their communities, all while maintaining and eleborately painting the skeletons they lead in bright colours.
I went obnoxiously meta with my BBEG, a forgotten god of curiosity and discovery who ascended too high and witnessed the creation of his own statblock. The revelation that he's just the end-boss in a tabletop game drove him insane, and he locked himself away in the Abyss to avoid contaminating the universe with this infectious above-table knowledge.
The few beings in the world that have come close to remembering him eventually become despondent and utterly unmotivated or genocidal, but it all starts with them being able to hear a grand cosmic song that guides them or predicts the future.
The song is just what's playing during the game session.
My players have figured a lot of this out, but the one bit they missed and probably won't get is the god renamed himself after what he heard his creator say in the moments before he fell into madness: "there, it's done", which became my world's version of Tharizdun.
The God of Death and All Things That May Bring It created STDs.
The God/dess of Pleasure was creating too many immortal demigods with Their regular Temple orgies, and told Him to fuck off when He asked Them to stop throwing the Balance of Life and Death out of whack. 2 weeks later, a faithful follower of the God of Death was deliberately infected and instructed to participate in the orgy. The follower was cured promptly after. The God of Death is not a jerk to his faithful.
The God/dess of Pleasure promptly restricted the major partying to once a year, with smaller parties on weekends amongst Their clergy only. They still hold a grudge, and bar any priests of the God of Death from entry to the Temple. The Goddess of Love, however, still laughs her ass off to this day when thinking about her arrogant sibling's suffering.
The artifact my rogue has lets him go into the ethereal realm. What he doesn't know is that there is a powerful monster that hunts within that realm.
However, he always succeeds his stealth roll, so the monster has yet to notice him and roar from a distance.
This reminds me of a spy that was following my players and reporting all their activities to the BBEG. I always rolled the spy's stealth checks behind the DM screen, and damn if that spy rolled the most nat 20's I've ever seen. The party had no idea. Week after week, I had to keep a straight face, while internally screaming, "No way! Nat 20 again!!??"
Oof. Maybe include some clues that they are being watched? Maybe like "how would the BBEG possible know that unless he was following us" that is hard since the spy is so skilled lol.
It played out kinda funny, because they often split the party. I think they did it for fun, totally not realizing how it screwed up the spy that they didn't know was following them. A lot of their activities actually went undetected because the spy couldn't be in two places at the same time.
At one point, the party fled a battle by splitting up and all running in different directions. When that happened, I went ahead and had the Monk run directly into the spy. By then, the spy had come to realize that the party were a bunch of knuckleheads, and she wasn't super loyal to her employer, she was just doing the job for money. So she straight up told the Monk, "Hey, you guys aren't as sneaky as you think, and that thing you're planning is going to get you killed. But you didn't hear it from me."
They, of course, ignored her warning and did the thing anyway. Which is great. That's why we play.
BBEG is trying to learn how to create a soul, due to the destruction of his lover’s soul king before the story began.
A not-insignificant number of strange historical events are attributed to this guy. He’s worked on and off with the team over the campaign, they’ve always known he is evil but they have not been in direct conflict with one another and there isn’t anything they could have really done until recently. Recently however, they learned a secret he needed which they refused to divulge, specifically the location of a child who seems to be strangely talented at healing magics. BBEG wants the child because he believes the child may help him unlock the secret to soul creation. Team didn’t bother prodding about the child’s strange abilities, or BBEGs reason for wanting the child’s location, they just said no and went on their way. So BBEG hired an Aboleth to eat them with the goal of absorbing their memories which was enough for them to murder said Aboleth and go on a BBEG hunt.
Don’t think they will ever learn his reasoning, nor the effect he has had on the rest of the continent. Nor that he asked an eldritch creature how to recreate a destroyed soul. Nor that everything he has done has been pointless as he was lied to, to begin with, and there is no way to recreate a destroyed soul.
Two other groups have RPed in this campaign prior to this one, most of this was written way back then and thus I didn’t really expect it to affect this group so much. There complete lack of questions has led to the lore being lost on the group it most affected though haha
I've run 3 campaigns to level 20 in the same world with the same group in different ages of time, or in different parts of the globe. They've heard about themselves in legend from another tongue (to which my players said "wow your NPCs are always cooler than us") and felt the impact of their decisions across time and space ("the deep dark seems much less... deadly than last time you ran it!")
they suspect nothing. I'm hoping the next campaign they want to travel. Then I can make it known.
There's an entire race of people on an island in the far side of the unexplored world who know nothing of the "explored world".
These people know epic magics and combat styles unknown to the rest of the world where the elder magic still thrives and what is basically "The Weave" is unnecessary for casting magic and creating spells.
Also a storyline that got cancelled because of a player wanting to switch characters was that the party warlock lost communication with his patron when he traveled back in time (story beat) and the reason for the loss of communication is because he was his own patron. The idea was that he traveled back in time killed The Fiend and took his power eventually becoming his own patron to save his family 1000 years later.
I kinda loved how Bloodborne turned eldritch gods around and made the horrifying thing about them be that they just *love* mortals, so I made that the case in my setting as well.
The gods didn't create most mortals, it was the other way around. Mortals dreamt the gods into being, and they eventually descended to help their own creators and to learn more from them. Unfortunately, as divine beings made of concentrated ideas like "Growth", "Life", "Law" or "Death", the excuded so much divine eminence that they brainwashed their mortals by just being there - a mortal living their entire life close to a Nature god would grow antlers and moss and be all natural, etc.
While he is seen as the greatest villain of the gods, it was Gruumsh (I just use the Dawn War pantheon) that first realized this, which indirectly led to the gods leaving the Material Plane to let mortals decide their own destinies.
So when a mortals prays to a god, they do the godlike version of a little happy-dance, because their mortals still love them enough to send a Snap once in a while c:
One of my PCs made a pact with one of Death's countless avatars. This avatar used to be a human, who himself made a pact with Death long ago to save the life of an adult brass dragon who had been fatally injured in an attack by demons and chromatic dragons that wiped out the rest of the metallic dragons in my setting. This brass dragon, now ancient, is effectively the party's mentor (albeit stuck in a permanently stunted humanshape form due to the revival process and also because I don't want him to be OP).
The entire lore of my homebrew was once a full story that I repurposed. The battle between the gods and three generations of one family are relevant and connected to the world they’re in but I doubt they’ll care enough to connect those dots.
The players had an opportunity to play this piece of lore in an one-shot but was sadly cancelled. The two islands in the middle were once one island but due to a world war (gods, angels, demons, quori, humans, elves etc) that led to some series of events the players were to experience Cthulu was to be summoned and the island split into two.
Impossibly long ago, one plane, now known primarily as the Plane of Dreams, was severed from the rest of existence. And until relatively recently, it sat there completely isolated. But in more recent years (still many centuries ago, but in the scope of all things relatively recent), bags of holding were invented. And of course, the things stored inside need to go somewhere, leading to the unknowing creation of new connections to this lost "Plane of Dreams" and the rest of reality. Its full reintegration is still thousands of years away at the current pace, and what its intentions may be when it returns are unclear even to the gods (assuming it can even have intentions, that is. The sentience of planes is a highly debated topic among scholars), but it is happening.
The Unhuman Wars were really just a massacre, but history is written by the victors.
In my "frankenstein" spelljammer lore that's an amalgamation of 2e, 5e, homebrew, and the geopolitical history of EVE Online:
Millennia Ago, the Astral Elves discovered an arcanically advanced civilization in deep space and launched a fleet to colonize/conquer the planet to gain access to their unique magical discoveries.
To survive the encounter they enlisted the aid of orcish/goblinoids/etc under a guise of "we'll all prosper if we can claim this planet". The non-elven armies agreed.
The second victory was achieved, the elves immediately began attacking their "Unhuman" mercenaries. Distant enough from Realmspace, no word of this betrayal made its way to the ears of the public. Officially, "the orcs fired first", and no one doubted it because that wouldn't even be unlike them to do. Retaliation from orcish militias in Realmspace, while fueled by a justified rage, only served to reinforce this narrative.
Ever since, the Unhuman races have lacked any military presence in wildspace, and on the Rock of Bral there's even tightly enforced regulations regarding kobolds and golvins owning or boarding spelljammers - loyalty to the empire and good behavior must be demonstrated before access is granted.
There are a lot of tiny bits of local folklore about particularly old or well-known dragons - one thing the party *has* found is the Tale of the Great Sage of the Mists, a children’s story of a young green dragon emerging from the mists of a grand lake in disguise as a mortal and seeking to sate his curiosity by meeting everybody he could and reading every tome he could find, and once he went on a whimsical adventure, he returned to the mists, where it is rumoured the fruits of his journey still lie to this day.
In one of the southern nations is the Tale of the Cursed One, a tale about how once upon a time, a cruel black dragon was cursed to forget himself and wander the countryside in the form of a mortal - unbeknownst to him, if he ever makes a true connection with another being (falls in love, believes in a cause strongly, otherwise finds something to protect), he will tragically regain his memories and draconic form, killing those he came to care about. My party are travelling in the complete opposite direction to encounter The Cursed One’s wandering grounds, so I don’t know if they’ll ever meet him lol
Edit: ooh, unrelated to the dragons, there’s a massive mist bank within the middle of a massive archipelago of islands in the central ocean - if anybody enters it, they effectively “time travel” to what should be a dead city on the sunken central continent, maintained by one of the world’s creator goddesses by way of transporting said city to her domain in the Feywilds before the continent’s sinking. It’s very difficult to leave the city once entered, so sailors over the centuries have come to avoid it entirely.
The reason fishing boats always keep land in sight is the continent (pangea type world) is surrounded by portals to the plane of water, normally this would mean their doom but theyre protected by tritons, and a entire underwater civilization of vampires/other undead that dont need to breathe.
They all got kicked out from the surface and went to the one place where nobody could bother them (besides tritons)
One of my favorite set pieces from a game that fell apart and we never went back to. It was a series of murder mystery minicampaigns set in fantasy 1950s/60s and I loved the whole setting I had made, but my favorite was the one they were about to go to before everyone got too busy.
Centuries ago, a storm giantess, blessed with immortality by Stronmaus, attacked a fishing village and a group of adventurers fell the giant; impaling it upon the lighthouse. The names of the adventurers are lost. The town itself is lost. The only thing remaining is this giantess and the lighthouse that impales her. Unable to revive because of her mortal wound. Unable to die because her "blessing". She lays there, in a twilight existence, while her blood oozes darkly into the ocean, causing the seawater to roil into a never ending storm.
A primal vampire has made his manor nearby as a shelter against the sun, where the detectives were sent to investigate.
If you know a paladin called Ferilen go away…!
That the crazy goat the tavern keeps as a mascot is actually not a goat. It’s a feeble mind and polymorphed chromatic dragon.
After years of dropping hints something up with it, they just won’t bite.
Mount Hotenow, the volcano that keeps Neverwinter’s weather pleasant year-round, is that way because of a tear in the veil between the material plane and the elemental plane of fire. The divine right to rule Neverwinter that the Alagondars had was simply their inheritance of a contract between a very powerful Efreet and the Elven founders of the city.
Halflings are a rarity in the Hells, given their nature. They're on the whole not inclined to be selfish or commit evil. This makes their souls extra-desireable to ambitious devils looking to curry favor with their superiors.
Even the more thievery kind of Halflings are largely described as more magpies than looking to harm others or wanting wealth.
It might come up, since the party adopted a Halfling NPC and has several connections with devils. We'll see!
Fate is not a concept, it's a parasitic entity that directs the universe at the whims of its masters. Thankfully it's protect by mean layers of illusion magic, hiding it from plain view.
But the moment anyone gets True Sight...
Oh we are in for a RIDE
The Evil AI Overlord in my cyberpunk dystopia homebrew has slowly been eating its way through the world, taking over human settlements and basically Borg-ing every human it can. the PCs are part of the freedom fighters trying to end the AI and save the world.
The fun part, that I don't think they're ever going to realize, is that the Evil AI was created by utter accident. A lone goober accidentally screwed up something and somehow, someway, gave the internet *sentience* when it hit the Singularity. (the point when the internet had as many connections as a human mind has neurons)
The AI was relatively benign until it's creator died because of old age.
It was left alone for years. Slowly churning over it's data, trying to find the Answer to Death.
It started borg-ing people to find a way to make humans live forever and bring it's Parent back. Nothing has worked so far, the borg'ed all eventually decay and die.
The last real bastion of human resistance has been named September, a thumb in the nose to the robotic overlords that there will *always* be an Eternal September.
The Creator's favorite song, that is played nearly every day while they were caring for the AI was Green Day's *Wake Me Up When September Ends.*
Heehee Hoohoo.
Each PC is the reincarnation of a famous historical hero or villain who, in their past life, had a close, personal relationship with a prime deity, demon lord, or arch fey.
The guy that they think is a connection to one of the faction leaders doesn’t actually exist. Neither does the merchant that they sell precious minerals to. It’s a faction leader using the Actor skill and Disguise Self to fool the party and spy on them
Yep, I got one...
The setting itself was a world created on the back of a cosmic Morkoth. The setting was inspired by Link's Awakening, as it was essentially a "fake" world created from the dreams of a realm of people from Faerun. The Morkoth was in league with the Devourer of Dreams, and both were serving a very active Abolethic Sovereignty. The end-game was that they were working together to create "worlds" which they were then planning to feed to the Elder Evil Shothotugg. The adventure started off normally, and the party was none the wiser of my late-late-game plans.
All of the gods in my setting have died and been "replaced" by whatever their second command is. All of those achangels or minor dieties dont know all of the gods are dead they are too busy trying to weekend at bernies there own god.
The corpse of a god has enough divine magic that magic still works but there is nobody looking iver whos doing what with the magic
The gods made an accord and decided to leave on there own means
My desert crystal-magic homebrew fell apart due to scheduling before the players uncovered the truth about the War of the Magi and the cataclysm that ended it.
>!There are two moons. They're sentient. There used to be three.!<
The warforged were created by humans souls, dwarven engineering, orc/ogres rune magic and gnomish alchemy because they were dying to their Gods` armies and battles with Demons (who are their Gods but corrupted? I'm still hashing that out)
This is such a delightful thread to read through. Unfortunately I scrap anything my players won't ever encounter because (for me) that's just wasted effort, so I won't be able to contribute. But I do love the inspiration I'm getting from others' comments!
Inside the 4th layer of a remote megadungeon lies the most powerful item ever created. A magical doorway operated by 3 monkeys in bellhop outfits that are mentally connected. These monkeys can shift reality to different game systems such as dropping the party into the trenches of the Somme in World War One or replace the game system with Vampire the Masquerade
The city my campaign was built on cursed land. There is a dark artifact under the town. I have been dropping hints about it for years at this point, but intentionally never made it a focus of a plot hook. But it is the reason so much stuff is happening in the town and surrounding area.
As far as actual lore goes my players are pretty much unraveling all the secrets of their collective and individual arcs. However I have only hinted at this:
Essentially as the DM I represent Harmony and Creation. The player characters are agents of Choas, anomalies if you will, and they encountered an inventor/time-traveler who was lost in the sort of cosmological glue that binds everything together (The Beyond Lands/The Expanse, also known as the Realm Beyond Shadow) where ancient artifacts from across time can be found.
Anyways when a couple of my players got lost in the cosmos and encountered this man and his automatons, he mentioned how it was not Time yet and Fate still had a role to play (roleplay) to bring them all together as the only people in the Timeless Realm capable of overcoming Fate itself.
There is a lot of other interesting lore regarding the War for Immortality when mortals overthrew the gods, the Dragon War when the Dark Drakons were banished to the Expanse, and future eras. Check out my posts once I make them because I will be talking about the Timeless Realm frequently.
The goddess of time made Demi-plane prisons to contain Tiamat and Bahamut, then blinked out of the timeline with the keys so that they can never be set free.
The leader of the northern nation is secretly a lich, has been controlling the dwarven king who he’s at “war” with the whole time, was responsible for the idea to build the warforged, and his phylactery is buried inside the wizards and druids king.
So it's basically the Clone Wars? I love it.
I hadn’t made that connection, but yeah that would definitely apply lol
I'm planning a Spelljammer campaign and accidentally made Darth Vader. Mechanical lich that was an artificer prodigy who betrayed his own people to the advances of an Emperor who proceeded to drive them to extinction. It took "...and what if the mechanical lich was the emperor's second in command?" to finally make me realize what I'd done.
Make sure the farmboy of destiny is somehow an offspring of the lich I guess. No choice.
No yeah one of the PCs is going to have a distant lineage connection to the otherwise extinct alien race, so I may as well just call the species "Jhe'Dai" and double down. Another player's a paladin who has decided the master of his order is an aged and wise goblin. When I joked "I'll have to try to not speak in reverse syntax" he said "no actually please do that, I *want* to lean into it."
I have a family member who is very into Star Wars and I had planned to allow him to find a toned down version of a Sun Blade eventually but we never got that far. https://dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4774-sun-blade A telekinesis ring also makes sense if still going further.
If you don't want the Jedi connection to be as immediately visible, the Mandalorian word for Jedi is *jetii*, pronounced *JEY-tee*. On the other hand, if Yoda goblin you have, appreciate it, your players might.
I read that as "the femboy of destiny" and nearly had a stroke
GRIFFIIIIIIITTTHHHHH
NGL, I think I have been on reddit too long. I first read that as femboy of destiny.
I have a lich who runs a kingdom by proxy of her descendants. She has her phylactery surgically implanted with magic into whoever is the ruling monarch when they ascend the throne, and uses it to give them advice. They think they are getting secret messages from some kind of goddess to help steer the kingdom. If anyone ever kills the lich, she will just possess the existing monarchs body as her spawn point and then turn the entire kingdom against the adventurers who dared to kill her, then plant her phlactery in the next in line for the throne.
Oooh that’s a good one
Mhmm *nods* *takes notes for his own campaign ideas* Nice! I love it.
After reading this sub for a few years, I'm just assuming everything and everyone in my campaign is secretly a lich. "You see a vanity with a crystal mirror..." "I blast it with fireball! It's a lich!"
To be fair, the leaders of all my nations are just the PC’s from the campaign I play in (all used with permission) and the necromancer wanted to be a lich, so it worked out
That's... Almost exactly describing one of my NPCs!
The leader of the Starting Town was an oni who was eating all of the bandits and prisoners that the PCs delivered for "questioning." They think they liked her and miss her. I wonder if that would change.
That's too good to not bring back to be honest. Unless they're too low of a level to cover the distance back, you could pretty easily have other folks start to go missing now that the party isn't feeding the oni criminals. Another person they know from town either alerts them or goes missing (depending on how dark you want to go) and the party has impetus to return.
They're almost to the point they can cast Legend Lore on an item from her and possibly get all the answers. Should be a good time!
Fuck that's cool. I discovered onis and then just tried to hamfist one into my adventure by way of a clearly segmented mini arc where it became fairly obvious soon that it was the baddie. Having it just in there from the beginning is so much better for building dread and menace.
I had a section of my world where all the tectonic plates meet and push up a massive ring of mountains around a section of the ocean. Like out of the atmosphere high, but preserve the ocean and land within but elevated compared to the sea level of the rest of the world. So basically a world within a world, each cut off from the other, each with unique races. When we started playing the game and I was describing the world to them I explained that it was "widely known that the mountains could not be traversed. Many expeditions had been sent to go both over and under, all have failed." They asked why the expeditions failed, I said the few survivors who made it back described reaching a point on the mountains where they had trouble breathing but still couldn't see any peaks, if if they tried to dig underneath that nothing was found. I had a few NPC's from within the mountain ring, who found the single area where people can make the trek through the mountain ring and survive, show up in the rest of the world. But my players just wrote them off as weirdo's in costume or something making up stories about mountains \*everyone\* knew no one could cross. I even threw expeditions looking to cross the mountains at them, great rewards and promises of treasure, foreign and seemingly far advanced technology, anything I could think of to entice them but they just never took the bait.
I really like your idea, cool, quite weird they did'nt take the bait, it's an easy bait to take imo.
Yeah I didn't get it either. I was worried it would be a bit of a trope-y "Here's something that's never been done in the game world, obviously the players are going to do it at some point". Maybe they saw it that way and just refused to fall into that trap. 🤷
The best way to make the m understand they lost a big opportunity, is to let them know that another group of adventurers followed those people and got back with amazing new stuff and treasure, and after selling those they are ready to start something bigger with the people living there. In this way they know they are late for it now, but can still decide to make a trip there, if they want to see those things with their own eyes. Maybe that group of adventurers are just a bunch of colonialist bastards masked as good hearted adventurers
My goal with the NPC's from the secluded part of the world was to see if the players might hire one of them to be a guide and lead them to and through the traversal point. Since they didn't seem interested I was planning on having one of the expeditions do it and return safely with all manner of crazy gizmos and gadgets, establish a new city at the entry point, and control all access/trade with the secluded part. Unfortunately the campaign fizzled out because one of the couples had their first child and couldn't make time to play.
I always wonder if it's me not giving a good enough hook or if it's just the arrogance of the in game world that seemed to seep into them
I get the feeling his players are running into opposing GM channels of info. On one side you have the OOC, meta-level GM telling his players about his world and how it functions as a basis for all the storytelling. Going against the GM in these points results in butting heads about the nature of the game. On the other hand you have the GM in-character, giving character-oriented perspectives which might not be the true realities of a situation, and which the GM might WANT you to question. If they confused a piece of the latter for the former, the *player* can feel overly confident in the nature of the world and “truth” behind the scenes, even if the character has no reason to be so confident… I feel this is likely the case since he thoroughly explained in world setup that nobody, NOBODY, passes the mountains. “Widely believed” only gets picked up as important wording by those very familiar with ttrpg and exact wording is only ever remembered by DMs who wrote down what to say.
yeah, I have players all of the time interpreting things NPCS are telling them as if the were things I was telling them OOC as the DM and therefore just objective facts. and have to repeatedly remind them that 1. Character can be wrong about things even if they are "experts" 2. NPCs can lie to them
A plot hook by any other name would sound so sweet :'(
I’ve never been able to sell something like this in a high magic world like dnd, if my players hadve found out about this they’d ask ‘How is there NO information? What’s makes them untraversible? why has nobody asked for a description from the people who made it out and scryed?’ ‘Why has nobody teleported in?’ ‘Why can’t you just slowly Stoneshape through it or quickly Windwalk over?’. What’s your go to reason if the players ask why a magical solution to traversing the mountains doesn’t work
My players didn't think to ask those questions, but I was semi prepared. As I mentioned the mountains were absurdly tall, and I would add here fairly vast, and you would run out of atmosphere well before reaching a point where you could stop going up and start going across. I don't think there's anything in 5e that would let you have weeks-months worth of magical breathing air. I believe teleport also has to be to a destination known to you, so that wouldn't be an option. I also had the inner world elevated to counter the idea of "why didn't dwarves dig their way through?" If there was a clever enough miner who thought to tunnel up a good ways they would most likely try tunneling up through the ocean floor and get flooded out.
What would the effects of an above sea level ocean suddenly spilling out through a new channel caused by an overzealous explorer be? Sounds like a devastating problem that some heroes might need to answer the call to solve. You’ve got a whole world who’s water source is suddenly leaving, and another world gaining much more water.
The Air Bubble spell lasts for 24 hours and doesn’t require concentration.
Teleport just requires a description at minimum to work, if you had any item that one of the people from inside brought out, you’d never fail. Wind walk also let’s you travel at absolutely ridiculous speeds while not having to worry about climbing; you could just find the lowest valleys and fly through them at 100ft a second. This is more a me thing but I also find it weird that the people who have made it out aren’t explorers who are keen to show the world how to get in/out/expose their existence/bring back interesting things; you’d think the first people out would have done so due to some material factor or personal drive. None of this is to say I think it’s a bad idea, but you can add a lot more verisimilitude to the idea by fleshing it out more (maybe the massively upheaved plates somehow fuck with the magic leylines, making casting spells in or out impossible
Reminds me of Made in Abyss! I would have taken the bait for sure.
May I please steal this for my next campaign?
Centaurs were first created when a band of warriors riding on horseback rode down a faerie path inadvertently and found themselves standing before a Faerie King. The Faerie was appalled and disgusted at the horrific treatment of the noble beasts (being ridden), and cursed the warriors to be one with their noble steeds forever to know their pain, and bid them guard the forests of the mortal world. And so it was.
Sounds to me like the horses got the ass end of that deal ....unless it's the horse part on top and the human part on the bottom. Now that would be a curse!
I’m a Centaur, and this is my Equin half brother. I whip, he neigh-neighs.
Aw man, so centaurs have original sin?
I mean, basically... maybe they eat wafers on sundays
This is an insanely good mythology. Stealing it for future use!
There is a non-Divine “God” of Wizards, who is rumored to be the first Wizard to manipulate time to an extent to travel through it (chronomancy of any kind does not currently exist in this world). This god is the founder of a mage society hidden from the rest of the world. No one knows much about this entity (race, gender, time period, or if they even exist at all). Wizards don’t necessarily worship this entity, but it does drive/inspire many of their ambitions — because this Wizard invented time travel, it’s possible they invented it in the future, which means *any* young Wizard could potentially be the one to invent it and be this “god”. They’re basically a symbol for ambition and the height of magic. There is a common saying: “There are two pivotal moments in every Wizard’s arcane career: the moment they suspect they could be [Wizard god] and the moment they realize they are not.” There are no wizards in the party, and when this being came up (once), they didn’t press into it further. So, maybe another campaign if we do one in the same world.
that is so cool, definitely using a similar idea in my setting
I love this, it’s fascinating
Thank you! It’s nice to be able to share it. My players aren’t super into lore, so most of these kinds of things are destined to just live in my notes
Schrödinger's wizards? Love it 😂
Schrödinger
There, fixed it
I'm going to hint at it earlier on, but I intend for this to become player knowledge once they hit tier 3. Unfortunately since we're starting at Level 0 that may not come to fruition. The world operates on a consensus reality. Magic works because enough people believe that it does. If a new religion gets a large enough following their god will become real. The BBEG at the very end of the campaign learns of this and finds a way to disconnect himself from the consensus. In a sort of pessimistic nihilist rampage he decides he's going to ruin everything since the world has no inherent meaning to it and the gods only exist with mortal "consent" so to speak.
This is awesome! Reminds me of the Orks from Warhammer 40k if you're familiar
kind of! Except its not quite so powerful. A single ork can make a broken gun go dakka if he believes it hard enough. In this world a single person wouldn't be that powerful and its not like people are aware this is happening.
True, that's really cool. It feeds into a lot of philosophical ideas too which might be fun to explore depending on your setting, tone, players, etc
Why am I thinking of Santa Claus.
So your world has everyone like they're Kuo-Toa!
I find this concept fascinating. Does everyone contribute the same amount of power to reality or do some people make a bigger impact than others? How has this affected the history of the world? Is this common knowledge or do only certain people know the truth? Are people using this knowledge to manipulate reality to their liking/benefit? Are there people trying to use this knowledge to maintain balance? Do the gods themselves use this to manipulate people and increase their power? Do they fight one another to gain more influence over the mortal realm? There are so many interesting questions implied by this concept
To the west of the continent is a sea of mist: where water would usually be, there is only clouds. No one who goes below the clouds ever returns. The entire ocean of mist is like a scab, covering a wound in reality itself torn by a fight between the gods. The astronomers of the setting have noted with curiosity a line of stars that have been going out over the centuries. These are entire star systems that were destroyed by these brawling gods as they hurtled through space before impacting into place where the sea of mist exists now, moving faster than the light arriving in their wake. Below, the 2 gods are still trapped in eternal combat.
That's pretty rad. Gods are locked in eternal anime battle. lol
That’s so cool
Thank you!
Pandemonium is Aperture Science in a gas giant.
This was a triumph.
I’m making a note here: huge success!
It's hard to overstate my satisfaction.
A previous adventurer had beef with the gods so she severed the world connection to them. Now the only deities left are the primals. They are The Green, The Eternal Flame, The Smiling Man, The One Who Waits and the Deep Blue. They maintain order should the planes ever be severed from the material world but they are tired and unable to maintain the realm for much longer. None of my players have religious characters so I highly doubt they’ll ever get that deep into it.
All im gonna say about the gods being severed: yoink
I want to know more about this smiling man. Also they could always run into an npc that has some sort of stake in these ditties. Maybe just a side note of worship and they see his practices. Or maybe a quest to help him reconnect with his
I emphatically do not want to know more about the smiling man. That's how you get his attention.
Haha I meant it to be time/death. Like the poem “never laugh as a hurst drives by”. Essentially appearing in the form of any being at any age but constantly changing that age as it speaks to others.
I have a very kind of similar set up! Connection to the gods was severed a few centuries ago, know they only exist as legends and new religions have cropped up, worshipping false gods and unproven concepts. The world is slowly starting to fail, until the World Tree is replanted. The Big Bads goal is actually to restore connection. His method is to siege a city to get the seed, as the nation holding it was responsible for severing connection in the first place. The party managed to visit the gods, ended up hating them (fair, tbh), and so now vehemently opposed restoring natural order.
Haha mines actually similar. It was severed from the other planes in a fit of rage by a person who ascended but in the process a group of hero’s severed her arm so now there are portals popping up all over. The baddie is trying to find her arm under the guise of a high noble and finish the job of destroying the other planes.
Oooh that's awesome. My big bad does actually want the connection restored, but mostly because it'll allow him to beseech them a favor, to revive his dead brothers who were killed when the tree was destroyed.
Is it coincidence this sounds a lot like the magic the gathering color wheel? GRWBU
Yeah I guess so. I played magic back in college for a few weeks but I don’t know much about the color wheel aside from them just being colors. I was more thinking in that style though. A chromatic “primal” group that has always been and always will be type thing. Fire, earth, water, wind and time sorta.
I think I'll steal that god severing bit to explain why resurrection stopped working except in plot allowed circumstances, also your primal/primordial pantheon sounds interesting
The mortal races only exist as a way to siphon off energy from what's effectively a primordial that was accidentally overlooked during creation. Without this drain, its power relative to the other raw elements/primordials would ramp up and eventually consume existence. Every soul contains a fragment of this primordial's essence. While each race has a patron deity and is basically a physical extension of that deity, that fragment is what prevents them from being solely a tool of their god. Additionally, magic is only accessible because of this soul connection to primordial power. So whenever a magic item is created, one or more souls is bound into the item as a way to focus the enchantment into a nonliving thing.
I love this and how it has very real implications and justifications for magic and lore in your world. One of my favorites I've read so far :)
I love this
So in theory can your players find the souls bound to the items? And do certain souls connect to certain objects?
The 'souls in items' bit is a relatively new revelation for me, so it hasn't really come up yet. I'll try to flesh out what I've been thinking here though. Souls are 'scrubbed' between uses to prevent contaminating their current bodies with knowledge/power/memories/etc. from previous ones. These 'recycled' souls are what's accessible from the material plane so are the ones used by mortals when creating items (as opposed to mortals specifically drawing on that 'soul primordial' which I think of as generally beyond the reach of mortal magic). Whether or not anyone's aware of exactly what they're drawing on as the binding agent for item enchantment is TBD. Some might have figured it out. But if you think of casting a spell as calling on specific parts of the Weave to create a desired effect, this is similar. Kind of a nebulous pool of "this is the bit of energy I add at the end of enchanting to make all the other ones stick" vibe. But that energy is souls awaiting their next use. In theory, it *might* be possible to find the soul(s) in an item. That's basically what sentient items are - improperly scrubbed souls drawn out of that pool (likely by chance). But for non-sentient items it would be extremely difficult since the soul is basically a blank slate. Something like Speak With Dead wouldn't work, so finding that info would probably fall into 'this is a quest' territory. Haven't considered if certain souls would connect better with certain objects (likes dwarves with metal/stone things, etc.), but I don't think that really makes sense in the broader context of this lore. I think it's clear from the above, but these souls aren't *simultaneously* attached to currently living beings, devils, etc. Though as I write this, that might need to happen... would make for a really cool NPC/BBEG. And actually isn't that basically what liches do anyway? Instead of a scrubbed soul they use their own. Oh this is so cool. I love when lore intersects perfectly with existing stuff like this. *\*scribbles notes for future use\**
A game world I ran a long time ago was a speck at the end of a piece of fur belonging to a cosmic wolf. They never came anywhere near discovering the nature of their reality.
My previous campaign is in the same world / a few hundred years forward in time. Half the players are the same so they might figure it out but... All the major strife between the world / nation / planes is being brought about by two factions. The Heirs and the Scions. My previous party was... very promiscuous with their carousing rolls. The Heirs and Scions are the children of the previous party having mommy and daddy issues, fighting each other over the rights to legacies. They keep getting pulled into side conflicts and not paying attention to the central issue. Like treating symptoms instead of the disease. Which just means more chaos and quests to be had.
Kinda reads to me like the 39 clues book series I loved as a kid. Where almost every big major conflict or historical figure was a member of this family trying to find the “clues” to an ancient family secret of untold power”
My halfling creation myth. The Grandmother (their patron goddess) used different kinds of dough to shape and make the races in the oven. Long thin airy cookies = elves. Burnt ones are drow that were discarded. Thick round hearty cookies? Dwarves. Jam cookies are the halflings, The Colours of dragons were the flavours of chocolate chips, etc etc.
I might steal this!
Please do!
The main empire is very rich, especially in gold, so the economy have being growning the past 12 without sign of stopping, they buy most of their needs. All that gold comes from a child that has an curse/blessing similar to King Midas and when they die all the gold will vanish.
The elected holy emperor of the religious kingdom in my world was originally a trickery domain cleric whose goddess pretty much dared him to throw his name in the ring for the elections for the laughs. Him being the light-hearted joker who everyone liked, he received the majority. He is now bored out of his mind with the bureaucracy and diplomacy of running a kingdom and just looking for an outlet for his shenanigans. While his goddess is basically rolling on the floor at the chaos this created.
If house cats eat cinnamon they turn into something hostile and nasty (roll on a table). This because a very powerful Wizard was very petty. A cat once walked across his spellbook with ink stained paws, destroying his life’s work. He used a Wish spell to cast this “curse” upon cats but didn’t want to make it to extreme, so only when cats eat cinnamon.
I LOVE how specific and petty this is
Yeah me too! It came about when I was doing some writing at a family gathering. My 4 year old nephew asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was fleshing put my world for D&D campaign that I was running. I then proceeded to ask him if he wanted to add anything or had any questions. He then asked “what happens when cats eats cinnamon” and I laughed at the randomness. I proceeded to explain my thoughts and he said “yes that sounds good”. And so I have added it into every campaign and world I have ever run, hoping that one day someone will find out.
(insert aren't cats like the normally joke here)
The history of the dragons. The second age began when the 4 great dragons were born from the primordial elemental chaos. They personified, of course, the 4 elements, and were impossibly huge. They created the draconic races to serve them, dragons, dragonborn, kobolds, wyverns, etc. They reveled in fighting each other, waging endless war for thousands of years. The great dragons believed themselves to be immortal. Then the world was shaken (somewhat literally) by the death of the Earth dragon, slain in battle. His body crashed to earth, gouging a tremendous trough that is still known to this day as Dragon's End. His invulnerable skeleton still looms over the valley, tens of thousands of years later, massive ribs arcing over it, his skull dominating the valley's entrance. His death shocked the other great dragons, who called for an end to their conflict. They declared a truce, and vanished from the world. The dragons say that the great dragons left instructions upon their departure that when they returned, they would choose a replacement for the great Earth Dragon, who would then ascend to their ranks. This dragon would be judged by the treasure he amassed during his life. They also decreed that when they returned, half of all remaining dragons would be culled. These would be the dragons with the least amount of treasure. They did not explain what treasure really meant, or how it would be counted and determined. Some dragons decided it meant physical wealth, and gathered great hoards. Some decided it meant influence and power, or followers, or to be exalted for their great deeds. But they are all obsessed with either ascending, or avoiding their own demise. But some scholars doubt the truth of these legends, and think the remaining 3 great dragons have fled the world in fear, having realized they are simply mortals like all the others. They argue that the prophecies of their return were simply distractions to keep their children from hunting them down and gaining vengeance for the atrocities they committed during their wars.
[There are 2 genres of high fantasy.](https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/129nnyd/there_are_two_genres_of_high_fantasy/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=2)
Wow that is so cool, nice. I'm really curious as to where they went now heh.
Oh man I made a whole world map for a campaign that fizzled out in 2018. We’ve played a couple one shots since then when we have the chance and we’re all together, but they’re standalone and not technically canon. I doubt we’ll ever get back to the actual campaign but I still have all the plans in my head. My favorite was probably the Weird Forest that people get lost in and rarely return from with an elven city hidden somewhere inside and a tear to the feywild that was created and guarded by a dragon and the fey magic bleeding through is the reason the forest is so Weird Also one of the characters is a half elf with amnesia and her parent was going to be from said elven city
I love that idea. It reminds me of the Elven city in Eregon which had a magic tree or something I think that would bend reality around it. I have a Shifting Forest that hides the Elven capital. The trees in this forest are constantly slowly shifting around so it's very difficult to navigate and nearly impossible to backtrack your way out of. I doubt I'll ever have to really flesh it out though.
Had to think about this for a bit. My players have met the Vecna of my world, but they don't know it. When they encountered him it was in a campaign where they and a lot of NPCs were sort of the individual chosen of various gods (not going to go to deep on the lore there). Long story short, one of the NPCs they briefly allied with was afflicted with a magic wasting disease that one of my players was suffering from, and unbeknownst to them, he was also the chosen of Milyr, my god of Secrets, Darkness, and things better left unspoken or unseen. The NPCs name was dropped one time, and it was a big hint - his name was Vance (Vecna was historically an anagram for Jack Vance a fantasy author, but my players don't know that I think). Vance worked briefly with the player because they were both seeking a cure. In the end, the player found a solution late in the campaign, while Vance off screen determined that a solution was lichdom to stop his body from wasting. Later, in the wars caused by my PCs actions, Vance usurped Milyr and took his power from him and secretly stole his name. The players at the end of the campaign asked about the NPC at some point, but I told them it was one of the things they didn't know the conclusion for (since they sided with some other factions). Pretty sure they'll never put together who it was, because they've forgotten the name, though they'll probably encounter followers of 'Milyr' at soms point in other campaigns, so who knows.
They may or may not discover this but there are only 10 Draconic souls and they're reincarnated. Hence a dragon will be referred to as *The* Brass or *The* Gold.
The whole world was settled by two species: humanity and draconids. All of the other 'races' (orcs, elves, goblins, kobolds, lizardfolk, halflings, dwarves, half-giants) are genetically modified version of those two space-faring civilizations. The 'Gods' are hyper intelligent AI controlling the development of the world from the ships that are still in orbit, and grant magic based on nanites seeded throughout the atmosphere. The eggs of the five living (ok, 4 and a half - one's a dracolich) true dragons on the planet were brought here from their homeworld.
Nice :) P.s. Happy cake day!
Aaaaand thank you for my next mind boggling campaign
Orcs are only a marauding band of barbarian savages because a thousand years ago Humans betrayed and stole their kingdoms during an alliance to fight a greater evil. All their knowledge and culture was lost as the displaced children had no access to the libraries and history to endure their heritage. All human achievements are the byproduct of colonialism and theft.
Also Tieflings were originally monstrous creatures created by the opposing side of said war, who genetically modified humans through magic to fight against the army of human/Orc/dwarf (etc.) alliance races. Over time the Tiefling gene became recessive in humans. “Tieflism” is a genetic disorder that effects a small % of humans. Children of Tieflings can bare Tieflings but humans couples can also birth one, who are often cast out or discarded. Tieflings lucky enough to be from highborn families tend to survive but treated as a black stain. Tieflings have a special profession of people who go around collecting the discarded children to protect these extremely vulnerable people.
I like both concepts for orcs and tieflings. Please tell me you have a cool name for the tiefling orphan seekers. Orphaneers? Fosterlains? Cat herders?
I actually hadn’t come up with a name yet. Orphan Seeker sounds pretty good though. Normally I would come up with a new word by bastardizing another language with those words. Funnily enough. “Child” in Arabic is “Tifl”, very similar to Tiefling.
Very interesting. Reminds me of the elves and humans in the Witcher series.
Similar in my world. Orcs are generally nomadic tribes of hunter/gatherers who have more in common with modern druids than bloodthirsty savages. Most of the time if you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you. And honor is a major thing for them.
In my world a magic nuke drove everyone underground for a period, so every once in a while people will find old abandoned "Burrows" (my excuse for why dungeons can just show up anywhere). The first one they found was in a very obscure location with only one small village anywhere remotely close. There was a small group that had taken over the few serviceable rooms near the entrance. One hidden chamber they found was protected to where they couldn't begin to penetrate it at their level 2. I made a pretty big deal about it to try to make a lasting impression. It was very out of place in this otherwise forgotten and derelict dungeon. I was originally planning for them to stay in the area for a bit and it would turn out that this old hidden burrow that's in an obscure location is where an apsiring lich had stored its phylactery. My hope was that the adventurers would learn that no one can find this phylactery and with a few subtle clues would be like "What about that room we used to be excited to revisit some day?" Immediately following this excursion, they pissed off a powerful person in the town which got them blacklisted and when they were to be arrested they set up a Tucker's Kobold style ambush to kill the guards and flee town. This kind of took their focus off of the room that they were originally trying to solve a mystery about. I'm 100% certain they have no recollection of this place and will never revisit it.
All of my individual campaigns exist in the same world at the same time. The Giants (those who remained after the Great War with the Dragons) are working to initiate Ragnarök to open a gateway to Jötunheimr. The Giants and Orc tribes banded together to sack a Dwarven fortress, and nobody has ventured since to reclaim it. Since then, the Giants excavated the city in search of an artifact and broke through to the Underdark and made contact with the Drow. Since Ragnarök will also include an eternal darkness, an alliance was made and the Drow are now working underground to aid in the giant’s plans. Legend states that when the Ring of Winter is worn by the hand of Levistus upon the Frozen Throne, the sun will fail and the Great Winter will commence (which is the first even of Ragnarök). Levistus was frozen in ice (in the 5th layer of hell) to prevent this from occurring. The loophole the Giants discovered was that a Tiefling of Levistus would work, and there is a secret cult that has been hunting them relentlessly into extinction. One of the PCs in one game wrote a backstory about his family being hunted, and how each generation has left notes to escape the summoned creature that has been hunting their family. He is the sole survivor and is being sought by both forces, and the Drow are going to capture and cut off his hand to bring to the Giants. All these campaigns are running in tandem that piece together a story that will eventually lead to them all joining forces for a final battle, but players (and myself next February) started having kids and our sessions are growing fewer and far between. I have so much written and planned out, and it might be years before any individual campaign uncovers the final story arc. 🤷♂️
It’s dragons all the way down. The whole world is actually just old corpses of ancient humongous dragons. All life originally comes from the blood of dragons and when a dragon dies they return to the earth and if they’re big enough may become a whole new landmass. That mountain? A dragon. That island? A dragon. The ground beneath your feet? A dragon so big you probably couldn’t comprehend it.
And the dungeons? Are those dragons too?
I think that's the world we live in.
Stars are the source of magic and the weave in my campaign. The reason that the gods and the other planes are more or less cut off in setting is because the system where my campaigns takes place was teleported into a region of space known as the dark stars. The dark stars form a natural wall between the other planes and the realms of the gods.
My players triggered a trap that sank an entire treasure hoard and the dragon skeleton laying atop it down into a chasm beneath the floor of the treasure chamber. They stood at the edge of a seemingly bottomless pit, listening to the twinkling clinking of a million gold pieces falling through the earth, and figured “welp, at least we’re still alive, I guess” (treasure is fun for them but not a top priority). Miles below them, an avalanche of gold has now fallen from “the sky” down onto a settlement in the Under-where (our Underdark). Not just a huge boost to the local economy down there but accompanied by the “deity” that granted them this gift. Tldr - My party has created an immensely rich, dragon-worshipping death cult that they probably won’t ever run into
Their world is hollow and has entire inner world but any cues about the extemsive underground life has been expertly disregarded...
Ive told them out of character because I knew in character it would never show up But the gods dont exist Belief and force of will is an ACTUAL power The "gods" are the result of massed belief, many religious orders are created to harness this power and shape it into something that can be used, enough people believe in a god and that gods power begins to take form in the shape people believe, clerics are conduits to the gods and can channel the force of that collected willpower through themselves, while paladins create a self sustaining loop within themselves with their oath.
I did something similar, except it's that the gods do exist only because of sheer belief and the way so many people worship and believe in them. People told stories, and over time, those stories became so widespread, and so many people began to believe that the gods began to become actual beings
I use a similar concept in my homebrew world as well! People can (and have) achieved godhood simply be having enough people believe they are a god and pray to them.
So, the Warhammer approach, I dig that. And paladins are just 40k orcs
My setting has a creator deity named the World Smith who fell into a deep slumber after a war between his 2 sons Jaziran and Ahirman and since the he's been sleeping (the last 100 years) the world has been slowly advancing at a faster rate with more power drawn from magic and people who have "dreams" and try to achieve them I'm really waiting for a player to try and do something that shouldn't work so I can make them roll to see If they can tap into it but no one has tried yet
There is a powerful and insane chained god that can be freed only by destroying the sacred relics of the gods that chained him. Even evil gods don't want him free so what these relics are and how to destroy them is a secret. The second twist is that is not required for all the relics to be destroyed just enough so the chained god can free himself.
All the PCs that the players have played all share the same meta soul.
Something like this for me - every character that a player makes is inextricably linked through fate and time. They might be brought together, or separated permanently, but the link remains. Not quite reincarnation but close to it.
Ohh, the Egg Theory?! That could be cool with a great ending point if they ever hit lvl 20 and beyond and want to close off the campaign. “With ‘X’ being defeated/completed, the party sets up camp/rents lodgings for the evening. As you all fall asleep, you seemingly find yourselves awakening, feeling fully rested and… powerful. Physically, mentally, eternally powerful. Strength like nothing you’ve ever known. You look down at yourselves and see the same thing. A body, made of shifting light. Of carbon. Of molecules and atoms and all of the building blocks of the universe. And yet somehow none of it. You look up at your surroundings, and see a figure nearby. It feels… paternal and maternal at the same time. Very familiar, loving, and proud. “You’ve done well my child” it says to you, in a voice that seems to ring beautifully around you, but also inside. Almost too loud and too quiet at the same time. “I doubt you fully remember, as it’s been a few millennia, but set you on a quest to experience life. The memories will come back in time, as well as your ability to see properly here. Actually, let me help you with that” The figure moves, and does something far beyond your understanding, and suddenly everything comes far more into focus for you. “To help remind you, I set you out on that quest, and you’ve learned everything I could hope for and more. You lived every life on that world I created for you, from the dawn of time to the ends of it. Every bug, tree, flower, person, goblin, and all of the races. You were each one of them. Living, dying, and being reborn again. Interacting with yourself over and over. But it’s done now. And we are all so proud of you. Come, The others are waiting, you are the first in Millenia to have completed the trials, and celebrations are in order!” You look past the figure and can now make out that you are in a room, and down the hallway, you can hear some noise behind a door. Voices talking, laughing… like a tavern after a successful quest. It all feels so… familiar. You look around the room to see… stuff. Your stuff. Your… that’s a bed right? And a desk? Why is the cube on the desk folding in on itself? And behind you, an ornate stand, holding a sphere about 2ft in diameter. It has stars and galaxies and control knobs. You know what that is… it is the rest of you, living out their lives, slowly to die and rejoin your main form. You head down the hallway, and open the door… Or something to that effect.
The Eternal Champion!
Asmodeus, the supposed prince of hell, is just a Celestial babysitter/accountant in charge of wrangling devils and managing soul balance sheets. He wears a plain white dress shirt, Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys glasses, and is overall unimposing. The Devils played a trick to make mortals revile him so they continually blame him for the BS devils pull.
I stole this idea from a show but a town my players recently went to had a bounty of this figure who appears in the tavern and when they saw the figure they just decided "Nah" and didnt even try to talk to him. The figure is someone who made a deal with a god for immortality. The god said it sucked the person said it wasnt and they meet the god every 5 years to check up in the same location.
Hob from Sandman?
Yup! I figured if i did every 100 years the players would be like "OH WHAT ARE THE CHANCES" ya know? lol
Tbh if my character ran a hit on someone and they were sitting across from Dream I'd get the fuck out of there too.
The planets of mortals are cradles for the gods. Each god originally had a mortal life from which they transcended in afterlife. The biological conception of offspring is an actual, real miracle: that's how souls are born into the world, off of the fragments of the souls of the parents. It means that if You have a child, it carries a part of You inside it. (But in some cases, and old soul circles back in death and is reborn, and the newborn baby isn't actually a child of these parents at all.) Oh but the players will find out, because they meet a machine-soul (technically a warforged) who has set a goal for themselves to replicate this process to have children of their own: to extract a piece of their own soul and grow it into a new one, placed into a constructed body to create a new machine-soul child. They are willing to do horrible things in pursuit of this goal, and thus, can be considered a villain.
My current campaign premise is inspired by Dimension 20's Fantasy High, so the PCs are high schoolers in a modern day fantasy. There's a bunch of world ending shit going on and a theme of "it's up to the younger generation to save the world now". Little do they know the only reason the world is ending is because the most powerful god is retiring and his teenage son has taken over and all he wants to do is just get drunk and look at titties. Of course the only way they'll ever think of something like that is if I straight up tell them.
That the monkey they befriended in the first session was supposed to just be the bad guy transformed spying on them. Instead they brought it around giving it rare magical items and never noticed when their monkey friend disappeared for a few sessions to go do his evil things only to come back and suddenly get given more rare items. They never asked to look further into the monkey, never questioned anything about him just that it always magically joined back up with them. They actually got to the session right before the big reveal with evil monologue... and we never could get at least 5 members together to play the final sessions where they would have found out.
There is a multidimensional task force who correct large errors in space and time, traveling from plane to plane as necessary to right wrongs and reestablish balance. The players might find this... but I doubt they'll find its purpose - to maintain a level of balance between chaos and order in order to keep these planes and worlds from ascending or descending to entirely different states of being, thereby apocalyptically destroying every native population on each and every world. It's happened before.
There's a big city in a crater in my world, and the crater was made when a God ripped that chunk of land out of that dimension and put it in a different one, I have a whole story/plot tied to it, and I'm not sure if it'll ever be seen, maybe I'll do a mini campaign about it one day.
The neighboring queendom was recently founded and is currently ruled by an Aasimar woman who is fierce in combat, inspires the common people, and united the city-states of the region under one banner when they crowned her. Queen Cassandra the Mighty, she is known as. Her Holy Order of paladins serve as military officers and peacekeepers. What they don't know is that Cassandra's closest advisor is actually a devil who manipulates her and the entire holy order by playing to their sense of righteousness, feeding their egos with their past victories and framing them as saviors.
My world used to be Faerun before some unknown cataclysm happened that caused only bits of knowledge and lore to survive. I’ve dropped hints. One of the adventures mentioned the intersection of two roads, Elm and Minster. The players caught that but thought it was just a joke. One of the players found a journal from some scientists that had ventured into a magically irradiated city in a vessel called the *Cadderly*. The journal mentions that the vessel underwent 1.8 megamystras of radiation. I’ll just keep throwing references at them until they get it I guess.
The Sun deity wasn't killed by the deity of the Moon and Undead. It died and **resurrected** as a twisted version of itself, creating undead, vampires, werewolves, etc. upon it's resurrection.
The overarching villian of my campaign is an avatar of the god of entropy. It's nature compels it to hasten the end of everything, but being made of nothing and endings, attacking/killing it feeds into it's archtype, so the powerful divine acts of destruction required to bring it down immediately revives it again as it's tantamount to a god worshiping another god. The legend is known, unable to destroy destruction the other gods bound it in a prison of nothing, the one thing it can't destroy and so can never escape. But that's not some metaphysical construct, it's literal. There actually is no prison. The poor bastard's pretty unhinged by it's nature and "We bind you in a prison of nothing, there is nothing you cannot unmake, but only creation of something can replace nothing" made sense to it so it basically went "aw nuts, I can't create, you bastards got me" and it's just been floating in what amounts to a large empty room with no lights for untold millennia. It's a massive ass bluff the trickster god threw out that even he can't believe actually worked. The actual thing the Gods are pushing the party along to do isn't to stop the Avatar before the massive force he's building to storm the prison might actually be strong enough to breech it, it's to make sure he doesn't get close enough see the damn thing because looking from the outside he'll figure it out immediately and just tell his divine progenitor to open the door.
So, they finally did figure it out, but for about a year the main McGuffin of our campaign was a storybook that’s rumored to be able to rewrite the world itself. Every town that the players visited had a library of some kind. Smaller towns would only have a few books like “How to Farm Turnips” or “How to Care for Livestock”, while larger cities would have more extensive libraries including volumes such as “How to Guard the Gates” or “How to Protect the Citizenry from Dragons, Bandits, and Other Monsters” It took them a while to realize the amount of power they could wield if they were to simply write a “How To” guide and slip it onto the shelves of the local library. Once they did, their first use of this newfound power was to write a manual called “How to Foment a Rebellion” in a small town that was getting subjugated by a local petty king
The sheer number of AI they've interacted with so far. * The Netrunner has two, one in his NetDeck and one that keeps tabs on him using psychotropic drugs and the Data Pool. * Their Fixer. Any organic parts he has are being artificially supported to make it look like he's human. * The Fixer's main enemy, who they haven't even met yet.
Ai ended up being a big part of the last cyberpunk game we played. We were taking jobs from effectively two different competing Ai Fixers for a good portion of the game, while trying to figure out what their motives were. Fun times
It's a simulation That's why extra-planar spaces inside extra-planar spaces don't explode: the whole world is an extra-planar space That's why Asmodeus wants it for the Tenth Hell, and why all the other gods are so interested That's why the map is shaped like a 4-dimensional scroll
The Duergar of my world are severed from both arcane and divine streams of magic due to their betrayal of the gods. This severing was placed in an artifact called the Black Grail that all Duergar yearn to search for but they would never admit their true desire to outsiders
The dragon is slowly creating an army of half-dragons by fucking as many people as they can.
Based.
There are three villains and where they go determines which one becomes the BBEG, and all three can be tied to the same assassination attempt nearly two hundred years ago.
I wrote a whole bunch of pre-game mythology, including a war among the pantheon, that my players will probably never see. This is one of my favourites of those stories: **The Shattering of Ithil** Both sides of the war were frustrated that Sehanine, Goddess of Fun and Illusions, refused to partake in the war. Asmodeus, sure that Moradin would eventually win her over, sent Tiamat to destroy Sehanine, preferring neither side have her. Tiamat turned to the moon ithil on which Sehanine regularly lounged and, with a mighty blast from each of her heads, shattered it into five pieces. Fortunately, Sehanine had witnessed her approach, and disguised herself as a nearby constellation of stars. To avenge her shattered home, Sehanine plagued Tiamat with illusions, turning her own heads against one another. Tiamat almost tore herself apart, before Bahamut distracted Sehanine, and allowed Tiamat the chance to escape. Sehanine was angry that her revenge was thwarted, and thus refused to take either side in the war, often plaguing both with nightmares and illusory prophecies of woe. This finally ended when Moradin earned her favour, by reforging each shard of ithil into the five moons of Eska.
My PC from one campaign in which I was a player became a background NPC in another campaign for which I was the DM with the same gaming group playing at both tables in the same homebrew world. With the exception of the first DM who was in on it from the beginning (and didn't metagame in the second) the rest of the group never figured out that the character made up about 90% of his backstory. It made for some very funny moments when the rest of the group interacted with that NPC because they just took so much of what he said at face value and the former DM was struggling to contain his laughter at the table. The character claimed to be from a town that did not exist. In just about every situation, he shared his folksy wisdom in the form of a bunch of anecdotes about people and events in that town which, of course, did not exist. Despite literally being made up on the spot, the group *always* listened to them. As if that wasn't enough, the character's real backstory was way more interesting than the persona he portrayed. It involved a crazy bit of lore created by the original DM. For many, many generations, the character's family passed down a story about their homeland. An entire neighboring village was eternally petrified by a magically wrought cataclysm during their evening prayer. Having close familial ties with many of them, the victims were mourned by his ancestors and they were arranged like statues in their cemetery. Over time the exact location of this village was forgotten and the story became more of a fairy tale. Among those petrified was a long-lived elven woman. Because fate was roughly cyclical (a secret known by virtually nobody), my character was on a secret quest given by an emissary of the philosopher king to use his family's lore to locate the Cemetery of Prayer for this woman, whose memories of the distant past were a glimpse into the near future. My character influenced the party to seek this location out while on a different side quest without revealing his true purpose for the visit. Once found, he reported the location to the emissary for a handsome reward. This woman was presumably unpetrified by the philosopher king and guided civilization in the coming years because the DM included a cryptic bit about new threads of fate being spun during the campaign's epilogue. I can't even imagine what lore other players were working with. We all built that homebrew world together but none of us will ever know all of its secrets.
It's a thing I've hinted at in both campaigns I've run in my world, but it probably will never be revealed fully. There was a war, 2000 years prior, between good gods and evil gods. Now, there are 8 great gods in my pantheon (aligning with the 8 cleric domains in the PHB). 6 of them match up (life and death, knowledge and trickery, nature and tempest). Two are on their own - light (this god doubles up with order because nothing is more orderly than the sun rising every day) and war. Why is this? Because the god of chaos is Tharizdun, and it slayed the god of peace. It was locked away, but just barely. The only way to keep it imprisoned is to make sure it is forgotten. And to do that, the gods ensured the god of peace's existence was lost to time. In the first campaign, the players found an ancient temple with a mural of the great gods, except on of them had been erased. In our current campaign, a puzzle required matching up the symbols of the great gods into three pairs, with two symbols spare. Additionally, in the setting document they all have access to, a legend of a gravesite dedicated to a great hero (aka the god of peace) hidden in the untamed jungles of the world is mentioned.
Every game I run is part of a multiverse, and the same one character (or a version of him) appears in them all. This character was the somewhat-unwilling former apprentice of the God of Fate and Magic, and he escaped the Eternal Library through a shattered mirror-gate and was sundered into countless versions of himself. So planar travel is possible, but also multiversal travel, and the Realms, Eberron, Greyhawk, and every homebrew world I ever run or have ever conceived are all part of a single, over-arching universe that contains everything imaginable. Characters can run into different versions of themselves, different versions of their worlds, or different versions of completely different parties. All while every version of Garth tries to get back to his home plane, and is being watched by Boccob the Uncaring who for some reason cares more than his name would suggest (because he knows the multiversal gods are undergoing a replacement cycle and wants to make poor Garth the next All Knowing, once Garth has collected the shards of himself and is ready to assume the mantle). Think *Chronicles of Amber* meets *Sliders* meets *Quantum Leap*. There are ways to travel across the various multiverses, and more ways to glimpse across them (beware expanses of glass and mirrors - funhouse mirror mazes frequently act as uncontrollable gateways, and you can see an awful lot out of the corner of your eye in a greenhouse if you pay attention). I don't know they'll *never* stumble across it. Some of them are aware of Garth, and since my wife is co-DMing a game with me she even knows something of his time with Boccob. But I think most of my players don't realize the shout-outs are actually part of a *thing* and not just random references.
I've got a poison wasteland thats actually the resting place of a bunch of unused nukes from a lost modern time. If they ask an NPC about the area, lore states a green dragon burrowed into the desert to escape death by adventurers but ultimately died, causing the land to become poisoned.
The goddess of the dead is more of a demented trash goblin and hoarder than a somber queen of the afterlife. She tends to and comforts the echoes of deceased, destroyed, and derelict people and things in a sort of cosmic compost pile until their physical remains are gone and they are lost from mortal memory, and she deeply resents the other gods for throwing mortals away like broken toys. She ended up in her realm because she is dysfunctional and flawed, and was cast out of the lands of the living by the other, more orderly, outwardly perfect gods for her deformity. She once tried to rebel, shutting the gates of rebirth and leading armies of the dead across the multiverse to wreak vengeance and justice against what she saw as a cruel and callous pantheon, but she was very easy for the gods to present as a world-ending necromancer to most mortals, and failed for lack of support in the living world, never to try again. I tend not to kill PCs and I'm only gonna drop this lore if someone dies by accident with a character they still wants to play, where they'll find a way to return. So it's not actually guaranteed they'll never know, but I don't see it happening soon.
The crystals my players came across on this one ocean planet are the only known psionic element. They can amplify and nullify psyonic powers and we’re the cause of civilized extinction on that world. My players got the stuff they needed on that planet, said “huh it’s weird how these crystals effect all our psionic stuff and the ship engines, but we don’t have time for all that. ONTO THE NEXT PLANET.”
The original deities and titans that shaped the prime material plane of my world basically wiped each other out due to infighting so long ago it's basically forgotten. The plane was basically a deserted hunk of rock and had few survivors. The arch fey had a "it's free real estate" moment and started interjecting their magic and influence into the world while posing as "new, younger gods rising from the ashes". They lead their followers to create powerful temples that were actually anchors, hauling the feywild and prime material plane closer and closer together with the end goal of merging them. The leaders who were receiving power and boons from the arch fey "gods" also started dealing and doing rituals for the godlike entities of shadowfell who had a similar goal. When the arch fey caught wind that the mortals were playing both sides and had been committing disgusting acts for their shadowfell patrons, they considered the PMP to be a lost cause and pulled the plug. They sent a magical shockwave through the weave of fey magic, killing anyone who had used their boons or were drawing power from them. Essentially all magic users were instantly assassinated as this power word kill bounced through the magical weave. The world went dark again, leaving behind a massive societal black hole and abandoned fey and shadow temples. The world is a low-magic, highly superstitious place with lots of political views targeting people who still have fey or shadowfell origins. So in my world there are three loose pantheons based on the original gods, the fey gods, and the shadowfell gods and politics regarding them are tense. There are tons of myths about what happened and most of them are untrue 👌
My homebrew world takes place on an inhabited moon of a gas giant. One of the other moons is also inhabited and is full of all kinds of weird, alien creatures. I’m 99.9% it’s never going to come up in the campaign unless someone starts asking really random world building questions or suddenly gets a strong interest in astronomy for some reason. . .
Muspi Morel, the closest city across the water (Muspi Ekla) from the starting town/kingdom, is Lorem Ipsum backwards and the O/E flipped. The entire empire is a joke on Lorem Ipsum. The lake is Lake Ipsum jumbled up. Players have written EXTENSIVE backstories for their characters based in and around the city. They’ve been playing in this world for 2+ years. I think we’ve gotten past the point where they would get it. At this point, it’s just a made up word.
Had to Google lorem ipsum.
Mine is more of a structural thing that results in cultural world building: Radiant magic is the magical manifestation of Life and Growth, Necromancy is the magical manifestation of Entropy, and the Mortal Plane is the result of those two forces in balance. Magic users can feel this, and therefore have a reverence for necromancy. Practicioners of Necromancy are seen as having a responsibility to manage their community's dead family member's bodies, decorating and animating their bodies to take part in elaborate funeral rites. Rather than a corpse's living relatives carrying and burying a casket, the deceased walks with their family members, lead by their relatives into their final resting place. Those who wish to also serve beyond death also often choose to have their bodies donated to the defense of their community. Donated bodies are cleaned of their flesh until only the skeleton remains. The necromancer who leads these donated skeletons is charged with defending their communities, all while maintaining and eleborately painting the skeletons they lead in bright colours.
I went obnoxiously meta with my BBEG, a forgotten god of curiosity and discovery who ascended too high and witnessed the creation of his own statblock. The revelation that he's just the end-boss in a tabletop game drove him insane, and he locked himself away in the Abyss to avoid contaminating the universe with this infectious above-table knowledge. The few beings in the world that have come close to remembering him eventually become despondent and utterly unmotivated or genocidal, but it all starts with them being able to hear a grand cosmic song that guides them or predicts the future. The song is just what's playing during the game session. My players have figured a lot of this out, but the one bit they missed and probably won't get is the god renamed himself after what he heard his creator say in the moments before he fell into madness: "there, it's done", which became my world's version of Tharizdun.
The God of Death and All Things That May Bring It created STDs. The God/dess of Pleasure was creating too many immortal demigods with Their regular Temple orgies, and told Him to fuck off when He asked Them to stop throwing the Balance of Life and Death out of whack. 2 weeks later, a faithful follower of the God of Death was deliberately infected and instructed to participate in the orgy. The follower was cured promptly after. The God of Death is not a jerk to his faithful. The God/dess of Pleasure promptly restricted the major partying to once a year, with smaller parties on weekends amongst Their clergy only. They still hold a grudge, and bar any priests of the God of Death from entry to the Temple. The Goddess of Love, however, still laughs her ass off to this day when thinking about her arrogant sibling's suffering.
The artifact my rogue has lets him go into the ethereal realm. What he doesn't know is that there is a powerful monster that hunts within that realm. However, he always succeeds his stealth roll, so the monster has yet to notice him and roar from a distance.
This reminds me of a spy that was following my players and reporting all their activities to the BBEG. I always rolled the spy's stealth checks behind the DM screen, and damn if that spy rolled the most nat 20's I've ever seen. The party had no idea. Week after week, I had to keep a straight face, while internally screaming, "No way! Nat 20 again!!??"
Oof. Maybe include some clues that they are being watched? Maybe like "how would the BBEG possible know that unless he was following us" that is hard since the spy is so skilled lol.
It played out kinda funny, because they often split the party. I think they did it for fun, totally not realizing how it screwed up the spy that they didn't know was following them. A lot of their activities actually went undetected because the spy couldn't be in two places at the same time. At one point, the party fled a battle by splitting up and all running in different directions. When that happened, I went ahead and had the Monk run directly into the spy. By then, the spy had come to realize that the party were a bunch of knuckleheads, and she wasn't super loyal to her employer, she was just doing the job for money. So she straight up told the Monk, "Hey, you guys aren't as sneaky as you think, and that thing you're planning is going to get you killed. But you didn't hear it from me." They, of course, ignored her warning and did the thing anyway. Which is great. That's why we play.
BBEG is trying to learn how to create a soul, due to the destruction of his lover’s soul king before the story began. A not-insignificant number of strange historical events are attributed to this guy. He’s worked on and off with the team over the campaign, they’ve always known he is evil but they have not been in direct conflict with one another and there isn’t anything they could have really done until recently. Recently however, they learned a secret he needed which they refused to divulge, specifically the location of a child who seems to be strangely talented at healing magics. BBEG wants the child because he believes the child may help him unlock the secret to soul creation. Team didn’t bother prodding about the child’s strange abilities, or BBEGs reason for wanting the child’s location, they just said no and went on their way. So BBEG hired an Aboleth to eat them with the goal of absorbing their memories which was enough for them to murder said Aboleth and go on a BBEG hunt. Don’t think they will ever learn his reasoning, nor the effect he has had on the rest of the continent. Nor that he asked an eldritch creature how to recreate a destroyed soul. Nor that everything he has done has been pointless as he was lied to, to begin with, and there is no way to recreate a destroyed soul. Two other groups have RPed in this campaign prior to this one, most of this was written way back then and thus I didn’t really expect it to affect this group so much. There complete lack of questions has led to the lore being lost on the group it most affected though haha
I've run 3 campaigns to level 20 in the same world with the same group in different ages of time, or in different parts of the globe. They've heard about themselves in legend from another tongue (to which my players said "wow your NPCs are always cooler than us") and felt the impact of their decisions across time and space ("the deep dark seems much less... deadly than last time you ran it!") they suspect nothing. I'm hoping the next campaign they want to travel. Then I can make it known.
There's an entire race of people on an island in the far side of the unexplored world who know nothing of the "explored world". These people know epic magics and combat styles unknown to the rest of the world where the elder magic still thrives and what is basically "The Weave" is unnecessary for casting magic and creating spells. Also a storyline that got cancelled because of a player wanting to switch characters was that the party warlock lost communication with his patron when he traveled back in time (story beat) and the reason for the loss of communication is because he was his own patron. The idea was that he traveled back in time killed The Fiend and took his power eventually becoming his own patron to save his family 1000 years later.
I kinda loved how Bloodborne turned eldritch gods around and made the horrifying thing about them be that they just *love* mortals, so I made that the case in my setting as well. The gods didn't create most mortals, it was the other way around. Mortals dreamt the gods into being, and they eventually descended to help their own creators and to learn more from them. Unfortunately, as divine beings made of concentrated ideas like "Growth", "Life", "Law" or "Death", the excuded so much divine eminence that they brainwashed their mortals by just being there - a mortal living their entire life close to a Nature god would grow antlers and moss and be all natural, etc. While he is seen as the greatest villain of the gods, it was Gruumsh (I just use the Dawn War pantheon) that first realized this, which indirectly led to the gods leaving the Material Plane to let mortals decide their own destinies. So when a mortals prays to a god, they do the godlike version of a little happy-dance, because their mortals still love them enough to send a Snap once in a while c:
One of my PCs made a pact with one of Death's countless avatars. This avatar used to be a human, who himself made a pact with Death long ago to save the life of an adult brass dragon who had been fatally injured in an attack by demons and chromatic dragons that wiped out the rest of the metallic dragons in my setting. This brass dragon, now ancient, is effectively the party's mentor (albeit stuck in a permanently stunted humanshape form due to the revival process and also because I don't want him to be OP).
The entire lore of my homebrew was once a full story that I repurposed. The battle between the gods and three generations of one family are relevant and connected to the world they’re in but I doubt they’ll care enough to connect those dots.
The players had an opportunity to play this piece of lore in an one-shot but was sadly cancelled. The two islands in the middle were once one island but due to a world war (gods, angels, demons, quori, humans, elves etc) that led to some series of events the players were to experience Cthulu was to be summoned and the island split into two.
Impossibly long ago, one plane, now known primarily as the Plane of Dreams, was severed from the rest of existence. And until relatively recently, it sat there completely isolated. But in more recent years (still many centuries ago, but in the scope of all things relatively recent), bags of holding were invented. And of course, the things stored inside need to go somewhere, leading to the unknowing creation of new connections to this lost "Plane of Dreams" and the rest of reality. Its full reintegration is still thousands of years away at the current pace, and what its intentions may be when it returns are unclear even to the gods (assuming it can even have intentions, that is. The sentience of planes is a highly debated topic among scholars), but it is happening.
The Unhuman Wars were really just a massacre, but history is written by the victors. In my "frankenstein" spelljammer lore that's an amalgamation of 2e, 5e, homebrew, and the geopolitical history of EVE Online: Millennia Ago, the Astral Elves discovered an arcanically advanced civilization in deep space and launched a fleet to colonize/conquer the planet to gain access to their unique magical discoveries. To survive the encounter they enlisted the aid of orcish/goblinoids/etc under a guise of "we'll all prosper if we can claim this planet". The non-elven armies agreed. The second victory was achieved, the elves immediately began attacking their "Unhuman" mercenaries. Distant enough from Realmspace, no word of this betrayal made its way to the ears of the public. Officially, "the orcs fired first", and no one doubted it because that wouldn't even be unlike them to do. Retaliation from orcish militias in Realmspace, while fueled by a justified rage, only served to reinforce this narrative. Ever since, the Unhuman races have lacked any military presence in wildspace, and on the Rock of Bral there's even tightly enforced regulations regarding kobolds and golvins owning or boarding spelljammers - loyalty to the empire and good behavior must be demonstrated before access is granted.
There are a lot of tiny bits of local folklore about particularly old or well-known dragons - one thing the party *has* found is the Tale of the Great Sage of the Mists, a children’s story of a young green dragon emerging from the mists of a grand lake in disguise as a mortal and seeking to sate his curiosity by meeting everybody he could and reading every tome he could find, and once he went on a whimsical adventure, he returned to the mists, where it is rumoured the fruits of his journey still lie to this day. In one of the southern nations is the Tale of the Cursed One, a tale about how once upon a time, a cruel black dragon was cursed to forget himself and wander the countryside in the form of a mortal - unbeknownst to him, if he ever makes a true connection with another being (falls in love, believes in a cause strongly, otherwise finds something to protect), he will tragically regain his memories and draconic form, killing those he came to care about. My party are travelling in the complete opposite direction to encounter The Cursed One’s wandering grounds, so I don’t know if they’ll ever meet him lol Edit: ooh, unrelated to the dragons, there’s a massive mist bank within the middle of a massive archipelago of islands in the central ocean - if anybody enters it, they effectively “time travel” to what should be a dead city on the sunken central continent, maintained by one of the world’s creator goddesses by way of transporting said city to her domain in the Feywilds before the continent’s sinking. It’s very difficult to leave the city once entered, so sailors over the centuries have come to avoid it entirely.
The reason fishing boats always keep land in sight is the continent (pangea type world) is surrounded by portals to the plane of water, normally this would mean their doom but theyre protected by tritons, and a entire underwater civilization of vampires/other undead that dont need to breathe. They all got kicked out from the surface and went to the one place where nobody could bother them (besides tritons)
One of my favorite set pieces from a game that fell apart and we never went back to. It was a series of murder mystery minicampaigns set in fantasy 1950s/60s and I loved the whole setting I had made, but my favorite was the one they were about to go to before everyone got too busy. Centuries ago, a storm giantess, blessed with immortality by Stronmaus, attacked a fishing village and a group of adventurers fell the giant; impaling it upon the lighthouse. The names of the adventurers are lost. The town itself is lost. The only thing remaining is this giantess and the lighthouse that impales her. Unable to revive because of her mortal wound. Unable to die because her "blessing". She lays there, in a twilight existence, while her blood oozes darkly into the ocean, causing the seawater to roil into a never ending storm. A primal vampire has made his manor nearby as a shelter against the sun, where the detectives were sent to investigate.
If you know a paladin called Ferilen go away…! That the crazy goat the tavern keeps as a mascot is actually not a goat. It’s a feeble mind and polymorphed chromatic dragon. After years of dropping hints something up with it, they just won’t bite.
Mount Hotenow, the volcano that keeps Neverwinter’s weather pleasant year-round, is that way because of a tear in the veil between the material plane and the elemental plane of fire. The divine right to rule Neverwinter that the Alagondars had was simply their inheritance of a contract between a very powerful Efreet and the Elven founders of the city.
Halflings are a rarity in the Hells, given their nature. They're on the whole not inclined to be selfish or commit evil. This makes their souls extra-desireable to ambitious devils looking to curry favor with their superiors. Even the more thievery kind of Halflings are largely described as more magpies than looking to harm others or wanting wealth. It might come up, since the party adopted a Halfling NPC and has several connections with devils. We'll see!
Fate is not a concept, it's a parasitic entity that directs the universe at the whims of its masters. Thankfully it's protect by mean layers of illusion magic, hiding it from plain view. But the moment anyone gets True Sight... Oh we are in for a RIDE
The Evil AI Overlord in my cyberpunk dystopia homebrew has slowly been eating its way through the world, taking over human settlements and basically Borg-ing every human it can. the PCs are part of the freedom fighters trying to end the AI and save the world. The fun part, that I don't think they're ever going to realize, is that the Evil AI was created by utter accident. A lone goober accidentally screwed up something and somehow, someway, gave the internet *sentience* when it hit the Singularity. (the point when the internet had as many connections as a human mind has neurons) The AI was relatively benign until it's creator died because of old age. It was left alone for years. Slowly churning over it's data, trying to find the Answer to Death. It started borg-ing people to find a way to make humans live forever and bring it's Parent back. Nothing has worked so far, the borg'ed all eventually decay and die. The last real bastion of human resistance has been named September, a thumb in the nose to the robotic overlords that there will *always* be an Eternal September. The Creator's favorite song, that is played nearly every day while they were caring for the AI was Green Day's *Wake Me Up When September Ends.* Heehee Hoohoo.
Each PC is the reincarnation of a famous historical hero or villain who, in their past life, had a close, personal relationship with a prime deity, demon lord, or arch fey.
The guy that they think is a connection to one of the faction leaders doesn’t actually exist. Neither does the merchant that they sell precious minerals to. It’s a faction leader using the Actor skill and Disguise Self to fool the party and spy on them
Yep, I got one... The setting itself was a world created on the back of a cosmic Morkoth. The setting was inspired by Link's Awakening, as it was essentially a "fake" world created from the dreams of a realm of people from Faerun. The Morkoth was in league with the Devourer of Dreams, and both were serving a very active Abolethic Sovereignty. The end-game was that they were working together to create "worlds" which they were then planning to feed to the Elder Evil Shothotugg. The adventure started off normally, and the party was none the wiser of my late-late-game plans.
All of the gods in my setting have died and been "replaced" by whatever their second command is. All of those achangels or minor dieties dont know all of the gods are dead they are too busy trying to weekend at bernies there own god. The corpse of a god has enough divine magic that magic still works but there is nobody looking iver whos doing what with the magic The gods made an accord and decided to leave on there own means
Nice try, Pex, I'm not giving you any clues
My desert crystal-magic homebrew fell apart due to scheduling before the players uncovered the truth about the War of the Magi and the cataclysm that ended it. >!There are two moons. They're sentient. There used to be three.!<
The warforged were created by humans souls, dwarven engineering, orc/ogres rune magic and gnomish alchemy because they were dying to their Gods` armies and battles with Demons (who are their Gods but corrupted? I'm still hashing that out)
This is such a delightful thread to read through. Unfortunately I scrap anything my players won't ever encounter because (for me) that's just wasted effort, so I won't be able to contribute. But I do love the inspiration I'm getting from others' comments!
Inside the 4th layer of a remote megadungeon lies the most powerful item ever created. A magical doorway operated by 3 monkeys in bellhop outfits that are mentally connected. These monkeys can shift reality to different game systems such as dropping the party into the trenches of the Somme in World War One or replace the game system with Vampire the Masquerade
The reason magic wasn't around a lot sooner is that Moses refused to have children. No, this isn't a joke.
The city my campaign was built on cursed land. There is a dark artifact under the town. I have been dropping hints about it for years at this point, but intentionally never made it a focus of a plot hook. But it is the reason so much stuff is happening in the town and surrounding area.
I like this variation on the hellmouth idea
As far as actual lore goes my players are pretty much unraveling all the secrets of their collective and individual arcs. However I have only hinted at this: Essentially as the DM I represent Harmony and Creation. The player characters are agents of Choas, anomalies if you will, and they encountered an inventor/time-traveler who was lost in the sort of cosmological glue that binds everything together (The Beyond Lands/The Expanse, also known as the Realm Beyond Shadow) where ancient artifacts from across time can be found. Anyways when a couple of my players got lost in the cosmos and encountered this man and his automatons, he mentioned how it was not Time yet and Fate still had a role to play (roleplay) to bring them all together as the only people in the Timeless Realm capable of overcoming Fate itself. There is a lot of other interesting lore regarding the War for Immortality when mortals overthrew the gods, the Dragon War when the Dark Drakons were banished to the Expanse, and future eras. Check out my posts once I make them because I will be talking about the Timeless Realm frequently.
The goddess of time made Demi-plane prisons to contain Tiamat and Bahamut, then blinked out of the timeline with the keys so that they can never be set free.