I have altered the fluff, pray I do not alter it further.


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber
SilvercatMoonpaw wrote:
Kryzbyn wrote:
Theres way more to this, but this is already a wall of text.
What's your racial line-up?

Standard, pretty much, Elves (with ofshoots like Drow), HUmans, Dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc.

There's more to the story on how the horde races came about. The gods warred amongst themselves for a bit (a couple different times), the good ones using the fairer races, the evil ones using newly created 'horde' races.

Funny thing is, I wrote the origin story up like it read from the bible for the players, then I wrote what really happened (A summary of which is what I posted).

Jeho ended up being more of an over-deity that only dragons worshipped effectively. He won't grant spells to any other race, unless circumstances require that he do so. He is the source of all oracle characters, though he lets them believe it's the entire pantheon's fault :P. None of the gods are perfect beings, and J'eho is damn near incompassionate at times.

Unbeknownst to the players, the Empire ha returned, twice to reclaim their old colony world. J'eho has destroyed them both times.
There is an inhabited world in the same solar system, that's inhabited by the Empire's enemies, and J'eho intervenes to keep Sirus off of everyone's radar as much as possible.

The current god of magic, though, was a mortal magic user from another universe...when J'eho realized he needed a servitor to monitor and govern the use of magic itself, he gave him the serum and elevated him. That story is neat also ;)

But I ramble...

Silver Crusade

Since we're having this interesting discussion...

Have your fluff changes ever resulted in 'problems?'

Like for example I have trouble with getting necromancer enemies and stuff like zombie pirates are right out.

My campaign's lack of druids also bolloxes up some assumptions for monsters and equipment.

Also, I've had players show up with expectations of how the different races 'should' act and them having to go through the learning trouble of figuring out that a goblin or kobold in town doesn't mean he's attacking it. Orc-hating dwarves have had to deal with the fact they're viewed as kind of jerks instead of as 'our lovable jerk.'

Also, since I have fewer deities, it means that occasionally I get a type of baddie who straight up doesn't have obvious clerical backing. I've got no god of undead for example. And the only real deities I have for a LE guy are a LN(E) god of retribution, a LN god of stability, law and farming, and a NE god of warfare.

Not having a god for every alignment, having no 'god of music' and having no real nature god, also seem to cause players a bit of confusion (closest I have to a nature god is a god who's thing is trees.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Not sure if any refluffing I have done has caused any problems, as I have yet to run a game in this world. It is all still in planning and conversion state. I have broad ideas and such already, but since I haven't had a concrete world map since I first started on this world (waaaaay back in 2003, and the map has changed at least 3x per 2 years), there hasn't been any actual real playing in this world. I tried running a sandbox campaign in it, but the players gave 0 backstory for me to go on, so we just scrapped it for a Paizo AP set in Golarion.

I do have 1/2 of the world map inked out on 7 28"x24" posterboard stapled to my wall (#7 was cut in half), with the other half drawn with pencil. Nothing else such as nations or smaller geography has been added, yet. It's been on my wall since October 2014, but getting a job back in December has cut down on the time I have available to work on it.

I hope to one day be able to run a game in my world.

Silver Crusade

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Adjule wrote:

Not sure if any refluffing I have done has caused any problems, as I have yet to run a game in this world. It is all still in planning and conversion state. I have broad ideas and such already, but since I haven't had a concrete world map since I first started on this world (waaaaay back in 2003, and the map has changed at least 3x per 2 years), there hasn't been any actual real playing in this world. I tried running a sandbox campaign in it, but the players gave 0 backstory for me to go on, so we just scrapped it for a Paizo AP set in Golarion.

I do have 1/2 of the world map inked out on 7 28"x24" posterboard stapled to my wall (#7 was cut in half), with the other half drawn with pencil. Nothing else such as nations or smaller geography has been added, yet. It's been on my wall since October 2014, but getting a job back in December has cut down on the time I have available to work on it.

I hope to one day be able to run a game in my world.

I've run more then half a dozen games in my campaign world, only 4 or so since 3.5 though.

You don't really notice the fluff changes and the complications (better word then 'problems') they bring up until you hit 'blue water,' and players start asking questions or make the wrong assumption and get their heads spun for it.

That being said, I've found if you're consistent and confident, players pick up immediately on world details.

Players in my games don't burn enemy corpses (because thats the funeral rite of the CE destruction goddess), and parties traveling with the Ocean-Death goddess' clergy find themselves occasionally groaning when said clerics are obliged to drag every sentient carcass they come across to the sea (lakes and rivers won't do) but they don't see it as 'odd.'

They still feel like they miss certain things though. Like druids.


I have run one game in my own campaign world thus far, and it went quite well. The player characters were hired to find a prince who had disappeared as well as recover an artifact that was stolen from the church of Metrean, the Lawful Neutral (leaning to Good) god of cities, civilization and fire. His followers believe that the clergy of Zarus, the Lawful Evil deity of humanity (who I picked up from a 3.5e D&D book) were behind both incidents, a belief that had caused a lot of tension in the city they were in. The player characters succeeded in doing both, actually.

Oh yeah, another thing in my campaign world. Only two Core races (as in Core Rulebook, not core by my setting's standards) have an evil patron deity, and those would be Humans and Half-Orcs, since two of the three deities that Orcs worship are Chaotic Evil. The main deity of the orcs was the demon lord Orcus, but most orcs nowadays worship an orc named Grogoth, who rose to godhood after slaying one of the few titans that still remained in the Material Plane in battle. The third deity they tend to venerate is Arukham, a deity of war and travel that is also popular with the centaurs.

That said, the two main gods of the elves on the continent of Esvel, the twins Elendriel and Ildavin, happen to be worshipped by both high elves and dark elves as well as some of the other ones. Elendriel is a deity of spring that looks like a high elf and presents the nicer side of the elven race as a whole (Chaotic Good), while Ildavin is a deity of autumn who has the appearance of a drow and presents the less pleasant side of elvenkind (Chaotic Evil). Actually, a quote I found among my notes might explain it better. "Collectively, this dual worship has been led by the Cult of the Heart and the Mind. For the high elves, Elendriel represents the heart of the elves and their culture, while Ildavin presents the mind. The drow have interpreted things differently, seeing Ildavin's passionate nature as the heart of the elven way of life, while Elendriel's focus on the arts of hunting and magic being a trait of the mind."

Scarab Sages

One of the consequences from the 'gods are sentient planes stuff' in Praetor, is that none of the races even have a patron. The dwarves come close, though, but Goriv (Goddess of Artiface, Represented as a female dwarf with 10 beards, each a different metal) is really only patron to one small dwarven kingdom. Nesil (God of Revelry, Represented by an elf with 4 fairies about his head) may look like an elf, but his CG alignment is a bit contrary to the LN elven societies in the world.

Those are the only two Major Deities in the world that even have appearances resembling core races. The minor deities have 2 humans, 1 halfling, and 1 gnome in their representations, but they are very narrowly focused (only have 2 domains each, except the previously mentioned azathoth analogue) and are far from prominent enough to elevate to a race's patron. Of the two human looking minor gods, one is a nondescript male (Ium-Hal, Assassins) and an armed blue haired nude woman (Veriata, Freedom). Not really screaming "Patron of the Humans".

Looking at my gods' appearances I have the following:
2 humans (nondescript male; armed nude woman)
1 dwarf (10 bearded female)
1 elf (fairy obsessed male)
1 gnome (cowled fiery murdertype)
1 halfling (decrepit old lady)
1 six legged horse-dragon
1 tentacle / eyeball mass
1 twelve armed skeleton
1 cloud of blood
1 iron golem
1 hydra (4h, flippers instead of feet)
1 burst of green energy
3 angelic figures (solaresque, metallic executioner, planetaresque)

As I wrote this, I remembered one of the interesting quirks with two of my evil gods. Ium-Hal (LE, Assassins) and Trampa (NE, Murder) are both gods who promote assassins. In-game, the Titans themselves all represent a single idea or concept. Chronos is time, Partath is dragonkind, Atmos is the cycle of rebirt. Most all of the lesser deities were formerly Titans who turned coat during the Godswar, joining the deities against the other Titans and eventually gaining domains via mortal worship, etc. ANYWAY, Ium-Hal and Trampa have very overlapping interests. For millennia, Ium-Hal had the Assassin Guild racket in the bag. But then an assassin of the quite small Black Fist Society (Trampa's church) offed the High Saint (Solus, NG God of Sun and Farming is basically Catholic church, so the Pope), and brought an assassin war into the forefront of the underworld as the two churches jockeyed for supremacy.

Out of game it went as follows: Praetor was a 3.5 setting using the Grayhawk gods from the PHB and a few FR. Solus was Pelor, for example. Anyway, whomever I had as Ium-Hal's 3.5 predecessor wasn't interesting enough for one of my old players, he wanted to be a Black Flame Zealot from one of the FR splats. They worshipped Pyremius, god who murdered old fire diety to steal some portfolio. Anyway, in comes Pyremius to accomodate the player. Add four years, and here's Pathfinder. I tried to shoehorn Golarion deities into the setting, but many didn't fit (Cayden made a good Nesil and Urgathoa a good Spes, but Sarenrae or Shelyn were definitely no Pelor, and Rovagug was too end times to be Hemsham). So I boiled out the parts I didn't like about the Oerth and FR gods and mixed it with the parts I liked about the Golarion gods, and formed out my own crude pantheon. That happened to have 2 assassin gods to maintain narrative posterity.

RPG Superstar 2013 Top 32

Freehold DM wrote:
Kalindlara wrote:

Thank you for the encouragement! :)

A note: the setting began life in its current form in 3.5, so there will be many assumptions that predate Pathfinder. I'm a big supporter of using everything in my campaigns, so some pretty esoteric sources are used. I didn't go into as much as I could, and there's definitely references to stuff outside the topic of warforged. Questions are welcome; I'm clearly willing to go on and on about it.

I decided to post this to a newly started blog, as I was a little leery about Paizo's legal ownership of anything I post here. I don't think they're doing anything inappropriate or abusive, for the record, but I do want to be a writer someday, and I don't want to accidentally give them legal rights to my world. :)

Plus, they might not appreciate the length. And this was the shortened version. :D

On The Nature Of Warforged

impressive, but long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wj5gv5gusoI


Kalindlara wrote:
Freehold DM wrote:
Kalindlara wrote:

Thank you for the encouragement! :)

A note: the setting began life in its current form in 3.5, so there will be many assumptions that predate Pathfinder. I'm a big supporter of using everything in my campaigns, so some pretty esoteric sources are used. I didn't go into as much as I could, and there's definitely references to stuff outside the topic of warforged. Questions are welcome; I'm clearly willing to go on and on about it.

I decided to post this to a newly started blog, as I was a little leery about Paizo's legal ownership of anything I post here. I don't think they're doing anything inappropriate or abusive, for the record, but I do want to be a writer someday, and I don't want to accidentally give them legal rights to my world. :)

Plus, they might not appreciate the length. And this was the shortened version. :D

On The Nature Of Warforged

impressive, but long.

Well... it is my nature. :)

Were you able to make it through it all? I tried to plan it out before writing, so that each idea flowed more naturally into the next. However, I ended up cutting out about a third of what I wrote (on the origin of the crystal) so it might be a little bumpy in the middle. Sorry, though. :)

it's okay. It just needs some editing.


Kalindlara wrote:

Thank you for the encouragement! :)

A note: the setting began life in its current form in 3.5, so there will be many assumptions that predate Pathfinder. I'm a big supporter of using everything in my campaigns, so some pretty esoteric sources are used. I didn't go into as much as I could, and there's definitely references to stuff outside the topic of warforged. Questions are welcome; I'm clearly willing to go on and on about it.

I decided to post this to a newly started blog, as I was a little leery about Paizo's legal ownership of anything I post here. I don't think they're doing anything inappropriate or abusive, for the record, but I do want to be a writer someday, and I don't want to accidentally give them legal rights to my world. :)

Plus, they might not appreciate the length. And this was the shortened version. :D

On The Nature Of Warforged

Yes, I like it, it also reminds me of an enemy state I have partly fashioned. It views the lives of those outside the state very dimly in importance. With the worth of others not even close to rivaling their immense commitment to greed. With so much on drones these days, I have been thinking of throwing together another evil state into my settings. Partly American, definitely imperial (but without overwhelming numbers and population) and waging war unlike other states it relies on its warforged, and flying warmages to pound enemies into dust and maintain its tenuous grip on power (more typical troops are there simply to support, and hold blackened and charred land). It got very lucky in what people it took in and how it turned their technologies to its war machine (Gnomes could certainly fit) and the darker side of Gnomish technocracy you mention resonates with me.

While they would make excellent bad guys, and the players would absolutely hate their cowardice and tactics (another team of warforged dropped on the players, enemy spellcaster bombards the party and flees), the question of how they are to be beaten would take up a lot of a campaign. It would be a hard slog through the unpleasant realism of drone & asymmetrical warfare. For now they are an idea, of some of the worst ideas of late modernity realised in a fantasy setting. Of course, whatever is placed has to fit. So for standard fantasy the ruins of this horrendous empire and its constructs still terrorising its old capital fits a bit better than a state far far above others in tech.


Golarion fluff change
Nations and religions that really do not get along are often at war. Politics is thus far less stable and peaceful.


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Golarion fluff change:
Aroden was artificially propping up humans, With him dead new races are starting to take over.


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Kalindlara wrote:

Thank you for the encouragement! :)

A note: the setting began life in its current form in 3.5, so there will be many assumptions that predate Pathfinder. I'm a big supporter of using everything in my campaigns, so some pretty esoteric sources are used. I didn't go into as much as I could, and there's definitely references to stuff outside the topic of warforged. Questions are welcome; I'm clearly willing to go on and on about it.

I decided to post this to a newly started blog, as I was a little leery about Paizo's legal ownership of anything I post here. I don't think they're doing anything inappropriate or abusive, for the record, but I do want to be a writer someday, and I don't want to accidentally give them legal rights to my world. :)

Plus, they might not appreciate the length. And this was the shortened version. :D

On The Nature Of Warforged

I am most impressed. I want to watch this anime.

You have a great deal of talent. :)


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SilvercatMoonpaw wrote:

Golarion fluff change:

Aroden was artificially propping up humans, With him dead new races are starting to take over.

Sort of related but not exactly the same thing is the fact that the other races have gained a better foothold at the Inner Sea as well as other areas ever since Aroden died in my version of Golarion.


In the one group I played the most PF fluff was handled stricter than rules. A player wanted to play a Halfling thundercaller bard. The GM said no, only Shoanti can be thundercallers.
The player argued that he could have learned something similar elsewhere but the GM said no.
Another player wanted to play something that was not possible RAW but fit the fluff so it was OK.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Ahh...forgot I did have one custom race...T'sikra (ZEEK-rah).
Aboreal lizard people, kind of like tree-kobolds, but nicer :)
They have the closest semblance of what life originally looked like on Sirus, and are the oldest, and the first race to develop psionic talents.


Oh! Right.

In (at least) one setting, I have kobolds as the "wyrmlings" of dragons.

Either they're sorcerers who follow the Dragon Disciple PrC -> actual dragon, they're warrior-type critters who eventually morph into the large and strong lizardfolk, or they're runty "normal" kobolds who live a "normal" lifetime (whether that's shorter or longer than the big burly lizardfolk depends on the setting and also on the level of local violence).

Also, in (at least) one setting, I have kobolds as "therianthropes" - thus explaining both the scales (as they are) and the furry forest-dwelling idea (in more myth and legend type things).

-------------------

In a recent game, I have it that goblins literally don't have "souls".

Instead, whenever they die, a new shadow is "born" on the plane of the same name.

Of course, this setting replaces the ethereal with Dragon Age "Fade", gods are literally formed out of those "Souls" and faith of the departed faithful who become one with said god, and goblins are redonkulously different critters (and, in addition to the normal goblins, also include ogres, trolls, and teeeeeeeeeeeechnically kind-of-sort-of orcs, though they've achieved independent souls, so they've kind of stepped away from the other goblins)... but it's an interesting setting.

((The goblin gods are also just an illusion. A sentient epic-powered illusion, perhaps, but just an illusion. As goblins don't have souls, their gods don't really exist. Thus, several thousand years ago, when the goblinoid shamans all got together to "prove" their gods to the arrogant "civilized" human(oids), they pooled all of their power to "summon" their gods, and instead created them. All the 40,000 shamans, and a laaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrge number of other nearby hapless goblins died in the mythically potent "pull" of "creating" the "gods"... but since goblinoids didn't have a soul... no real gods were created. Summoned to wipe out a human civilization, the illusion-gods quickly did so, sealing the entire metropolis deep beneath the sea, and cursing the souls there to be stuck, attempting to establish a cycle of reincarnation as "goblin heroes" while summoning "lost" and "unable to be found" power from around the world to grant it to those goblin heroes; all of this was to create goblins with souls, allowing them to have real gods (which is what the "gods" were summoned for). They only had a few fleeting moments of semi-independent "true" sentience, though, as the majority of local goblins that did survive saw them as brutal, blood-thirsty, savage and destructive creatures who would destroy their own worshipers for "daring to bother them"... and thus the illusion-gods' concept of themselves were quickly corrupted to match, while the goblins descended into barbarism to reflect what they believed their gods were like. And the "experiment" the gods set up both worked really well and failed horribly at the same time. But that's another story.))

Dark Archive

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Tacticslion wrote:
In (at least) one setting, I have kobolds as the "wyrmlings" of dragons.

Kobolds starting out as something that crawls forth from unfertilized dragon eggs (which dragons produce three to five of per year, even when not mated).


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Once again,set beats me to the punch.

Same thing in my campaign setting, but it happens at the dragon that laid the eggs behest. kobolds are stealthy assassins, potent sorcerors, and saboteurs par excellence, but fair poorly in straight up hand to hand combat due to their frailty. disturbingly servile, even in the eyes of their draconic parents, as there are no (known)gnomes in my world, their inherent rivalry is with half dragons, who they feel stole their heritage in some way.


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Fluff change in the marshes. The lizardfolk aren't just primitive savages without accomplishments. An ancient race, they were the inventors of certain groups of evocation spells. They achieved this through sorcery, not wizardry (books don't do well in swamps). The lizardfolk spells brought about from their honed and directed blood abilities were later emulated by wizards via near perfect copies.

Of course the humans insist they invented these spells, but the lizardfolk cities pre-date human towns. Their temples to sorcery are older than the most venerable progenitor wizards. This is not taught in the human cities.


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True dragons were at one point guardians of the gods (I tweeked their alignments so that there is at least one for each alignment) earthly treasure vaults (think Talos in the old Jason and the Argonauts movie). At some point the gods lost interest, dragon guardians were slain, vaults were plunder. Still the descendants of those guardians still exist and they still have the urge to guard treasures, hence the tendency to have hoards. Whether the gods created the true dragons or merely change them to suit their purposes is not clear, since it happened ages ago.

Sovereign Court

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Let's see. My world. Haven't named it yet.

Humans run the gamut from evil slaver empire and to a badass Sparta-like kingdom and a Nar Shaddaa kind of shanty city.

Elves have an island kingdom, are imperialistic and conquerors, having taken several beacheads on the main continent, consider every other shorter lived race lesser than them.

An offshoot of elves are almost your standard hippy elves, one with nature and all that, But are willing to back it up with weapons.

Gnomes live on an island, their society structured around a university like society where knowledge and advancement is valued beyond everything. They created steelborn.

Orcs are orcs, but Hobgoblins have an empire in one of the major deserts/badlands.

Dwarves have three distinct kingdoms, one is a classic dwarven kingdom, second is based on trade and diplomacy and the third is a society of builders.

Halflings are nomads, traveling everywhere, or making a living in cities, they used to have an empire, but a magical disaster wiped it off the face of the world, and they are what remains of a once great people.

Half elves are insanely rare, but basically the same. Half orcs as well.

Silver Crusade

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Ah yeah, dragons.

Chromatic Dragons in general on Spook's campaign like think they're the oldest species.
They aren't.

The humans, or rather humanoids actually came first. Humans and halflings are older races than serpentfolk, lizardfolk, dragons, gnomes or elves. Mostly because the humans and halflings are derived from a progenitor species.

Kobolds look up to dragons, but in general aren't dragons themselves. They aren't really 'cutebolds' on my campaign world, but they're welcomed into civilization. However, they still only live about forty years, and they tend to take on dangerous jobs so their life spans are low. Kobolds breed fairly quickly, but the out of control kobold breeding is also controlled somewhat by them being civilized and being in monogamous supportive families. Civilized kobolds tend to get their forty years. Atavistic 'return to nature' kobolds die like the kobolds they are.

The world's most accomplished trapsmith is a Kobold.

Quite a few of the humanoid races that aren't really keen on civilization general are having a tough time surviving anywhere but the most obscure areas.

Dire corbies are really rare since they're already quasi-suicidal and the nation-states tend to look at a dire corbie tribe more as an 'infestation' then a tribe.

Ditto gnolls. Flinds have actually succeeded in saving their species by controlling the gnolls and having them swear allegiance to the LE(N) country. In other countries they only tend to exist as small groups.

Hobgoblins basically throw in with various national militaries. Those who try to 'refound kingdoms of old' often find themselves getting a chance to test their military strategies immediately against the nation states, who are better trained, better equipped, and considerable larger. Also there were no hobgoblin kingdoms of old.

Most of the atavistic humanoids are motivated by the fact that the overarching civilizations of the various nations looked at humanoid cultures (typically built on conquest, cannibalism, incest, and horror) and said 'no, your culture sucks' and re-educated the young.

Most of the humanoid species remaining are descended from children taken from destroyed humanoid nests and educated.

Orcs in particular have a sort of situation where some of their more evil leaders want to return to the 'dignity' of their old lives where they lived in caves, ate whoever they wished, took whatever they wanted, and generally are upset that they typically only attract the most brutal, ineffectual and stupid orcs.


Good stuff.


In my setting, goblinoids breed true along the female side. e.g a human male and hobgoblin female would produce a hobgoblin offspring. A male hobgoblin and female human would produce a human offspring. So no half-goblinoids. The only exception is templates (half-dragon, half-fiend, etc).


Nothing of the Dragon type in my game. Nothing like them ever existed. Eastern/Oriental "dragons" are okay since I kind of consider them to be a separate kind of creature. Dragon turtles too.

Sovereign Court

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I use drakes. Dragons are so rare that nobody has seen one in centuries.


Drakes in my setting are what eventually hatch from unfertilized dragon eggs. They are a great source of embarrassment to their parents, who usually just discard the eggs in an area where they will be forgotten about.

Dark Archive

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Hama wrote:
I use drakes. Dragons are so rare that nobody has seen one in centuries.

Ooh, good one.

I had one campaign that only had one of each chromatic dragon type known. The red was the ruler of a kingdom of fire giants with armies of fire hobgoblins, etc., the black was a shadow-necromancer type in a swamp (and possibly undead herself), the blue was a storm queen who basically lived by piracy in a certain stretch of coastal waters, the ships she devastated looted by her flying urd minions, that travelled in her wake like crows following an army, the white a savage predatory force of the north, and nobody knew about the green, who was in a non-dragon form, having ruled an elven nation for centuries.

Any one of these 'big five' dragons would be an AP worthy end-boss, and not just something you could subdue and use as a mount or make into armor or something.

There were no known 'good dragons,' or other dragons, although lesser 'dragon' type creatures, like wyverns, filled some niches.

'Dragonhide' armor would be instead made from wyvern and drake hide. At merely 2x the cost of cow-skin, it's kind of silly to think it's made from actual dragons, in any event!


I too am a big fan of the drakes, using the variants of an old Dragon magazine.

The good news about culling a horde of wyverns or drakes is the amount of cool gear that gets made and then used by adventurers. Can create a small economic boom.


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Set wrote:
I had one campaign that only had one of each chromatic dragon type known.

Hey! I did that in one campaign setting that I was building (although, I added one of each of the metallics, too)! I tied the continued existence of the world to the continued existence of those five dragons.

... then I killed all of them except the silver in a great cataclysm that nearly annihilated the world, and sent everything into an "eternal" winter that lasted for juuuuuuuuuuust long enough that civilization and most life was lost.

Eventually, after the winter "warmed up" a bit, three cursed "gods" (moderately powerful immortal creatures who were cursed in various ways) eventually recreated various species of plants and creatures and the like, and civilization rose from their (very minor) influence; they were only able to do so because the last phoenix sacrificed its power and essence so that all living things could exist (though, hypothetically, one could true resurrection said bird, if your CL was large enough to reach back ~10,000 years (not that anyone has access to 9th level spells anyway...)).

Meanwhile, the silver dragon sleeps under the lost lands far to the south (the pole), deep in a hibernation (as does the linnorm, but at the opposite side of the world), hoping to survive so the world does. The balor lord and solar that make up the sun and provide the matrix by which all magic is accomplished more-or-less cancel each other out. The neothelid (the last possible one of its kind) that provides the basic spark for all new sentience has encased itself in quintessence (compressed, liquid time) to become eternally "protected" and eternal in its own maddened ideas, eternally seeking a way to corrupt all to madness and become 'the' god of its own insane and impossible world.

And the three creatures responsible for the destruction of the world* ("the" froghemoth, "the" shoggoth, and the Tarrasque) are all sleeping, still-extant, in the depths of their respective locales (a comparatively-accessible swamp, the bottom of the ocean, and the depths of a mostly-inaccessible continent, respectively).

And this is the world where the good guys won.

I linked it before, but just in case you were curious and the other link wasn't interesting enough. :)

* Or rather, the physical destruction of all constructed and civilized and tamed elements. Mostly. It's complicated.


Anyone do anything with demihumans? Kuo-toa, boggards, lizardfolk, ettercaps or the like?

Lantern Lodge

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Well, this is my Homebrew and my take on many things

My world is called Mundus. It has 3 main continental masses and culture.
It is an aboleth laboratory, to study human evolution. They observe and try to not interfere. After all, they HAVE many back-up world.
I have divided races in four groups :

Human and human like :
Humans (homo sapiens) The dominant species. Incredibly versatile. They are more ancient than the others, save maybe for the dwarves.

Elves (homo sapiens nobilis) and half-elve, live in guetto or in nomad group in forest (like the scoia tael in the witcher). Wrongly claim to be the oldest race.

Orc (homo sapiens robustus), live in nomad group, like a mix of celtic tribe and native american. Some live in urban guetto.
Incredibly strong warrior, and fearless in battle. They were a highly spiritual people, but due to elve and human xenophobia, had fallen to violence and brutality to survive. The yesterday druid have been replaced by scared witch-doctor.

Dwarf homo pumilonis. Live integrated among human. They also have their own culture, which work like the republic of Plato.

Halfling (Homo humilis, similar to Homo florensis) Not discovered by mankind yet, they live isolated on a Archipelago south of the TianXia continent.

Demi human :they exist and are product of Aboleth meddling a bit with DNA and Fleshwarping.

Catfolk, Tengu and ratfolk are the more common and the more eager to interract with mankind.
Catfolk hail from cities-states on the continent called the Green Hell. (Amazonian rainforest up to eleven).
Their culture is basez on Aztec.
Tengu are exiled from TianXia and the Sun Islands. They live in nomadic group. Among the Demi Human, they are the most integrated in human society.
Ratfolk are weird merchant and engineer. But they are fierce to defend their lairs.

Lizardfolk are highly isolationnist.
Boggard are nearly instinct because of their agressive nature
Merfolk are the rarer one.

Ettercap are a failed experiment. Aboleth didn't succeed in their extermination, but their are too isolated to be a menace.

Serpentfolk are NOT an demi human race. They are in fact, an accident unforeseen by the aboleth overseers.
To avoid to ruin their experience, aboleth triggered an ice age which shattered the serpentfolk civilisation and crippled the human. But at the times, the elves rose to prominence and destroyed nearly every record of the old human civilisation.

Gobelinoid : they are primate, hominidae but not member of the genus homo.
gobelin are nearly extinct, thanks to the dwarf policy of total war against them.
Bugbears are extinct
Hobgoblin are organized in tribe, lead by Khan.

Aliens and planetouched race : android, aasimaar and the like.

Basically, human is the dominant species and non humans are living in ghetto, à la Witcher or Dragon Age.
Human are bastard, but given a chance, the elves would not be better. And they have done the same if not worse.

Dragons have the same freedom of alignement as mortal. You can met a lawful good black dragon. They act as protector of environmental balance and keeper of secret man was not meant to know.


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DM Under The Bridge wrote:
Anyone do anything with demihumans? Kuo-toa, boggards, lizardfolk, ettercaps or the like?

On Wune(the world and land of Freehold! The Saga of Wune), life is divided into three categories.

The First Races are beings that are native to Wune. They include the True Elves(who call themselves the Shuu), the centaur(who call themselves the Taka), and all manner of fey, as well as certain types of giants(Storm and Jungle giants currently, maybe more), ettercaps, lizardfolk and troglodytes. Then there are the Second Races, who were created by the gods specifically in their search for servitors, including the usual cast of characters, goblinoids, merfolk, Common Elves(an offshoot of the Shuu that were cursed by the gods and also exiled from the Yggdrasil itself)and most others. Then there are the Third Races, which are Half-Orcs and Half-Elves primarily, but also forms of life from Elsewhere, such as the Rakshasa, Doppelgangers, Aranea, and a few other creatures from the Worlds Beyond.


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Edit- Troglodites, ettercaps, and lizardmen are referred to as "those others" by the Shuu- forms of life that may or may not have been created by the yggdrasil but are native to the world nonetheless. Their relationship with them is usually poor,but not necessarily violent unless they are trespassing in the yggdrasil, which is rare.

Common elves are considered to be of the Third Races, not the Second.


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Ettercaps, aranea, driders, and other spider related creatures were formed initially by drow and their spider goddess (Arachne in my setting) from other humanoid beings (though they breed true). Those worthy individuals with sorcerer powers for instance where changed into aranea, while more mundane individuals were transformed into ettercaps. Non-drow elves could be transformed into drow by the same process (drows are believed to have been originally from the plane of shadow).

Drow actually have open recruiting in most large cities and this is tolerated by most groups, though frowned upon. Yet since they tend to recruit from the cities unwanted (homeless, runaways, etc), most cities are willing to allow it. They make it a point not to break any local laws, not out of respect, but as a means of forcing their presence (that and bribes, threats, etc). Drow tend to be very political (especially the ones sent to the surface world) in my setting.

Their chaotic nature is revealed in their belief that you have to choose your path. So they would not force someone to become an ettercap for example, but that doesn't mean they would feel obligated to explain all the consequences. So they might say that it will make you physically more powerful and you'd become more aware of your surrounds. At the same time, you'll be able to command giant spiders. They wouldn't point out you'd be turned into a monster or that your intellect would be damaged.

Lantern Lodge

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For classes this is my takes :
Martial work as indicated, with some differences :
- Fighter are more "master at arm" than rank and file soldier.They tend to be sergeant and other role in the different armies.
- Paladins are an exception : the only way to become a paladin is to be a worshipper of a path of inspiration-like religion which is one of the major antagonist of Mundus.
These paladins are lawful good. To their cult. the rest of the world is fair games.

Divine spellcaster work like this :
To cast a divine spell, you need to be trained in Theurgy (a bit of magic arcana and theology, scorned by real mage) and to have faith (thanks captain obvious)
In fact, you just need faith to cast a divine spell. They are not granted by deities (this work like Eberron a bit) and your alignment is irrelevent.
This need of study is why churches tend to have ecclesitheurge, evangelist and cloistered cleric instead of vanilla cleric.
Warpriest and inquisitor work as normal.
Warpriest are often use as chaplain in the local armies.
Inquisitor are covert ops.

Druids need to bond to land to be effective. And the more they became powerful, the more distant they grows as they forsake their attachment to human issue and prefer to concern with natural one.
Ranger and hunter need to bond to use their hedge druidic magic, but with lesser consequences.
In fact, to be a Ranger and or Hunter, it is important to know this basical hedge magic.

For skill monkey class,
Rogue are nearly everything.
Bard are usually trained in their way, as they are frequently used to spy.
Skald are more feral, use to bolster troop in battle

For arcane spell caster :
Arcane work by manipulating planar substance and power.
Wizard study and use try and trusted method. Their casting method is in fact the safest way to use magic, as planar substance can be a very potent source of corruption.
During their training, they are presented with a transparent crystal which change color based on the elemental affinity of the prospective mage (Blue for water, Red for fire, white for air, yellow for Earth, Gold for universal and black for void). In fact, they are all member of elemental school.
Witch and warlock made an eldritch pact with a patron. But wether the pact is real or just a poorly understood ritual is not yet solved.
Sorcerer work as RAW, but with an exception : they all manifest a mystic third eye.
Arcanist are mad scientist mage, or insane engineer. They take reckless risk to use magic. And are the most likely to get a spellblight.


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Coooooool.

Love the third eye.


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Fluff change from another thread on dragons:

Dragon Atlantis! Welcome the New Neighbour-lords

Dragons inhabited a number of islands far from any sort of civilisation and originally lived primitively. Like Komodo dragons plus Aborigines (racism alert!). When the seas rose, their shallow islands went under, forcing them to fly to the continents.

Once there they terrorised and ate, bred with other dragons that made the journey and controlled the highlands (like mountains), because they like to perch and look down upon their new domains (something they used to not be able to do on flat islands). In doing so, they discovered peoples, cities and civilisations, they also discovered they like very much to lord over them and dine on the trade roads (which are not unlike a sushi-later, if you have ever ate off one of those). Their intellects also grew with their curiosity, whereas previously there had not been much stimulation or change.

Yes, the "Atlantis" dragons are now experiencing a renaissance of the mind while becoming the biggest predatory "cats" around and enjoying playing with their new food. No, there are no good gigantic carnivorous lizards nesting on mountains and devouring everything for miles around.

Most are wyrm, and they are breeding quite fast now. The young will be very common in a few years, unless those eggs or hatchlings are killed soon.


ElderNightmare wrote:

For classes this is my takes :

Martial work as indicated, with some differences :
- Fighter are more "master at arm" than rank and file soldier.They tend to be sergeant and other role in the different armies.
- Paladins are an exception : the only way to become a paladin is to be a worshipper of a path of inspiration-like religion which is one of the major antagonist of Mundus.
These paladins are lawful good. To their cult. the rest of the world is fair games.

Divine spellcaster work like this :
To cast a divine spell, you need to be trained in Theurgy (a bit of magic arcana and theology, scorned by real mage) and to have faith (thanks captain obvious)
In fact, you just need faith to cast a divine spell. They are not granted by deities (this work like Eberron a bit) and your alignment is irrelevent.
This need of study is why churches tend to have ecclesitheurge, evangelist and cloistered cleric instead of vanilla cleric.
Warpriest and inquisitor work as normal.
Warpriest are often use as chaplain in the local armies.
Inquisitor are covert ops.

Druids need to bond to land to be effective. And the more they became powerful, the more distant they grows as they forsake their attachment to human issue and prefer to concern with natural one.
Ranger and hunter need to bond to use their hedge druidic magic, but with lesser consequences.
In fact, to be a Ranger and or Hunter, it is important to know this basical hedge magic.

For skill monkey class,
Rogue are nearly everything.
Bard are usually trained in their way, as they are frequently used to spy.
Skald are more feral, use to bolster troop in battle

For arcane spell caster :
Arcane work by manipulating planar substance and power.
Wizard study and use try and trusted method. Their casting method is in fact the safest way to use magic, as planar substance can be a very potent source of corruption.
During their training, they are presented with a transparent crystal which change color based on the elemental affinity of the prospective...

Does the appearance of the eye vary with their bloodline?

Lantern Lodge

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DM Under The Bridge wrote:


Does the appearance of the eye vary with their bloodline?

Yes, but it is not a sure method for bloodline identification.


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The doppelgangers are one of the strangest beings from Elsewhere to arrive upon Wune, eclipsed only by the rakshasa. Former slaves of that very same race, they were the first to find their way to Wune from their native plane, and used their natural abilities to blend in. It was paradise for them as a people, and they remained in the land for more than a generation, with some going so far as to pursue the great renewal- a ritual that locked a doppelganger into a specific form and over time allowed them to truly forget the majority of their past lives. That this spell required the deaths of several sentient beings that they then replaced was seen as a regrettable necessity by most. Doppelgangers infiltrated nearly every people and power base on Wune, even the distant and insular Shuu. Their respite was at an end, however, when the start of the Divine War coincided with the rakshasa discovering their hideaway. Separated from one another due to the utter chaos of the dragons and their allies fighting a war for independence against the gods and their servitors, the doppelgangers were at first easy prey for the rakshasa and their new slave race, the aranea- themselves former doppelgangers altered by tortuous magic most vile to strip them of their free will even as it enhanced their shapechanging abilities, creating the perfect slave-hunters. Facing extinction, the few remaining magic-users among the doppelgangers that had not pursued renewal cast a great ritual spell to sever the rakshasa's link to their homeworld, trapping them all upon Wune even as they restored the free will of their areana kin. This created enough confusion to once again allow the doppelgangers to blend in with the various peoples of Wune, this time using the lesser masquerade- their innate ability to change forms- and not the great renewal, which they discovered was how the areanea was hunting them down in the first place. Stranded on Wune, the doppelgangers travel now in small coteries seeking either lone rakshasa to ambush, aranea to rehabilitate, or a community of any race to take refuge in for a time, before their mask begins to fade and they must take to the road again.


I was running a game in Oerth, but really liked Golarion. But I also longed for the RP of my old Army days, back at the dawn of 3.0, in the Scarred Lands and Freeport.

So I sort of smushed them all together.

There were a few issues. At the outset, I didn't realize from the Amedio Jungle maps we were using, that there was actually a huge mass of land between a theoretical port in Varisia that send the PCs across the ocean to Sasserine. And although I kept the two moons of Oerth, I didn't want to keep the geosystem rather than solar system, so that used Golarion.

Elves have a bad rep. Orcs and goblinoids get to live in Freeport. I mean Sasserine. They aren't well liked, but they aren't murdered on sight.


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Kain Darkwind wrote:
There were a few issues. At the outset, I didn't realize from the Amedio Jungle maps we were using, that there was actually a huge mass of land between a theoretical port in Varisia that send the PCs across the ocean to Sasserine.

It's never too late to sink half the Flanaess!

Dark Archive

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At least some evil werewolves are possessed by some sort of demonic wolf-spirits that take over when they 'wolf out.' They can be cured by a ritual exorcism that drags the wolf-demon out of them and forces it to materialize (at which point, it must be killed), or a shamanic variation that sends the victim (or some champions) into the person to fight the spirit as spirits themselves. Stats depended on the level of the victim (saving the king might be harder than saving a bunch of peasants!), but usually some sort of fiendish or half-fiendish wolf, worg or dire wolf or something.

It made the event of attempting to cure infected lycanthropes more 'fighty' than just 'here, have some wolfsbane and maybe you won't die.' (And also played more to the PCs strengths of blowing stuff up.)

(Idea based off of some shamanic 3rd party book that had shamen curing disease or poisons by causing them to manifest as creatures of appropriate CR and then fighting them off in a spirit battle. If the shaman lost, they also contracted the disease / poison!)


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Necromancy is a school of magic centered around the idea of replacing the life force of a formerly sentient being and replacing it with energy from the plane of shadow. If used on creatures that are already deceased it results in simple creations like skeletons or zombies, but when used upon a living being, it sometimes results in horrid creatures that need to sup upon the life they left behind, such as ghouls, vampires, and werewolves.


The werewolf thing reminded me of an interesting one I encountered in a 2nd edition game. Monsters that have an 'infection' quality, such as lycanthropy and vampires, can override previous infections.

Our example was a young man we encountered that had become a vampire. In our attempt to help him we tracked down a man rumored to have cured himself of vampirism. His 'cure' was to be turned into a werewolf.

Most players agreed that this didn't make sense, but 2nd ed.

Lantern Lodge

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Hags were the product of a witch coven pact gone horribly wrong.
The survivor scattered. As hags target remote community, a lot of inbreeding ensued and explain the deformity and different kinds of Hags.
As well as their madness.

Ogre were the product of the Black Sun alchemist grand scheme of giving birth to a Master race. Ogre were supposed to be stronger than a human, and as smart.
Suffice to say their creation were gone horribly wrong.
Ogre are strong, incredibly good at surviving. But they weren't really bright and not up to the Black Sun standard. When they tried to exterminate them, the ogre rose in rebellion and made a slaughter, as they were dumb but incredibly crafty when it come to violence and atrocities.
Thank to the Black Sun biomantic tampering, the ogre manage to survive inbreeding. Today they are still a plague to deal with.

When the Ice age begin and the elves toppled the remnant of the first human civilisation, they tried to alter animals to create a beast of burden. Their creation were deemed to dumb to be a menace, yet clever enough to be tamed, tough enough to be used in nay thing, yet killable using simple elemental magic.
But trolls were not as easy tamable as they thought. And troll managed to escape and wrecking havoc.
Elves conveniently erase the record and try to demonize troll.
But Trolls remembered. And they were not as dumb as elves thought..;

Sahuagin were a merfolk prototype. But when the aboleth discovered they incredible mutability, they deemed it an unexpected good result and let them loose on Mundus.
Sometimes, they keep check on them.


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I like the troll origin story.

I would also be very amused if the players learned the elves have been editing history from a wise old troll.

Silver Crusade Contributor

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DM Under The Bridge wrote:

I like the troll origin story.

I would also be very amused if the players learned the elves have been editing history from a wise old troll.

You might even say...

that the elves were...

is hit by various thrown objects

The Exchange

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Kalindlara wrote:
DM Under The Bridge wrote:

I like the troll origin story.

I would also be very amused if the players learned the elves have been editing history from a wise old troll.

You might even say...

that the elves were...

is hit by various thrown objects

*waits for it*

*waiting for it*

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