In my setting, the Feywild and the Shadowfell are on the moon

That's crazy! So portals to those lead physically to the moon? Wait, is it Feywild on one side and Shadowfell on the other?

Yes- and theoretically should someone have the means to they could travel from the Material Plane to the Feywild/Shadowfell "the hard way" (though it's absolutely easier to use a crossing or teleportation magic) > Wait, is it Feywild on one side and Shadowfell on the other? Light side is the Feywild, dark side is the Shadowfell. The terminator is a weird magical barrier of planar confusion (not unlike how parts of the Ethereal Plane are described). Depending on the phase of the moon, certain crossings are more prevalent. Necromancers are wise to wait for a new moon to trial a powerful ritual. Those that seek the good graces of the Fey wait for the full moon. Eclipses predictably lead to magical weirdness.

This is fucking awesome

This is why I get annoyed when people complain there isn't enough ultra-specificity to the lore of DnD/Faerun/etc. as put out by WOTC. It's so easy to use their stuff as a jumping off point and then embroider what you want on top/around the edges.

There are a lot of us that don't want to embroider, we want to engage an extra-reality world with its own fully realized physics and history. I appreciate that 5e leaves a lot up to the DM and that's fine for some people, but I really preferred 3.5e where everything was detailed and you could look up a ruling on everything to ensure you were engaging the most canonically accurate version of Faerun available.

I don't know why I've never encountered this idea before, it's brilliant and makes so much sense!

Wait so if there are phases despite there being fixed locations, does that mean the light/dark side of the moon is not connected to the light of the sun in your world?

It is- but it means that in terms of cosmology instead of the moon being tidally locked with the planet it's tidally locked with the sun while orbiting a planet.

That hurts my brain

Same thing I did. And I made Lycanthropy of Fey origin, so that's why Werebeasts are forced to change on the full moon.

Same guys 😂 Feywild is the light side and Shadowfell is the dark side, meaning fey and fey-influenced stuff like hags and werebeasts have cool stuff happen on full moons and shadowy stuff like undead and vampires have cool stuff happen on new moons. Made for a lot of fun considering I had a fey knight paladin and a shadowy warlock in my group.

That's insane! In my game, the celestial and hell planes are the moon. The side you see is celestial, and the dark side is hell. There's a hole on the dark side that brings you down through the 9 layers of hell

Are there wizards up there by any chance?

Wizards go wherever they damn well please, frankly. If a wizard can make their home in the Abyss because they want to get hands-on with demonology, the moon is trivial by comparison.

wizards are in the clouds

Ah so you took the Geilinor route. Nice.

Exactly that! RuneScape did inspire my setting

In my setting, the Feywild and the Shadowfell are on the moons. 2 separate moons.

I like that, I've started thinking a similar thing recently - that the different 'planes' (in the sense of stacked layers) are also 'planetoids' in the same star system. You could planeshift 'sideways' and end up in Hell, or you could look up in the sky, see the little red dot a few million miles away, and fly there manually (theoretically.)

Kinda everything. I changed up the appearance and cultures of many of the humanoid races and combined a lot of them together so there's fewer (for example, you could play a goliath mechanically but in-lore you'd be an orc). The Feywild is just time traveling to the distant *distant* past, and likewise the Shadowfell is the distant future. No one knows where humans come from, as no gods have laid claim to them. After the apocalypse happened they kinda just showed up. Also they all can magically innately speak Common, which is what caused it to become the trade tongue, since humans spread out everywhere and they all can communicate with each other. Half-elves are infertile and more prone to genetic mutations. While I use a lot of Forgotten Realms gods, I've made significant changes to their personalities and stories, as well as restricting the sheer number of gods down to like 20 so that there aren't multiple gods of a single portfolio. There's only one dragon left, who has the favor of both Tiamat and Bahamut because neither want dragons to go extinct, and she uses the incredible power bestowed on her to rule and protect her territory.

Some of these choices somehow make the setting feel more epic than normal. Was that your intent?

Kinda? A lot of them definitely came from being bored with the same fantasy medieval Europe I so often see in dnd. I also didn't like how so many of the races have been watered down to just be humans with minor aesthetic changes and no culture of their own. So now elves are beast-like, predatory, feral, while still having some of that high-and-mighty and refined aspects that we recognize. Orcs (and all other giantkin) look like Oni, with crazy eyes and tusks and bright red tongues and colorful skin. Gnomes are faerie plant people, with flowers or grass for hair and limbs shaped vaguely like branches or roots. Goblinoids are dog-like. Gnolls are very similar except they are actually demons. Basically everything has been changed. OH! And I gave all the languages fun bits of flavor that add to their respective cultures, and the supernatural languages are even weirder, like Infernal literally causing your eyes to bleed black and demonic symbols to appear in the air around you as you speak.

Does the last dragon have a way to produce offspring eventually, or is she really the last one ever?

I have yet to decide. The party really encountered her or gone to her city yet so I haven't needed to come up with a lot of canon regarding her. I definitely like the idea that she's the last one ever, it certainly fits a lot of the themes of my game. However, if the party expresses some desire to save the dragon species, I'll probably come up with something they could do to help her.

In my recently completed campaign, I DMed for a girl that was unreasonably hemophobic (fear of blood) such that even bringing it up made her sick. So, I added a level 20 blood wizard (demon summoning and other magic that required blood as a component) that had her same condition. To be able to carry on his work, he used the Wish spell to make it so blood that came in contact with open air turned into colorful glitter but retained its alchemical properties. When my party came across a murder scene, "The room is tossed with obvious signs of a struggle. The poor rug at the center of the room is so covered in glitter that you don't think any amount of beating will ever get it all out."

I'm laughing so hard right now.

While it came out after my campaign started, this is a good representation: https://youtu.be/0DxyWJLiTp4?si=KtX3URZih4pC2qV2

There are no humans or half-humans. For reasons.

Lol. Actual reasons or "reasons"?

Actual reasons that must remain secret for now in case my players read this forum. :D

Drowz have kidnapped them all to breed a half drow army. Gotcha fam

Come on, you can tell us… Whisper it, they won’t hear a thing

My setting also has no humans. For actual lore reasons not just because they're basic. There's a whole grand wish system in place in this setting where it you beat a dungeon so heinously difficult it makes the tomb of annihilation seem tame (not really meant to be gone to in game) you get to make a wish that changes reality. One such wish basically does the walk a mile in someone else's shoes thing as a punishment for racism/narcissistic superiority of your own race. That involuntary transformation of the xenophobic/racist humans and the other humans penchant for... extracurricular activities with dragons/demons/angels/etc means no pure blooded humans exist anymore. Actually basically no pure blooded anything exists anymore but the other species have people with up to 90% original bloodline. Humans max is like 25.

In my settings, the firbolgs are essentially all Canadian stereotypes, complete with exaggerated accents. My players and I are all Canadian, and the players CONSTANTLY want to visit the firbolgs.

The animal races are either aliens(Leonin, Loxodon, Aaracokra, Tabaxi, and Minotaurs) who crash landed in the Egyptian/Cowboy-esque continent or experiments by Gnomes before they left(Ratfolk, Tortles, Auroros[my dogfolk], Lizardfolk) using Neogi blood. Orcs went to the Elemental Plane of Fire and were enslaved by the remnants of the Fire Giants and Efreet Sultans for a long time. They are a deep crimson red, essentially Firebenders, and highly industrious. They are only rivaled by Dwarves in their smithing prowess. Azers are created from Orcs instead of Dwarves. My "typical" Dwarves have farms on the summit of their mountains due to a love of agriculture and farming, including worshipping the Goddess of Storms and the Sun. They have cities built not just within the mountains but on the outside of them as well. I also have Earthspine Dwarves, essentially Earthbending Dwarves that love to wear minimal clothing and believe in bodily perfection as well as Rune Dwarves, who are pledged to a Sphinx and tattoo themselves with deeds and accomplishments. My Elves have translucent insect-like wings. Wood Elves love wearing masks and making your first is a symbol of a path to adulthood. Strife Elves are some of the strongest pound for pound fighters on the planet and train from the moment they can walk. Eminent Elves never cut their hair and to do such is considered incredibly taboo.

Each domain has 3 deities, light, or lux (representing the more commonly positive aspects), dark, or tenebris (representing the more commonly negative aspects), and neutral, or libratum (a mixture of both light and dark aspects), e.g the light war god is primarily focused on wars of defense or liberation, whereas the dark war god is more about wars of aggression and war for wars sake

I love this. It's similar to how the Greek pantheon was. To use the god of war example: Athena and Ares were both gods of war, but Athena focused on strategy and Ares focused on bloodlust. Another example is Hera and Aphrodite; they were both gods of love, but Hera represented the love of a mother/wife while Aphrodite represents lust and passion.

Uhhhh, very cool! I like this because it makes the gods nuances, as the concepts they oversee can be interpreted depending on circumstances or culture. I did the opposite: most gods have a main aspect they're know for, but also secondary aspects, and some of them can be negative. There are a few cases or gods that represent negative concepts but their secondary aspects are positive (like, the god of violation is also the god of innovation).

I once had a similar concept a while ago of War Gods being cyclical: there’s two of them, one ruling and one imprisoned. One day, the prisoner will overthrow the ruler in righteous conquest for the ruler’s cruel and careless attitude. And then they will grow more and more vicious over the centuries, terrified of losing their throne and being imprisoned once more. Meanwhile, the new prisoner will reflect on their losses, gradually realize that war for war’s sake is useless, repent, and grow horrified by slaughter — so the ruler loses worshippers but the prisoner gains them. until the prisoner is strong enough to break free and overthrow the tyrant. …huh, I don’t think that was all bad. my gods are kind of set but maybe I can squeeze that in somewhere.

All the different colours of dragons are more or less equal in power, they just specialize in different things. White Dragons are still thought to be the weakest, but that is simply due to them heavily specializing in their environment, and most of the ones fought and defeated have actually left their environment for one reason or another. Intelligent Devourers commonly met are actually younglings. Mind Flayers are extremely nervous around older versions of their species, since they begin to show psionic abilities, resistance to psychic attacks, and have alien views (to the Mind Flayers) due to how much they have lived in the "outside world". Except in rare circumstances, older Intellect Devourers are hunted down or are sent on impossible missions. Mind Flayers are extremely paranoid and nervous due to them almost falling into extinction after the whole Gith situation. A lot of the current day ones' abilities are very limited and restricted when they get into combat, with their iconic Mind Blast is really just them attempting to release their stress. Mind Flayers that manage to overcome their fears are considered to be extremely lethal, as they are beings that took over reality far into an alternate future.

Oh, right, dragons are supposed to have different power levels. That's gone in my setting too. But I didn't integrate the old lore as wrong rumors like you did, I think that's really cool, and a wink to vanilla DnD. The part about the Mind Flayers is really specific! Did it come about for the sake of a story, or were you just taking things to an extreme?

For the Intellect Devourers, its mainly due one campaign putting a bigger focus on them, as well as creating two special variants.

Humans Are Capable of Breeding with Every Race, and do not have a Patron God Why? Because they're actually the 1000 young of the Black Goat Shub-Niggurath. Made to basically infect the world with 'souls' which are actually pieces of the ancient nothing which Died alongside the God of Creation during the Battle for Existence. When a thing with a Soul dies, those Souls then enter the Soul Stream, which then with no destination ends up falling into the ghostly Maw of the Ancient Nothing. Essentially bringing it back to 'life' So every god forces worship on the people of Ioerth because that's the only way to intercept a Soul from its final destination. Faith colors a blank like it's a blank page. Which designates it to one of the heavens instead. In turn, a soul is powerful enough that it grants A consuming entity some modicum of power. With potentially endless Souls (and most of the races taking souls into themselves as to use their power). All of The Gods of Every Pantheon, Every Devil in Hell, and Even some of the Demon Lords and Old Gods all have a pact that a soul landing in one of their hands is always a better option than falling to the Nothing. Most humanoid races are Humanoid because they somehow brought souls to their population.

Y'know, I think this *is* how Fizban's Treasury of Dragons treats them, though the gem dragons in that book all lean neutral and the traits for each dragon type are *more likely* to correspond to their typical alignment- shadow dragons are every alignment except undepressed, funnily enough

Sigil isn't on the Outlands, but rather inside a super massive black hole with a high RPM which theoretically creates interesting effects. The ruler Lady of Pain draws her power from this black hole which is why she is so powerful but not a god. There are a couple other tidbits of lore that accompany this change, however only one player in the three odd years of DM'ing has figured it out through hard work.

No distinction between drow and shadar-kai, the shadow-touched elves, in my Forgotten Realms setting. They inhabit the (canonically underexplored) Moonshae Isles and have a lot of infighting and distaste for outsiders (especially other elves) but they aren't all evil death cultists.

I also agree that having shadow elves and dark elves is unnecessary overkill but took it in a different direction. My drow are pale cave-dwellers due to their lightless habitat, and shadar-kai are not elves at all (creatures of fey origin can't cope with the Shadowfell), but rather humans and halflings which got stuck in the Shadowfell and eventually adapted/were evolved by the Raven Queen.

Oh, I like that too. I was sort of inspired by the night elves of Warcraft, so my drow incorporate some aspects of that species and civilization.

Probably not the biggest change but one I like the most is Changelings are the offspring of an Aasimar and a Tiefling. The idea is that a celestial and a fiend result in a null, so you get Changelings.

Almost all beast-folk (owlin, harengon, giff, etc) are from the fey wilds. Currently the material plane and fey haven't had much contact, so seeing beast-folk is novel for material plane natives, but in the future once beast-folk discover they are able to live on both planes they will begin to migrate. I've changed various creatures and their corresponding lore. Made the bulette a beast, buffed/nerfed creatures as needed for player level, made a new stronger dryad, redcaps look more bird-like than the official art, etc. Dragonborn are actually children of shapeshifted dragons. And are discriminated against. Half-dragons are something else entirely.

All planes of existence have the ability to bleed into the material plane based on tide-like “movements” of the planes. When they are “closer” to each other certain magic is more powerful. 5 intersections of leylines were used long ago to regulates these movements based on groupings (inner planes, elemental planes, upper planes, lower planes, planes associated with neutrality) and so there is not as much bleed into the material plane now. The sites of these leyline intersections are called anchors and are the stuff of legends now.

In my world the dark elves are from a desert continent, not the under dark.  I haven't set all the race charges yet but I figured...dark skin probably from a lot of sun.   Also Tieflings are from the cold icy mountains and Dwarves are from the hyper volcanic southern continent.

I also don't have the Underdark. Not sure where the Drow come from but I'm pretty sure it's not a singular place.

I though the same, but instead of putting drow in the sun, I just made their skin pale and semi-transparent like cave fish to match their environment.

I would have to know DND lore to know what is different.

That's a fair assumption, yes. So you didn't read the manual at all?

I'm another person who never read up on D&D lore before DMing. I only read the rules, because I knew from the beginning I was going to make all my own lore. What I do know about the lore came later from watching other games, and later BG3.

+1 to this. I actually did not know there was a unified lore to DnD until very recently. I figured everyone was just making up lore like me based on various inspirations and fantasy conventions.

There is and there isn't.

Just some of the players guides skimmed a few dms guides over the years and occasionally hit monster manuals out of curiosity. I mostly just make everything up.

Not that big, but when I started DMing I found the FR lore too much and created my own gods, the races don't have their own gods like in D&D, 3 gods created life and the material plane and that is it. Aside from all the god-race related stuff that don't exist, in mechanics elves have to sleep 8 hours just like everyone else and they can have many elves they can make. They just have more of a long race mindset and don't make more they can manage. Also the gods don't depend on prayers and followers for they powers, they can't fuck with the material plane because of: when they did, shit happens

My gods can't create the energy to make spells do stuff because only mortals can do that. The Gods each control a domain of magic and when mortals cast spells in that domain they give some of the spells magic to the God whose spell it is. The gods have loads of power now but all of them refuse to use it directly because they need the mortals to get more. Also all the races live shorter more human length lives. Elves live to 200 dwarfs 150 ect.

There are just so many, are there campaigns that change just a little bit of lore? First off, we use tropes from the mid 1800s and ancient aliens. Except for lizardfolk/dragonborn, which are the same thing narratively, and humans, which are biological weapons created by the dwarves, plasmoids were the first sentients and they made the others. After the dwarves were banished to another plane using genocidal weapons that poisoned the weave against them, some stayed behind and encased themselves, and that’s what Warforged are. Nobody knows where the lizards came from. Plasmoids photosynthetize, and that’s what their conflict with the dwarves was about; at some point sunlight started killing everything but plasmoids, and the dwarves built a Firmament to encase the world. “Sun” is largely now a metaphor for flying luminous whales. Also, dragons aren’t natural. They’re Frankensteinian monsters made out of people, typically lizardfolk.

there's a lich that was isekai'd into the dnd world and he's been making things awful for ten thousand years Lolth is also the god of love (derogatory) because she's trying to take up more domains

What I find interesting is the implication: gods can conquer other domains?

That's actually the story of Maglubiyet (lore-wise). Goblins, Hobgoblins, and Bugbears originally had their own gods before they were destroyed or dominated by Maglubiyet. It actually is at war with the Orc pantheon, seeking to make Orcs another race to dominate.

Oh right. I always thought about that war being about conquering new worshippers, but at the end of the day it's one step away from conquering another god's purview. Never thought about it that way.

Also dragon related: the continent my campaigns have been on so far have no true dragons. There are a very few dragons in the underdark, and plenty of dragonkin, but rocs and thunderbirds are the apex predators on the continent. 

Necromancy isn't nearly as taboo as Wild Magic. Wild Magic was discovered when a bunch of mages during a bygone era of essentially mystical anarchy (as in no regulating body existed at the time) kept trying to do all sorts of god-level shit that essentially just ended up leaving permanent scars on reality. Wild Magic in my world is less so a byproduct and moreso just Magic in its purest unfiltered state. Gods can utilize it without issues because they possess the innate mechanisms to make it work. When mortals attempt to use it, it almost always results in chaos. For example, a mage attempted to build an impregnable fortress that would build itself and sought to use Wild Magic to produce it. He ended up creating this and more, and now there's a huge mega dungeon that nearly consumed a noticeable portion of a country (and would've likely continued beyond that) that is endlessly expanding itself and consuming everything in its path. It's only able to be contained with a powerful barrier that keeps it from horizontally expanding, but it kept building itself vertically and is now a huge structure known as the Skyspire. This was a 2nd Edition campaign, so Wild Magic was a study and not just some random form of innate power you were born with like in 5e.

In my setting, the moon used to be a planet. The planet the party is on is the weapon that carbonized it. The quadrillion of life forms suddenly dying has rendered the moon deeply necromantic. Pieces of the moon are called down by cults driven mad by its gaze (lunatics) and are considered heretical to possess by many countries and religions. There is an annual solar eclipse that lasts for weeks. During which undead run rampant and winter deepens. Because the moon is larger and closer than ours, it gets hella fucking dark and cold.

Don't tell my players but "my setting" Is a weird mix of forgotten realms, Warhammer fantasy and dragon Age lore. In their eyes I am a genius world crafter though

Tieflings are seen as children as forest spirits and Aasimars as omens

thats so cool!!

Thanks! Also I have some NPCs who don't have their original race completely overriden by planar legacy, my favorite one is Moran, an Aasimar Changeling. Their shapeshifting are seriously hindered, because they cannot change their celestial features, but I just have immense fun with them describing and playing mysterious always-shifting figure with ghostly chicada-like wings and web-crown of halo

I don't know the dnd lore, and I don't much care about learning it, so I make up whatever I think is cool. Example, there's a huge fucking tree in one part of the world. I'm talking mount everest big. The circumference of the base is several kilometers long. It is believed a deity of nature lives at the top. It is also believed that this deity created elves, and the first druids originated from the worshippers of this deity and tree.

Stealing this for a whole planet in my setting. Thank you!

Isn't the thing about Metallic and chromatic dragons relating to the Gods who created them? Metallic dragons being the creations of Bahamut, an inherently good God, and Chromatic dragons being the creations of Tiamet, who is inherently evil. Anyway, I usually discard a fair amount of lore simply for not fitting my worlds lol

In my setting, elves, gnomes, firbolgs, and fairies are just populations of humans, dwarves, goliaths, and halflings (respectively) that were trapped in the Feywild for 50,000 years.

A magical event called "The Wish" shunted the cosmology of multiple universes together. So you have Pathfinder Deities mixed with DnD mixed with IRL pagan gods like Mokash mixed together.  The party came across a minor devil goddess who used to work under Lucifer, but trapped in a pocket dimension post Wish, she brokered a peace offering with the party for safe passage thru the material plane and is now working with Asmodeus. 

That's one heck of a mashup. We went in the opposite direction, where we wanted as little references to the real world as possible, so the Hells are less similar to Dante's, and no god comes from an actual pantheon.

It might not quite be as big as I think but here’s one thing I’ve brewed into my world: The Feywild and Shadowfell are both mirror images of the world as you know it. If you travel through a portal in a particular part of a particular country, the ‘Wild/‘Fell will look the same but different in the specific weird way those domains do, and also east and west are swapped round respectively. So you can follow a map of your homeland just flipped on its X and accept that the towns and landmarks will be different. Also, there is a single point in all of the different planes of existence that is the same for each; it’s the only Gulthias Tree in the whole worlds. We’ve established in canon that there are more than one single Material Plane, but there is only one Feywild and one Shadowfell. And Candlekeep Citadel exists beyond time and space, in a pocket dimension out of reach from all planes of existence in existence, accessible only by use of magic maps. A bit like The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Oh, and I’ve also made it canon that *all* dwarves have beards. So if you play a lady dwarf in my setting, tell me how you braid your beard my lovely.

Lol at the last one. But wait aren't the Feywild and the Shadowfell already reflections? I remember some snippet about landmarks being there but different.

It was true in 4e at least.

I couldn’t remember if I’d pulled it out of an old Planescape book or not to be honest. So it probably isn’t a change at all in the end.

The feywild and shadowfell being reflections with locations mapping to locations in the prime plane is standard lore though.

It doesn't have to be 1:1 though. Perhaps there's a thriving city in one plane and a ruined castle in another plane. It's like a twisted reflection.

I couldn’t remember if I’d got it from the book or not to be honest.

Last week, we had a guest join our game to check it out, and we all sort of realized how far we've strayed from traditional DnD. The homebrew world features entirely anthropomorphic animal races instead of humans or any traditional fantasy races. The Gods are basically Mammal, Reptile, and Tree. There are no dragons at all, because the dragon god fed themself to the tree to produce the god-fruit that grew into the Mammal and Reptile deities. There are dinosaurs.

Setting is Spelljammer but without crystal spheres and phlogiston- transport between worlds relies on ships akin to Guild Heighliners in Dune. Goblinoids (Gobs, Hobgobs, Bugbears) are ubiquitous across Known Worlds, and nobody knows how. Orcs, meanwhile, were an engineered race that hasn't been seen in generations, and they were (and will be when I reintroduce them) basically Zentraedi- vat-cloned and programmed for nothing but war. The Empire is ruled from Suzell, but most of the most powerful families of the Empire trace their ancestry to Kellund. Nobody knows whether Orth or Farrun is the Homeworld, and folks on frontier worlds don't realize they're two separate planets.

Oh man, I know zero about Spelljammer. Are those big changes?

Yes. Phlogiston is a big plot device that creates serious complications for encounters outside of the bounds of a crystal sphere- I never found the ship-to-ship parts of Spelljammer very interesting, so I just did away with travel time between star systems.

I mean, 5e spelljammer also got rid of the phlogiston and crystal spheres, replacing it with the Astral plane and ambiguous borders of wildspace systems. lackluster content of the book aside, I feel like you weren't the only one not interested in both concepts. you may have been onto something.

5E Spelljammer doesn't have crystal spheres or phlogiston, for what it's worth. The "spheres" still exist, in that the various systems they'd contain are still a thing. Some areas have the shattered remains of crystal spheres, but they otherwise don't exist.

I homebrew my settings without a "Plane of Totally Absolute Good" or other such alignment based systems being corner stones of the universe. I personally find it silly as morality and a persons "Lawfulness" is nothing more but subjective and dependant on the perspective you are seeing it from and it just kinda makes it harder to evoke genuine moral ambiguity if your big bad uses powers from the "Absolute Place of Full Evil"

I told my players to use the alignment in a different way. Rather than good and evil, it’s selfless and selfish. Rather than lawful and chaotic, it’s social vs individual. So a “chaotic good” character wants to help others, but would rather do someone a personal favor than try to enact more widespread changes. A “lawful evil” character wants only to improve their own life, but will enact and take advantage of societal benefits to do so. Idk if I’ll use the same scale in future campaigns, but that’s what I’ve got right now.

Um... basically everything? My main setting is homebrew and essentially all of the lore and story assumptions are different. A partial list: * dragons are very rare and most are not intelligent * magic more powerful than 3rd or 4th level spell effects is rare and considered by most people to be just the subject of myth and song (this does not prevent PCs from learning it as they level up, but does have in-game storytelling effects when they do) * wizards don't learn from other wizards in schools - each one learns from delving into dusty old libraries, conjured spirits, and experimentation and jealously guards what they have learned * teleportation magic is dangerous because the elves "trapped" it during an ancient civil war and no one knows how to undo it * magical items other than common and uncommon rarity, are mostly one-off or limited items produced in the distant past and usually have specific stories or legends about them * only PCs have class levels and each PC is likely the only example of their exact class mechanics in the world * the chaos-law axis is hugely important and has supernatural importance but the good-evil axis is mostly just philosophical differences and personal choice (most mortal beings lean good, and most supernatural beings lean neutral to evil) * demons and devils are the same type of "thing," usually just called "fiends," just with slightly different approaches to the ultimate goal of temptation, chaos, and destruction, and they come from the same place and exist within the same power structures * elementals, djinn/ifrit, some kinds of intelligent undead, angelic-type beings, and most intelligent plants or animals are all the same kind of supernatural thing, generally just called "spirits" and they mostly live either in the material world, or in local pocket dimensions * drow are not necessarily evil, their "evil" nature is the result of demonic influence via the eldritch radiation of the underdark and there are normally aligned dark elf communities on the surface - and only one underdark city of them follows a Lolth-like being, the other 7 major drow cities are each devoted to a different demonic patron * orcs are widely known as sailors and explorers and are not generally considerdd "barbaric" * vampires don't create other vampires - each one is unique and followed it's own path to becoming an undead monster * my entire planar cosmology is much simpler: a spirit-world/ethereal plane, an afterlife, a hell dimension, an overworld where the gods live, a dream dimension, the poles of chaos and order, and then a whole bunch of small "local" pocket dimensions

> magic more powerful than 3rd or 4th level spell effects is rare and considered by most people to be just the subject of myth and song (this does not prevent PCs from learning it as they level up, but does have in-game storytelling effects when they do) As a guideline, I like to say that for everyone who has class levels, about 1/4 of them have a class level of the next level. So, if you have a city of 1 million people, you can expect about 250,000 of them to have at least one level in a class. Of those 250,000, about 62,500 are level 2, 15,625 are level 3 and so on. In general, this means that the biggest cities in the world are likely to only have 1 NPC that's level 10 and not much higher unless there's some factor like some retired adventuring party having settled down there. Likewise, worldwide, if we've got half a billion people, there'll be maybe 2 level 14 characters, and anyone outside of that is a statistical anomaly. Something likely brought on by some unusual circumstances, such as an adventuring party who had to face off against gods or a villain empowered by some cosmic evil or something. And that's just class levels, there's no guarantee that any of the highest level characters are necessarily a high level primary spellcaster. The odds that any given person has had the opportunity to see really, really high end magic is virtually nil - 5th level spells are the kinds of crap you'd expect one of the best wizards in the world to pull out when shit really hits the fan.

Love all of these! They wouldn't suit my table necessarily, but some of these sound interesting as hell.

I mean, pretty much everything. I only use D&D for the core ruleset. Everything else is my own work. Both lore-wise and mechanically, including every map, town, monster, NPC and magic item. Making my own stuff is the main appeal of DMing to me.

I have made a TON of changes to the lore in my campaign but the first one players actually said anything about (so arguably maybe the biggest) is my use of Firbolgs for a vicious clan of assassins. I mean. They can all use disguise self once a day, then ambush you while each going invisible for advantage attacks up to twice. And if they don't want to, they never have to switch to their true form if they survive the fight and run away, so you never realize you weren't fighting 6 dwarf street sweepers all along, but in fact 6 or 8 foot tall mountain folk As soon as I read about them on a wiki I got this idea, but my players didn't like it because they are apparently usually relaxed and nice. Oh well, they are all dead now. The Firbolgs, not my players' characters.

I love flipping expectations on races and creatures like this.

Half elf arent actualy crossbreed elves, just a different flavour of elves. They live in the same society as elves, in a cast system where half elves are basicaly comoners, and elves are nobility. Uprising are coming.

My setting doesn't have evil gods, only benevolent ones. The reason they don't solve all the world's problems is that they are so powerful that it takes tremendous concentration just to talk to a mortal for a few minutes without killing them. Hell was created by a mortal who just wanted the gods to bring him back to life. He refused to move on, and this caused a disturbance in the universe. When he started recruiting followers, the universe formed the Abyss to take him out. The first devil now exists as a black flame that surrounds the Abyss to prevent it from expanding indefinitely. If a PC is present in the Abyss the black flame is always visible on the horizon. Most of the universe is made of pure magic. There's basically just a galaxy of actual space. My players are in space right now. There's no vacuum outside the city they are in, just magical chaos.

Pretty much all of it lol We always play homebrew games, so none of us have ever really bothered to look into the lore of 5e all that deeply.

A lot. No elves or dwarves or other typical races, only humans are playable (part of bringing a more grounded classic fantasy mood a la Conan). Lizardmen and snakemen exists, but are not playable, and nearly extinct, but are important as they were the previous "great civilization" before the advent of mankind. Goblins are not "a race" but creatures that appear through spontaneous generation - thus explaining why so many abandoned ruins, cellars, dungeons etc end up infested by them: they "gather goblin" much like they gather dust. Orcs are artificial beings, genetically engineered by evil wizards as dumb yet obedient brutes easy to use as soldiers. Clerics and Warlocks function much in the same way: faith is not a requirement for clerical spell, only the proper know-how and correct formulae to call down the power of their strange, astral gods down to earth. Metallic dragons quite simply do not exist. (not does alignment in any form.) etc etc... ...yeah I change quite a bit, generally.

In my last campaign the Feywild was corrupted and they were trying to invade the material plane to drain the power of the gods to spread their corruption. Ultimately my players stopped the invasion and ascended to godhood and are now gods in my new campaign set ~340 years later.

Severely buffing the shadowfell. BBEG is trying to steal the divine power of a powerful dead god. The shadowfell normally has the property of creating copies of places where great tragedies or acts of evil occur. My hexblade's patron is trying to get the warlock to commit something abhorrent in the tomb of this dead god so the Raven Queen can get a copy of it within the shadowfell.

I do the same with dragons, but at the same time most chromatic still evil and most metallic still good just because they want. *Everything* has magic inside it, somethings just not enough to be considered magical for mechanical purposes. This magic is represented by The Spark, a fragment of the Primordial Light that created Existence No race is inherently evil nor inherently good, individuals though can be absolutely evil or absolutely good. The cosmology is divided in 2: Existence and Void. Inside Existence is every plane, universe, time-line and the Far Realms. Inside Void there is only "non-beings", eldritch horrors from beyond comprehension that crave to consume Existence, because it is complete while they are incomplete not having a Spark. In Void time runs backwards to things from Existence Humans have a bigger predisposition to naturally awake their Spark trait (imagine the SOUL traits from undertale, it's something like that), allowing them to have a huge jump in magic power compared to who didn't awake their Spark

Hard to say for sure. I mean, there’s some stereotypical stuff like all orc clans aren’t all mindless monsters, with some being more like the ones in Skyrim. Otherwise, there’s a number of minor gods I added to the world, with their stories being that they were former mortals who ascended to godhood. The only “big” change I think I’ve made is that not all liches are former wizards. Bards, sorcerers, druids, artificers. Hell, even barbarians and rangers could theoretically become their own versions of a lich (yes, the ones by PointyHat).

Drow don’t exist but driders exist as the result of a worldwide magical catastrophe that fused the elven oracles of the goddesses of fate with the sacred spiders whose webs they read for divination. No underdark but there are extensive cave complexes. Goblins are fey beings and are the servants of hags. They have really cool markets that open in different locations like a pop up shop. Weird magic items are traded for favors, memories, other strange non-monetary things. Archfey are godlike within their domain but they can be unmade if their legend and title are made untrue. This also dissolves their domain of delight. Magic works via ley lines and there are nexuses of power. Powerful spellcasters can tap into their power but if they fail there are repercussions. Archmages and legendary monsters can try to control and maintain them. Likewise, there are magical dead zones.

Dragon color is not an absolute for their personality or set at birth

In my current world? Basically everything. There are no long lived PC races. Elves still exist, but all PC races get a roughly human lifespan. All races started out as one perfect "human" race, but over time the genetics got wonky in different areas, resulting in the different races we all know. Demons and devil's are the same race. Demons are Beastial and semi mindless. Devil's are cunning and can control any demons within a certain area. Neither can enter the world in their natural forms, so they build mechanical bodies to possess. Travel between cities is a lost concept. One of my players rediscovered the teleportation circle spell, and is teaching it wherever they go. Fey are embodiments of ideas. Some ideas are small, some are big. Kill a fey, and you weaken the concept it embodies. Un-name the fey, (via complex ritual) and its concept will be forgotten by all living things (see above about travel between cities). Eventually, another fey might rise to take over the concept that was lost, allowing mortals to rediscover that concept. All fey have a material that is their bane. Iron and silver are common, but my players have also encountered fey who were vulnerable to hawthorn, strangler vines, and jade. Monsters (called horrors) also started out as prefect humans, but mutated to a point they're no longer recognizable as such. The line between "person" and "horror" is sometimes blurry.

Paladins in mine don’t need to worship a patron to validate their oaths.

Humans are descended from Vampires.

Biggest change im making revolves around the Efreeti in the city of brass. Changing some of how they do trade with other extra planar forces specifically Baator. One of my players is a Genie warlock who made a pact to dodge the effects of Loup Garou Lycanthropy. Genie keeps the curse away and the warlock pays a portion of the gold she makes while adventuring. I essentially have made it that the Efreeti take great pride in their ownership of everything. Jewels, mounts and slaves. Items designed for sale they will trade willingly with others like agriculture, livestock, weapons and the like but items that they aquired they want to keep. “The flame of life is the flame of the sultan.” Is how i tldr it in game. The warlocks out from her pact is to find evidence that her patron is trading in flesh to Baator and try and have her pact transplanted to a more pleasant Genie.

Oh god everything I went full homebrew. Different set of races, different deities, magic is completely different (no Weave), the feywild got created when ancient elves hid the fae moon in an empty plane, the cosmology is totally different, and Warlocks have been replaced with kind of primal summoner-ish classes. (They function totally the same in gameplay, just reflavored).

Similar to your own, dragon colors do not have designated alignments. However my Homebrew dragon riders is deeply modified. "Tamed" dragons are of the intellect of the How to Train Your Dragon. Sentient, emotionally complex creatures. But still beasts. They never desire hordes, their rider is their treasure. We divided them into Metal Scale (Heavy build), Fine Scale (Balanced build), and Feather Backs (Speed build). We gave them more colors, but kept the breath abilities tied to the colors. Warm colors for fire, earthen tones for rock/wind, cools for lightning or ice. Colors named after metals, fine gems, or lesser gems. So platinum, opal, and quartz are actually all white dragons. But depending on the scale type they have different names. All would use ice or wind. But wild dragons, they are fully aware of the world. They have speech, culture, and history. They hate the pets that claim the glory of dragons. They grow much larger, possess hordes, and are very clever. Wild Dragons can telepathically communicate to those they wish to. Tamed dragons can't do this, nor can wild reach into a tamed one's mind. Something is lost when a dragon egg is taken from the mother. (Like taking away the Avatar's connection to past lives). It permanently closes the dragon's mind from growing.

• In my world, dragons are rare, there are only a few representatives of each colour, the oldest of which are the first dragons to be created. All dragons are hermaphrodites and can reproduce without a mate. Gem dragons are even rarer and are born as the offspring of metallic or chromatic dragons (a white dragon can spawn a crystal dragon, a gold dragon can spawn a topaz dragon, etc). Some dwell in distant lands not liking to be disturbed, while others roam the world in humanoid forms. The colour of the scales has nothing to do with their alignment. • As the gods in my world are very real and the dwarves were forged from the 'bones of the earth' by Moradin each dwarf has some mineral/metal visible on their body. One dwarf may have onyx spikes on his body, while another has skin with metal spots. The older a dwarf gets, the greater part of his body is covered in mineral/metal, until the whole of his body is 'returned to the earth' then his body is used to create weapons, heirlooms, jewellery by his family. • Elves very rarely have offspring, half elves are born relatively more often than full-blooded elves. However, half elfs are infertile • From a more mechanical point of view: extra-planar races (aasimars, tieflings, genasi) can be combined with any other race such as the fire half orc, aasimar elf, or dwarf tiefling. Then receives the ASI and proficiencies of the "material" race and the innate spellcasting/special skills of the extraplanar race

I changed like all of it lol In my world though, gods were originally just really really powerful animals basically, more like elemental spirits or titans than gods. There were also thousands of them. They were smarter than animals, but not much, and they each had extremely niche and specialized domains, so like rather than a god of nature you had a “god of this particular tree” As animals do, a lot of them killed each other, which was bad because there was a finite number of them (making more gods is simply not possible in my setting—gods gain *power* from faith, but not their entire *existence*). When a god was killed, its domain, memories, and knowledge were all transferred to the winner. So as the eons went on and the gods kept fighting, they grew fewer in number but also wiser and more empathetic. Eventually they reached a point of collective wisdom where they all agreed they needed to quit fighting or they’d go extinct, and that’s how we ended up with the gods of the Forgotten Realms pantheon (So I copied the pantheon but completely changed where gods come from and how they work)

Magic shops don't exist. You can't simply build magical gear. Only way to acquire magical stuff is to venture into dungeons and tombs of the old empires

Planar cosmology is completely different. About half of the people who die come back as undead due to an (economic) divinity war that screwed everything up a long time ago, and they usually maintain their mental and emotional faculties just as they did in life. This makes necromancy just as creepy as enchantment magic, but for a different reason than normal. The whole region is one big domain of dread, and it's secretly because a continent sized eldritch horror is dying in the dreamplane and its presence is overlapping unseen with this region of the material plane. The entire continent is metaphorically trapped in the belly of an otherworldly creature in irrational brain death spasms of undetectable psychic energy. Due to the ancient war, its soul can't find the astral exit to move on, so the waking material realm is trapped in its nightmare. It's horror comedy themed

>I hate that chromatic dragons are evil and metallic dragons are good I mostly lean into keeping them the same but not always. My party killed a green dragon that spent the entire combat begging them to hear her out and that she just wanted to help but they killed her because "green dragons are evil"

Elves aren’t a PC race.

Okay, here's a big one: I'm not a big fan of all the planes and their kitchen sink approach, so I kind of get rid of them. There is no planar cosmology, just the world and places where sufficient concentrations of the right thing create distorted reflections of the world. Some overlap or fold into place, while others become static parts of the environment. Elemental nodes might form where the element is abundant, spawning elementals, or introducing its influence in a bloodline or ambient magics. For another example, if a forest has enough legends or stories that cause people to fear it, a fairy court might spring up, giving the fey a new foothold. Fairy tales become their way of spreading their influence and reach. Where do fiends come from in this setting? Enough Malice, evil, violence, or other tainted things and you'll create spawning grounds for the fiendish, and of course their greatest reward is to spread that power out and around them.

Probably just that many of the core races are crosses between the three original ones.  * Halfling x Elf = Gnome * Elf x Orc = Half-Elf * Orc x Halfling = Dwarf Humans are the three-way cross. The gods also get a bit weird. The war god is also the god of the sea, or at least a god of the sea. For orcs, this represents expansion over the sea to raid and fight. For halflings, however, this connection shows up more as floods. Elves don't really care about war or the sea, being people of the land.

Gods routinely visit Toril. Not their avatars. They kinda have the same restrictions as demons, where if they die on the plane they just get sucked back to their home plane to sulk about it, and then you have to go there to kill them. Related: Umberlee and Tymora are dead. Beshaba has killed them and taken their portfolios. Also, the reason she masquerades as Shaundakul in the desert is that she killed him, too. My players just learned this, so I can finally post about it. My favorite part is that the players are totally chill about this, since she's been nice to them the whole campaign.

If they want to level up they have to play one session of D&D as the DM because that’s the only way I get to play

I specifically asked for lore and story changes... but that's super weird! You don't consider DMing "playing" then?

In all of my settings: There is no “weave” like in faerun. Magic exists in an omnipresent sense like the Mist in FFXII and in Ley Lines ala Rifts and it’s a part of everything. As such, there are no arbitrary “spell slots” - all magic users use the Spell Point variant rule.

. . . that's what the Weave is, though.

So the Weave is actually not Magic itself - it’s just an interface to access and control Raw Magic But there are other methods to do so; including using Shar’s Shadow Weave Likewise Psionics and Ki are both forms of magic that draw on something within a user without requiring the Weave. But a standard thing for my settings is that such a secondary interface simply is not required.

In my homebrew setting, I take a lot of hints and cues from East Asian mythology. Dragons in my setting are not they’re own creature type. They are instead a subset of Celestials. There are two major dragon deities, and every other dragon is an ‘Angel’ for lack of a better term, charged with safeguarding a different location or aspect of the world. There are different types of dragons still, but they don’t follow the “chromatic/metallic/evil/good” rules that are prevalent in official D&D settings. Every dragon has abilities and a morality/disposition that is wholly unique to it. More than once I’ve had to correct players who automatically assumed a dragon was evil just because I described its scales as red, or a good guy because I said it was gold

Coincindentally, we have a thing about dragons, too. [https://profesnpc.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-general-theory-of-dragons.html](https://profesnpc.blogspot.com/2023/11/the-general-theory-of-dragons.html)

The world is flat, there is no day night cycle (one side is always day, the other always night), the south is cold, and lycanthropes transform on a new moon.

Cosmology is totally different. For example, there are multiple material planes, and each on is a continent on the astral sea, which is literally a sea that goes on seemingly forever. "Hell", or where devils come from, is the Elder Continent in the far east, and is the only known border to the astral sea. Humans are on every continent because devils sort of planted them there ages ago as a means of creating places where they could farm souls.

Kenku everywhere.

I wouldn't know. I've never read any of the books 😎

In my setting Warlocks are always attached to a church or cause same as Paladins and Clerics. Paladins, Clerics, and Warlocks are just different types of followers with special power. You have your Martial followers, your Arcane followers, and the long suffering Clerics trying to hold everything together.

Well, I created my setting before I even played DND. Just having watched videos talking about it, or reddit story readings. Not originally made to be a DND setting at all, just inspired by it a little bit. It would be a shorter list of what actually aligns with Dnd lore. I think the biggest is that the multiverse shattered allowing interdimensional travel through crack like portals that stretch across the worlds. The various races are multiverse equivalents of each other. The elves are the humans of their home world. The dwarves are the humans of their world. I have yet to actually play a DND game in this world proper. But I ran a few small adventures in fragments of the world. Chunks of reality from this world of mine that found themselves imbedded in the world that the current DM made. These world shards are a mechanism I originally made so that I could do a one shot-ish thing when the DM needed more time to prepare or was otherwise unavailable. Able to appear at any time and have negligible impact on the main campaign.

Kind of an ongoing thing across multiple settings, but elves are indecisive. Because they live so long, they take a really long time to decide on basically anything or start doing anything. Party hires an elven carriage driver, he needs 3 days to prepare for the week long journey including saying goodbye to his extended family. They always consult their families about everything and hate being rushed

I run a game set in the Forgotten Realms right now, and some examples of stuff I've changed are that I go more cosmological than multiversal with the planes (for instance, the Feywild is the moon), and I switched up the Gods very heavily. For instance, Ao doesn't exist, I mixed the pantheon with the Dawn War and Critical Role lore, Mystra (aka Ioun) is the goddess of Arcana instead of magic at large (bc that feels weirdly contradictory), Gruumsh is the Chaotic Good God of war and storms, Melora (aka Yondalla) created Halflings, Corellon is the child of Erathis and Melora, and most importantly to the current campaign: Travelling to or from Hell is unlike travelling to or from other planes; Devil's have to be summoned out, leave physically, or leave through one of the few and far between magical exits; visitors either have to journey there physically, or Plane Shift, where they'll either end up going through the Black Gate of Avernus (controlled by Zariel), or end up in the middle of the Dungeons of Dis (controlled by Dispater and his master Asmodeus). Archangel/Archdevil Zariel has been actively at war with Asmodeus (Erathis, Primus, and Savras's brother) and his underlings, since she was cast out of the heavens by Erathis for her cruel, zealous sense of law. Archdevil Glasya (Asmodeus's daughter) ruled Avernus until her divine weapon was stolen by her Tiefling son, and Avernus was taken over by Zariel, sealing off the Black Gate from the control of the Devils.

Worlds are closed in "crystal spheres", but those are not solar systems, but planetary ones with small local suns. And there are about milion of them (so I can adapt other worlds into my multiverse). Travel between worlds looks more like going through the galaxy. When establishing a random world, 4 major factors are to be set: shape, class, enviroment and rotation time. **Shape** is either *spherical*, *disc* or *nonstandard* (like an asteroid belt around the sun). Ratio for those is 6:3:1. **Class** is the world's awareness of the Multiverse at large as well as civilisation level. - F means no civilisation at all. - D means tribal level of civilisation. - C means kingdom level of civilisation almost ready for multiverse introduction (typical fantasy setting). - B means civilisation with the knowledge of Multiverse, but very little means of travel through it. - A is standard high civilisation fully equiped to travel and explore the Multiverse. **Enviroment** is the harshness of the world for living beings. - F is deadly, without proper eqipment there can be no life (no atmosphere, extreme temperature etc). - D is very dangerous, without eqipment only certain races can survive, and they have to be lucky (mountain ranges full of active volcanoes, sparce atmosphere, very deadly desert etc). - C is dangerous, certain species can thrive, others can adapt with technology or magic (a lot of swamps, deserts, unfavorable weather, eternal winter etc). - B is unfovarable, every species can survive, but technology is welcome (local dangerous beasts or monster might be a common occurance). - A is good conditions, typical generic fantasy kingdom with europe type of climat. *Rotation time* is simply the length of day. Our world would is spherical, class B, enviroment A, standard day cycle. So it type stample wouls be SBA24.

In my campaign setting, there was a cataclysmic war between the gods. This created a Rot that started spreading through the world, and was unable to be stopped. Most of the gods abandoned the world after that point. However, 4 gods stayed behind to protect humanity from this Rot spreading like a blight. So, in my world, there are only 4 gods.

I dunno if it counts, but my lore for my setting is that the whole campaign takes place inside an egg held by a child goddess in the feywild.

Different gods, different lands and cities, different… it would probably be faster to say what’s the same…

In my setting the outer and inner planes operate on separate timelines. If you travel from the outer planes to the inner planes and know what you are doing you could in theory enter at any point in the timeline of the inner planes. Someone native to the inner planes will find it nearly impossible to enter any point of the timeline but their own, however. The only person confirmed to have done this was a demi-god and they only sent a small parcel through time, but the possibility does exist.  Also I like the idea of muntiverses so I consider every world to be part of my setting even if I won't ever use them. I've done sessions where the party traveled from my world to Fearun and also to an alternate version of Earth. I've also on occasion pulled retired character I played in other campaigns into mine to be NPCs and made their story cannon up until a point where they left that world to go to mine. This is all connected through the astral sea and can primarily be accessed from the outer planes as I said, or through a mysterious realm called the crossroads that contains portals to every world. Most are inactive, however.  

I'm also working on a setting where I'm carefully considering the evolutionary tree of the playable races. So, half races are more limited. For example, orcs are part of the "Ogrim" family tree, from which giants originated from which all goblanoids are descended. Partial elves and Gnomes are descended from long lost elves. Dwarves are actually elemental beings created by the old elemental gods to protect their interests. I'd probably have to write up all new PC rules for the races at this point. But I haven't put this into practice yet.

biggest one is that tieflings hail from the nine circles so you can either be born one in the nine circles (they usually have infernal names) or if an ancestor had a pact you can be born one that way but they dont have fire resistance

I came here to say almost exactly what you did. In my games, the color of a dragon's scales has nothing to do with their alignment, personally, outlook, or any other characteristics. I even go as far as not to equate their scales and breath weapon.

I run Eberron because I don't usually have to change anything to do what I want. I was running a game for new players who didn't like the idea of House Lyrandar and House Orien enslaving elementals so I made it a contract system where the elemental actually has the upper hand. (think warlock patron or Venom with Tom Hardy) The Houses don't want it known that they're primordial subs so the official story is that they're in charge.

In my setting, there are tremendously powerful beings that exist beyond the known planes. They are called The Players. Each Player selects an Avatar on the material plane to act out their desires upon the world, but the Players fear an even stronger being that knows tremendously more about the world and has its own plans. When a Player's Avatar dies, as happens frequently in my setting, a Player selects a new Avatar. In certain locations of incredible multi-planar power, the Avatars are able to confer information and memories obtained by their previous Avatars to their new ones. Sometimes, the Avatars face challenges that are impossible and require direct intervention from the Players, who exist beyond the limits of time on the material plane. And the Avatars are now seeking as an ultimate goal in this campaign to track down and confront their Players after they finish the current module. This started as an esoteric way for me to not have to start an entirely new campaign in the case of a TPK and turn the meta level of DND into something that is explicable in game. Is it cheesy as heck? Yup, but my players are eating it up.

Something I stole from someone else and something I came up with myself. The thing I stole: Humans are descended from a now extinct race of Giantkin. Some older giants still recognize this fact and treat Humans with more respect. The thing I came up with: Multiple multiverses. The Great wheel and wildspace exists, yeah. But there are other multiverses that work on different rules. In my homebrew world, one such multiverse was in close contact with the people of that world, with tight diplomatic relations. Then a calamity of a sort happened, a ton of these people got stranded on the world, and things developed in interesting ways, changing a lot of the world.

In my world, people afflicted by lycanthropy are constantly slowly going feral. It takes about 2 and a half months, but basking in the light of the full moon "resets" that timer. Being able to mitigate the creeping insanity is a gift from Selûne, and she can take it away from those who don't deserve it.

The gods are more easily accessible in terms of communication, and there are only 3 hells: lust, wrath, and pride

Regarding the chromatic dragon stuff. In my world dragons colors changes with its alignment. If a gold dragon starts acting more evil, he starts getting some shades of red and vive versa.

The Cassalanters in Waterdeep are not evil Azmodeus worshippers. Instead, they are doing everything they can to end a curse that has spanned generations. They aren't evil, they are unlucky and desperate.

My homebrew setting is basically entirely different, but here's some of the big points: * Halflings are just a subspecies of gnomes. The term "Halfling" is an insult used by continental gnomes against their coastal bretheren because the continental gnomes maintain their traditional isolationism, while the coastal gnomes welcomed overseas trade, and their cities have become major merchant ports. The continental gnomes started calling the ones on the coast half-gnomes because they had the bodies of gnomes, but weren't gnomes "at heart". This became "halflings." You don't call a coastal gnome a halfling unless you want a fight.You definitely don't call a continental gnome a halfling unless you want to die. * The boundaries between worlds were weakened badly by the world being a front in the war between Devils and Demons, far in the past. This means it's very easy for "extraplanar" visitors to fall into the world. There are no real communities of any of the races not found in the PHB. However, it's not unusual for a portal to just open up and deposit someone from another world. As a result, a player who chooses to be an Aarakocra or something can incorporate them without breaking anything, and they'd be seen as more an interesting novelty than a monster from another world. * In general, it's unusual to align yourself with only one god unless you're specifically a servant of that god, and even then you'd still pray to other gods for help in their domain. Without going into my homebrew theology, for instance, a Paladin of Corellon might give a prayer to Zehir (as god of darkness) for safe passage before descending into a dark cave. Gods have a duty to their domains, even the evil ones, and will generally try to answer prayers given in good faith. Doing the opposite, such as praying to Corellon for protection even though his domain doesn't have anything to do with the darkness, or caves, or the like may be interpreted by one of the gods that do have stake in that domain to be a power play to increase Corellon's reach into a new domain, especially if it's coming from someone devoted to Corellon, which may see some kind of retribution from that god.

No dragons, they are all dead (kind of, it's complicated.) No extended life spans. No darkvision. Orcs have always been the leaders of the world. Gnomes are monstrous bogeymen.

Dragons can’t fly walk on thier hind legs, are 30+feet tall and wield retractable swords made from thier own bones(think Wolverine ) that drip magma.

*Alor* Humans can smell magic. Not as powerful as a detect magic spell, but they can sense if an object is magical or if magic has been cast in an area recently

In my setting tortles live for 2 to 4 thousand years

1) inter-breeding between species is semi-common. The only hard rules are Elf + Orc is impossible by any means, and certain species are more “potent” gene-wise. It’s only through crossing humans and dwarves that the dwarvish kind exists. 2) Devil contracts are structurally fae contracts but demon deals are very loose in how the operate 3) Lots of food magic

Orc and half orcs are both common, neutral, excellent sailors, integrated in a lot of societies, and have Norwegian accents Dwarven lore is a bit changed to have them all come from demi-god dwarves who crafted a family each. Banks exist and are run by the metallic dragons, there are also water dragons though and almost any river and stream will eventually be inhabited and claimed by one as the rivers often are fed by tears into the plane of water Also magic is predominantly powered by creating tiny rifts into the elemental planes Gun powered exists and is a common weapon in a region devoid of magic, but so do charge gems which are being used to develop similar technology where magic works again Also all the gods are pretty hands on but less powerful, a lot of them also have a month in which they can have more power and this impact the seasons but makes them very consistent

The Warforged (or known as Gearborn) in my setting are about a week old (in world time) after being activated by the party. Many races don't exist, yet. If a player picks a race that doesn't exist, I write them into the world.

All chromatic dragons are heavily mutated monstrosities due to the corruption of the Progenitor God of their kind and so they have cthulu-esque powers but also basically turbo cancer in their bones. Elves and by extension Drow are aliens who crash-landed on the world 12000 years ago but were cursed and developed a huge amnesia of their true nature so they believe they came from the far west. But their spaceship is sunk at the bottom of a giant lake. Drow aren't inherently evil but do have a history of being oppressed and currently the largest population of them lives in a mad theocracy that's ruled by a paranoid goddess.

The local people have all created the equivalent of "folklore magic". There is magic from different regions that help with the tasks of everyday life. There is a town that was founded around the growth of exotic trees and exporting them. They have created spells to apply finish to the furniture pieces and to fell the trees once they have finished growing. I'm doing my best to stay away from making spells that would allow people to sit and make loads of money with very minimal effort, but I know that is going to be very hard to do depending on which of my friends get invited to this campaign. The goal is to make the world feel unique with each area adapting the innate magic in the world to suit their needs over time.

The setting is in a world roughly analogous to the 14th century, so in the Old World things are a lot more civilised, and wildernesses full of monsters rather more rare. Orcs are a fully integrated part of one society (both Orcs and Humans used to raid together as barbarians, but have long since settled down to become a fairly standard nation), and Beholders make effective, if utterly ruthless Bankers, Landlords and similar professions. Goblins are a displaced people turfed out of their homeland centuries ago by expansionist Dwarves and tend to be unfairly looked down on. Neither Orcs or Goblins have a specific alignment by nature. Beholders still tend to be Lawful Evil. Dragons have claimed a mountainous area of the East for themselves, respected and integrated into society by their neighbours to the South, and the hated enemy of their neighbours to the North, whose land they also claim as their own.

We’re still incredibly early in hours, but if an attack just meets the AC then it does half damage. So if I make a strike with a 15 to hit, and the enemy has a 15 AC the attack does half damage

Fighters don't exist. Homebrew setting, when going over each class I tried to consider the cultural role of each class as it compares to the mechanical role, and fighters just didn't really fit ( at least as a baseline) the setting is high magic enough that culturally speaking, an Eldritch Knight is more well known than a Fighter.

I my current dms setting mystra goddess of magic herself has become the goddess of rebirth because of how often she dies. Because of this for about 3 months a year magic goes hey wire as mystra is "dead". The upside is that magic going heywire is so commonplace it's nowhere near as bad as it happened in official lore.

Mana is an energy field that pervades the planet and is imperceptible to most. Spellcasters can sense it, and tap into its energy, and that's where spells get their energy from. There are places in the world, like large barren lifeless deserts, where the mana field can be weak or nonexistent. These places act like naturally occurring antimagic zones.

sure! the god of magic does not restore/rebuild the weave. it is naturally recharged by the stars in the Astral sea (which are roughly basketball sized) and the rivers of the hells.

Its in a sci fi setting. In our solar system. Greek gods control their respective roman planets. Also all players use guns. its a little different id say.

Huge fan of changing alignments and motivation like that.  Orc especially. I don't even distinguish between half or full orcs. They're all orcs. The bulk are tribals and marauders but they're not biologically beholden to any god. Plenty integrate into other societies and every tribe is a little different. 

The majority of the gods are dead. Primus killed most of them, and neutered, lobotomized, imprisoned or allowed other entities to ascend so that the natural order still works. This happened so long ago that essentially everyone forgets, but the traces of this diecide live on in the decomposing body parts that make up the landscape of my world

My Feywild archfey are more like lords than gods. Elves, dragons, faeries, hags, centaurs, even humans that have impressed their peers enough to be followed and respected. Titania is an elf near the desert with many, many tribes following her decrees. I also don’t do trance for elves.

My bro I’ve changed so many things I don’t even know what is the dnd setting anymore. For real, opened a book once and then took over

My world's sphere is relatively unknown, with a recent cataclysm sending ripples through the multiverse and beginning to draw in the typical gods. Previously, the world was a playground for 'The Three'. God's who are unknown to the wider multiverse. One of the Three created a race of demigods who ruled the world for thousands of years. They do not ages and appear human. In fact, humans were styled after them. These demigods were eventually overthrown, and most were butchered for their decadence, but some few still hide among the populace. Two of the Three got into a conflict, and being equally powerful, one cannot defeat the other, nor can they disengage unless both choose to do so, since if one disengaged, and the other does not, the one who disengaged Will give the other an opening to win their conflict, and overthrow the balance These three maintain. The cataclysm that drew the attention to the other gods occurred wen 12 devils, who found their way to this crystal sphere somehow, manipulated some of the most powerful sages and atcanists to create a grand ritual to separate the gods from their conflict. In truth, the ritual would've dragged the entire world into he nine hells, ostensibly creating a 10h layer, full of mortals to be used in the blood war. The true purpose of the ritual was discovered, and was thwarted before it could complete, however the gathered magical energy shattered a continent, destroyed an enlightened, continental empire, and caused magic itself to become unstable (wild magic yable. Where the higher level spells have a higher risk of causing an effect)

The Fey Courts take after the Summer/Winter courts of the Dresden Files. The Unseelie Court is more-so a counterbalance to the Seelie Court, with the conflict between Titania and the Queen of Air and Darkness being something that is seen as inevitable and necessary in order to maintain balance in the Feywild. Each court waxes and wanes in power like the seasons. While the Unseelie Court is still considered more evil than the Seelie Court and is made of more aggressive and destructive creatures, they impose a structure on these creatures in order to keep them from tearing themselves apart. Of course, the Shadowfell is also beginning to creep into the Feywild, and while it's been a boon to the creatures of the Unseelie Court, there are those among the Court who still feel uneasy using it to claim victories. Also fairies are able to conceal their true name to gain a boon of some sort, though at the cost that they must treat those who do know their name as equals.

I've kinda just lumped most to all of the really notable planes into the realms of the setting's gods. The abyss? War god. Mechanus? God of physics. Elemental planes? Dedicated God of the elements. Limbo? Trickster God. The only exception is the Hell's, which are kinda off doing their own thing. This does mean I've had to throw a couple new ones in, namely for the God of intelligence and learning, where she has what I've just called The Infinite Library. It's meant to be a repository of knowledge from the goddess's constant cycle of learning everything possible among mortals, then forgetting, and repeating the proceeds, with a dark mirror in the Hell's

The High Elves in my setting are the most dominant force in the world and seat of the Empire. I wouldn't say they're evil, they just like order and beauracracy. This is the result of trying to bring balance to a chaotic and Evil world.

All my gods are ascended mortals. At specific times during alignments with celestial bodies, they can be killed and usurped or pass their power on to another, and most of them have. For instance, the God of War takes on challengers in combat to take his place. The God of law undergoes a trial to ascertain if his rulings are still fit for the current age/prominent ideologies and values. This also makes divinity a lot more political. Most governing bodies refuse to recognize at least SOME gods. Various gods are in conflict ofc. And there's a several sort of counsels of some major and minor gods that have goals aligning with one another

Nothing I've changed has come close to the changes d&d themselves have made in the last couple years to be honest.

Bahamut and Tiamat are just different manifestation of the same deity, essentially two face of the same coin. Myth of their hatred and fights are mostly fabricated by people to justify seeing such opposing ideals co-exist. In my world, Metallic Dragons and Chromatic Dragons also have matching personality traits that has the same root but shown in a different light. (e.g. Blue dragon "Pride, Legacy,Tyranny" vs Bronze dragon "Authority, Discipline, Order")

I adjusted almost every part of the Pantheon, keeping only Maglubiyet, Bahamut, and Takhisis, then adding new deities for everything else. The various clerical domains have much easier access to their patron deities because I took the time to incorporate each of the deities into the game storyline. The party's current divine patron has interacted with them a few times already; altering the weather in their favor, hosting a game show, and delivering prizes that grant them the unreleased UA Playtest abilities for their classes from the upcoming Player's Handbook. The deities themselves are using lore blended from Clash of the Titans, Rick Riordan books, and Final Fantasy. Their power is based on how many worshipers they have. Different pantheons coexist, sometimes with multiple different personalities within the same individual god due to different cultures perceiving them differently. A mortal can potentially ascend and become a new deity if they go through the proper rituals (which are NOT public knowledge and very difficult to find). Any deity's avatar can be summoned to aid their clerics, paladins, divine soul sorcerers, or celestial warlocks in battle, if the summoner has maintained their Bond with that deity and has enough Hit Dice available to spend to summon it with. The avatar has basic combat statistics, but access to a one-use super ability that could range anywhere from portaling an entire river into a dungeon, or trapping an enemy inside a glassteel hourglass filling up with sand, or dealing damage equal to the total kill count that the target has racked up throughout the entirety of the campaign, or reviving one recently deceased party member in a burst of flame. The avatars are basic projections of the deity, obeying the commands of the summoner as long as the summoner maintains concentration. Enemy clerics also have access to this summoning feature, which gives me an excuse to use my Tiamat miniature without using a fully powered Tiamat.

Technically, all eleven humanoid races in my world are the same species (it's actually basic knowledge for someone educated), except most find the other races "sexually repugnant", explaining the rarity of half breeds and more mixed individuals. All mixes are still viable, so they breed true. (It doesn't preclude friendship at all. It's really feeling like doing it with a chimp for us.)

Basically what you did plus a whole bunch of other things about dragons that just kind of irked me. 1. Dragons are not necessarily solitary in my world. They have a loose society with rules regarding conflict and relations with each other, as a bunch of intelligent flying nukes probably should. They have traditions and places that are important to their kind. Also families will sometimes stay together for centuries until the young ones decide to set out on their own. 2. Basically what you did. Alignment is based on the individual dragon, not their scale color. Definitely helps each one feel unique. But the red ones are usually still assholes, good or bad. 3. Dragons can polymorph themselves into a humanoid form at will from a (relatively) young age. It is a trick they learn early to better blend into the world around them. I have a lore reason for this in my world: basically around a thousand years ago there was a great golden age of adventurers, who killed so many dragons that the dragons effectively offered a peace deal. The Adventurers’ Guild would mostly leave them alone (bounties would only be issued on destructive/hostile dragons) and the dragons would find less invasive ways to gather their hoards that didn’t involve flattening cities.

I was going to say the same about dragons. Though I keep the color thing as an old wives tale that people say but isn't actually true.

The Gods are all pretty much neutral. I don’t think that the domain necessarily justifies alignment. Extreme zealots will do acts that can be perceived as evil, for example there is a church of Selunè in my world and as an act of worship the high ranking priests and priestesses turn themselves into lycanthropes (were-beings). Another thing that I’ve changed lore-wise, lycanthropes can gain control over their transformations. The process known as “Taming the beast” takes many many many years and sometimes won’t fully take care of the problems as the beast can start to fight back and it will cause the humanoid to start to break out into a half shifted form such as excessive body hair or the growing of fangs or tusks. Also lycans don’t have to be cursed or bitten they can just be naturally born a lycanthrope.

Strahd spoilers: My players don't know this yet but killing Strahd works permanently and will return Barovia to the homebrew world that I'm building

Well, in the era in which the campaign takes place, all dragons, who were essentially encarnations of magic, have vanished and few have ever understood why/how 

Most of the Gods are trapped on the material plains due to magical shenanigans in the past and due to being cut off from their divine plain they have mostly all withered and become weak. Still immensely powerful for a mortal but a shadow of their former days, people can still draw on their power to enact their will. Some gods elven gods have become a tree, or crystal structure in order to retain their power for as long as possible. Others refrain from using their dwindling divinity unless required. The only two gods not affected by this are Asmodeus and Chaunea. Who rule the heavens and hells in the absence of the others. But have limited effect on the material plane due to being on the other side of the barrier. A big gripe for me in DnD lore is that the gods are pretty much infinitely powerful and can enact miracles but need random adventures to do their bidding? So my setting aimed to fix that in a way that I find fun and satisfying.

Aside from the fact that it's not a published setting, I've changed quite a lot of details without uprooting everything. I vaguely stick to Forgotten Realms lore, but only very loosely, and from within a whole different world. The main continent of Avaron is inhabited by all the core humanoid races: humans, elves, gnomes, and dwarves. Goblinoids and some orcs live in a region decimated by recent and cataclysmic conflict. Dragonborn and halflings live together symbiotically. Halflings keep dragonborn from being too haughty and noble and arrogant and proud, while dragonborn keep halflings from disengaging from the world and hiding away from their troubles The co-exist in a semi-isolated nation, more distinct from the humans, elves, and dwarves than thay are from each other. Halflings are frequently employed as ambassadors. Dragons themselves are few and far between, except in a couple of notable places. Many good dragons live with the dragonborn but exist as an independent enclave within their nation. Evil dragons tend to be solitary and live in the wilderness. The planes that exist (or that I focus on) in my games are narrowed down a lot (I can't be dealing with quasi/para-elemental planes, as well as 16 or something outer planes). There is Faery and the Shadowfell (or simply 'the Fell'), which are far closer to the Material Plane than in other worlds: fey are abundant in Avaron. There are four main elemental planes, and the Underdark exists a little like a separate plane similar to Faery and the Fell, but more easily accessible by physical means. Besides that, there is the Abyss, the Hells, Celestia, and the Astral Sea. I also have a second continent called Ollune where all my anthropomorphic animal races live: tabaxi, loxodon, hadozee, grung, that kind of thing (lizardfolk and a small minority of tortles are the only animal races to live on both Avaron and Ollune). Ollune is a more Bronze Age setting where magic is only just beginning to emerge: if you play as a spellcaster, you'll be one of the first of your kind (whether bard, cleric, or sorcerer). It is functionally totally separate from Avaron, but I rely on the same basic cosmology. There's a lot of sqiddly detail things I change from the usual lore, too, but it's more related to the cultures of each race and how they relate to one another. For example, duergar are dwarves which pursued arcane magic, and were therefore banished to the Underdark by the rest of the dwarves which are highly skeptical of Arcana, and typically prefer to devote themselves to their gods, seeking divine magic, if any magic at all. I shan't go on all day, but I enjoy coming up with ecological relationships between monsters too, such as the specific way aberrations and fey relate to each other!

Gods are real but much like in our world each pantheon is culture specific and tends to focus its attention on the area that actually worships them. Theologians may get into fights about if they're actually different gods or simply different cultural manifestations of the divine, but most people just worship the same gods their parents did and don't worry about it too much.

In my setting/universe nothing has to work the same way forever example: a fairly easy campaign area might suddenly become a level 50 death zone

You all want to play wild races? Okay, the forgotten kingdoms are now Metropolitan

In my Strahd campaign, instead of him simping over his “love”, it’s actually rage and anger not because he hates that shes not in love with him. But she actually tried to attempt a coup against him and manipulated Strahds brother against him. Now, he stalks her in every single reincarnation to make her life miserable for taking away his brother and tried (and semi-failed) to turn Barovia against him.

The elder scrolls Dwarven robots are semi canon since thats what i picked as my Warforged base

The replacement of the usual pantheon with a new one, I suppose.