D&D 4e: Any lore you liked?

Yeah, I know that bashing 4e was the most recent big meme on Veeky Forums, but its glory days are gone now. So, let's be honest: were there any lore changes that you actually liked? Are there any ideas from Points of Light/Nerath Vale you wish WoTC had brought over?

I've got my own share of things I liked, but way more than will fit in just one post...

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Since I started this, I figured I should get off my high horse and share my own opinions. Sorry, but I have trouble mapping things out, so this is going to be pretty stream-of-consciousness rambly, and for that I apologize.

he Nentir Value spoke to me in a way I couldn't really recall any other setting doing so before.

The addition of Dragonborn as a core PHB, especially after having lost their rather awkward "Races of the Dragon" fluff, really was a huge upside to me. When I read the "Races & Classes" preview book, I found myself nodding along with the book talking about how dragon-men were an obvious niche to fill and just inherently cool - but then, I've never been a huge fan of the bog-standard "Tolkien rip-off" flavor of the classic races, and fond of monstrous humanoids as something more than just enemies to kill.

Actually, that brings me to something else: I love the way many classic races were tinkered with and redefined in 4th edition. Each step from Basic took the "classics" a little further away from just straight-up ripoffs of Tolkien's work, but 4th edition was the cleanest cut of all - and yet they all still felt "right" to me.

Dwarves... well, okay, dwarves didn't change that much, but they still felt richer and deeper to me. I also liked the shedding of Tolkienisms like bearded females (which was mostly something that people laughed at) or rarer females.

The Elf/Eladrin split made a huge amount of sense to me; the Elf archetype in D&D has always basically been two ideas stuffed crudely into the same space, ultimately contradicting themselves. I mean, we've got a race that is simultaneously described in a very druidic fashion and supposed to be incredibly talented arcanists, despite the fact that druids and wizards are traditionally enemies. There's a reason why a Dragon Magazine article on magical plants points out that engineering life in such a way runs antithetical to druidic beliefs. A clean seperation made both stronger, as now they could stand on their own.

Gnomes! Oh, where do I start with gnomes? I never liked gnomes prior to 4th edition; they were always just lazy amalgamations of dwarf and elf traits, with no clear identity of their own. The closest we got were the Tinker Gnomes of Krynn, who were, like the Kender and Gully Dwarves, essentially a disastrous attempt at a "comic relief race". 4th edition was the first time I actually saw gnomes having any sort of value.

Half-Orcs dropping the default rape baby assumption was a huge step up. It was an ugly and limiting assumption, and didn't really add anything to the game.

Halflings finally dropping all vestiges of their hobbit ancestry and becoming new and unique was a huge leap forward, although I will admit that 3e had already made some pretty good steps in this department from their 2e portrayal.

Add in that the various new races of 4e tended to be so interesting - angels who forsook the heavens to live amongst mortals! Sapient fragments of a gate against the Far Realm! - and, all in all, 4th edition was a huge breath of fresh air in terms of racial fluff.

The settings outside of Nentir Vale... well, I can't really call myself able to play that game either way, seeing as how I didn't have the huge investment in Forgotten Realms, Eberron or Dark Sun that others did.

Honestly, I kind of liked the Spellplague and the loss of many of the more "novel-gluing" characters for FR, but I can understand people being annoyed at what they saw as a rather hamfisted rehash of the Time of Troubles.

For Dark Sun, though, I was pretty much in favor of everything that happened there. Tweaking defiling into a constant temptation for all casters felt so much more right than just making it another wizard subclass. As for the loss of mul sterility... I'll be honest; I've never seen any believable justification for there not being half-dwarves that didn't boil down to "but Tolkein never had them!" Beyond that, I also object to grimderp - a bit of darkness or edginess can do wonders, especially in the right setting, but making muls sterile and usually kill their moms in childbirth felt like just trying too hard to be edgy.

Speaking of darkness... I love a lot of the various lore we got for monsters in 4th edition. It's hard to really point to any one thing in particular, but a few things that stand out...

The "Playing Gnolls" article in Dragon Magazine was a huge thing for me. I always liked the idea of gnolls, but they've been traditionally one of the less represented "savage" races - despite their long history of being playable at the same time. This Dragon article gave them some of the best and most well-thought-out fluff they've ever had, and I was bitterly disappointed that it didn't make it into the Dragon magazine Annual, even when the goofy "Santa Dragon" mini-adventure did.

Shadar-Kai were awesome, going from a particularly assholish breed of fae from the rather dull Plane of Shadow in 3e to a race of immortality seekers who got what they wanted... at a cost. Essentially, they were playable, not necessarily evil cenobites, and that was an awesome idea.

Dragons were a huge upgrade, to me. When the designers decided to stick with the idea that "no monster actually in the monster manual should be Good, else what are your reasonable expectations of using it", that led to characterization of the dragons that I found more enjoyable than what they had before. Additionally, I have never really liked the core Metallic quintet being Gold, Silver, Copper, Brass and Bronze, as indicated in the threat I started about it - Iron and Adamantine just fit the core five so much better, and the subsequent metallic & chromatic dragons they added were awesome. Orium and Purple Dragons in particular were really cool.

Angels! Oh, I loved the change in Angels. The Celestials of old were... well, they tried, but they never really stuck out to me. Part of that was just my general distaste for the alignment, part of it was bad artwork (seriously, I say this as an actual fan of anthros: the 3e Guardinals were hideous), part of it was just a generally bland feeling they gave off. 4e's Angels, however, were everything I could have wanted in a standard Celestial. 4e's design paradigm of "if it's only Good, it doesn't really warrant stats in a monster manual" led to one of the most interesting and sincerely "angelic" Angels; aloof, powerful, and concerned only with the will of the gods.

Likewise, the elementals of 4e were a huge upgrade. Prior to 4e, elementals were... well, boring. For creatures as iconically fantastical as they're supposed to be, pre-4e elementals are just bland. I don't know who they are or waht they do, and I could care less. The most interesting things in the Elemental Planes were always "sub-elementals", like Genies and Azers and Salamanders and Tritons. 4th edition changed that. It gave us so many new and varied forms of elemental, all with their own distinctive forms and abilities, and really sold the beauty of the Elemental Chaos. Best part? You could still have your vanilla elementals, both as themselves and as the awesome "elemental soldiers of destruction" that were Archons.

Which brings me to the Cosmology... I've never really liked the Great Wheel. Why? Well, to be blunt, it falls into two reasons: grid-filling and blandness.

The grid-filling is obvious: we have seventeen different planes all based on desperately attempting to explore different conjunctions of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil. And the only reason we don't have nineteen to twenty-three planes is because TSR couldn't come up with any ideas that even they considered decent for "Neutral Good/Evil and True Neutral borderplane" and the like.

And that's just the Outer Planes! We've also got no fewer than sixteen Elemental Planes (four elemental, four paraelemental planes based on conjunctions of the former, and eight quasielemental planes based on conjunctions of the elemental planes with the Positive/Negative Energy planes), plus the Astral and Ethereal Planes, which have never really been defined in any way that made the distinction feel organic to me.

The blandness stems from that; we've got too many damn planes, so the interesting stuff has always been scattered sparsely over the whole overly saturated lot of them. To say nothing of how the Elemental Planes were pure "gotcha!" territory - you went to the Plane of Fire? You either fried outright, or you were presented with the "riveting" scenario of wandering through an endless 3-dimensional expanse of nothing but fire. Fire to the left of you, fire to the right, fire in front of you, behind you, above you, below you. Boring! And it was so boring that even TSR had to mix it up with the incorporation of some "elemental contamination", like floating islands/cities in the Plane of Air or the very existence of the City of Brass.

The World Axis, in comparison was organic. It was fluid, it flowed smoothly, it felt real, not forced into place to make up for everything. You had the classical but never really explored by D&D Worlds of the Dead and the Fae. You had the Astral Sea, which holds all the dominions of the gods together - and the dominions are brilliant, because they let you recreate and emulate the better ideas of the Great Wheel, like the clockpunk world-engine of Mechanus, without having to force them into fitting the framework of alignment. You have the awe-inspiring Elemental Chaos, with some of the most fantastic vistas ever seen in D&D and which would have been impossible under the old cosmology.

The Shadowfell also stands head and shoulders over the old Plane of Shadow for me because of a simple reason; it's nowhere near as monodimensional as its "basic" planes. The Plane of Negative Energy was basically the ultimate "Gotcha!" Inner Plane, being a featureless, empty void that sucked out levels by the second. The Plane of Shadow was essentially a mirror image of the material world, but if you turned off all of the lights. The Shadowfell is more than the sum of its parts... still dark, gloomy, creepy, and full of dead people, but there's a mythic feel to it. When I think of the Shadowfell, I think of the scenes from Disney's Night on Bald Mountain, where ghosts are rising from their graves, with a dash of Tim Burton's gothic works, like Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas.

One of the things I loved was the little tweaking between gods and their followers. We have Invokers, which are essentially divine sorcerers cum prophets, who draw upon the most fundamental energies of a patron deity, and we have Avengers, who practice esoteric rituals as, literally, "holy killers". And none of this is alignment based. You can have an Avenger devoted to Sune or Wee Jas or any other god of beauty who's out to kill all sources of ugliness. You can have an Invoker of Lolth or Lamashtu who is Good aligned and seeks to redeem her patron goddess. You couldn't have that in 3e or AD&D - although, to be fair, you can still kind of have it in 5e, as it at least maintained 4e's attitude of "mechanically enforced alignment sucks and is counterproductive for interesting characters".

Similarly, some of the features of the Elemental Planes were just so incredible. The Riverweb was an enormous spider-web like array of rivers floating in midair. Gloamnull was a demon-haunted, noirish flying city full of genasi. Heck, even the City of Brass got some shiny new features to it.

Still on the cosmological scale, the Primal Spirits from 4e were an awesome addition to the pantheon of gods, elementals, fiends and faeries. In all honesty, I never really liked the druid; like the monk, it reeked of token culturalism, an almost obligatory "Celtic" addition alongside the monk's "oriental" addition, but whereas the monk filled its own niche as a bad-ass barefist kung fu warrior, the druid was just an awful jumbled up mess, not quite sure if it was some sort of wilderness wizard or a nature priest. What really made it seem like a tacked-on addition was when actual nature-god priests became a thing in their own right, leaving you wondering just what the hell was the point of the druid.

The Primal Spirits answered that. They finally presented an "Old Religion" that really felt different to just "the resident rural deities" of the bog-standard pantheon. They gave a flavor to druids that made them stand apart, rather than just feeling like they were given the barest of handwaves to explain it.

But monster lore also played its part in why I loved 4e so much.

I will admit that Volo's Guide fleshed out the individual giants more than 4e, but the Ordning still doesn't feel good to me. I loved their 4e fluff, where the giants are the weaker imitations of the titans, the life wrought by the Primordials themselves in imitation of the Gods. A giant is fundamentally opposed to the world of mortals because it carries within it a spark of that ancient time, when the world was raw and untamed, and it wants to shatter the laws the gods put in place to make it different.

>this whole thread

Not entirely 4e, but Eberron had lots of cool stuff. Especially because it's not a living setting, and it decided to actually leave some mysteries unanswered, letting you focus on whatever particular part you want; I quite liked the racial supremacist half-elves whose patrons were freaking krakens.

Many of the EDs had some really cool fluff too. Being able to steal memories? Come back from the future and save yourself? Just... wonder out of hell? There's some literal epic level stuff in there, and I really liked that.

The underlying cosmology makes sense in a way that the great wheel never really worked.

Part of that is that the 4e cosmology is significantly more simplified than the old AD&D one.

Prime Material with 2 overlapping dimensions one that is fundamentally overcharged with negative energy (shadowfell) and another that is supercharged with positive energy (feywild).

That the Primordials brought the planes out of the fundamental chaos of the elemental - limbo plane.

That divine homes are basically small realms that float in the astral sea like a constellation and tons of them got wrecked in the dawn war so you never know what sort of weapon is present.

I also really like Nentir Vale as it basically gives all the normal quest hub attributes while being true to the central design of PoLand.

Yeah, mechanically, Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies are two of the things I miss most in 5e. As you said, they were epic in name and in nature; you could become a new god, or a primordial, or a dragon, you could go off and become the creator-god of an entire new universe, you could make yourself the Author of Reality, or an eternal watcher who travels through time, space and reality as you please. You could lead armies, become one of the greatest generals the multiverse has ever seen, take over a layer of Baator/the Abyss, become a living avatar of magic, imprint yourself on the collective subconciousness...

I mean, seriously, what's to hate about having cool campaign end-goals like this?

>Ctrl+F
>Torog
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Seriously? Just me?

My favorite 4e lore is REMOVE GNOMES

I also liked non-good metallics. It makes more sense for a dragon.

Also, the worst change in 4e: Whatever the fuck a "yugodemon" is.

>Nentir Vale
Yeah, all of PoLand was fucking radical because it allowed an absolute scrub and first-time DM to hop into setting creation while still having support. I absolutely fucking loved it as someone that was just beginning to get into world creation, as you had broad strokes of the setting painted but with so much room for your own creation. The way they built upon the setting was beautiful, because a lot of it was handled by giving you a fact and letting you come up with your own why.

Also, the whole idea of Points of Light was refreshing from so many settings that feel so finished, so completed. PoLand was a place where the only place you knew you were relatively safe was a town of a few thousand in a valley of danger. The Southlands held some vague notion of civilization but that was far from where you were. Any day, some ravenous monster from below, some orcish horde from the Stonemarch could sweep down into the valley and place your entire way of life in jeopardy.

It all fit in so perfectly with the general feel of the gameplay itself, where players were meant to feel like larger-than-life heroes, men and women fated for greatness, torchbearers that would bring the light of Fallcrest into the dangerous world and tame it, little by little.

>remove gnomes
But it didn't. Instead, it actually did a lot to develop gnomes and make them an interesting race whose abilities made sense. They were basically a race of PTSD-riddled VK charlies whose stealth and trickery was part of how they had survived the oppression of firbolg slavers in the darkness of the Feywild.

Even when I do planescape I run my planes with different features. My negative energy plane is full of floating debris and survivable by default, the negative energy comes from a black sun that shines rotating light like a lighthouse.

As long as you're not in the light you can hang around fine, though everything's dark and muffled (I describe it like being in space, sound doesn't carry through the air but you can hear stuff through solid objects like the floor)

But if you're not in cover when the sunbeams come through they'll sandblast your soul, and any undead in the light are healed and empowered.

You misunderstand, user. I was referring to the spoilered picture, an account of Garl Glittergold's massacre of the primordial kobolds and the deification of Kurtulmak, as my favorite piece of 4e lore, and also tying it to the "REMOVE KEBAB" meme which references the forcible removal or destruction of middle-easterners.
4e is the only edition that made acceptable gnomes still, ironically

That's just a difference in scale, but I believe the major motivation was that it turned out barely anybody ever played at those tiers anyway.

That's a 3.5 book, faggot.

You have to go back.
forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?796235-D-amp-D-Fluff-Wars-4e-vs-5e&p=20738619#post20738619

A piece of lore I just the realized the potential of was in the first monster manual, which stated "Rats are sacred to Torog, the King That Crawls".

That infestation of rats in the basement could be something very evil indeed.

Running my current 5e game in the Nentir Vale. Never cared for FR. Like the Eladrin/Elf split. MV2 is one of the all-time great setting books. Gypsy halflings are better for the game than Tolkien NPC level hairfoots. The great wheel is dumb because it's based on alignment and alignment is dumb. The Feywild is fun and a way to get extraplanar travel to low level characters where D&D really shined.

You got gypsy from 4e halflings?
I got boat people...
Which I guess COULD be argued as a form of aquatic gypsy.

I got a 50/50 mix of gypsy and Cajun. And as friends with Cajun, you get a lot of the same in both. Just gypsies wander the length and breadth of a place while Cajuns are content to stay on the water.

These
Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths were the absolute shit because I love high level superhero bullshit

The Cosmology was streamlined and simplified from the retardation that was the Great Wheel, I dug the Shadowfell and Feywild occupying the same space as the Prime Material but in separate dimensions

Points Of Light was the perfect D&D setting to use in the Starter Set, it was super vague, mildly generic and allowed for massive customization as opposed to FR which presents the same problem as a DC Comics game namely "Why don't the ultra powerful characters in the setting do this shit instead of some level 8 nobodies"

Paragon Paths were hype as fuck. You could argue that they were turned into the archetypes in 5E, but there's really nothing quite like them. Especially the Racial Paragon paths. Honestly, PP were the best handling of prestige classes because it gave your character just enough to distinguish them from anything else and generally had oodles of flavor baked into the crunch.

...

I'm planning on reworking my upcoming Lost Mines of Phandelver game to be in Nentir Vale so I can expand outward from there with my own shit and have it not be shit.

The only issue is the hilarious placenames which I might change. When I said "guess what the town is gonna be called" my friend immediately guessed Fallcrest and Winterhaven. Didn't even have to think about it.

I love 4e, I'm a little disappointed we're not using it for this campaign, but it does have a different feel from the other games. Reading the 5e book takes me back to when I was a kid and would spend hours reading the DM's guide.

Love the copypasta.

4e still sucked ass.

Honestly PoLand is vastly superior to Sword Coast as a setting at this point for 5e. It has roughly the same degree of detail as FR greybox or 1e Greyhawk which is more or less perfect to allow the PCs to seem like Big Damn Heroes even at relatively low levels.

I always liked how you didn't have gods of specific races in PoL, but rather goods that extol virtues commonly found in certain races, meaning those races are more likely to worship that god.

Moradin isn't the god of dwarves, he's the god of creation, earth and protection, things which dwarves care deeply about. Corellon, similarly isn't the god of elves, but the god of spring, beauty and the arts, things which elves care about

i liked that they removed that wall in the Fugue Plane which was pretty unnecessary in the first place when Myrkul was taken down

I really love all the lore surround the Abyss: the creation of it, the Dawn War, Tharizdun's story, Asmodeus' rise to power. I've read the demonomicon cover to cover, absolutely worth it. There's amazing nuggets of information in there that give incredible insights into some greater beings of the universe and their innermost secrets.

I'm a real sucker for god-level lore and world creation stories, and 4e really delivered on that stuff.

Hopefully relevant to this thread: what bit/s of 4e lore would you most want to see WoTC ultimately bring back to 5th edition?

Eladrin and Shadar-kai. The Feywild and Shadowfell aren't useless without them, but mostly they are.

Well, to be fair, eladrin are in the DMG and actually made the transition fairly seamlessly, given they're basically High Elves with Misty Step instead of a free cantrip, but yeah, they definitely need more prominence.

As for Shadar-kai... hell yeah I'm with you on that. I've tried to homebrew them, as they're useful for a setting I'm building, but I'm pretty sure they've wound up being god-tief powerful...

Getting rid of Mystra in FR.

Not the whole stupid shenanigans that surrounded it, mind you. Just that they done away with her.

Having a god of magic was always stupid in FR. Too bad they fucked it up with the Spellplague shit, and then they even brought her back in 5e.

As a whole 4e was the best edition in terms of fluff.

For me 5e has just been a step back from that. Especially in terms of halflings and gnomes.

have a map, Veeky Forums

Oh God, an entire species of fun-sized coonasses, it's horrifying.

That said, blackened possum is now a staple of halfling cuisine in my setting.

I always have mixed feelings about maps of PoLandia.

In 3.x, the elves *were* distinct. The woodsy ones were wood elves. Separate Subrace. Stats in MM3.5 the common elves were the ones that 4e made "eladrin", and eladrin was still a monster category (CG Outsiders).

I really liked 4e dark sun.

Ditto.

Linking the Abyss with Tharzidun was good, because both subjects already had the same goal of destruction of the universe in mind, so I'm willing to say Ahriman's blood established the basis for the Abyss, but the Seed of Evil is what started the Punchmeat Monster Lovecraft by proxy factory as a means to an End, and I like that the Sharn are from what appears to be a callback to Voidharrow, the Abyss in a parallel world where Tharizdun originated, but in actual fact, it's a universe where he succeeded in ending everything with his Black Cysts including the alignment system, so he shedded his divinity and became a true Great Old one, without getting shafted to Elder Evil, per alignment system, leaving behind the Sharn, a Race of leftovers made by the collective fusion of every sapient creature Tharizdun obliterated in all-consuming Entropy.

FUCK SHADOWFELL. IT'S FUCKING HALLOWEENTOWN OTHERWORLD AND YOU KNOW IT, NO YOU DON'T GET TO OWN AN ELEMENTAL PLANE YOU SHIT-BITCH DEITY.

Yeah, it was great.

Actually, Age of Sigmar is the recent big meme on Veeky Forums. I know that and I don't even play modeling games.
You my friend are WAY out of touch.

>>Especially in terms of halflings
How so?

>recent
>two years

Personally I always found it incongruous that 4e cared so much about positions and distances at the tactical level but doesn't care at fucking all about those things on a larger geographic level.

I assume because their heads are big.

>Shardmind
Besides being badass and having spectacular imagery in their paragon path, how they wrote their thought process is great. Some seek out others of their lost kin, others seek to preserve themselves over the thing they were born from, and still others insist on destroying their own and themselves to quickly restore the gate.
>Primal Spirits
Still the system I use for natural magic to this day, though I often put elemental and positive/negative spirits as related or even components of primal spirits.
>Deliciously folksy Fey plane in general
Absolutely the best

Whoa a map that actually seems to take into account topology when incorporating rivers and forests. Bonus is that it isn't a blatant totally not Europe map.

Yeah, this:

What 4e mostly did in 4e with elves, was relocate subraces from other books (setting books and the monster manuals) to the PHB.

Tieflings.

To be honest, I really enjoyed the 4E lore. I got started with D&D at the end of 3.5/beginning of 4E, so pretty much everything I know about the lore of their various realms comes from 4E.

I think the issue is that neither is that separate *enough*, "high elves" and "wood elves" don't make much sense on their own. With 4e making eladrin and elves different races, both were able to develop distinct, better fluff.

Admittedly I'm not super familiar with nentir vale, but they always had rather distinct fluff.

Wood elves live in the woods, are insular, and tribal. They're either nomadic or have treetop cities. They're social with themselves, and to some extent with regular elves, but tend not to be friendly to humans. They have a culture focused on nature and community and friendship and bonding and dancing is a major pastime.

Regular elves are fairly friendly enough to humans, even if they are aloof and superior. They have a culture focused on magic and art and community, but more like "everyone is actively involved in the running of the town".

They seem very distinct to me.

I didn't like this particular change. It was basically "high elves can teleport and have the name of the CG outsiders".

I didn't like the removal of the cg outsiders, and didn't see anything terribly interesting added to "elves" as a result of them being renamed to eladrin.

Unless they were further developed in some book I haven't read, that is.

>live in the woods, are insular, and tribal
Which is crap.

>Opinions
I happen to like wood elves. Most interesting of the not super obscure races.

Depending on the setting, full orcs and hobgoblins may also be good. And Drow are interesting in a backstabbing campaign or as antagonists.

Wood elves are awesome and fit in most campaigns. Good contrast of very social but also very suspicious of strangers.

The biggest distinction between Elves and Eladrin in 4e(besides appearance) is that Elves were native to the World while Eladrin were native to the Feywild.

Also it put the point of divergence of all the types of elf to the single break-point of Lolth's rebellion.

Ah. Fair enough. That's definitely nentir vale specific, and I was unaware nentir vale had that particular history. But that's also ancient history, not present day culture.

Faerun is basically the opposite. Sun elves arrived and there were already several local breeds of elves running around, including wood elves. Moon elves are all descended from a single guy who showed up with the sun elves. They'd been running around for millennia before lolth defected and a large subset of dark elves got turned into drow.

Why do some stars hate the world, Veeky Forums

I don't think anyone who says he likes 4e lore is ever thinking about FR user, of course I'm very rarely thinking about FR in any given scenario.

I liked some of the new Outer Planes like Chernoggar and Kalandurren. The Elemental Chaos was also a cool idea, although I prefer 5e's implementation of it.

Eh. It's the only D&D setting Ive found that I like that is even vaguely generic fantasy, but fair enough. (Dark Sun and Eberron are okay but not even vaguely generic fantasy, and planescape is awesome but not vaguely generic fantasy).

Greyhawk and points of light were much to empty for me (though I hear nentir vale did eventually get more detailed, it's just that that detail is hard to find and spread out across many books), and birthright and dragonlance I just couldn't get into.

I really like how Eladrin are, in every element, not of this world

Even their teleport power is them briefly returning to the feywild before popping back into the material world.

I do however feel like not enough was done with them, they weren't made alien enough

It was sort of implied that Eladrin had a spectrum of other-worldliness.
Eladrin commoners, the more adventurous of which would be the ones to visit the mortal world(PCs included) were the less eldritch variety, while the Eladrin nobles that belonged to the courts of the Archfey mostly stuck to the Feywild.

Gotta agree here, I loved how they changed angels in 4e. Same for what you said earlier about elves.

I also liked stripping out the alignement restrictions on classes, and cutting the evils down to just devils and demons, since it never really made sense to me to have both.

Also, Raven Queen is by far my favourite D&D Deity.

But otherwise, I'll be honest, I didn't notice the lore much in 4e. I hadn't played 3.5 before I'd played it for the first time, and I've always just made my own lore up for the most part, integrating stuff as and where it's appropriate. It's still probably my favourite system, but the lore? Never really mattered a whole lot to me.

I really wish the Player's Handbook Races books had taken off. It is a shame that there are only two of them. They were great books and an Eladrin one would have been amazing.

Old Eladrin weren't removed, just relocated to the Feywild and their scrubs given the status of a PC race. Noble Eladrin are still scary outsiders, and Ghaele, Bralani, etc are their... titles I think, or something like a mix between titles and occupations

Oh, no. They love it. Just with a spicy psychic sauce

I'm kinda stuck on 4e because my group can't be convinced to transition to 5e - I suppose it's OK after all since we still manage to have fun and the last campaign we played was immensely entertaining.

What irks me is that in the PHB there's only a grand total of three pages about multiclassing and so thus far all characters were pretty vanilla, although for new adventure I think I'll make the leap and try this.

To be honest, refluffing works better in 4E than multiclassing anyway

You could dual-class instead or whatever the full hybridization is called. Or focus on skill powers from PHB3; I've done a wonderful Warlord with a slew of History based abilities for a scholarly tactician.

Grab the CBLoader and read up on hybriding.

Also,

>whatever the full hybridization is called
hybridization

>refluffing
I don't know that term, english is not my first language
well in our country only the base phb was published so I have to restrict myself to those rules (half my group doesn't know sufficient english for us to go beyond what's published or transition to 5e so that's why I have to make do with 4e)

"Refluffling" is discarding the description text for abilities and considering them different things with the same mechanical effects. The book itself gives an example like "Maybe instead of a mote of light your Magic Missile appears as spectral skulls screaming towards your enemies." Just change the italic "fluff" text at the head of the statblock to make it something different or more interesting.

However, I feel that the saminess of things is made a lot worse by only using the one book. If your group can't use others, I don't know if there's a good fix.

It sounds like you like it for the opposite reason many people liked PoLand. PoLand was almost purposefully half-finished so that the players could have a meaningful impact on the setting without it simply being retconned by some book or supplement that is set in the already incredibly detailed setting.

>I don't know that term, english is not my first language

It means to take the mechanics of something, but explain it differently.

If I recall correctly, either the PHB or DMG actually has an example where a player wants to play a salamander or an efreet or something like that, which spits fire to attack enemies. There's no Salamander race/class, so the DM just decides to say Dragonborn counts as salamander, and that the Ranger's weapon attacks are actually him spitting fire and using his claws.

>(half my group doesn't know sufficient english for us to go beyond what's published or transition to 5e so that's why I have to make do with 4e)

Wow, sorry to hear, the base PHP is actually pretty bad when compared to all the other stuff.

that makes sense, I'll talk with my DM about this

about other books the choice is either we just don't use them or I have to translate them from scratch since it's normal everyone would like to read them at some point and explaining it each time would definitely impede the gaming part of out get togethers.
Like I said earlier, we have fun so it's all good

Get the CBLoader.

It is an offline character building tool compiling everything; all the classes, races, feats, weapons, etc.

You can even use it to translate things if you want and have the time.

Thankfully, 4e's power layout is very easy to read, so even with bad English it should not be a problem if you have any English at all.

What country BTW? Would be funny if you were next door...

Here's some links:

pastebin.com/85Hm56k5

thanks friendo
poland

Polak, Węgier, dwa bratanki
I do szabli, i do szklanki
Oba zuchy, oba żwawi
Niech im Pan Bóg błogosławi

ayy, lecsóbro?

Exactly.

If I'm going to go to the hassle of using a published setting, I want a detailed setting like Faerun or Golarion or Westeros or Arda or the Continent (the Witcher) or the Hyborian Age.

I don't see the appeal of a half finished setting. In that sort of scenario, just give me a huge grab bag of races and monsters and classes to choose from (a toolbox to work with), and rules to build my own, and I'll build a setting exactly to my specifications, myself. A half finished setting isn't giving me any benefit.

I have the same sentiment regarding nwod, but more so, because it lacks the tools for me to make a setting of my own choosing (the splats are the splats), and the setting it gives me is vague and I'll defined (and not one I'm terribly interested in).

aye