How is the lore in D&D 4?

How is the lore in D&D 4?

What is points of light?

Points of light was a default setting I've never heard anyone seriously mention.

4th edition Lore was minimal and designed to stay out of the way of the DM unless wanted. Their lore was designed to be used or ignored as desired by DMs or players. It was there to give ideas.

Dragonborn had an old fallen empire.
Teiflings did too. They might have ruined each other.
Each monster also had lore players could roll to see if they knew. Some of it was absolute garbage. The infamous "Bear Lore".

"Points of Light" was the default tone from the DMs Guide. It basically said towns and cities are not default, any that exist are exceptions and not the rule, and large cities are invariably set upon by the various dark forces of the setting. Settlements and cities are the Points of Light. Players move between and beyond them into the uncharted.

It was more a tone than a setting as the whole point was that any module (or more likely your GMs created towns and NPCs) could be used under this base tone and setting.

"Points of Light" is the described "style" of the default game world; other terms I've seen used for it include World of Adventure.

Essentially, it makes the core assumption that most of the world is an unsafe place ("darkness"). Civilization is either few and far between, with dangerous wilderness spanning most of the world, or it's heavily corrupt and subverted by real and magical evils. The basic point is, your players are IT when it comes down to adventuring material. There's no Big Names who will take care of the problems for you, the cavalry is a remote prospect if it exists at all: if anybody's going to save anything, it's got to be you guys, or else it's not going to be anyone.

As for the lore, if you can kick the nearest grognard in the balls, it really isn't that bad. Honestly, I thought it was some of the best lore of any generic D&D edition.

Rather than the somewhat sterile Great Wheel, for example, you had the very flexible World Axis; a planar setup that actually feels like something a real-world mythology would cook up.

Also, as said, fluff is kept minimalistic; the books all encourage you to take what suggestions they make and use, change or discard them as you see fit.

It fucking accident, just like Saints Row 2. But it isn't real now, anyway because it was technically Elminster's fucking dreams.

The good parts of it are that Tharizdun is now associated with the Creation of the Abyss, which is fine as he and Demons have the same end-term goal, also extending him to being the reason the Sharn Exist, as his attempt to blow everything up, worked in a parralel world, which is pretty much a callback to one of his origins, stating he's from Voidharrow. And a number of planes deities that weren't stated in 3.5 got their hayday.


The bad parts about it is that it had-the most awful fucking expansion on the Far Realm, over saturated the shit out of it to a "babby's lovecraft tier level of making cosmic horror just another flavour of enemy, which already was a thing, but they simply overdid it opposed to what was going on with it in 2e-3.5". The spellplague and everything that followed that mess, they fucked up vampires and shafted them to fat-fuck Orcus, but it's not like they could've known about Kanchelsis, obscured in canon, and in publishing to singular mention in 3.5 in Hordes of the Abyss, which you'd have to then have played a 1e Module to know who Vlad Tolenkov was, the guy shagging Lloth who is his high priest, and is the reason why Drow like vampires so much, which they then wrote up a Web Enhancement for his layer mentioned in Hordes of the Abyss, but then they got the memo they fucked up and accidentally rewrote him as a tryhard vampire demigod, and then released the fix in Dragon magazine, but then there was subtext anyhow in the Vampire Lord Template which showed Fat Fuck Orcus was subverting his right Over vampires (Not like Kanchelsis paid attention anyway) and this was finalized in 4e with the 4e Vampire Lord ritual being a Ritual to the guy, doing away with the known Demiplane of Dread Age category, salient abilities and other tidbits of fluff that was still canon by then.

In addition there is literally a Lich God of luck who accidentally became a god because Kanchelsis, being the lazy borderline stupid Mixed-race mogrel he is, let a bit of his divinity off to float in the ether for a laugh, only for it to get snagged on said Lich, and the Lich became "Velsharoon, but even more Bro-tier" who helps you out with becoming a Lich as what ammounts to the Zyzz of Necromancers everywhere, something Kanchelsis was pissed off about, but still didn't do anything about anyway because Kanchelsis is literally a cosmic arguement against race-mixing being the offspring of YET ANOTHER ELVEN FUCKUP and Mixing with the blood of an Elder Evil, or Fucking ZARUS (It's stated it was the unamed god of man in 2e, which in 3.5 IS Zarus, but in another it's Elder Evil, and it's mentioned the Seldarine literally try not to talk about this, leading the implication they censored it, which explains why 3.5's creation theories has little callback to the deities making mortal races from their blood.) (Which, if you look up the contents of Pelor's faith, you'll notice he is one of the Few deities to come down to Oerth to literally curbstomp a pack of vampires with the villagers they were assualting and make the most fuckass anti-vampire Dagger ever which forces a Will-save or lose your entire fucking Spawn hierachy control, and he even has a dedicated Parable on vampires saying they were Pelors faithful who turned away from his light) Under the Pelor/Zarus Context, it's almost as if he's trying to cover up any involvement he had in accidentally Vampire-god.

As for where Kanchelsis lives, I will describe it to you-
Literally the Scarlet Devil Mansion + Castlevania (Touhouvania) with the Outside being surrounded by these lazy fucks as he does nothing all day but harass his "So CE They switched alignment from boredom per Van Richten's guide on anything Past Strahd's Age" followers and starve them for no reason, and occasionally popping in a mortal to fuck with as he acts all nice then the next moment turns into the "beast" and fucks their shit.

His appearance is the Rake or the best, the Rake being the humanoid half-of vampirism and the Beast being "Not WOD guize!"

The WE where he's a demigod says he's got 3 dedicated Pain & Panic Tier Minions who do errands for him

He's basically a retarded mongrel Intermediate deity asking to be killed, or Demigod, again, WoTC fucked up, and now there are two of him, more than his other two "selves"

His high Priest is in that one 1e Underdark adventure, his domain in the Demonweb pit, and he's shaffing Lloth in 3.5, one should note his High priest is in the following Predicament "Vlad Tolenkov wants to Camarilla but my borderline retarded deity won't let me." and the cult is called the Union of Eclipses, one should note that it's made up of all the broken -ass Vampires you will never-ever encounter in D&D without TPK, because they'd all be Demigod tier, effectively D&D issued Dead Apostle Ancestors who only show up to give their creator the minimum respect he deserves to keep his playhouse running.

>What is points of light?
The best setting to come out of DnD, putting in just enough for a DM to work off of and not clogging it up too much with spotlight stealing established NPCs and factions like FR

I find it hard to believe that anyone actually cares for any of this shit.

PoLand is probably the best setting to come out of DnD since Eberron, and as far as more traditional fantasy settings go, I'm not sure anything has ever really surpassed it. It has the ideal tone for playing heroes in a world preyed upon by darkness where you are helping to keep the torch burning to stave off the horrors that dwell in the dark forests, on savage mountain peaks, and in the dark places below the surface. Everything gets just enough fluff to pretty well define the Nentir Vale while the surrounding world is only ever really touched on by faint strokes that allows every group's interpretation of PoLand to be completely different, and it forms an established setting that still gives Dungeon Masters and parties an amazing amount of freedom to twist and turn the setting into whatever they want it to be.

On that note, it was never disclosed but located beyond the area of the Demiplane of Dread, there's a plane where Vampyres exist, Living vampires that have made all mortals their slaves, It's unknown if they are related to Kanchelsis, seeing as what was published in 2e on them showed they hated Vampires, but it's interesting to not such a place exists.

Anyhow, another bad thing about 4e was that they cluster-fucked a number of deific pantheons from other settings togther, screwed over pantheons from our world brought over to the great wheel Via the usual plot mechanic of "Elves want slaves, get a few from X-version of planet Earth", Rewrote Orcus for no fucking reason, and added another bit of still OP as fuck but the writers don't source their shit so the version of me you get is actually a hell of a lot more weak, leaving more work for you in the long run asshole! And still managed to somehow oversaturate Faerun more so than it already is, which you know- literally 400+ novels written for the fucking setting on top of every Dungeon, PolyHedron, and Official Splatbook with Elmister going "What ho faggot! Want to know something about our setting so fucking detailed it still hasn't collapsed and fallen to the lower planes under it's own weight? No? Here! let me publish highly dangerous spells written by our "evil and should never be imitated" Endless fucking supply of Liches we never seem to fucking run out of!"

No really, long-term reading of any article Elminster is narrating shows him handing out spells this fucking dangerous, it's fucking amazing really.

From a technical perspective E is an evil DMPC Wizard with godlike powers including Admin privilege to cast past Epic-level spells if someone pisses him off enough, turns men into women, runs a Shadow network of Spies and intelligence gatherers, and realeases potential world ending spells to the public Domain and tells people what's in the wilderness that is going to kill them today.

Why are you still posting? No-one gives a shit about Forgotten Realms. It's a garbage setting before 4E, it's a garbage setting in 4E, and it's a garbage setting after 4E.

work on your spacing and punctuation please. reading this is painful.

spacing things out more would help for one.

I can't believe someone wrote so much to say so little.


OP, PoL was great. It puts it just enough to inspire players and DMs, but steps out of the way to allow people to utilize their creativity.

One of things that makes PoL shine, in my book, was that it strove to be its own thing; no mix of real world pantheons clumsily shoved into the greater backdrop, just a single pantheon that evolves and changes in its backstory and with no Incredibly Specific Gods.

Plus, it even managed to take some of the staler lore of old and make it feel new.

Playing Gnolls was an excellent treatment of a race that's been sharing the same ground as orcs, and that includes being PC viable, since it reared it's hyena-like head.

Nerull went from a generic cackling slaughter-monger to creation's first necromancer, who wanted to do good but went evil after deciding "screw you all, you're all hypocrites!" because of how the gods treated him for making necromancy.

The Blood War went from being a huge setting-monopolizing thing to just one of the many intricate details of the planes.

I could go on and on, because, really, I love 4e's lore. I use it in place of 5e's lore wherever I can.

Work on killing yourself, please. Between your own plebbit spacing, lack of punctuation and capitalization, you're really the nigger calling the kettle black.

This user knows exactly what's up. PoLand is basically just a framework for DMs to build their own settings out of while still having a skeletal framework to base themselves off of. What's at the end of the King's Road to the South? You decide. What's to the east of the Dawnforge mountains? You decide. What's north of the Winterbole forest? I don't fucking know, you decide.

It establishes a general tone where there is great evil out there in the world and the flame of civilization is weak and guttering. The empire that kept the darkness at bay has fallen, and the Nentir Vale is just a border province that has already been razed once by monstrous hordes. The player characters are Heroes with a capital H, and it falls upon them and others like them to ensure the safety of the people of the Vale. And perhaps they might manage to not just help Fallcrest survive another month but instead fight back the darkness, raising the banner of civilization and helping to become Big Damn Heroes that will go down in history as legendary figures as according to their Heroic Destiny.

>nigger calling the kettle black.

Christ, not this guy again. I don't know how or why he manages to type shit like this in every one of these threads.

>plebbit spacing
I keep seeing this mentioned lately by insufferable jackass anons. I'm beginning to think it's just one asshole now.

Have a new line. Just because.

Fuck you.

So you don't actually know what plebbit spacing is, do you? Since you didn't actually do it.

He's the same piece of shit who tries to dispute any sort of long-winded post as effort-posting, does everything in his power to make 4e and 5e sound godlike, depreciates older Veeky Forums andchan culture, and ironically acts like a rulefag redditor who want's everything picture perfect like it's his personal demiplane.

We might be kinder to you, if you stop acting like a fucking ledditor.

The Book of Planes was great, I prefer it over Spelljammer. It feels closer to what you expect from D&D.

About as good any any other MMO on the market right now.

Ie, garbage.

>le TTMMORPG meme.

If it wasn't labeled as D&D, you all would have sucked its' dick.

Even being labeled as DnD, many of us do still suck its dick.

It's pretty much the only good lore in D&D, except for maybe whatever 0e or Basic have.

4rries still delusional.

I always found it funny how 4e got called MMO or vidya edition yet the setting doesn't really work for MMOs since the world is quite vague and indistinct outside of either the Vale or the planes, and the system is actually quite hard to work into a videogame - and never actually was.

Outside of one short-lived Facebook game, the only thing to even try "4e MMO" defaulted to using Forgotten Realms and had nothing to do with the system.

Some folk don't know what posting behaviors they have to avoid to keep from triggering the kinds of folks who say things like plebbit, because they have no concept of what it's like on reddit.

I've been doublespacing my posts on Veeky Forums since before Reddit was invented, and I don't intend to go there just to find out what you don't like.

Doublespacing isn't plebbit posting, fagarelli. It's the space between a replied post and your reply to that post that signals it. Do you think that everyone else on Veeky Forums just types giant blocks of text without ever spacing their posts?
Or starts new paragraphs without a space like some sort of fucking troglodyte?

This is the sign of the plebbit. This is what people laugh at as plebbit posting because it's relatively uncommon on Veeky Forums, yet it's the staple of replies on the Elsewhere.

plenty of mmos have great settings tho
what's with Veeky Forums elitism towards video games anyway

you literally play pretend with dice

This is only applicable towards 4e's iteration of Forgotten Realms and not the generic PoL setting. Also your posts are fucking terrible in structure. Paragraph breaks and lines separating concepts are your friend.

I still want to jack Final Fantasy XIV's primal concept for a fantasy game one of these days. It's such an interesting way of letting you have monster races that are weak individually but very threatening on a macro scale.

I think 4e deserves recognition for finally taking the effort to create the Primal Spirits, meaning we had Druids who for the first time were something other than "Nature Sphere Clerics with a radically different power set and a Captain Ethnic Flavor".

Plus, while I figure this is more crunch than fluff, I think the fact it actually gave every single casting class its own unique array of spells really warrants applauding.