Who really misses 4e D&D's fluff?

Was I the only guy who thought that Catastrophe Dragons were a pretty damn awesome concept?

No, I'm congratulating him for reaching maturity.
I started on 2e, how the fuck do you think I feel?

I'l be honest... I really, really don't understand why people seemed to flip their lids over the changes 4e made to dwarves.

Hell, I thought the Forgeborn Dwarves in particular were awesome, especially because they tied dwarves and "dwarf-like elementals" together so neatly.

Out of curiosity, what's the hourly rate? I'm thinking of getting into this line of work, it seems pretty cushy.

I'm sorry, but... I have absolutely no idea.

Every setting should have natural disasters that can strike at random, and elements whose description immediately informs the players that they aren't expected to overcome it, but the challenge is simply to survive.

Every setting should have wonders and mysteries and uncertainties and space for monsters and dragons and other unknowable things.

D&D can be garbage whenever the specifics pinning down the system become limiting traps, restricting the wonder of discovery and the joy of being. In short, D&D is garbage in the same way that every system is garbage - because it isn't perfect for you. That said, it is an enormously flexible toolkit, once you slay a few sacred cows.

The spell list shouldn't be meant to be universally employable, and the lack of custom spell creation guidelines make inventing setting-appropriate spells a task of trial and error.

Basically, you should stop pissing on other people having fun, and help them have fun instead.

I had never heard of them before now. Could you sell me on them?

/thread

In a nutshell, when Io was killed by the Primordial Erek-Hus, many dragons went adrift in different ways. These dragons were easy prey for blandishments from other primordials, which allowed them to be reworked into dragon-shaped embodiments of the most deadly elemental disasters in the world.

They are fury and distraction made manifest, seeking to devastate all around them in accordance with their nature.

Here, this will explain it better than I can with the limits of Veeky Forums posting: 1d4chan.org/wiki/Catastrophic_Dragon

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.

Too bad D&D is still the only system that does high fantasy right.

Since Dragons got mentioned, I have to ask: did anyone like the switch-over from Brass & Bronze to Iron and Adamantine? Because I thought it was great.

The Brass and Bronze could never really distinguish themselves from each other or even from the Copper Dragon, to me. I couldn't tell you which is the lawful one and which is the prankster and which is the wanna-be socialite.

Iron and Adamantine also made the Metallics feel... I don't know, "stronger". On the one hand, you've got the five primary colors, and on the left, you've got the three noble metals... and two copper alloys? Seriously?

Plus, Iron Dragons are neat as the "feral" Metallic - they're essentially the dumb brute that Metallics try to lock in the basement, like the Chromatics do with the White Dragon.

You're doing a very poor job of making this sound good.
The way you explain it, it sounds like some shitty underage b&'s fanfiction.

I liked it myself. Brass, Bronze and Copper all did have the issue of being very similar metals. It didn't make the metalics look visually distinct.

Yep. Hells, didn't Brass, Bronze and Brass even have fairly similar silhouettes? With Iron and Adamantine, they look like no other Metallic - one's metallic gray with three horns, one's metallic black with a great big beak.

Is there anything wrong with taking one's favorite aspects from the cosmologies of 1e, 2e, 3.X, 4e, *and* 5e and assembling them together into a Great Wheel with World Axis inspiration?

I do not think there is much wrong with removing the Phlogiston, having the Deep Ethereal be the Elemental Chaos, and making spelljammers sail out of crystal spheres and into seas of fire from which trees of frost and lightning grow. This can also exist alongside the Inner Planes.

I likewise think there is little ill with having the Negative Energy Plane and the Shadowfell be one and the same to draw upon the themes of both, or having the Positive Energy Plane and the Feywild likewise be united.

I'm fully in favour of mixing and matching.

Personally, I think some regions of the outer planes could be used with the Shadowfell or Feywild.

I'd just move the Elven realm of Arvandor and their gods to the Feywild and make the gods into Archfey.

no

in fact this is the best in general even if your specific implementation may turn out good or shit

I prefer to keep the actual Outer Planes around, because 4e's cosmology downplays one of my top three favorite aspects of the Great Wheel: Saṃsāra.

One of my favorite aspects of the Great Wheel/Planescape is the idea that when people die, they reincarnate as petitioners in an appropriate Outer Plane, with much of their personality intact but very little of their memories. Many petitioners go on to evolve into various types of outsiders, like archons in Mount Celestia, baatezu in the Nine Hells, and tanar'ri in the Abyss.

I like the idea of a mortal finding new life as a celestial or a fiend and evolving through myriad dazzling forms. It is possible that they might become curious about their old lives and go to lengths to investigate what they were previously, just for the sake of closure. It is also possible that they might join one of the factions that study reincarnation in-depth, such as the Believers of the Source and the Dustmen, and possibly seek nirvana/moksha/kaivalya and ascension towards the Source/True Death.

I love the idea that, given the right RPG system, someone could actually play one of these reincarnated souls and explore many a roleplaying opportunity based on such a thing.

While Planescape: Torment did not actually address the standard petitioner reincarnation cycle, it did address reincarnation in a different yet equally interesting way, and that was fascinating too.

The World Axis has some of this with the exalted and the outsiders in the Astral Sea, the deva race, and the Keeper of the Everflow epic destiny, yet it is not quite such a central facet of the setting.

True, we just end up with a strange case of duplication where we end up with two realms of wonderous beautiful fae... just one are Celestials and live in an Outer Plane.

>You then have an 8 hour combat where your victory was never really in question but gotta play it out anyway to get that phat loot and XP

Regarding fey, I have never liked how any edition has implemented them.

1e, 2e, 3.X are the absolute worst, barely even giving them any place in the world. 5e includes the Feywild as an afterthought.

4e made the most conscious effort to give the fey plenty of lore, but if you think about it, they still*have no solid place in the world. The Dawn War was primarily an Astral Sea/natural world/Elemental Chaos conflict, and the Shadowfell plays an important afterlife role, so where does that leave the Feywild? It could be excised entirely, and the setting's cosmological backdrop would work perfectly well; that is not a good sign.

In my Great Wheel/World Axis mashup, I embrace them having no real place in the cosmology.

Any newly born, created, or reincarnated creature might just be a "fey." There is a slight hereditary basis to it. The "fey" template confers at least two of the following: (1) an allergic reaction to some degree of iron, (2) remarkably tiny size, (3) insectile wings, (4) whimsy in varying degrees, up to and including plain old madness, (5) some form of obsessive-compulsiveness over oaths and promises, (6) some form of obsessive-compulsiveness over narrative logic.

The Positive Energy Plane: This is also known as the Plane of Faerie or the Feywild, and shares many traits with those planes. Like any other Inner Plane, elemental pockets are in abundance here. It is is inhabited not only by positive energy elementals (also known as "vivacious" elementals or "spiritovores"), but also by the multiverse's largest concentration of fey. Ragnorra lives here too. This plane is home to the soul fonts which provide the souls for all newborn sentient and sapient creatures in the multiverse. A mix of non-fey positive elementals and fey positive elementals inhabit the soul fonts. The two greatest and most influential soul fonts are the Bastion of Unborn Souls and the Garden of Unborn Immortals.

Arborea contains the second-highest concentration of fey.

In 4e it was sometimes described as the prototype of the world.

You could go whole hog with that. Make things like dire animals feywild natives, with the modern versions the more refined, mortal versions.

I never got to play 4e even though I admired it from a distance. Honestly, I'd love a Points of Light/Nentir Vale sourcebook for 5e.

>He have a shit DM that refuse to use any monsters that can TPK him.

bump

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.

What line of work? Shills for d&d? On your Veeky Forums? Ridiculous nonsense. Now, have you heard about the new minis the Wizards of the Coast have come up with? Wow, I bet they're going to be really fun, after all, you get what you pay for!

0.02 cents per post, 0.01 cents per reply.

>I likewise think there is little ill with having the Negative Energy Plane and the Shadowfell be one and the same to draw upon the themes of both, or having the Positive Energy Plane and the Feywild likewise be united.
I approve, if only because it would make Quasi-Elementals interesting.

A Salt Quasi-Elemental in this cosmology would be more like a mass of incredibly concentrated superdense brine suffused with the energy of the Shadowfell.

Think of it like those pools they've found at the bottom of the ocean that are so dense that submersibles bounce of... only the liquid is mobile and trying to kill you.

And it's touch has the same effect as one of the undead.

It's the same with Steam Quasi-Elementals, they may look like couds, but like most beings with ties to the Feywild they are both unpredictable and dangerous.

>shill
>who is actively shitting on the current lime, and idealizing the previous edition that Mearls strangled in the cradle with his chubby grognardy hands because he couldn't handle change

Kys

I'd make the quasi-elemental realms places in the Feywild and Shadowfell.

Imagine the plane of salt as an immense dead sea, a salt pan that seems to stretch for infinity, occasionally broken by ruined vessels and brackish pools.
Likewise, the plane of minerals becomes part of the feydark. A massive geode-like realm filled with crystalline beings.

Coolio.

Though I wonder where the Feywild and Shadowfell are in relation to the Elemental Planes and you get from one Quasi-Plane to it's corresponding Elemental plane.

Cinder is clearly below Fire though you can also find ways into it below Smoke and Magma.

Dust and Mineral have weird Geological topograpy as you can probably dig downwards in one, travel for a bit and then emerge in the other.

Steam is clearly present as the great rolling sea of clouds above both the Feywild and the Plane of Water.

Lightning, Vacuum and Radiance would be the trickiest to connect though, and Vacuum would be the hardest to describe.

>4e had gnomes as fae refugees fleeing slavery in another world
>5e takes them back to just being zany little fuckers

I hate it.

>Lightning, Vacuum and Radiance would be the trickiest to connect though, and Vacuum would be the hardest to describe.

I mean seriously, think of that from a DM perspective, it's the epitome of trying to warn an idiot not to do something.

Because when you get to the Quasiplane of Vacuum... it looks like the rest of the Shadowfell. sure there's a weird mirage effect around the border, but there are incorporeal Shadowfell Natives there so it should be fine.

Then the Party tank walks into it and HUEAHUGUGIGAHUG! *dead*

>tfw Points of Light is gone forever

I agree, I dug 4E's approach to the cosmos - don't know what exactly quite worked about it, maybe just that it kind of took a balanced approached to mapping shit out and how it went about the world's creation, how it just kind of happened and the gods, devils, demons, primordials, etc. all kind of tried laying a claim to it that resulted in nobody really coming out on top but perched in a precarious balance of a power structure around it.

>seriously, I say this as an actual fan of anthros: the 3e Guardinals were hideous

This is why the guardinals in my setting are cute anime kemonomimi.

So are hound archons, warden archons, hellcats, hell hounds, arcanaloths, jariliths, molydei, and so on and so forth.

Ah, here's where it gets fun.
Quasi means something that appears to be x, but actually isn't.
Therefore the Quasi-elemental realms appear to be elementally based, but actually aren't.

Ash could be a great forest, turned into smoldering cinders. Amongst it lurks ashen undead.

Dust is a great plain, full of dunes and ancient forgotten tombs.

Lightning is a massive roiling storm in the Feywild, with isolated floating islands drifting through the storm. Lightning flashing from cloud to cloud, everywhere the sound of thunder echoes.

Radiance is a realm of light, rainbows and stars all gathering together in glittering cities, all of which blind any not taking precautions.

Steam is located in a volcanic part of the feywild, where vents and hot springs keep the air full of boiling hot water vapour - often too toxic to breath.

And last is the Vacuum. A particularly desolate domain of dread, even the very air here has perished. Those entering quickly find themselves suffocating, their torches begin to sputter out. Nothing lives here, and even the material undead avoid it, leaving the realm for their spectral kin.

>the 3e Guardinals were hideous
Still not as bad as diTerlizzi guardinals.

If you like it so much, nothing's stopping you from using it.

4e DMG: We've revamped the D&D cosmology
me: Sure, why not?
4e DMG2: We're putting Sigil back in
me: Awesome! I loved mucking about with the Factions
4e DMG2: oh but it's post-Faction War, so the Factions are just a footnote.
me: *autistic screaching*

Always liked the idea of kobolds evolving into wyrvens if given enough time to grow.

That is... oh, gods, I have seen bloody Warner Bros animation-styled furry porn that was less eye-bleedingly awful than that.

I've recently set a game in Forgotten Realms, and was wondering if any user had a good link to this book here. I'm looking for fluff information, mostly.

Anything else that you guys could recommend too would be really appreciated.

You know, honestly, it kind of bugs me that people complain so much about "my tieflings lost their variability in 4e!" when the reality of it is that:

1: You didn't have a tiefling variable table to roll on until the Planewalker's Handbook came out a good *two years* after Planescape's release.

2: Almost all tiefling art boiled down to a human with at least one item from this list: horns, tail, hooves. Seriously, can anyone name any 2e tiefling art that didn't meet that paradigm? Only one I can name is Sly Nye from Faces of Sigil, who just looked like an elf with overgrown fingernails.

I don't miss the fluff itself per-se. What I miss is the assumptions from which it approached the fluff: you aren't playing in THE MEGASETTING, in which the PC's are a measurable quantities in the grand balance, you are playing in YOUR setting,in which the PC's are the heroes.

Torment had a few, but they were minor characters.

Yeah, off the top of my head, only Ei-Vene, Kesai-Serris, and, in BG2, Haer-Dalis broke from the old.

Kesai-Serris may count as Hagspawn instead, like Gan from NWN2.

You're better at this than me, you know that right?

Do we know when Necromentals were introduced? Something tells me we could fold them into the Shadowfell and also create some sort of Feywild counterpart.

I'd say that, Unlike Quasi-Elementals, which come into being naturally on both planes and are more akin to the planar natives, Necromentals and their Feywild counterparts are just yanked out of their plane of origin and forced into a body made of it's quasiplanar counterpart.

As result, both are dangerous to be around, Necromentals because the level of Shadowfell exposure drives them crazy and the Feywild counterpart I haven't got a name for because, well...the evirons of the Feywild quasiplanes are already pretty dangerous, so condensing them into a single mobile area is probably a bad move.

I mean all the others are pretty dangerous, and Mineral is most likely home to crystals that assimilate anything that comes into contact with them and the internal dimensions of the caverns are shifting constantly, so yeah.

Off the top of my head, necromentals were introduced in 3rd edition's Libris Mortis.

Maybe the Elemental Weirds are the feywild form. Turned into a feminine fey appearance.

I approve!

Of course this doesn't make them any less horribly dangerous to be around.

Also I thought the Weirds were Snakes made of an Element.

Different edition.

These are a 3.5 critter. They're also seers, which is a feywild-ish thing.

>Why don't people like it when a basic race is changed entirely to be unalike itself?

I vehemently disagree with your characterization of the process as retaining a continuity and identity. We're told outright that sense of self and memories are removed entirely and that once they transform into outsiders, they lose their free will and old personalities and just become typical examples of the being. It's not an individual evolving into a new being or new forms, it's a soul being destroyed and used as raw material for an outsider with no continuity. From the perspective of an individual, it's nothing but final death and oblivion from the start.

Ah, makes sense.

4e tieflings have ugly paper mache tube horns.

look at how dumb you are