Hurray!
Well anyway, I decided to shape the lore more or less from scratch. I'll probably be keeping the normal deities (with some adjustments where necessary) plus one (although the new one is already dead....so yeah
)
But anyway, first off I wanted to test a change to the normal magic system (as vancian style magic makes me nauseous) Specifically, I will be making all magic other then warlock invocations have three "tiers" with the middle one being the normal vancian version.
The lesser tier will be "cantrips" which exist solely to remedy the retarded situation of mages running out of magic.
It works similar to warlock invocations (which is why the warlocks got ignored by this) in that it counts as a spell-like ability, and can be used limitlessly as a standard action. To counter this, they are very weak. Specifically they are at least halved in power/duration/whatever the primary effect is. Possibly 1/3 if that's still to powerful.
The greater tier are "ritual" versions of spells. Basically these are the "create an entire skeleton army, plunge a city into darkness" kind of thing. So they are really powerful and really expensive. These are usually reserved as a plot device, but I figure anything an NPC could do, the players should be able to as well.
Anyway, ON TO THE ACTUAL SETTING.
One thing I wanted to do was make the world really, really old. As in, this setting is a few BILLION years old. Expect some really powerful dragons, liches, and vampires.
Then I focused on the races, and I came up with some interesting twists on the traditional lore.
Humans: Humans are the newest race on the world. Not because they evolved later then elves, dwarves and orcs, but because they literally popped into existence as a full civilization around 4000 years ago. They don't know why this happened and neither does anyone else, with the sole exception of "The Source" A deity-like being that popped into existence simultaneously. And then promptly died in what the other gods have dubbed "The Kobold Incident" This also claimed the life of Lolth, which has altered the Drow civilization immensely.
So after popping into existence with a fortified city and severe retrograde amnesia, humans decided to try and get used to their surroundings a bit, bringing them in contact with the Elves. This flipped the elves out quite a bit, as the elves were the dominant race up to this point, when suddenly a totally alien civilization literally materialized in the middle of their territory.
Relations were further strained when the elven paladins sent to check this out realized that humans, unlike every other being in the universe, HAD NO ALIGNMENT. At least not in the sense they were used to, while there were some "good" humans and some "bad" humans, they didn't create readable, or as was later found out, affectable Alignment. They then consulted with their gods....who ALSO had no idea what a human was, and basically this caused an enormous panic, leading into the Long War. This war was fought between elves, their dwarven allies, and humans.
And I need to get to bed
Finish storytime later XD