500 word challenge

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:31 am

Sure. We can do a thing about the Beastlands.

Krigala

Krigala is a world between two stars. As the planet spins, one sun comes into view just as the other recedes beyond the horizon. One star is a pale red, the other small and blue; as the suns rise and fall the sky changes color, but it is always a time of day. Despite the fact that the darkness of night never comes to anywhere on Krigala, the climate is moderate for most of the year and the light levels never become brighter than an early morning on most other worlds. At the poles, both suns are visible all the time, but they are so low to the horizon that it is both dim and cold year round.

There are no separate continents on Krigala, but there are so many lakes of various sizes that roughly half of the surface is water. Many lakes are salty or brackish. Krigala is part of the Okeanos watershed, and most portals take the form of pools of water. Some forests have many such portal pools in them. There are no major cities on Krigala, but many villages and towns. The dense forests and extensive grasslands which cover most of the planet are largely untamed outside the small polyps of civilation.

The natives of Krigala are not humanoid in appearance, but there are many races of them. There are several tribes of talking horses, most notably the Unicorns and Pegasi, which are Krigalan in origin. There are also several tribes of bird, including the Great Eagles and the Phoenixes. And there are a number of tauric creatures, as Krigala is the origin of the Centaurs and the Wemics. Due to the bestial appearance of the inhabitants, Krigala is often named as one of the Beastlands. Metal has been introduced from other worlds, but none of the native tribes work it themselves.

Because most of the people of Krigala are hunter gatherers or even herbivorous grazers, the resources of Krigala are largely untouched. There is rich farmland and bountiful ore veins that are simply unclaimed, waiting for an agricultural or metal using people to stake a claim to them. But while the native peoples will be unlikely to dispute such settlements, the land is not without its dangers. The wilderness is full of deadly monsters who threaten homesteaders and their creations either by attacking them or simply by stomping through their fields.

-398 words.

-Username17

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 10:34 am

TiaC wrote:Can I just say, half the maps in the Manual of the planes are useless.

Carceri is reimagined in Tome as a series of prison demiplanes. I'd say the Acheron description fails its alignment rather than the other way around - you sign up for a LE plane of Organized Warfare and get a lawless wasteland full of marauders. More than Ysgard is hurt by alignment - Beastland could just have been the Druid plane, and once you look beyond being the main LG plane and the gold, Celestia is a giant mountain climbed by people on personal quests of self-enlightenment and throws challenges at people to enable that. Elysium has the entrapping trait going for it.

Bringing Equestria into it could work, I suppose? For the non-fans, the MLP world is static unless changed. The skies do not move, the clouds do not move, the plants do not grow. At the same time, natives do have the power to make that change. One race can control the heavens, and the conflict between the ruler of the Day and the ruler of the Night over the proportions of one tho the other is the plot of the first episodes. Another race is charged with making the water cycle happen, and a third one is required for plant growth, but also has growers of rocks. The unmanaged areas are not hospitable, with deserts and eternal snowstorms and the like. So if you make Arcadia work like that, you can fight elementals outside the frontier terraforming towns, engage in politics that shape the landscape and climate, and if those get too hot, the place that was the capital at the time of the last War of Day and Night is now in the middle of a magic forest that spawns monsters ranging from cockatrices to kajiu and someone needs to clean that up.

Edit: I guess that's the risk of typing up large responses.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 11:40 am

I worked up an 8-plane thing, based on a flippant comment I made here somewhere. Settings are inherently better (IMEO) except one or two tricky things of trying to include something for Bytopia and fucking Carceri.

500 words, eh.

Nirvana

Tick, tock, Berk (heh, last one): clockwork this place is not.

But regular it is, eerily so for anyone with some life left in them. Just as Chaos is personified by endless Giant Frogs as an answer to anything, so Law takes the form of a myriad of different cultural and social groups, races, and stranger things, each isolated on their own great chunk of ... whatever they take the black stuff for. It conforms to their laws, you see.

So the Modrons live on great interlocking metallic black gears and call it Mechanus. Various warring dead prepare to fight without end on their great shattered slabs of crashing ruin and call it Archeron. A few Guardinals make black dirt of their islands and guard magic orchards called Arcadia. The Abeils live in an endless black hive that's said to gather from every world with abundant flowers, but have no name for it at all. Formian hive burrows, the workshop of the Inevitable, many a great Dwarf fortress full of traps and statues of forgotten legends, Bladelings living in a zone of flying black blades, half-mad Archons tending grave-worlds of the fallen righteous, there's even whispers of horrible far-touched realms full of power unimagined that sought to free the black stuff, and without Law is left frozen in place, waiting.

It's all Nirvana, perfection to the mind of the locals. Not minds you see, they don't normally each have their own, and nor will you if you stay long enough.

Everywhere you enter, there's a very long list of rules (not always presented, but you just sort of know it, in time), and when you break them the punishment is service, conformity. Service in their unending wars, in fixing their damnable machinery, or in pulling a weed that forever exists in it's perfect place in their local horror of perfectly moribund drudgery. Refusing service? Some other service, possibly as a running target for keeping their archers in practice.

Getting from one part to another is mostly a matter of finding the right rule to follow. Earning a citation in battle, having a licenced skill for a delegation, or just preserving your fruit in the assigned jars. Whatever you want, you'll soon know how to get it, or oddly enough what rule to break that will earn you what you need, kicking those jars over to get sent somewhere more useful for "punishment".

Yet living folk hide out their whole lives here, never moving or seeking to leave. Following the rules so as to not have to follow the rules, if you follow me. Cocooned in their safe little repetitive drone of an existence, locked away from whatever thing drove them here, not really mad because they don't really have enough of themselves left to be mad. Who'd chase them down in here? What worse could be done? People use Hell as a bad word, think Carcerai a prison, but nothing's worse than becoming someone else's version of perfection in the ever-bright blackness of Nirvana.

~470 words.

DM note: Nirvana is a railroad, like the Heavens and Hells only moreso. Take the best of your railroading spirit and run it past some wonderous sights at a good pace, reach your destination in due time, and let players get the Hell (or wherever) off the thing.

Leress · Post by **Leress** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 11:52 am

tussock, that's 504 words.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 3:17 pm

Absolutely nothing can be done to salvage the alignment traits of the outer planes, because alignments are unsalvageable. I mean seriously, Dero and Duergar behave pretty much exactly the same but one is Lawful and the other is Chaotic. The Drow's slave-holding caste system is Chaotic, but the Formian's slave-holding caste system is Lawful. In the edition change from 2nd edition to 3rd, Orcs went from Lawful to Chaotic with no other meaningful changes in behavior description. It's garbage.

Even the shapes of the outer planes are not salvageable in most cases. Gehenna is an infinite expanse that is still somehow recognizable as two mountains that you can climb to the top of. That's some seriously zen shit right there. Obviously, the planes need to be converted into a number of worlds, which means most of them need to be basically spheres. They can and should have some rather crazy traits, but all the "infinity" garbage needs to get binned and most of the crazy topology needs to go with it.

That being said, many of the more interesting facets of planes can be made true about planets, especially ones that live in a fantasy universe. Baator can be a planet with nine surfaces and a giant pit connecting them. It can be "always twilight" on Krigala because it has multiple suns. Celestia can be basically exactly septerra core with a big mountain to connect the layers. Bytopia can go ahead and be a hollow world where people walk around on the inside. And so on.

I'm deeply ambivalent about whether some of the more fanciful shapes should be kept. I mean, obviously we aren't getting anything out of Gehenna being conical rather than just a regular sphere that happens to have a lot of volcanoes on it and native fauna that are filled with gas. But the planets in the Avalas system being cubes instead of spheres is something that I could go either way on.

The god-homes are also deeply fucked in a lot of cases. Did you know that the Sun God of the Giants lives on a plane where it is literally nighttime all the time? The fact that a bunch of pretty dickish Norse gods ended up in a world of everlasting goodness has already been touched on, but Zeus and company end up the same. Some gods are placed according to alignment (which is fucked), while other gods are placed according to pantheon. In general, pantheons should stick to a world or two, and the alignment traits of those worlds should be totally binned. So the Greek Gods can be on Mount Olympus, which is on the planet of Arvandor except for the ones that are on Tartarus IV. And that becomes OK once you no longer have the assumption that everyone on Arvandor is good and everyone on Tartarus is bad.

That being said, I could see an argument for having Regulus being a giant gear shaped flat world that people walked on the surface of. That's insane, but I could see a place for that sort of thing in a fantasy universe. But having it be a "plane of Law" is simply bullshit. You can't make Law make any sense, so that's a terrible thing to hang a world concept on.

-Username17

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 6:51 pm

In the case of Gehenna, and other similar sorts of things, just have the seat of the gods that live there be the iconic two mountains. That way Everyone Knows about the most famous pair of mountains, but it's still a spherical volcanic planet.

Elysium - A sweet planet that's like Italy or whatever, but it's so totally rad that you get entrapped by it and never want to leave.
Beastlands - A planet with two suns in perpetual twilight and lots of intelligent non-humanoids, as stated.
Aborea - A planet full of fey, it's like Ireland towards the poles and like Greece around the middle.
Ysgard - The Scandinavian battle planet where upwellings of positive energy resurrect people every day.
Limbo - An actual non-planet, where everything is Giant Frog and crazy and weird and probably written by Douglas Adams.
Pandemonium - As written, a tidally locked planet full of swiss cheese tunnels and valleys where there's constant rushing wind as air pressures try to balance between the melting section and the frozen section.
The Abyss - This one is a single planet (seemingly infinite, but actually just very large, perhaps Jupiter sized) that contains uncountably many sub-layers that you can get to, from from the top layer and some from other sub layers.
Carceri - A primary plane that can be Plane Shifted to and from normally, and then a large collection of pocket dimensions that you can only enter or exit from at fixed points.
Hades - A world where the light magically mutes all the colors (as if everyone were seeing via darkvision all the time), and it's full of demons. Non-natives have their emotions of all sorts slowly drained until they become near-mindless wanderers.
Gehenna - A planet best known for the two large volcanos (each over 30,000ft from base to top) that sit near each other and are historically the fortresses of whoever happens to be at the very top of the power structure.
Hell - A planet that is actually nine planetary crusts layered in upon each other, with a single open shaft several miles across being the easiest path between layers. Planar travel is impossible on any of the inner layers unless you are close enough to the pit to see the stars above it.
Acheron - A former planet of pure metal that broke and shattered into a giant asteroid belt of large metal hunks that drift around their star.
Mechanus - A planet that has been so industrialized with gear work and metal that people often forget that there really is a dirt planet under it all. The upper levels are primarily inhabited by all kind of mechanical creature, and the dirt below is primarily occupied by formian colonies and tunnels.
Arcadia - A relatively peaceful planet where everything is fairly temperate and civilization and overgrowth don't really compete with one another.
Celestia - Best known for its cluster of seven mountain peaks that all have formed from a single gigantic mountain that otherwise stands on its own with flatlands for dozens of miles in all directions. It is the seat of power for several of the major gods. Also of note is that while the majority of Celestia has an abundance of waterways, shallow ponds, and marshes, it has no great oceans anywhere. The maximum depth of any Celestian body of water anywhere on the whole planet is 108ft.
Bytopia - A "planet" where people live on the inside of the crust and gravity moves them outward. There is a cluster of twisting light sources that move about within the "core" volume of the planet, dimming and growing in a complex pattern that leaves the place with a 23 hour day/night cycle and makes the source of the light appear to move slightly throughout the day (though in a pattern that itself loops only every 17 days, rather than every single day like with a normal sun).
Outlands - A planet who's major feature is the "infinitely tall" spire that nonetheless has a torus-shaped city floating above it. In actuality the spire is not infinitely tall, it is exactly 55,555 ft tall and the torus is exactly 1,700 ft above that, or so the gods claim. No mortal has ever measured it directly because the spire itself is covered over in spacial warping and seemingly no one can travel from bottom to top no matter how often someone tries to become famous by doing so. You always end up at some lower point on the spire without having realized it, thus the "infinite" claim. The top of the spire, should you fly to it from above or the side, it a circular flat plain mostly just covered in rocks and grass that's about 5 miles in diameter. For reasons that are also unknown to mortals, and perhaps even to the gods, divine salient powers do not function within 3 miles of the spire in any direction (which includes the city above it), despite the fact that every other kind of magic (including normal divine spells) does.

-807 words, but 17 planes so whatever.

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 7:44 pm

Elysium - they were going for opium den originally, so it should have drugs growing on it. The entrapping trait comes from a widespread plant that is a psychic drug - mild, but cumulative with plant concentration - that can get you hooked.

The Abyss - we don't actually need to convert all that stuff to single planets, and same goes for a number of other planes (Acheron). The tana'ri come from a large star cluster in a galactic core that has a more planets than anyone can count located in relatively close vicinity.

Outlands - fuck that. The Spire is only marginally more stupid than the infinite plain it stands on in the original concept, but a giant spire sticking out of the surface of a planet is really stupid (Homestuck readers have become too jaded to be moved by the time it happens). If you have to have an Outlands, it's a system with 16 planets spaced evenly on the exact same orbit, with some kind of astronomical-scale feature (particle/dust stream?) going through the middle. The system is a major trade hub because each of the planets has a gate to a different system. Aoskar claims his toroidal divine realm is at the end of the Spire, and magically makes it visible at the point where it fades into the distance, but no one knows where it actually is because the image moves away if you try to approach.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 8:34 pm

Nope, the spire is fantastic and it was so long before Homestuck was a thing. Have a sense of cosmic absurdity.

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Aug 02, 2014 11:06 pm

I like some planes not being planets. It makes them more alien. Hell, one of my favorite sci-fi novels is The Integral Trees/The Smoke Ring.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 1:05 am

For the record, Gehenna is effectivly not an infinite plane. It's four volcanoes are actually finite in size, but it floats in an infinite void.

Also, I do support the alternate dimension things, at least in a form. One of the (few) things I actually l actually liked about 4e was that it ditched the great wheel and made the planes be floating around in the "Astral Sea". I'd probably take it a few steps further that that, and give the planes finite (but huge) sizes within that. People are described as "Sailing" the astral sea, so it pretty much works like Spelljammer or something.

EDIT: I also forgot that I liked how the elemental planes were blended together into one place, I didn't like what they did with making it limbo, but I'd do it kind of like what planescape did. If you traveled far enough, you could go from one elemental plane to another, like walking (flying?) from air to fire and so on.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:14 am

Let the Outlands be the local galactic quasar. A great accreation disk lights the local space and while a death ray of x-rays and plasma beam out of the quasar's poles. "Above" a pole of the quasar rests the ring world of sigil, precariously balanced in an eddy of magnetic plasma with the quarsar's death ray shooting through it's open center and out towards infinity. All the other "planes" orbit this central focal point at various distances.

RobG · Post by **RobG** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 3:58 am

Libertad's planar revision project

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=53461& ... highlight=

Desdan_Mervolam · Post by **Desdan_Mervolam** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 9:15 am

Are there any decent rules as to how science-fantasy spaceships work, either Spelljammers or other things? The only 3e rules for Spelljammer I've seen was a woefully incomplete issue of Polyhedron magazine, which actually completely fails to explain what powers a Spelljammer, which might be okay, except that they do explain how a Lifejammer works, making them the option for slavers who want to save a little money up front and want to waste it forever afterwards.

schpeelah · Post by **schpeelah** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 10:46 am

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Are there any decent rules as to how science-fantasy spaceships work, either Spelljammers or other things? The only 3e rules for Spelljammer I've seen was a woefully incomplete issue of Polyhedron magazine, which actually completely fails to explain what powers a Spelljammer, which might be okay, except that they do explain how a Lifejammer works, making them the option for slavers who want to save a little money up front and want to waste it forever afterwards.

They're supposed to be powered with spell slots from a mage's head. The mage puts on a special helmet for that.

Desdan_Mervolam · Post by **Desdan_Mervolam** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:08 am

Okay.

You realize how utterly useless this answer is to me, right?

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 11:59 am

The eponymous Spelljammer ships of the Spelljammer setting ran on legacy mechanics. That is to say, the entire system was based on the "Spell Memorization" spiel from AD&D which is no longer canon. Moving forward, Spelljammer ships would obviously have to work some other way, which means that you can pretty much write your own fluff and mechanics.

The big problem with Spelljammer from a conceptual standpoint is that the ships were too expensive to own and operate. That meant that they weren't really the sort of thing that low level parties could afford, and since high level parties can still cast plane shift, it's all moot if you can't get around in a Spelljammer ship before you hit Paragon. But that's honestly really easy to fix, and since you're going to have to rewrite a bunch of the basics I don't even care.

-Username17

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 5:19 pm

There was a fan project to update Spelljammer to 3E. I haven't taken a deep look at it so I don't know if it's any good though.

http://www.spelljammer.org/

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 6:58 pm

The polyhedron version wasn't great, but it was good enough to handwave. I ran a moderately successful campaign on that foundation for several months, and it only ended when I had to move away.

Lokathor · Post by **Lokathor** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 7:07 pm

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Are there any decent rules as to how science-fantasy spaceships work, either Spelljammers or other things?

Dark Dungeons is a retro-clone with a spelljamming-style rules section. Most of it can be dragged into 3e moderately okay, particularly with Tome. Assume that the ship is a normal ship except for some particular magic item that is the engine core that lets the ship fly. The engine core might or might not be a Wish Economy Item, depending on how you wanna do things, but it's probably best to keep it as a Gold Economy Item so that lower level people can more reasonably have them, and sometimes several of them.

Dark Dungeons gets around the Plane Shift issue by making Plane Shift only work between planes that are all hooked to the same crystal sphere. To travel between crystal spheres you still need to get in your ship and fly there through space.

fectin · Post by **fectin** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 7:11 pm

Actually, come to think of it, Darkfuries Publishing put out Aether & Flux, which is an obvious spelljammer expy. It's pretty decent, IIRC, though I only ever looked through it.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sun Aug 03, 2014 8:24 pm

TiaC wrote:Hadozee, that was the race I was thinking of! They seem to have a lot of wasted potential.

So there's like three requests for Hadozee, and for some reason we're talking about their original setting (Spelljammer) at the moment, so let's get on them. The Hadozee are decent adventurers and have a clear shtick. Unfortunately, their backstory hinges on some of the dumbest things in Spelljammer (see: Unhuman War), which means that when people ask for more information about the Hadozee they most get the Chief Wiggum "kind of trailed off there..." response. Anyway, here we go:

Hadozee

In most of the known universe, the Hadozee are known as “Deck Apes,” because they look like apes and are almost universally encountered on ships (whether of the nautical, aeronautical, geonautical, or aethernautical variety). On their homeworld of Arvandor in the Arborean Tree of Worlds, they are called “Canopy Apes,” because they live in the treetops of the Bottomless Jungle, and look like apes. This distinguishes them from the less intelligent “Cloaked Apes,” which have larger patagial skin flaps and look like apes wearing cloaks. Calling a Hadozee a Deck Ape is not considered insulting, but calling one a Cloaked Ape is deeply offensive.

Hadozee are well adapted to living in the swaying treetops of the Bottomless jungle; their strong grips and opposable big toes make them great climbers, their ability to maintain their grip while sleeping allows them to sleep on high branches, they never get dizzy or have motion sickness when the branches they are holding are swaying, and their skin flaps allow them to cover long distances between trees and recover while falling. But once the Hadozee left their jungle homes, they found these adaptations have made them uniquely fit for life on a ship. They climb rigging with ease, can tie knots with their feet, never get sea sick, and can secure themselves while sleeping in a storm. Hadozee actually feel instinctually nervous when standing on immobile solid ground, and those who leave the jungle almost invariably spend almost all of their time on something, whether that be a ship, a riding beast, or some other unstable surface. Hadozee chairs for use on land are rounded on the bottom and are described as “wobbly” by other races.

The ancient Hadozee people lived well out of sight of the ground (and it is hypothesized by many that the ground may literally not exist in parts of the Bottomless Jungle), and worked neither metal nor stone until they had made contact with the Arvandorian Elves. Realizing the Hadozee talents, the Hadozee were compelled to serve in the Seelie navy. While the first Hadozee deck hands were slaves to the Elves, that was a long time ago and Hadozee and Elves are on good terms in the present day.

Hadozee tend to enjoy travel and exploration as individuals, and Hadozee society values those who have seen and experienced many things. The Bottomless Jungle is now considered a place for Hadozee to retire to once they've sailed seas of water and sand on a number of worlds, not a proper place for Hadozee to live and die eating grubs and nuts in the same sea of leaves.

Because of their patagial skin flaps, Hadozee have difficulty wearing the kinds of breast plates and shirts that are common to other humanoids. Attachments have to be made over the shoulders and between the legs rather than around the waist. Adjustments can be made, and of course magical clothing has no difficulty tailoring itself to a Hadozee's physique.

-496 words

-Username17

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 3:00 am

FrankTrollman wrote: That being said, I could see an argument for having Regulus being a giant gear shaped flat world that people walked on the surface of. That's insane, but I could see a place for that sort of thing in a fantasy universe. But having it be a "plane of Law" is simply bullshit. You can't make Law make any sense, so that's a terrible thing to hang a world concept on.

I'd make it the plane of "Artifice" and "Industry" - not as an innately magic trait, but that it was a normal world that, while rich in minerals, has started to collapse internally. The inhabitants used their sophisticated knowledge of blah blah blah to gradually reinforce the inside to the point that it is now one massive internal world, with massive sets of man-made gears and shit inside to keep all the systems running. You now have country-sized cogs shifting about, which is the iconic thing that people genuinely liked about the place, without it being "Innately Lawful", and people are more willing to believe that a load of dudes decided to make the plane like that rather than "it is just inherently like that and spawns robo-monsters as needed to hunt down Time Stoppers and Liches".

Obviously there would be quite a lot of laws in regards to "don't fuck around with the machinery"*, and they would frown upon dickheads who like ruining/tinkering with shit. But that doesn't have anything to do with Law and Chaos, and no plane particularly likes having people do things that endanger the plane. Whatever.

*Or possibly just one law: don't fuck around with the machinery.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:24 am

[*]Gehenna - A planet best known for the two large volcanos (each over 30,000ft from base to top) that sit near each other and are historically the fortresses of whoever happens to be at the very top of the power structure.

So, Olympus Mons (cool name, bro) is 21km high (or 26km, depends how you measure). And, really, it's still not that big compared to what it might have been on a slightly larger planet.

Problems for really big mountains include causing the local crust to sink, shifting the gravitational centre of the planet in their own direction, and further weighting by solidification of various atmospheric components in the upper atmosphere. But you can just ignore all that in a fantasy world and have a 100km high volcano on a 3000km base, or at least as big as the ones on Mars.

OK, at that point it wouldn't look like a mountain, more like an infinite slope that you can never finish climbing, but mechanically that's how Gehenna works in planescape anyway.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 9:49 am

virgil wrote:In all my years of gaming, I've never heard of the Aarakocra being treated as more than tribal bird people with omnipresent claustrophobia.

A few more suggestions include: Baldandar, Kna, Wallara, Snyad, Phanaton, Shark-kin, & N'djatwa

This last one should be a good challenge...leShay

The leShay aren't actually particularly difficult. No matter how far into Elf Wank you go, there's going to be an amount of fey and magic and shit that they have. I'm actually in favor of them having the fey type, but being much more human-esque in other ways (even down to living no more than 200 years and going adventuring in their twenties). But regardless of where you set those dials, there is always going to be conceptual room for more magical and more fairy-like Elves.

And those "more magical" versions can come from the Feywild, or Arvandor, or Arvanaith, or whatever the fuck you decide to call the place where the Seelie Court chillaxes. And they also need names, which could just as easily be "Eladrin" or "leShay" or "Sidhe" or all of those things if you decide to have multiple levels of planar Elves.

Fundamentally, Oberon and Titania have be something, and that something could just as easily be called a "leShay" as anything else, and then you're done.

Those Mystara bits are more challenging, largely because I don't have two shits to rub together about Mystara and don't really know their backstories. The Kna are just giant Locathah, and probably merit mention in a paragraph about how some Locathah are giants and they are called "Kna." The N'djatwa are half-Ogres who happen to have magic powers, but I genuinely have no idea what magic powers those might be, because they never made it into 2nd Edition because the writers felt that they already had enough flavors of Half-Ogres (and what with having Orogs, Ogrillons, and more than one writeup called "Half-Ogre," in addition to the frank admission that the "Half-Giant" was as likely to have Ogre blood as any other flavor of giant, I am forced to agree). N'djatwa probably merit a sentence or two in the Half-Ogre entry.

-Username17

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Mon Aug 04, 2014 10:11 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
virgil wrote:In all my years of gaming, I've never heard of the Aarakocra being treated as more than tribal bird people with omnipresent claustrophobia.

A few more suggestions include: Baldandar, Kna, Wallara, Snyad, Phanaton, Shark-kin, & N'djatwa

This last one should be a good challenge...leShay
The leShay aren't actually particularly difficult. No matter how far into Elf Wank you go, there's going to be an amount of fey and magic and shit that they have. I'm actually in favor of them having the fey type, but being much more human-esque in other ways (even down to living no more than 200 years and going adventuring in their twenties). But regardless of where you set those dials, there is always going to be conceptual room for more magical and more fairy-like Elves.

But the leShay also have the duel-wielding bastard swords bullshit and the albino bullshit. They are the work of a fucking 12 year-old.

The phoelarch could have been cool if they hadn't gone with "They always travel, and are always alone so no culture."