5e Game Info

So first off I'll say that the games I run are usually sandbox games, meaning you're free (in fact encouraged) to make your own decisions about which plots to follow, what to do, and that some events in the setting will occur whether your characters are there or not. It also means you're not likely to see any "save the entire world" or "the one big bad evil guy responsible for all the bad stuff" plots. Please try to be within some degree of reason though, for example don't pick one of the following setting choices and then decide "nope, let's go to a different continent entirely" or such. Also I should note you'll get experience for things other than combat.

Also it should be noted that there are no alignments. There's no such things as objective good and evil and being inherently lawful or chaotic is complete nonsense. As such the gods are not grouped up into "good and evil" camps, but each individually work towards ends that benefit them and their domains. Sometimes the gods will work together on something that benefits each party. And in some cases certain gods just do not get along, even outside of their goals conflicting. (Examples: Everyone pretty much hates Asmodeus and Vecna as they would tear down the other gods and take their power for their own, Bahamut and Tiamat's domains are in opposition and are ancient enemies, Melora has a beef with Pelor, the Raven Queen, Sehanine, and Corellon for stepping on her toes by having domains of the seasons, Vecna and Pelor don't get along because Pelor is racist against undead even though they have nothing to do with his domains.)

The Cosmology

The grand cosmology is based on the one of 4th edition D&D's default setting. Which isn't to say it's exactly the same.

In the long distant past there was only the Elemental Chaos and the Primordials. Then some of the primordials decided to make a place that was less chaotic which came to be known as the Astral Sea. These primordials became the gods and made realms for themselves in the astral sea. Then the gods decided to work together to make the world with its many races. The gods made the world in three parts, all overlapping with each other, but separate places that in ways mirror each other. These parts of the world are known as the Natural World, the Feywild a place of wild nature to unbelievable extremes beyond the bounds of the natural world and brimming with so much arcane magic that the rules of the Feywild are alien to those of the natural world, and the Shadowfell a dark place where ruin and decay overrun everything and death lurks under every rock and behind every twisted withered tree. The Primordials saw this world and for various reasons decided that the it must be unmade. The gods did not wish this and so the gods and the primordials fought a long brutal war. In the end the gods won, if barely, only a small amount of the gods survived and the primordials were forced into slumber as they could not truly be killed. Because of the struggles between the primordials and the gods, the world came to lay on the border between the elemental chaos and the astral sea. During the war, great wounds were afflicted upon reality and great horrors were made. Through the wounds in reality the aberrations of the Far Realm sometimes squeeze through or touch mortal minds which they twist. Many of the horrors made by gods and primordial alike were thrown into what is called the Abyss, an infinitely deep pit in the elemental chaos. The creatures that reside there are known as demons. And then there are other vile things like the devils made by the god Asmodeus that reside in his realm of the Nine Hells.

The Gods

Short version

Asmodeus: Power, Domination, Tyranny
Avandra: Change, Luck, Trade, Travel
Bahamut: Justice, Honor, Nobility, Protection
Bane: War, Conquest
Corellon: Arcane magic, Spring, Beauty, The arts
Erathis: Civilization, Invention, Laws
Gruumsh: Turmoil, Destruction
Ioun: Knowledge, Prophecy, Skill
Kord: Storms, Strength, Battle
Lolth: Spiders, Shadows, Lies
Melora: Wilderness, Sea
Moradin: Creation, Artisans, Family
Pelor: Sun, Summer, Agriculture, Time
Raven Queen: Death, Fate, Winter
Sehanine: Trickery, Moon, Love, Autumn
Tiamat: Wealth, Greed, Vengeance
Vecna: Undeath, Secrets
Zehir: Darkness, Poison, Serpents

Long versions

Spoiler:

Other things people might worship
Dragons, Lesser Primordials which surrendered to the gods, Archfey, Elementals of great power, Demons of great power, Lords of the Hells or powerful Archdevils, Powerful beings of the Shadowfell, Spirits both large and small, Great Old Ones, and of course false or dead gods.

Angels
As with the other stuff, my angels are based on the 4th edition ones rather than the 5th edition ones.
Relevant pictures:

Spoiler:

Angels are creations of the gods or sometimes naturally occurring in the Astral Sea. The gods use them for any number of purposes.
Some angels who serve one particular god for a very long time, do an extraordinary task in service of that god, or were made with a great expenditure of divine power become an Angel of -insert god name here- or Archangels. These archangels are much more powerful than other angels, are bound to the service of one specific god, and their appearance changes to reflect this. For example an Angel of Lolth (yes Lolth has angels even though her divine realm is actually in the Abyss) might have a body pattern like a black widow, shadowy black flames, and have eight spider-like legs rather than wings that seem to climb unseen webbing in the air rather than fly by flapping wings.


Now that the cosmology has been established, finally on to the worlds and the setting options you'll be choosing from!

The Worlds

World 1
This world is the most typical D&D world as far as the world itself is concerned. Your typical medieval fantasy affair.

Option 1a
Probably the most standard D&D setting land of the options. A hilly tropical/semi-tropical land bordered by a long mountain range to the west, seas to the north and east, and a large swamp to the south. The members of the party start out captured by a bandit army camped out in the ruins of what was once the largest city the world has ever seen.

Option 1b
Probably the second most standard D&D setting. A large land of various climates divided up amongst various theocracies where a new religious movement is stirring up trouble. Plenty of room for monsters, people-on-people conflict, and basically anything else you might want in a game.

Option 1c
Post-apocalyptic horror. Not that I will actually expect to scare people. Unnerve and creep out maybe. Lots of undead, demons, and other more mysterious horrors. Also lots of artifice (magi-tech type stuff). Most of the people of this land are were dwarves, halflings, gnomes, and pixies, so human sized people might have to squeeze through some places. Bordered on three sides by water and on the west by the mountains between it and the next option.

Option 1d
A country that's land level is slightly below sea level with lots of swamps and is filled with massive trees that reach up into the skies for miles upon miles and house entire towns. Society isn't very advanced in most places, tribes on the ground, elves and other fae races (and some humans of course) up in the trees. Gnomes are split between the ground dwelling tribes and the fae towns up in the trees. Minotaurs in the mountains to the east. Monsters abound.

Option 1e
A dreary city in the middle of the sea made up of many small islands (some large enough for several city blocks, others barely large enough for a single person to stand on) with powerful families and guilds owning almost all of it. Probably not a lot of monsters and such and a lot more crime and shady dealings and gang warfare type clashes. What monsters there are are probably undead, aberrations, and sea monsters.

Option 1f (Not actually an option at this point due to not having psionics rules and a bunch of races I was using for it from 4e yet. Just including it because I feel like it.)
Pseudo-medieval japan in the desert with dinosaurs. Some amounts of artifice. Synthetic wood called wud. Very few members of the fae races. Normal minority races the ruling ones, normal majority races are slaves. Psionics are more common than in other lands.


World 2
This world has more influence from the Lesser Primordials and is thus more influenced by the raw elements. (As in air, water, fire, and earth. Not Argon and Potassium. That'd be a bit odd I expect.) The Feywild is largely divided into four parts, each ruled by a king and queen representing a season. Which seasonal royal is reigning supreme in a year effects the weather of the Natural World and presumably the Shadowfell as well. There are seasonal and elemental "nodes" in the world that cause the influence of that season (king or queen) or element to have more of a presence in the node's area of influence. Areas not in reach of a node are instead effected by a Lesser Primordial which can in some cases make them even stranger and more hostile than node areas. The world has things like rivers and landmasses floating through the skies, ever-present lava lakes or rivers, or poison gas swamps.

Option 2a
A large city is under siege due to political fallout. The party can be on either side (though I personally think the besieging side would be more interesting as the defenders of a castle thing is a bit of a cliche by now). Neither side is objectively the good or bad guys. The besieging side is allied with monstrous humanoids like orcs and goblins. The defenders have constructs. Both sides probably have other things up their sleeves. There are also some neutral parties that might be swayed to aid one side or the other. Plenty of opportunities for non-combat stuff, but an endless supply of excuses to stab stuff all day every day too.

Option 2b
A grand quest to find something impressive for the party's boss/lord/whatever to present to someone in order to try and win their hand in marriage or at least form an alliance. Could basically go in any direction as the manner of the impressive thing the party is to look for is completely up to them. Expect lots of travel, perhaps interplanar travel.


World 3
This world is more influenced by spirits. Strange greenish mist hangs in the air and is thickest near the ground, mostly operating by its own rules and ignoring other natural events. This mist is known by various names like the spirit mist, myst, aether, or miasma. The veil that separates the Feywild, Natural World, and Shadowfell is less a general rule as it is in the other worlds and more of an optimistic suggestion. For this world the Feywild is literally the land of dreams and the Shadowfell nightmare. If one falls asleep exposed to the miasma there is a good chance of finding oneself in the feywild or shadowfell and not even realizing it until you would normally wake up. It's also possible to simply wander into one or the other while awake, though it's at least somewhat less common, though hardly unheard of. Spirits can act as a protection against the myst by becoming patron spirits of a town or city and guarding it with spirit fire. Spirit fire has no heat, but emits the same light as regular flames and has various colors and properties depending on the spirit. The one similarity is that it repels the aether. As such only the brave and bold venture forth from civilized places. There are also malign spirits whose spirit flame has other effects. Even though the spirit mist prevents people from seeing very long distances, it is known that sometimes the geography of the world changes. People weren't sure if this was really the case or if the breaches into the feywild and shadowfell were just screwing up cartography, until the noticed that sometimes towns wind up moving from their relative positions of each other.

Option 3a
The party is the to-be founders of a new town due to overpopulation in their home city. They will get a new patron spirit and then find a location to settle upon. Then they and NPCs under their leadership will build the town to the party's specifications withing the limits of their resources. There will be choices of who to bring with them, what to build, what resources to focus on gathering, weighing whether or not to risk going outside of the town's area to procure resources they don't have or run out of, and when to go get more people from their home city and who to escort them. And of course there will be occasions where their new settlement needs defending.

Option 3b
As close to a classic "evil party" as I'm going to offer as a premise (not to say you can't choose to be "evil" in any of the other settings, feel free). Each member of the party has a pact with some nefarious entity, be it a malign spirit, an unseelie archfey, some powerful creature of the shadowfell, a demon, or some lovecraftian horror. They will roam the land, occasionally doing the bidding of the beings they have pacts with and otherwise free to pursue whatever goals they wish.

for me id pick either 2a with us besieging i have some fun ideas with that
or 3a because it's unique never done something like that before i cant place one above the other though

Option 3A: seems the most exciting to me, taking leadership rolls directing NPC's for mutual survival, a lotta fun, particularly due to the low performance abilities at low levels, First choice.
Option 2a: Again, lots of persons in a siege, low level party can get by more easily without being the load bearing stone that keeps the keep from crumbling. (based on your description of how games are run I'd imagine so anyway) I've also never played a cityscape/stayed in one location for really long periods of game play, Second choice.
Option 1c: I'm fond of this idea for 2 reasons, first the lollypop guild concept amuses me (particularly if we can play as pixies) and second it will probably often be the case that we see a monster that we need to avoid fighting. (high level demons, vampires etc.) and the sneaky aspect coupled with the "horror" theme sounds like a lot of fun, Third choice.

I guess my top three choices would be 1D, 2A, and 3A

Recording Sunset's vote her for posterity:

" 1a because whilst it's not the easy deciding option, it's the one I like.
3b as second
1e as third "

Ok so 2a was chosen, with the option of being on the sieging side.

First I'll give some more details for this setting so you can make character concepts that work in it. (More details will follow when I make the actual OOC thread. Details like....names for things.)

Also because you chose a thing in World 2 there's another round of voting. Since cities are normally set in some kind of node, what kind do you want the city to be in? Options there are things like Summer King, Winter Queen, or one of the four elements.

Setting stuffs

The -name- kingdom has long been ruled by a line of those with the bloodline of a specific dragon who was involved in its founding. The royal family lives in and rules from the largest city in the kingdom with solid walls around the city and a castle in the middle, with a second wall between the outer wall and the castle. For a fair while the royal family has issued laws that favor merchants over farmers and workers and in some cases even more than non-merchant noble families. Meanwhile the most powerful Duchy in the kingdom has more recently been changing laws in their lands that favor farmers, artisans, and other individual laborers. This has caused some tension between merchants and the poorer people. However this was hardly enough to incite rebellion. The spark was one of the noble families close to the royalty discovering that the last few generations had no signs of the progenitors dragon's blood in them and had been bathing their young children in dragon's blood to have them gain the traditional half-dragon nature those of the bloodline possessed. This wasn't good for their image no matter what, but even worse was the rumors and hints of evidence that they had gotten the dragon blood by having a dragon killed. (A big no-no in this culture.) The -name- Duchy was maybe not the first (things happened rather quickly) but certainly one of the loudest to declare the royal family false rulers and declare rebellion against them. In almost no time at all they had assembled an army, leading some to wonder if they had been preparing for this in secret, though others dismiss this as assembling and hiding an army for several years would be unfeasible. The royal family similarly seemed to have prepared for this, though maybe not as fully, and raised forces of their own quickly. Since you're on the besieging side your characters also know that the -name- Duchy has allied with the goblins and other goblinoids in the mountain range to the west of -city name-, who were slowly being stuck between a large orc force moving into the mountains from the west and the city they could not survive attacking on their own to the east.

Also a general note about World 2 I forgot to mention before. There are very few humans, who have instead over time become Genasi. If you don't know what that is, Genasi are basically the elemental equivalent of Tieflings (though mating with elementals isn't specifically involved since that wouldn't work out too well a lot of the time). No we don't have official rules for that race yet, but it shouldn't be too hard to whip something together using Tieflings as a baseline.

You guys should have a lot of options here for how you wound up on the side of the Duchy. Mercenaries, nobility from just about anywhere (even from the royal's city), or pretty much whatever else you can think up. Just ask me about your idea first before settling on it.

Ok now for the houserules and such on character creation.

Character Creation

The first thing to note is that your characters will start out at level 3. Because levels 1 and 2 involve the possibility of tripping down a short flight of stairs and instantly dying and that would just be a waste.

The race ability bonus rule
Rather than races and subraces giving bonuses to specific abilities, those bonuses may go to any ability, but multiple different bonuses from race can't go to the same ability. (Example: Fish says it gives +2 to Wisdom and +1 to Dex, you would treat this as if it said it gave +2 to one ability and +1 to any other ability.)

The class skill list rule
Just ignore what your class list says. All skills are on your class list regardless of class. Also you get two more skill proficiencies.

The diversity rule
Nobody can pick the same race or class as anyone else. (Exceptions can be made for multi-classing but I don't know why you'd be doing that already. But maybe...)
Also, humans are boring. That's not actually a rule, just my personal opinion.

Banned Class options
There's only two things on this list.
1) The Wild Sorcerer, because it might as well be called "give the GM a headache".
2) The Ranger Archtype of Beastmaster, because it's the only bad choice in the whole system (at least until you get to level 11, but that is a long time to wait to have nice things you should have had the whole time).

More Options
If you want to play a race or subrace that doesn't exist or alter the features you'd get from an existing one, we can do that.

If you have class features based on a specific element(s) and would like to do some other element(s), that's on the table too. Also we can talk about altering the elements of spells.

If your choices for class features or spells are reaction type actions, I'd personally prefer you avoid those as reactions slow combat way down in play by post. If you'd like to take something that would give you a reaction ability you don't feel you must have but you'd like to take the rest of it, we can certainly work on giving you something else to take instead.

If you just don't like some of the class or archetype features, in some cases I'm willing to discuss changing those.

If you want to change which Abilities your class uses, I'm up for talking about that. I think there are four or five classes that use Charisma and one that uses Intelligence? So yeah, in the interest of having a better chance of a well rounded party this is totally on the table. Especially if it matches some different kind of flavor you'd like to do for the class or maybe as an entirely difference concept just using the same mechanics.

Equipment
Ignore both of the normal options, we'll talk more about this later. I'll probably ok having items that make sense for your concept rather than hand out a specific amount of money to everyone.

Backgrounds
I'm totally in favor of people wanting to make their own options, not just being forced to choose from only the options presented in the book. Especially since that was never the design intent. You don't have to roll for anything to do with your Background, just pick what you like. Even if you are using one of the presented options and the thing you want isn't on it's list (or any list).

I might not allow all Features from Backgrounds as they might make very little sense or have very little possible use for the setting.

Inspiration
Technically we are using this rule. In reality you guys will probably have to repeatedly remind me it exists as my default assumption is people will try to roleplay their character as well as they can in a roleplaying game. Go figure.

Choice of Bonus (Which may be a bad idea on my part, but whatever. We'll see I guess.)
In addition to all the stuff you normally get, you can choose one of the following options.

1) The Healer Feat.

2) The Ritual Caster Feat, ignoring the prerequisite.

3) The War Caster Feat.

4) 3 Points to buy the following:
1 Point: A skill proficiency. (You can't spend more than 2 points on this.)
1 Point: A known language
1 Point: 2 weapon proficiencies
1 Point: 2 tool/vehicle type/etc. proficiencies.
2 Points: Proficiency in shields or the next highest armor proficiency above what your race/class grants you.

Proficiencies in unofficial weapons
Totally ok, assuming it's a medieval or older weapon type in some culture (or fantasy one that's on the same level). (Well, in most cases. You might suggest some random thing that's completely obscene, but I can't name one off the top of my head.) Of course if you do make such a choice, we'll have to come up with the stats for said weapon. Generally this only will apply to martial weapons, but I guess you might be able to come up with some simple weapon that isn't really similar to any of the official options. *shrug*

If you have proficiency in "all martial weapons" or some similar wording, I'll treat that as proficiency in such unofficial weapons too.

Official races/subraces that are in the DMG and not the PHB so you probably aren't aware of them

There's only two. The subrace of Eladrin (google it?) and the race of Aasimar, which are basically the celestial version of Tieflings. (D&D really has a lot of not super creative "X+human and looks mostly like a human" options for a system that doesn't just outright give us catgirls. Although I guess 4e's Shifters were kinda close. Not really close enough though.)

I'm just going to list the mechanics because I can't copy/paste the text from my DMG.

Eladrin subrace of Elf
+1 to Intelligence
Elf Weapon Training: You have proficiency with longsword, shortsword, shortbow, and longbow.
Fey Step: You can cast the misty step spell once using this trait. You regain the ability to do so when you finish a short or long rest.

Aasimar
+2 Charisma, +1 Wisdom
Size: Medium
Speed: 30 feet
Darkvision: 60 feet
Celestial Resistance: You have resistance to necrotic damage and radiant damage.
Celestial Legacy: You know the light cantrip. Once you reach 3rd level, you can cast the lesser restoration spell once with this trait, and you regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. Once you reach 5th level, you can cast the daylight spell once with this trait as a 3rd level spell, and you regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest. Charisma is your spellcasting ability for these spells.
Languages: Common and Celestial


Ability spreads
Instead of making you guys suffer the horrible official point buy mechanic for 5e or rolling and tempting you to cheat and/or having people feel like they're just not as good as someone else, I'm rolling several spreads for stats. All of you can choose any of these options. All of you can pick the exact same one if you want.

Spread 1) 11, 10, 15, 15, 18, 11

Spread 2) 11, 12, 17, 16, 9, 14

Spread 3) 15, 14, 13, 10, 10, 18

Spread 4) 16, 17, 5, 15, 13, 12

Spread 5) 13, 14, 12, 14, 16, 15


Character Sheets
I would prefer if everyone made their character sheet at the following site.

http://www.myth-weavers.com/forumhome.php

the 5e sheets are under the Sheets (Alpha) section.