tell me about your cool d&d lore/characters! (general dnd discussion)

hey y'all! i'm a dm sometimes and a player other times, and being able to do both makes me appreciate the work the other folks put in at the table. particularly as a both kind of person, i love learning about the lore of other people's settings. as a player i love exploring and learning about the world's history, and in particular i love learning about the culture my character might come from. as a dm, i love any opportunity to take a good idea and incorporate it into my setting in a way that fits!

i'll start: family crests are mainly a human and dwarven phenomenon, as humans and dwarves tend to have the least unique last names and are more easily identifiable by their crests. most other races have unique family names, or clan names, or they simply do not identify themselves with their heritage at all. dragonborn, however, have a unique way of identifying a family--by the cut of the gemstone on the family's heirloom.

I'm currently playing a drow rogue, and we're playing a little fast and loose with D&D drow lore, borrowing a lot from Spire: The City Must Fall and Heart. rowanrookanddecard.com rowanrookanddecard.com.
My favorite bit of lore from Spire is that dark elves lay eggs. :D Sounds better than the human way of doing things.

For my character's backstory, Kas is young (relatively speaking) and was brought up in a crime organization, until a member from a rival group attacked them and left them for dead on the mountainside. The wife of my character from our previous campaign (human fighter, bit of orc ancestry) found Kas and nursed them back to health, so they've been living with their adopted family in a small mountain village.

Now they just want to go on fun adventures with their friends in the party, but specters from their past loom. :') Sorry Kas.

And I love your gemstone idea! Have you used it for a PC?

oooh that sounds like so much fun! honestly the vanilla drow lore is not that interesting anyway--laying eggs sounds way cooler, you're right hahaha. is spire a different tabletop system? i'm curious to know why they decided drow lay eggs, that's intriguing!

oh thats so cool to have your current character related to a previous one in some way! i love that idea. what kind of criminal organization were they raised in, and what were they doing on the mountainside at that time? poor kas hahaha.

thanks! i allow my players to create and play multiple characters that they swap out over the course of the campaign--so on one adventure they might play a human fighter, on another they might play their half-elf bard, but they're always free to swap back to the human fighter should they please. one of my players has created a secondary character who is what's called a coalescent dragonborn--a dragonborn sorcerer of the draconic bloodline subclass. one of their ancestors was a fairly famous explorer-type who was renowned in the pc's birth city for having rescued many people from the eruption of a nearby volcano, at the cost of the ancestor's own life. they carry a mirror with a rainbow opal with a cut that any dragonborn would recognize as belonging to that explorer's ancestry. it hasn't come into play yet since we're still building this secondary character, but it has made me think a lot more about dragonborn society and how they tend to work culturally!

Yup, Spire is a different system! I don't know what the reason for the egg lore is exactly, possibly just because it's cool. Eggs are an item players can have (or at least they are in Heart, I don't remember with Spire), so it's kinda fun that they can be carrying their future but-not-quite-yet child around in a pocket or something.

The criminal organization is pretty standard D&D thieves guild stuff, I must confess. :"D I think the most interesting worldbuilding aspect I came up with was that the drow in the organization look down equally on Lolth AND Elisatree followers, finding them weak for relying on goddesses. (Kas has become an Elisatree fan in the meantime, as an extra act of rebellion.) The humans in the org aren't crazy about gods either.

Kas had been sent on a reconnaissance mission against the rival group when they got attacked. I love finding ways to connect all my PCs, highly recommended. :D I even have Kas dating one of the group's favorite NPCs from the previous campaign.

I also really like your idea of letting players swap between PCs! I have people in my groups who are overflowing with character ideas, so I think they could really go for something like that. (Also, a good way to build relationships between PCs and former PCs!) Do you place a limit on how may characters people can have at at time, and do all the PCs have to be in relatively the same location to easily swap?

The image of the rainbow opal as a family crest is really beautiful. It sounds like it's going to be an emotional time for the PC when it comes up. :o

oh that really is a sweet notion hahaha. now i'm imagining a drow adventurer taking care to carry their egg carefully and having daily rituals to make sure it's safe. that's so, so cute.

hey no judgment here! there's so much cool stuff that can be done with a thieves' guild--if anyone can appreciate just straight-up a thieves' guild, it's me. i actually don't know much about drow deities, though i do know of lolth and her association with... spiders? right? i don't know much about elisatree. what made kas start following her?

oh that's SO fun, my favorite thing is when npcs from a previous campaign come back to make appearances in the next one. it's one of my favorite things haha. i'm running a sequel to my first campaign with a different group and having favorite npcs from the last campaign reprising their roles for a new set of players has been a lot of fun--seeing who they like and who they don't, especially now that 25 years has passed since the first campaign. how much time has passed between your last and your current campaign? what was your last character like?

thanks! i actually kinda stole it from my dm, who floated the idea to us quite some time ago (and some of my group have taken him up on it, myself included). though i must say i made it hard on myself as my second character is a spy and she's the most interested in the circles that my first character is part of, so i'm sort of playing chess with myself haha. i digress! i don't necessarily have a limit on the number, but i think most of my players have soft-capped themselves at two characters--a primary, which they started the campaign with, and a secondary, which also serve as a backup in case the primary dies. i have just one exception and that person rolled up a joke character they ended up liking hahaha. the idea is that all the characters, primary and secondary, would be part of the same guild, so it wouldn't be strange to mix and match who's playing primary and secondary characters, and they'd have a sort of hub to come back to after the end of each story arc so they can swap between arcs if they please. they haven't quite gotten to that point yet, since the campaign just started in... july i think? and we just got done with our first story arc so we're moving out of the first town next session. but i think it's in the cards, and they know that they have at least one place they could set up shop if they wanted to make that town their base of operations.

thanks! it definitely could be, though i think this particular character doesn't care for their family since they ran away--so it would be sort of a negative thing for sure. it's kinda funny--all the secondary characters that have been created so far have things influencing their lives from outside of themselves like deities and distant ancestors, but the primary characters are all self-motivated or motivated by things at a more interpersonal level. it's been a fascinating trend, thus far.

I'm currently playing as a tiefling sorcerer called Kalma in 4th edition game (our dm homebrewed the world for us!). She is a sweet and excitable girl and living embodiment of the knife kid vine. Her parents, unfortunately, had her living in an attic, as well, she was a weird demon, an abomination. They gave her a name that means death in hopes of it jinxing her and well... she would just perish. 

However, she survived and when Kalma was old enough her parents kicked her out. She delivered bread for a year or so until was basically called to the unemployment office and was given a job. This is how she met her two new dads and weird uncle lmao. Divorced half-orc fighter, divorced human cleric and eladrin assassin snake oil merchant - the three don't yet like each other a lot, but Kalma is the sweet gal who brings the group together. Even the grumpy eladrin cares about her.

Sadly, her first job wasn't that exciting as they all almost got pulverized by a giant underground squid, but they all escaped alive by sheer luck or dm's mercy haha. But hey! She got her very first own apartment now, and it has a ceiling window too! 

Ohey! I can chat it up in here a bit <3

I'm in 3 campaigns currently!  One has been running forever - I play a Siren (homebrew) Swashbuckler rogue whose murderous family is the big bad of our campaign.  She got bored on an island that isolated itself from the rest of society (think the Amazons, but with the man-killing) and ended up leaving, something that got her branded traitor by her Queen grandmother and the rest.  now they've apparently decided in the last few years they'd rather rule the world than be apart from it, which has been a... fun.. experience for my poor girl.  I love my friend who dms for it though, ahhh.

My other two are a centaur barbarian (my icon) and a tiefling scholar who just got turned human as an unfortunate side effect of some magic.  She's pretty chill with it though, as the magic also means she can pursue her #1 goal of researching dangerous, forbidden things without constantly being tracked down for it.  

I really want to try DMing a campaign here soon!  But I need to wait until after november because I KNOW attempting that and attempting NaNo would be wayyyy too much.  If I run anything, it will be in the Cypher system, because I am a huge fan of how they make every skill applicable to your character's backstory.  I've really only ever played 5e in homebrew settings ^^; so I know next to nothing of the lore of the actual setting.

^ I am convinced that just about every group needs a sweetheart character to keep it together!  Just one of those things!