Tell me a bit about your or your DM's homebrew campaigns and campaign settings, be it the plot of the campaign or some lore about the setting.

I am working on a campaign based on suggestions and input from my large player group (27 base, up to 34) that follows a set of restrictions they provided and a combination of inspirations from them and myself, that are all fused and melded together into a world that falls under the rubric of "Our World is Different".

Basically, we said take out all the stuff from the original books and stories that inspired D&D, except elves and dwarves, and then rebuild it all using newer and older material. 

The Campaign is immense, because it is a fresh one, and that requires a new set of homebrew rules and major changes to existing rules, and also the creation a new setting for it.

The setting is finished -- the V1.0 version (prior to cleanup and changes as we do the Rulebook) can be found in my signature as a PDF. This month and next I am finishing up the Handbook for players (classes and such) and the magic system (which uses a spell point system). The full campaign, for levels 1 to 20, will be finished and ready to go by January 1 f next year.

Our *current* set up is a town and a dungeon on a floating mountain valley in the middle of nothing. The dungeon keeps restocking itself and is part of a plan to take over the town, so is a staging area.  The party goes in, cleans it out, gets out, goes and parties, then does it all again. It is our playtesting set up for everything with the upcog stuff as well as our own stuff for the next campaign.

All of that said...

It is D&D. There are wizards and warriors. There are monsters and baddies.

The new setting world has Seven Cities that are all very different from each other in little ways that matter, while sharing much of the same stuff. Most people do not have magic, but Adventurers almost always do. There are gladiator games, there is an ongoing secret war with the nightmare dimension, there is a demon that has been turned loose again and is slowly killing off those in a town it cannot control -- mostly children. There is a Princess who is in trouble, and an Emperor who is removed from it all. THere are gods and Old Ones and Spirits of the World. There is an Evil Empire that is building up its forces to invade. 

The adventures all take from assorted popular movies the storylines and plots, and come fromm pretty much every genre. It is, as they say, A Lot.

My favorite piece of Lore right now is about the Dire War. High in the mountains, there are several Colonies -- places of isolation and reserve where the disaffected have been drawn over the years, and where Pedants teach Pupils a way of living and fighting that is less about weapons and more about self defense. The most skilled among them become Cenobites, and many of them will return to the world and become Adventurers, often to provide the Colony with support.

Every seven years, however, they face the consequences of an ill informed act that dates back to the founding of the first Colony. One night, the very first Pedant, who created the Way of the Open Hand,  found herself facing a terrifying creature who came through a breach in the Weave, a passage through the Veil, from another dimension. Behind it lay hundreds of others, but the tear was only wide enough for one at a time, and so she fought them, using the Way. These were not mortal beings, such as you or I; nay, these were the creations of terror, the embodiment of Nightmares. After defeating in single combat 32 of them killing all, she found herself facing the Lord of Nightmare, who proposed a bargain -- for he wanted to pass through and take this Mortal Realm from us that he might have a way to pursue his ongoing war with the Lord of Dreams in the dimension of Dreamland. She said no, that she would stand before them each time, and none would pass unless they defeated her and those who followed her.

And so it was set. Every seven years, the greatest Cenobite champions from all the land, having trained and competed to have the honor, fight for the safety of the World against the selected and handpicked champions of Nightmare, in one on one bouts of mortal combat. Nightmare has not won yet, though they cheat a little more every year.

That is just one of the things going on in the new campaign world. There are a lot of them. We have magical girls (and guys, and thems), gunslingers, witches who ride on brooms and flying carpets and flying ships and a sand of sea that is sailed across bu ships of its own. There Fae Lords and Ladies who seek to trap the unwary and add to their collections, there are demons who devour heart and devils who feast on flesh.

And a ton of it was pulled from stuff like I did the whole Mortal Kombat deal above, lol.

I love kitchen sink settings like that where there's a little bit of everything when they're done well, but if done badly and the myriad of ideas don't fit or connect to each other efficiently, the setting can get sort of bloated with all the ideas and lore. But from what you've said, your campaign setting seems to be one of the good ones. It sounds perfect for D&D, like you could run virtually any campaign in it.

Quote from TheFlamboyantGnome >>

I love kitchen sink settings like that where there's a little bit of everything when they're done well, but if done badly and the myriad of ideas don't fit or connect to each other efficiently, the setting can get sort of bloated with all the ideas and lore. But from what you've said, your campaign setting seems to be one of the good ones. It sounds perfect for D&D, like you could run virtually any campaign in it.

Much to my surprise, it ended up that way, lol. Hence why I share the pdf, lol.  Even once it goes up on Amazon, I will make about 18 cents on each copy, lol.

The hardest part about creating a world like this is that i had a lot of stuff I had to find a way to make fit into it, as opposed to making it fit the world. And that's before we even get to the D&D stuff.  Just to name a few things, I had to include robot maids (a last minute addition), the mechanical monsters from Horizon Zero Dawn, a species that sorta combines the man-thing and Swamp-thing sorts of monsters with Sasquatch, yeti, and even the bridge trolls, and then I needed something that wasn't "generic fantasy land".

I have a city of folks who focus on making magical items and clockwork constructs. I have a city that is the Wild west, but it is shaded by that sand sea, lol. I have a city of gangsters, where they have actual drive bys, lol -- Al Capone would be right at home. There is the "traditional city", but it is a very guy oriented place that made a lot of women mad so they went off and made their own -- only it isn't much better, lol.

The trick to all of it, though, is to build three levels deep for each reason why something exists -- and everything has to have a reason to exist. So, for example, I have the MK lore above. It exists for the sole purpose of grounding the idea of Monks (called Cenobites here because I am moving away from Earthly parallels) in the world. Next, I had to ground why the bad guys wanted to do it (to take over this mortal realm and sneak into Dreamland).  That was grounded by the war between Nightmare and Dreamland -- which is a planar conflict grounded in the difference between their respective planes.

Hell ad the Abyss have a similar conflict -- and have already broken into the mortal realm that lies in that Plane (to give you an idea of how it flows). All of it is a bit of a trip, and it is buried in the basics of the lore -- which is also just vague enough that anyone could take it and build upon it and expand it without much trouble. There are places where a whole separate city could be put, or a whole new set up.  There is an island kingdom that mixes polynesia with Minoan culture (which was shockingly easy), and a host of minor differences that all tie back to a huge conflict called The God's War.

I will be honest, though -- although the world can be played using DDB, for example, it doesn't quite work as well (hence the Handbook, which is based, again, on what my players wanted, and is a lot more 1e/2e influenced in classes and such). It kinda feels in some ways like we are rewriting the game -- but the Setting/Lore is easily used for anything by anyone.

Yet not generic in the usual sense, and I still laugh when I come across some of the references buried in it.

I'll share some details that I've enjoyed from various settings

Leprechauns ("monster" species)

Amazingly powerful and strange creatures. They were originally created to aid the gods in creating the world, so their mental evolution has been quite limited.

They are task oriented to the extreme and are very limited in terms of human emotion. I had one young leprechaun, who was different for some reason. He explained that his friends only ever compete and never just have fun. They have very little capacity for empathy or anger etc. They are, however, very creative in a way, and able to appreciate beauty - to the extreme. But according to Finok they consider perfection beautiful, so their art is also a competition of perfection.

When they try to be creative instead of perfect, they tend to create the weirdest, most childish things. Because of this, their towns are weird weird places. Tip: I had a 3yo child design their city and it was AMAZING. There was a gigantic living horse in the middle of the city and their houses had weird shapes. Also many other strange things that only a child could come up with. 

Completely hairless, but their nose hairs grow rapidly. These nose hairs are also magical and can be woven into powerful items such as musical strings etc. They use them for their own purposes but they are often willing to trade their nose hairs for treasure too. Elder and more powerful leprechauns stop cutting their nose hair and start braiding and decorating them. This is usually a sign of high status and these particularly powerful bundles of hair would be a sought after prize for any level of mage or adventurer. 

Very very smart and knowledgeable creatures. They also spy on people to learn. 

They don't have mouths. They speak telepathically. When they eat, a hole appears in their face that they shove food into. 

Finok delivered a message that the elders will give the players a chance. If they manage to find a way into the city, they'll allow it. If they misbehave, they will be turned into goats and milked until they die of old age. 

Mechanical info

A leprechauns age and status is measured in spell slot levels. A leprechaun has two slots per short rest. The level of the slot is based on their age. A typical adult has lvl 4-5 slots. Older ones have bigger slots and they are born with lvl 1 slots. Usually they suppress these abilities for newborns to avoid danger.

They live several hundred years. 

A leprechaun only has one spell: wish. The level of their wish is based on their slot level, allowing them to create any spell of their slot level or any similar level effect. 

So the eldest leprechauns can cast 2 x lvl 9 wish per short rest. Pretty god-like. This is why they are a monster race with a limited personality. This wish cannot be lost even if they create an effect other than replicating another spell. 

In addition: 

They have at will telekinesis that grows with age from 100lbs to 500lbs. 

At will telepathy

Telekinetic push at will. Dmg cantrip against multiple enemies within reach. Deals dmg based on age and pushes enemies away. 

At will: simple conjuration and transmutation tricks

Invisibility and counterspell both twice per short rest. 

They aren't a hostile race. They are neutral. They could destroy humans if they wanted to, but that is not their purpose. They live to create things. 

Yeah, I've had trouble adapting my campaign setting I'm working on to 5e, especially regarding magic. It uses the basic 5e system with ability checks and saving throws, but I've had to either edit, delete or create entirely new classes. Races aren't a problem though, as they're pretty easy to homebrew.

Weird.

I love it.

A tidbit I sometimes mentioned but I don’t think I ever explained:

there are three broad overall categories of undead: pure, void, and hybrid. Pure undead are the same people they were in life, just sticking around after death. These are the ghosts, as well as the reborn and dhampire lineages. This doesn’t mean they haven’t changed, dying and returning to not-life can be a traumatic experience, but they aren’t controlled by anything that they weren’t when they lived, at least not initially. The largest and oldest still standing city is inhabited by pure undead.

Void undead are animated by the fell power of the Void, often controlled by a sorrowsworn unwittingly generated from the person in life. These include skeletons, zombies, ghouls, and most physical types. The scary thing is that they arise through the same mechanism as pure undead, but are far more common, while pure undead seem to dwindle out as time goes on.

Hybrid undead are the most cursed and horrific, as they’re a fusion of the original person’s spirit and Void corruption, integrating more and more into each other until there’s no clear point where one begins and the other ends. Specters, wraiths, and banshees are hybrids, as well as vampires, death knights, and liches. Some hybrids can avoid giving into their anti-life urges for a while, perhaps even dozens of years, but none can hold out forever. Those who haven’t succumbed are often either looking for a cure, though some see no point and embrace their new existence. Most liches and some death knights are the most feared of this type, because they willingly subjected themselves to what most people would consider a fate worse than death for the sake of more power.

I am in an episodic campaign right now that was inspired by things like Hellboy and the Witcher. It takes place in this world, Earth, but hundreds of years in the future. Unfortunately, the monsters from the past have reappeared, and the world is pretty much post-apocalyptic.  People no longer live in the cities, because they are overrun with mythical beasts. Most technology has been destroyed, so everything has been set back to the medieval ages. As players, we are Paupers. Paupers are people who travel from town to town, aiding the people by combating the dark monsters that have overrun the world. My character is a warforged named Yankedoodle. He doesn't know much about the world because he just recently activated in a bunker. He is a bard of lore, and has a built in cassette, dvd, and record player. The lore that he travels around and collects are old recordings of mostly 60s through 90s songs, and he plays them to use his magic. He also plays ukulele and can Right now, we are in the Appalachian mountains, and the society that now lives there uses moonshine as currency. I also heard from the DM that we may travel to New Orleans because that is where most Fey have appeared. 

Quote from The_Summoning_Dark >>

I am in an episodic campaign right now that was inspired by things like Hellboy and the Witcher. It takes place in this world, Earth, but hundreds of years in the future. Unfortunately, the monsters from the past have reappeared, and the world is pretty much post-apocalyptic.  People no longer live in the cities, because they are overrun with mythical beasts. Most technology has been destroyed, so everything has been set back to the medieval ages. As players, we are Paupers. Paupers are people who travel from town to town, aiding the people by combating the dark monsters that have overrun the world. My character is a warforged named Yankedoodle. He doesn't know much about the world because he just recently activated in a bunker. He is a bard of lore, and has a built in cassette, dvd, and record player. The lore that he travels around and collects are old recordings of mostly 60s through 90s songs, and he plays them to use his magic. He also plays ukulele and can Right now, we are in the Appalachian mountains, and the society that now lives there uses moonshine as currency. I also heard from the DM that we may travel to New Orleans because that is where most Fey have appeared. 

 I love it!

And it explains how you can be a weregerbil.

Quote from AEDorsay >>

I am working on a campaign based on suggestions and input from my large player group (27 base, up to 34) that follows a set of restrictions they provided and a combination of inspirations from them and myself, that are all fused and melded together into a world that falls under the rubric of "Our World is Different".

Basically, we said take out all the stuff from the original books and stories that inspired D&D, except elves and dwarves, and then rebuild it all using newer and older material. 

The Campaign is immense, because it is a fresh one, and that requires a new set of homebrew rules and major changes to existing rules, and also the creation a new setting for it.

The setting is finished -- the V1.0 version (prior to cleanup and changes as we do the Rulebook) can be found in my signature as a PDF. This month and next I am finishing up the Handbook for players (classes and such) and the magic system (which uses a spell point system). The full campaign, for levels 1 to 20, will be finished and ready to go by January 1 f next year.

Our *current* set up is a town and a dungeon on a floating mountain valley in the middle of nothing. The dungeon keeps restocking itself and is part of a plan to take over the town, so is a staging area.  The party goes in, cleans it out, gets out, goes and parties, then does it all again. It is our playtesting set up for everything with the upcog stuff as well as our own stuff for the next campaign.

All of that said...

It is D&D. There are wizards and warriors. There are monsters and baddies.

The new setting world has Seven Cities that are all very different from each other in little ways that matter, while sharing much of the same stuff. Most people do not have magic, but Adventurers almost always do. There are gladiator games, there is an ongoing secret war with the nightmare dimension, there is a demon that has been turned loose again and is slowly killing off those in a town it cannot control -- mostly children. There is a Princess who is in trouble, and an Emperor who is removed from it all. THere are gods and Old Ones and Spirits of the World. There is an Evil Empire that is building up its forces to invade. 

The adventures all take from assorted popular movies the storylines and plots, and come fromm pretty much every genre. It is, as they say, A Lot.

My favorite piece of Lore right now is about the Dire War. High in the mountains, there are several Colonies -- places of isolation and reserve where the disaffected have been drawn over the years, and where Pedants teach Pupils a way of living and fighting that is less about weapons and more about self defense. The most skilled among them become Cenobites, and many of them will return to the world and become Adventurers, often to provide the Colony with support.

Every seven years, however, they face the consequences of an ill informed act that dates back to the founding of the first Colony. One night, the very first Pedant, who created the Way of the Open Hand,  found herself facing a terrifying creature who came through a breach in the Weave, a passage through the Veil, from another dimension. Behind it lay hundreds of others, but the tear was only wide enough for one at a time, and so she fought them, using the Way. These were not mortal beings, such as you or I; nay, these were the creations of terror, the embodiment of Nightmares. After defeating in single combat 32 of them killing all, she found herself facing the Lord of Nightmare, who proposed a bargain -- for he wanted to pass through and take this Mortal Realm from us that he might have a way to pursue his ongoing war with the Lord of Dreams in the dimension of Dreamland. She said no, that she would stand before them each time, and none would pass unless they defeated her and those who followed her.

And so it was set. Every seven years, the greatest Cenobite champions from all the land, having trained and competed to have the honor, fight for the safety of the World against the selected and handpicked champions of Nightmare, in one on one bouts of mortal combat. Nightmare has not won yet, though they cheat a little more every year.

That is just one of the things going on in the new campaign world. There are a lot of them. We have magical girls (and guys, and thems), gunslingers, witches who ride on brooms and flying carpets and flying ships and a sand of sea that is sailed across bu ships of its own. There Fae Lords and Ladies who seek to trap the unwary and add to their collections, there are demons who devour heart and devils who feast on flesh.

And a ton of it was pulled from stuff like I did the whole Mortal Kombat deal above, lol.

 Love this campaign looks like you put a lot of time and effort into it

Quote from AEDorsay >>

I am working on a campaign based on suggestions and input from my large player group (27 base, up to 34) that follows a set of restrictions they provided and a combination of inspirations from them and myself, that are all fused and melded together into a world that falls under the rubric of "Our World is Different".

Basically, we said take out all the stuff from the original books and stories that inspired D&D, except elves and dwarves, and then rebuild it all using newer and older material. 

The Campaign is immense, because it is a fresh one, and that requires a new set of homebrew rules and major changes to existing rules, and also the creation a new setting for it.

The setting is finished -- the V1.0 version (prior to cleanup and changes as we do the Rulebook) can be found in my signature as a PDF. This month and next I am finishing up the Handbook for players (classes and such) and the magic system (which uses a spell point system). The full campaign, for levels 1 to 20, will be finished and ready to go by January 1 f next year.

Our *current* set up is a town and a dungeon on a floating mountain valley in the middle of nothing. The dungeon keeps restocking itself and is part of a plan to take over the town, so is a staging area.  The party goes in, cleans it out, gets out, goes and parties, then does it all again. It is our playtesting set up for everything with the upcog stuff as well as our own stuff for the next campaign.

All of that said...

It is D&D. There are wizards and warriors. There are monsters and baddies.

The new setting world has Seven Cities that are all very different from each other in little ways that matter, while sharing much of the same stuff. Most people do not have magic, but Adventurers almost always do. There are gladiator games, there is an ongoing secret war with the nightmare dimension, there is a demon that has been turned loose again and is slowly killing off those in a town it cannot control -- mostly children. There is a Princess who is in trouble, and an Emperor who is removed from it all. THere are gods and Old Ones and Spirits of the World. There is an Evil Empire that is building up its forces to invade. 

The adventures all take from assorted popular movies the storylines and plots, and come fromm pretty much every genre. It is, as they say, A Lot.

My favorite piece of Lore right now is about the Dire War. High in the mountains, there are several Colonies -- places of isolation and reserve where the disaffected have been drawn over the years, and where Pedants teach Pupils a way of living and fighting that is less about weapons and more about self defense. The most skilled among them become Cenobites, and many of them will return to the world and become Adventurers, often to provide the Colony with support.

Every seven years, however, they face the consequences of an ill informed act that dates back to the founding of the first Colony. One night, the very first Pedant, who created the Way of the Open Hand,  found herself facing a terrifying creature who came through a breach in the Weave, a passage through the Veil, from another dimension. Behind it lay hundreds of others, but the tear was only wide enough for one at a time, and so she fought them, using the Way. These were not mortal beings, such as you or I; nay, these were the creations of terror, the embodiment of Nightmares. After defeating in single combat 32 of them killing all, she found herself facing the Lord of Nightmare, who proposed a bargain -- for he wanted to pass through and take this Mortal Realm from us that he might have a way to pursue his ongoing war with the Lord of Dreams in the dimension of Dreamland. She said no, that she would stand before them each time, and none would pass unless they defeated her and those who followed her.

And so it was set. Every seven years, the greatest Cenobite champions from all the land, having trained and competed to have the honor, fight for the safety of the World against the selected and handpicked champions of Nightmare, in one on one bouts of mortal combat. Nightmare has not won yet, though they cheat a little more every year.

That is just one of the things going on in the new campaign world. There are a lot of them. We have magical girls (and guys, and thems), gunslingers, witches who ride on brooms and flying carpets and flying ships and a sand of sea that is sailed across bu ships of its own. There Fae Lords and Ladies who seek to trap the unwary and add to their collections, there are demons who devour heart and devils who feast on flesh.

And a ton of it was pulled from stuff like I did the whole Mortal Kombat deal above, lol.

 Same here looks like it was made over several years and lots of effort I dont have even close to a long enough attention span to do this!

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Quote from The_Summoning_Dark >>

I am in an episodic campaign right now that was inspired by things like Hellboy and the Witcher. It takes place in this world, Earth, but hundreds of years in the future. Unfortunately, the monsters from the past have reappeared, and the world is pretty much post-apocalyptic.  People no longer live in the cities, because they are overrun with mythical beasts. Most technology has been destroyed, so everything has been set back to the medieval ages. As players, we are Paupers. Paupers are people who travel from town to town, aiding the people by combating the dark monsters that have overrun the world. My character is a warforged named Yankedoodle. He doesn't know much about the world because he just recently activated in a bunker. He is a bard of lore, and has a built in cassette, dvd, and record player. The lore that he travels around and collects are old recordings of mostly 60s through 90s songs, and he plays them to use his magic. He also plays ukulele and can Right now, we are in the Appalachian mountains, and the society that now lives there uses moonshine as currency. I also heard from the DM that we may travel to New Orleans because that is where most Fey have appeared. 

 I love it!

And it explains how you can be a weregerbil.

 Yup. Our last session we fought a bunch of weird vampires and a vampire bear. We are not certain, but our rogue, who is a house cat that was somehow transformed into a tabaxi, might have contracted vampirism. Now we might have a vampiric, awakened house cat who is incredibly chaotic and who also has vowed to serve a Leshy. 

Because of the other members of the party, my warforged also does not understand the difference between an orphan and a robot. So when he delivered the news to a little girl that her father was killed by a vampire, he told her that she was now a robot like him.

Our next session might involve a Tikbalang. 

Quote from The_Summoning_Dark >>

Quote from AEDorsay >>

Quote from The_Summoning_Dark >>

I am in an episodic campaign right now that was inspired by things like Hellboy and the Witcher. It takes place in this world, Earth, but hundreds of years in the future. Unfortunately, the monsters from the past have reappeared, and the world is pretty much post-apocalyptic.  People no longer live in the cities, because they are overrun with mythical beasts. Most technology has been destroyed, so everything has been set back to the medieval ages. As players, we are Paupers. Paupers are people who travel from town to town, aiding the people by combating the dark monsters that have overrun the world. My character is a warforged named Yankedoodle. He doesn't know much about the world because he just recently activated in a bunker. He is a bard of lore, and has a built in cassette, dvd, and record player. The lore that he travels around and collects are old recordings of mostly 60s through 90s songs, and he plays them to use his magic. He also plays ukulele and can Right now, we are in the Appalachian mountains, and the society that now lives there uses moonshine as currency. I also heard from the DM that we may travel to New Orleans because that is where most Fey have appeared. 

 I love it!

And it explains how you can be a weregerbil.

 Yup. Our last session we fought a bunch of weird vampires and a vampire bear. We are not certain, but our rogue, who is a house cat that was somehow transformed into a tabaxi, might have contracted vampirism. Now we might have a vampiric, awakened house cat who is incredibly chaotic and who also has vowed to serve a Leshy. 

Because of the other members of the party, my warforged also does not understand the difference between an orphan and a robot. So when he delivered the news to a little girl that her father was killed by a vampire, he told her that she was now a robot like him.

Our next session might involve a Tikbalang. 

 Very interesting (In a good way)

The eras go roughly: Protean Age -> Civilization 0 Demonic Age -> Elucinor -> Void Age -> (Redimo) -> Vanalesse ->  Death Age (current)

In the Protean Age, reality was just a dream and nothing was the same from one moment to the next. Time was nonlinear and life continuously mutated. Civilization 0 was never founded, it was what was in place when existence became real and gained a definite form (mutations were still common, but a life form could expect several years between forms). 

Civilization 0 is widely believed to have been a golden age. In truth, it was only that for about 70% of the population, but they assumed that the other 30% were just wrong and didn’t count them. This was the time of the Original Giants, the semi-divine rulers of the world, who arose in the Protean Age when Devine Beings walked among the inhabitants of the world. However, as ages went on, it became clear that Civilization 0 could not continue to exist in the now defined world, and the Original Giants became unstable, unable to continue functioning under these physical laws. In their respiration to find a new recourse to live and continue their realm on, the Original Giants destroyed Civilization 0 and collapsed into the first demons.

In the Demon Age he inhabitants of the world were on the brink of extinction, preserved by a combination of being more powerful than they are today and the visitation of the Divine Beings who counted the ever growing tide of demons. The Divine Beings tried to study the forces that had turned the giants into demons, but some of them became so fascinated that they turned themselves into demons too. Others decided to fight fire with fire and became the first devils. The devils were about to exile the demons to a dark realm, but then started oppressing the world’s inhabitants, seeing them as the slice of the next scourge, and had to be exiled in turn. The uncorrupted Divine Beings returned to their realms.

The demons and devils, however, realized they could turn mortal souls into more of their kind if said mortal pledged themselves to them, knowingly or otherwise, and began a war in the mind. The realm the fiends had been sent to became the Void, and when mortals started aligning with fiends, the Void became a part of them too. 

I’ll describe the rest of these eras later. This is just a rough draft and I’m not completely happy with it, but I wanted to get something of this down.

Sounds cool. Can't go wrong with precursor civilisations and demonic incursions.

Hold on to you hat, it only gets more gonzo from here.

With the Void becoming more and more intrinsically linked with the mortal mind, the sages of the world scrambled to find a solution before the inhabitants destroyed themselves. That solution was the Engraved Emperor, a sapient golem rogramed to be the perfect ruler who would preside over the successor of Civilization 0. At least, that’s the popular story, in truth the EE was made by the rebels of Civilization 0. The city EE founded was Elucinor, which spread to the whole world. Indeed, such was its influence that the world is still called Elucinor to this day.

The EE experiment was going well. The Void as it was was effectively countered, and the influence of the fiends seemed to wane. The EE filled its court with other golems, programmed to reject the Void’s usual influence. But there was a problem. The Void was a part of all life now, and gained traits resembling life. The ability to change, to mutate, to adapt. As it gained its own sort of sentience, it deprecated the fiends and changed to a different tactic. It mined the minds of mortals for their horrors, guilts, and hidden desires. It birthed shadows, sorrowsworn, dream eaters, and many others. The greatest of these were the True Masters, for they could rule over people without them ever knowing, and they initiated the second part of the plan.

Elucinor was meant to be more equal than Civilization 0, but people being people, in groups and out groups were made, and definitions of the “right” and “wrong” kind of Elucinorians became more strict. The True Masters first targeted those who were rejected in society, much like the 30% in Civilization 0. When rumors of monsters being spawned from these people spread, the True Masters stoked the flames of hatred, encouraging and tempting toward outright oppression and violence against the people most prone to generating sorrowsworn. The Engraved Emperor tried to stop this unrest, but its programming was against a fundamentally different kind of Void, so didn’t understand what was happening to the people now. The EE could only implement a stopgap measure of raising up Yulathe, a tree from the ancient forest of Whisper, to absorb as much Void energy as it could. But this could not stop the actions of his subjects, who were already going along with the True Masters’ design, and Elucinor collapsed and the EE vanished. The rule of the Void had begun, and few even were aware.

Redimo was a hidden civilization built around Yulathe and using it to treat those who were affected by the True Masters. Yulathe was an effective defense. And Redimo looked like it could reestablish peace. But they found a new enemy in the giant-kin, descendants of the original Demi-god giants. They carried the same philosophy of rulership as the giants, but saw themselves as a more perfect version of them, not needing now-nonexistent resources to function. The idea that they’d need anything outside themselves to overcome the Void was deeply offensive to them. They founded Vanalesse on what they thought were the true ideals of Civilization 0: a despising of any internal weakness and holding no mercy for those who could not live up to their standards.

Redimo and Vanalesse went to war, neither getting an upper hand. Vanalesse had a semblance of the giants old power, while Redimo had learned some techniques for making the shadows work for them. A desperate mission into the heart of Redimo tipped the scales, however, when half the roots of Yulathe were burned. With Redimo’s protection against the True Masters weakened, and the True Masters leaving Vanalesse alone in accordance with their plans, Vanalesse slowly overcame Redimo and destroyed it.

 Vanalesse then turned its attention to the rest of Elucinor, hunting down anyone they saw as the people most prone to generating sorrowsworn, denying that this treatment was only making the problem worse even as void spawned monsters multiplied. They did the same to the “failures” of their own people, which ultimately proved to be Vanalesse’s undoing, those giant-kin that coded or were exiled ended up joining the scattered Elucinorians and created a coalition that greatly weakened the giant-kin empire. They were helped by Steel Singer, a golem that was part of the Engraved Emperor’s court, who made them weapons and war machines.

Thus begins the Death Age. All the inhabitants of the world are scattered and terrorized by shadows; Vanalesse is down but not out, preparing for round three; the fiends are abandoned and motivated to take thr Goid back from the mortals who “stole” it; Yulathe is hanging by a thread; the Engraved Emperor is nowhere to be seen; and the True Masters are basically undisputed. So it’s a bit of a mess, all things considered.

Like I said, this isn’t the final version. In particular I want to emphasize that Vanalesse’s way of dealing with the sorrowsworn problem is wrong in a more demonstrative way than just saying it is.

I'm developing one that's pretty classic.

I started at one point, the Biblical Flood, ragnarok, titanomaquia and gigantomaquia are the same event, so the purge of the evil of the world was a cosmic war that led to the end of the ancient gods. In the D&D language the ancient gods are the titans, and the giants the sons of the titans. The titans are celestials who chose to become material beings as agents of other more powerful celestials, it was the titans who brought magic to the world, when the war occurred the renegade celestials were defeated, their leader was thrown into the lower planes and from his fall arose the abyss, the other celestials were trapped in hell, in prison, abbadon and other inferior planes.

The war occurred because the titans began to abuse their powers in the material world, enslave and corrupt the beings of the material world, which includes orcs, humans, haflings, etc. During the war several titans took on different sides, those on the defeated side were imprisoned or exiled, many magical beasts were created by the Titans because of the War. After the end of the War the material world spent millennia recovering, one of the consequences of the war was the alignment with feywild, shadowfell and elemental chaos, leading to the appearance of other groups such as elves, genasis, gnoms, etc. The situation now is that these groups began to rebuild new great kingdoms and began to open the exploration of the ancient kingdoms of the titans, refinding the ruins and, often, reopening ancient horrors.

There are several other minor general changes to the game, Celestial includes Angels, Archons, Devils, Demons and other creatures, all of them are not only outsiders, but also undead and aberrations, because celestials can not have full reality in the material world. Dragons are ancient celestials who have assumed guardian roles in the material world. Divine conjurers need to connect not to a specific deity, but to a temple, each temple holds an artifact and a teaching of angels or archons, wizards also need to be attached to a high-sorcery school, which contains the arcane power source.

There are several other aspects I'm developing from how my players develop or present new ideas

 A few tidbits from my world:

• Birds evolved from dragons, not from dinosaurs, so they have 4 legs plus wings, rather than 2 legs plus wings.
• Dinosaurs were the subserviant slave race to the primordial dragons, and formed their armies. The events which killed them was a great war between the primordial dragons. Their fossils often appear with imprints of weapons and armour.
• Dragons were largely wiped out by a hero called Olbanor the Traveller, who sought out the dragons and slew them. A few young remained, to repopulate, but the greatwyrms are gone.
• The Tower is a stack of cities 10 miles wide and infinitely tall, which stands in the middle of the world. They say that the Tower is as though a map of the planes were folded over and over, and then a pin pushed through it. The Tower is the pin.

The campaign is extremely fun thus far, and the main antagonists have become an Ettin called Throwdown who is an artificer and a barbarian, and then more distantly there stands the mysterious figure of Balthaz the Eternal, the king of the giants, who took the northern mountains of Ormnir from the Dwarves. Dwarves now live in the woods, and there is a sub-race of Dwarves which replaces their stone cunning with the same ability, but for wood.

There's so much more, but I am not risking writing it on the internet! I don't think my players would come looking, but I'd hate for them to spoil anything for themselves!

My lore book doesn’t reveal everything, lol.

Wyrlde is actually a colonized world, and the original inhabitants are six limbed bilaterally symmetrical beings. So all the creatures with six limbs are Native beings, including Dragons and centaurs and wemics and the like. Terraforming, the assorted wars, the presence of Gods — all of it has forced them into pockets where the sapient and sentient ones among them have evolved and developed hidden civilizations.

on the primary continent, they are clustered into an area in the northeast, and they seriously do not like the assorted peoples who have completely changed their world and caused massive global extinction — none of which any of the players will be aware unless they hie off to the area.

it is a focus of the final couple of adventures in the big campaign (you don’t want to even set foot there unless you are at least 17th level), but also extends to the other continents via the next campaign possibility that involves circumnavigating the globe.