Do people tend to prefer that if you reference something from an official source, that it be 100% that thing. For example, Tiamat is Tiamat is Tiamat. Tiamat is the same dragon queen goddess no matter what world she is referenced in. So if you play with Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and somehow end up running into Tiamat, she would 100% know about the events from RoT/ The Forgotten Realms lore. OR do people tend to be fine with a "more or less copy" that's not tied up in all the lore of it's source? IE I can totally have Tiamat in my world, and not have to plot around the events of "canon" stories.
Well Tiamat is a primordial Mesopotamian chaos monster of salt water. In my homebrew world she's closer to that than to the mother of chromatic dragons. WotC can't own ancient mythology. But I might use aspects of her stat block. Or not. Feel free to customize the monsters for your campaign to achieve the desired balance for an encounter.
I'm trying to find a nice balance between "hey i know that character/place/god/etc..." and "Well the WOTC modules say that character X should be in town Y, doing action Z." or the ever enjoyable "Character X doesn't sound like that/ Character X wouldn't do 'that', they would do 'this' "
If you have players who insist that your story should be told their way, something not right.
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Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
But I will also admit that I hate the answer. “My world, my story” always feels like the DM’s “it’s what my character would do”. Or other similar “I don’t want to have to justify this. Shut up”
I have been playing D&D for almost 30 years and the only official settings I have ever really used haven’t really been supported since TSR published D&D. (I preferred Mystara, Dark Sun, and Planescape.)
I haven’t actually followed the evolving cosmology since 2e. For example, my multiverse still includes the quasi elemental planes, and there are doors to them in Sigil at the top of the infinitely tall spire. I skipped 4e, so I didn’t even realize they combined the Negative Energy Plane and the Plane of Shadows into the Shadowfell for almost a year into 5e. 🤷♂️
I never particularly cared for the Forgotten Realms as a setting (too… generic) and feel much the same way about the Wildmount, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Birthright campaign settings too. I actively despise Ravnica and never even looked at Theros. (I skimmed Eberron back in 3e and haven’t looked at it’s lore since then.) Since I have absolutely 0 clues as to the goings on in any of those settings, how could my version of Tiamat, or Vecna or any of the others…?
My point is, if DMs weren’t free to reimagine things for their own tables, the game likely wouldn’t need DMs because it likely wouldn’t still exist. Or if it did it would be more niche, and certainly not be the dominant industry brand that it is.
Your Tiamat knows whatever you decide Tiamat knows. Heck, you can decide there is no Tiamat and if anybody complains at you for it tell them to PM me. I got your back.
But I will also admit that I hate the answer. “My world, my story” always feels like the DM’s “it’s what my character would do”. Or other similar “I don’t want to have to justify this. Shut up”
That still comes back to the feeling of a need to justify it to players.
If you need to justify it to yourself, that's something nobody else can decide for you. I can only recommend experimenting with how much established lore you wish to follow, to bend, and to ignore altogether; whatever feels right to you.
Don't discount the creation of lore, too. Players turning Tiamat into a child's toy and given to a Goblin infant as a gesture of peace between the largest Goblin tribe and a tiny tribe of Kuo-toa will never be canon. With that in mind, consider that trying to keep in canon can be very detrimental. Much of a D&D adventure are the exceptions to the rule rather than the expected norms.
It is also up to you to judge how your players will react. If you choose to play with rules-lawyers, you might want to be certain of the rules and be ready to point to the exact page for a ruling. If you choose to play with a bunch of improvisational comedians, you should expect things to never go as you had hoped and do so in the most ridiculous way.
It is a cooperative effort with all players (meaning DM and characters), but you as a DM are responsible for setting the stage as you see fit. The only justification you need is your own by whatever standards you choose; your story, their story, a pre-established story, an impossible story,
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I borrow a lot from the lore and change it for my own purposes, but I have literally never played the lore dead straight.
I'd consider a player that cares so much about the game lore so far as to insist on official lore only like a unicorn cause I know for a fact that person does not exist. If they write down a single piece of your lore and remember it later? Marry them.
Edit: going back and reading some of the other comments again, I just wanna go further and say that aside from it being *ok* to adapt/change lore to fit your game, I think that's actually a *good* thing that you should definitely be doing if you feel up to it. Especially if you're dealing with more experienced players who might have more knowledge of the game lore than their characters do. Not all characters are experts on inter-planar mechanics, so that knowledge disparity can often lead to metagaming on the player's part. The players should still have the opportunity to discover new lore that's unique to your DMing style, if you have the time to go that extra mile.
That isn't to say that you *must* do your own lore. If you're a newer DM, the existing game lore exists as a convenient shorthand for you to use while you're getting used to running other parts of the game/ you can also use it verbatim if you just *really* like it.
Thank you. This all spawned off a LONG argument about how I wanted an NPC to have a backstory where through luck and a deal with an Evil God like being, they managed to stop an Archdevil from manifesting into the material plane.
And OH BOY did people lose their collective crap that a mortal could best a god at anything.
Zhule, are you talking about this thread? I don't think your representation is accurate, and if you're posting here for validation after that thread, that's a little (if not way) uncool. I don't think the "LONG argument" you describe can be distilled into "lore orthodoxy" and "Zhule, the reasonable person." Not all, but I think a lot of that discussion was in good faith offered as constructive criticism, at least mine was, and I'm pretty darned sure the rest of the participants were at least at the outset. I could see why some of the posters in the thread grew impatient and heated. That's something that doesn't need to be rehashed in public, but feel free to PM if you want my take.
That aside, lore's on hand and can be used however you want. Whether you're some sort of Forgotten Realms orthodoxyist or completely fabricate your own world or take pieces of published material and put your own spin on it, or any degree within those posts, the trick is how well you run it. It's a performative thing, meaning both at the table but in the work you put into playing. All could be done really well and really badly. The big thing is a verisimilitude thing, that's not just doing good voices or what have you, it's presenting the world in a way that's consistent to give the players a grounded platform to play on and "buy in" but it's also presented with a high enough frequency of surprise to keep the players engaged, but not confused.
Of course a big thing about "lore" some folks really eat all that stuff up, others get sleepy when the history is recounted. The good DM knows their players' appetites and the right balance. For instance in some games it _really matters_(tm) what the nature of gods are or whether fiends like devils and demons can have souls. In a lot of others, it doesn't.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I have never claimed to be a rational and reasonable person. I have passion about things I create and if people don’t like them/don’t think they work, then I want to understand WHY. An answer that boils down to “because, no” isn’t going to be very convincing. Nor is it going to give me anything to work backwards from to make a better version 2.0/3.0/etc….
as to the whole souls thing. I would still LOVE to know what term would be acceptable to define the “core” of a divine/demonic being. And how one would go about explaining the metaphysical size of that “core”, in comparison to a mortal soul. Because while in some settings “devils don’t have souls” is important, they would still possess something that binds them together. Something that returns back to the Hells if the devil is killed outside of them. And “soul” is a super easy term to use and basically everyone knows what it means.
You're asking stuff that has no definition in D&D and certainly not 5th Edition. The official D&D answer is "what DM decides". Yet, you are unhappy with that answer.
If you're unhappy with the only actual valid answer there's nothing left to discuss.
We could give you our own personal ideas but again, these are "us as DMs" not official.
"Soul" is left vague deliberately. There is no other "core"/thing. Everything beyond this is "DM", and you don't like that. So, what is your expectation here?
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Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond. Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ thisFAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
You may want to drop the all caps when trying to good faith discuss with folks, it drips of sardonicism, and in this context comes off as "a bit" fragile giving you've left one thread and then poorly represented it in a new one to basically to get validation. And now you want to revisit that thread, so I'd argue this thread should be merged with your original thread.
So, again, you can do what you want, but what I'll drop here is distilled from the Monster Manual, Modenkanian Tome of Foes, Descent into Avernus and my own reading into RL esotericism, the occult, and "angels on the head of pin" theology. I'm not using it to attack your idea, nor do I think anyone was in the other thread, but rather demonstrate a much more thought out system that has literally stood the test of time in that it's used a lot more in imaginative works than what you've proffered.
Devils are beholden to that which made them. There may be intermediaries up the ranks, but all Devils are pledged to various arch devils and everyone is ultimately pledged to Asmodeus. A devil is a very fluid thing, it is what it's superior says it is, whether it remembers anything, memories being a core to most regular soul folk, is at its superiors whim. When a Devil is defeated, not killed, on the prime material plane it returns to who they're beholden. Maybe they're reconstituted, maybe they're obliterated in the Styx and used to make something else. The Devil's (or Demon Lord's this is one of those areas where Devils and Demons are very much alike) will is as much a part of the essence of an infernal being as the soul from whence the Devil originally came. Yes, a Devil is literally "post soul" having more often than not arisen from the Styx having been conveyed there as part of their afterlife. I don't even think Wish spells can actually reconsitute a soul that's been damned in RAW, but there's DM flexibility if you have a soft spot for the musical Hadestown. But if you want to play around with mechanics, you're free to. But your critics in the other thread sort of see you cutting corners with the magic system, creatures established stats, etc. ... for this story of the Cleric-Lich whose point isn't entirely clear in your game other than a cool thing for you the DM to know about your world (and that's fine, we all have those).
Again, you can create some sort of Devil "soul catcher" I recommend the box used in Ghostbusters or at least look at how labor intensive planar binding and dominate spells are and build off from there. Again you don't have to. You got your central conceit in some Cleric-Lich who can bust deals with Devils and beat gods ... nothing wrong with that, it reflects the real life pantheon of Chuck Norris if you don't have a name for them yet.
I find that “because the DM says so” is rarely used to explain why the grass in this world is orange. And is more often used to explain why the monk can suddenly cast Meteor Storm off each of their punches/kicks.
I know there is no universal “correct” answer to many of the questions I pose. Most of them are to be viewed through the lens of “how would YOU do this”. Or “would YOU allow such and such”
Again the soul thing is me trying to find a term that isn’t going to anger people because it’s “wrong”. I’m trying to avoid having to use 100 words where 3 “wrong” ones would have worked just as well. I’m also trying to avoid that thing where you offend someone by using the incorrect term, so you use a different term that apparently is ALSO incorrect. So things start to get heated because you really want to explain how X does Y, but you keep using incorrect terms and person calling you out on it, won’t tell you what an acceptable term would be.
To touch on the original question: I've been thinking about a way to do both lately - refer to "baseline" D&D lore, but still have my own.
In the campaign I'm running now, I posit that wherever elves exist, Lolth makes a point of finding a small community of them, isolating them in a cave somewhere and driving them insane. She then tells them a story about their history that's a mishmash of the standard lore and then puts them in touch with one another across the worlds, so that her most loyal subjects are in charge of "educating" her newest ones about their "history."
As a result of this, it really doesn't matter whether the drow began in Erlhei-Cinlu or Menzoberranzan or my own city of Zijdespin, they all basically have the same lore. In some places, though, the cracks show more than others and once in a while, a drow might wake up to the truth of the situation. But whether that is enough to change the results, who can say?
The all caps is me trying to stress certain words (which is not the easiest thing to do via text and much less so via text on a mobile device). It is often not meant to be rude or abrasive, it’s there to draw focus or imply there is more behind the word(s).
the other thread ended up getting away from me (and rather heated). It was suppose to be
1) “which Archdevil is best known for dealing with knowledge”.
2) knowledge that could be use to learn the Arcane (in a hyper sped up pace)
3) Arcane knowledge that would eventually be used to become a Lich.
it got shortened to “which Archdevil can make you a Lich?” Which is a very different question, with a lot more issues tied up into it.
As for the issues with devil’s and souls. Would it help if I portrayed it as “I need a way to explain why an imp or succubus can get onto the prime material plane, but Asmodeus/ the Gods/ Cosmic Horrors can’t just pop over to ‘borrow a cup of milk’, as it were”
The cleric is… a lot of things. He’s there as a “cool backstory I know because I’m the DM”. He exists as a possible BBEG (or powerful ally to fight a different BBEG). He’s a million different flavors of plot device. But I think I really like him as a question. That question could be “how much do you trust the Gods?”, it could also be “how far are you willing to go, to get revenge on someone who “wronged” you?”
As for the binding… it needs work. I think it makes an interesting MacGuffin for the players to deal with between levels 10-20. Maybe it’s not a full binding. Maybe it’s just enough of the essence to make a counter measure against the Archdevil trying again. A sort of virus vs vaccine situation if you will
BogWitchKris: I agree, this is a hugely important part of a Session Zero.
And Zhule, if it helps:
Mephistopheles;
Current lore has a consortium of deities imprisoning Asmodeus specifically, in an echo of Paradise Lost.
My personal lore is that succubi/incubi are the easiest things to get across dimensions because people on the Prime want them here so much. You could just as easily say the hole between the two dimensions is smaller, so only an imp can squeeze through. To open a BIG hole, you need such and such forbidden rite that such and such hero can prevent.
BogWitchKris: I agree, this is a hugely important part of a Session Zero.
And Zhule, if it helps:
Mephistopheles;
Current lore has a consortium of deities imprisoning Asmodeus specifically, in an echo of Paradise Lost.
My personal lore is that succubi/incubi are the easiest things to get across dimensions because people on the Prime want them here so much. You could just as easily say the hole between the two dimensions is smaller, so only an imp can squeeze through. To open a BIG hole, you need such and such forbidden rite that such and such hero can prevent.
Oh I provided a whole bit on Mephistopheles as the "Devil for arcanists" mentioning that as not just D&D precedent but going back to Faust myths. One thing I wasn't sure on, since this is Cleric who is either abandoned by and/or abandoned their god, is they're a particular Devil that focuses on Blaspheme? Zariel's corruption of Elturel I think was a one timer for personal reasons, but I couldn't see that as anyone's specialty. Post is in the other thread.
Do people tend to prefer that if you reference something from an official source, that it be 100% that thing. For example, Tiamat is Tiamat is Tiamat. Tiamat is the same dragon queen goddess no matter what world she is referenced in. So if you play with Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, and somehow end up running into Tiamat, she would 100% know about the events from RoT/ The Forgotten Realms lore. OR do people tend to be fine with a "more or less copy" that's not tied up in all the lore of it's source? IE I can totally have Tiamat in my world, and not have to plot around the events of "canon" stories.
Well Tiamat is a primordial Mesopotamian chaos monster of salt water. In my homebrew world she's closer to that than to the mother of chromatic dragons. WotC can't own ancient mythology. But I might use aspects of her stat block. Or not. Feel free to customize the monsters for your campaign to achieve the desired balance for an encounter.
I'm trying to find a nice balance between "hey i know that character/place/god/etc..." and "Well the WOTC modules say that character X should be in town Y, doing action Z." or the ever enjoyable "Character X doesn't sound like that/ Character X wouldn't do 'that', they would do 'this' "
Your world. Your story.
If you have players who insist that your story should be told their way, something not right.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
You are right.
But I will also admit that I hate the answer. “My world, my story” always feels like the DM’s “it’s what my character would do”. Or other similar “I don’t want to have to justify this. Shut up”
I have been playing D&D for almost 30 years and the only official settings I have ever really used haven’t really been supported since TSR published D&D. (I preferred Mystara, Dark Sun, and Planescape.)
I haven’t actually followed the evolving cosmology since 2e. For example, my multiverse still includes the quasi elemental planes, and there are doors to them in Sigil at the top of the infinitely tall spire. I skipped 4e, so I didn’t even realize they combined the Negative Energy Plane and the Plane of Shadows into the Shadowfell for almost a year into 5e. 🤷♂️
I never particularly cared for the Forgotten Realms as a setting (too… generic) and feel much the same way about the Wildmount, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, and Birthright campaign settings too. I actively despise Ravnica and never even looked at Theros. (I skimmed Eberron back in 3e and haven’t looked at it’s lore since then.) Since I have absolutely 0 clues as to the goings on in any of those settings, how could my version of Tiamat, or Vecna or any of the others…?
My point is, if DMs weren’t free to reimagine things for their own tables, the game likely wouldn’t need DMs because it likely wouldn’t still exist. Or if it did it would be more niche, and certainly not be the dominant industry brand that it is.
Your Tiamat knows whatever you decide Tiamat knows. Heck, you can decide there is no Tiamat and if anybody complains at you for it tell them to PM me. I got your back.
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That still comes back to the feeling of a need to justify it to players.
If you need to justify it to yourself, that's something nobody else can decide for you. I can only recommend experimenting with how much established lore you wish to follow, to bend, and to ignore altogether; whatever feels right to you.
Don't discount the creation of lore, too. Players turning Tiamat into a child's toy and given to a Goblin infant as a gesture of peace between the largest Goblin tribe and a tiny tribe of Kuo-toa will never be canon. With that in mind, consider that trying to keep in canon can be very detrimental. Much of a D&D adventure are the exceptions to the rule rather than the expected norms.
It is also up to you to judge how your players will react. If you choose to play with rules-lawyers, you might want to be certain of the rules and be ready to point to the exact page for a ruling. If you choose to play with a bunch of improvisational comedians, you should expect things to never go as you had hoped and do so in the most ridiculous way.
It is a cooperative effort with all players (meaning DM and characters), but you as a DM are responsible for setting the stage as you see fit. The only justification you need is your own by whatever standards you choose; your story, their story, a pre-established story, an impossible story,
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
I borrow a lot from the lore and change it for my own purposes, but I have literally never played the lore dead straight.
I'd consider a player that cares so much about the game lore so far as to insist on official lore only like a unicorn cause I know for a fact that person does not exist. If they write down a single piece of your lore and remember it later? Marry them.
Edit: going back and reading some of the other comments again, I just wanna go further and say that aside from it being *ok* to adapt/change lore to fit your game, I think that's actually a *good* thing that you should definitely be doing if you feel up to it. Especially if you're dealing with more experienced players who might have more knowledge of the game lore than their characters do. Not all characters are experts on inter-planar mechanics, so that knowledge disparity can often lead to metagaming on the player's part. The players should still have the opportunity to discover new lore that's unique to your DMing style, if you have the time to go that extra mile.
That isn't to say that you *must* do your own lore. If you're a newer DM, the existing game lore exists as a convenient shorthand for you to use while you're getting used to running other parts of the game/ you can also use it verbatim if you just *really* like it.
Thank you. This all spawned off a LONG argument about how I wanted an NPC to have a backstory where through luck and a deal with an Evil God like being, they managed to stop an Archdevil from manifesting into the material plane.
And OH BOY did people lose their collective crap that a mortal could best a god at anything.
Zhule, are you talking about this thread? I don't think your representation is accurate, and if you're posting here for validation after that thread, that's a little (if not way) uncool. I don't think the "LONG argument" you describe can be distilled into "lore orthodoxy" and "Zhule, the reasonable person." Not all, but I think a lot of that discussion was in good faith offered as constructive criticism, at least mine was, and I'm pretty darned sure the rest of the participants were at least at the outset. I could see why some of the posters in the thread grew impatient and heated. That's something that doesn't need to be rehashed in public, but feel free to PM if you want my take.
That aside, lore's on hand and can be used however you want. Whether you're some sort of Forgotten Realms orthodoxyist or completely fabricate your own world or take pieces of published material and put your own spin on it, or any degree within those posts, the trick is how well you run it. It's a performative thing, meaning both at the table but in the work you put into playing. All could be done really well and really badly. The big thing is a verisimilitude thing, that's not just doing good voices or what have you, it's presenting the world in a way that's consistent to give the players a grounded platform to play on and "buy in" but it's also presented with a high enough frequency of surprise to keep the players engaged, but not confused.
Of course a big thing about "lore" some folks really eat all that stuff up, others get sleepy when the history is recounted. The good DM knows their players' appetites and the right balance. For instance in some games it _really matters_(tm) what the nature of gods are or whether fiends like devils and demons can have souls. In a lot of others, it doesn't.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I have never claimed to be a rational and reasonable person. I have passion about things I create and if people don’t like them/don’t think they work, then I want to understand WHY. An answer that boils down to “because, no” isn’t going to be very convincing. Nor is it going to give me anything to work backwards from to make a better version 2.0/3.0/etc….
as to the whole souls thing. I would still LOVE to know what term would be acceptable to define the “core” of a divine/demonic being. And how one would go about explaining the metaphysical size of that “core”, in comparison to a mortal soul. Because while in some settings “devils don’t have souls” is important, they would still possess something that binds them together. Something that returns back to the Hells if the devil is killed outside of them. And “soul” is a super easy term to use and basically everyone knows what it means.
You're screwing us over here.
You're asking stuff that has no definition in D&D and certainly not 5th Edition. The official D&D answer is "what DM decides". Yet, you are unhappy with that answer.
If you're unhappy with the only actual valid answer there's nothing left to discuss.
We could give you our own personal ideas but again, these are "us as DMs" not official.
"Soul" is left vague deliberately. There is no other "core"/thing. Everything beyond this is "DM", and you don't like that. So, what is your expectation here?
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
You may want to drop the all caps when trying to good faith discuss with folks, it drips of sardonicism, and in this context comes off as "a bit" fragile giving you've left one thread and then poorly represented it in a new one to basically to get validation. And now you want to revisit that thread, so I'd argue this thread should be merged with your original thread.
So, again, you can do what you want, but what I'll drop here is distilled from the Monster Manual, Modenkanian Tome of Foes, Descent into Avernus and my own reading into RL esotericism, the occult, and "angels on the head of pin" theology. I'm not using it to attack your idea, nor do I think anyone was in the other thread, but rather demonstrate a much more thought out system that has literally stood the test of time in that it's used a lot more in imaginative works than what you've proffered.
Devils are beholden to that which made them. There may be intermediaries up the ranks, but all Devils are pledged to various arch devils and everyone is ultimately pledged to Asmodeus. A devil is a very fluid thing, it is what it's superior says it is, whether it remembers anything, memories being a core to most regular soul folk, is at its superiors whim. When a Devil is defeated, not killed, on the prime material plane it returns to who they're beholden. Maybe they're reconstituted, maybe they're obliterated in the Styx and used to make something else. The Devil's (or Demon Lord's this is one of those areas where Devils and Demons are very much alike) will is as much a part of the essence of an infernal being as the soul from whence the Devil originally came. Yes, a Devil is literally "post soul" having more often than not arisen from the Styx having been conveyed there as part of their afterlife. I don't even think Wish spells can actually reconsitute a soul that's been damned in RAW, but there's DM flexibility if you have a soft spot for the musical Hadestown. But if you want to play around with mechanics, you're free to. But your critics in the other thread sort of see you cutting corners with the magic system, creatures established stats, etc. ... for this story of the Cleric-Lich whose point isn't entirely clear in your game other than a cool thing for you the DM to know about your world (and that's fine, we all have those).
Again, you can create some sort of Devil "soul catcher" I recommend the box used in Ghostbusters or at least look at how labor intensive planar binding and dominate spells are and build off from there. Again you don't have to. You got your central conceit in some Cleric-Lich who can bust deals with Devils and beat gods ... nothing wrong with that, it reflects the real life pantheon of Chuck Norris if you don't have a name for them yet.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I find that “because the DM says so” is rarely used to explain why the grass in this world is orange. And is more often used to explain why the monk can suddenly cast Meteor Storm off each of their punches/kicks.
I know there is no universal “correct” answer to many of the questions I pose. Most of them are to be viewed through the lens of “how would YOU do this”. Or “would YOU allow such and such”
Again the soul thing is me trying to find a term that isn’t going to anger people because it’s “wrong”. I’m trying to avoid having to use 100 words where 3 “wrong” ones would have worked just as well. I’m also trying to avoid that thing where you offend someone by using the incorrect term, so you use a different term that apparently is ALSO incorrect. So things start to get heated because you really want to explain how X does Y, but you keep using incorrect terms and person calling you out on it, won’t tell you what an acceptable term would be.
To touch on the original question: I've been thinking about a way to do both lately - refer to "baseline" D&D lore, but still have my own.
In the campaign I'm running now, I posit that wherever elves exist, Lolth makes a point of finding a small community of them, isolating them in a cave somewhere and driving them insane. She then tells them a story about their history that's a mishmash of the standard lore and then puts them in touch with one another across the worlds, so that her most loyal subjects are in charge of "educating" her newest ones about their "history."
As a result of this, it really doesn't matter whether the drow began in Erlhei-Cinlu or Menzoberranzan or my own city of Zijdespin, they all basically have the same lore. In some places, though, the cracks show more than others and once in a while, a drow might wake up to the truth of the situation. But whether that is enough to change the results, who can say?
This is going to be a long one.
The all caps is me trying to stress certain words (which is not the easiest thing to do via text and much less so via text on a mobile device). It is often not meant to be rude or abrasive, it’s there to draw focus or imply there is more behind the word(s).
the other thread ended up getting away from me (and rather heated). It was suppose to be
1) “which Archdevil is best known for dealing with knowledge”.
2) knowledge that could be use to learn the Arcane (in a hyper sped up pace)
3) Arcane knowledge that would eventually be used to become a Lich.
it got shortened to “which Archdevil can make you a Lich?” Which is a very different question, with a lot more issues tied up into it.
As for the issues with devil’s and souls. Would it help if I portrayed it as “I need a way to explain why an imp or succubus can get onto the prime material plane, but Asmodeus/ the Gods/ Cosmic Horrors can’t just pop over to ‘borrow a cup of milk’, as it were”
The cleric is… a lot of things. He’s there as a “cool backstory I know because I’m the DM”. He exists as a possible BBEG (or powerful ally to fight a different BBEG). He’s a million different flavors of plot device. But I think I really like him as a question. That question could be “how much do you trust the Gods?”, it could also be “how far are you willing to go, to get revenge on someone who “wronged” you?”
As for the binding… it needs work. I think it makes an interesting MacGuffin for the players to deal with between levels 10-20. Maybe it’s not a full binding. Maybe it’s just enough of the essence to make a counter measure against the Archdevil trying again. A sort of virus vs vaccine situation if you will
BogWitchKris: I agree, this is a hugely important part of a Session Zero.
And Zhule, if it helps:
Mephistopheles;
Current lore has a consortium of deities imprisoning Asmodeus specifically, in an echo of Paradise Lost.
My personal lore is that succubi/incubi are the easiest things to get across dimensions because people on the Prime want them here so much. You could just as easily say the hole between the two dimensions is smaller, so only an imp can squeeze through. To open a BIG hole, you need such and such forbidden rite that such and such hero can prevent.
Also as a quick aside. That last part comes off as really sarcastic and rude. Don’t think you meant it to be. But it does come off as demeaning
Oh I provided a whole bit on Mephistopheles as the "Devil for arcanists" mentioning that as not just D&D precedent but going back to Faust myths. One thing I wasn't sure on, since this is Cleric who is either abandoned by and/or abandoned their god, is they're a particular Devil that focuses on Blaspheme? Zariel's corruption of Elturel I think was a one timer for personal reasons, but I couldn't see that as anyone's specialty. Post is in the other thread.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.