Lore: The World and its Echoes

The world has no proper name, but it bears a wide variety of prosaic and poetic names among those people who ever find need to call it anything but “the world.” It’s the creation, the middle world, the natural world, the created world, or even the First Work.

The primordials formed the world from the raw materials of the Elemental Chaos. Looking down on this work from the Astral Sea, the gods were fascinated with the world. Creatures of thought and ideal, the gods saw endless room for improvement in the primordials’ work, and their imaginings took form and substance from the abundance of creation-stuff still drifting in the cosmos. Life spread across the face of the world, the churning elements resolved into oceans
and landmasses, diffuse light became a sun and moon and stars. The gods drew astral essence and mixed it with the tiniest bits of creation-stuff to create mortals to populate the world and worship them. Elves, dwarves, humans, and others appeared in this period of spontaneous creation. Resentful of the gods’ meddling in their work, the primordials began a war that shook the universe, but the gods emerged victorious and the world remains as they have shaped it.

As the world took shape, the primordials found some pieces too vivid and bright, and hurled them away. They found other pieces too murky and dark, and flung them away as well. These discarded bits of creation clustered and merged, and formed together in echoes of the shaping of the world. As the gods joined in the act of creation, more ripples spread out into the Feywild and the Shadowfell, bringing creatures to life there as echoes of the world’s mortals. Thus the world was born with two siblings: the bright Feywild and the dark Shadowfell.

The Shadowfell is a dark echo of the world. It touches the world in places of deep shadow, sometimes spilling out into the world, and other times drawing hapless travelers into its dark embrace. It is not wholly evil, but everything in the Shadowfell has its dark and sinister side. When mortal creatures die, their spirits travel first to the Shadowfell before moving on to their final fate.

The Feywild is an enchanted reflection of the world. Arcane energy flows through it like streams of crystal water. Its beauty and majesty is unparalleled in the world, and every creature of the wild is imbued with a measure of fantastic power.

Lore: The Birth of the Abyss

In the earliest days of creation, even before the gods and primordials began their terrible war, one god was not content with sharing power—he wanted absolute control over the nascent universe. This god, whose name is spoken only in panicked whispers, sought a source of power he could use to gain total dominion over the unfolding realms of creation. Somewhere in the infinite expanse of space, he found the weapon he sought in the form of a tiny shard of utter evil.

The touch of the shard drove this god to madness, corrupting him so completely that he was no longer recognizable as his former self. Never the less, he carried the crystalline fragment into the depths of the universe—into the lowest reaches of the primordial vastness that would one day become the Elemental Chaos—and planted it there.

Evil took root like a foul seed of corruption, burrowing deep into the unshaped matter of the Elemental Chaos and spreading unholy tendrils far and wide. A yawning chasm of infinite gloom and despair opened up at the lowest pit of creation, swallowing all matter and light, defiling anything that drew near.

The Abyss was born...

The evil of the Abyss corrupted even some of the mighty primordials— Demogorgon, Baphomet, Orcus—and reshaped them into the likeness of pure destructive evil. The mad god hoped to wield these demonic princes as weapons in his war of conquest, but they would not bend to his will or any but their own.

So he left the Abyss and marshaled other elemental forces in his bid for domination, but the other gods overcame him, chaining him forever in a secret place known only to them. Now he is called the Chained God, or by his demented followers, the Elder Elemental Eye. His only desire is to escape his prison, and he rarely spares a thought for the realm he inadvertently created.

But the Abyss remains, a festering cyst beneath the Elemental Chaos. Within its lightless depths, demons erupt into birth, live out their short and violent lives, and are reabsorbed into the darkness. Demon princes rule their petty Abyssal domains, scheming to destroy the gods and all their works. The god Lolth hides in the Demonweb Pits, corrupted and perhaps driven mad by the same power that shattered the Chained God and made the first demon princes.

And somewhere far beneath all imagining, the crystalline Heart of the Abyss still beats its unceasing cadence of evil.

Lore: The Dragon Gods

One story that is told about the creation of the universe concerns the dragon-god Io. The dragons, this legend says, were his particular creation, lovingly crafted to represent the pinnacle of mortal form. Though they were creatures of the world, the power of the Elemental Chaos flowed in their veins and spewed forth from their mouths in gouts of flame orwaves of paralyzing cold. But they also possessed the keen minds and lofty spirits of the other mortal races,
linking them to Io and the other gods of the Astral Sea.

Io’s arrogance was his downfall. While the other gods banded together to combat the primordials, Io spurned the help of other gods. He was so confident in his own might that he
faced a terrible primordial called Erek-Hus, the King of Terror, alone. With a rough-hewn axe of adamantine, the King of Terror split Io from head to tail, cleaving the dragon-god into two
equal halves.

Erek-Hus did not have the chance to celebrate his victory, however. No sooner did Io’s sundered corpse fall to the ground than each half rose up as a new god—Bahamut from the left and Tiamat from the right. Together the two gods fought and killed the King of Terror.

The legend continues to explain that Io’s qualities were split between the two gods who rose from his death. His hubris, arrogance, and covetous nature were embodied in Tiamat, who is revered as a goddess of greed and envy. But Io’s desire to protect creation and his sense of fairness took root in Bahamut, now worshiped as god of justice, honor, and protection.

The two dragon gods both shared one of Io’s worse qualities, however— his preference for working alone. After they defeated Erek-Hus, they locked in battle with each other, ignoring the pressing threat of the primordials. Only when Tiamat fled the battle did the two gods turn their attention back to the larger war, and each still preferred to work alone.

Of course, in these more enlightened days, any paladin of Bahamut will tell you that “the Platinum Dragon” is an honorific title, not a literal description, and that Bahamut is no more a dragon than Moradin is a dwarf. These are gods, not mere monsters.

Even so, many are the chromatic dragons that serve Tiamat, whose monstrous form is that of a colossal dragon with five heads—one head resembling each of the five main chromatic dragons.