Creation Myths, History and the Dawn War In D&D

[SpaceMarine93]

I had been reading up a lot about Dungeons and Dragons recently, and although I often find lots of lore about the worlds, the planes of existences, the races, the moral alignments and what not, I find it frustratingly difficult to find a comprehensive account of the D&D standard scenario back-story. As in, what was the creation of the world like? What were the major events that shaped the world, such as this thing I keep stumbling upon known as the 'Dawn War'? How did the major players such as the Gods, races, monsters, Demons, good and evil, came to be?

Can anyone give me a comprehensive account? Timeline? Lore? Anything? (Especially on this 'Dawn War' thing, it sounds really big.)

[Anguirus]

Well first of all, you've got to be aware that while the lore of 3E and 4E have similarities, they are explicitly different.

Earlier (2E and previous) there was no one default setting. In 3E "Greyhawk" became the setting for the game publications that weren't explicitly tied to another setting.

However, 4E started over with an intentionally vague set of assumptions. The idea was to allow a wide variety of game ideas in a general framework of "points of light surrounded by darkness", while still having a story to tie together the various kinds of races, monsters and the planes if the DM didn't want to develop his own. However, this "non-setting" accumulated so much detail that fans are basically just calling it the Points of Light or PoL setting. The major difference between it and a "normal" campaign setting is that only a very small amount of the geography of the game world has been officially presented to us (in the DMG).

So PoL is where you'll find your Dawn War. The Dawn War was a conflict between the gods and the "primordials," who assembled the world from raw elements but were too capricious to allow the development of sapient life. Several specific battles in the Dawn War have been described, including one where a primordial cleaved the dragon god Io into the two warring gods Bahamut and Tiamat.

Now the demons are a group of primordials who were corrupted by a "shard of pure evil" that was discovered after the world's creation and flung into the Elemental Chaos, gouging out the Abyss from it. The devils are angels who were corrupted by said shard, slew their god, and stole the shard out of the Abyss to form the Nine Hells in the Astral Sea. The Blood War between devils and demons erupted over this action.

As for a comprehensive timeline, it doesn't exist, due to the "vagueness" edict I mentioned before. However you will no doubt find the most coherent accounts of the history in the various Planes supplements. Unfortunately I only own the first of these.

As for the races, many of them are tied to one of the three great fallen empires. There was Bael Turath (human, but much of the nobility made deals with devils and became the race of tieflings), Arkhosia (dragons and dragonborn), which warred and destroyed each other, and more recently Nerath. Nerath was created by humans but normalized relations between virtually all player races. It fell spectacularly, creating the "PoL" set up of islands of civilization remembering the old days and lots of "dungeons" with great works of the past that could never be recreated. It's implied that Nerath was too big and it's fall was inevitable, but there are references to the final fall being precipitated by a great invasion of gnolls. (Gnolls are basically Reavers in 4E.)

[mr friendly guy]

So how do Overgods like AO fit into the new cosmology, especially with regards these Primordials (are they even still around?). Did AO just stand there and let the gods take on the Primordials?

[Anguirus]

Ao only exists in the Forgotten Realms. No Dawn War in the Realms. There are primordials in the Realms now, but they have been incorporated in the 100 year time jump and don't affect the world's established creation story.