Video

Nice

So similar to 40k Orks

I found them in BG3 completely by accident! lol

Personaly i love the Kua-Toa dyvinity and gods works and in my sorld most of the races have sutch abilities

GREAT VIDEO! gave me a fantastic base mechanic for my next campaign :D thank you!

In my setting, a wilderness inn is a rarity. Mostly only major trade hubs have inns for travelling merchants and mercenaries. The few that are out in the wild are always fortified. One inn that played a repeat role in the campaign was a front for local military intelligence. The kingdom underwent civil war, so the nature of the troops there changed a couple times, but it always had some heavily armed presence and was well fortified. These fortress-inns were well known landmarks along the major roads where they were located.

Yay kraken week!

I always imagined that the reason the Kua-Toa could do it and others couldn't was because the amount of people required to make a deity was lowered for them by the mindflayers, who would have to lack the ability to do so themselves to warrant doing it in the first olace, perhaps to make a big ol squid god and thereby making their retaking of their empire easier. Though obviously doing so with fish people was a bad idea.

Specialized Wizards and Tacticians (S.W.A.T.)

Your voice and videos are always enjoyable to listen too. ❤

🎉

In a way, this kind of reminds me of the Orks from Warhammer whose collective belief shapes reality and alters physics

Everything you said makes a lot of sense, and I don't even play RPGs or LARPs. By the way, awesome crochet creatures in the background.

Imagine an army of these guys with several gods being created fighting for them that would be scary

In the real world humans make gods. No matter the mythology they still exist to 'serve' spiritual/intellectual need. Even evil deities exist as a foil to teach some lesson. These are Anthropogenic pantheons. Fantasy is more Animism without a power limit. Gods are incredibly powerful spirits which instead of being tied to small parts of the material plane are tied to entire planes of existence. The river spirits does not need your worship to survive, its significance to you is more about you than it. Baal enjoys you causing some chaos in his name, but has an entire plane to justify his existence.

I worked with my DM to design my current character who is a half drow half kuo toa as it is stated in lore that they do cross breed with other races and those hybrids tend to appear as their half race, but become more fishlike as they age. My character is a trickster cleric rogue multiclass and suffered at the hands of a trio of green hags in the feydark for sixty years, during which time his madness and transformation began and he developed an intense narcissism because he refused to break under the torture of the hags. Eventually he began to manifest cleric-level powers, but only when the fey deity Erevan Ilesere happened upon him strung up in his cage and found the situation humorous and told him he believed in him, affirming his narcissism. Erevan claims my character as a cleric in his employ, but he does not actually grant him any magic at all, and finds it hilarious that he is generating all his magic on his own. His memory is quite shaky owing to being lost in the feydark for so long, plus the innate madness that overcomes the Kuo Toa as they age, but he's incredibly effective at what he does and does not believe any god exists that he can't tangibly see.

Does anyone know the specific song in the background. Around 3:30?

turning this concept into a whole new campaign

There's a pretty big assumption here: that the faithful can be swayed by rational argument or even evidence. 90 percent or more of the population of the Forgotten Realms never go more than a few miles from home or the nearest town. They have no knowledge of the underlying metaphysics of the D&D universe. Fish people somewhere far away who can dream new gods into existence is just a fun story, one that can be dismissed out of hand because that's "obviously" not how gods work. Clerics are invested in their god not being a fish-people dream, so they have a vested interest in preventing the idea from catching on. Trying to convince the masses that the Kua-Toa can manifest gods is a Lovecraftian campaign in it's own right, with the PC's being the ones "infecting" the world with their "madness".

I've said this before and I've got to say it again. I strongly object to your statement that the deities of most D&D settings objectively exist. To most people, the only thing they know is that clerics exist. Even the clerics themselves know only that their magic works, not why. They may hear voices in their head, and they may see other signs, but ultimately, many of the miracles their god can grant are replicable by wizards who claim no access to divine power. Is divine power even any different from arcane power, or is that just a theory invented by the churches to prop up their mundane power? This idea feeds into your interpretation of the Kuo Tuo even more worryingly: if the gods don't exist, but powers that suggest their existence do, and those powers can be accessed by mortals with enough belief... Well, there's no need to even believe in a god to believe in power. The road to psionics seems all the quicker for that.

For the laughs, I made kuo-toa aware of the game mechanics

If this sets the tone, #Krakenweek is gonna be a BANGER

Hear me now, how many Kua-toa are needed to make a God?

6:13 And he was 100% correct

Oh you participate in Kraken Week, cool! I did not catch that. It's always fun to listen to you!

Hot take: The Kuo-Toa's power is the way all gods were formed. D&D lore very heavily implies that Aberrant creatures like Aboleths and even some friends existed before the gods appeared, and the Kuo-Toas gained their power through experiments by Mind Flayers. We also know Beholders can literally dream things into existence. So the gods were spawned from the thoughts of some kind of Aberration who literally thought them into existence.

It's probably no coincidence that 1st edition kuo-toa relied on a Freudian-style concept of the subconscious. 1st edition D&D was pretty full of pop Freudianism, especially the psionic system, which was built on the Freudian id, ego, and superego. To say nothing of the 1st edition DMG's insanity table, which was full of Freudian and even older diagnoses (like "dementia praecox") which were already obsolete in the 1970s, never mind today.

It’s funny actually in DND there was an empire that believed you could create gods and that empires folly was karsus

If I recall, both Mindflayers and Gith are future versions of humans. So perhaps this godless psionic awakening is actually the future of the setting, and the Githyanki rebellion and Mindflayers escaping to the past is merely history being circular. The aboleths don't remember them because it hasn't happened yet. The Kua-Toa are the beginnings of the original Grand Design, before the first Illithid Empire ever arose.

The counter-argument that believers within the D&D multiverse can give is that, because archpriests of Blibdoolpoolp can only cast spells up to 5th level, they are nothing but Warlocks, idol worshipers who can get their powers from a multifaced underwater patron who calls itself a god.

Hi, I didn't realize that I like your channel. Every time I've tried one of your videos I clicked away because the volume was just too low for me to listen to while driving. I stayed this time because the fish people are really interesting. I want to leave this, in case you haven't heard it before, if there's a way to sound balance your volume just a little bit louder I think it would be good for your channel.

andré young from multiverse kkkkkkk

“A study on the Kuo-Toa god shaping capabilities” will be the parallel in my world to the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, not a proposal on absence of intelligent design of the species, but the mortal design of gods, probably shattering the pantheon into various interpretations of gods (wich are constellations, probably deconstructed and becoming different faces of the gods based on every star that makes them)

At my table, the Vampire Lord Barsaba Bovich is attempting to convince a submarine community of Kua-Toa that he is the current aspect of diety worthy of their faith. He is most recently coordinating shore raids where the PCs are adventuring.

The Athar (one of the Factions in Planescape). Also known as "the Defiers" or "the Lost", they deny not only the gods' right to pass judgment over mortals, but their very divinity. They claim that the gods (whom they call "powers") are powerful but have limits and do not deserve worship. Thats also wy they live in Sigil because non of the Gods are allowed to enter. The lady of pain keeps them out. In most worlds of the Material Plane (and other places) the most religiouns condam them as heretics and a harmful Cult and hunt them down. Most of this "conspiracy" is already Canon 😎

I often run BBEGs with the desire to become a god and I think that my next campaign will have them trying to convince some Kuo Toa that they are the god and turn into it.

I’m at 14:13 and your description put me in mind of the Space Orks of WH40K and their version of psychers called ‘Ead Bangers.

This video makes me feel a bit more confident in my workdbuilding as my setting actually touches on the minor differences of the many forms of manifesting, from maneuvering spirits in subtle ways to get them to produce effects for onesself to manipulating the weave, to psionics, and even high Technology my setting has multiple brands of diety, none that fit the original dnd conception of deities, more or less being simply powerful creatures, some are mortals turned gods, some are powerful creatures imbued with powers, maybe an ancient pantheon has a classic form of diety but no longer is worshipped

Swarms of ordinary mortals trying to become deities isn't a new idea; it's always been a prominent part of Planescape. There's a whole faction called the Believers of the Source who aim for exactly that, but other individuals and factions often have similar goals.

Hey the description doesn't have a link to the Kraken Week playlist yet, just in case you didn't realise, or anyone else reading this thought they were going crazy

humans learn about kuotoas -dominos-> Daoismpunk setting

Very cerebral video I very much enjoyed it :)

Hopefully you're only taking your info from module D2, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa. Since the WotC games are not backward compatible with AD&D or D&D and are therefore not the same game.

Great, Great content. My own undersea race of the Idre have incredibly close ties to the gods in my campaign. Now, I've got to question how the Idre interact with the Kuo-Toa. Thank You.

When I first learned the Kuo-Toa lore, I understood it completely differently to how you did. I read it as saying *all* gods are birthed in the Kuo-Toa way, and that their bodily form exists as the tangible, metaphysical substance of faith, conscience and soul (because most dnd lore treats it as such), any 'fight' an adventuring party would have with a god is actually with its aspect, and thus the only way to truly kill a god is to have all its followers lose faith and belief. I understood it simply as the first observed instance in the lore's recorded history of this process occurring - the first birth of a god that mortals would witness and study. I think the idea that the gods exist in this extradimensional realm of pure sentience with no up, down, left or right, but is completely contained within the collective mind of the mortal races, is what makes the gods what they are. Having stat blocks for gods, making them killable, undermines their godly status. BUT the notion that the aforementioned 'observation' of Blibdoolpoolp's birth could start Renaissance-level upeaval and autocrats and demagogues starting wars with eachother? A race of fish-people almost universally stareotyped as second-class, stupid, pimitive, pitiable and laughable singlehandedly uprooting civilisation out of sheer paranoia and superstition (which is more understandable in a world with an ethereal plane)? OH MY GOD this is going to change the way I write homebrew.

Oh hey i was about to put a relatively friendly bunch of kuos in my game

Making me love my current fathomless aberrant sorlock kuotoa custom race with a baby god stuck in his head even more!!! Gotta show this to my gm!!

In a setting where it is discovered that the Kua-Toa’s godmaking power is discovered to be completely unique to them, I can see them suddenly becoming very powerful in society as people will invent gods that fit their needs and then shower Kua-Toa with gifts and flattery, begging them to worship the god and make it real

The deeper you learn of DND lore, the more you recognise that vanilla dnd is cosmic horror, the players (fortunately for them?) do not know it

Kuo toa are my favorite little fish men great video!