Random Campaign Setting

Over at Monsters and Manuals, noisms threw out the challenge to take 2d6 random monsters from your bestiary of choice and build a setting around them as the intelligent races of the campaign world.

I decided to roll randomly to choose between the three main monster books from AD&D and go from there. I rolled the Fiend Folio and then randomly picked the following monsters:

Dark Creeper, Drow Elf, Flind, Githzerai, Sheet Ghoul, and Thoqqua.

All of them are normally intelligent except the Thoqqua, which is also my only non-humanoid. It's pretty easy to build a setting around these then.

The majority of the surface world is overrun with sheet ghouls. These are the remnants of a great civilization that fell into decadence and consumed itself. Being undead, the sheet ghouls do not normally die. They maintain a mockery of life, performing all manner of depraved and sadistic acts, seeking to find some meaning and pleasure in their endless existence.

The githzerai have a civilization almost as old as the ghoul kingdom. They maintain strong fortresses on the surface from which they wage war against the ghouls, along with vast subterranean gardens in which the majority of their people live. In their gardens, they work to perfect their psionic abilities and maintain their ancient ways. They are constantly wary of beings from other planes, fearing the arrival of their ancient enemies.

Primitive flind bands go to the surface to raid and perform their rites of passage. They otherwise live in caves and caverns between the surface and the deep reaches. They have a rigid, militaristic warrior culture that emphasizes strength and honor above all else.

The other races inhabit the deep reaches, an endless network of tunnels underground. These tunnels are the neverending work of the thoqqua. The rock worms move constantly between the other races, serving as messengers and mediators. They also study the other races, and they have records of their history that go back thousands of years. These records are completely indecipherable to other races, being recorded in the folds and striations of rock in the thoqqua tunnels.

The drow and dark creepers are regularly at war with one another over the scant resources underground. They are both masters of stealth and ambush and use this to their advantage against each other. Occasionally, a large war party of one race will attack a settlement of the other, but most of the fighting between them is confined to opportunistic raids.

This is obviously just a quick sketch, but it actually might be fun to play a session or two there.