Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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What you're asking, Falwith, is for the 'new' lore to be shunted off to the side as random splinters that don't matter and have no impact. "Drow are ALWAYS EVIL, ALL THE TIME, because the evil Lolthian city of Menzoberranzen makes them that way! ...except for this one little village of maybe fifty or so less-evil drow, off in some corner of Faerun nobody pays any attention to, I guess..."
How does that solve anything? You're still demanding that entire species of sapient humanoid creatures be treated as A.C.E.F. and murdered on sight while making absolutely meaningless 'concessions' to splinter lore you not only never intend to use yourself but are kinda actively angling for nobody else to use, either. How does that make anybody happier? The people who hate "evil" species not being genetically evil have to tolerate the splinter lore Besmirching Their Forgotten Realms, and the people who want a more nuanced approach don't get it because the splinters are so small it's pointless to try and use them in a story. You still have to discard FR lore and build your own if you want anything other than Humans Good, Everything Else Bad.
Why bother?
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I don't know what A.C.E.F. means, but I haven't seen anyone argue that an inherently evil race must be slaughtered on sight. This feels like a strawman argument.
"Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces with prominent lower canines that resemble tusks." MM p245 (original printing)
You don't OWN your books on DDB: WotC can change them any time. What do you think will happen when OneD&D comes out?
I chuckled a bit at how you want to just chuck a newly discovered variant of a race off to the side and not use them. So far as my OWN handling of things, nowhere did I indicate a small splinter sect of 50 or so humanoids. See, here is where we differ. You have a need to have everything be a happy melting pot where everyone loves everyone else and there are no evil societies. I prefer to have a wide variety of social systems and beliefs and in some cases, the greater bulk of a race that has been encountered ARE of that evil, dark mentality. There are areas where this race has settled and live a more tolerant and inclusive lifestyle, but honestly, rewriting the history of Menzo so everyone can and does worship what God they want and plays nice with all the other races simply washes out the range of variety.
I guess I need to know why it's such a horrible thing to allow societies of evil to exist in a fantasy realm? That's what I am seeing from those who feel the lore MUST be entirely redone. ANY society of evil MUST be eradicated. NO society is permitted to be wallowing in evil, dark thoughts, motives and ideals. An entire ban on anything that isn't rainbows and lollipops seems rather....odd?
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
A.C.E.F.: Always Chaotic Evil Forever.
Always: every last single member of the species is A.C.E.F. There are no exceptions that do not involve literal divine intervention, and even those are kept to an absolute minimum. ALL drow are evil sun-hating slavers. ALL orcs are evil near-mindless marauders. ALL kobolds are evil craven dragon worshippers. So on and so forth - exceptions are not to be treated as exceptions and will be suppressed until there are no exceptions.
Chaotic: the species is invincibly opposed to any form of peaceful coexistence. They cannot be reasoned with, they cannot be negotiated with, they cannot be parleyed with. The species is chaotic to the point of madness, at least insofar as 'The Good Guys' are concerned. All attempts at nonviolent confrontation fail, period. No rolling required, you simply cannot talk to these species.
Evil: the species is inimically, genetically, fundamentally hostile to all non-them forms of life. They kill, grape, maim, and torture just for shits, because it's the evil thing to do, and if there's a way they can harm 'The Good Guys' society they will do it, even at great expense to their own societies. They are evil to levels even Saturday morning cartoon villains would balk at, so horrifically over-the-top monstrous that not murdering them on sight would be considered an 'Evil' act by most human gods.
Forever: none of the above can ever be fixed or changed. The species is a uniform hive-mind monocolture that is catastrophically chaotic and outlandishly evil, and it will remain that way until Toril's sun goes red giant and consumes the world in dying sunfire. No amount of effort by any heroic party can change even the slightest aspect of such a species. Should the heroes find a drow infant squalling in the Underdark, abandoned moments after its birth by its progenitors, and attempt to raise it as their own? That child will grow up into a moustache-twirlingly Hyper Evil sun-hating spider-worshipping slaver, because "drow are spider-worshipping slavers" is baked into their blood and bones and absolutely nothing will ever change. They aren't even people. Not really. They're one-note cardboard cutouts some eight-legged ******* goddess moves around like Monopoly pieces whenever she gets bored, with no goals, aspirations, or ambitions of their own save Being More Chaotic or being More Evil - both strictly as their human surface-worlder enemies define it.
It's what all the Old Lore Diehards want - for 'Villainous' species to be flat, boring, pointless monocultures that exist solely to spawn stat blocks they can murder for profit. Even discarding the ethical arguments against portraying a technically-sapient species that way...it's just boring. Lazy, boring storytelling that just squats on the most basic, superficial and played-out fantasy tropes to build a minimally-viable game of murderhoboing all the darkies for another roll at those random loot tables. A lot of modern players simply aren't interested, and frankly more and more of the older, established players aren't interested anymore either.
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"As a drow, you are infused with the magic of the Underdark, an underground realm of wonders and horrors rarely seen on the surface above. You are at home in shadows and, thanks to your innate magic, learn to conjure forth both light and darkness. Your kin tend to have stark white hair and grayish skin of many hues. The cult of the god Lolth, Queen of Spiders, has corrupted some of the oldest drow cities, especially in the worlds of Oerth and Toril. Eberron, Krynn, and other realms have escaped the cult’s influence—for now. Wherever the cult lurks, drow heroes stand on the front lines in the war against it, seeking to sunder Lolth’s web."
Would you kindly point out the rewrite to "Menzo" for me?
"This new text replaces a description that confused the culture of Menzoberranzan—a city in the grip of Lolth’s cult in the Forgotten Realms—with drow themselves. The new text more accurately describes the place of drow in the D&D multiverse and correctly situates them among the other branches of the elf family, each of which was shaped by an environment in the earliest days of the multiverse: forests (wood elves), places of ancient magic on the Material Plane (high elves), oceans (sea elves), the Feywild (eladrin), the Shadowfell (shadar-kai), and the Underdark (drow). Drow are united by an ancestral connection to the Underdark, not by worship of Lolth—a god some of them have never heard of."
Maybe in here?
You seem to be correlating a change in lore (or censorship) to the company going broke; however as a reminder correlation is not the same as causation. I dont know the full history of 2nd edition, but I imagine that it is a substantial leap to put its shortcomings squarely and fully on the shoulders of lore changes which occurred.
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Looking over the errata, the only change in Volos for Mind Flayers is from this:
to this:
Nothing within the table was changed, so all of their possible behaviors are still the same. Where is the problem exactly? It doesnt mention any change to their diet.
If being okay with this change makes one a "pearl clutcher" then I guess I better pickup the Identify spell.
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So your just gonna double down then. Ok
Edit: Also I feel like there's a fun irony in discussing something like "group think" in the same thread as Mind Flayers
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As usual, people don't read the actual content. They just make up crap and spew it out into forums.
[removed. Responded to the wrong user. My bad]
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Edit: simple misunderstanding
Man. Isn't it astonishing how evil is nothing more than a hereditary switch that's flipped ON or OFF at birth? All the people arguing against any changes to improve flexibility in this thread are so right - you can't possibly have a campaign villain who'se held to be evil because of its actions and the evils it commits on the region! It has to be evil because it was born that way, even if it's never done anything but lurk in the Underdark its whole life eating the brains of people down there your Heroic Adventuring party's never heard of!
Why, let's ignore the human robber baron preying on a defenseless populace and crippling trade throughout our region - that guy's human, he can't possibly be evil! Who cares about the corrupt duke feeding that robber baron information and supplies in exchange for a cut and the use of his smuggler's lines to undercut the king and sidestep trade levies and tarriffs - he's human, how could be possibly be a Campaign Villain?! Why bother with the shadowy cabal of ancient necromancers who're using the duke as a patsy to destablize the region and try to tip it into civil war so they can reap bodies by the thousands and act unimpeded by armies too busy slaughtering each other to chase them down and stasmp their dark magics out? Those necromancers are human - we done told you already, humans can't possibly be evil! They weren't born that way, and that means no action they could ever undertake as part of setting up a thrilling campaign storyline would ever make them evil!
Let's instead launch an invasive war of conquest into the Underdark to get at those mind flayer guys who've shown no sign whatsoever of any intent to cause our nation trouble and stir up that whole hornet's nest, because all those guys down there are evil and must be expunged! That's the D&D way!
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That's it? That's what all this anger is about?
I finished casting Identify with my clutched pearls and have determined youve slicked your slope with the Grease spell
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So eating brains of people isn't wrong? Good to know that Hannibal lecter isnt evil to you
Why do you seem against expanding the lore to also include non-clutist Drow as it would fix things without changing the clutist Drow. You said they would be splinters but that wasn't in the post you replied to just that lore can be expanded. You made the comment about splinters. You seem to take the worst possible way to expand things instead of trying to find ways to make it work.
It seems you don't want the old lore to stay and want it gone instead of expanding the lore further even to the point of hyperbole and strawmans
PR style responses are considered hostile intent.
Well it is obvious that without those words you would have no way of knowing that Mindflayers eat brains and are likely to assume that they eat carrots. /s
Can I put this in perspective a bit? First, the actual content changed or removed is minimal. In this day and age you can pull up the collected info on any setting in a browser window in a matter of seconds. I too would like more content in an actual book in my own two hands, but this (re-)moved content amounts to a drop in the proverbial bucket - it's wouldn't solve anything decribed as "a lot". If that's your main concern, just take it to the interwebs and grab whatever you want from wikis or fan pages or even from someone else's cool homebrew. Second, if WotC were to move this removed content to the relevant setting books, this would affect just one of them: the Realms book. Which we have exactly one of so far and, to loop back to my first comment, that one doesn't even cover one percent of the info on the FR that's been released over a handful of editions. I can't see how this move instead of remove alternative would in any way help you out with your complaint.
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The problem with comparing "monsters" such as orcs, goblins, drow etc... to RL animals who can't change their natural impulses is that in the DnD world, Orcs, goblins, Drow etc... have HUMAN levels of intelligence. In the dnd world they are a PEOPLE. You can't make a comparison like that to real life because we don't HAVE another fully sentient species on our planet. There's no frame of reference. What we DO have in our world is other peoples. We attribute human qualities to them such as behavioral diversity because of their human levels of thought.
If you want to homebrew these species as animalistic and possessing uncontrollable instincts that's fine! thats the whole point of a homebrew world, to make your own lore.
But as long as their statblock indicates human levels of intelligence, I'm going to design them with every bit of complexity as I would any other person.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand point missed, twice over.
Everyone clutching their pearls and wringing their hands saying "How will I make evil villains for my campaigns if the books don't explicitly tell me something is evil?!"
The answer is very simple - actions make evil, not heritage. The lion-in-the-wild thing is an idiotic example - no the lion's not bloody 'evil', but if it's eating farmers on the frontiers you put it down anyways to protect your own. If mind flayers are eating brains in your backyard and preparing to invade your realm, you go deal with that because even though the mind flayers don't consider themselves evil at all, you ain't gonna be having that brain buffet nonsense in your hometown because you like your brains where they are, thanks.
You don't need a book telling you "Mind flayers are evil" to make a campaign about mind flayers threatening your society. You don't need a book telling you "all drow are always terrible" to run a campaign where Menzoberranzen has uncovered ancient magical superweapons and is about to make that your problem. Hell, it'd make that game more interesting to have a sporadic influx of refugees from Menzoberranzen be what alerts the players to the problem in the first place - cast-offs and living detritus that escaped their fate as fuel for the weapon, begging sanctuary. Good way to lead into the campaign - have the players help resolve this sudden, bizarre influx of ragged, malnourished 'slaver elves' and figure out what the hell that's all about as a way for them to discover "wait, the priestesses of Lolth have uncovered what?! HOLY SHIT, we need to do something about that!" Hell, maybe one of the party's PCs is even one of those escapees. They used their talents to bring themselves and a heartbreakingly small handful of their friends and family out, and they're the only one both brave and powerful enough to risk going back and setting this to rights.
I'd totally be down to play that game, probably as the delf escapee. The whole "Oops, Menzoberranzen is doing the slavery thing again, y'all better go genocide you some dark people and bring back their loot"? Significantly less so, thanks.
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Eating brains is wrong, but if you only know they're eating brains in a theoretical "this book by this hopefully trustworthy author says so" it's a pretty big step to fire up the old crusade machine. It's unfortunate for the poor souls who end up like this, but if these mindflayers are only snacking on the cerebrum of the rare dumb humanoid trespassing on their lawn that's not that much different from any other race that defends their turf with prejudice and typically the other civilizations don't declare war on those for doing that either. If squidheads start sending raiding parties for to bring back takeout, that's something else - because it's not some theoretical evil happening in another back yard than ours anyway.
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