Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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They are NOT changing/removing/replacing the lore... AT ALL. They are making the core books more setting agnostic, likely because they are releasing several new/old settings within the next few years. What is true lore-wise for one world may not be true for others. The lore for each individual setting, however, is 100% unchanged.
Also, they removed the alignment from player character race options, because player characters can be whatever alignment the player wants them to be. Having cookie cutter character design dictated by what is generally true lore-wise is not interesting in the slightest. While halflings may generally be lawful (in a particular setting), a player character halfling can be anything. There's no reason to even mention alignment in the player character options.
If you'd like, you can read more about the unchanged established lore of various settings at fandom.com subdomains. For example:
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com
https://eberron.fandom.com
In fact, that was one of the things that contributed to TSR's bankruptcy: producing lots of different books for a multitude of different settings was expensive and reduced the appeal of each book to individual gamers, hurting sales. Which was further compounded by the company gaining a reputation for creating settings that they would then not support, further discouraging gamers from investing in the books.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Then what's the solution?
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
Please do not contact or message me.
Make most of the material setting-neutral so that it's useful regardless of what setting someone wants to run.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
So a few pages back someone posted a link to a psychology article, and looking at the post after it no one seems to have read it. Which is a shame because it raised some good points one of them being when Wotc remove devils and demons in 2e because of the satanic panic. Meanwhile many players still kept using them which cause Wotc to bring them back. Which to mean means that so long as enough people believe that Wotc are being less than intelligent with the new direction there taking, then they will eventually go back to the way things were. Another part of the article I believe was help full was when it said "And the D&D game encourages flexibility. If a player wants to play a happy, peaceful, non-violent, well-intentioned lesbian orc wizard, they can." and this is true. This is probably where Yurei will come in and bring up those two people who had bad experience's. And to that I say for the once who was put off by the -1 to intelligence they now have the option to pick a different ability score because of tashas and if they complain about how the lore paints the majority of orcs just tell them they can make up some orc tribe somewhere that renounced the ways of their brethren and took up a life of farming or something. And for the player that was gay or something(I'll be honest I tend to skim Yurei post at this point as they tend to rehash the same thing) there was not and is not any thing in the mechanics or lore that I can think of that would be affected by whether they themselves of their character was gay. It could have been the other players causing the issues and if so leave because and I cant believe I have to say this but people are allowed to their beliefs if they had an issue with it talk to them and if they refused to change their minds then leave. you are not responsible for them only yourself.
and for those curious here's a link to that article.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
So for the people who are saying the evil societies are bad because saying all members of a race are evil, do remember every account of these societies that we do have are from outsiders. Just like I'm sure the poor schmuck getting sacrificed by an Aztec priest thought all Aztecs were evil, or The villages being raided by Vikings that all Vikings were evil, or how about the native Americans thinking all Europeans were evil. You are given a single point of view for the societies as a dungeon master, as a world builder it is up to you to flush out said societies.
*Edit and before anyone says that the nuances of all these societies should be included in the books that introduce them I question your comprehension of just how monumentous a task that would be for Wotc to implement.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
Anyone else notice the article "WotC's New Lore Chanages Raises Questions Among Players" doesn't cite one actual player perspective besides those presumably held (but maybe just entertained) by the author J.R. Zambrano? From the volume of the posters in this thread, at least in this player community the number of people who are truly "raising questions" by the recent "lore" errata are a definite minority in the playerscape. Just sayin'.
Per usual when it comes to interpreting WotC editorial decisions, BoLS is Chicken Littling. Where in actuality. The sky is not falling. No one is telling anyone they are playing their game wrong.
It seems a lot of folks in this forum's arguments have shaped the article around BoLS's* interpretation of the rationale for the changes, focusing strictly on frankly reactionary interpretations of the Diversity and Dragons statement from a year or so back. Making D&D broadly accessible, the market goal of that statement, sure, that does require some rethinking of essentialist notions and unintended offense aspects deep baked into what "D&D is" ... a reexamination almost every aspect of culture does on a fairly regular basis. No art or pastime has ever been "ruined' or really even upset by becoming more inclusive. However, it is a sad fact of the politics of culture that whenever such a move is made, noise is made by reactionaries who feel they are "losing something," which is laughably ironic in the age of archives and wikis (bros, to those wiki suspicious types out there, D&D Beyond bro, is owned by a company that got the money to buy D&D Beyond by ... running wikis, bro, with nary a take down notice from an IP holder).
What gets me is among the specific passages we're talking about in this week's errata, only three of them are truly being made out of "sensitivity" concerns. One on Fire Giants addresses a paragraph on slavery, which followed several paragraphs that discuss slavery , just that the set off and not excised paragraph dives in further into the slave economy and a joke about broken backs that a reasonable person could construe may push the topic a bit too far by conventional play sensibilities ... nothing saying you can't go there if you want to go grim dark on your representation of slavery replete with heartless jokes from your NPCs or even your "anti heroes" if you're running that sort of game, but it's more on you to do that rather than claiming your playing in a tradition that's still presently supported. Cannibalism and the Yuan-Ti same thing. It's grim stuff that transgresses past the sensitivities of many adults let alone the children and young adults the games are really marketed after. And the passage on Half Orcs being products of an essentializing "rapaciousness" and/or an Orc eugenics program? Utterly unnecessary and very incompatible with some game world presentations of Orcs. These are the hills over which some people are planting their flags on? Yes, slavery, cannibalism, treating sentient beings as "breeding stock" these are forms of violence that cross the line of many folks who are otherwise comfortable with iterations of hack and slash and death by arcane kablooey. They can be incorporated in a game, like any theme, but are not necessary to make Fire Giants, Orcs, or Yuan Ti your bad guys. You can go there if you want, heck make a trifecta of it, but it's WotC's prerogative to no longer draw the general D&D player a map to "go there." It's just not the broad base they're trying to reach at this point in the game's growth, so the grimmer legacy notes of the game are now a niche and is something WotC wants to move past to broaden enjoyment of the game. These subject matters like every other theme with no rules guidance are matters a table can engage if it's agreed upon.
The rest of Volo's most recent edits are striking away "Roleplaying a X" which consists of a sort of dictate for how the monster is to be played, striking it in favor of the tables that were already in the book that give the DM a broader array of basic options to use out of the (text) box, or as inspiration. It's liberating for the game, that's all. I mean, all you all fighting in defense of these lost words, you all know the rest of the book too, right? Or are you here because BoLS ignited you? I mean looking at the errata section for Volo's, were your games really harmed by the ability score modifiers when WotC got rid of negative mods? When that sort of stuff comes up, there's a common refrain by complainants that such moves are homogenizing character options with a note of something to the effect of "why be any species" etc. I never actually hear those posters actually corroborating how their games have been ruined or otherwise hampered by these mechanical changes.
Don't presume I'm some sort who wants D&D with "play nice" as a requisite. I can play very dark. We have discussions at my table to make sure we're all on board with my portrayals of undead and aberrations (informed by a mix of vocational and intimate familiarity I have with physical trauma and the entropy just beyond the barriers imposed by the neurochemical phenomenon we call rationale thought). It's a way I can play, but not a mode I unleash on players without discussions of boundaries. Moreover, I want D&D to be a rule set that serves as the foundation of play for a broader player community than just me. I got no problem mining the history of game lore to find an "edge" if I want to. Heck, my favorite present game I'm running is basically mining 2E's Planescape mixed up with a mix of pop and actual philosophical nihilism (sorta think Into the 'Spiderverse meets True Detective with a liberal dose of Twin Peaks). I don't need a 5e manual granting me the authority to play that way. Nor should any complainant demand it. The "established lore" of any edition has always been nothing more than a simple foundation, not the architecture. To use an old Plato analogy, more to be cute than anything else, get out of the cave and see that folks are discovering great forms of play beyond the shadows to which you're clinging.
*Or at least J.R. Zambrano's, I don't know whether the views of BoLS beyond that one writer are really represented in his article, just as I find suspect Zambrano's presumption of interpreting what "D&D players" in general feel about these edits without qualifying what segment of the player base he's actually talking about.
postscript: oh those assertions about the integral mechanical role of alignment? Do tell me how Detect Evil and Good work in 5e rules. Yes Evil and Good in some sort of default cosmology offered by WotC (though also explained as an option and not essential for play ... look at some of Coleville's extraplanar entities S&F to see how things can go off the script if you just do your own build) are "elemental" in that the planes and their alignment positioning sort of "give shape" to the multiverse (if the DM wants to follow those suggestions). However, just because you have extraplanar entities who take an alignment absolutely, that in no way mandates world building where a given wordly entity that includes such an entitiy in their creation narrative also be absolutely positioned in that alignment. I mean, come on, all the logic chopping posing as philosophical rigor in that vein is readily defeated by actual theologies that pose good and evil as "real things" in the world but grant that human souls or psyches or being or what have you are not "essentially" one or the other. One shouldn't have to go there in discussing fantasy, but I guess sometimes such reality checks are warranted when absolutism, even in fantasy, is asserted.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
First of all, Wizards of the Coast didn't even exist as a company when the Satanic Panic occurred. That was TSR. And they didn't remove demons and devils from 2nd Edition, they just changed their names to tanar'ri and baatizu and said that those were the names that they called themselves while "demon" and "devil" were the words ignorant mortals used for them. So they were never brought back to the game because they never left.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Sourcebooks are supposed to be unbiased third-person omniscient perspectives on the beings that live in a D&D world. They need to provide accurate information, not present some sort of in-universe bias that's written by a whiny basement dweller who's still bitter that his ex got sick of his passive aggressive BS and dumped him in favor of an orc so now he's going to make their whole race look bad in revenge. If a sourcebook is "just someone's perspective," it's a useless source.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
It's what they've been doing: releasing Realms content in small packages, and washing their hands of anything remotely looking like a comprehensive FR setting sourcebook. There's the SCAG and a couple of adventures ostensibly set in the Realms, I'm sure there'll be an Underdark book at some point and maybe others, but there's no Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book anymore and I'm thinking there won't ever be one for 5E.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
FR suffers from extreme bloat. Main npc's die and get resurrected through cloning more than marvel heroes, leading to complete lack of caring on my part. You can't kick a tree without an Arch Mage falling out of one, deities die every few minutes to be reborn a few modules later. This setting needs a hard reset. I used to love it, but now I can't make myself care. And while I can only applaud WoTC finally entering the twenty-first century I wish they had done this not by removing lore but by rewriting it in a manner I don't want to start an argument with myself. But lets wait and see what next year brings.
*emphasis mine*
Oh, have I got a thread for you. Case-in-point:
https://www.enworld.org/threads/red-orc-american-indians-and-yellow-orc-mongolians-in-d-d.684780/page-2#post-8488556
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and still say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
*cough* *Lich* *phylactery and tefillin* *cough*
Oh, and Hobgoblins in Samurai armor that are in many of the editions of D&D (including 5e). As well as the multiple racist depictions of Drow throughout the decades.
Edit: Oh, and the Vistani. Perhaps the most egregious example from modern D&D.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
My only issue with people digging for racism in D&D races is that Humans in D&D come in all the shapes, sizes and tints they do here. This means anyone saying the other "races" are comparing to humans of RL is reaching and looking for something to feel bad about. How, when there are black humans in the game, someone can say Drow and supposed to represent black humans, is something I can't really follow. If Drow are supposed to be the black humans of D&D, then what are the black humans of D&D supposed to represent?
This won't have a solution, because people have triggers and those who don't have those triggers will always struggle to make these imagined connections. It's like every other facet of life, if you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find something to be offended by.
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.
It's simple, really. If you want someone to be evil, make them do evil things.
Villains are not born, they are made.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I don't think anybody's saying Gygax created the Drow to be a specific and unique analogy for black people in D&D. That doesn't have to be the case for the idea that "this entirely black civilization is evil to the core" to be potentially offensive though. Offensive notions can be more subtle than beating someone over the head with an obvious metaphor. There are presumably Jewish people in the muggle world of the Harry Potterverse, but that doesn't mean the look of the goblins running the Gringotts bank didn't justify a few raised eyebrows.
Not trying to be political here, but saying you're sure there's lots of good ones in a group of people too usually means you're about to say something bad about the group nonetheless. Racism doesn't need to be internally consistent to be racism either. You're overthinking it if you're going for some rational argument to show something offensive shouldn't necessarily be. That's a moot point: whether it should be or not is immaterial, whether it can be is all that matters.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
I really believe that part of the reason that WotC is branching out to other settings and trying separate the FR lore from the core of the game is due to all the surveys about favorite settings they posted over the past couple of years. I would be willing to bet that FR is not as popular as they would like and they are wanting to broaden the appeal of the game by stepping a back from it a little and expanding on the "Multiverse".
Except that the way that D&D has depicted orcs and drow as subhuman brutes and vile temptresses who wish to slay or enslave any human they encounter and routinely engage in cannibalism and human sacrifice is exactly the way that Europeans historically depicted Africans, Arabs, East Asians, and the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Australia and Oceania.
D&D lore was heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Edgar Rice Boroughs, and those authors were all seriously racist.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.