And if, in a given world, the fey truly do not exist? Then fey creatures such as elves, goblinoids, and other such critters don't as well and they're excluded. Not every world needs to accomodate every species.
Or you houserule it. Boom, elves are not fey. Done. Same if you want Kalashtar to be fey in origin, have Tieflings come from fey bloodlines instead of infernal ones or have Kenku have a little or a lot of fey in them. Make it so. /Picard voice
The whole setting agnostic move as some present it is a bit silly. Are they not going to have any kind of non-genetic (for lack of a better word) info at all? That seems dreadfully boring. But if they do, how is that not something that may differ from one setting to the next? I'm pretty sure there will be 'cultural' or 'flavour' parts in the writeups, just no references to specific settings, a nod to the whole multiverse being a big place and things being as malleable as the multiverse is big, and maybe some boilerplate text about things being more like guidelines than actual rules.
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I always wonder why people question the reason for the existence of various Elves (just an example) in a campaign world but humans always get a pass. There is absolutely no reason for any real world creature to exist on any world other than Earth, but we just accept that Forgotten Realms, Eberron and everywhere else has humans, cats, dogs and all manner of creatures that shouldn't be there, but fret over Elves and Dwarves and where they do and don't fit in.
Also MMM: makes the goblinkin races have a fey background now
woopdi-doop
Goblins, Hobs, and Bugbears/Bugaboos from the folklore were always Fey. In fact, they were about as "fey" as you could get. (Changelings were too, so it also makes sense that they're fey in this book.)
And goblinoid identity in D&D hasn't really evolved that much in the past 50ish years beyond "Tolkien-ish always evil mooks that you can kill without feeling bad about it", so I like having more flavor on them, especially if it echoes the folklore more. (I've been told that 4e had something similar, but due to not having played that edition, I myself cannot confirm this. Can anyone that has played it/read the 4e books confirm this?)
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And goblinoid identity in D&D hasn't really evolved that much in the past 50ish years beyond "Tolkien-ish always evil mooks that you can kill without feeling bad about it", so I like having more flavor on them, especially if it echoes the folklore more. (I've been told that 4e had something similar, but due to not having played that edition, I myself cannot confirm this. Can anyone that has played it/read the 4e books confirm this?)
There's references to goblins in the feywild, and that they had an ancient empire that extended into the feywild, but what I have access to doesn't particularly echo folklore goblins.
Also MMM: makes the goblinkin races have a fey background now
woopdi-doop
Goblins, Hobs, and Bugbears/Bugaboos from the folklore were always Fey. In fact, they were about as "fey" as you could get. (Changelings were too, so it also makes sense that they're fey in this book.)
And goblinoid identity in D&D hasn't really evolved that much in the past 50ish years beyond "Tolkien-ish always evil mooks that you can kill without feeling bad about it", so I like having more flavor on them, especially if it echoes the folklore more. (I've been told that 4e had something similar, but due to not having played that edition, I myself cannot confirm this. Can anyone that has played it/read the 4e books confirm this?)
making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Yes I already knew that irl folklore goblins are hairy fairies, half of the stuff in DnD based off of irl lore doesn't match the irl lore anyway, so I don't care.
Making them fey completely changes the game-feel the goblinkin have, which you can likely tell I heavily dislike.
Just heavily annoyed that somehow adding more presumptions about a race (that goblins have fey DnD or whatever) is being advertised as making them somehow more agnostic to the settings. As well as so pissed they're messing with the goblinkin races in general. They were fine the way they were but WotC is determined to "fix" what isn't broken.
According to WotC, only the PHB content has to be available for all settings they publish according to their The 5e Design Philosophy… ilosophy… osophy…. Everything else, including races, classes, and subclasses and not intended to be “setting agnostic.”
making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Yes I already knew that irl folklore goblins are hairy fairies, half of the stuff in DnD based off of irl lore doesn't match the irl lore anyway, so I don't care.
Making them fey completely changes the game-feel the goblinkin have, which you can likely tell I heavily dislike.
Just heavily annoyed that somehow adding more presumptions about a race (that goblins have fey DnD or whatever) is being advertised as making them somehow more agnostic to the settings. As well as so pissed they're messing with the goblinkin races in general. They were fine the way they were but WotC is determined to "fix" what isn't broken.
Okay, you're making a lot of assumptions here and leaping to conclusions. A few points:
First, this book is for setting agnostic races and monsters specific within the D&D Multiverse. It's not about making the races more "setting agnostic", it's about including the setting agnostic races in the book (Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D). Saying "this book is for setting agnostic creatures" is not the same as "we are making all the races in this book be more setting agnostic". Sure, they have made a few of them more setting agnostic than they were before (Shifters and Changelings, specifically), but that does not mean that all of them are.
Secondly, what "game-feel" did Goblinoids have before? Because it was almost completely "evil mooks that follow evil gods that you can kill and feel good about killing". They had some minor cultural stuff in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk (which isn't setting agnostic, so they excluded it from this book), but didn't have much other "game-feel" to them. Adding Fey Ancestry to them makes them adds more "game-feel" to them, and gives them more of a story than they had before. (Goblinoids in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk used to have a whole different pantheon, but then that pantheon was conquered and mostly killed off by Maglubiyet, who took over the Goblinoid races. Adding Fey Ancestry to the Goblinoids hints that their previous "pantheon" might have been Archfey, possibly of the Unseelie Court. This actually makes sense based on what little we know of the previous Goblinoid pantheon, with the vestige of a dead goblinoid god creating nilbogs, being a sort of trickster spirit that fits really well with the overall theme of Fey.)
Third, in my opinion, it's generally a good thing to keep creatures taken from mythology and folklore similar to how they appear in their source material. If you don't use them as presented, and don't build onto them in some interesting way . . . why would you even use those creatures in the first place? Make up something else, don't appropriate a creature from a culture and decontextualize it to the point that it has next-to-no resemblance of the source creature. It's fine to make small changes here or there (D&D Genies are fairly similar to their source material, but slightly changed to fit the Elemental Planes better and have Genasi children, for example), but completely removing the cultural context is generally not a good thing.
tl;dr - Changing Goblinoids to be descended from Fey does not mean that they did this change to make the races more setting agnostic (they were already setting-agnostic, existing in most D&D worlds already, from Exandria and Eberron to Faerun and Oerth), and it is generally a good thing to have creatures taken from folklore/mythology to have some major similarities with their source material.
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According to WotC, only the PHB content has to be available for all settings they publish according to their The 5e Design Philosophy… ilosophy… osophy…. Everything else, including races, classes, and subclasses and not intended to be “setting agnostic.”
making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Putting them in the game at all is inherently not setting agnostic.
And that's the rub behind this whole thing, isn't it?
"I don't want setting-agnostic species. I want rich, deep, immersive lore that tells me the place of every single species in the world of Faerun." "But I don't play in Faerun..." "Well **** YOU FOREVER, then. Go find a different game you turd-burgling toenail-sniffing wart-licking little pissant, Faerun IS D&D and anyone who says otherwise can sod off and die." "But...they sold this really cool book for - " "IT DOESN'T MATTAH WHAT THEY SOLD! You play in Faerun and you feckin' like it or I will burn your books in front of you and use the embers to set fire to your house!"
So on and so forth. And some people eventually get tired of people threatening to burn their houses down over not playing in Faerun.
I'd say sorry about that, but I'm not.
I presume this is just hyperbole, but no this isn't my opinion, at the very least not exactly.
Giving goblinkins the fey ancestry trait explicitly states something about your world lore the moment you put that in your game. That they come from the fey, that they come from that world. That fey exist in that setting at all. Them being a PC race implies that these people go out and adventure, that somehow they got onto your normal people plane from their fairy people plane (or whatever equivalent the in the cosmology is of either of these). That inherently makes it not setting-agnostic. Which I'm pointing out is contradictory to the supposed mission of this book. That was what my comment was about, that the mission of the book and the content is contradictory. The big drive behind it was that I don't like the book and a realization that it doesn't make sense popped into my head, so I posted it.
I don't play in faerun. The only time I technically have is when I played LMoP, and I've only ever played like ~9 sessions in that module. ~3 of those being the start because they were pick up games. That's the only time. Every other time has been in my homebrew world or the kitchen-sink setting of the oneshot server I'm on. Forgotten Realms is honestly boring, mostly just because that's the only lore you see people chat about. I don't care much about it otherwise.
You know, interestingly enough giving goblinoids Fey Ancestry makes them seem more rounded out and able to be a people unto themselves rather than just antagonistic cannon fodder. I think there's a difference between setting agnostic and genre agnostic going on here. Adding a few more folk to the fey umbrella, especially those that seem Unseelie, completes that whole family tree in a way that makes it more whole, in my opinion. And I think having a balanced Fey family tree is something that IS setting agnostic, but it is not GENRE agnostic. I think it is fully within the parameters of vaguely fantasy to have a fully fleshed out Fey family tree just as it is to have a fully fleshed out Fiend family tree or Draconic family tree.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
According to WotC, only the PHB content has to be available for all settings they publish according to their The 5e Design Philosophy… ilosophy… osophy…. Everything else, including races, classes, and subclasses and not intended to be “setting agnostic.”
Well, until this new book, that is...
I should have typed “universal,” not “setting agnostic.”
Notice that none of the races updated in this new book are PHB content? The Content in Volo’s, Xanathar’s, Tasha’s, Mordenkeinen’s, & Fizban’s (and obviously all setting books like SCAG, Eberron, Strixhaven, Wildemount, etc.) is not considered by WotC to be “universal” in nature. Even the magic items in the DMG and the Monsters from the MM are not guaranteed/required to be “universal” to all settings published for 5e by WotC. So the bog-standard PHB Dragonborn and Tieflings exist in all settings according to WotC, but not necessarily their variants. Since none of the goblinoid races are PHB content, playable Goblinoids are not guaranteed by WotC to exist in all settings.
(Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D).
As monsters, yes, but not as playable races. That’s part of why I fell in love with Mystara and panned on FR & Greyhawk, it had options for goblinoid PCs. And at that time “goblinoids” included Kobolds, Orcs, Gnolls, Ogres, and Trolls.
This updated content may be “setting agnostic,” but that doesn’t mean “universal.” They are not tied to any one specific setting, but that doesn’t mean they have to exist in every setting.
(Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D).
As monsters, yes, but not as playable races. That’s part of why I fell in love with Mystara and panned on FR & Greyhawk, it had options for goblinoid PCs. And at that time “goblinoids” included Kobolds, Orcs, Gnolls, Ogres, and Trolls.
This updated content may be “setting agnostic,” but that doesn’t mean “universal.” They are not tied to any one specific setting, but that doesn’t mean they have to exist in every setting.
I agree that they don't have to exist in every D&D setting 100%. Even settings where some goblinoids exist don't need all of them to exist (Goblins exist in Ravnica, but Bugbears and Hobgoblins don't). However, I do think that almost all D&D settings that do have Goblinoids should allow for them to be a playable race in those settings, unless it's a "5e Forgotten Realms Gnolls" situation where they're basically demons in all but name and probably shouldn't be listed as Humanoid creatures. I also agree that "setting agnostic" and "universal" are also very different distinctions. There's a ton of "setting agnostic" stuff in D&D that can be used in basically all settings, but are purposefully excluded from some of them, but there's very few "universal" parts of D&D (Humans, I guess? Almost every race is "setting agnostic", but doesn't exist in every single D&D setting. Is there any D&D setting where Humans don't exist?)
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making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Yes I already knew that irl folklore goblins are hairy fairies, half of the stuff in DnD based off of irl lore doesn't match the irl lore anyway, so I don't care.
Making them fey completely changes the game-feel the goblinkin have, which you can likely tell I heavily dislike.
Just heavily annoyed that somehow adding more presumptions about a race (that goblins have fey DnD or whatever) is being advertised as making them somehow more agnostic to the settings. As well as so pissed they're messing with the goblinkin races in general. They were fine the way they were but WotC is determined to "fix" what isn't broken.
Okay, you're making a lot of assumptions here and leaping to conclusions. A few points:
First, this book is for setting agnostic races and monsters specific within the D&D Multiverse. It's not about making the races more "setting agnostic", it's about including the setting agnostic races in the book (Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D). Saying "this book is for setting agnostic creatures" is not the same as "we are making all the races in this book be more setting agnostic". Sure, they have made a few of them more setting agnostic than they were before (Shifters and Changelings, specifically), but that does not mean that all of them are.
That's not what the marketing has said, but suuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrre.
Secondly, what "game-feel" did Goblinoids have before? Because it was almost completely "evil mooks that follow evil gods that you can kill and feel good about killing". They had some minor cultural stuff in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk (which isn't setting agnostic, so they excluded it from this book), but didn't have much other "game-feel" to them. Adding Fey Ancestry to them makes them adds more "game-feel" to them, and gives them more of a story than they had before. (Goblinoids in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk used to have a whole different pantheon, but then that pantheon was conquered and mostly killed off by Maglubiyet, who took over the Goblinoid races. Adding Fey Ancestry to the Goblinoids hints that their previous "pantheon" might have been Archfey, possibly of the Unseelie Court. This actually makes sense based on what little we know of the previous Goblinoid pantheon, with the vestige of a dead goblinoid god creating nilbogs, being a sort of trickster spirit that fits really well with the overall theme of Fey.)
"3 and a half feet of concentrated bastard, nyeheheheh." is the best way to explain the goblin (the short one, specifically) game-feel to the uninitiated. Do you play goblins often? Just because they had no game-feel to you because you haven't bothered to think of them past a random encounter table doesn't mean they didn't have any at all. It also doesn't mean that others don't enjoy the game-feel you brush off.
the over-all goblinkin feel is "grungy". You walk into one of their camps, caves, or the like and you're abound with rusty traps, ambushes, and a shit ton of angry gobbos of varying sizes. A bunch of them might be drunk and already kinda hurt cuz you interrupted some party they were having and they were having a drunken brawl amongst each other because the mostly percussive music got the mood up. They're monstrous, tribal races who are against the world of adventurers who are waltzing up to their houses and breaking their pots. Oh these guys had shinies? My shinies now. They take what they got and make the most out of it to survive. Grungy, angry, slight penchant for cruelty, simply not nice by human standards but not exactly evil. Now the greens have more of a penchant for cowardliness and being selfish, the reds lean more towards valuing the group but their specific group tho, and the furred ones are more solitary. But they're all still nice ol' thugs and share the common traits of the above.
Some folks online like to make the goblins (short ones specifically) cute, infantilized mascots. Which is fine for some, but they also generally like to keep the trait of the "finder's keeper's" attitude goblins have.
Making them fey just turns them all to the hairy, prankster, house spirit thing from irl lore, completely tossing everything out into the trash for a completely different feel to the goblinkin.
Third, in my opinion, it's generally a good thing to keep creatures taken from mythology and folklore similar to how they appear in their source material. If you don't use them as presented, and don't build onto them in some interesting way . . . why would you even use those creatures in the first place? Make up something else, don't appropriate a creature from a culture and decontextualize it to the point that it has next-to-no resemblance of the source creature. It's fine to make small changes here or there (D&D Genies are fairly similar to their source material, but slightly changed to fit the Elemental Planes better and have Genasi children, for example), but completely removing the cultural context is generally not a good thing.
[REDACTED] I may not like at all the goblinkin changes WotC is making and wish to hot hell that they didn't make them, but damn if they didn't have the RIGHT to make them. Context be damned. Context be damned to all ****. It's called art and being creative.
You know, interestingly enough giving goblinoids Fey Ancestry makes them seem more rounded out and able to be a people unto themselves rather than just antagonistic cannon fodder. I think there's a difference between setting agnostic and genre agnostic going on here. Adding a few more folk to the fey umbrella, especially those that seem Unseelie, completes that whole family tree in a way that makes it more whole, in my opinion. And I think having a balanced Fey family tree is something that IS setting agnostic, but it is not GENRE agnostic. I think it is fully within the parameters of vaguely fantasy to have a fully fleshed out Fey family tree just as it is to have a fully fleshed out Fiend family tree or Draconic family tree.
They already were able to be people unto themselves, just because your perception of them didn't evolve past the encounter table doesn't mean they weren't able to be peoples in their own right. If to you they were always only cannon fodder, then that is the fault of you never using them as anything else or never thinking about them past their monster stats or your DM doing these things.
You know, interestingly enough giving goblinoids Fey Ancestry makes them seem more rounded out and able to be a people unto themselves rather than just antagonistic cannon fodder. I think there's a difference between setting agnostic and genre agnostic going on here. Adding a few more folk to the fey umbrella, especially those that seem Unseelie, completes that whole family tree in a way that makes it more whole, in my opinion. And I think having a balanced Fey family tree is something that IS setting agnostic, but it is not GENRE agnostic. I think it is fully within the parameters of vaguely fantasy to have a fully fleshed out Fey family tree just as it is to have a fully fleshed out Fiend family tree or Draconic family tree.
They already were able to be people unto themselves, just because your perception of them didn't evolve past the encounter table doesn't mean they weren't able to be peoples in their own right. If to you they were always only cannon fodder, then that is the fault of you never using them as anything else or never thinking about them past their monster stats or your DM doing these things.
Spicy take. So yeah, I get that you don't like this new direction, but honestly that's no reason to start finding "fault" in any of this. That implies that I was or am somehow doing something wrong when it's just a matter of taste. I like this new direction, you don't. Simple as that. No need to take it personal.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Making them fey just turns them all to the hairy, prankster, house spirit thing from irl lore, completely tossing everything out into the trash for a completely different feel to the goblinkin.
No, it really doesn't. Fey does not mean Disney. Plenty of goblins were quite malicious.
making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Yes I already knew that irl folklore goblins are hairy fairies, half of the stuff in DnD based off of irl lore doesn't match the irl lore anyway, so I don't care.
Making them fey completely changes the game-feel the goblinkin have, which you can likely tell I heavily dislike.
Just heavily annoyed that somehow adding more presumptions about a race (that goblins have fey DnD or whatever) is being advertised as making them somehow more agnostic to the settings. As well as so pissed they're messing with the goblinkin races in general. They were fine the way they were but WotC is determined to "fix" what isn't broken.
Okay, you're making a lot of assumptions here and leaping to conclusions. A few points:
First, this book is for setting agnostic races and monsters specific within the D&D Multiverse. It's not about making the races more "setting agnostic", it's about including the setting agnostic races in the book (Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D). Saying "this book is for setting agnostic creatures" is not the same as "we are making all the races in this book be more setting agnostic". Sure, they have made a few of them more setting agnostic than they were before (Shifters and Changelings, specifically), but that does not mean that all of them are.
That's not what the marketing has said, but suuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrre.
Really? Care to quote anyone from WotC about that? Because never in all of its marketing has it said "we are making the races in this book more setting agnostic". Instead, they just said "the races that will be included in this book are the ones that aren't setting-specific". They just chose the ones that they didn't think were setting specific (including the races that primarily appeared in one setting over the others that conceptually should be setting agnostic) and put them in the book, with some revisions. Not all the revisions were about them being setting agnostic or making them more setting agnostic, most of them were about having them be more in line with the more modern design space and their current approach of the races.
Or, are you just making stuff up because your argument is weak and you can't find anything to back up what you're saying?
Secondly, what "game-feel" did Goblinoids have before? Because it was almost completely "evil mooks that follow evil gods that you can kill and feel good about killing". They had some minor cultural stuff in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk (which isn't setting agnostic, so they excluded it from this book), but didn't have much other "game-feel" to them. Adding Fey Ancestry to them makes them adds more "game-feel" to them, and gives them more of a story than they had before. (Goblinoids in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk used to have a whole different pantheon, but then that pantheon was conquered and mostly killed off by Maglubiyet, who took over the Goblinoid races. Adding Fey Ancestry to the Goblinoids hints that their previous "pantheon" might have been Archfey, possibly of the Unseelie Court. This actually makes sense based on what little we know of the previous Goblinoid pantheon, with the vestige of a dead goblinoid god creating nilbogs, being a sort of trickster spirit that fits really well with the overall theme of Fey.)
"3 and a half feet of concentrated bastard, nyeheheheh." is the best way to explain the goblin (the short one, specifically) game-feel to the uninitiated. Do you play goblins often? Just because they had no game-feel to you because you haven't bothered to think of them past a random encounter table doesn't mean they didn't have any at all. It also doesn't mean that others don't enjoy the game-feel you brush off.
I primarily play in Eberron, Exandria, and my homebrew world, all of which have a unique take of goblinoids and give them more in-depth and interesting cultures than "they're just evil little people with big noses and ears that you can kill without feeling bad about it" that the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and much of the D&D Multiverse has chosen to treat them.
I do use goblins in a more interesting way than the core of D&D has for most of its history. I don't "play" goblins very often, because I am a Forever DM that basically never gets to play, but I do run them often, include them prominently in my campaigns and worlds, and do have nuance with who they are. (Goblinoids in my homebrew world are fairly often "evil", but it's entirely cultural, and not in the "kill on sight because they're basically demons ruled by an evil god" kind of evil, but in the "they're extreme religious zealots, xenophobic bigots, and idealistic purists that have attempted genocide and eugenics multiple times in the past few centuries, and more need to be taught the error of their ways" kind of evil. Their culture contains goblinoids of all the alignments, and other diversity in opinions and personality traits that people tend to have, it's just the dominant goblinoid culture in my world that tends to make them bigger jerks than others.)
the over-all goblinkin feel is "grungy". You walk into one of their camps, caves, or the like and you're abound with rusty traps, ambushes, and a shit ton of angry gobbos of varying sizes. A bunch of them might be drunk and already kinda hurt cuz you interrupted some party they were having and they were having a drunken brawl amongst each other because the mostly percussive music got the mood up. They're monstrous, tribal races who are against the world of adventurers who are waltzing up to their houses and breaking their pots. Oh these guys had shinies? My shinies now. They take what they got and make the most out of it to survive. Grungy, angry, slight penchant for cruelty, simply not nice by human standards but not exactly evil. Now the greens have more of a penchant for cowardliness and being selfish, the reds lean more towards valuing the group but their specific group tho, and the furred ones are more solitary. But they're all still nice ol' thugs and share the common traits of the above.
You have clearly never read a product about or played/run a campaign in Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, or Mystara if that's your view on all goblin(oid)s in the D&D Multiverse. That's certainly a type of goblinoids in some D&D settings, but they're not the only one, or even the majority one in 5e settings. "Goblin Slayer"-style goblins are easily the minority of goblins in official 5e D&D settings.
Some folks online like to make the goblins (short ones specifically) cute, infantilized mascots. Which is fine for some, but they also generally like to keep the trait of the "finder's keeper's" attitude goblins have.
I have literally only ever seen one do that for D&D goblins, and that's JoCat, and his version of goblins (which are adorable) do not represent the overall attitude of people that change goblinoids in their D&D campaigns/settings. And even if they were . . . that would change absolutely nothing about the discussion we're having. It's a red herring, and not even that accurate of one.
Making them fey just turns them all to the hairy, prankster, house spirit thing from irl lore, completely tossing everything out into the trash for a completely different feel to the goblinkin.
No, it does not. It literally doesn't. They aren't "Fey" (creature type), and instead have "Fey Ancestry", like Elves and Half-Elves. Do Elves having "Fey Ancestry" make them be trickster house spirits like many folklore elves? No, it doesn't, so this ridiculous slippery slope fallacy doesn't apply to Goblinoids.
(Also, "some people make goblins cute" and "goblins are now descended from fey" are not a cause-effect scenario. They're barely even correlated, and only because they're both on the vague topic of "goblins". "Fey" does not mean "cute". Most fey from folklore and from official D&D books are genuinely terrifying. Especially the Unseelie Court, but the Seelie Court is scary, too.)
Third, in my opinion, it's generally a good thing to keep creatures taken from mythology and folklore similar to how they appear in their source material. If you don't use them as presented, and don't build onto them in some interesting way . . . why would you even use those creatures in the first place? Make up something else, don't appropriate a creature from a culture and decontextualize it to the point that it has next-to-no resemblance of the source creature. It's fine to make small changes here or there (D&D Genies are fairly similar to their source material, but slightly changed to fit the Elemental Planes better and have Genasi children, for example), but completely removing the cultural context is generally not a good thing.
"aPpRoPrIaTiOn" ugh.
Oh, seriously? You throw up arms about that? The usage of a word you don't happen to like in a nuanced explanation of why taking creatures out of context isn't generally a good thing? Maybe you should do some introspection as to why the use of that one word made you freak out.
Note: "Appropriation" is not always about offense, it's often not about saying "you don't have the right to use that part of another person's culture", it's almost always more nuanced than what you seem to think of the word, and it's always a valid complaint when applied accurately. Which I did in that post, by the way. Just in case you decided to stop reading after you saw that word because you've been taught by a certain wing of the media that anyone that uses that word apparently is automatically wrong and the rest of what they're saying deserves to be ignored because of the use of that one, inoffensive, nuanced word that you've been trained to not like.
I may not like at all the goblinkin changes WotC is making and wish to hot hell that they didn't make them, but damn if they didn't have the RIGHT to make them. Context be damned. Context be damned to all ****. It's called art and being creative.
Context is everything. Context. Is. Everything. If you are making a creature from folklore or mythology be almost completely unrecognizable in the way that you're using it when compared to the source material creature . . . why are you even using that creature? Make something new! Name it a "smeerp" if you want. Create something completely unique and give it a unique name. If it doesn't pass the Duck Test, it's not a Duck (Goblin), and you should name it something else.
Being creative and appropriating a creature for name recognition and changing almost everything about it are not the same thing.
And, in my opinion at least, making Goblinoids have Fey Ancestry in D&D is pretty creative, because it lets them fit into the broader D&D Multiverse even better (again, assuming that they are at least in some way related to the Unseelie Archfey).
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Or you houserule it. Boom, elves are not fey. Done. Same if you want Kalashtar to be fey in origin, have Tieflings come from fey bloodlines instead of infernal ones or have Kenku have a little or a lot of fey in them. Make it so. /Picard voice
The whole setting agnostic move as some present it is a bit silly. Are they not going to have any kind of non-genetic (for lack of a better word) info at all? That seems dreadfully boring. But if they do, how is that not something that may differ from one setting to the next? I'm pretty sure there will be 'cultural' or 'flavour' parts in the writeups, just no references to specific settings, a nod to the whole multiverse being a big place and things being as malleable as the multiverse is big, and maybe some boilerplate text about things being more like guidelines than actual rules.
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I always wonder why people question the reason for the existence of various Elves (just an example) in a campaign world but humans always get a pass. There is absolutely no reason for any real world creature to exist on any world other than Earth, but we just accept that Forgotten Realms, Eberron and everywhere else has humans, cats, dogs and all manner of creatures that shouldn't be there, but fret over Elves and Dwarves and where they do and don't fit in.
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Goblins, Hobs, and Bugbears/Bugaboos from the folklore were always Fey. In fact, they were about as "fey" as you could get. (Changelings were too, so it also makes sense that they're fey in this book.)
And goblinoid identity in D&D hasn't really evolved that much in the past 50ish years beyond "Tolkien-ish always evil mooks that you can kill without feeling bad about it", so I like having more flavor on them, especially if it echoes the folklore more. (I've been told that 4e had something similar, but due to not having played that edition, I myself cannot confirm this. Can anyone that has played it/read the 4e books confirm this?)
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There's references to goblins in the feywild, and that they had an ancient empire that extended into the feywild, but what I have access to doesn't particularly echo folklore goblins.
making them fey makes them inherently not setting agnostic.
Yes I already knew that irl folklore goblins are hairy fairies, half of the stuff in DnD based off of irl lore doesn't match the irl lore anyway, so I don't care.
Making them fey completely changes the game-feel the goblinkin have, which you can likely tell I heavily dislike.
Just heavily annoyed that somehow adding more presumptions about a race (that goblins have fey DnD or whatever) is being advertised as making them somehow more agnostic to the settings. As well as so pissed they're messing with the goblinkin races in general. They were fine the way they were but WotC is determined to "fix" what isn't broken.
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Putting them in the game at all is inherently not setting agnostic.
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According to WotC, only the PHB content has to be available for all settings they publish according to their The 5e Design Philosophy… ilosophy… osophy…. Everything else, including races, classes, and subclasses and not intended to be “setting agnostic.”
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Okay, you're making a lot of assumptions here and leaping to conclusions. A few points:
First, this book is for setting agnostic races and monsters specific within the D&D Multiverse. It's not about making the races more "setting agnostic", it's about including the setting agnostic races in the book (Goblinoids are setting agnostic, and have been for ever in D&D). Saying "this book is for setting agnostic creatures" is not the same as "we are making all the races in this book be more setting agnostic". Sure, they have made a few of them more setting agnostic than they were before (Shifters and Changelings, specifically), but that does not mean that all of them are.
Secondly, what "game-feel" did Goblinoids have before? Because it was almost completely "evil mooks that follow evil gods that you can kill and feel good about killing". They had some minor cultural stuff in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk (which isn't setting agnostic, so they excluded it from this book), but didn't have much other "game-feel" to them. Adding Fey Ancestry to them makes them adds more "game-feel" to them, and gives them more of a story than they had before. (Goblinoids in the Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk used to have a whole different pantheon, but then that pantheon was conquered and mostly killed off by Maglubiyet, who took over the Goblinoid races. Adding Fey Ancestry to the Goblinoids hints that their previous "pantheon" might have been Archfey, possibly of the Unseelie Court. This actually makes sense based on what little we know of the previous Goblinoid pantheon, with the vestige of a dead goblinoid god creating nilbogs, being a sort of trickster spirit that fits really well with the overall theme of Fey.)
Third, in my opinion, it's generally a good thing to keep creatures taken from mythology and folklore similar to how they appear in their source material. If you don't use them as presented, and don't build onto them in some interesting way . . . why would you even use those creatures in the first place? Make up something else, don't appropriate a creature from a culture and decontextualize it to the point that it has next-to-no resemblance of the source creature. It's fine to make small changes here or there (D&D Genies are fairly similar to their source material, but slightly changed to fit the Elemental Planes better and have Genasi children, for example), but completely removing the cultural context is generally not a good thing.
tl;dr - Changing Goblinoids to be descended from Fey does not mean that they did this change to make the races more setting agnostic (they were already setting-agnostic, existing in most D&D worlds already, from Exandria and Eberron to Faerun and Oerth), and it is generally a good thing to have creatures taken from folklore/mythology to have some major similarities with their source material.
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Well, until this new book, that is...
I presume this is just hyperbole, but no this isn't my opinion, at the very least not exactly.
Giving goblinkins the fey ancestry trait explicitly states something about your world lore the moment you put that in your game. That they come from the fey, that they come from that world. That fey exist in that setting at all. Them being a PC race implies that these people go out and adventure, that somehow they got onto your normal people plane from their fairy people plane (or whatever equivalent the in the cosmology is of either of these). That inherently makes it not setting-agnostic. Which I'm pointing out is contradictory to the supposed mission of this book. That was what my comment was about, that the mission of the book and the content is contradictory. The big drive behind it was that I don't like the book and a realization that it doesn't make sense popped into my head, so I posted it.
I don't play in faerun. The only time I technically have is when I played LMoP, and I've only ever played like ~9 sessions in that module. ~3 of those being the start because they were pick up games. That's the only time. Every other time has been in my homebrew world or the kitchen-sink setting of the oneshot server I'm on. Forgotten Realms is honestly boring, mostly just because that's the only lore you see people chat about. I don't care much about it otherwise.
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You know, interestingly enough giving goblinoids Fey Ancestry makes them seem more rounded out and able to be a people unto themselves rather than just antagonistic cannon fodder. I think there's a difference between setting agnostic and genre agnostic going on here. Adding a few more folk to the fey umbrella, especially those that seem Unseelie, completes that whole family tree in a way that makes it more whole, in my opinion. And I think having a balanced Fey family tree is something that IS setting agnostic, but it is not GENRE agnostic. I think it is fully within the parameters of vaguely fantasy to have a fully fleshed out Fey family tree just as it is to have a fully fleshed out Fiend family tree or Draconic family tree.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I should have typed “universal,” not “setting agnostic.”
Notice that none of the races updated in this new book are PHB content? The Content in Volo’s, Xanathar’s, Tasha’s, Mordenkeinen’s, & Fizban’s (and obviously all setting books like SCAG, Eberron, Strixhaven, Wildemount, etc.) is not considered by WotC to be “universal” in nature. Even the magic items in the DMG and the Monsters from the MM are not guaranteed/required to be “universal” to all settings published for 5e by WotC. So the bog-standard PHB Dragonborn and Tieflings exist in all settings according to WotC, but not necessarily their variants. Since none of the goblinoid races are PHB content, playable Goblinoids are not guaranteed by WotC to exist in all settings.
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As monsters, yes, but not as playable races. That’s part of why I fell in love with Mystara and panned on FR & Greyhawk, it had options for goblinoid PCs. And at that time “goblinoids” included Kobolds, Orcs, Gnolls, Ogres, and Trolls.
This updated content may be “setting agnostic,” but that doesn’t mean “universal.” They are not tied to any one specific setting, but that doesn’t mean they have to exist in every setting.
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I agree that they don't have to exist in every D&D setting 100%. Even settings where some goblinoids exist don't need all of them to exist (Goblins exist in Ravnica, but Bugbears and Hobgoblins don't). However, I do think that almost all D&D settings that do have Goblinoids should allow for them to be a playable race in those settings, unless it's a "5e Forgotten Realms Gnolls" situation where they're basically demons in all but name and probably shouldn't be listed as Humanoid creatures. I also agree that "setting agnostic" and "universal" are also very different distinctions. There's a ton of "setting agnostic" stuff in D&D that can be used in basically all settings, but are purposefully excluded from some of them, but there's very few "universal" parts of D&D (Humans, I guess? Almost every race is "setting agnostic", but doesn't exist in every single D&D setting. Is there any D&D setting where Humans don't exist?)
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That's not what the marketing has said, but suuuuuuuuuuuuuuurrrrrre.
"3 and a half feet of concentrated bastard, nyeheheheh." is the best way to explain the goblin (the short one, specifically) game-feel to the uninitiated. Do you play goblins often? Just because they had no game-feel to you because you haven't bothered to think of them past a random encounter table doesn't mean they didn't have any at all. It also doesn't mean that others don't enjoy the game-feel you brush off.
the over-all goblinkin feel is "grungy". You walk into one of their camps, caves, or the like and you're abound with rusty traps, ambushes, and a shit ton of angry gobbos of varying sizes. A bunch of them might be drunk and already kinda hurt cuz you interrupted some party they were having and they were having a drunken brawl amongst each other because the mostly percussive music got the mood up. They're monstrous, tribal races who are against the world of adventurers who are waltzing up to their houses and breaking their pots. Oh these guys had shinies? My shinies now. They take what they got and make the most out of it to survive. Grungy, angry, slight penchant for cruelty, simply not nice by human standards but not exactly evil. Now the greens have more of a penchant for cowardliness and being selfish, the reds lean more towards valuing the group but their specific group tho, and the furred ones are more solitary. But they're all still nice ol' thugs and share the common traits of the above.
Some folks online like to make the goblins (short ones specifically) cute, infantilized mascots. Which is fine for some, but they also generally like to keep the trait of the "finder's keeper's" attitude goblins have.
Making them fey just turns them all to the hairy, prankster, house spirit thing from irl lore, completely tossing everything out into the trash for a completely different feel to the goblinkin.
[REDACTED] I may not like at all the goblinkin changes WotC is making and wish to hot hell that they didn't make them, but damn if they didn't have the RIGHT to make them. Context be damned. Context be damned to all ****. It's called art and being creative.
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They already were able to be people unto themselves, just because your perception of them didn't evolve past the encounter table doesn't mean they weren't able to be peoples in their own right. If to you they were always only cannon fodder, then that is the fault of you never using them as anything else or never thinking about them past their monster stats or your DM doing these things.
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Spicy take. So yeah, I get that you don't like this new direction, but honestly that's no reason to start finding "fault" in any of this. That implies that I was or am somehow doing something wrong when it's just a matter of taste. I like this new direction, you don't. Simple as that. No need to take it personal.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
No, it really doesn't. Fey does not mean Disney. Plenty of goblins were quite malicious.
Really? Care to quote anyone from WotC about that? Because never in all of its marketing has it said "we are making the races in this book more setting agnostic". Instead, they just said "the races that will be included in this book are the ones that aren't setting-specific". They just chose the ones that they didn't think were setting specific (including the races that primarily appeared in one setting over the others that conceptually should be setting agnostic) and put them in the book, with some revisions. Not all the revisions were about them being setting agnostic or making them more setting agnostic, most of them were about having them be more in line with the more modern design space and their current approach of the races.
Or, are you just making stuff up because your argument is weak and you can't find anything to back up what you're saying?
I primarily play in Eberron, Exandria, and my homebrew world, all of which have a unique take of goblinoids and give them more in-depth and interesting cultures than "they're just evil little people with big noses and ears that you can kill without feeling bad about it" that the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and much of the D&D Multiverse has chosen to treat them.
I do use goblins in a more interesting way than the core of D&D has for most of its history. I don't "play" goblins very often, because I am a Forever DM that basically never gets to play, but I do run them often, include them prominently in my campaigns and worlds, and do have nuance with who they are. (Goblinoids in my homebrew world are fairly often "evil", but it's entirely cultural, and not in the "kill on sight because they're basically demons ruled by an evil god" kind of evil, but in the "they're extreme religious zealots, xenophobic bigots, and idealistic purists that have attempted genocide and eugenics multiple times in the past few centuries, and more need to be taught the error of their ways" kind of evil. Their culture contains goblinoids of all the alignments, and other diversity in opinions and personality traits that people tend to have, it's just the dominant goblinoid culture in my world that tends to make them bigger jerks than others.)
You have clearly never read a product about or played/run a campaign in Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, or Mystara if that's your view on all goblin(oid)s in the D&D Multiverse. That's certainly a type of goblinoids in some D&D settings, but they're not the only one, or even the majority one in 5e settings. "Goblin Slayer"-style goblins are easily the minority of goblins in official 5e D&D settings.
I have literally only ever seen one do that for D&D goblins, and that's JoCat, and his version of goblins (which are adorable) do not represent the overall attitude of people that change goblinoids in their D&D campaigns/settings. And even if they were . . . that would change absolutely nothing about the discussion we're having. It's a red herring, and not even that accurate of one.
No, it does not. It literally doesn't. They aren't "Fey" (creature type), and instead have "Fey Ancestry", like Elves and Half-Elves. Do Elves having "Fey Ancestry" make them be trickster house spirits like many folklore elves? No, it doesn't, so this ridiculous slippery slope fallacy doesn't apply to Goblinoids.
(Also, "some people make goblins cute" and "goblins are now descended from fey" are not a cause-effect scenario. They're barely even correlated, and only because they're both on the vague topic of "goblins". "Fey" does not mean "cute". Most fey from folklore and from official D&D books are genuinely terrifying. Especially the Unseelie Court, but the Seelie Court is scary, too.)
Oh, seriously? You throw up arms about that? The usage of a word you don't happen to like in a nuanced explanation of why taking creatures out of context isn't generally a good thing? Maybe you should do some introspection as to why the use of that one word made you freak out.
Note: "Appropriation" is not always about offense, it's often not about saying "you don't have the right to use that part of another person's culture", it's almost always more nuanced than what you seem to think of the word, and it's always a valid complaint when applied accurately. Which I did in that post, by the way. Just in case you decided to stop reading after you saw that word because you've been taught by a certain wing of the media that anyone that uses that word apparently is automatically wrong and the rest of what they're saying deserves to be ignored because of the use of that one, inoffensive, nuanced word that you've been trained to not like.
Context is everything. Context. Is. Everything. If you are making a creature from folklore or mythology be almost completely unrecognizable in the way that you're using it when compared to the source material creature . . . why are you even using that creature? Make something new! Name it a "smeerp" if you want. Create something completely unique and give it a unique name. If it doesn't pass the Duck Test, it's not a Duck (Goblin), and you should name it something else.
Being creative and appropriating a creature for name recognition and changing almost everything about it are not the same thing.
And, in my opinion at least, making Goblinoids have Fey Ancestry in D&D is pretty creative, because it lets them fit into the broader D&D Multiverse even better (again, assuming that they are at least in some way related to the Unseelie Archfey).
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