What I find most ridiculous about the whole thing is, from the Joe Starr quote Davyd posted on the first page, " it's a book that's meant to open up D&D lore a little bit so that you can use anything that you want in your homebrew world." The stated point is to make official lore modular so anything can be pulled from one setting and plugged into another as is with no tweaking whatsoever to make it fit neatly into any other setting. Do you know what the downside of making everything canonically setting generic is? It officially and canonically waters down everything, including the original settings which are now less original. The very idea of making official lore "homebrew friendly" is a self contradicting concept. Nobody should need official lore for their homebrew because then is isn't homebrew, it's official lore. All this is really accomplishing is a reverse of the original status quo where settings and lore with any specific and unique traits are now "homebrew" retcons of the original ones that have been officially retconned into being generic and nonspecific.
Congratulations, WotC, you've applied the GURPS philosophy to D&D. Which is something anybody could have done on their own and plenty of people have been doing for decades because that's what homebrew is. Just do the same thing that's worked for as long as D&D has existed and say "your game can work however you want it to."
This book doesn't change the setting specific lore, said lore will just be contained to the books on those settings. We're getting setting agnostic shifters and changelings, but Eberron books still contain Eberron specific lore for them. We're getting more setting specific elves and dwarves, but Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and the countless Forgotten Realms adventures still contain setting specific lore for them
WotC is removing the setting specific lore from the books that aren't meant to be setting specific, but they're not touching anything in the books that are setting specific.
My point is that "lore neutral" races is completely unnecessary. A game I've been playing for the better part of a year now has a shifter PC in a homebrew world; the DM and player didn't need a book to tell them how to do that and on top of that I'm pretty sure there is no official lore anywhere for four and a half foot tall, slimy pink skinned axolotl themed shifters. The DM had their standard pre-game one on one with the player, asked what kind of character she wanted to play, then said "Okay, here are some ways we can work that into this world."
My point is that it's superfluous at best because anything trying to be marketed as "official homebrew" is a waste of time. Homebrew adaptations don't need official help. That's why it's called homebrew. I think WotC would do better publishing more setting specific content, across a number of settings, that players and DMs can cherry pick for races, lore, etc as they please or just have another option of a fully fleshed out world to play in. And even within an official setting you're never going to find two moderate to long running games in which the same setting looks and feels exactly alike despite sharing the same locations, NPCs, etc to begin with. I've seen a lot of folks on this very forum, as well as elsewhere, who prefer to use published adventure modules for their games. I've never seen two descriptions of the same module being played the same exact way, and most would are only recognizable as being the "same" setting and base plot from the names of locations and significant NPCs. Those players and DMs didn't need a published guide to make it easier for them to adapt a scripted adventure plot to their group and often a setting that isn't even the Forgotten Realms; they just said, "Hey, this is neat! With a few tweaks my group will love it!"
Honestly, I'm rather sure this is a result of WotC having decided some time ago that the idea to make Forgotten Realms the official default setting was not a good idea so they're backpedaling from that without admitting that they think they did something suboptimal in the first place. There are arguments both ways on the subject. I figure they went with including FR lore as default in the core books as a way of introducing ready made, good to go setting and lore for new players so they don't need to worry about that while still learning the game. Fine, that works, and they still have the well stated caveat that any DM can do whatever they want with setting, lore, and even rules to make it all fit the game they want to run. Then D&D got a huge surge in popularity (including sales) that has continued to trend upwards since. That upswing started shortly after 5e's introduction so the system itself clearly has an influence, and the hugely popular Critical Role started a year later and launched the trend of D&D live play campaigns as a popular form of entertainment media. Not only CR but also a vast majority of the myriad other live play streams and podcasts out there use original homebrew settings (personal example, CR was not the first live play I consumed, but only one of over a half dozen long running ones I have enjoyed was set in an official setting). A lot of new players who became interested in the hobby because of these original settings approached D&D with a desire to either play in those settings or invent their own unique worlds and really don't care about Forgotten Realms (this is why Vax now competes with Drizzt over the king of the edgelord fanboys/fangirls title). And, honestly, there really isn't much content that needs any explanation or official assistance to divorce from FR in the core books.
The issue, Flushmaster, is that this book and this approach isn't for you. It's not for me. It's not for anyone with a recognizable name on this forum.
This book? This approach? This whole design shift from Wizards? It's for the person with three posts to theior name who posts a thread on the forums asking "Hey...is it okay if I change what harengon look like?" People too new and nervous to feel comfortable with changing their games around at a whim, people who feel like what's written in the books is the game and only Experts can homebrew and not have it blow up in their faces. I.e. the strong majority of Wizards' customer base, at this point.
Remember, Flush - you're an Advanced User. I'm an Advanced User. Most of the people in this thread are Advanced Users. Wizards doesn't need to worry about us. They barely need to write books for us. People who can bang out an entire homebrew base class, several species, and a slew of new spells and items for those classes/species in the space of an afternoon, do absolutely zero playtesting on it, eyeball them and go "yeah...that seems 'bout right", plop it all in their game, and be more-or-less correct? They don't need Wizards' help.
People who have to ask the Internet if it's okay to make harengon look less like Loony Tunes characters before they'll feel comfortable modifying the aesthetics of a species from the book? They need help. They need J-Craw and the rest to tell them it's okay to do what you have obviously long since internalized that it's okay to do. J-Craw is on record as saying that a surprisingly big piece of his job is constantly - constantly - working to remind/inform people that the books are a guideline and a starting point, not the entirety of D&D. That's not how any other form of game works, and he has to fight against people assuming the books are the game at every turn.
The Forgotten Realms is being de-emphasized in part because of all the new streams with their own setting books on Kickstarter and people wanting to follow along, and in part because of how utterly impossible it is for any of those new players who aren't Advanced Users to try and follow along and keep up with fifty god damned years of incomprehensible, contradictory, and impossible to research back lore. For the first time in the game's history, D&D is not being introduced to new players nigh-exclusively by extensively experienced Advanced User grognards who've been there through every edition, know the Realms by heart, and have been chattering the newbie's ear off about it for five years already anyways. For the first time in the game's history, people who've never heard of the game before, or never cared, are growing interested and picking it up without the intervention of Old Guys, and that's changing pretty much everything about how Wizards has to approach the game.
So. In summary, I suppose: just put all the Forgotten Realms lore back in. Every argument you just made for why they shouldn't have taken it out applies to putting it right back in. You know it by heart, and presumably your game's not choking on it the way a lot of other folks' games do. So put it back in, and remember - your level of D&D Competence is exceptional, not normal. They ain't writing this junk for you, they're writing it for normies we can barely comprehend.
The only objection to making something non-setting specific is that it can stunt development of lore and the official help provided in making interesting characters. A race/class/monster/etc that does really well in Eberron probably won't work very well in Faerun. To make it work in both settings and all the others, you have to be very good at designing it or just accept that it will be "okay" in all. It's hard to tell how much a generic approach to things like this would actually have held things back. It's possible that it's not hindering it at all.
On the other hand, it is much easier for a person to pick up a setting specific feature that they like and adapt it to their own setting than it is to build new stuff onto a stump. The more information you have to work with, the more you can just adapt rather than trying to invent new stuff - it's much easier to prune and reshape than to grow.
I'd prefer that they did really in depth stuff with the various races, monsters, etc, and just let me adjust it, than to give generic "one-size-fits-all" stuff that still leaves the heavy lifting for me to do.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
The issue, Linklite, is that doing "really in depth stuff" with various races, monsters, etc., is that the "really in depth stuff" becomes a straitjacket that stops anyone else from using it if they don't use it exactly as written, unless they're an Advanced User themself and can do the work of detangling the critter from its backdrop.
Like, presume the Monster Manual had fifteen whole-ass pages of beholder lore explaining in great and excessive detail the exact ways in which beholders exist in Faerun, how they came to be in Faerun, their existence and influence over Faerun, and the precise way in which they act while in Faerun. Presume the book goes to exhaustive length to tie the critters as closely and inextricably to Faerun as possible, with explicit ties to a dozen different gods, a deep impact on the world's history that has in turn shaped their own attitudes and actions, and at least twenty callouts to specific events in Faerun's history and their impact on beholderkin.
Lots of folks in this thread and many others would go "**** yeah! PERFECT! That's the kinda shit I'm talking about! MMMM, look at all that rich, meaty, juicy lore! So tasty! More please, Wizards!"
Counterpoint: absolutely none of that is helpful for the vast majority of people who'd run the critter and a great deal of it is an active hindrance. Even people playing in Faerun don't really need more than "Beholders are intruders in our reality, creatures from outside the Prime Material plane that seek goals difficult for mortals to comprehend," perhaps a paragraph or two on typical beholder antics, and then the critter's stat block and lair. The MM information on any given dragon type is honestly pretty spot-on. "This is where they like to live, this is how they often act, this is what we usually envision their desires to be, and this is how somebody can piss them off." Enough to let a DM figure out how to slide the critter into an adventure and have it make enough sense for the players to grok it and have fun. All the rest is narrative wankery.
And I mean that in the most literal sense I can - it's wankery. It's gratuitous self-pleasuring on WotC's part, offered up for lore hounds who love indulging in lore deep dives despite them having no practical positive impact on running games and quite often a significant negative impact. The only people who're going to catch that the DM totally included the bits in the lore about how the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was) reshaped beholder culture (beholders have culture? They're paranoiac megalomaniacal aberrant eyeball monsters, you have to have a society to have a culture!) are other lore hounds who've wallowed in the same lore and want validation. People who want that kind of intense deep dive into WotC's Faerunian lore are better served buying official D&D novels rather than game books.
Fizban's dragon book is a fantastic example. The Monster Manual information on dragons was great. Pretty much exactly what any DM needs to run a dragon in their game. Fizban's book turning every dragon everywhere into a pseudomythical, semi-divine being that exists across all of space and time as innumerable multiversal echoes of itself, more omnipresent and powerful than any actual god, with the final goal of absorbing all its echoes to become The One? Completely, utterly unneeded. It's a couple hundred pages of narrative wankery, and its mere existence makes it very difficult for me to make use of dragons in my Dungeons and Dragons game unless I make a point of beating all that garbage out of my players' heads. Anyone who's read Fizban's book assumes that's how all dragons are now, forever, and that's simply untrue. That big steaming lore dump is actively counterfactual to my own homebrew settings and any official/third-party setting I like to make stories in, and disentangling any useful information from that great brick brick of a lore turd is a job for an Advanced User.
"Really In Depth Lore" is not useful to running a game. It is not significantly different than a novel - it's something people read because they like reading about that stuff, not because they need it to run a game. That information certainly has its place in the overall D&D lexicon. That place is not, and never will be, in the core game books.
There have been several lengthy threads about whether cultural qualities should be in racial entries or not. I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone about the racial ASI arguments. "It's a book that's meant to open up D&D lore a little bit so that you can use anything that you want in your homebrew world" isn't the only reason for WotC to release M³. That approach will be the standard policy going forward though, so it makes sense to mention that specifically (and it obviously goes for mixing and matching between non-homebrew worlds too) - it's not just about lore neutral races in this book, it's about books having lore neutral races period from now on. I don't like the floating ASIs only option, so I'm going to at least formulate suggested ones for my campaigns. I do like setting-neutral writeups for races, but I'd like the setting books to provide more info. I like that more races and monsters get crammed into a single book for those only just starting out, even though I already have both books that got collated. Things are a bit more complex than just opening stuff up for homebrew.
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Source Books should be as setting agnostic as possible. Setting lore should be found in setting books along with setting specific backgrounds, Sub Races, Monsters and the like.
Source Books should be as setting agnostic as possible. Setting lore should be found in setting books along with setting specific backgrounds, Sub Races, Monsters and the like.
Agreed.
I really do not get how people can even go with a straight face that more open things harm "homebrew" or something. It's really simple.
If you want a game with a rich lore from "X" specific setting, just look for a game that is set in that setting. If you want a game where you'll never encounter a good kind Yuan-Ti, you'll still be able to find those games.
However, now people who want to play a good, kind Yuan-Ti won't have to deal with some DM going "Can't cause book says evil" just because the book says that when their world isn't even in the setting that lore comes from.
No one is looking at a less restrictive version of the character and going "I'll never be able to customize this to my world", it's about making those folks who are very bound by "But it says this" not have that as a way of shutting down ideas for THAT reason alone. If you're still wanting Yuan-Ti to always be evil and not be in that setting, you can still do that.
I really do not see any realistic circumstance that having a "generic, lore less" option hurts either people who want to focus on lore, or those who don't.
The issue, Flushmaster, is that this book and this approach isn't for you. It's not for me. It's not for anyone with a recognizable name on this forum.
This book? This approach? This whole design shift from Wizards? It's for the person with three posts to theior name who posts a thread on the forums asking "Hey...is it okay if I change what harengon look like?" People too new and nervous to feel comfortable with changing their games around at a whim, people who feel like what's written in the books is the game and only Experts can homebrew and not have it blow up in their faces. I.e. the strong majority of Wizards' customer base, at this point. ]
I guess since I think of myself as a lifelong learner I'll be reading this book with the noobs? Just saying, I'm largely in favor of the book, and think it may faciliitate a DM going "and so can you!" to an interested player better than the existent trove of books. I'm thinking it might be handy.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
@Yurei, I get what you're saying. I don't always agree with all of the opinions I see you post (though I do agree with a good bit of them) but I found your colorful wording there particularly entertaining and largely agreeable. Particularly about people very new to the concept of D&D (and by extension any TTRPG) in general literally not knowing what they're doing. We were all there at some point, trying to get a mental grip on this new, fascinating and dauntingly complex game. My first direct experience with D&D was guesting in a caffeine fueled "all nighter" party with some friends in high school, alternating between 2nd edition D&D and Mariokart64 and the original Super Smash Brothers while consuming medically inadvisable quantities of soda and junk food until we all passed out around when the sun came up. I had no clue what was going on (I don't think I ever properly grasped how THAC0 works), and I didn't realize until much later that they were playing a joke on me by handing me a sheet for a Kobold fighter. But it was fun. A few years later when I joined a group playing a 3.0 game in college and then shifted to 3.5 shortly later I learned the basics from experienced players and did a lot of reading myself. I read the PHB cover to cover, then the DMG. I kept my Monster Manual sitting on the back of my toilet and would read a few entries every time I took a dump. For a while I was a regular and frequent poster on the official WotC D&D forums, back when they still had them, and was quite proud that I managed to attain "one of us" credibility with the other hardcore nerds that probably spent a bit too much time on there. I actually understood the 3.5 grappling rules and made a villain NPC that used them exactly once, at which point my players asked me to please never subject them to that again. I still have about a dozen 3.5 books in a box in the closet about ten feet from where I currently sit, even though I haven't actually opened one of them in recent memory. I was once asked to run a game, with no advance notice, for mostly people who had never actually played when the only materials at hand were a few sets of dice and character sheets printed out from a downloaded PDF and I was able to build fifth level characters for everyone from my memory of the rules while also scribbling down mostly accurate, half improvised monster stat blocks and the map for a rudimentary dungeon crawl over the course of about an hour. I am aware that most people who play D&D do not dive into it to such an extent.I also have significantly above average knowledge retention for material that I read and I've had enough higher math classes (even if I didn't get the best grades in anything involving trigonometry or calculus) to recognize the patterns and formulae that make up the mechanics of the rules and thus can hear somebody describe a concept that they want for a class, spell, feat, etc and slap something together on the spot that's more or less balanced like you described.
When I came back to D&D about a year ago, after roughly fifteen years of not playing, I was a bit suspicious of 5e in general, but as I actually looked into it my opinion was (and still is) "Wow, they took all the good stuff from 3.5 and trimmed away a bunch of overly complex math so things are easier to learn and everything goes quicker and smoother. This is awesome!" The biggest challenge I've encountered to getting new people to try D&D, by far, is convincing them to not be scared away by all the "nerd stuff" that makes up the rules.
[At this point I will note that I just typed a multi-paragraph rant about how most people who get confused by the rules haven't bothered to even try actually reading them in the first place but then I realized it's not really on topic so I cut it and saved it for when it will inevitably become relevant elsewhere.]
You don't even need good knowledge retention to understand the concept of lore being malleable for your game. We are literally sitting at a table (or in an online chat channel or whatever) and describing make believe scenarios while using rules to determine success at challenging things with dice. Rules aside, those scenarios are literally whatever the DM says they are. The very first paragraph of the first chapter of the PHB describes this. Verbatim: "It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination." The focus of the game could be an aggressive tribe of goblins raiding a frontier village, or it could be that the local girl scout troupe has been dabbling in some infernal magic and are using summoned imps to extort people under threat of burning down their homes and businesses if they don't buy a buttload of cookies so they can have the highest sales totals in the kingdom. I honestly find it difficult to understand how anybody who actually reads that could be so dense as to believe that they are somehow not allowed to decide that dragons in their game are actually aliens from another planet who fart fire rather than breathe it out of their mouths if that's what they think is fun for their game. Seriously, do they think somebody is going to interrupt their session and arrest them for imagining wrong? If somebody is that dense then there's no amount of open ended wording that can help them grow an imagination.
What a lot of people is pick and choose0 lore and other inspirations from one or more campaign settings, books, comics, movies, and even weird dreams that they mash up into "this'll be cool" and set their game there. And every one of those sources they use has at least some elements that are just tossed out. I have honestly never heard of somebody saying "I want to use warforged in my world but I don't want to use the entire Eberron setting and all of the lore from it so I guess I can't." They say something like "I'm using warforged rules for the race of magical construct/robot people in my setting. Don't worry about Eberron lore, I made up my own origin story for them. The racial stats are literally the only thing I'm using from that entire setting. I didn't even bother reading most of it myself because I was only interested in the magitech androids." And they could plan on using their versions of characters and NPCs that are mechanically warforged to pose Asimov inspired philosophical questions about the nature of intelligent life and free will or they could just want fantasy stand-ins for intelligent AI killing machines a la the Terminator franchise.
Yes, there are plenty of players and DMs out there who have a good idea of what they want to do with their own setting and just need some crunchy bits that they can plug in there because they haven't and aren't interested in going full nerdlord and actually learning the mechanics of 5e D&D from a game design perspective to make their own classes, races, spells, etc. That doesn't mean that it's necessary to strip away all the lore from things. I have not seen a single person complain about there being too much existing lore about Aasimar in official 5e publications. I have seen plenty of complaints about the extent of officially provided Aasimar lore being less than one full page and then one paragraph for each of the subraces with their respective stats and traits. All the complaints I've seen about Tiefling lore pretty much boil down to "there isn't enough of it" because they want more options [apparently] without bothering to come up with their own original lore for characters with Abyssal rather than Infernal heritage. This is not a situation of "we need less lore getting in the way." For a setting agnostic sourcebook the writers should be presenting more lore for each race: a page or two for each of two or three different approaches (possibly taken from existing settings or just made up for that book by people who are professionally creative) so that players and DMs can pick one that they like as a basis for what they want to use in their game.
So, after a bunch of ranting I'm saying that homebrewers can always just ignore lore if we don't want it, but those who want lore to sample for ingredients to their homebrew stew gain nothing from the official material deliberately avoiding the inclusion of lore like it's some kind of creative herpes that people are afraid of contracting.
Myself I'm looking forward to these racial changes bringing older races up to date with the new ones, I just wish DDB let you order the gift set which with already owning 2 of the books I wouldn't have to buy them again but know I'm waiting till May
Myself I'm looking forward to these racial changes bringing older races up to date with the new ones, I just wish DDB let you order the gift set which with already owning 2 of the books I wouldn't have to buy them again but know I'm waiting till May
That's definitely a WotC permission thing, not a DDB decision. None of WotC's digital partners has MMM available in any form until the individual release. I'm really curious as to WotC's sales on this product since, acknowledging this is partially not being able to get the books in stores in time for holiday shopping, it just seemed like bundling a "preview of the future" with books most people "who care about the future" already owned seems sorta bone headed in the community relations front. That said, May's not that long away, but when it releases buyers will have a lot of perspective on the book already and likely to have a firmer opinion on whether to buy it or not than any other book released, it's just a really curious move and I'm pretty sure there's a product manager who's weathering team meetings like an executive in a Robocop boardroom.
Also curious how DDB will manage access to the new monsters vs their original incarnations. As I'm anticipating there will likely be several products between now and 2024 or whenever WotC CD Project D&D 2024 RED is unveiled that will "nudge" PHB and MM and heck maybe even some DMG+XGtE content. I think Tasha's was implemented fairly well (for what was implemented) in terms of character management. But there isn't a monster manager similar to the character management toggles so ... maybe part of the rework that includes improving the search function?
I honestly find it difficult to understand how anybody who actually reads that could be so dense as to believe that they are somehow not allowed to decide that dragons in their game are actually aliens from another planet who fart fire rather than breathe it out of their mouths if that's what they think is fun for their game. Seriously, do they think somebody is going to interrupt their session and arrest them for imagining wrong? If somebody is that dense then there's no amount of open ended wording that can help them grow an imagination.
Mmm ... this is kind of judgmental, no? Creativity is a skill. Like any other skill sometimes one has natural talent, sometimes one must practice in order to achieve some measure of aptitude. I've seen plenty of people who just were not confident in their skill and thus wanted to do everything right so they wouldn't look foolish in front of others when doing a new activity. Once they got some confidence, they bloomed and were coming up with cool characters and other things. If they had run into such judgmental attitude, they might have bounced off of the hobby altogether.
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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!
People like that need more lore to use as training wheels while they get a feel for the game in general and how they want to play their game in particular. Material that has been intentionally stripped of any lore to be "homebrew friendly" does absolutely nothing to help such people.
People like that need more lore to use as training wheels while they get a feel for the game in general and how they want to play their game in particular. Material that has been intentionally stripped of any lore to be "homebrew friendly" does absolutely nothing to help such people.
All the more reason for them to buy a setting book that has that information.
That's my point. And also part of that point is that more lore "options," which can also be called inspirations, seeds, or whatever else you want to call them, should be included with all material for players and DMs to consider using, or use as a starting point to get their own imaginations going. The official word that I quoted from Davyd's quoted excerpt of an interview says that the official plan with MotMM is to provide rules that can be used a la plug and play into homebrew games without the complications or inconveniences of pre-existing lore. That's the opposite of giving people ideas to work with, which encourages and fosters homebrew creativity.
If you don't like the official lore attached to a race or class but you like the mechanics (traits, class features, etc) then just toss the lore and dress up the crunchy bits that you do like however you please. Like my above example of using the rules for warforged as any sort of magitech intelligent construct /android race that could range from "I Robot" to "Terminator" in flavor in games that have absolutely nothing to do with anything else from Eberron. Or, for a Forgotten Realms example, I'll quote Yurei's comment about "the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was)" as a great example of official lore that many folks just looked at and said "*$%# that" and pretended it never existed. Seriously, all I know or have cared to learn about the Spellplague is it's some ridiculous cataclysmic event that put Drizzt's girlfriend into a terminal coma as part of a canon explanation within the FR novels for the magic system changing from 3.5 to 4e rules. Then a few books and a narrative time skip later a reincarnated Cattie-Brie sees a bunch of wizards of questionable stability shooting off spells like bootleg fireworks at a hillbilly hoedown to celebrate how magic has suddenly and inexplicably reverted to more or less the same way it was before "the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was)" when 5e was launched.
Removing or just not making more lore does not foster more creative homebrew. Like Yurei said, most folks playing D&D aren't the "Advanced User" types that want to spend the time learning the ins and outs of the design theory the rules are built on and then spending more time inventing an entire fully fleshed out setting from scratch. If people were doing that en masse they wouldn't also be buying Matt Mercer's books because that's exactly what he did for them with Exandria. And nobody's home game is going to resemble an episode of Critical Role, even amongst the most unoriginal diehard fanboys/fangirls using those Exandria books because everybody is going to put some kind of spin on the official lore and flavor if only subconsciously. More often people are going to do something like take the city of Emon, call it something different and have their group start a campaign with a plot hook based on an obscure episode of The X Files that gets introduced by a reskinned version of The Gentleman (who is a resident of a different Exandrian city) resulting in a campaign that won't resemble the adventures of Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein at all. Those books are absolutely crammed with unique and in depth setting specific lore; check out how many people are buying them and tell me with a straight face that the masses want "setting agnostic" material.
Edit: I am well aware that there is ultimately little to no effect that any of these arguments will have on what actually gets published. I'm making them because I'm a huge nerd with strong opinions about a hobby that I greatly enjoy and not much else to do with my free time. I've already spent about six hours this week actually playing D&D in two different homebrew settings that borrow races, classes, deities and more from numerous official sources and end up looking nothing like any of those "seed" sources in any but the most superficial of ways. I've also been awake for a little over twenty-four hours now and should probably get some sleep before I get completely incoherent with ranting and rambling like a crotchety old grognard gone senile. As a parting thought I will point out that if you're taking the time to read this then I'm not the only one with strong opinions on this stuff. Hooray for the internet.
This discussion is starting to devolve off topic and move into a more general discussion of how lore should be presented and how it's used. If you want to continue that topic, please do so in a new thread
This book doesn't change the setting specific lore, said lore will just be contained to the books on those settings. We're getting setting agnostic shifters and changelings, but Eberron books still contain Eberron specific lore for them. We're getting more setting specific elves and dwarves, but Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide and the countless Forgotten Realms adventures still contain setting specific lore for them
WotC is removing the setting specific lore from the books that aren't meant to be setting specific, but they're not touching anything in the books that are setting specific.
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My point is that "lore neutral" races is completely unnecessary. A game I've been playing for the better part of a year now has a shifter PC in a homebrew world; the DM and player didn't need a book to tell them how to do that and on top of that I'm pretty sure there is no official lore anywhere for four and a half foot tall, slimy pink skinned axolotl themed shifters. The DM had their standard pre-game one on one with the player, asked what kind of character she wanted to play, then said "Okay, here are some ways we can work that into this world."
My point is that it's superfluous at best because anything trying to be marketed as "official homebrew" is a waste of time. Homebrew adaptations don't need official help. That's why it's called homebrew. I think WotC would do better publishing more setting specific content, across a number of settings, that players and DMs can cherry pick for races, lore, etc as they please or just have another option of a fully fleshed out world to play in. And even within an official setting you're never going to find two moderate to long running games in which the same setting looks and feels exactly alike despite sharing the same locations, NPCs, etc to begin with. I've seen a lot of folks on this very forum, as well as elsewhere, who prefer to use published adventure modules for their games. I've never seen two descriptions of the same module being played the same exact way, and most would are only recognizable as being the "same" setting and base plot from the names of locations and significant NPCs. Those players and DMs didn't need a published guide to make it easier for them to adapt a scripted adventure plot to their group and often a setting that isn't even the Forgotten Realms; they just said, "Hey, this is neat! With a few tweaks my group will love it!"
Honestly, I'm rather sure this is a result of WotC having decided some time ago that the idea to make Forgotten Realms the official default setting was not a good idea so they're backpedaling from that without admitting that they think they did something suboptimal in the first place. There are arguments both ways on the subject. I figure they went with including FR lore as default in the core books as a way of introducing ready made, good to go setting and lore for new players so they don't need to worry about that while still learning the game. Fine, that works, and they still have the well stated caveat that any DM can do whatever they want with setting, lore, and even rules to make it all fit the game they want to run. Then D&D got a huge surge in popularity (including sales) that has continued to trend upwards since. That upswing started shortly after 5e's introduction so the system itself clearly has an influence, and the hugely popular Critical Role started a year later and launched the trend of D&D live play campaigns as a popular form of entertainment media. Not only CR but also a vast majority of the myriad other live play streams and podcasts out there use original homebrew settings (personal example, CR was not the first live play I consumed, but only one of over a half dozen long running ones I have enjoyed was set in an official setting). A lot of new players who became interested in the hobby because of these original settings approached D&D with a desire to either play in those settings or invent their own unique worlds and really don't care about Forgotten Realms (this is why Vax now competes with Drizzt over the king of the edgelord fanboys/fangirls title). And, honestly, there really isn't much content that needs any explanation or official assistance to divorce from FR in the core books.
The issue, Flushmaster, is that this book and this approach isn't for you. It's not for me. It's not for anyone with a recognizable name on this forum.
This book? This approach? This whole design shift from Wizards? It's for the person with three posts to theior name who posts a thread on the forums asking "Hey...is it okay if I change what harengon look like?" People too new and nervous to feel comfortable with changing their games around at a whim, people who feel like what's written in the books is the game and only Experts can homebrew and not have it blow up in their faces. I.e. the strong majority of Wizards' customer base, at this point.
Remember, Flush - you're an Advanced User. I'm an Advanced User. Most of the people in this thread are Advanced Users. Wizards doesn't need to worry about us. They barely need to write books for us. People who can bang out an entire homebrew base class, several species, and a slew of new spells and items for those classes/species in the space of an afternoon, do absolutely zero playtesting on it, eyeball them and go "yeah...that seems 'bout right", plop it all in their game, and be more-or-less correct? They don't need Wizards' help.
People who have to ask the Internet if it's okay to make harengon look less like Loony Tunes characters before they'll feel comfortable modifying the aesthetics of a species from the book? They need help. They need J-Craw and the rest to tell them it's okay to do what you have obviously long since internalized that it's okay to do. J-Craw is on record as saying that a surprisingly big piece of his job is constantly - constantly - working to remind/inform people that the books are a guideline and a starting point, not the entirety of D&D. That's not how any other form of game works, and he has to fight against people assuming the books are the game at every turn.
The Forgotten Realms is being de-emphasized in part because of all the new streams with their own setting books on Kickstarter and people wanting to follow along, and in part because of how utterly impossible it is for any of those new players who aren't Advanced Users to try and follow along and keep up with fifty god damned years of incomprehensible, contradictory, and impossible to research back lore. For the first time in the game's history, D&D is not being introduced to new players nigh-exclusively by extensively experienced Advanced User grognards who've been there through every edition, know the Realms by heart, and have been chattering the newbie's ear off about it for five years already anyways. For the first time in the game's history, people who've never heard of the game before, or never cared, are growing interested and picking it up without the intervention of Old Guys, and that's changing pretty much everything about how Wizards has to approach the game.
So. In summary, I suppose: just put all the Forgotten Realms lore back in. Every argument you just made for why they shouldn't have taken it out applies to putting it right back in. You know it by heart, and presumably your game's not choking on it the way a lot of other folks' games do. So put it back in, and remember - your level of D&D Competence is exceptional, not normal. They ain't writing this junk for you, they're writing it for normies we can barely comprehend.
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The only objection to making something non-setting specific is that it can stunt development of lore and the official help provided in making interesting characters. A race/class/monster/etc that does really well in Eberron probably won't work very well in Faerun. To make it work in both settings and all the others, you have to be very good at designing it or just accept that it will be "okay" in all. It's hard to tell how much a generic approach to things like this would actually have held things back. It's possible that it's not hindering it at all.
On the other hand, it is much easier for a person to pick up a setting specific feature that they like and adapt it to their own setting than it is to build new stuff onto a stump. The more information you have to work with, the more you can just adapt rather than trying to invent new stuff - it's much easier to prune and reshape than to grow.
I'd prefer that they did really in depth stuff with the various races, monsters, etc, and just let me adjust it, than to give generic "one-size-fits-all" stuff that still leaves the heavy lifting for me to do.
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The issue, Linklite, is that doing "really in depth stuff" with various races, monsters, etc., is that the "really in depth stuff" becomes a straitjacket that stops anyone else from using it if they don't use it exactly as written, unless they're an Advanced User themself and can do the work of detangling the critter from its backdrop.
Like, presume the Monster Manual had fifteen whole-ass pages of beholder lore explaining in great and excessive detail the exact ways in which beholders exist in Faerun, how they came to be in Faerun, their existence and influence over Faerun, and the precise way in which they act while in Faerun. Presume the book goes to exhaustive length to tie the critters as closely and inextricably to Faerun as possible, with explicit ties to a dozen different gods, a deep impact on the world's history that has in turn shaped their own attitudes and actions, and at least twenty callouts to specific events in Faerun's history and their impact on beholderkin.
Lots of folks in this thread and many others would go "**** yeah! PERFECT! That's the kinda shit I'm talking about! MMMM, look at all that rich, meaty, juicy lore! So tasty! More please, Wizards!"
Counterpoint: absolutely none of that is helpful for the vast majority of people who'd run the critter and a great deal of it is an active hindrance. Even people playing in Faerun don't really need more than "Beholders are intruders in our reality, creatures from outside the Prime Material plane that seek goals difficult for mortals to comprehend," perhaps a paragraph or two on typical beholder antics, and then the critter's stat block and lair. The MM information on any given dragon type is honestly pretty spot-on. "This is where they like to live, this is how they often act, this is what we usually envision their desires to be, and this is how somebody can piss them off." Enough to let a DM figure out how to slide the critter into an adventure and have it make enough sense for the players to grok it and have fun. All the rest is narrative wankery.
And I mean that in the most literal sense I can - it's wankery. It's gratuitous self-pleasuring on WotC's part, offered up for lore hounds who love indulging in lore deep dives despite them having no practical positive impact on running games and quite often a significant negative impact. The only people who're going to catch that the DM totally included the bits in the lore about how the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was) reshaped beholder culture (beholders have culture? They're paranoiac megalomaniacal aberrant eyeball monsters, you have to have a society to have a culture!) are other lore hounds who've wallowed in the same lore and want validation. People who want that kind of intense deep dive into WotC's Faerunian lore are better served buying official D&D novels rather than game books.
Fizban's dragon book is a fantastic example. The Monster Manual information on dragons was great. Pretty much exactly what any DM needs to run a dragon in their game. Fizban's book turning every dragon everywhere into a pseudomythical, semi-divine being that exists across all of space and time as innumerable multiversal echoes of itself, more omnipresent and powerful than any actual god, with the final goal of absorbing all its echoes to become The One? Completely, utterly unneeded. It's a couple hundred pages of narrative wankery, and its mere existence makes it very difficult for me to make use of dragons in my Dungeons and Dragons game unless I make a point of beating all that garbage out of my players' heads. Anyone who's read Fizban's book assumes that's how all dragons are now, forever, and that's simply untrue. That big steaming lore dump is actively counterfactual to my own homebrew settings and any official/third-party setting I like to make stories in, and disentangling any useful information from that great brick brick of a lore turd is a job for an Advanced User.
"Really In Depth Lore" is not useful to running a game. It is not significantly different than a novel - it's something people read because they like reading about that stuff, not because they need it to run a game. That information certainly has its place in the overall D&D lexicon. That place is not, and never will be, in the core game books.
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There have been several lengthy threads about whether cultural qualities should be in racial entries or not. I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone about the racial ASI arguments. "It's a book that's meant to open up D&D lore a little bit so that you can use anything that you want in your homebrew world" isn't the only reason for WotC to release M³. That approach will be the standard policy going forward though, so it makes sense to mention that specifically (and it obviously goes for mixing and matching between non-homebrew worlds too) - it's not just about lore neutral races in this book, it's about books having lore neutral races period from now on. I don't like the floating ASIs only option, so I'm going to at least formulate suggested ones for my campaigns. I do like setting-neutral writeups for races, but I'd like the setting books to provide more info. I like that more races and monsters get crammed into a single book for those only just starting out, even though I already have both books that got collated. Things are a bit more complex than just opening stuff up for homebrew.
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Source Books should be as setting agnostic as possible. Setting lore should be found in setting books along with setting specific backgrounds, Sub Races, Monsters and the like.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Agreed.
I really do not get how people can even go with a straight face that more open things harm "homebrew" or something.
It's really simple.
If you want a game with a rich lore from "X" specific setting, just look for a game that is set in that setting.
If you want a game where you'll never encounter a good kind Yuan-Ti, you'll still be able to find those games.
However, now people who want to play a good, kind Yuan-Ti won't have to deal with some DM going "Can't cause book says evil" just because the book says that when their world isn't even in the setting that lore comes from.
No one is looking at a less restrictive version of the character and going "I'll never be able to customize this to my world", it's about making those folks who are very bound by "But it says this" not have that as a way of shutting down ideas for THAT reason alone.
If you're still wanting Yuan-Ti to always be evil and not be in that setting, you can still do that.
I really do not see any realistic circumstance that having a "generic, lore less" option hurts either people who want to focus on lore, or those who don't.
I guess since I think of myself as a lifelong learner I'll be reading this book with the noobs? Just saying, I'm largely in favor of the book, and think it may faciliitate a DM going "and so can you!" to an interested player better than the existent trove of books. I'm thinking it might be handy.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
@Yurei, I get what you're saying. I don't always agree with all of the opinions I see you post (though I do agree with a good bit of them) but I found your colorful wording there particularly entertaining and largely agreeable. Particularly about people very new to the concept of D&D (and by extension any TTRPG) in general literally not knowing what they're doing. We were all there at some point, trying to get a mental grip on this new, fascinating and dauntingly complex game. My first direct experience with D&D was guesting in a caffeine fueled "all nighter" party with some friends in high school, alternating between 2nd edition D&D and Mariokart64 and the original Super Smash Brothers while consuming medically inadvisable quantities of soda and junk food until we all passed out around when the sun came up. I had no clue what was going on (I don't think I ever properly grasped how THAC0 works), and I didn't realize until much later that they were playing a joke on me by handing me a sheet for a Kobold fighter. But it was fun. A few years later when I joined a group playing a 3.0 game in college and then shifted to 3.5 shortly later I learned the basics from experienced players and did a lot of reading myself. I read the PHB cover to cover, then the DMG. I kept my Monster Manual sitting on the back of my toilet and would read a few entries every time I took a dump. For a while I was a regular and frequent poster on the official WotC D&D forums, back when they still had them, and was quite proud that I managed to attain "one of us" credibility with the other hardcore nerds that probably spent a bit too much time on there. I actually understood the 3.5 grappling rules and made a villain NPC that used them exactly once, at which point my players asked me to please never subject them to that again. I still have about a dozen 3.5 books in a box in the closet about ten feet from where I currently sit, even though I haven't actually opened one of them in recent memory. I was once asked to run a game, with no advance notice, for mostly people who had never actually played when the only materials at hand were a few sets of dice and character sheets printed out from a downloaded PDF and I was able to build fifth level characters for everyone from my memory of the rules while also scribbling down mostly accurate, half improvised monster stat blocks and the map for a rudimentary dungeon crawl over the course of about an hour. I am aware that most people who play D&D do not dive into it to such an extent. I also have significantly above average knowledge retention for material that I read and I've had enough higher math classes (even if I didn't get the best grades in anything involving trigonometry or calculus) to recognize the patterns and formulae that make up the mechanics of the rules and thus can hear somebody describe a concept that they want for a class, spell, feat, etc and slap something together on the spot that's more or less balanced like you described.
When I came back to D&D about a year ago, after roughly fifteen years of not playing, I was a bit suspicious of 5e in general, but as I actually looked into it my opinion was (and still is) "Wow, they took all the good stuff from 3.5 and trimmed away a bunch of overly complex math so things are easier to learn and everything goes quicker and smoother. This is awesome!" The biggest challenge I've encountered to getting new people to try D&D, by far, is convincing them to not be scared away by all the "nerd stuff" that makes up the rules.
[At this point I will note that I just typed a multi-paragraph rant about how most people who get confused by the rules haven't bothered to even try actually reading them in the first place but then I realized it's not really on topic so I cut it and saved it for when it will inevitably become relevant elsewhere.]
You don't even need good knowledge retention to understand the concept of lore being malleable for your game. We are literally sitting at a table (or in an online chat channel or whatever) and describing make believe scenarios while using rules to determine success at challenging things with dice. Rules aside, those scenarios are literally whatever the DM says they are. The very first paragraph of the first chapter of the PHB describes this. Verbatim: "It shares elements with childhood games of make-believe. Like those games, D&D is driven by imagination." The focus of the game could be an aggressive tribe of goblins raiding a frontier village, or it could be that the local girl scout troupe has been dabbling in some infernal magic and are using summoned imps to extort people under threat of burning down their homes and businesses if they don't buy a buttload of cookies so they can have the highest sales totals in the kingdom. I honestly find it difficult to understand how anybody who actually reads that could be so dense as to believe that they are somehow not allowed to decide that dragons in their game are actually aliens from another planet who fart fire rather than breathe it out of their mouths if that's what they think is fun for their game. Seriously, do they think somebody is going to interrupt their session and arrest them for imagining wrong? If somebody is that dense then there's no amount of open ended wording that can help them grow an imagination.
What a lot of people is pick and choose0 lore and other inspirations from one or more campaign settings, books, comics, movies, and even weird dreams that they mash up into "this'll be cool" and set their game there. And every one of those sources they use has at least some elements that are just tossed out. I have honestly never heard of somebody saying "I want to use warforged in my world but I don't want to use the entire Eberron setting and all of the lore from it so I guess I can't." They say something like "I'm using warforged rules for the race of magical construct/robot people in my setting. Don't worry about Eberron lore, I made up my own origin story for them. The racial stats are literally the only thing I'm using from that entire setting. I didn't even bother reading most of it myself because I was only interested in the magitech androids." And they could plan on using their versions of characters and NPCs that are mechanically warforged to pose Asimov inspired philosophical questions about the nature of intelligent life and free will or they could just want fantasy stand-ins for intelligent AI killing machines a la the Terminator franchise.
Yes, there are plenty of players and DMs out there who have a good idea of what they want to do with their own setting and just need some crunchy bits that they can plug in there because they haven't and aren't interested in going full nerdlord and actually learning the mechanics of 5e D&D from a game design perspective to make their own classes, races, spells, etc. That doesn't mean that it's necessary to strip away all the lore from things. I have not seen a single person complain about there being too much existing lore about Aasimar in official 5e publications. I have seen plenty of complaints about the extent of officially provided Aasimar lore being less than one full page and then one paragraph for each of the subraces with their respective stats and traits. All the complaints I've seen about Tiefling lore pretty much boil down to "there isn't enough of it" because they want more options [apparently] without bothering to come up with their own original lore for characters with Abyssal rather than Infernal heritage. This is not a situation of "we need less lore getting in the way." For a setting agnostic sourcebook the writers should be presenting more lore for each race: a page or two for each of two or three different approaches (possibly taken from existing settings or just made up for that book by people who are professionally creative) so that players and DMs can pick one that they like as a basis for what they want to use in their game.
So, after a bunch of ranting I'm saying that homebrewers can always just ignore lore if we don't want it, but those who want lore to sample for ingredients to their homebrew stew gain nothing from the official material deliberately avoiding the inclusion of lore like it's some kind of creative herpes that people are afraid of contracting.
Myself I'm looking forward to these racial changes bringing older races up to date with the new ones, I just wish DDB let you order the gift set which with already owning 2 of the books I wouldn't have to buy them again but know I'm waiting till May
That's definitely a WotC permission thing, not a DDB decision. None of WotC's digital partners has MMM available in any form until the individual release. I'm really curious as to WotC's sales on this product since, acknowledging this is partially not being able to get the books in stores in time for holiday shopping, it just seemed like bundling a "preview of the future" with books most people "who care about the future" already owned seems sorta bone headed in the community relations front. That said, May's not that long away, but when it releases buyers will have a lot of perspective on the book already and likely to have a firmer opinion on whether to buy it or not than any other book released, it's just a really curious move and I'm pretty sure there's a product manager who's weathering team meetings like an executive in a Robocop boardroom.
Also curious how DDB will manage access to the new monsters vs their original incarnations. As I'm anticipating there will likely be several products between now and 2024 or whenever WotC CD Project D&D 2024 RED is unveiled that will "nudge" PHB and MM and heck maybe even some DMG+XGtE content. I think Tasha's was implemented fairly well (for what was implemented) in terms of character management. But there isn't a monster manager similar to the character management toggles so ... maybe part of the rework that includes improving the search function?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Mmm ... this is kind of judgmental, no? Creativity is a skill. Like any other skill sometimes one has natural talent, sometimes one must practice in order to achieve some measure of aptitude. I've seen plenty of people who just were not confident in their skill and thus wanted to do everything right so they wouldn't look foolish in front of others when doing a new activity. Once they got some confidence, they bloomed and were coming up with cool characters and other things. If they had run into such judgmental attitude, they might have bounced off of the hobby altogether.
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!
People like that need more lore to use as training wheels while they get a feel for the game in general and how they want to play their game in particular. Material that has been intentionally stripped of any lore to be "homebrew friendly" does absolutely nothing to help such people.
All the more reason for them to buy a setting book that has that information.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
That's my point. And also part of that point is that more lore "options," which can also be called inspirations, seeds, or whatever else you want to call them, should be included with all material for players and DMs to consider using, or use as a starting point to get their own imaginations going. The official word that I quoted from Davyd's quoted excerpt of an interview says that the official plan with MotMM is to provide rules that can be used a la plug and play into homebrew games without the complications or inconveniences of pre-existing lore. That's the opposite of giving people ideas to work with, which encourages and fosters homebrew creativity.
If you don't like the official lore attached to a race or class but you like the mechanics (traits, class features, etc) then just toss the lore and dress up the crunchy bits that you do like however you please. Like my above example of using the rules for warforged as any sort of magitech intelligent construct /android race that could range from "I Robot" to "Terminator" in flavor in games that have absolutely nothing to do with anything else from Eberron. Or, for a Forgotten Realms example, I'll quote Yurei's comment about "the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was)" as a great example of official lore that many folks just looked at and said "*$%# that" and pretended it never existed. Seriously, all I know or have cared to learn about the Spellplague is it's some ridiculous cataclysmic event that put Drizzt's girlfriend into a terminal coma as part of a canon explanation within the FR novels for the magic system changing from 3.5 to 4e rules. Then a few books and a narrative time skip later a reincarnated Cattie-Brie sees a bunch of wizards of questionable stability shooting off spells like bootleg fireworks at a hillbilly hoedown to celebrate how magic has suddenly and inexplicably reverted to more or less the same way it was before "the Spellplague (whatever the hell that was)" when 5e was launched.
Removing or just not making more lore does not foster more creative homebrew. Like Yurei said, most folks playing D&D aren't the "Advanced User" types that want to spend the time learning the ins and outs of the design theory the rules are built on and then spending more time inventing an entire fully fleshed out setting from scratch. If people were doing that en masse they wouldn't also be buying Matt Mercer's books because that's exactly what he did for them with Exandria. And nobody's home game is going to resemble an episode of Critical Role, even amongst the most unoriginal diehard fanboys/fangirls using those Exandria books because everybody is going to put some kind of spin on the official lore and flavor if only subconsciously. More often people are going to do something like take the city of Emon, call it something different and have their group start a campaign with a plot hook based on an obscure episode of The X Files that gets introduced by a reskinned version of The Gentleman (who is a resident of a different Exandrian city) resulting in a campaign that won't resemble the adventures of Vox Machina or the Mighty Nein at all. Those books are absolutely crammed with unique and in depth setting specific lore; check out how many people are buying them and tell me with a straight face that the masses want "setting agnostic" material.
Edit: I am well aware that there is ultimately little to no effect that any of these arguments will have on what actually gets published. I'm making them because I'm a huge nerd with strong opinions about a hobby that I greatly enjoy and not much else to do with my free time. I've already spent about six hours this week actually playing D&D in two different homebrew settings that borrow races, classes, deities and more from numerous official sources and end up looking nothing like any of those "seed" sources in any but the most superficial of ways. I've also been awake for a little over twenty-four hours now and should probably get some sleep before I get completely incoherent with ranting and rambling like a crotchety old grognard gone senile. As a parting thought I will point out that if you're taking the time to read this then I'm not the only one with strong opinions on this stuff. Hooray for the internet.
This discussion is starting to devolve off topic and move into a more general discussion of how lore should be presented and how it's used. If you want to continue that topic, please do so in a new thread
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