Not going to make a sales pitch here, but it should be pretty obvious I myself think there's a real scarcity of the two within D&D 5e as stands (along the lines of finding water in Death Valley). BUT that's my opinion and I'm curious what the rest of ths community feels.
Personally loved D&D 3rd Edition for both, and 4th Edition was a surprising breath of fresh air that expanded on what was there in clever and creative ways which I retain for my own games, because how could I not steal it? The war between the Gods and the Primordials was wonderful, to have enemies of the Gods themselves, as well as tree roots that snaked down to show where all the Races and Monsters came from (like Titans and Giants being the province of the Primordials)
My two cents, 5E is going bland and mainstream as humanly possible. Lore is not something they can have frankly. Just look at the Neogi original description and what they put out now in the censored 5E content. Players not familiar with Neogi reading 5E censored description miss that Neogi are slavers and were one of the main bad guys in 2E Spelljammer, you just couldn't negotiate with most of them you were chattel get to work slave was how they looked at everyone not neogi. When the crew sees mind flayers and are looked upon as "thank God they ain't Neogi", but the 5E censored content can't convey that, well you got an issue. The good news though is 5E Cookbook and 5E Underoo sales are up! Its like we are going through the Satanic Panic and Lorraine Williams is in charge of TSR all over again.
Keep the pre-Winninger content books, they have some lore. use the older content frankly. Now, the older content wasn't necessarily written as well as todays content from being quickly usable. Writing in RPG's has progressed a lot in 30 years. However, the content in 2E and 3E was noticeably better than 5E, even the 4E content was better at times for breadth of detail.
There really should be a Loremasters forum dealing with content from all editions where people can ask Lore questions and what books or Dragon or Dungeon magazine to find it in. The Story and Lore forums are generally weak, I would not use that personally. Right now MrRhexx and AJ Pickett on youtube are probably the best resources you can find for lore and they give the books and magazines they use in their videos.
I really don't understand why you can't have slavers in Official D&D. The only concerns I can see are 1. The implication of racism, and 2. Somehow suggesting slavery wasn't that bad.
Slavery in the wider historical sense did not have to be about Race, especially since most reference Rome rather than pre-Civil War America / Abolitionism. For two, yeah, there are some repulsive people that somehow believe "slavery wasn't good or evil, it just was," but that's why you just say explicitly that slavery is Evil. It's not "Typically Evil," it is just Evil.
I just checked the neogi tonight after looking at the new neogi in Spelljammer and compared them to Legacy and I was disgusted. Welcome to Winninger's D&D, now with 50% less lore. From Volo's and Mord's they removed the lore, and all of it was useful. The new mords doesn't have it. For Winninger's 5E, it is what it is. I don't have anything positive to say about the changes to the game since he took over. Reading the censored 5E description of the Neogi its tortuous for the writer trying not to convey that a Lawful Evil slaver is really just not evil just alien in though, so we just can't know what they are thinking. The excuse being made is that they are making it setting agnostic, and its just all Faerun lore, which it isn't. It's D&D lore and has been so since the white box. Neogi were introduced in Spelljamer 2E as one of the main villains, they weren't set in Faerun. Hell the first spelljamer book had them as the main baddies on Krynn.
I feel you. Any number of monsters like that get fixed for my own games. Exactly how a Mind Flayer Colony can be supported by dominated slaves when they can only dominate once per day with concentration is beyond me. I personally changed the Mind Flayers ability to Enslave and gave it an extended duration, while Elder Brains were given the ability to make the Domination Permanent over time, though permanent in much the same way as True Polymorph is permanent, as well as using other mind affecting effects to cure the enchantment, etc.
Exactly how a Mind Flayer Colony can be supported by dominated slaves when they can only dominate once per day with concentration is beyond me.
I think the simple answer is that creatures can do more than just what their stat block says. Stat blocks describe what a creature does when in combat with PCs and are not meant to be the end-all-be-all of a creature's abilities. I imagine that controlling thralls that have been dominated for months or years would be much easier than besting the will of a hostile hero.
While I do really appreciate a "default" set of lore - I too preferred the baseline worldbuilding in the 4e PHB to what we got in 5e, but then I've never been much of a fan of Forgotten Realms - I have to wonder how much I'd actually use at this point. Probably my favorite thing about Dark Sun is the way they throw all the default lore away and get weird with it, and I tend to do the same thing with my own settings.
Sure official D&D lore can be great for inspiration, but so can literally all other media. I dunno, maybe it's the lack of lore that has driven my habit of "outsourcing" for ideas, but at this point I don't ever feel like I'm hurting for inspiration. I mean the Strixhaven book has tons of flavor in it, but at the same time I kinda feel like I'd almost rather do my own adaptation of Harry Potter that could be more tailored to my preferences.
Personally I'm waiting for the splat lore books to come out. Its the only reason I can think why they deleted all the lore from Mords and Volo's. It was the tactic of 2E when they stretched that game system out for so long it was like dough stretched to be transparent. The new lore splat books will have a lot of art and be content poor like everything I've seen from Winninger when it comes to rules and lore.
I just went and did a big dump of Drow source books for when my group starts making it down into the underdark for Lolth. A lot of reading to flesh out some of the classic 1E modules that I never got to play as a kid.
This is actually a common way of visibly replying to a comment (you'll see that if you click the black arrow next to the quote users name, it takes you directly to said comment) without disruptively padding out comments.
Also editing a reply to avoid it being disruptively long is not censoring. As they pointed out, changing things is not the same as censoring things. The fact they did a quote means that the original message is highlighted and more accessible.
Let's try and avoid casting aspersions of censorship on each other, especially when nothing is being censored (quite the opposite, Lostwhilefishing used the quote function to highlight the original comment, rather than just using the reply option)
This is actually a common way of visibly replying to a comment (you'll see that if you click the black arrow next to the quote users name, it takes you directly to said comment) without disruptively padding out comments.
Also editing a reply to avoid it being disruptively long is not censoring. As they pointed out, changing things is not the same as censoring things. The fact they did a quote means that the original message is highlighted and more accessible.
Let's try and avoid casting aspersions of censorship on each other, especially when nothing is being censored (quite the opposite, Lostwhilefishing used the quote function to highlight the original comment, rather than just using the reply option)
I was referencing "Censored" from the post Lostwhilefishing quoted, which can be found in the original by Portential "Reading the censored 5e ... " No aspersions were made.
What's all this about "censored"? Chainging things is not the same as censoring things.
You can read the descriptions for yourself. The uncensored Legacy content from Volo's give you a better picture of Neogi. Meanwhile, the censored content from Multiverse might as well make the Neogi out as Vulcans from Star Trek. This kind of change of content was very common during Lorraine's tenure running TSR. You can't have anything scary or edgy that might upset one person. I mean after all if you upset one mother of a 12 year old D&D fan, its a lost sale of a person who hates RPG's on moral grounds and would never buy RPG content in the first place. Meanwhile, the world building was lost as was the audience who bought the game in part for the lore building. It's Winninger's decision, so they can go with it. This does NOT build the lore for the world, taking out one of the great evils. It appears they hired a sensitivity writer to remove the concept of slavery and evil from the Neogi and instead they wrote them as emotionless vulcans, for a Lawful Evil Slaver species? The Neogi are literally written to be a foil.
At the rate things are going under Winninger's helm of D&D, I suggest keeping your old books handy. It helps a lot when world building to have an accurate description of a monster and its history. If I was playing the Neogi as written in Mords, I'd be playing them at robots or vulcans trying to discern the tortuous description by the writer.
What's all this about "censored"? Chainging things is not the same as censoring things.
You can read the descriptions for yourself.
Again, changing things is not censoring. But OK, they changed things and now they suck. Is that a fair summation of your qualms?
I gave one example where the new writing that made monster non-sensical. If you want to go the more literal route and not state that Multiverse censored content by definition, then go to the first chapter of Mord's or Volo's. All of that content was censored, i.e. removed from Multiverse. The content for the Blood War from Mord's as written no longer exists in the current 5E books. It is what it is. We paid more for a new book to increase the CR of the monsters but got what appears to be sensitivity writing making monsters extremely hard to understand and role play and the censoring of complete lore as well. We got a lot of really good stuff for the DM to build a monster - gone. Chapter 1: Monster Lore from Volo's and Chapter 1: The Blood War, Chapter 2: Elves, chapter 3: Dwarves and Duergar, Chapter 4 Gith and their endless war, and Chapter 5: halflings and gnomes from Mord's were removed from Multiverse.
I mean when you have to go to a youtuber to get better information on a monster than the books we paid for, something is wrong with WotC writing standards.
I've only ever played 5e so I obviously don't know what I'm missing, but it seems like the solution to all of this is simply to home-brew the missing information.
The more lore and worldbuilding Wizards crams down players' throats, the less room there is for players to play D&D. If Wizards plunks down lore for a given creature and says "This is what [X] is. if you run [X] at your table any differently from this at all? You're an absolutely horrible person, you're ruining your D&D game, neither your players nor your ancestors willl ever forgive you, and Gary Gygax will send shades from the afterlife to haunt your nightmares", then guess what? Anybody who dislikes that lore gets to find a new game, even if they otherwise mostly like this one. Even the second post in this thread was demanding a 'Loremaster's' forum that allowed them to continue perpetuating decades-old lore nobody can find, access, or study anymore so that people could be barred from the game for not knowing fifty years of inaccessible, contradictory Faerunian lore that eliminates all reason and purpose for going out to Adventure in the first place.
5e books don't need millions of words of exhaustively (and I do meaning exhausting) laid out lore that chokes off all possibility of mystery, exploration, or adventure. They need enough words to get the DM's juices going so the DM can present the players with a situation worth Adventuring in. I don't need a five-page dossier on the precise societal mechanisms of neogi slavery and why it's just the coolest thing to do that, and I'd argue nobody ever really did. A line stating "Slavery and hierarchical dominance are built into a neogi's brain in ways that would nauseate most humanoids" is really all I need to know the intention, i.e. 'these things' minds don't work like humanoid minds and they're real big on slavery'.
Besides...it's Spelljammer. "Explore the unknown reaches of Wildspace!" is the entire point. Why do we need to know absolutely everything there is to know about it before playing our first session. Where the hell's the fun in that?
The example given was Neogi. Original 5E text was 600 words and they described they were slavers and gave example of evil. The new 5E in Mords was less than half of the original, doesn't mention they are evil and states they have no concept of good or evil, turning one of the foils of Spelljammer into Vulcans. You might like that, and hey that's fine. I don't like the writer not being allowed to state that yes, Neogi are slavers and yes they do commit evil. The new writing from Multiverse reads like the writer is describing a vulcan, its just bad and frankly confusing to roleplay. I'm not keen on the stat block example, but a lot of the writing in Multi doesn't have much flavor, the statblock analogy fits more than it should for a D&D product.
I've seen this type of writing back in 2E when Lorraine ran the company into the ground and put her own moral values into the game, changing the lore to the point where it just didn't make a lot of sense.
I've only ever played 5e so I obviously don't know what I'm missing, but it seems like the solution to all of this is simply to home-brew the missing information.
Dude, I buy the material from WotC to save time when building content, not to get confused by their tortuous writing trying not to state that a slaver race of xenophobes but are really emotionless beings who enslave because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. Ok, congrats writer, they just described a modron that can dominate.
The example given was Neogi. Original 5E text was 600 words and they described they were slavers and gave example of evil. The new 5E in Mords was less than half of the original, doesn't mention they are evil and states they have no concept of good or evil, turning one of the foils of Spelljammer into Vulcans. You might like that, and hey that's fine. I don't like the writer not being allowed to state that yes, Neogi are slavers and yes they do commit evil. The new writing from Multiverse reads like the writer is describing a vulcan, its just bad and frankly confusing to roleplay. I'm not keen on the stat block example, but a lot of the writing in Multi doesn't have much flavor, the statblock analogy fits more than it should for a D&D product.
I've seen this type of writing back in 2E when Lorraine ran the company into the ground and put her own moral values into the game, changing the lore to the point where it just didn't make a lot of sense.
What are you talking about? The new stat blocks have the following:
"Typically Lawful Evil"
"Because adult neogi have the power to control minds, they consider doing so to be entirely appropriate."
"They left their home world long ago to conquer and devour creatures in other realms. During this era, they dominated umber hulks and used them to build sleek, spidery ships capable of traversing the multiverse."
Sure, the description has far less lore in it than before, but what is left definitely indicates evil.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Not going to make a sales pitch here, but it should be pretty obvious I myself think there's a real scarcity of the two within D&D 5e as stands (along the lines of finding water in Death Valley). BUT that's my opinion and I'm curious what the rest of ths community feels.
Personally loved D&D 3rd Edition for both, and 4th Edition was a surprising breath of fresh air that expanded on what was there in clever and creative ways which I retain for my own games, because how could I not steal it? The war between the Gods and the Primordials was wonderful, to have enemies of the Gods themselves, as well as tree roots that snaked down to show where all the Races and Monsters came from (like Titans and Giants being the province of the Primordials)
My two cents, 5E is going bland and mainstream as humanly possible. Lore is not something they can have frankly. Just look at the Neogi original description and what they put out now in the censored 5E content. Players not familiar with Neogi reading 5E censored description miss that Neogi are slavers and were one of the main bad guys in 2E Spelljammer, you just couldn't negotiate with most of them you were chattel get to work slave was how they looked at everyone not neogi. When the crew sees mind flayers and are looked upon as "thank God they ain't Neogi", but the 5E censored content can't convey that, well you got an issue. The good news though is 5E Cookbook and 5E Underoo sales are up! Its like we are going through the Satanic Panic and Lorraine Williams is in charge of TSR all over again.
Keep the pre-Winninger content books, they have some lore. use the older content frankly. Now, the older content wasn't necessarily written as well as todays content from being quickly usable. Writing in RPG's has progressed a lot in 30 years. However, the content in 2E and 3E was noticeably better than 5E, even the 4E content was better at times for breadth of detail.
There really should be a Loremasters forum dealing with content from all editions where people can ask Lore questions and what books or Dragon or Dungeon magazine to find it in. The Story and Lore forums are generally weak, I would not use that personally. Right now MrRhexx and AJ Pickett on youtube are probably the best resources you can find for lore and they give the books and magazines they use in their videos.
I really don't understand why you can't have slavers in Official D&D. The only concerns I can see are 1. The implication of racism, and 2. Somehow suggesting slavery wasn't that bad.
Slavery in the wider historical sense did not have to be about Race, especially since most reference Rome rather than pre-Civil War America / Abolitionism. For two, yeah, there are some repulsive people that somehow believe "slavery wasn't good or evil, it just was," but that's why you just say explicitly that slavery is Evil. It's not "Typically Evil," it is just Evil.
I just checked the neogi tonight after looking at the new neogi in Spelljammer and compared them to Legacy and I was disgusted. Welcome to Winninger's D&D, now with 50% less lore. From Volo's and Mord's they removed the lore, and all of it was useful. The new mords doesn't have it. For Winninger's 5E, it is what it is. I don't have anything positive to say about the changes to the game since he took over. Reading the censored 5E description of the Neogi its tortuous for the writer trying not to convey that a Lawful Evil slaver is really just not evil just alien in though, so we just can't know what they are thinking. The excuse being made is that they are making it setting agnostic, and its just all Faerun lore, which it isn't. It's D&D lore and has been so since the white box. Neogi were introduced in Spelljamer 2E as one of the main villains, they weren't set in Faerun. Hell the first spelljamer book had them as the main baddies on Krynn.
I feel you. Any number of monsters like that get fixed for my own games. Exactly how a Mind Flayer Colony can be supported by dominated slaves when they can only dominate once per day with concentration is beyond me. I personally changed the Mind Flayers ability to Enslave and gave it an extended duration, while Elder Brains were given the ability to make the Domination Permanent over time, though permanent in much the same way as True Polymorph is permanent, as well as using other mind affecting effects to cure the enchantment, etc.
I think the simple answer is that creatures can do more than just what their stat block says. Stat blocks describe what a creature does when in combat with PCs and are not meant to be the end-all-be-all of a creature's abilities. I imagine that controlling thralls that have been dominated for months or years would be much easier than besting the will of a hostile hero.
While I do really appreciate a "default" set of lore - I too preferred the baseline worldbuilding in the 4e PHB to what we got in 5e, but then I've never been much of a fan of Forgotten Realms - I have to wonder how much I'd actually use at this point. Probably my favorite thing about Dark Sun is the way they throw all the default lore away and get weird with it, and I tend to do the same thing with my own settings.
Sure official D&D lore can be great for inspiration, but so can literally all other media. I dunno, maybe it's the lack of lore that has driven my habit of "outsourcing" for ideas, but at this point I don't ever feel like I'm hurting for inspiration. I mean the Strixhaven book has tons of flavor in it, but at the same time I kinda feel like I'd almost rather do my own adaptation of Harry Potter that could be more tailored to my preferences.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
The problem is that without World-Building Lore, everything just becomes a set of stat blocks. That's not fun and it's never been D&D.
Personally I'm waiting for the splat lore books to come out. Its the only reason I can think why they deleted all the lore from Mords and Volo's. It was the tactic of 2E when they stretched that game system out for so long it was like dough stretched to be transparent. The new lore splat books will have a lot of art and be content poor like everything I've seen from Winninger when it comes to rules and lore.
I just went and did a big dump of Drow source books for when my group starts making it down into the underdark for Lolth. A lot of reading to flesh out some of the classic 1E modules that I never got to play as a kid.
What's all this about "censored"? Chainging things is not the same as censoring things.
I like how you referenced "censored" in a quote that you edited down to "stuff."
This is actually a common way of visibly replying to a comment (you'll see that if you click the black arrow next to the quote users name, it takes you directly to said comment) without disruptively padding out comments.
Also editing a reply to avoid it being disruptively long is not censoring. As they pointed out, changing things is not the same as censoring things. The fact they did a quote means that the original message is highlighted and more accessible.
Let's try and avoid casting aspersions of censorship on each other, especially when nothing is being censored (quite the opposite, Lostwhilefishing used the quote function to highlight the original comment, rather than just using the reply option)
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
I was referencing "Censored" from the post Lostwhilefishing quoted, which can be found in the original by Portential "Reading the censored 5e ... " No aspersions were made.
You can read the descriptions for yourself. The uncensored Legacy content from Volo's give you a better picture of Neogi. Meanwhile, the censored content from Multiverse might as well make the Neogi out as Vulcans from Star Trek. This kind of change of content was very common during Lorraine's tenure running TSR. You can't have anything scary or edgy that might upset one person. I mean after all if you upset one mother of a 12 year old D&D fan, its a lost sale of a person who hates RPG's on moral grounds and would never buy RPG content in the first place. Meanwhile, the world building was lost as was the audience who bought the game in part for the lore building. It's Winninger's decision, so they can go with it. This does NOT build the lore for the world, taking out one of the great evils. It appears they hired a sensitivity writer to remove the concept of slavery and evil from the Neogi and instead they wrote them as emotionless vulcans, for a Lawful Evil Slaver species? The Neogi are literally written to be a foil.
At the rate things are going under Winninger's helm of D&D, I suggest keeping your old books handy. It helps a lot when world building to have an accurate description of a monster and its history. If I was playing the Neogi as written in Mords, I'd be playing them at robots or vulcans trying to discern the tortuous description by the writer.
Uncensored Legacy Content description 600 words:
Volo's Legacy
Censored Neogi from Multiverse 226 words::
Mord's
Again, changing things is not censoring. But OK, they changed things and now they suck. Is that a fair summation of your qualms?
I gave one example where the new writing that made monster non-sensical. If you want to go the more literal route and not state that Multiverse censored content by definition, then go to the first chapter of Mord's or Volo's. All of that content was censored, i.e. removed from Multiverse. The content for the Blood War from Mord's as written no longer exists in the current 5E books. It is what it is. We paid more for a new book to increase the CR of the monsters but got what appears to be sensitivity writing making monsters extremely hard to understand and role play and the censoring of complete lore as well. We got a lot of really good stuff for the DM to build a monster - gone. Chapter 1: Monster Lore from Volo's and Chapter 1: The Blood War, Chapter 2: Elves, chapter 3: Dwarves and Duergar, Chapter 4 Gith and their endless war, and Chapter 5: halflings and gnomes from Mord's were removed from Multiverse.
I mean when you have to go to a youtuber to get better information on a monster than the books we paid for, something is wrong with WotC writing standards.
AJ Picket Neogi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g6uDVV0e6c
Even Web DM goes into Neogi:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6TUnvgKGsA
I've only ever played 5e so I obviously don't know what I'm missing, but it seems like the solution to all of this is simply to home-brew the missing information.
They changed it, so now by definition it sucks.
The more lore and worldbuilding Wizards crams down players' throats, the less room there is for players to play D&D. If Wizards plunks down lore for a given creature and says "This is what [X] is. if you run [X] at your table any differently from this at all? You're an absolutely horrible person, you're ruining your D&D game, neither your players nor your ancestors willl ever forgive you, and Gary Gygax will send shades from the afterlife to haunt your nightmares", then guess what? Anybody who dislikes that lore gets to find a new game, even if they otherwise mostly like this one. Even the second post in this thread was demanding a 'Loremaster's' forum that allowed them to continue perpetuating decades-old lore nobody can find, access, or study anymore so that people could be barred from the game for not knowing fifty years of inaccessible, contradictory Faerunian lore that eliminates all reason and purpose for going out to Adventure in the first place.
5e books don't need millions of words of exhaustively (and I do meaning exhausting) laid out lore that chokes off all possibility of mystery, exploration, or adventure. They need enough words to get the DM's juices going so the DM can present the players with a situation worth Adventuring in. I don't need a five-page dossier on the precise societal mechanisms of neogi slavery and why it's just the coolest thing to do that, and I'd argue nobody ever really did. A line stating "Slavery and hierarchical dominance are built into a neogi's brain in ways that would nauseate most humanoids" is really all I need to know the intention, i.e. 'these things' minds don't work like humanoid minds and they're real big on slavery'.
Besides...it's Spelljammer. "Explore the unknown reaches of Wildspace!" is the entire point. Why do we need to know absolutely everything there is to know about it before playing our first session. Where the hell's the fun in that?
Please do not contact or message me.
The example given was Neogi. Original 5E text was 600 words and they described they were slavers and gave example of evil. The new 5E in Mords was less than half of the original, doesn't mention they are evil and states they have no concept of good or evil, turning one of the foils of Spelljammer into Vulcans. You might like that, and hey that's fine. I don't like the writer not being allowed to state that yes, Neogi are slavers and yes they do commit evil. The new writing from Multiverse reads like the writer is describing a vulcan, its just bad and frankly confusing to roleplay. I'm not keen on the stat block example, but a lot of the writing in Multi doesn't have much flavor, the statblock analogy fits more than it should for a D&D product.
I've seen this type of writing back in 2E when Lorraine ran the company into the ground and put her own moral values into the game, changing the lore to the point where it just didn't make a lot of sense.
Dude, I buy the material from WotC to save time when building content, not to get confused by their tortuous writing trying not to state that a slaver race of xenophobes but are really emotionless beings who enslave because they don't know the difference between right and wrong. Ok, congrats writer, they just described a modron that can dominate.
What are you talking about? The new stat blocks have the following:
"Typically Lawful Evil"
"Because adult neogi have the power to control minds, they consider doing so to be entirely appropriate."
"They left their home world long ago to conquer and devour creatures in other realms. During this era, they dominated umber hulks and used them to build sleek, spidery ships capable of traversing the multiverse."
Sure, the description has far less lore in it than before, but what is left definitely indicates evil.