I have the physical books for Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I know most of the races have migrated over so I'm not as concerned about that. But the Lore in those two books are no where to be found now and I think that is a shame for people getting onto the DnD Beyond bandwagon after those two books were removed. I kind of wish they'd at least share the monster and race lore from those for free on here or even just a nominal fee so I could share the lore with my players.
I have the physical books for Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I know most of the races have migrated over so I'm not as concerned about that. But the Lore in those two books are no where to be found now and I think that is a shame for people getting onto the DnD Beyond bandwagon after those two books were removed. I kind of wish they'd at least share the monster and race lore from those for free on here or even just a nominal fee so I could share the lore with my players.
Hold on to those books. Continue to use them as the ultimate source of your lore. That and earlier editions of the game. I don't know if you have a virtual copy of those books. But if you do, I wonder what are the legal ramifications of sharing with your players material that is no longer available, if a corporation has decided to delete that material from any other source.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
I, and others, appreciate lore not being included as it lets DM’s and players come up with their own. And I think lore, like you would like to keep, be contained in setting books. So if a DM wants to run a homebrew campaign setting and do something different with a race/monsters they don’t have players saying “but the rule books say X, Y, or Z.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
Players usually don't read the lore or anything else that isn't on their character sheets. It's up to the DM to slowly introduce their campaign lore during the game, assuming the players care.
You don't have to "pirate" to tell someone what a book says 🤨just don't quote large swathes of it verbatim. How do you think people described rulebooks to each other before DDB?
Illithids, Demons and Devils will be in the next Monster Manual, so we can see what that says and go from there. I do hope they'll flesh those out later too, but player-facing content is the priority. The fact is that we don't need, say, in-depth information on Ilsensine to throw some mindflayers at the party right away.
The issue with lore in major sourcebooks is that the majority of players play in homebrew settings. Putting Forgotten-Realms-specific information can create some problems at these homebrew tables, since the “official lore from the main sourcebook” might contradict what the homebrewing DM’s lore might be. Additionally, this lore takes up a lot of space in books designed to dump large quantities of monsters, all for lore many tables might never care about. Reducing the lore frees up more space for monsters, making the book more useful to those who just want the monsters.
Additionally, having official lore is less important in 5e than in any other lore—there are plenty of old sourcebooks, online Wikis, YouTube videos, video games, etc. to share the official lore for worlds like Forgotten Realms. They do not need to repeat for the umpteenth time lore that has already been shared—not when all that lore is available at everyone’s fingertips with a couple clicks of a button.
Overall, I think this is a great change. It gives us more rules content by giving us more space for monsters and other mechanical content and it reduces the conflict between “official” lore and homebrew world which can cause issues for some groups. And it does all that without removing old lore—all that lore can be found in places like the Forgotten Realms Wiki, and found in a more compressive, better formatted way than the rule books ever could.
if you bought the books digitally here before they were removed, you still have access to them.
There is zero value in lore to me, because -- like most folks 00 I create my worlds from whole cloth and apply lore that works for my world. I would prefer that they separate "game rules" from "Lore information" entirely -- I bought Volo's and then set it on a shelf to never use again. I am still super pissed off about the worthlessness of BoMT to me because it is 95% lore.
They would make a killing selling just the lore books to players -- yeah, I know "players don't read lore" as a maxim and all that, but in 40 years I've learned that players love lore often more than DMs, so I never buy that. I just need the rules and mechanics. THe "don't read lore" stuff applies to the original creations of the majority of DMs, not the published stuff (I mean, do you really think the FR wiki is only put together by DMs?).
that is wishful thinking, of course, on my part -- they will still put out lore about demons and devils and all the rest, and in a form very much like they did with giants and dragons (which iis more useful overall, I suppose, to some).
Ultimately, all that cut content will return. It will be written by someone else (Mike Mearls was in charge of Volo's, as a note), and will fit more of what Wizards is trying to do, but I bet it will have a lot of the cut lore in it still. So It isn't so much "cut" as it is "in process of being revised".
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
Honestly, I think lore is underrated atm and people place too much emphasis on the idea that it oppresses homebrew simply by existing. Clearly homebrew has flourished for decades alongside printed lore. This is not to say that some lore hasn't involved concepts that really aren't a good look, but at the same time I think the bland semi-idealized versions we're getting in MotM are overcorrecting; I've seen the critique about goliaths being "ableist" in VGtM, which is one facet presented in the book. But, from a worldbuilding perspective (I would like to emphasize this point; I am only speaking in terms of writing for a fictional setting, not arguing for or against anything as a component of real world cultures), this is a product of the fact that the main goliath population centers are in harsh environments where everyone needs to pull their weight; it's not a positive or admirable cultural trait, but purely in the context of setting design, that does not make it automatically bad writing. There's no actual feature that codifies or encourages players to adopt the attitude, and as I've already pointed out people have clearly been disregarding lore they do not wish to incorporate for decades.
Now, races like Kenku that had their need to mimic sounds to speak baked in as a trait players were supposed to work around definitely had traits that were detrimental to play and needed revised, and the Orc section of Volo's could have used another pass or two to pull some more "savage barbarian" tropes from their make-up, but imo that's where you just take an opportunity like the upcoming update where Orcs are being fully normalized as a PHB race to scrape the last of that off. The way they aggressively cut out any useful race lore honestly seems more like a detriment to me since it undercuts D&DB's utility as one stop shopping for tools to play the game and possibly risks putting people off from information overload as they try to read through a wiki article built up from several decades of accumulated lore rather than something more streamlined like what we had in VGtM and MToF. It's not the end of the world, but I think this idea that D&D should be so setting neutral that there's no baseline lore on races and suchlike is ultimately overcorrecting and making it harder for new DMs to worldbuild by reducing the number of tools D&D is providing for them to work with.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
Not everyone wants to build their own worlds from scratch, though, and the thing is that the presence of pre-existing lore demonstrably does not preclude DIY worldbuilding, while the absence of lore very much does preclude those who don't have the time or inclination to design a whole setting from having a foundation they can modify and build on.
Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
Not everyone wants to build their own worlds from scratch, though, and the thing is that the presence of pre-existing lore demonstrably does not preclude DIY worldbuilding, while the absence of lore very much does preclude those who don't have the time or inclination to design a whole setting from having a foundation they can modify and build on.
You don’t need Legacy content (content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with) to avoid building world’s from scratch. If you want to rely on the work of others (I certainly borrow from others for my worldbuilding) there are countless books with lore in them from major third-party and DMsGuild/Patreon publishers. Much of it is better than anything WotC ever produced too.
Honestly, I think lore is underrated atm and people place too much emphasis on the idea that it oppresses homebrew simply by existing. Clearly homebrew has flourished for decades alongside printed lore. This is not to say that some lore hasn't involved concepts that really aren't a good look, but at the same time I think the bland semi-idealized versions we're getting in MotM are overcorrecting; I've seen the critique about goliaths being "ableist" in VGtM, which is one facet presented in the book. But, from a worldbuilding perspective (I would like to emphasize this point; I am only speaking in terms of writing for a fictional setting, not arguing for or against anything as a component of real world cultures), this is a product of the fact that the main goliath population centers are in harsh environments where everyone needs to pull their weight; it's not a positive or admirable cultural trait, but purely in the context of setting design, that does not make it automatically bad writing. There's no actual feature that codifies or encourages players to adopt the attitude, and as I've already pointed out people have clearly been disregarding lore they do not wish to incorporate for decades.
Now, races like Kenku that had their need to mimic sounds to speak baked in as a trait players were supposed to work around definitely had traits that were detrimental to play and needed revised, and the Orc section of Volo's could have used another pass or two to pull some more "savage barbarian" tropes from their make-up, but imo that's where you just take an opportunity like the upcoming update where Orcs are being fully normalized as a PHB race to scrape the last of that off. The way they aggressively cut out any useful race lore honestly seems more like a detriment to me since it undercuts D&DB's utility as one stop shopping for tools to play the game and possibly risks putting people off from information overload as they try to read through a wiki article built up from several decades of accumulated lore rather than something more streamlined like what we had in VGtM and MToF. It's not the end of the world, but I think this idea that D&D should be so setting neutral that there's no baseline lore on races and suchlike is ultimately overcorrecting and making it harder for new DMs to worldbuild by reducing the number of tools D&D is providing for them to work with.
This is why I said they need to do stand alone Lore Books!
I mean, damn straight they need to have something for folks just starting out who were never the sort to build their own private fantasy lands in their heads, lol. I would never argue that they should not have lore. It provides color, sparks imagination, and challenges people to see things while also often explaining things in the game that are not "mechanical".
yeah, there's the profit thing as well, yada yada, but...
It would give them the ability to also focus on providing both a set of guidelines for creating one's own stuff, for modifying published stuff (because about a third of all games are a mix of published and home brew -- and that's growing, not shrinking or being stable over the last several years), while also giving them a chance to show it in action using the existing worlds.
A lot of the stuff that is problematic, as well, comes from the combining of someone's species" with their culture. You know "orc Culture" and "elf culture" and Firbolg culture" and all that crap. The culture needs to be separated from the species -- from the race -- because race is not culture.
Doing that, as well, seriously opens up possibilities and gives folks the chance to create cool stuff that can be good or evil without tying it to a specific thing and freeing the designers to do more interesting stuff.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
Not everyone wants to build their own worlds from scratch, though, and the thing is that the presence of pre-existing lore demonstrably does not preclude DIY worldbuilding, while the absence of lore very much does preclude those who don't have the time or inclination to design a whole setting from having a foundation they can modify and build on.
You don’t need Legacy content (content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with) to avoid building world’s from scratch. If you want to rely on the work of others (I certainly borrow from others for my worldbuilding) there are countless books with lore in them from major third-party and DMsGuild/Patreon publishers. Much of it is better than anything WotC ever produced too.
Which supports the idea that such lore has value, and therefore it would behoove them to produce material for this. The quality of the writing is a completely different point from whether or not WotC should be printing lore in the first place, and if your argument for why they shouldn't is "other people are already doing it", that honestly seems more like an argument that it's something that would benefit from becoming accessible at what for plenty of people is likely their first if not only source of D&D materials.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
As do I, I don't use most canon lore, but some people don't want to go through the hassle of writing their own lore, and some choose to incorporate parts and build off of it to learn to do worldbuilding, and then eventually make their own lore and worldbuilding, using it to learn.
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Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
Not everyone wants to build their own worlds from scratch, though, and the thing is that the presence of pre-existing lore demonstrably does not preclude DIY worldbuilding, while the absence of lore very much does preclude those who don't have the time or inclination to design a whole setting from having a foundation they can modify and build on.
You don’t need Legacy content (content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with) to avoid building world’s from scratch. If you want to rely on the work of others (I certainly borrow from others for my worldbuilding) there are countless books with lore in them from major third-party and DMsGuild/Patreon publishers. Much of it is better than anything WotC ever produced too.
Which supports the idea that such lore has value, and therefore it would behoove them to produce material for this. The quality of the writing is a completely different point from whether or not WotC should be printing lore in the first place, and if your argument for why they shouldn't is "other people are already doing it", that honestly seems more like an argument that it's something that would benefit from becoming accessible at what for plenty of people is likely their first if not only source of D&D materials.
Value is subjective and not really relevant, especially when that content is still available (for free). The owners of the content do not wish to sell that content any longer. The content they are producing is more than enough to get someone started. Given that your position seems to be that some do not wish to build their world from scratch, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on because what they are giving is a framework. What you truly are asking for is dense material that is not included in current books. How do you know that they are not currently working on that right now?
Ultimately this argument breaks down under very little scrutiny. Those who want a framework have it now. Those who want more have it now too with third party content or even with Legacy content. If a DM is so lazy that whenever a player has a question about lore, they hand them MToF and tells them to look it up, why can’t they do that with the Forgotten Realms wiki? It certainly is going to be there and in fact, has more than MToFs and is more organized too.
If you want THAT specific problematic lore back in the current books, just say that.
A lot of the stuff that is problematic, as well, comes from the combining of someone's species" with their culture. You know "orc Culture" and "elf culture" and Firbolg culture" and all that crap. The culture needs to be separated from the species -- from the race -- because race is not culture.
They are not mutually inclusive, but from the perspective of fictional worldbuilding they are not mutually exclusive either. If we use the concept of the different races originating in different geographic regions, then there is no reason that some of them would not have formed their initial cultures independent of other races. Some might have subsequently absorbed, integrated, or been subsumed by other cultures down the line or otherwise formed melded cultures, but there is nothing inherently wrong with having an orc nation or elf nation, and I would argue that the racial traits do allow for a certain amount of race/culture interplay; living for centuries and always manifesting some magical traits as opposed to having a stronger capacity to endure bodily trauma and for physical exertion seem like they would have an impact on development and values. And that's setting aside that even the latest UA sticks with the idea that the different races were created by different deities, adding a whole other set of pressures. You are of course free to disregard any or all of this as you wish in your own worldbuilding, but the trope itself is simply a neutral tool and a valid narrative choice.
If you want THAT specific problematic lore back in the current books, just say that.
I'm not specifically in favor of any one particular piece of problematic lore being reinstated (and I'm not exactly sure which piece you're trying to significantly indicate here), just that if WotC are going to be allowed to worldbuild- which I believe they should- then player races/cultures should be allowed to be something besides overly whitewashed and idealized instances that present no objectionable characteristics whatsoever, which sometimes feels like what we're getting these days. No, this does not mean that I unreservedly support them adding [insert any of the popular examples of negative ethnic stereotyping or other taboo/transgressive element], but the current descriptions we're getting in places like MotM and the UA's are so short as to be useless for worldbuilding and terribly bland, imo.
If you want THAT specific problematic lore back in the current books, just say that.
I'm not specifically in favor of any one particular piece of problematic lore being reinstated (and I'm not exactly sure which piece you're trying to significantly indicate here), just that if WotC are going to be allowed to worldbuild- which I believe they should- then player races/cultures should be allowed to be something besides overly whitewashed and idealized instances that present no objectionable characteristics whatsoever, which sometimes feels like what we're getting these days. No, this does not mean that I unreservedly support them adding [insert any of the popular examples of negative ethnic stereotyping or other taboo/transgressive element], but the current descriptions we're getting in places like MotM and the UA's are so short as to be useless for worldbuilding and terribly bland, imo.
Think of the modern version as vanilla extract. You can use it to make a vanilla cake when you add some other ingredients, but you can also use it in chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps, brownies, and any number of other things. It also tastes pretty awful on its own—but it is never designed to be on its own, and consuming it without additional context is not how most people use it. Vanilla beans might be better for some things, but they take up a lot more space and have a lot more limited a use—particularly given how little content you receive for the cost.
The new lore is the same way—you can combine it with pretty much anything to get what you want, and though on its own it is lacking, the versatility makes it much easier and more applicable to the majority of bakers.
And, of course, Wizards can sell vanilla beans also—that’s what books like Fizban’s and adventure modules provide.
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I have the physical books for Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. I know most of the races have migrated over so I'm not as concerned about that. But the Lore in those two books are no where to be found now and I think that is a shame for people getting onto the DnD Beyond bandwagon after those two books were removed. I kind of wish they'd at least share the monster and race lore from those for free on here or even just a nominal fee so I could share the lore with my players.
Hold on to those books. Continue to use them as the ultimate source of your lore. That and earlier editions of the game. I don't know if you have a virtual copy of those books. But if you do, I wonder what are the legal ramifications of sharing with your players material that is no longer available, if a corporation has decided to delete that material from any other source.
1) They haven't deleted any books, they just no longer sell new instances of them through DnDBeyond and wizards.com. They're not selling 4e books in those places either; every product has a shelf life.
2) The lore that was deleted included a lot of references and associations they'd rather not perpetuate in their game anymore, like savage orcs, ableist goliaths, amoral lizardfolk and kenku being incapable of creativity. If you would like those species to still behave that way at your table, you are free to do so.
3) Sharing that deprecated lore with your players is as easy as lending them your physical books or just telling them what it says.
Problem is my players are not local, hence why I had to re-buy everything on DnD Beyond. Hard to share the books over the internet without pirating, and I won't do that. And playing telephone where I tell my character all about the racial lore rather than just sharing the book in my campaign? We both work and have hard enough time scheduling sessions. I'm not going to spend a session just letting them lore for their one character.
Yeah, I understand that some of it had to go, and I agree with some of that. But having to cut lore about illithids, demons, and devils? Or how about that additional lore on Dwarven deities or how the elves came into being? I played at a table with a gender fluid player that was using the Blessed of Corellon to reflect that with their elf character. New players won't know about that unless someone who was around previously and has the books.
I guess I'm just hoping when the new version comes out next year they eventually add the lore back in some of the books.
I, and others, appreciate lore not being included as it lets DM’s and players come up with their own. And I think lore, like you would like to keep, be contained in setting books. So if a DM wants to run a homebrew campaign setting and do something different with a race/monsters they don’t have players saying “but the rule books say X, Y, or Z.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
Players usually don't read the lore or anything else that isn't on their character sheets. It's up to the DM to slowly introduce their campaign lore during the game, assuming the players care.
You don't have to "pirate" to tell someone what a book says 🤨just don't quote large swathes of it verbatim. How do you think people described rulebooks to each other before DDB?
Illithids, Demons and Devils will be in the next Monster Manual, so we can see what that says and go from there. I do hope they'll flesh those out later too, but player-facing content is the priority. The fact is that we don't need, say, in-depth information on Ilsensine to throw some mindflayers at the party right away.
The issue with lore in major sourcebooks is that the majority of players play in homebrew settings. Putting Forgotten-Realms-specific information can create some problems at these homebrew tables, since the “official lore from the main sourcebook” might contradict what the homebrewing DM’s lore might be. Additionally, this lore takes up a lot of space in books designed to dump large quantities of monsters, all for lore many tables might never care about. Reducing the lore frees up more space for monsters, making the book more useful to those who just want the monsters.
Additionally, having official lore is less important in 5e than in any other lore—there are plenty of old sourcebooks, online Wikis, YouTube videos, video games, etc. to share the official lore for worlds like Forgotten Realms. They do not need to repeat for the umpteenth time lore that has already been shared—not when all that lore is available at everyone’s fingertips with a couple clicks of a button.
Overall, I think this is a great change. It gives us more rules content by giving us more space for monsters and other mechanical content and it reduces the conflict between “official” lore and homebrew world which can cause issues for some groups. And it does all that without removing old lore—all that lore can be found in places like the Forgotten Realms Wiki, and found in a more compressive, better formatted way than the rule books ever could.
if you bought the books digitally here before they were removed, you still have access to them.
There is zero value in lore to me, because -- like most folks 00 I create my worlds from whole cloth and apply lore that works for my world. I would prefer that they separate "game rules" from "Lore information" entirely -- I bought Volo's and then set it on a shelf to never use again. I am still super pissed off about the worthlessness of BoMT to me because it is 95% lore.
They would make a killing selling just the lore books to players -- yeah, I know "players don't read lore" as a maxim and all that, but in 40 years I've learned that players love lore often more than DMs, so I never buy that. I just need the rules and mechanics. THe "don't read lore" stuff applies to the original creations of the majority of DMs, not the published stuff (I mean, do you really think the FR wiki is only put together by DMs?).
that is wishful thinking, of course, on my part -- they will still put out lore about demons and devils and all the rest, and in a form very much like they did with giants and dragons (which iis more useful overall, I suppose, to some).
Ultimately, all that cut content will return. It will be written by someone else (Mike Mearls was in charge of Volo's, as a note), and will fit more of what Wizards is trying to do, but I bet it will have a lot of the cut lore in it still. So It isn't so much "cut" as it is "in process of being revised".
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Forgotten Realms wiki has what you seem to be after. I personally see it as a crutch to your own worldbuilding though. The PHB mention’s the Blessing of Corellon, so players who are looking for that option certainly still have it.
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Honestly, I think lore is underrated atm and people place too much emphasis on the idea that it oppresses homebrew simply by existing. Clearly homebrew has flourished for decades alongside printed lore. This is not to say that some lore hasn't involved concepts that really aren't a good look, but at the same time I think the bland semi-idealized versions we're getting in MotM are overcorrecting; I've seen the critique about goliaths being "ableist" in VGtM, which is one facet presented in the book. But, from a worldbuilding perspective (I would like to emphasize this point; I am only speaking in terms of writing for a fictional setting, not arguing for or against anything as a component of real world cultures), this is a product of the fact that the main goliath population centers are in harsh environments where everyone needs to pull their weight; it's not a positive or admirable cultural trait, but purely in the context of setting design, that does not make it automatically bad writing. There's no actual feature that codifies or encourages players to adopt the attitude, and as I've already pointed out people have clearly been disregarding lore they do not wish to incorporate for decades.
Now, races like Kenku that had their need to mimic sounds to speak baked in as a trait players were supposed to work around definitely had traits that were detrimental to play and needed revised, and the Orc section of Volo's could have used another pass or two to pull some more "savage barbarian" tropes from their make-up, but imo that's where you just take an opportunity like the upcoming update where Orcs are being fully normalized as a PHB race to scrape the last of that off. The way they aggressively cut out any useful race lore honestly seems more like a detriment to me since it undercuts D&DB's utility as one stop shopping for tools to play the game and possibly risks putting people off from information overload as they try to read through a wiki article built up from several decades of accumulated lore rather than something more streamlined like what we had in VGtM and MToF. It's not the end of the world, but I think this idea that D&D should be so setting neutral that there's no baseline lore on races and suchlike is ultimately overcorrecting and making it harder for new DMs to worldbuild by reducing the number of tools D&D is providing for them to work with.
Not everyone wants to build their own worlds from scratch, though, and the thing is that the presence of pre-existing lore demonstrably does not preclude DIY worldbuilding, while the absence of lore very much does preclude those who don't have the time or inclination to design a whole setting from having a foundation they can modify and build on.
You don’t need Legacy content (content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with) to avoid building world’s from scratch. If you want to rely on the work of others (I certainly borrow from others for my worldbuilding) there are countless books with lore in them from major third-party and DMsGuild/Patreon publishers. Much of it is better than anything WotC ever produced too.
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This is why I said they need to do stand alone Lore Books!
I mean, damn straight they need to have something for folks just starting out who were never the sort to build their own private fantasy lands in their heads, lol. I would never argue that they should not have lore. It provides color, sparks imagination, and challenges people to see things while also often explaining things in the game that are not "mechanical".
yeah, there's the profit thing as well, yada yada, but...
It would give them the ability to also focus on providing both a set of guidelines for creating one's own stuff, for modifying published stuff (because about a third of all games are a mix of published and home brew -- and that's growing, not shrinking or being stable over the last several years), while also giving them a chance to show it in action using the existing worlds.
A lot of the stuff that is problematic, as well, comes from the combining of someone's species" with their culture. You know "orc Culture" and "elf culture" and Firbolg culture" and all that crap. The culture needs to be separated from the species -- from the race -- because race is not culture.
Doing that, as well, seriously opens up possibilities and gives folks the chance to create cool stuff that can be good or evil without tying it to a specific thing and freeing the designers to do more interesting stuff.
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Which supports the idea that such lore has value, and therefore it would behoove them to produce material for this. The quality of the writing is a completely different point from whether or not WotC should be printing lore in the first place, and if your argument for why they shouldn't is "other people are already doing it", that honestly seems more like an argument that it's something that would benefit from becoming accessible at what for plenty of people is likely their first if not only source of D&D materials.
As do I, I don't use most canon lore, but some people don't want to go through the hassle of writing their own lore, and some choose to incorporate parts and build off of it to learn to do worldbuilding, and then eventually make their own lore and worldbuilding, using it to learn.
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Value is subjective and not really relevant, especially when that content is still available (for free). The owners of the content do not wish to sell that content any longer. The content they are producing is more than enough to get someone started. Given that your position seems to be that some do not wish to build their world from scratch, you don’t have much of a leg to stand on because what they are giving is a framework. What you truly are asking for is dense material that is not included in current books. How do you know that they are not currently working on that right now?
Ultimately this argument breaks down under very little scrutiny. Those who want a framework have it now. Those who want more have it now too with third party content or even with Legacy content. If a DM is so lazy that whenever a player has a question about lore, they hand them MToF and tells them to look it up, why can’t they do that with the Forgotten Realms wiki? It certainly is going to be there and in fact, has more than MToFs and is more organized too.
If you want THAT specific problematic lore back in the current books, just say that.
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They are not mutually inclusive, but from the perspective of fictional worldbuilding they are not mutually exclusive either. If we use the concept of the different races originating in different geographic regions, then there is no reason that some of them would not have formed their initial cultures independent of other races. Some might have subsequently absorbed, integrated, or been subsumed by other cultures down the line or otherwise formed melded cultures, but there is nothing inherently wrong with having an orc nation or elf nation, and I would argue that the racial traits do allow for a certain amount of race/culture interplay; living for centuries and always manifesting some magical traits as opposed to having a stronger capacity to endure bodily trauma and for physical exertion seem like they would have an impact on development and values. And that's setting aside that even the latest UA sticks with the idea that the different races were created by different deities, adding a whole other set of pressures. You are of course free to disregard any or all of this as you wish in your own worldbuilding, but the trope itself is simply a neutral tool and a valid narrative choice.
I'm not specifically in favor of any one particular piece of problematic lore being reinstated (and I'm not exactly sure which piece you're trying to significantly indicate here), just that if WotC are going to be allowed to worldbuild- which I believe they should- then player races/cultures should be allowed to be something besides overly whitewashed and idealized instances that present no objectionable characteristics whatsoever, which sometimes feels like what we're getting these days. No, this does not mean that I unreservedly support them adding [insert any of the popular examples of negative ethnic stereotyping or other taboo/transgressive element], but the current descriptions we're getting in places like MotM and the UA's are so short as to be useless for worldbuilding and terribly bland, imo.
Think of the modern version as vanilla extract. You can use it to make a vanilla cake when you add some other ingredients, but you can also use it in chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps, brownies, and any number of other things. It also tastes pretty awful on its own—but it is never designed to be on its own, and consuming it without additional context is not how most people use it. Vanilla beans might be better for some things, but they take up a lot more space and have a lot more limited a use—particularly given how little content you receive for the cost.
The new lore is the same way—you can combine it with pretty much anything to get what you want, and though on its own it is lacking, the versatility makes it much easier and more applicable to the majority of bakers.
And, of course, Wizards can sell vanilla beans also—that’s what books like Fizban’s and adventure modules provide.