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.
Legacy content isn't content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with, it's just old content that they're not selling anymore but is kept around for people who paid for it before so they can keep using it if they want to. The stuff they actually don't want to be associated with, like certain parts of the 5E hadozee lore, is outright deleted. It does not become Legacy.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Oh, the lore conversation again. I do love when they play the old hits.
Aside from the problematic nature of some, perhaps many, species descriptions, WotC has made the decision that the default setting is now "The Multiverse." This makes lore next to impossible. An orc in the Forgotten realms and an orc in Exandria are very different. A halfling in Eberron and Athas are very different. They stopped doing lore, because lore will be campaign and setting dependent. And since there is no default setting, there can no longer be a default lore. Additionally, there had been surveys where I think 60 percent of people use homebrew worlds, or said homebrew is their favorite, or something along those lines. And of those other 40, they are playing across a few different settings. There's not a ajority playing in the same place. A plurality probably are in the FR, but that still leaves most of us off doing something else.
So, stuff about for example, Corellon making elves, well there's plenty of worlds where Corellon doesn't exist. So, they made the choice that rather than have DMs tell their players, Corellon isn't in this world, no matter what it says in the elf description in the PHB, WotC decided to just leave it out, and let people use whatever lore they liked. They know full well that the fr wiki exists, so they don't spend valuable, finite print space re-hashing lore that both already exists for free and won't be used by most games.
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.
Except I suspect a significant segment of people who use the material aren't "bakers", to use your metaphor, they're people trying to make something nice in their home kitchen, who are now left trying to figure out how to make a coherent dish when the ingredient list, ingredients themselves, and actual steps of the recipe have been scattered across multiple disparate sources rather than being consolidated for easy cross-referencing. That is the benefit to such sources being offered on the same forum; with three clicks in maybe 30 seconds if my internet doesn't drag its feet I can go from the DMG to a subsection of lore in MToF, with links to a number of other relevant sections on the same page right there on the side, whereas the FR Wiki gives less info on a page I can less readily navigate. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good wiki-dive, but between that and D&DB, I much prefer the latter for quickly parsing through lore. Ultimately, my point is just that the accessible D&D material is extremely limited at supporting first-time worldbuilding at this point, and I think it would be beneficial to the environment as a whole if they had something substantial available in the same market a first-time group is going to be buying their DMG and PHB in, rather than tacitly telling them "you just have to figure it all out yourself". Medium and high tier worldbuilders are nicely supported by having access to Legacy material and/or having the time, inclination, and/or knowledge to dig up 3rd party references, but the low tier people trying to do it for the first time just seem like they could use some better support for worldbuilding alongside the support for other aspects of the game.
Oh, the lore conversation again. I do love when they play the old hits.
Aside from the problematic nature of some, perhaps many, species descriptions, WotC has made the decision that the default setting is now "The Multiverse." This makes lore next to impossible. An orc in the Forgotten realms and an orc in Exandria are very different. A halfling in Eberron and Athas are very different. They stopped doing lore, because lore will be campaign and setting dependent. And since there is no default setting, there can no longer be a default lore. Additionally, there had been surveys where I think 60 percent of people use homebrew worlds, or said homebrew is their favorite, or something along those lines. And of those other 40, they are playing across a few different settings. There's not a ajority playing in the same place. A plurality probably are in the FR, but that still leaves most of us off doing something else.
So, stuff about for example, Corellon making elves, well there's plenty of worlds where Corellon doesn't exist. So, they made the choice that rather than have DMs tell their players, Corellon isn't in this world, no matter what it says in the elf description in the PHB, WotC decided to just leave it out, and let people use whatever lore they liked. They know full well that the fr wiki exists, so they don't spend valuable, finite print space re-hashing lore that both already exists for free and won't be used by most games.
I mean, the UA is still referencing Corellon, Gruumsh, and Moradin as the progenitors of their races. Which is honestly why I think WotC's current tack is a mistake; they're not making a clean break from lore (which I honestly think would ultimately create more problems than it solves for bringing new groups into the game), but they're cutting out more than general references leaving people new to the game with a mélange of brief paragraphs that just raise questions the material doesn't answer, either putting someone on the spot to make something up or requiring them to search elsewhere which seems like a less than ideal early experience for a group, particularly if they got inspired by seeing someone's well put-together campaign and are now floundering trying to figure out how that group knew all kinds of details while they can't find an explanation of who Corellon is beyond "the guy who made the elves" in their 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.
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.
Legacy content isn't content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with, it's just old content that they're not selling anymore but is kept around for people who paid for it before so they can keep using it if they want to. The stuff they actually don't want to be associated with, like certain parts of the 5E hadozee lore, is outright deleted. It does not become Legacy.
The hadozee lore wasn’t outright deleted. It was overtly changed. If we want to count lost words, it was 262 words down to 105, which I guess is technically a net loss of lore though hardly anything to agonize over and it was specifically the only glaring blunder in the book which had only just made it to first printing. I have written 11th hour, sleep-deprived discussion posts for my degree that contained more words than what was deleted from the hadozee.
I’m not sure we will be seeing ableist goliaths, brutal orcs, and evil drow as their base nature ever again. You might find some in a given official setting but I would bet dollars to dimes that if you do see it in the future, you will see an example of a savage orc alongside a savage gnome because of their local culture, not as a facet of the orc race. I would wager that in the future, we will see these changes impact even Forgotten Realms. In fact, we already are seeing these changes in Forgotten Realms with the drow.
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.
Fair enough. I disagree that they are useless for worldbuilding and strongly prefer making it setting agnostic so I have the freedom to develop individual cultures on my own without my players asking me why I am ‘making my orcs wrong’.
I am being a bit silly with that last bit; I DM for two individuals who were reluctant to play initially because of those stereotypes and both of the tables I DM for were universally pleased that I excised that nonsense before WotC did.
I am okay with setting books getting setting specific lore but for the most part, I believe that keeping things largely setting agnostic is more useful to worldbuilders who do not wish to play specific settings. For those who wish to have lore just given to them, I stand by my position that there are libraries of content available from corner to corner of the web that do the lifting for even the laziest of DMs.
Oh, the lore conversation again. I do love when they play the old hits.
Aside from the problematic nature of some, perhaps many, species descriptions, WotC has made the decision that the default setting is now "The Multiverse." This makes lore next to impossible. An orc in the Forgotten realms and an orc in Exandria are very different. A halfling in Eberron and Athas are very different. They stopped doing lore, because lore will be campaign and setting dependent. And since there is no default setting, there can no longer be a default lore. Additionally, there had been surveys where I think 60 percent of people use homebrew worlds, or said homebrew is their favorite, or something along those lines. And of those other 40, they are playing across a few different settings. There's not a ajority playing in the same place. A plurality probably are in the FR, but that still leaves most of us off doing something else.
So, stuff about for example, Corellon making elves, well there's plenty of worlds where Corellon doesn't exist. So, they made the choice that rather than have DMs tell their players, Corellon isn't in this world, no matter what it says in the elf description in the PHB, WotC decided to just leave it out, and let people use whatever lore they liked. They know full well that the fr wiki exists, so they don't spend valuable, finite print space re-hashing lore that both already exists for free and won't be used by most games.
I mean, the UA is still referencing Corellon, Gruumsh, and Moradin as the progenitors of their races. Which is honestly why I think WotC's current tack is a mistake; they're not making a clean break from lore (which I honestly think would ultimately create more problems than it solves for bringing new groups into the game), but they're cutting out more than general references leaving people new to the game with a mélange of brief paragraphs that just raise questions the material doesn't answer, either putting someone on the spot to make something up or requiring them to search elsewhere which seems like a less than ideal early experience for a group, particularly if they got inspired by seeing someone's well put-together campaign and are now floundering trying to figure out how that group knew all kinds of details while they can't find an explanation of who Corellon is beyond "the guy who made the elves" in their books.
"Corellon made elves" and "Grummsh made orcs" is not at odds with anything they're doing. Humans came from somewhere too, and that didn't stop Humans living in X from being drastically different to Humans living in Y.
The point is that PC races presumably have free will, so "X deity made Y race" is not sufficient reason for Y race to have a monolithic culture or singular attitude.
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.
Legacy content isn't content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with, it's just old content that they're not selling anymore but is kept around for people who paid for it before so they can keep using it if they want to. The stuff they actually don't want to be associated with, like certain parts of the 5E hadozee lore, is outright deleted. It does not become Legacy.
The hadozee lore wasn’t outright deleted. It was overtly changed.
The part that WotC didn't want to be associated with was deleted even for people who bought it before that was implemented, while Legacy content is still available for anyone who already paid for it. That's the difference.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
The part that WotC didn't want to be associated with was deleted even for people who bought it before that was implemented, while Legacy content is still available for anyone who already paid for it. That's the difference.
Yeah, that's called errata, it's not a new thing in this hobby. You can track down one of the pre-errata original printings on eBay or similar if it matters that much.
The part that WotC didn't want to be associated with was deleted even for people who bought it before that was implemented, while Legacy content is still available for anyone who already paid for it. That's the difference.
Hadozee still exist. Lore for them still exist, just in a different form. As was stated, this is called errata. Spelljammer is still in circulation. Hadozee, drow, goliaths, and orcs all still exist, but the lore for them is very different now. As for the legacy content still being accessible, the circumstances around that is obviously very different. 160 words can be cut without causing more than some whinging on the forums from a handful of people who care about the issue far less than they let on. Delete entire books that people paid for and you can trust DnDShorts to crap all over the internet about it and make it OGL 2.0.
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.
While I agree that many companies produce better lore books than D&D has while owned by Hasbro, the idea that we should only get mechanics, with no lore attached doesn't sit well wiith me. It's not like classes and lineages don't already have lore related to them. Having to buy additional books from third party vendors for lore that should have at least gotten a mention in the original book "D&D" branded book just smacks of lazy creative teams and is basically telling people to pay twice for similar content. Setting books obviously cannot cover everything either, not when there are over 15 different lineages and dozens more sub-lineages. There should be a compromise between lore and mechanics. While the mechanics are the most useful since they are necessary for a rules-based gaming system, the mechanics should also "hang on" some kind of lore the way that muscles hang on a skeleton. Partly, this is to help DMs to have a jumping off point for their own lore, but it is also useful for the DM to answer questions about the mechanics of the creature.
Let's look at Rakshasa as an example: the statblock tells you this is CR 13 creature but with only 2 piddly multiattacks doing 2d6+2 slash damage. (For context, the Chimera is a CR 6 creature that attacks 3 times per round and has a breath weapon.) The spells under the "Innate Spellcasting" section don't suggest anything impressive either: nothing that does direct damage and only three that might directly turn combat in their favor: suggestion, plane shift and dominateperson. A lot of people will look at that and just scratch their heads. Aside from the Limited Magic Immunity feature, there is nothing there that says "This should be a challenge for a level 8 or 9 party." The only way that CR 13 makes sense is by providing a significant chunk of lore: what are the Rakshasa''s habits, likely strategy, leverage over the PCs.
If the DM or players want to tweak or completely re-write the lore in their own game, they should be encouraged to, but saying "go buy another book" or "go through a web search and use what comes up" when there are often conflicting sources of information online (lore often changes between editions) is a bad look for what is essentially a storytelling game + a war game combined into one. Once players and DMs get accustomed to the idea that there is no official lore whatsoever, the storytelling part of the game will become occluded by the war game aspect, in which case "role-playing" just becomes an exercise in war gaming.
I'm always conflicted by things like this. Getting rid of problematic lore has never bothered me, but getting rid of problematic lore and not replacing it with non-problematic lore does. For example: my Player's Handbook has a little sidebar on "typical drow culture," but several of my players have newer copies that just have a blank spot on the page where it used to be. That kind of thing doesn't sit well with me.
As for the Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse--I hate what they did with that. Not only did they remove a lot of cool ways to play characters and monsters that was in the previous two books--but they changed almost everything they did keep so now I have to deal with the fact that basically I need to buy a whole new book in order to get access to stuff I already have but without the most interesting bits.
As for those saying the multiverse setting makes it no longer monolithic so lore isn't needed, that could be worked around with a single sentence to the effect that this is an example of how to do lore from one specific setting. Lore is great for context, and helps keep monsters from being a bag of hit points.
While I agree that many companies produce better lore books than D&D has while owned by Hasbro, the idea that we should only get mechanics, with no lore attached doesn't sit well wiith me. It's not like classes and lineages don't already have lore related to them. Having to buy additional books from third party vendors for lore that should have at least gotten a mention in the original book "D&D" branded book just smacks of lazy creative teams and is basically telling people to pay twice for similar content. Setting books obviously cannot cover everything either, not when there are over 15 different lineages and dozens more sub-lineages. There should be a compromise between lore and mechanics. While the mechanics are the most useful since they are necessary for a rules-based gaming system, the mechanics should also "hang on" some kind of lore the way that muscles hang on a skeleton. Partly, this is to help DMs to have a jumping off point for their own lore, but it is also useful for the DM to answer questions about the mechanics of the creature.
Let's look at Rakshasa as an example: the statblock tells you this is CR 13 creature but with only 2 piddly multiattacks doing 2d6+2 slash damage. (For context, the Chimera is a CR 6 creature that attacks 3 times per round and has a breath weapon.) The spells under the "Innate Spellcasting" section don't suggest anything impressive either: nothing that does direct damage and only three that might directly turn combat in their favor: suggestion, plane shift and dominateperson. A lot of people will look at that and just scratch their heads. Aside from the Limited Magic Immunity feature, there is nothing there that says "This should be a challenge for a level 8 or 9 party." The only way that CR 13 makes sense is by providing a significant chunk of lore: what are the Rakshasa''s habits, likely strategy, leverage over the PCs.
If the DM or players want to tweak or completely re-write the lore in their own game, they should be encouraged to, but saying "go buy another book" or "go through a web search and use what comes up" when there are often conflicting sources of information online (lore often changes between editions) is a bad look for what is essentially a storytelling game + a war game combined into one. Once players and DMs get accustomed to the idea that there is no official lore whatsoever, the storytelling part of the game will become occluded by the war game aspect, in which case "role-playing" just becomes an exercise in war gaming.
It is interesting how not being bothered by problematic lore being removed is being equated to saying WotC should not have lore at all. Setting agnostic does not mean 'no lore' and setting specific books do have lore. If not having lore does not sit well with you, then you will be pleased to learn that there is plenty of lore now and likely going forward too.
WotC is still making lore for this edition. We got an entire book about the Feywild added to DDB this year that is 90% lore. Baldurs Gate 3 is chock full of lore, and both WotC (all the way up to Crawford and Perkins) as well as Ed Greenwood himself contributed to it. I'm just as avid for more of it as everyone else, but I don't want them to return to the 3.5 paradigm of inundating the market with splatbooks every single year. Between 2003 and 2007, WotC printed 14 splatbooks for Eberron alone, none of which were modules or adventure paths, never mind the FR, Greyhawk, and setting-agnostic stuff that also came out in that time, as well as the articles and novels etc. If you're a DM hungry for ideas that might sound great, but from a publishing standpoint it's just not sustainable.
The quality of a lot of those books really suffered for the last few years of that period, too. The timeline between writing and publication was short enough that they obviously had skipped on a lot of QC in order to make deadlines.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
While I agree that many companies produce better lore books than D&D has while owned by Hasbro, the idea that we should only get mechanics, with no lore attached doesn't sit well wiith me. It's not like classes and lineages don't already have lore related to them. Having to buy additional books from third party vendors for lore that should have at least gotten a mention in the original book "D&D" branded book just smacks of lazy creative teams and is basically telling people to pay twice for similar content. Setting books obviously cannot cover everything either, not when there are over 15 different lineages and dozens more sub-lineages. There should be a compromise between lore and mechanics. While the mechanics are the most useful since they are necessary for a rules-based gaming system, the mechanics should also "hang on" some kind of lore the way that muscles hang on a skeleton. Partly, this is to help DMs to have a jumping off point for their own lore, but it is also useful for the DM to answer questions about the mechanics of the creature.
Let's look at Rakshasa as an example: the statblock tells you this is CR 13 creature but with only 2 piddly multiattacks doing 2d6+2 slash damage. (For context, the Chimera is a CR 6 creature that attacks 3 times per round and has a breath weapon.) The spells under the "Innate Spellcasting" section don't suggest anything impressive either: nothing that does direct damage and only three that might directly turn combat in their favor: suggestion, plane shift and dominateperson. A lot of people will look at that and just scratch their heads. Aside from the Limited Magic Immunity feature, there is nothing there that says "This should be a challenge for a level 8 or 9 party." The only way that CR 13 makes sense is by providing a significant chunk of lore: what are the Rakshasa''s habits, likely strategy, leverage over the PCs.
If the DM or players want to tweak or completely re-write the lore in their own game, they should be encouraged to, but saying "go buy another book" or "go through a web search and use what comes up" when there are often conflicting sources of information online (lore often changes between editions) is a bad look for what is essentially a storytelling game + a war game combined into one. Once players and DMs get accustomed to the idea that there is no official lore whatsoever, the storytelling part of the game will become occluded by the war game aspect, in which case "role-playing" just becomes an exercise in war gaming.
It is interesting how not being bothered by problematic lore being removed is being equated to saying WotC should not have lore at all. Setting agnostic does not mean 'no lore' and setting specific books do have lore. If not having lore does not sit well with you, then you will be pleased to learn that there is plenty of lore now and likely going forward too.
I never said that problematic lore should or should not be removed in this post. It seems to me you are suggesting something not actually stated by me. That is rude and erroneous.
Also, keep in mind that when lore gets removed from a playable species/lineage that of course has will have implications for how that species/lineage will appear in the Monster Manual that they plan on publishing in 2024 (or 2025). They didn't just get rid of the "problematic" elements of Bugbears, Goblins and Hobgoblins. They made them into effectively fey humanoids. That suggests a major change to lore, which I hope they will actually provide details about rather than just hand-wave as "it happened, we have nothing else to say about it because reasons."
They did, in fact, cut out lore on Illithids, Demons, and Devils in MMPM. These are thematic and intelligent potential enemies (or temporary allies??) for the PCs that are very likely to appear over the span of a campaign or even multiple campaigns. If the PCs are epic heroes, questing in dangerous lands, slaying da Evilz, they need to have a set of memorable villains. The purpose of lore should not be to completely replace the DM's or the players' imaginations but to jump start it. Having some lore provides a trunk and a few branches for the DM (and maybe players) to draw in their own leaves and additional branches. We cannot assume that everybody has a bunch of disposable time and income to buy a bunch of books or spend hours surfing the Internet to cobble lore together from multiple, sometimes contradictory, sources.
Look, the second any lore gets printed anywhere, it will appear almost instantaneously on a Wiki or tool-set or stolen whole-cloth as a scanned book available in the most basic to access places. Lore will always be additive, as, even if it changes between editions, or even between printings, it will never go away. If the issue is that the lore feels less "official" to you because it is not printed in the most recent texts, they you can join the rest of us in the clubs of people who keep the deep lore and the "lost ways" on our shelves or our favorites tabs for posterity and/or occasional perusal or inspiration. However, it is wasteful to thrash and whine about the present changing. The now is always in flux and will continue to be as the seconds blur past.
Embrace the future. Remember the past.
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"The mongoose blew out its candle and was asleep in bed before the room went dark." —Llanowar fable
I agree that the whitewashing of all the races seems to be a lazy, overkill way to avoid potentially offending someone, somewhere, over something 9that may not even exist today, but will be invented tomorrow to become the latest craze)
Settings books are cash cow potential for WotC, honestly. A book about FR, explaining how Orcs, Goblins, Elves and all the races native to the realm live would give DMs a solid base to build their game in, under FR setting. Planescape, or Eberron, would be separate books, explaining how these races exist on THAT world, which may be wildly different to FR, or Ravenloft, or whatever other worlds they wish to release lore for.
Removing the lore, I reiterate, is the lazy man's way out. Expanding and segregating lore to different settings is a far better option, as it retains what has always been in setting A, while showing that this race is very different in setting B. As opposed to trying to flesh out and have living, organic settings, WotC opted to make everyone vanilla and let DM's decide who is like what, where. For those building worlds, literally from scratch, who want nothing more than a stat block, that's great. for a DM who would like to create a story in an established setting, to avoid having to invent the wheel for every race there, it's a big task. It's far simpler to erase things when someone cries hurt than to explain how that thing that hurt is only relevant in one setting. Lazy changes make for poor results, as we are seeing.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
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Legacy content isn't content WotC no longer wishes to be associated with, it's just old content that they're not selling anymore but is kept around for people who paid for it before so they can keep using it if they want to. The stuff they actually don't want to be associated with, like certain parts of the 5E hadozee lore, is outright deleted. It does not become Legacy.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Oh, the lore conversation again. I do love when they play the old hits.
Aside from the problematic nature of some, perhaps many, species descriptions, WotC has made the decision that the default setting is now "The Multiverse." This makes lore next to impossible. An orc in the Forgotten realms and an orc in Exandria are very different. A halfling in Eberron and Athas are very different. They stopped doing lore, because lore will be campaign and setting dependent. And since there is no default setting, there can no longer be a default lore. Additionally, there had been surveys where I think 60 percent of people use homebrew worlds, or said homebrew is their favorite, or something along those lines. And of those other 40, they are playing across a few different settings. There's not a ajority playing in the same place. A plurality probably are in the FR, but that still leaves most of us off doing something else.
So, stuff about for example, Corellon making elves, well there's plenty of worlds where Corellon doesn't exist. So, they made the choice that rather than have DMs tell their players, Corellon isn't in this world, no matter what it says in the elf description in the PHB, WotC decided to just leave it out, and let people use whatever lore they liked. They know full well that the fr wiki exists, so they don't spend valuable, finite print space re-hashing lore that both already exists for free and won't be used by most games.
Except I suspect a significant segment of people who use the material aren't "bakers", to use your metaphor, they're people trying to make something nice in their home kitchen, who are now left trying to figure out how to make a coherent dish when the ingredient list, ingredients themselves, and actual steps of the recipe have been scattered across multiple disparate sources rather than being consolidated for easy cross-referencing. That is the benefit to such sources being offered on the same forum; with three clicks in maybe 30 seconds if my internet doesn't drag its feet I can go from the DMG to a subsection of lore in MToF, with links to a number of other relevant sections on the same page right there on the side, whereas the FR Wiki gives less info on a page I can less readily navigate. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good wiki-dive, but between that and D&DB, I much prefer the latter for quickly parsing through lore. Ultimately, my point is just that the accessible D&D material is extremely limited at supporting first-time worldbuilding at this point, and I think it would be beneficial to the environment as a whole if they had something substantial available in the same market a first-time group is going to be buying their DMG and PHB in, rather than tacitly telling them "you just have to figure it all out yourself". Medium and high tier worldbuilders are nicely supported by having access to Legacy material and/or having the time, inclination, and/or knowledge to dig up 3rd party references, but the low tier people trying to do it for the first time just seem like they could use some better support for worldbuilding alongside the support for other aspects of the game.
I mean, the UA is still referencing Corellon, Gruumsh, and Moradin as the progenitors of their races. Which is honestly why I think WotC's current tack is a mistake; they're not making a clean break from lore (which I honestly think would ultimately create more problems than it solves for bringing new groups into the game), but they're cutting out more than general references leaving people new to the game with a mélange of brief paragraphs that just raise questions the material doesn't answer, either putting someone on the spot to make something up or requiring them to search elsewhere which seems like a less than ideal early experience for a group, particularly if they got inspired by seeing someone's well put-together campaign and are now floundering trying to figure out how that group knew all kinds of details while they can't find an explanation of who Corellon is beyond "the guy who made the elves" in their books.
The hadozee lore wasn’t outright deleted. It was overtly changed. If we want to count lost words, it was 262 words down to 105, which I guess is technically a net loss of lore though hardly anything to agonize over and it was specifically the only glaring blunder in the book which had only just made it to first printing. I have written 11th hour, sleep-deprived discussion posts for my degree that contained more words than what was deleted from the hadozee.
I’m not sure we will be seeing ableist goliaths, brutal orcs, and evil drow as their base nature ever again. You might find some in a given official setting but I would bet dollars to dimes that if you do see it in the future, you will see an example of a savage orc alongside a savage gnome because of their local culture, not as a facet of the orc race. I would wager that in the future, we will see these changes impact even Forgotten Realms. In fact, we already are seeing these changes in Forgotten Realms with the drow.
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Fair enough. I disagree that they are useless for worldbuilding and strongly prefer making it setting agnostic so I have the freedom to develop individual cultures on my own without my players asking me why I am ‘making my orcs wrong’.
I am being a bit silly with that last bit; I DM for two individuals who were reluctant to play initially because of those stereotypes and both of the tables I DM for were universally pleased that I excised that nonsense before WotC did.
I am okay with setting books getting setting specific lore but for the most part, I believe that keeping things largely setting agnostic is more useful to worldbuilders who do not wish to play specific settings. For those who wish to have lore just given to them, I stand by my position that there are libraries of content available from corner to corner of the web that do the lifting for even the laziest of DMs.
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"Corellon made elves" and "Grummsh made orcs" is not at odds with anything they're doing. Humans came from somewhere too, and that didn't stop Humans living in X from being drastically different to Humans living in Y.
The point is that PC races presumably have free will, so "X deity made Y race" is not sufficient reason for Y race to have a monolithic culture or singular attitude.
The part that WotC didn't want to be associated with was deleted even for people who bought it before that was implemented, while Legacy content is still available for anyone who already paid for it. That's the difference.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, that's called errata, it's not a new thing in this hobby. You can track down one of the pre-errata original printings on eBay or similar if it matters that much.
Exactly.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Hadozee still exist. Lore for them still exist, just in a different form. As was stated, this is called errata. Spelljammer is still in circulation. Hadozee, drow, goliaths, and orcs all still exist, but the lore for them is very different now. As for the legacy content still being accessible, the circumstances around that is obviously very different. 160 words can be cut without causing more than some whinging on the forums from a handful of people who care about the issue far less than they let on. Delete entire books that people paid for and you can trust DnDShorts to crap all over the internet about it and make it OGL 2.0.
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While I agree that many companies produce better lore books than D&D has while owned by Hasbro, the idea that we should only get mechanics, with no lore attached doesn't sit well wiith me. It's not like classes and lineages don't already have lore related to them. Having to buy additional books from third party vendors for lore that should have at least gotten a mention in the original book "D&D" branded book just smacks of lazy creative teams and is basically telling people to pay twice for similar content. Setting books obviously cannot cover everything either, not when there are over 15 different lineages and dozens more sub-lineages. There should be a compromise between lore and mechanics. While the mechanics are the most useful since they are necessary for a rules-based gaming system, the mechanics should also "hang on" some kind of lore the way that muscles hang on a skeleton. Partly, this is to help DMs to have a jumping off point for their own lore, but it is also useful for the DM to answer questions about the mechanics of the creature.
Let's look at Rakshasa as an example: the statblock tells you this is CR 13 creature but with only 2 piddly multiattacks doing 2d6+2 slash damage. (For context, the Chimera is a CR 6 creature that attacks 3 times per round and has a breath weapon.) The spells under the "Innate Spellcasting" section don't suggest anything impressive either: nothing that does direct damage and only three that might directly turn combat in their favor: suggestion, plane shift and dominate person. A lot of people will look at that and just scratch their heads. Aside from the Limited Magic Immunity feature, there is nothing there that says "This should be a challenge for a level 8 or 9 party." The only way that CR 13 makes sense is by providing a significant chunk of lore: what are the Rakshasa''s habits, likely strategy, leverage over the PCs.
If the DM or players want to tweak or completely re-write the lore in their own game, they should be encouraged to, but saying "go buy another book" or "go through a web search and use what comes up" when there are often conflicting sources of information online (lore often changes between editions) is a bad look for what is essentially a storytelling game + a war game combined into one. Once players and DMs get accustomed to the idea that there is no official lore whatsoever, the storytelling part of the game will become occluded by the war game aspect, in which case "role-playing" just becomes an exercise in war gaming.
I'm always conflicted by things like this. Getting rid of problematic lore has never bothered me, but getting rid of problematic lore and not replacing it with non-problematic lore does. For example: my Player's Handbook has a little sidebar on "typical drow culture," but several of my players have newer copies that just have a blank spot on the page where it used to be. That kind of thing doesn't sit well with me.
As for the Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse--I hate what they did with that. Not only did they remove a lot of cool ways to play characters and monsters that was in the previous two books--but they changed almost everything they did keep so now I have to deal with the fact that basically I need to buy a whole new book in order to get access to stuff I already have but without the most interesting bits.
As for those saying the multiverse setting makes it no longer monolithic so lore isn't needed, that could be worked around with a single sentence to the effect that this is an example of how to do lore from one specific setting. Lore is great for context, and helps keep monsters from being a bag of hit points.
It is interesting how not being bothered by problematic lore being removed is being equated to saying WotC should not have lore at all. Setting agnostic does not mean 'no lore' and setting specific books do have lore. If not having lore does not sit well with you, then you will be pleased to learn that there is plenty of lore now and likely going forward too.
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WotC is still making lore for this edition. We got an entire book about the Feywild added to DDB this year that is 90% lore. Baldurs Gate 3 is chock full of lore, and both WotC (all the way up to Crawford and Perkins) as well as Ed Greenwood himself contributed to it. I'm just as avid for more of it as everyone else, but I don't want them to return to the 3.5 paradigm of inundating the market with splatbooks every single year. Between 2003 and 2007, WotC printed 14 splatbooks for Eberron alone, none of which were modules or adventure paths, never mind the FR, Greyhawk, and setting-agnostic stuff that also came out in that time, as well as the articles and novels etc. If you're a DM hungry for ideas that might sound great, but from a publishing standpoint it's just not sustainable.
The quality of a lot of those books really suffered for the last few years of that period, too. The timeline between writing and publication was short enough that they obviously had skipped on a lot of QC in order to make deadlines.
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"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I never said that problematic lore should or should not be removed in this post. It seems to me you are suggesting something not actually stated by me. That is rude and erroneous.
Also, keep in mind that when lore gets removed from a playable species/lineage that of course has will have implications for how that species/lineage will appear in the Monster Manual that they plan on publishing in 2024 (or 2025). They didn't just get rid of the "problematic" elements of Bugbears, Goblins and Hobgoblins. They made them into effectively fey humanoids. That suggests a major change to lore, which I hope they will actually provide details about rather than just hand-wave as "it happened, we have nothing else to say about it because reasons."
They did, in fact, cut out lore on Illithids, Demons, and Devils in MMPM. These are thematic and intelligent potential enemies (or temporary allies??) for the PCs that are very likely to appear over the span of a campaign or even multiple campaigns. If the PCs are epic heroes, questing in dangerous lands, slaying da Evilz, they need to have a set of memorable villains. The purpose of lore should not be to completely replace the DM's or the players' imaginations but to jump start it. Having some lore provides a trunk and a few branches for the DM (and maybe players) to draw in their own leaves and additional branches. We cannot assume that everybody has a bunch of disposable time and income to buy a bunch of books or spend hours surfing the Internet to cobble lore together from multiple, sometimes contradictory, sources.
Look, the second any lore gets printed anywhere, it will appear almost instantaneously on a Wiki or tool-set or stolen whole-cloth as a scanned book available in the most basic to access places. Lore will always be additive, as, even if it changes between editions, or even between printings, it will never go away. If the issue is that the lore feels less "official" to you because it is not printed in the most recent texts, they you can join the rest of us in the clubs of people who keep the deep lore and the "lost ways" on our shelves or our favorites tabs for posterity and/or occasional perusal or inspiration. However, it is wasteful to thrash and whine about the present changing. The now is always in flux and will continue to be as the seconds blur past.
Embrace the future. Remember the past.
I agree that the whitewashing of all the races seems to be a lazy, overkill way to avoid potentially offending someone, somewhere, over something 9that may not even exist today, but will be invented tomorrow to become the latest craze)
Settings books are cash cow potential for WotC, honestly. A book about FR, explaining how Orcs, Goblins, Elves and all the races native to the realm live would give DMs a solid base to build their game in, under FR setting. Planescape, or Eberron, would be separate books, explaining how these races exist on THAT world, which may be wildly different to FR, or Ravenloft, or whatever other worlds they wish to release lore for.
Removing the lore, I reiterate, is the lazy man's way out. Expanding and segregating lore to different settings is a far better option, as it retains what has always been in setting A, while showing that this race is very different in setting B. As opposed to trying to flesh out and have living, organic settings, WotC opted to make everyone vanilla and let DM's decide who is like what, where. For those building worlds, literally from scratch, who want nothing more than a stat block, that's great. for a DM who would like to create a story in an established setting, to avoid having to invent the wheel for every race there, it's a big task. It's far simpler to erase things when someone cries hurt than to explain how that thing that hurt is only relevant in one setting. Lazy changes make for poor results, as we are seeing.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.