I believe that perhaps this move isn't one of conforming to the world, but merely a further clarification and separation between Lore, and Game Mechanics. I believe it's highly likely this stuff will return in future lore books.
And at the risk of pushing certain buttons. The 5e Corellon lore is not something that would be against the current right side of history. Corellon was mercurial in nature and form and their frustration and anger with Lolth and her side was based on the idea of trapping elves in single forms. Sounds very much in line with the idea of not forcing definitions on people.
Personally, I love the idea of having books full of all or mostly all crunch. Because I so twist and alter even when I use existing Lore that that stuff just isn't as useful to me. I end up ignoring things frequently, or rewriting things. Just like when the new Spelljammer comes out, if they've dropped the space travel aspect of it I'll just write it right back in.
Separating lore/flavor from crunch is not bad - if we continue to get both. If all we get from now on is crunch I can see that as problematic for many newer DMs. It won’t affect me much as ai have hard copy of just about everything for the world of my choice (FR) as well as bookmarked access to the FR wiki. I don’t know about other settings but the work that has gone into the FR wiki over the years is not something that WOtC could really afford to maintain as there are are far more folks interested in keeping it updated than WOtC could ever afford to pay - that’s why third party sites like the FR wiki are so useful and so good - labors of love not salary.
Well, for starters I had my suspicion that this new tome would bring social justice ruination on D&D, but it would be unfair to assume that everything is out to be cancelled out there. On the other hand as a positive expectation I had wished, but not dare to hope for Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse to be expanding on lore and themes and variants and all that, to help DMs set up the world as they want, especially if they want to set it up in a way that they feel are "legit" towards the official rules.
Now I feel that I have been disappointed on both fronts. The book isn't overcatering to special snowflakeism, but it definitely does dull the races and monsters and their lore. Which of course means that instead of expanding and adding flavor, it just removed even more, leaving less. Sure the art is all flashy and "unique" and whatnot for the "new" races. Yet I feel as if I was handed fresh dry crackers. Not even the good pirate crackers filled with lice and touched by filty sailor hands, soaked in whatever nasty stuff they were handling. No, it's just unimaginitive, flavorless crackers. But there is a lot of it.
What I suggest is that you get past material. I'm currently running an Ironstar campaign with 5 dwarves in it and I purchased a bunch of 2e and 3.5e books about dwarves and the underground and the north and all that. I read the lore and decide how this going to affect or unaffect my setting.
For instance the old books state that a high % of dwarves are infertile and also more dwarves are male than female. Does this mean that dwarves have 3 genders/sexes (I make very little difference of the two) like how bees work? Fertile females, fertile males and infertiles? Maybe it's a bad understanding of dwarven reproduction (for instance it could be that they have fertile phases, but that have to match with their partners and this doesn't always happen even if they have partners). IS this relevant for the story? Is there like a dedicated cult of Sharindlar dead set on keeping dwarven births up? How is arranged marriage work with this? Many questions some might I want to answer in the campaign, but I could also ignore this entirely.
Since the currently reduced lore is really bland you'll have to figure out how it works for you and your table and that's it. Except if it's not how I like it in which case you are very wrong and I have already put your name in the D&D version of The Great Book of Grudges
Meh. When West End Games lost their license for Star Wars and Disney shifted the SW universe official back story that didn't make any of the WEG books disappear from the world and any GM who wanted could run a game using WEG SW rules keeping continuity with the older novels.
Anyone who fancies being an edgelord can still run games with older content and make entire races evil if they want to. Any gaming group that likes the older settings can use the older settings. Drive thru RPG has lots of legacy content available on pdf largely unchanged except for a corporate disclaimer saying that the content no longer represents the official corporate view.
Want something different? Run it. Don't like a change? House rule a change to it. That's what people have been doing for decades to make Drow PCs with good alignments or whatever else they and their DMs agreed was fair game.
It'll change the shape of Adventurers League going forward, but that has always changed to match speeds with what the players wanted as the flavor of the moment. Ever play an RPGA Al Qadim adventure? Seen any recently?
D&D has been "ruined" more times than I can even remember since I rolled up my first AD&D character. People go and come back. Settings go and come back. Somehow we are all still playing the game after decades of hot and cold.
Meh. When West End Games lost their license for Star Wars and Disney shifted the SW universe official back story that didn't make any of the WEG books disappear from the world and any GM who wanted could run a game using WEG SW rules keeping continuity with the older novels.
Anyone who fancies being an edgelord can still run games with older content and make entire races evil if they want to. Any gaming group that likes the older settings can use the older settings. Drive thru RPG has lots of legacy content available on pdf largely unchanged except for a corporate disclaimer saying that the content no longer represents the official corporate view.
Want something different? Run it. Don't like a change? House rule a change to it. That's what people have been doing for decades to make Drow PCs with good alignments or whatever else they and their DMs agreed was fair game.
It'll change the shape of Adventurers League going forward, but that has always changed to match speeds with what the players wanted as the flavor of the moment. Ever play an RPGA Al Qadim adventure? Seen any recently?
D&D has been "ruined" more times than I can even remember since I rolled up my first AD&D character. People go and come back. Settings go and come back. Somehow we are all still playing the game after decades of hot and cold.
Play how you want.
This is all well and good, but I don't think it's wrong to ask for better and more official lore for E5 and this is not it, chief. If I can buy 8 or so books on Drive Thru RPG (which I did) for the price of this one and any of those either provide more interesting and more, in quantity, lore than this one, then that's not a very good buy and it is a valid critique. Of course I would still be happy for the hundreds of monsters the book has in it, but then again, most of these were monsters barely touched upon from older 5E books, right? So none of the new monsters I was wondering about, instead of deepening the lore it is flattened. (We could go into an argument how "entire races being evil" actually makes way more sense than what you would think, but let's not). So sure I'll go dig up the older monsters and older lore and older dungeons but then...why did I even buy this book, right? I'm not saying I wouldn't want to, I'm saying that I wish it was more of what I would have liked it to contain and I think that is a valid critique as well.
So they could have easily claimed Changelings were the original elves before they were restricted to their current form?
Sorry been reading through this and wondering what they were thinking.
My initial reaction was to ignore their new book and if I ever played or run a game this will only prove a problem if my DM decides to adopt their new tactic.
If its up to me I'll just run with what I've got and ignore their changes where possible.
Still keep an eye here you never know what will happen next.
What do I think? The same thing that I thought when Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes came out and deleted all the original lore about Corellon and Elves. That the lore is still out there and I can go find those books if I REALLY need it, otherwise no big deal.
Personally, I still use the Elven Origins Evermeet established back in the 2nd edition AD&D era. I don't lament that those books are no longer casually available.
If they have deleted the stuff from Tome of Foes, as far as I am concerned any retcons that contradict my ancient copy of The Complete book of Elves are no longer relevant ;)
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
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I believe that perhaps this move isn't one of conforming to the world, but merely a further clarification and separation between Lore, and Game Mechanics. I believe it's highly likely this stuff will return in future lore books.
And at the risk of pushing certain buttons. The 5e Corellon lore is not something that would be against the current right side of history. Corellon was mercurial in nature and form and their frustration and anger with Lolth and her side was based on the idea of trapping elves in single forms. Sounds very much in line with the idea of not forcing definitions on people.
Personally, I love the idea of having books full of all or mostly all crunch. Because I so twist and alter even when I use existing Lore that that stuff just isn't as useful to me. I end up ignoring things frequently, or rewriting things. Just like when the new Spelljammer comes out, if they've dropped the space travel aspect of it I'll just write it right back in.
Separating lore/flavor from crunch is not bad - if we continue to get both. If all we get from now on is crunch I can see that as problematic for many newer DMs. It won’t affect me much as ai have hard copy of just about everything for the world of my choice (FR) as well as bookmarked access to the FR wiki. I don’t know about other settings but the work that has gone into the FR wiki over the years is not something that WOtC could really afford to maintain as there are are far more folks interested in keeping it updated than WOtC could ever afford to pay - that’s why third party sites like the FR wiki are so useful and so good - labors of love not salary.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
Well, for starters I had my suspicion that this new tome would bring social justice ruination on D&D, but it would be unfair to assume that everything is out to be cancelled out there.
On the other hand as a positive expectation I had wished, but not dare to hope for Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse to be expanding on lore and themes and variants and all that, to help DMs set up the world as they want, especially if they want to set it up in a way that they feel are "legit" towards the official rules.
Now I feel that I have been disappointed on both fronts.
The book isn't overcatering to special snowflakeism, but it definitely does dull the races and monsters and their lore. Which of course means that instead of expanding and adding flavor, it just removed even more, leaving less.
Sure the art is all flashy and "unique" and whatnot for the "new" races. Yet I feel as if I was handed fresh dry crackers. Not even the good pirate crackers filled with lice and touched by filty sailor hands, soaked in whatever nasty stuff they were handling.
No, it's just unimaginitive, flavorless crackers. But there is a lot of it.
What I suggest is that you get past material. I'm currently running an Ironstar campaign with 5 dwarves in it and I purchased a bunch of 2e and 3.5e books about dwarves and the underground and the north and all that. I read the lore and decide how this going to affect or unaffect my setting.
For instance the old books state that a high % of dwarves are infertile and also more dwarves are male than female. Does this mean that dwarves have 3 genders/sexes (I make very little difference of the two) like how bees work? Fertile females, fertile males and infertiles? Maybe it's a bad understanding of dwarven reproduction (for instance it could be that they have fertile phases, but that have to match with their partners and this doesn't always happen even if they have partners). IS this relevant for the story? Is there like a dedicated cult of Sharindlar dead set on keeping dwarven births up? How is arranged marriage work with this?
Many questions some might I want to answer in the campaign, but I could also ignore this entirely.
Since the currently reduced lore is really bland you'll have to figure out how it works for you and your table and that's it. Except if it's not how I like it in which case you are very wrong and I have already put your name in the D&D version of The Great Book of Grudges
reading some of these posts with Lacrimosa playing in the background is really funny
Meh. When West End Games lost their license for Star Wars and Disney shifted the SW universe official back story that didn't make any of the WEG books disappear from the world and any GM who wanted could run a game using WEG SW rules keeping continuity with the older novels.
Anyone who fancies being an edgelord can still run games with older content and make entire races evil if they want to. Any gaming group that likes the older settings can use the older settings. Drive thru RPG has lots of legacy content available on pdf largely unchanged except for a corporate disclaimer saying that the content no longer represents the official corporate view.
Want something different? Run it. Don't like a change? House rule a change to it. That's what people have been doing for decades to make Drow PCs with good alignments or whatever else they and their DMs agreed was fair game.
It'll change the shape of Adventurers League going forward, but that has always changed to match speeds with what the players wanted as the flavor of the moment. Ever play an RPGA Al Qadim adventure? Seen any recently?
D&D has been "ruined" more times than I can even remember since I rolled up my first AD&D character. People go and come back. Settings go and come back. Somehow we are all still playing the game after decades of hot and cold.
Play how you want.
This is all well and good, but I don't think it's wrong to ask for better and more official lore for E5 and this is not it, chief.
If I can buy 8 or so books on Drive Thru RPG (which I did) for the price of this one and any of those either provide more interesting and more, in quantity, lore than this one, then that's not a very good buy and it is a valid critique.
Of course I would still be happy for the hundreds of monsters the book has in it, but then again, most of these were monsters barely touched upon from older 5E books, right?
So none of the new monsters I was wondering about, instead of deepening the lore it is flattened. (We could go into an argument how "entire races being evil" actually makes way more sense than what you would think, but let's not). So sure I'll go dig up the older monsters and older lore and older dungeons but then...why did I even buy this book, right?
I'm not saying I wouldn't want to, I'm saying that I wish it was more of what I would have liked it to contain and I think that is a valid critique as well.
So they could have easily claimed Changelings were the original elves before they were restricted to their current form?
Sorry been reading through this and wondering what they were thinking.
My initial reaction was to ignore their new book and if I ever played or run a game this will only prove a problem if my DM decides to adopt their new tactic.
If its up to me I'll just run with what I've got and ignore their changes where possible.
Still keep an eye here you never know what will happen next.
i'm going with terrywilcox. its outside the scope of the book...and also very likely outside of the page count limit.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
Deck of Decks
If they have deleted the stuff from Tome of Foes, as far as I am concerned any retcons that contradict my ancient copy of The Complete book of Elves are no longer relevant ;)
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha