MToF elves focus a lot on reincarnation as something that defines their lifecycle wherein though death can be staved off, old elves ultimately still want to die. In Eberron, the main settlement of elves cling to life enough to form their over version of "undeath" that is fueled by devotion from descendants, and even the spirits of their ancestors are believed to still be around all the time. This makes them very unsettling to others in a way that gives elves a smidgen of the freakish. If if they're good-aligned they are still unnatural and scare druids.
I did take some time to step back a bit and wonder that even though yes, the differences are not extreme or insurmountable, what was it that bugged me the most about the MToF elves, and I think it's that their ways and culture are presented almost as an inherent thing in them, it's not that elves believe this and thus do that, but they believe this and that because it's hardwired into their subconscious and very soul to seek Arvandor and psychologically change with their constant exposure to past lives and constant need to return from their "fallen" state and return to Corellon (even if Corellon (or even Lolth) doesn't exist in the setting). If that's your cup of tea, fine but it does have that "half-orcs are brutal because of Gruumsh's blood and maddening whispers" thing that most half-orc players just throw out the window.
I also want to mention that this isn't the first time a recent change has caused issues for me. Since the 5e Monster Manual, liches are said to require feeding on souls, and so it made it much harder for me to talk about both out of character and in character about the possibility of non-evil liches which did exist in previous editions. Even though the need to feed on souls is part of the reason why in Tomb of Annihilation that the Red Wizards of Thay are interested in the Soulmonger and is the reason why a certain lich in Curse of Strahd is senile, I was glad that there was still hope for the non-evil lich in Princes of the Apocalypse. It's much easier to say "this monster is not like the one in the MM", but it was still a barrier I had to get through when talking about non-evil liches that I wanted to tear up my MM. At the time I didn't think of it much as a retcon, because typically cataclysmic events like the Sundering change magic to the current edition.
If there can still be non-evil liches, there may still be hope for the lich who, while evil, doesn't need to feed on souls so can hide inside a tower for 300 years for the party to die of old age.
However, I understand that even without this barrier, talking about a non-evil lich still requires going through the other barrier of "don't you have to kill babies to make the phylactery?". And the answer is the same: baelnorns and that friendly lich in the monastery, (and for previous editions check "Monsters of Faerun" for 3rd ed.)
Why not just have a different form of undead other than lich? I mean, its not like liches are the be-all-end-all of undead wizard types. Arcanoliches are a thing, iirc, in previous editions, who worked differently than regular liches and weren't evil. There have been vampire spellcasters, there are ghost mages, there are mummy-type creatures. It shouldn't too hard to come up with another zombie/skeleton-mage that functionally works like a lich but works on different stats. Its like the difference between a ghost and a specter. Both are ephemeral remnants of people trapped in this world, but one is antagonistic and evil, while the other is neutral and can go any which way.
Take another example from the Tome of Foes, even. The githyanki and githzerai both have creepy undead types as leaders. One is a lich, the other is a powerful arcane-psychic type. The latter can't move, at least not at the moment, but its still an example of someone who's basically undead-immortal but not a soul eater. Its a "not-a-lich" that for all intents and purposes is basically a demilich.
As for the elf thing? Well, its a bit odd, because the writers are trying to reconcile the 4e version of elves with the 1st through 3rd editions; they've admitted that its a challenge. Elves used to be flat out mortal until 4e made them into (to use the 3e term) Outsiders. Things got weird here. And, in D&D, its not like their is a very strong line between culture and genetics - the two are kind of smooshed together into a single block, to the point that even the writers admit that, if you raised a dwarf in an entirely human settlement, you probably should be using the human stat block rather than the dwarf one. So, the MToF elf chapter is a good part of culture mixed in with their innate life cycle.
Like, the whole undead elf thing. Baelnorn liches have been a thing long before Eberron. Oh, hey, another totally renamed non-evil lich thing that doesn't eat souls. Anyways, back on subject. The Baelnorn still fit within the new elf culture - there are a lot of elves still that want out of this cycle of reincarnation. In some cases, the baelnorn were created by the Seldarine themselves. The eladrin want to evolve from just an elf into a pure fae as well as part of their reincarnation cycle. So, if we just swap cultures that prize sticking around rather than reincarnating...
It does take a bit of work, admittedly. Its not an easy thing, but honestly that's true of all settings, no matter the game. I'm used to adapting the offical material and tweaking it to fit my personal settings, since I never run things purely by the book.
Well, its not like keeping it all that its cracked up to be either. Like I said, 5e is a deliberate attempt to merge all previous editions together, so if you want to use 3e lore, of course there's going to be issues. I just don't think its an insurmountable issue if you did want to mix them.
I personally try to keep things to the newest edition and not reference old material, simply because I don't want to confuse new players. But I'm used to a more cyclical group; a more established group would probably want to keep what is more familiar to them.
Yes they were called "archliches" before, but now the term is being used for very powerful liches like Arcerak in 5e to conform to what the term "archlich" usually means outside of D&D. Sometimes they were called "good liches" in Libris Mortis, and in Princes of the Apocalypse the term "lich" is used for a non-evil lich. Baelnorn are distinctly different because of how they are made and some don't even have phylacteries. But with monsters it's easier to make such distinctions. But it's much easier to change monsters and make exceptions for monsters in specific circumstances.
I'm glad that they made it "dwarfy" things are cultural, they are not inherent, but then to put on elves? I think going too much into detail about any race like giving them a psychological lifecycle will put too much pressure on newer players to conform and or bend their characters to it.
4e lore material took place in it's own setting: Nentir Vale aka Points of Light, they made it a unique setting with "best of the best" of multiple settings including a smaller pantheon with the best known deities like Pelor, Bahamut, and Corellon from other settings smacked into one setting. So any changes, and yes there were a lot of changes in 4e, were mostly relevant to Nentir Vale. Forgotten Realms on the other hand, has a history of bending over backward to accommodate edition changes (and always involves a cataclysm, Ao doing weird stuff, and Mystra dies again), such as using the Sundering to introduce dragonborn into the Realms.
I personally try to keep things to the newest edition and not reference old material, simply because I don't want to confuse new players. But I'm used to a more cyclical group; a more established group would probably want to keep what is more familiar to them.
I think here is something that I think is pretty concerning to me, since I tend to game in groups that are mixed in terms of experience. I have been in fights with other players and DMs negotiating about lore and if a character concept fits in or does not fit into the setting. A newer player might come in with an elf who talks a lot about their past lives and thinks they have what it takes to impress Corellon, meanwhile an older player has an elf who has no idea what the newer PC is talking about. Since I am alerted to this "retcon", I already know what to do if this happens and have the talk with players about lore differences and what lore we can agree on. The solution may seem simple, but it may come up in a later publication the way soul-eating liches did(and ironically ones that likely don't eat souls because their phylactery is several miles away), and I would see it as yet another thing that might drift older players and newer players.
I'm glad that they made it "dwarfy" things are cultural, they are not inherent, but then to put on elves? I think going too much into detail about any race like giving them a psychological lifecycle will put too much pressure on newer players to conform and or bend their characters to it.
I don't think they did put it on elves. There are certain biological imperatives, but I think you're overestimating which is culture, and which is genetics. The reincarnation cycle and which memories you see in a trance is the biology. How the individual elf reacts and feels, however, is not determined. There are general guidelines for what elves tend to do, but that's culture which changes between settings.
4e lore material took place in it's own setting: Nentir Vale aka Points of Light, they made it a unique setting with "best of the best" of multiple settings including a smaller pantheon with the best known deities like Pelor, Bahamut, and Corellon from other settings smacked into one setting. So any changes, and yes there were a lot of changes in 4e, were mostly relevant to Nentir Vale. Forgotten Realms on the other hand, has a history of bending over backward to accommodate edition changes (and always involves a cataclysm, Ao doing weird stuff, and Mystra dies again), such as using the Sundering to introduce dragonborn into the Realms.
5e is supposed to try and reconcile all editions. That's why Corellon is back to being a non-defined being of wild magic, like zie was in the earliest editions, going back to zir roots. I may blame 4e more than others, but all of the edition changes do add up here.
I notice that, when a lot of people talk about older lore, they generally tend to refer to the 3e/3.5e era of lore. 1st/2nd stuff tends to fall into the background, unless we're talking Planescape. That's been my experience, at least.
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I think here is something that I think is pretty concerning to me, since I tend to game in groups that are mixed in terms of experience. I have been in fights with other players and DMs negotiating about lore and if a character concept fits in or does not fit into the setting. A newer player might come in with an elf who talks a lot about their past lives and thinks they have what it takes to impress Corellon, meanwhile an older player has an elf who has no idea what the newer PC is talking about. Since I am alerted to this "retcon", I already know what to do if this happens and have the talk with players about lore differences and what lore we can agree on. The solution may seem simple, but it may come up in a later publication the way soul-eating liches did(and ironically ones that likely don't eat souls because their phylactery is several miles away), and I would see it as yet another thing that might drift older players and newer players.
I wouldn't exactly call it a retcon, because all this lore has existed in the past at one point or another.
Still, in that situation? I simply tell the older player that its from a new book, and then tell the players if we're using said book or not. After that? You can believe whatever you want to believe. Or, rather, the characters can believe whatever you want them to believe. I'm a huge fan of leaving things as myths, and suggest that the two elves were simply raised on two different myths that they prefer, or that their cities have different teachings. "You don't know which is right" or "It works for you" are generally the answers I go with. I don't feel compelled to nail down an answer to this kind of thing, simply because I find that restrictive as both a GM and as a player.
If I wanted to make a cleric of Corellon that was an elf supremacist that wanted to take over the world? Well, okay, I wouldn't go that far- still a Chaotic god, after all. But a cleric that tries to prove that elves are "objectively" the best of all races and has stories and myths to back it up? I would leave enough wiggle room to allow it, simply because it gives me options for characters, be it NPC antagonist or being a jerk PC. And the reverse is also true - I've had people tell me I couldn't play a cleric simply because I wasn't a blind faith zealot. Going back to your example elf PCs, I wouldn't like it if I sat down, had a character, then was told that my concept wasn't viable because of the lore that you prefer to follow. I am a firm believe that lore shouldn't get in the way of character ideas or stories, but rather provide an open ended question to encourage stories.
MToF elves focus a lot on reincarnation as something that defines their lifecycle wherein though death can be staved off, old elves ultimately still want to die. In Eberron, the main settlement of elves cling to life enough to form their over version of "undeath" that is fueled by devotion from descendants, and even the spirits of their ancestors are believed to still be around all the time. This makes them very unsettling to others in a way that gives elves a smidgen of the freakish. If if they're good-aligned they are still unnatural and scare druids.
I did take some time to step back a bit and wonder that even though yes, the differences are not extreme or insurmountable, what was it that bugged me the most about the MToF elves, and I think it's that their ways and culture are presented almost as an inherent thing in them, it's not that elves believe this and thus do that, but they believe this and that because it's hardwired into their subconscious and very soul to seek Arvandor and psychologically change with their constant exposure to past lives and constant need to return from their "fallen" state and return to Corellon (even if Corellon (or even Lolth) doesn't exist in the setting). If that's your cup of tea, fine but it does have that "half-orcs are brutal because of Gruumsh's blood and maddening whispers" thing that most half-orc players just throw out the window.
If there can still be non-evil liches, there may still be hope for the lich who, while evil, doesn't need to feed on souls so can hide inside a tower for 300 years for the party to die of old age.
However, I understand that even without this barrier, talking about a non-evil lich still requires going through the other barrier of "don't you have to kill babies to make the phylactery?". And the answer is the same: baelnorns and that friendly lich in the monastery, (and for previous editions check "Monsters of Faerun" for 3rd ed.)
Yeah, regardless of any interpretation of how different elves respond to the biological phenomenon, the phenomenon itself changes elves in eberron, and probably in other worlds. They remember past lives! Come on! The Aerenal and Tairnadal would spend centuries trying to cultivate that and lengthen the amount of time that they can still access those memories during trance. It would be an enormous part of their culture. Too big to just pretend that it's always been there but no book mentioned it.
Also, what about dark elves in Dragonlance? Do they suffer the same fate as Drow in Greyhawk and FR, even though "the schism hasn't occurred yet" there?
Anyway, about liches. The idea that they have to eat souls to stay "alive" is just dumb. Part of the point of a lich is that they are sustained entirely by their magic. They can hide from the world for centuries, because they don't physically need anything. They are, essentially, just their mind and their magic.
I don't think they did put it on elves. There are certain biological imperatives, but I think you're overestimating which is culture, and which is genetics. The reincarnation cycle and which memories you see in a trance is the biology. How the individual elf reacts and feels, however, is not determined. There are general guidelines for what elves tend to do, but that's culture which changes between settings.
5e is supposed to try and reconcile all editions. That's why Corellon is back to being a non-defined being of wild magic, like zie was in the earliest editions, going back to zir roots. I may blame 4e more than others, but all of the edition changes do add up here.
I notice that, when a lot of people talk about older lore, they generally tend to refer to the 3e/3.5e era of lore. 1st/2nd stuff tends to fall into the background, unless we're talking Planescape. That's been my experience, at least.
Are we still doing "z pronouns"? Not trying to be rude, and I apologize if this comes across that way anyway, but did you know that "singular they" is grammatically correct? The general singular they, eg, "The phone is ringing, but I can't be bothered with another random stranger today. They can leave a voicemail.", is as old as the singular you, and thus older than Modern English. The nonbinary they, as would be appropriate for Corellon, can only be confirmed directly to be about as old as the 1950's, but is now both very common usage (which literally means it is correct in conversational English), and recognized by multiple dictionaries and style guides as grammatically correct.
Not saying you shouldn't use zie, you should do what you want, I just like to point all that out because people tend not to know.
Anyway, elves! IMO, the change to Corellon is only "good" if you value originalism rather highly. Otherwise, while making them nonbinary is fine, making them an indifferent a-hole parent god is...hard to justify, for me. I mean, the stories about them from various editions all still work with their nonbinary nature, you just have to understand that they aren't actually male, as such, but some storytellers like to portray "him" that way, likely because "he" fills the space in many stories that the storyteller expects to be filled by a definitely male figure, such as "fathering" children with a female elf god, or being the central deity in a mythology full of a wide range of female figures.
My problems with the new lore is more to do with the other deities, with Corellon's new attitude toward their children, and with the hardcoded biology of things that will have inescapable impact on the psychology of elves in any world that uses the new lore, and changes things about existing characters if this new mid-edition lore is adopted at the table.
For instance, why are all of the elf gods other than Corey-lawn just super ancient elves? Now all of a sudden Llolth has (IMO) a much less interesting story, as do all elf gods.
More importantly, is all this new stuff with the trance, and Transcendence, and all that. Oh, Drow never experience Transcendence? Ok, cool cool cool. How about no? I'm going with no. Any group of gods who will refuse the offspring of those who made the wrong choice (not even an evil choice, btw, in the MToF lore), such that even those who return to worshipping the "right" gods and all that can't ever rejoin the proper afterlife of their people....that isn't a god of Good, in any world I'm running a game in.
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MToF elves focus a lot on reincarnation as something that defines their lifecycle wherein though death can be staved off, old elves ultimately still want to die. In Eberron, the main settlement of elves cling to life enough to form their over version of "undeath" that is fueled by devotion from descendants, and even the spirits of their ancestors are believed to still be around all the time. This makes them very unsettling to others in a way that gives elves a smidgen of the freakish. If if they're good-aligned they are still unnatural and scare druids.
I did take some time to step back a bit and wonder that even though yes, the differences are not extreme or insurmountable, what was it that bugged me the most about the MToF elves, and I think it's that their ways and culture are presented almost as an inherent thing in them, it's not that elves believe this and thus do that, but they believe this and that because it's hardwired into their subconscious and very soul to seek Arvandor and psychologically change with their constant exposure to past lives and constant need to return from their "fallen" state and return to Corellon (even if Corellon (or even Lolth) doesn't exist in the setting). If that's your cup of tea, fine but it does have that "half-orcs are brutal because of Gruumsh's blood and maddening whispers" thing that most half-orc players just throw out the window.
I also want to mention that this isn't the first time a recent change has caused issues for me. Since the 5e Monster Manual, liches are said to require feeding on souls, and so it made it much harder for me to talk about both out of character and in character about the possibility of non-evil liches which did exist in previous editions. Even though the need to feed on souls is part of the reason why in Tomb of Annihilation that the Red Wizards of Thay are interested in the Soulmonger and is the reason why a certain lich in Curse of Strahd is senile, I was glad that there was still hope for the non-evil lich in Princes of the Apocalypse. It's much easier to say "this monster is not like the one in the MM", but it was still a barrier I had to get through when talking about non-evil liches that I wanted to tear up my MM. At the time I didn't think of it much as a retcon, because typically cataclysmic events like the Sundering change magic to the current edition.
If there can still be non-evil liches, there may still be hope for the lich who, while evil, doesn't need to feed on souls so can hide inside a tower for 300 years for the party to die of old age.
However, I understand that even without this barrier, talking about a non-evil lich still requires going through the other barrier of "don't you have to kill babies to make the phylactery?". And the answer is the same: baelnorns and that friendly lich in the monastery, (and for previous editions check "Monsters of Faerun" for 3rd ed.)
Why not just have a different form of undead other than lich? I mean, its not like liches are the be-all-end-all of undead wizard types. Arcanoliches are a thing, iirc, in previous editions, who worked differently than regular liches and weren't evil. There have been vampire spellcasters, there are ghost mages, there are mummy-type creatures. It shouldn't too hard to come up with another zombie/skeleton-mage that functionally works like a lich but works on different stats. Its like the difference between a ghost and a specter. Both are ephemeral remnants of people trapped in this world, but one is antagonistic and evil, while the other is neutral and can go any which way.
Take another example from the Tome of Foes, even. The githyanki and githzerai both have creepy undead types as leaders. One is a lich, the other is a powerful arcane-psychic type. The latter can't move, at least not at the moment, but its still an example of someone who's basically undead-immortal but not a soul eater. Its a "not-a-lich" that for all intents and purposes is basically a demilich.
As for the elf thing? Well, its a bit odd, because the writers are trying to reconcile the 4e version of elves with the 1st through 3rd editions; they've admitted that its a challenge. Elves used to be flat out mortal until 4e made them into (to use the 3e term) Outsiders. Things got weird here. And, in D&D, its not like their is a very strong line between culture and genetics - the two are kind of smooshed together into a single block, to the point that even the writers admit that, if you raised a dwarf in an entirely human settlement, you probably should be using the human stat block rather than the dwarf one. So, the MToF elf chapter is a good part of culture mixed in with their innate life cycle.
Like, the whole undead elf thing. Baelnorn liches have been a thing long before Eberron. Oh, hey, another totally renamed non-evil lich thing that doesn't eat souls. Anyways, back on subject. The Baelnorn still fit within the new elf culture - there are a lot of elves still that want out of this cycle of reincarnation. In some cases, the baelnorn were created by the Seldarine themselves. The eladrin want to evolve from just an elf into a pure fae as well as part of their reincarnation cycle. So, if we just swap cultures that prize sticking around rather than reincarnating...
It does take a bit of work, admittedly. Its not an easy thing, but honestly that's true of all settings, no matter the game. I'm used to adapting the offical material and tweaking it to fit my personal settings, since I never run things purely by the book.
Well, its not like keeping it all that its cracked up to be either. Like I said, 5e is a deliberate attempt to merge all previous editions together, so if you want to use 3e lore, of course there's going to be issues. I just don't think its an insurmountable issue if you did want to mix them.
I personally try to keep things to the newest edition and not reference old material, simply because I don't want to confuse new players. But I'm used to a more cyclical group; a more established group would probably want to keep what is more familiar to them.
Yes they were called "archliches" before, but now the term is being used for very powerful liches like Arcerak in 5e to conform to what the term "archlich" usually means outside of D&D. Sometimes they were called "good liches" in Libris Mortis, and in Princes of the Apocalypse the term "lich" is used for a non-evil lich. Baelnorn are distinctly different because of how they are made and some don't even have phylacteries. But with monsters it's easier to make such distinctions. But it's much easier to change monsters and make exceptions for monsters in specific circumstances.
I'm glad that they made it "dwarfy" things are cultural, they are not inherent, but then to put on elves? I think going too much into detail about any race like giving them a psychological lifecycle will put too much pressure on newer players to conform and or bend their characters to it.
4e lore material took place in it's own setting: Nentir Vale aka Points of Light, they made it a unique setting with "best of the best" of multiple settings including a smaller pantheon with the best known deities like Pelor, Bahamut, and Corellon from other settings smacked into one setting. So any changes, and yes there were a lot of changes in 4e, were mostly relevant to Nentir Vale. Forgotten Realms on the other hand, has a history of bending over backward to accommodate edition changes (and always involves a cataclysm, Ao doing weird stuff, and Mystra dies again), such as using the Sundering to introduce dragonborn into the Realms.
5e is supposed to try and reconcile all editions. That's why Corellon is back to being a non-defined being of wild magic, like zie was in the earliest editions, going back to zir roots. I may blame 4e more than others, but all of the edition changes do add up here.
I notice that, when a lot of people talk about older lore, they generally tend to refer to the 3e/3.5e era of lore. 1st/2nd stuff tends to fall into the background, unless we're talking Planescape. That's been my experience, at least.
We do bones, motherf***ker!