Why I feel so abysmally let down by the "Ravnica" news...

Tony Vargas · Jul 25, 2018

Cyber-Dave said:
In fact, cyberpunk is famously described as being a new-wave of romanticism. In its early days, many critics used the term "neuromanticism" or "neuromantic" to describe the genre. That term was taken from Gibson's seminal text and the wide-ranging perception that cyberpunk was a form of "new romanticism." You should think of romanticism more in terms of its relation/attitude towards enlightenment era philosophy (generally negative, though a one word descriptor is reductive), its evaluation of emotion (generally positive), and its use of concepts such as the "sublime" (viewed as the highest aesthetic form).

OK, so noted. Cyberpunk always seemed innately cynical, to me, but I wasn't that big into it, so may have missed a lot of nuance.

Whatever label you want to put on the spirit of steampunk, though, I think it differs notably from that of cyberpunk.

Cyber-Dave · Jul 25, 2018

@Tony Vargas

Cyberpunk is, in many ways, cynical or dystopian. It is also, in many ways, utopian. Arguments about whether it is utopian or dystopian are standard critical fair. Quite frankly, in my opinion, cyberpunk is innately ambiguous more than anything else, at least when you examine any given set of texts synchronically. I believe that a diachronic analysis is required in order to make anything even resembling a clear interpretation of the genre as a whole or a specific set of texts from the genre tenable. All that, however, is beside the point. The point is: a romantic text can be hopeful, cynical, or both. Romanticism has virtually nothing to do with how hopeful or cynical a text is.

Likewise, your claim that cyberpunk and steampunk are innately different on the level of spirit is not accurate either. Steampunk largely owes its existence to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. That text is considered to be the foundational steampunk text. The text is, in many ways, a cyberpunk novel transposed to a Victorian era. Hell, it is written by the Movement's two most famous authors! ("The Movement"--capital M--is a label used to describe cyberpunk before Bruce Bethke's short story title got appropriated by Gardner Dozois and used to re-brand the genre of writing created by its first-wave authors.) At its heart, that is what steampunk is. It is a sub-genre of cyberpunk which takes the basic precepts of the genre and transposes them to an earlier, Victorian era.

SkidAce · Jul 25, 2018

MNblockhead said:
I'm a long-time D&D fan (since the early '80s) and I'm excited to see a brand-new D&D setting. Much more than just another update to prior settings. Updating prior settings in DMs guild, allowing time for playtesting, and then giving POD access makes a lot of sense to me (i.e. Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron). In a short period of time I get:

Dragon Heist, a low-level heist game set in Waterdeep with city-campaign crunch and a fleshed out classic-setting city [Hard Cover, classic setting]

Dungeon of the Mad Mage, a high-level Dungeon Crawl in a classic dungeon, with room for the DM to expand it built into the design [Hard Cover, classic setting]

Wayfarer's Guide to Eberron, a very well-written guide to Eberron, authored by the person who created the setting, in PDF and DnD Beyond, which will be updated, later available for print on demand

A brand-new setting for 5th edition, taken from the rich lore created for Magic the Gathering

What, exactly, am I supposed to be upset about? The Eberron model also gives a financially feasible way for WotC to bring many of the old settings to 5e.

Really, I'm VERY happy--as a long-time D&D fan--about the recent and upcoming releases. The only thing I can think of that would really rock my world is if they managed to get Gary Gygax's actually Castle Greyhawk material and release it as 5e hardcover.

I just can't manage to find anything in all of these announcements to trigger my inner nerd-rage hulk.

Quoted for truth.

Guest 6801328 · Jul 25, 2018

Cyber-Dave said:
It is, however, reasonable that fans are disappointed.

It's also inevitable.

If you had gotten exactly what you wanted, other fans (equally long-term and hard-core) would be disappointed/angry/etc.

"You said it's not what we expect, and <insert whatever here> is exactly what I was expecting. Therefore you BROKE YOUR PROMISE".

Etc.

Cyber-Dave · Jul 25, 2018

Elfcrusher said:
It's also inevitable.

If you had gotten exactly what you wanted, other fans (equally long-term and hard-core) would be disappointed/angry/etc.

Sophism. Someone will always be disappointed. The degree to which people have voiced their discontent, though, is not an inevitability. In fact, in 5th edition’s life span, it is an anomaly.

Tony Vargas · Jul 25, 2018

Cyber-Dave said:
Quite frankly, in my opinion, cyberpunk is innately ambiguous more than anything else

S'OK....

Steampunk largely owes its existence to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine. That text is considered to be the foundational steampunk text. The text is, in many ways, a cyberpunk novel transposed to a Victorian era. Hell, it is written by the Movement's two most famous authors! ("The Movement"--capital M--is a label used to describe cyberpunk before Bruce Bethke's short story title got appropriated by Gardner Dozois and used to re-brand the genre of writing created by its first-wave authors.) At its heart, that is what steampunk is. It is a sub-genre of cyberpunk which takes the basic precepts of the genre and transposes them to an earlier, Victorian era.

Not familiar with the short story.

AFAIK, Jeter (the only thing of his I've read was '87's Infernal Devices, which certainly seemed very steampunk - if crossed with a bit of Lovecraft) coined the phrase before the Difference Engine even came out, and it was more, it seems, in winking reference to cyberpunk trending at the time, than steampunk being period-shifted cyberpunk. Steampunk could as easily have been called Victorian Fantasy or Retrofuturism or Wellsist-Verneanism or something...

But, hey, if there's some school of literary criticism with precise jargon definitions of the term, by all means, don't take my little opinions as challenging it.

Cyber-Dave said:
Sophism. Someone will always be disappointed. The degree to which people have voiced their discontent, though, is not an inevitability. In fact, in 5th edition’s life span, it is an anomaly.

True. Voicing dissatisfaction - any potentially dissenting opinion, really - has it's own dynamics, too. If you expect to get a sympathetic hearing vs being shouted down & ostracized, for instance, can affect whether you express the opinion, at all, which in turn can contribute to an environment that seems less or more sympathetic to such expression. That's why history calls some dissenters 'heroic,' because they were taking real risks for their time, when others who might have agreed were not willing to.

5e, so far, has enjoyed a period in which complaints/negativity have not generally been sympathetically received....

Mistwell · Jul 25, 2018

Cyber-Dave said:
This was the video that started getting me excited about Ravnica: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPZ9hkRr9pw.

That's a pretty excellent overview of what we might expect. Thanks.

[video=youtube;DPZ9hkRr9pw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPZ9hkRr9pw[/video]

Cyber-Dave · Jul 25, 2018

Tony Vargas said:
AFAIK, Jeter (the only thing of his I've read was '87's Infernal Devices, which certainly seemed very steampunk - if crossed with a bit of Lovecraft) coined the phrase before the Difference Engine even came out, and it was more, it seems, in winking reference to cyberpunk trending at the time, than steampunk being period-shifted cyberpunk. Steampunk could as easily have been called Victorian Fantasy or Retrofuturism or Wellsist-Verneanism or something...

I haven’t read Jeter. My interest in steampunk is tangential. Most of my scholarship is about cyberpunk. It is entirely possible that Jeter, like Bethke, used the name for a genre before it became a genre/generated the name that would later title the genre. Bethke’s “Cyberpunk” predates Neuromancer (and quite frankly seems very cyberpunk to me), but even Bethke likes to give credit to Neuromancer for the birth of cyberpunk as a genre. Similarly, it is virtually unanimously agreed that the Difference Engine set the literary conventions for steampunk.

robus · Jul 25, 2018

Raunalyn said:
So, let's talk about Ravnica then. Those of you who are fans of the setting...sell it to us who don't know much about it. What makes it unique? What makes it interesting? Why would those of us who are grognards want to play campaigns set in this setting?

This is really what I think was missing from the announcement, and the source of much of my disappointment.

When I watched the DnD Beyond video on it, it definitely seemed to be geared towards Magic players wanting to have different experience playing in the plane. Talk of “your favorite guild” etc, like the viewer already has an opinion.

It sounds intriguing, but it would have been nice to have a level 1-5 adventure to animate the setting for those of us coming at it fresh. Looking forward to some DMs Guild content to meet that need I guess...

Jester David · Jul 25, 2018

Paul Farquhar said:
Spelljammer is explicitly steampunk.

Explicitly? As in it’s mentioned in the Spelljammer books?
What page?

That’s be quite a feat. While Spelljammer was release two years after the term was coined, it came out years before it was commonly used. Good on the writers then.

Really, Spelljammer gets its Steampunk elements not from Steampunk itself, but by drawing from the same stories: the stories of Verne and Wells. And it has far more overt magic and fantastic elements than most Steampunk settings, like flying nautilus ships and space whales and the Ptolemic cosmology. It’s it’s own unique mashup with elements of steampunk, swords and planets, weird fantasy, and more.

Paul Farquhar said:
And sky pirate stories tend to get filed under Steampunk on Amazon.

Amazon’s catageories are hardly what I would call definitive. There’s a finite number and sometimes authors just have to choose the least bad option.

Paul Farquhar said:
This is pretty much completely wrong. Steampunk technology is what people living in the 19th century thought futuristic technology would look like (and 1920 was the future in 1899). Thus, it is often "magical" because of Clarke's 3rd Law: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

All of that applies to Eberron.

Eberron is actually an example of the subversion of Clarke’s law: any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

There’s no retrofuturistic technology or anachronistic technology. Technology that looks retro or exists too soon. Instead, there’s magic that replicates technology.
There’s a big difference between a clockwork prosthetic powered by gears and springs and one that is simply magic. Between a steampunk cellphone that has gears and a large phonograph horn and a set of sending stones that fulfills the same purpose.