Recent content by arjomanes

But the disclaimer said "Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the...

This whole conversation is difficult. I've seen comments about orcs, drow, hobgoblins, goblins, duergar, dwarves, and gnomes. There may be others that are perceived as problematic as well. Giants, trolls, oni, ogres, goliaths, genies, aasimar, devils, demons, tieflings, there seems to be a lot...

Don’t be afraid to create villains from any culture. Actually DO create villains in every culture in your game. My current game is set in 13th century Latvia/Belarus. Religious contention is a major plus. Catholic Christians, Orthodox Christians, pagan balts, pagan slavs, even Mongol warriors...

Empire of the Petal Throne was the best version of D&D that TSR published. But D&D was ok.

No. Get rid of it. First Edition's "races" went a long way to creating the kitchen sink Mos Eisley Cantina we now see in D&D. Sure D&D was already half there with its LOTR knock-offs, but at least there was a dwarf, or an elf, or a hobbit, alongside the human cleric and magic-user. They were...

How I run Chaotic clerics in my campaign (my campaign is a little different from boilerplate D&D): Actually let's approach it from the other end. . . So Lawful religions exist because the Law requires it. This is why all lawful religions are monotheistic in my campaign. The Law of the Lord is...

Gradine, this last post was really great, and good advice for any scenario that involves people or people-like characters. I'm currently running a campaign that is trying to model a more medieval feel, so it involves plenty of petty war and violence—not big wars that end up in history books—the...

From the title pages of the new Frostbitten and Mutilated book: So there's the Vikings appropriation everyone has been pointing to. That Zak, always upending apple carts.

WOTC lists the first languages it will translate, but that doesn't mean there will be no attempt to translate into Russian, Chinese, or any of the languages mentioned. http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/news/localization

Somewhat tangential, but not as tangential as you'd expect: https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/12/entertainment/bruno-mars-cultural-appropriation-reaction-trnd/index.html edit: just so you know it's not spam or phishing, it's a CNN article titled "​After Bruno Mars is accused of cultural...

if you want minis and maps and maneuvers/powers, then 4e. If you want freeform imagination and description, then Original D&D, or something close to it (Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess have free PDFs that make it easy to get started right away). The free basic 5e works...

There is a lot of D&D material for historical/mythic-fantasy. TSR did historical sourcebooks for 2e; Green Ronin did some excellent sourcebook for historical time periods; many Dragon magazine articles explored themes of medieval history and religion. I remember one about Satan in a very early...

There's a lot to unpack here, and probably too much for a super constructive conversation. Just for starters we're talking about racism, colonialism, cultural appropriation of myth. Then we bring in the "kitchen sink" approach to setting design that these big publishers always create. How are we...

Jim Raggi at Lamentations of the Flame Princess just posted on Google + that the writer(s) for his 21st-best-selling book made 21 cents/word (in Euros). Royalties. https://plus.google.com/112262093672917983853/posts/4B6j9CaezK7

I like this system, but I'd never run it with anything other than Basic 5e. I think there might be too many variables and corner cases when you add in more complicated classes and feats.