D&D 5E Unearthed Arcana: Gothic Lineages & New Race/Culture Distinction

The latest Unearthed Arcana contains the Dhampir, Reborn, and Hexblood races. The Dhampir is a half-vampire; the Hexblood is a character which has made a pact with a hag; and the Reborn is somebody brought back to life.

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Perhaps the bigger news is this declaration on how race is to be handled in future D&D books as it joins other games by stating that:

"...the race options in this article and in future D&D books lack the Ability Score Increase trait, the Language trait, the Alignment trait, and any other trait that is purely cultural. Racial traits henceforth reflect only the physical or magical realities of being a player character who’s a member of a particular lineage. Such traits include things like darkvision, a breath weapon (as in the dragonborn), or innate magical ability (as in the forest gnome). Such traits don’t include cultural characteristics, like language or training with a weapon or a tool, and the traits also don’t include an alignment suggestion, since alignment is a choice for each individual, not a characteristic shared by a lineage."

 

[Vaalingrade]

I dunno. But if we are to argue that the monsters aren't antagonists then they have a right to life same as anyone. Good luck.

No one is taking murder away.

In fact my favorite pastime is when a DM tries to punish me for playing a non-standard race by having everyone in town be a jackass to me--laying waste to the town. Hellish Rebuke is right there in the features after all...

 

[Don Durito]

I think it's fine, although removing the idea that any fiends were once mortals (leaving all dead mortals as petitioners of one type or another) might be even better.

Yeah, I dislike racial gods as well, especially since they're done so badly. If you look at the orc gods, they have a goddess of healing and fertility, a god of tactics, and a god of strength and loyalty. But they're evil, even though those same gods would be neutral or good with any "good" race. I hope they move away from racial gods.

This is one of the great things about the OSR.

It just asked "do we really need all this accumulated cruft"? But mainstream D&D fandom still seems to be stuck in this same rut. People talking about reconceptualising Grumsh so he's less problematic - but it seems a bit...redundant. Do you you need Grumsh at all? What is he for? Just chuck him in the bin.

And at the same time it's worth asking do we need Orcs at all? Is the idea really all that redeemable? Orcs as always evil monsters are not interesting in the slightest. Evil orcs now are not able to serve the function they served in the 1970s, they're only able to gesture at it. And non-evil Orcs have a tendency to run into some kind of noble savage trope just as easily.

By all means, if people really like Orcs and really want to do something with them - then by all means - but it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the accumulated cruft of D&D can just be left out entirely with no real harm to the game (and to the benefit of less constrained imagination).

 

[Chaosmancer]

You know, I'm back a few pages and I'm reading all of these aggressive questions about whether or not fantasy can exist as a genre, whether or not DnD needs to be abandoned, can you even have villains in any story.

And I can't help but ruefully chuckle in disbelief. It's like watching someone stand up and start screaming

"YOU! Random person on the street, do YOU have the answers to some of the most complex and troubling questions of the twentieth century? Don't you have an easy digestible answer for an issue that the most talented writers, artists and philosophers have been grappling with for decades with limited or no success! QUICK, give me your wisdom random person, tell me exactly what we need to do! YOU CAN'T!!! Then it is all FAKE, there is nothing wrong if you can't give me an answer!"

Like, I'm a fairly smart guy. College educated. I'm a writer, and I've been grappling with these ideas for a long time. I don't know how to fix it. I can't just, change hundreds or years of human behavior and come up with something that both preserves what I love and stops hurting people who don't deserve the harm inflicted on them.

I'm a straight white guy, when I write a female character am I doing it wrong? Am I perpetuating the wrong tropes? I don't know. I try not to. I try to make sure I don't fall too far one way or the other. But, I'm not a cultural genius. I'm not Shakespeare, and I don't think Shakespeare could have figured this out either.

I figure as long as I recognize there is a problem, and I put some effort into making sure I don't make things worse... that's about the best I can do. Be kind. Be mindful. Be compassionate. If I'm doing that, I'm doing my best. And if people want more than my best... that's on them. I'm limited. I can't change everything in the world and half the time I can't change myself.

Anyways, just my thoughts upon seeing all these questions shot like bullets into the crowd. Like they are somehow supposed to be easily answered with simple steps, instead of being really difficult things we need to grapple with.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Yes. Granted, sometimes there could be irreconcilable differences. Like if a mind flayer needs to eat my brain in order to survive and I would rather keep my brain, it is unlikely that we would be able to reach an amicable compromise on the matter.

Bad Joke:

"What if they offer to only eat half of it, you only use 10% of your brain anyways, so you won't even notice. Tentacle promise"

/Bad Joke End

 

[Chaosmancer]

Why? They are thinking, they have a system of rank. Yes they are magical, but where's the line in the sand for you?

Generally for me, because they are entropy on two legs.

They aren't born to families, they arise out of a pit of evil with the sole purpose of ending all life across all planets. They are a ideological force given form so we can stab it. They are murder, they are killing, they are destruction given a body by the power of literature. They could be ink blots, and they still work, only they would be less visually horrific, because tearing and ripping is more visceral

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is one of the great things about the OSR.

It just asked "do we really need all this accumulated cruft"? But mainstream D&D fandom still seems to be stuck in this same rut. People talking about reconceptualising Grumsh so he's less problematic - but it seems a bit...redundant. Do you you need Grumsh at all? What is he for? Just chuck him in the bin.

And at the same time it's worth asking do we need Orcs at all? Is the idea really all that redeemable? Orcs as always evil monsters are not interesting in the slightest. Evil orcs now are not able to serve the function they served in the 1970s, they're only able to gesture at it. And non-evil Orcs have a tendency to run into some kind of noble savage trope just as easily.

By all means, if people really like Orcs and really want to do something with them - then by all means - but it's worth bearing in mind that a lot of the accumulated cruft of D&D can just be left out entirely with no real harm to the game (and to the benefit of less constrained imagination).

I liked having Luthic imprison Gruumsh, and basically use him as "Good intentions warped by ego, stubbornness, and rage"

Gruumsh, in my version, really does want what is best for the orcs. He wants them to thrive. But he believes that the same path he started on at the dawn of time is the best way, that they just need to keep doing the same things, the same way, and that will eventually lead their people to prosperity.

While Luthic saw that the old ways were killing her children. The lack of use of healing magic, the constant warfare, the unwillingness to ever cooperate with non-orcs. She saw that would be the end of the Orc race, so she betrayed her husband to save her children. But she doesn't want to. She doesn't want to imprison him. She wants him to work with her, but he refuses. To blind to see.

Personally, I like it a lot. Some good hooks and some nice divine drama. But, it is my own take and nothing more.

 

[Mecheon]

It just asked "do we really need all this accumulated cruft"? But mainstream D&D fandom still seems to be stuck in this same rut. People talking about reconceptualising Grumsh so he's less problematic - but it seems a bit...redundant. Do you you need Grumsh at all? What is he for? Just chuck him in the bin.

There's parts to him that's salvageable and able to be turned interesting ways. Same with Lolth. Problem is you've gotta get a bloody crowbar to seperate it from the cruft

Imagine a Lolth that actually cared about and acted like spiders, as in, y'know, loving parents who would sacrice their lives for their children!

Mostly I get kind of stuck when it comes to the fact the gods are real, and have racial ties.

D&D has handled gods absolutely, 100%, bloody awfully the whole way through and not realistic in the slightest. "Its the gods fault" is a piss-poor explanation for everything. A slapped on 'oh yeah the gods did it' is a deus ex machina response to cover up bad writing afraid to make what should be people into actual people.

 

[Guest 6801328]

"YOU! Random person on the street, do YOU have the answers to some of the most complex and troubling questions of the twentieth century? Don't you have an easy digestible answer for an issue that the most talented writers, artists and philosophers have been grappling with for decades with limited or no success! QUICK, give me your wisdom random person, tell me exactly what we need to do! YOU CAN'T!!! Then it is all FAKE, there is nothing wrong if you can't give me an answer!"

You know, when I was 35ish years younger I held some (many?) strongly held opinions that are very different from those I have now. (My very liberal freshman roommate once screamed in my face, "If that's your thinking THEN YOUR THINKING HAS TO BE CHANGED!!!!" Not very effective persuasion.). At the time, some of the things that I believed were so painfully obvious, so clearly the "truth", that I could only conclude that those who didn't agree with me had to be stupid, evil, or both.

It's not that I now hold the opposite opinions. Rather, it's that I'm kind of in the middle because I realize that these things are actually really complicated and messy. And I would warn anybody, on either side of the spectrum (or from any N-dimensional corner of that spectrum) that if you think your version of the truth is so simple and clear and obvious that anybody who disagrees with you must be wrong...then your version of the truth is dangerously simplistic.

Likewise, this stuff about racial tropes in RPGs is really messy and not simple. You will find edge cases that aren't clear cut. You can design, if you so desire, an imaginary race that makes it really, really hard to determine which side of the line it's on. Not least because everybody will disagree about exactly where that line is.

I have two observations about that:

1. The existence of edge cases, and the difficulty of deciding them, does not invalidate that premise. "The existence of twilight does not disprove the difference between day and night."
2. If members of disadvantaged groups want some aspects of my favorite game to change because they believe that it might make some tiny little dent in one of the biggest problems civilization faces...or, heck, even if they just want it to change because they'll feel more welcome...I'm going to err on the side of saying, "Yeah, sure." It's the least I can do. Maybe quite literally the very least I can do, short of doing absolutely nothing.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Grumish gets to stay simply for the act of drunk driving his plane into someone else's to start a fight.

 

[squibbles]

I find mind-flayers* totally fine, because it doesn't rely on those primitive, tribal tropes. And it's not the tentacles; they would still be fine without those.

Then again, I'm a privileged white male, and once upon a time I thought orcs were fine. It might very well be the case that mind flayers are built on some insidious tropes that have been used to marginalize real world people.

*Not 'humanoid' by D&D formal definition, but mostly humanoid in form.

Because extra-planar immortal demons are a different archetype than primitive, subhuman savages. The former hasn't been used as an excuse for enslavement and genocide. The latter has.

Hey, not that you're being unclear or that you bear the burden of proof in making this tropes and archetypes argument, but, if you're so inclined, could you go through some humanoids in the MM or other 5e publications which don't run afoul of the primitiveness trope.

Mind flayers are a good example but, at least in published material for 5e, they're all high CR. Are there any humanoids left to throw at a low level party once the orcs, goblinoids, gnolls, bullywugs, grimlocks, kobolds, lizardfolk, kuo-toa, troglodytes, etc. are excised? I'm asking in good faith, not as a gotcha.

I know the obvious answer is conventional bandits, soldiers, and cultists, or, maybe low CR demons and undead, but that seems... lacking.