D&D General Transgender Drow are Canon in Forgotten Realms! Woo!

UngeheuerLich said:

Probably because drow were also depicted as evil and evil people tend to be naughty word in general?

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Well that, and because their heavy gender roles makes it so that they would not approve of any trying to say they are bucking the system.

Levistus's_Leviathan said:

If you haven’t heard of them, you’ll probably be interested in the Scythians’ Enarei.

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Oooh I hadn't, that's fascinating. There was a huge amount of like, I dunno what to call it but, like, "gender exploration" going down in the ancient and to some extent classical world, and I kind of blame the narrow-minded Romans for putting a lid on it.

Dire Bare said:

But really, how hard is it to honor, legally binding or otherwise? Let Ed publish whatever he wants . . . and then either work it into a WotC product in some way, ignore it, or "overwrite" it with new, official canon. It's pretty low effort on WotC's part to remain in compliance, and it makes hardcore Realms fans happy.

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I mean I think that's the thing - Ed hasn't proven a liability. He's consistently LGBTQ+ friendly and sex-positive in a society where, still, those are generally acceptable opinions, and he likes polycules (including some truly huge ones - I think in his frontier book from a few years ago there was an polycule with like 30 people in it!) more than most but he doesn't obsess about them or try to make them "front and center" in ways that are likely to cause moral panics or the like. He also often has good or cool ideas, frankly, and the FR has this distinctive vibe that he's really helped keep constant.

So as long as he stays cool, WotC have nothing to worry about. The cultural climate changed, and that stuff became more unacceptable, then I could see WotC becoming flighty about this, but their solution would probably just be not publishing FR stuff and quietly shifting the default/implied setting of D&D to something else that they own more.

I realize earlier ppls had mentioned Corellon Larethian from Forgotten Realms and specifically the character Fala from Dragon Heist along with a few other neighbors the party can meet in that campaign.

Elminster, of Ed Greenwood fame, also spent time as a woman.

Ruin Explorer said:

So as long as he stays cool, WotC have nothing to worry about. The cultural climate changed, and that stuff became more unacceptable, then I could see WotC becoming flighty about this, but their solution would probably just be not publishing FR stuff and quietly shifting the default/implied setting of D&D to something else that they own more.

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Interestingly, something like that did sort of happen. While he was never especially overt about it most of the time, there seems to have been an intentional and quiet shift away from the more sexual elements of the FR. This can be chalked up to TSR and later WotC just making "sensible" financial decisions by not mentioning the orgies. But there was also the death of Ed's Mystra, which not only heralded the introduction of 2E, but distanced us from the grooming/many lovers version of the character and replaced her with Midnight.

Seramus said:

Interestingly, something like that did sort of happen. While he was never especially overt about it most of the time, there seems to have been an intentional and quiet shift away from the more sexual elements of the FR. This can be chalked up to TSR and later WotC just making "sensible" financial decisions by not mentioning the orgies. But there was also the death of Ed's Mystra, which not only heralded the introduction of 2E, but distanced us from the grooming/many lovers version of the character and replaced her with Midnight.

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But then BG3 put the sex back (including grooming-type Mystra) and I still wonder how WotC feel about that lol - "On the one hand, this is way too sexy for what we are trying to make into a bland and child-friendly game, on the other hand, well over $100m for doing absolutely nothing...".

Ruin Explorer said:

But then BG3 put the sex back (including grooming-type Mystra) and I still wonder how WotC feel about that lol - "On the one hand, this is way too sexy for what we are trying to make into a bland and child-friendly game, on the other hand, well over $100m for doing absolutely nothing...".

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Yeah. The stories about the grooming/many lovers version of Mystra have been retold in forums so many times it's basically an ancient meme at this point, despite the fact that version of Mystra was only official for 2 years. So I imagine Larian either didn't know much about Midnight and only heard the oft-repeated stories about the old Mystra, or they decided having three versions of the Goddess would be too confusing for players and intentionally merged Mystra and Midnight's lore to keep things simple.

If the latter, it means they intentionally kept the grooming/many lovers angle for reasons.

Ed has always been cool about this. His response to the Siege of Dragonspear controversy was very sensible.