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Ironically, most people who create a setting and go down that road often end up with humans being the two-dimensional always-evil naughty words for persecuting those beautiful elves and noble-savage orcs.

It does always seem to be orcs and drow that get fixated on, doesn't it*? For me, it's telling that the same sort of reaction isn't provoked by fiends or hags, or even ogres and giants.

There is nothing, not one single thing that WotC could possibly do that you would not take as evidence of some imminent giga-crossover with Spiderman, GI Joe, Super Mario and The Munsters.

It's early days, but it does feel like the group is a lot more cohesive and amenable to working together. C2 did have a long span when it was a collection of angsty loners who were all waiting for someone else to ask them about their tragic backstory and who often didn't have a firm reason to...

The DMG does not require that, it gives it as ONE example of what an adventuring day might look like. /petpeeve

To me, that reads more as a good reason to jettison alignment, because that's a Dragonlance-level mishandling.

For me, that's a bit of a pity, because "group that has a god acting as an abusive parent and unnaturally forcing them into a mould (but there are in-setting ways for them to break free and many already have)" is a really fascinating fantasy-world concept for me that immediately starts...

"I'm sorry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all." "Oh. What's it called now?" "Urectum!"

Bit of an excluded middle there.

I think it's implicitly left to settings to provide a distinction (like gold dwarves and shield dwarves in FR, which have quite different cultures), but a lot of them don't really do that. And there is a sweet spot where a non-human race feels non-human in some important ways, but isn't...

Alternatively, don't write it in such a way that it can be mistaken for mental illness (which is what seems to have happened), but rather a point of view that seems weird to humans, but is entirely consistent and sensible to those who hold it. Or, let the non-humans actually feel unlike humans.

Right now, as a side-project, I'm doing a Warhammer 40K conversion, and it's been delightfully easy to convert stuff and even to come up with new subsystems (Warp travel being a slightly modified Dramatic Task, for example).

Easy. The excluded groups gained more visibility (and purchasing power), and many producers realised that hey, we don't actually need to lose what made our things fun to make them more accessible (and expand the market).

The well is probably poisoned by now, but if I was running Dragonlance, I'd play up the kender lack of awareness of personal property as going both ways--if they have a pouch of gold, they'll hand it over to a beggar who clearly has more use for it than they do, or they'll happily lend their...

If someone who is actually from a group that I'm not part of says "this thing portrays my group in a hurtful or tone-deaf way", than that opinion has more weight than mine. I can still like whatever I like in the privacy of my own mind, but I'm not going to demand the wider world continue to...

All I know is that my gut tells me maybe.

While I think the griping about this is overblown....shall we not do the misery poker thing? Just skip past it?

If you're going to recap the history of Synnibarr, you can't leave out Lord Midnight and his 72-headed chameleon hydra. Or how the entire game takes place on a hollowed-out Mars that was turned into a planet-size starship and had both an inner and outer world. Or how the playable species include...

I like the 4e take on it--Kalak is dead and Tyr is a troubled free city (so the grimdark isn't quite so relentless), but the sillier stuff from the metaplot hasn't happened.

But on the downside, it's, y'know, Amazon. If there's some alternative legal way to check out the series in the future, I'll look into that.