NOW LIVE! -- Presents for Goblins: Festive Resources for 5E on Kickstarter! A festive softcover of holiday-themed D&D 5E resources, including the short adventure 'Presents for Goblins'.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8108488" data-attributes="member: 16814">I am not.  China is actually one of my source points -- it's got one of the longest recorded histories and periodically suffers famine with great regularity.  Nothing in the historical records of China, which are depressing, remotely gets to what the adventure presents:  two years of deep winter, no sun, and people in the taverns drinking mead.  There's some scattered human sacrifice, and a few offerings to the gods, but largely things are at the end of a poor harvest with a late spring -- hungry but not desperate.  The only desperation in the module is that we're told things are desperate -- the actual module doesn't do anything to reinforce this.If it were true that people could survive this kind of treatment because humans are just that tenacious, Antarctica would be peopled.Pointing to another bad premise because it's popular is exactly what I said it was last time -- things aren't true because their popular.  And, GoT described the winter as people don't live in the cold places anymore because they starve and die.  It's not something that people go, eh, we'll get through that, it's presented as an existential crisis for the north.  The mere threat of which is used to say things could be worse, do better.  WotC brought that winter, but then largely ignored the impacts of it.   That they were serving two masters is clear -- they wanted a gazetteer of the Dales but also wanted an adventure.  As such, they lay out the premise that it's two years of winter but then present the Dales as they normally are but sprinkle in a few adventure hooks related to the long winter.  They do both -- have the winter and not have the winter.  I see how it happened, and the conflicting needs, but it leaves a situation where we're talking about an existential crisis AND mostly normal life at the same time.  As this thread has shown, there's some easy work that could fix this, but, well, we didn't get it.  And that's a valid criticism that isn't defeated by "but people like Game of Thrones and it referenced a long winter, too!"</blockquote>

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