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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Clint_L" data-source="post: 9373021" data-attributes="member: 7035894">This is not how the introductions read to me.Republishing this material in such a public way does present WotC and these scholars with a bit of a conundrum. They are clearly celebrating the material by giving it the ultimate deluxe treatment and presentation. They have also put in the effort to make this a serious and significant work of scholarship. However, it is being marketed to and will reach an audience far beyond scholarly norms.If you are writing a history book primarily for scholars and students of history, then there are certain assumptions you can make. Namely, that your audience will mostly understand that potentially objectionable primary documents are not being endorsed. Instead, they are being preserved and presented for assessment and analysis. So that is what is being spelt out here, to make doubly sure that someone picking up this book because, say, they love D&D and want to experience it in its original glory, doesn't take the deluxe presentation of these early documents as WotC's endorsement of all of the attitudes expressed therein.That is probably obvious to most of us here, so we see these disclaimers as kind of overblown and defensive. But we're not really who is being addressed.So to me, these introductions strike me as expressing a love for the game in general and for these original documents in particular. I mean, Jon Peterson has basically made this subject his life's work. He loves this stuff. And also as an acknowledgement that, yup, some of the thoughts expressed therein reflect a different cultural moment, so take them in that context.Edit: I'm reminded a bit of the introductions that Chaosium now adds to all of their Call of Cthulhu stuff. Basically, "Hey, we know this dude was horribly racist and that comes across in his work. But his mythos is amazing and we're doing our best to be faithful to that part of his art without promoting the bad stuff." Not that the early creators of D&D were anything like Lovecraft, but some of these materials do have jokes and assumptions that have aged badly, so WotC needs to be very up front about that. Again, especially given that everything is being presented in such a deluxe package that is an endorsement in itself.</blockquote>

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