NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 8031007" data-attributes="member: 59082">I just loved this rant/ramble/diatribe. Very entertaining and with lots of good points. Thanks for that.It is hard to know how to respond to such a rich post, but I'll tease out one element. The colonial thing is interesting, because in a way D&D is very much based on colonialism, but with very different assumptions: that there is real evil that is encroaching on the "light of civilization," that Monster Be Here, a Terra Incognita that includes dragons and magic and treasure. Or the 4E version: the "Points of Light" in the monster-infested wilderness. And yes, it has elements of the Old West, probably because Gygax & Co were Americans (midwesterners, at that). They created D&D when the Spaghetti Western was still going strong. But you're right, both in terms of OA and the inception of D&D: the primary sources of inspiration are secondarily history, and primarily fiction: literature and film.But I don't think this is a jab at indigenous peoples, as if Gygax etc--not to mention the hundreds that came after--were saying that indigenous people were evil and needed to be civilized. The whole set-up is one of "gamism"--what assumptions make sense to create a fun and exciting context for an adventuring experience. It is a make-believe scenario, and inherently simplistic relative to the real world. If anything, the reverse is true--at least from the Tolkienian perspective: the orcs are soldiers of the evil emperor who seeks world dominion, and the natural and native people rally to defeat them.D&D has evolved since then. There is more nuance, a greater diversity of tropes and themes, and the underlying assumptions have been--at the least--loosened up. I hope to see that continue. If nothing else, I hope that WotC takes this opportunity to provide a wider range of campaigns themes and worlds to explore. How about something closer to Le Guin's Earthsea or Erikson's Malazan, or the OGL Midnight setting in which the good guys existed in tiny pockets within an evil (colonialist) empire.One more thing. I love what you said about Ray Bradbury's coda. It is strange and worrisome how anyone could think that getting rid of the past would solve anything. If anything, we need the mistakes of the past to make a better future. It makes me think that no one reads Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Brave New World etc anymore. Woe is us.</blockquote>

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