Dragonlance Dragonlance "Reimagined".

[Velderan]

um you quoted my changes... change the pantheon grouping, the alginment axis of the tower and the here I will copy and paste...

the racism/sexism right out for a game (it's okay for a story but not a game we are expecting to play with different people)
from a story point of view some minor tweaks would be enough... change 'good' and 'evil' to light and dark, and make some evil in the light side and some good in the dark side... then do the same with the wizards align the towers with the moons but not a concept of good and evil.

add an option for the DM to insert other races, it doesn't take much more then a page to show how you can include any/all races.

You literally can do all of those things, you don't need permission from Hickman, Weis, or anyone at WotC to make whatever changes fit your table better. I've ran DL games a few times and made a bunch of changes to lore and rules to fit what my players wanted. Since you've mentioned racism, I wasn't a fan of the insinuation that gully dwarves were the result of gnome/dwarf inter-breeding so I omitted that part and made them just regular dwarves who due to poverty were uneducated and dressed shabbily but still street smart so the bad guys tended to underestimate them. They were capable of understanding important information and helped the party quite a bit with learning the layout of Xak Tsaroth and where the important stuff was located. The party needed the info so they didn't treat them as inferiors. Easy fix to something I wasn't a huge fan of. My changes might not fit your table and that's fine.

Anything published should always be looked at as just a suggested starting point to craft your game with.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

First - not all contemporary humans adhere to what you call "modern morality". What counts as good is contested.

wait... there are people arguing that murder genocide and apocalyptic events are good?

Second - D&D has been doing what you say shouldn't be done for many decades now. For instance, D&D treats lethal violence in an utterly casual manner not reconcilable with any of the moral theories taught in mainstream contemporary US philosophy departments.

violence is AOKAY in the US (but don't show too much skin or mention adult naughty time)... you can have a PG movie have people killed 'by bad guys' or 'for the right reason'

 

[Vaalingrade]

Tales like the Cataclysm, and the fall of Numenor, and some similar real-world traditions, are concerned with collective punishment, not "collateral damage".

If you don't consider the people who were wholly uninvolved when perpetuating a massacre, it doesn't matter whether they think it's collateral damage or not.

There were children, foreign traders, those incapable of moral thought or action, and just plain folks who never even knew what was going on, not to mention the following generations that grew up on a post-apocalyptic wasteland they they gave zero care to when they pitched their cosmic hissy fit.

If punishment was the goal, they're not just not good, or even evil. They're monsters.

 

[Alzrius]

More information from the 2E Tales of the Lance boxed set (page 25 for those who have a copy):

It also says (page 3):

Finally, the Cataclysm, as recorded here, is a compilation of legends and folktales.

Given that the subsequent section is penned in the first person plural (i.e. the repeated use of "we"), it's pretty clear that this is an in-character attempt to explain the Cataclysm, and so contains errors and assumptions.

 

[Velderan]

Who authored this?

The design credits:

Design: Harold Johnson, John Terra, J. Robert King, Wolfgang
Baur, Colin McComb, Jean Rabe, Norm Ritchie, Margaret
Weis, Tracy Hickman, Jeff Grubb, Doug Niles, Michael
Williams

 

[Vaalingrade]

You literally can do all of those things, you don't need permission from Hickman, Weis, or anyone at WotC to make whatever changes fit your table better.

The discussion at hand is more about what a catastrophic business decision it would be for WotC to do this, not to excuse everything with Rule 0.

 

[pemerton]

See, here's the thing. If, in a D&D game, a paladin monarch decided to go mass-murdering people because their king committed the "sin of pride," that paladin would fall.

In the GH setting, a paladin - the King of Furyondy - presides over a feudal monarchy. There is no way of reconciling feudal monarchy with liberal humanist values. The operation of inheritance, caste and unfree labour is a starting point to that argument. There's a reason that once of the first acts of the French revolution was to abolish feudal statuses.

If we insist that the good characters of our fantasy fiction must really be good, then a paladin feudal monarch is a contradiction.

 

[DarkCrisis]

That seems plausible, given the content.

Ill say one thing though, the 2E book handles Tinker Gnomes a heck a lot better than the 1E book (which was written by Weis and Hickman). Most of the gaming stuff is the same between the 2 books just the lore is weird in the 2E version.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

You literally can do all of those things, you don't need permission from Hickman, Weis, or anyone at WotC to make whatever changes fit your table better.

right but we are not talking table we are talking publishing a book

Since you've mentioned racism, I wasn't a fan of the insinuation that gully dwarves were the result of gnome/dwarf inter-breeding so I omitted that part and made them just regular dwarves who due to poverty were uneducated and dressed shabbily but still street smart so the bad guys tended to underestimate them.

then why care that we are pushing to make that the default

Anything published should always be looked at as just a suggested starting point to craft your game with.

true but in 2022 what you publish can cause backlash

 

[pemerton]

If you don't consider the people who were wholly uninvolved when perpetuating a massacre, it doesn't matter whether they think it's collateral damage or not.

This thread - and these boards - are not the place to discuss the actual morality of killing and punishment.

I'm pointing out that literary works, folk traditions, and the like sometimes deploy moral frameworks that are not reconcilable with liberal humanist values. When it comes to D&D, some obvious examples are a casual acceptance of the permissibility of lethal violence, including a liberal notion of consenting to be killed (eg in duelling - something that post-Enlightenment is unlawful in European and American countries); collective punishment (a recurring theme in D&D, starting with module B2); political values that make Franco look like a moderate (eg all the LG monarchies); etc.

Similar tropes are found in many other fantasy works - eg JRRT's work, Arthurian legend, etc.

The Cataclysm is no harder to make sense of than any of the rest of this. It is also found in JRRT. But I've never heard of JRRT being accused of advocating genocide. And in my view that would be absurd. We can criticise JRRT for the racism in his work; or for his reactionary politics; but not for advocating genocide.