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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3015349" data-attributes="member: 18832">The problem that I think I, at least, have with your line of argument is that Wizards of the Coast isn't doing any such thing.There are no robots or spaceships in anything Wizards of the Coast publishes. There are warforged - which are certainly, explicitly, and undeniably inspired by robots, especially by Asimovian questions of personhood and purpose - and there are traces of Second Edition's spelljammer ships to be found here and there, chiefly in Lords of Madness, but no robots per se or spaceships anything like those found in Star Trek or even 2001: A Space Odyssey.You complain that Wizards of the Coast has a race in its Player's Handbook called "gnomes" which is entirely unlike the gnomes of folklore and myth. I have to tell you that my response is, per Bill Hicks, four simple words: Yeah? And? So? What?We can point to any of the fantasy creatures such as elves or dwarves in a work such as Tolkien's and demonstrate that not only are they inspired by one culture's "take" rather than by another's, they are also significantly and at times wildly different in Tolkien's novels than in his inspirations.His dwarves, for instance: do they, like their Norse inspiration, "seem to be interchangeable and may be identical with the svartálfar (black elves), and sometimes the trolls"? Is it Tolkien's dwarves or his trolls which "fear sunlight, which might even turn them into the stone they sprang from"?If Tolkien can pick and choose what attributes he gives to creatures he calls according to folkloric or mythological names, and create new creatures (hobbits) which are similar to other such creatures but distinct from them in order to serve Tolkien's own purposes, why is it illegitimate for the writers of D&D to do the same?At this point we have thirty-two years' worth of D&D material, amounting to many times the output of any single fantasy writer. Why shouldn't Wizards of the Coast pick-and-choose elements to emphasise from this massive resource? If they want to emphasise the tricksterish, close-to-nature feylike attributes of gnomes, or make "gnome" the playable race which stands in for tricksterish nature spirits but makes sense in the context of established D&D worlds, how is that illegitimate? "According to myth, gnomes hoarded secret knowledge just as they hoarded treasure" - the gnomes of Zilargo in Eberron certainly hoard secret knowledge, for instance.Not only is there more to fantasy than Spenser, Tolkien, and other writers primarily inspired by folklore and myth - a Hell of a lot more, at this point in the history of fantastic literature - there's also the completely reasonable phenomenon of recursion, reflection upon what D&D has already done to innovate in the fantasy genre and further development of those new ideas.Honestly, I think you're tilting at straw windmills.</blockquote>

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