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="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8081677" data-attributes="member: 18">[USER=5142]@Aldarc[/USER] said it required equivocating to claim Wildemount is "morally ambiguous" in the sense of S&S, and this is precisely what he was talking about, I believe.In Sword and Sorcery, "morally ambiguous" typically refers primarily to the protagonist and maybe his cohort of fellow quasi-heroes. The foes they face are very often purely evil. Conan doesn't fight people who are merely misunderstood, unless they're hot babes who he ultimately teams up with to fight the real evil, generally speaking (I'm sure in the canon there is an exception or two, of course). Likewise Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. They're certainly dodgy geezers, but the people they face (unless hot chicks) are usually outright evil. They're not ambiguous figures, but monsters metaphorical and literal, slavers and be-tentacled beasts. Same for Elric - it's not a case of "we're only fighting because we have different goals, we're both equally good/bad!", it's "I need to destroy this sorcerer because he's hurting people" or the like.So the typical S&S trope is you have a morally ambiguous hero, maybe a few other morally ambiguous characters who he interacts with, but the main adversary and indeed most adversaries, will be evil or bestial.Whereas Eberron has a very different kind of moral ambiguity. There are deeply evil beings out there, but the bulk of the setting is about conflicts between different goals and ideologies, and it doesn't fit well with S&S. You can see this in Baker's own novels and blog, where he often stresses how people react to something that seems evil/scary but isn't actually, or where something is kinda evil but not actually any more evil than X more normal thing. It's actually a major theme of Eberron, and a very different thing. My impression was that Wildemount was pretty much the same deal - competing factions which are not evil.</blockquote>

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