Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9349730" data-attributes="member: 6790260">If I may:What, exactly, makes (say) a very restrictive list of playable species more "sword and sorcery" than an expansive one? What makes a warlock pact hostile to S&S thematics or experiences, while a cleric's faith is not hostile to that? (To be clear, pacts and faith are NOT the same, I am vehemently opposed to the notion some have that you can substitute either one for the other.)I have seen very little hate for Greyhawk in this thread. I have seen quite a bit of reluctance to view an old way as inherently good and needing perfect preservation. That doesn't mean a gleeful hatred of the old. It means that the old must be justified by more than just age, especially if it's going to claim a degree of importance high enough that no future ideas, no matter how well-liked, may ever expand or enhance what has already been written down.Dismissing what is old solely because it is old is chronological snobbery. But dismissing what is new solely because it is new is fawning traditionalism. We can, and should, do better. Gygax was not afraid to deviate radically from any strict notion of S&S in Greyhawk, as evidenced by the Barrier Peaks. The notion that a Faustian bargain for power, or a person with scaly skin and intensely bad halitosis, is somehow inherently a bridge too far while literal space aliens and ray guns are perfectly cromulent is pretty dubious, to put it mildly.That doesn't mean we should intentionally overturn the applecart unless it's warranted that we do so. Chesterton's fence and all that. If something were legitimately a serious issue, and we could clearly articulate why and what would make it better, then I think there's room for that. Like, to invent a fake example, if there were a kingdom really obviously built on a bunch of racist stereotypes of (say) Chinese and Japanese culture, that would be pretty uncool. It would be reasonable to say that, insofar as those harmful stereotypes could be removed, they should be—and if they can't be, maybe that whole society needs to be retconned out because it's not good to celebrate racist caricatures. I'm fairly sure no such blatant caricatures exist in Greyhawk.But, particularly when it comes to the addition of things, I'm not really seeing why it's such an attack to desire to add them. Warlocks seem like a highly precedented idea, people getting dangerous powers by consorting with questionable entities sounds exactly like the kind of thing the morally-grey adventurers of that world could get into. And major influences, like Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, already have shades of it, since the latter uses magic on occasion.</blockquote>

Verification