Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Veltharis ap Rylix" data-source="post: 9024991" data-attributes="member: 66357">I think the Ardling needs refinement before it can be brought back, enough that trying to work it into this year's Planescape book seems unlikely to me...The Ardling was initially pitched as a form of celestial planetouched paralleling the new Tieflings, with the bestial aspects being used mainly to differentiate them from the Aasimar and emphasize ties to more "bestial" celestials (hound archons, guardinals, etc.) and/or quasi-animal mythological figures like Sun Wukong. In other words, the bestial aspects were largely for flavor.But people seemed to latch on to those bestial aspects and pushed for them to be more emphasized, to the point that the second iteration of the Ardling had narrowed down to only having ties to the Beastlands, effectively making it a look more like a unified framework for anthropomorphic animal races (Aarakocra, Tabaxi, etc.) with mild celestial flavor instead.This split on whether the Ardling should primarily represent "celestial planetouched" or "animal person" seems to be where they fell through the cracks.It's a bit of a tangent, so bear with me, but one of the few 4e cosmology revisions that I really liked was explicitly making Angels as a category into the servants of the gods, without regards to alignment. In fact, I think an argument could be made to decouple the gods themselves from alignment altogether - seriously, going by his depictions in Greek mythology, what alignment would best represent Zeus? - and let them be defined solely by their deific domains, personality, relationships, motives, and actions. And I say that as someone that loves D&D alignment. Different settings incorporate "the gods" to greater or lesser degrees, but the Planescape fan in me has always liked the idea that the multiverse is bigger than the gods and that there are powerful forces for good/evil/etc. outside of explicit divine creation and influence. Tiamat being a goddess is fine, but I don't need Asmodeus to also be a god - I'm fine with him "merely" being the greatest of the archdevils (or something even older than the multiverse itself, depending on what source you use), and the fact that even a god like Tiamat is merely a resident within his circle of influence is icing on the cake.Decoupling Angels from alignment allows for a more distinct divide between the "celestial" (i.e. naturally occurring denizens of the Upper Planes) and the "divine" (i.e. creations/servitors of the gods), and by the same token, I really liked the concept of the Ardling as a wide-ranging celestial planetouched because it allows Aasimar (and Angels by proxy) to be more tightly themed around their ties to the divine. And personally, I don't see much benefit to replacing Aarakocra, Tabaxi, et al. with a single generic "animal person" species with baked-in celestial undertones... Why can't my dog-man be arcanaloth spawn if I want him to be?Unfortunately, that seems like the direction the playtest feedback was pushing them, and I think what happened is that on top of not meeting the popularity threshold they were aiming for, at some point the Ardling had also stopped serving the role the designers had created it to serve - if it was just a matter of finding the right expression for the concept they had, I don't see why they couldn't take another swing at it in an upcoming playtest UA, but if they think the underlying concept itself needs work, then I think it makes more sense why they'd opt to pull it entirely.I do hope they come back to it, because as said, I think the idea behind the Ardling has potential, but I wouldn't expect it to be ready in time for this year's Planescape release.</blockquote>

Verification