D&D 5E New Drow cultures coming in Starlight Enclave, the Lorendrow and the Aevendrow

[Jfdlsjfd]

People absolutely need to determine how serious or dark their game is going to be ran.

I think having the 'default' lean towards 'there are no evil cultures' in a setting which often leans into High Fantasy (Good vs Evil) tropes, makes very little sense.

I think retconning Lolth dominated culture would be a mistake, as I dont believe you need to remove these elements from the game at all. Lolth is a villain. The party is (often) Good. Good adventurers stand against villains, and if you play with dungeon delving, kicking in doors, and multiple encounters a day to expend your abilities, well you need "Bad Guys" to do that against.

If you wish for your world to run as a 'mostly peaceful world where adventurers just explore and meet other people to talk to' I mean, fine, I certainly hope you enjoy that game.

I think it's a move from "high fantasy assumptions" to "Superhero genre assumptions" (everyone is good, except a supervillain like Thanos, totally unconnected, with unbelievable ideas that you can see are wrong, but who has the individual power to cause great harm, unless the heroes, of equal power, can move against him).

Its not FR though at that point, by a long shot, so play it in Eberron or some other world.

Can I interest you int my campaign instead, where the heroes boldly defeat the Archpriestess of Lolth and her plan to delay the international agreement to progressively phase out a 2% export tax on non-ferrous alloy until reasonable compensations are granted? We'll have a BLAST.

To be honest, that's not my Eberron either. I play it, as KB puts it, as a world on the brink of collapse barring heroic intervention. Everyone is selfish, avaricious, self-concerned, xenophobic, bigoted, well, humans (as in real-world, not the fantasy race known for its lack of darkvision) and they need to be saved ; it's just the question of choosing who the bad guy will be for the campaign at hand: dragonmarked houses (think Arasaka on steroids), the five nations (minus one of course), the Blood of Vol, the Aurum (even the setting's Reform Club can be a den of villainy), the Lords or Dust (who want to unmake the world) or the Dragon, (who oppose the Lords of Dust but have no qualm if ensure it means removing all gnomes from the prophecy)... It's certainly more gritty than intended but I think it makes room from providing... lifelike villains.

 

[Scribe]

I think it's a move from "high fantasy assumptions" to "Superhero genre assumptions" (everyone is good, except a supervillain like Thanos, totally unconnected, with unbelievable ideas that you can see are wrong, but who has the individual power to cause great harm, unless the heroes, of equal power, can move against him).

Yeah, I would agree with this for sure.

I just wish they would create a new setting for it, and let that be the default assumed setting moving forward so that settings which existed prior to this shift do not need to be saddled with retcons.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, I would agree with this for sure.

I just wish they would create a new setting for it, and let that be the default assumed setting moving forward so that settings which existed prior to this shift do not need to be saddled with retcons.

For the love of Pete, please do this WotC! It's the only way to make the majority of people happy. Just lean into the new paradigm instead of testing the water with your toe. The measures you've made and are making aren't enough for the new crowd anyway, while they are simultaneously incrementally irritating many of your older fans.

 

[mrpopstar]

(For those of you who read the novel, are avendrow, lorendrow, and udadrow capitalized as proper nouns or lowercase?)

Great question! I haven't read the novel, but if they're cultural groups I would hope they're capitalized.

 

[Yaarel]

For the love of Pete, please do this WotC! It's the only way to make the majority of people happy. Just lean into the new paradigm instead of testing the water with your toe. The measures you've made and are making aren't enough for the new crowd anyway, while they are simultaneously incrementally irritating many of your older fans.

I am sympathetic, and also unsure how WotC can create a new setting.

An update to the Players Handbook, would make its "core" rules feel more setting agnostic. (I approve.)

But the default setting is Forgotten Realms. While this setting lacks a majority of users (when most homebrew and some use other official settings), it does enjoy a plurality, as the most popular setting, relative to other official settings.

The corporate Intellectual Property branding, for novels and movies and so on, is the Forgotten Realms. I dont see how it is possible for WotC to leave this setting behind.

 

[Yaarel]

Great question! I haven't read the novel, but if they're cultural groups I would hope they're capitalized.

Yeah, I take it to mean:

• If they are capitalized, then they are "cultures", like the human cultures in the Players Handbook.
• If they are lowercase, then they are "subraces" of the elf race.

Who knows if the author is so technical. But I am curious!

 

[Micah Sweet]

I am sympathetic, and also unsure how WotC can create a new setting.

An update to the Players Handbook, would make its "core" rules feel more setting agnostic. (I approve.)

But the default setting is Forgotten Realms. While this setting lacks a majority of users (when most homebrew and some use other official settings), it does enjoy a plurality, as the most popular setting, relative to other official settings.

The corporate Intellectual Property branding, for novels and movies and so on, is the Forgotten Realms. I dont see how it is possible for WotC to leave this setting behind.

I understand why they'd be afraid of jumping in with a new setting, but in the long run it would be a good business move. The Realms enjoys a plurality as you say because most of their material features it, not because it's actually super popular. Change all that to a new, modern view friendly setting, and that's where all the attention will be. They just have to commit to it.

 

[Remathilis]

I think it's a move from "high fantasy assumptions" to "Superhero genre assumptions" (everyone is good, except a supervillain like Thanos, totally unconnected, with unbelievable ideas that you can see are wrong, but who has the individual power to cause great harm, unless the heroes, of equal power, can move against him).

Not even.

Thanos has an army. There are groups like Hydra, AIM, the Hand, the Hellfire Club, that are groups full of card-carrying mooks for Wolverine to carve up with impunity. On a cosmic scale, whole species like the Chutari, Kree and Skrulls get rather monoculture and evil aligned societies (with exceptions, as always). And for every normal person who cheers the Avengers, there is one who thinks Spider-Man is a menace and that Mutants should be feared and contained.

The MCU as of Endgame has felt like heroes are the norm and villains are rare individuals that show up for a movie to menace the heroes, but actual comics have the same structure as D&D and the same issues.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not even.

Thanos has an army. There are groups like Hydra, AIM, the Hand, the Hellfire Club, that are groups full of card-carrying mooks for Wolverine to carve up with impunity. On a cosmic scale, whole species like the Chutari, Kree and Skrulls get rather monoculture and evil aligned societies (with exceptions, as always). And for every normal person who cheers the Avengers, there is one who thinks Spider-Man is a menace and that Mutants should be feared and contained.

The MCU as of Endgame has felt like heroes are the norm and villains are rare individuals that show up for a movie to menace the heroes, but actual comics have the same structure as D&D and the same issues.

None of them are evil though. Because alignment doesn't exist anywhere but D&D. I used to play a lot of superhero tabletop RPG in the 80s, and it worked just fine without alignment.

Thanos doesn't do what he does because he is evil, he does what he does because he believes he is doing the right thing. Heroes oppose him because they believe Thanos is wrong about that.

And Loki, as addressed in the TV series, really doesn't enjoy causing suffering. The universe casts him in the role of villain because the heroes need a punching bag to measure themselves against.

And the superhero genre is full of characters who switch sides on a regular basis.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Not even.

Thanos has an army. There are groups like Hydra, AIM, the Hand, the Hellfire Club, that are groups full of card-carrying mooks for Wolverine to carve up with impunity. On a cosmic scale, whole species like the Chutari, Kree and Skrulls get rather monoculture and evil aligned societies (with exceptions, as always). And for every normal person who cheers the Avengers, there is one who thinks Spider-Man is a menace and that Mutants should be feared and contained.

The MCU as of Endgame has felt like heroes are the norm and villains are rare individuals that show up for a movie to menace the heroes, but actual comics have the same structure as D&D and the same issues.

Thanks. My exposure to superhero genre is very limited, mostly to a few films and I was actually thinking of the Endgame Avengers or Dr Strange.

None of them are evil though. Because alignment doesn't exist anywhere but D&D. I used to play a lot of superhero tabletop RPG in the 80s, and it worked just fine without alignment.

You don't need alignement to be evil. Playing the lottery thinking that the odd are in your favour is wrong, but not evil. Planning to kill half the population to solve any problem -- even if it is with good intentions, like stopping climate change -- is morally reprehensible (and might even not be wrong): evil doesn't need to be on a character sheet to exist, as evidenced by the word predating D&D. The only difference between D&D evil and real-life evil is that D&D evil tries to be objective (with definitions eminently debatable) while real-life, dictionnary-defined evil is depending on social values, so nobody thinks of himself as evil, even Nazi Germany concentration camp personel who thought themselves as just doing their job, after all. But rationalizing their acts didn't make them less morally reprehensible.

Thanos doesn't do what he does because he is evil, he does what he does because he believes he is doing the right thing. Heroes oppose him because they believe Thanos is wrong about that.

I don't agree. Heroes don't oppose someone who is wrong, not in the D&D usual way of action. If you think the Brexit deal was wrong, you set up talks to resolve the situation, you don't send heroes to defeat either the English Prime Minister or the President of the EU commission and their supporters (depending on whose side you think is wrong). If you think postponing the age of legal retirement is wrong, you don't send heroes, at most you set up protests. Heroes, people who are ready to commit one of the most morally reprehensible thing in existence, killing sentient beings, for their cause, must not fight something that is simply wrong. They must fight something that is so morally heinous that it justifies getting into a fight. Usually because the other side is morally reprehensible to the extreme, and not simply slightly morally wrong like a tax evading company (killing half the population or trying to pull a whole city into another plane...) and it's humanitary to intervene the way D&D parties do. If the villain of the day is wrong and not evil, you don't need D&D heroes.