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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8411410" data-attributes="member: 7030755">I think this tension is longstanding within dnd.  It is part a difference between sword&sorcery and high fantasy, but also pertains to the way that colonial scenarios are "justified" via an assumed moral lens, usually one connected to alignment.  That is, in effect, the PCs are mercenaries for a colonial state, driven by greed, but their actions can also be glossed as defeating the forces of chaos and/or evil.  The <a href="https://www.prismaticwasteland.com/blog/the-keep-on-the-borderlands-is-full-of-lies" target="_blank">Keep on the Borderlands</a>.  (Incidentally this dynamic--exploitative violence dressed up as justice or as a "civilizing mission," is central to colonial ideology).The essentials kit is interesting in this regard.  Phandelver has, for me, the feel of a settler mining town from a Western, with some fantasy gloss.  There's reference to ancient history, but no sense that the human locals have any primary claim to the land or the mines.  The antagonists are all alignment-evil, but they also have more prosaic motivations, namely they've all been displaced and are in turn displacing others.  For the most part what they are after is food and shelter.  The only antagonist acting outside of these types of concerns is an cult of an evil storm god (that could probably be reskinned as druids).  Probably the way that most groups play this adventure is to defeat an antagonist in combat, level up, then defeat the next most powerful antagonist, justifying all of it via the evil alignment, but non-colonial solutions are on the table.Anyway when it comes to settings, I do think they will try for a non-colonial, non-orientalizing kara tur or zakhara, if not as a setting than as an adventure, just because of some things some of the writers for VRGtR were hinting at on twitter.  Whatever settings they do, they will have to be marketable and tightly themed for new audiencesThe more interesting question for me is: when are they going to run out of nostalgia and classic settings?</blockquote>

Verification