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D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

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This topic contains 69 replies, has 10 voices, and was last updated by  greyhunter88 5 years, 2 months ago.

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  • #1323958

    mecha82
    Participant
    10037xp

    Thing about typical medieval high fantasy is that it tends to be really generic so I understand WotC wanting to make it more interesting and increase appeal since they want to sell as many of those DnD products as they can. Of course IMO best option is to have different settings for people to choose from when ever it’s possible even if FR might be most popular setting that they currently have. That said I am not familiar with modern FR since I was into it back when I was teenager back in late 90’s and when I was still young adult back in early 2000’s so I haven’t been keeping up on it so I refuse to form opinion about it before I possibly get back into it in one form or other.

    #1324072

    Lol… well I seem to have opened up things with making the news more broadly known amongst us. I pretty much fall into the same thoughts already expressed here that the worlds are broad as is. Al Qadim and Oriental Adventures I think had their appeal to try and broaden the scope of the campaign settings. I think that the Shaar addition might have had potential but the whole of RPGs is to try and make the realm fantastic by how alien it is. You can’t really make Africa alien by the distance of time and space away from the modern when people still live tribally today as they did centuries ago. Greyhawk covered quite a bit with their cultures in Forgotten Realms and may have already covered what a whole new setting set out to play. Grousing about the culture war’s effects on gaming really doesn’t attend to fact that there are elements of society that push on our hobby. It makes little sense within the community to just bend to the will of ideologues viewing the hobby from behind a lense of identity politics as it will just ruin business for the companies doing business. As one of my favorite YouTube creators says “Get Woke, Go Broke”.

    Overall, I’m also aware that this is a forum for a business in Europe where things are nowhere near as free for speech so as much as a rant is a good vent of frustration regarding my happy-fun-time it might hurt the OTT crew. I love this platform and you lot are an extensive community of people to be friendly with. I’ll leave off with the pleasantness of knowing you all, slapping figures with paint and minimizing my grudge factor.

    #1324170

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    I don’t think you can classify Medieval fantasy as generic – they’re not and there’s no such thing as a generic setting because they’re all unique in their own way.  I think what you might be trying to articulate is that they seem mundane but that’s more a product of where you’re from than anything the settings themselves have to offer.  Medieval Europe is, for most of us, our history;  it’s what we know and sometimes it doesn’t seem all that interesting or exciting.  Arabian Nights or tales of the Orient seem very exotic and exciting to us simply because they’re strange and foreign and for most of us largely unexplored parts of history and geography.  But I guarantee you that if you lived in somewhere like Turkey (as the only arab country I can think of that wouldn’t consider D&D to be some kind of devil worship) or Japan, Medieval Europe probably seems very exotic, foreign and exciting whereas Arabian Nights might seem more mundane.  I think we do our own history a disservice if we simply describe it, ir things inspired by it, as “generic”.

    It’s a little bit like when I watch game of thrones and everyone has British accents, and not just English, regional accents.  There Yorkshire and Lancashire for the Northmen, a mixture of Northern England and Scottish for the wildlings.  There’s even people with Geordie accents in there.  To me that doesn’t really seem so exciting because living in the north of England that’s what I hear every day.  But to someone in the USA those accents that step away from the more commonly exported BBC ENGLISH (what’s referred to here as “received pronunciation”), they seem quite exotic and foreign and were used precisely for that reason

    That said I do think that Forgotten Realms is a little bland but it’s that way for a reason – it’s basically like the McDonald’s of RPG settings. It’s designed for mass appeal and deliberately plays it safe. It shies away from difficult themes and is designed using a fairly modern, Western lense in terms of the cultures and social attitudes presented in the setting. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, it’s not particularly challenging but it is a very good place to start playing RPGs because it’s fairly light and quite easy to relate to.

    With that in mind I don’t really think that including Al Qadim is likely to do anything to the game beyond expanding the boundaries of the supported world making it easier to move your games to a wider variety of sub-settings within the parent Forgotten Realms world – not a bad thing but also not exactly ground breaking.  I do agree with @horati0nosebl0wer about not bending the knee to pressure groups not because I always disagree with the pressure groups views (although in most cases I do) it’s simply that Internet outrage mobs, irrespective of their political leanings, are usually very small and geographically disparate minorities whose voices are artificially amplified by the fact that the Internet allows them to congregate together, virtually, and shout at the same time. The majority of people are usually silent on such matters and, rather than being outraged, will simply take their business elsewhere, without much complaint, if they don’t like the product you produce (hence the rise of the phrase “Get Woke Go Broke”, which is really just the description of market forces reacting to the silent majority). But, I definitely don’t think this is an attempt by Wizards of the Coast to “Get Woke” (some would argue they already are) even if Comicbook.com might try to spin it that way (they do have a tendency to lean more than a little to the progressive left). In my opinion this is nothing more sinister than WotC offering a wider range if options for playing D&D – something I think they have to do to stay relevant and interesting because the RPG market is actually quite competitive now. There’s lots of Indy games out there that offer a huge range of settings and that are more mechanically sound and exciting than D&D and they cover a wide range of settings. D&D has to continue to provide more variety simply to keep its current business, let alone try and win business form the competing games.  So to me this seems more like a business move than some kind of progressive agenda.  And honestly, even if this was some weird kind of diversity and inclusion move, the net effect of it is still going to be that there could be Oriental, Arabian and African locations available in D&D, which is still a good thing.  Remember that just because the motivation behind something isn’t always to your liking, that doesn’t mean that the out turn of that won’t be.

    #1324536

    limburger
    21533xp
    Cult of Games Member

    @mecha82 It was only limited because it didn’t bring in the additional sales the suits were hoping for …
    To me that was the worst part of the entire change. It was not done because it would allow for better stories.
    It was done in an attempt to attract a market that doesn’t exist.

    And it was done against established rules within the setting and it kind of ‘ruined’ the comic by suddenly switching to a different lead character. As such I certainly can understand the outrage …

    While breaking rules isn’t bad by default … it does require a lot of care.

    Why mess with an established IP when you can create a new series ?
    If the writing/art is good then there will be enough people liking the series to make it profitable.

    btw :
    I’m glad we don’t share the same likes and dislikes. The world would be boring if we did 😉

    // —

    @onlyonepinman : I think D&D was never meant to be an authentic medieval fantasy setting.
    As such the ‘modern’ morals don’t feel out of place.

    I do wonder how the ‘classic’ settings will compare to their updated versions.
    Maybe it’s the same thing with updated rules.
    Maybe the moral outrage brigade manages to stay quiet … (I doubt they will)

    And maybe the changes are for the good of the setting.

    #1324651

    mecha82
    Participant
    10037xp

    @horati0nosebl0wer Not all of us care about this culture war and why should we. It’s something that only people in internet do from both sides with whole very American “us vs. them”-mentality and at end of day it doesn’t have effect on those of us around hobby making it waste of time and effort that can be used on other things. So it’s not “bending knee” but ignoring those people simply because they don’t actually matter when it comes to hobby. More they are given spotlight, more they views become known instead of silencing them.

    @onlyonepinman I fully agree with that “Remember that just because the motivation behind something isn’t always to your liking, that doesn’t mean that the out turn of that won’t be.”- line and it was well said. Too bad that too many people tend to forget that because of they anger that stops them from thinking straight. I would say that over all quality of content is more important thing than reasons for making it. That said there is always whole subjective side to things so that not everyone likes same things and considers same things good or bad as some one else.

    #1324733

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    The reason you should care about the culture war is because although it might look it’s just something people in America are doing on the Internet it’s not.  It will have and is already having consequences outside of America.  Even ignoring the introduction and expansions of Hate Speech laws, it’s having an impact on areas like payment processing and finance.  Whether you agree with recent high profile bannings from Patreon that was really just the problem bubbling to the surface.  The culture was is not just in America because we have global companies who are used worldwide and those companies are bending to pressures whether willingly or unwillingly (although in the case of Mastercard I would suggest it’s willingly).  The culture war, for good or for ill, is having an effect on your life and while you might think it’s ok because you don’t hold the same views as the people being targeted, the fact that they can be targeted by services that are both essential (because we live in a world driven by credit) and virtual monopolies (with the only real alternative to Mastercard being Visa) then I think that is actually a massive cause for alarm; it may not be us today but that doesn’t mean it never will be.  As the left drifts further and further to the left, those of us currently in moderate positions will increasingly find ourselves branded as right wing.  And as the extremes of the right are gradually banned and censored, what is considered extreme will gradual contract closer to the centre to the point where what is currently moderate will become the extreme and be banned.  So while in the context of games and gaming the culture war might seem insignificant and it’s effects irrelevant (it’s only a game right? Don’t like it don’t buy it), it’s a much bigger problem than whether or not your favourite game or comic or film has suddenly become overly PC.

    #1324743

    mecha82
    Participant
    10037xp

    Thing is while it’s easy to point fingers and say that only one side is wrong it’s not true because those opposing that have become more and more similar to that. Which is why I keep saying different side of same coin when it comes to this because more often than not it tends to be case. Which is why I am critical towards both sides and I keep being so. Yes, both sides might hate me from it but I don’t care because at end of day I am not going to bother thinking what they think about me and i am not going to stop going to point out both sides stupidity. Both sides tend to use same tactics like case of James Gunn  proves were it was Trump supporter who caused him getting fired by Disney because he was anti-Trump so neither side has moral high ground in my eyes.

    #1324759

    Thinking about the branding of the ‘culture war’ as only an American thing is not quite right to pigeonhole it. As @onlyonepinman points out there are other factors at work at various levels that may not be directly aimed at the gaming hobby.

    With regard to gaming, I’d argue that we as gamers are, generally, a sub-culture with a history of play. There is the simple goal of “Play” (kinda like the re-introduction of Peter Pan to the Lost Boys in the film ‘Hook’). The camps of competitive or cooperative exist within gaming but they don’t exclude anyone from the aim of having ‘Fun’. There really isn’t anything further than that with anything we do in this hobby. All our activities tend to be in the pursuit of making it Fun for everyone Playing. As a company flexes its influence on the subculture it relies on for existence, ‘bending the knee’ to the people who don’t Play and aren’t acting in the interest of Fun it does tend to put some sand in the shorts and chafe some tenders.

    With regard to the world of Anglophone and gaming, look at the history of the fluff for Warhammer 40k back in the 80s and how it developed. From there peek at comics with 3000AD that led to the Dredd IP in its various manifestations today. Consider the reason Paranoia was ever created as a game to mock the banality of the world around its creators. Gaming was meme culture before the Internet. Trump shopped as The God Emperor was genius in fusing the ideas to troll vocal authoritarian culture but it doesn’t shield the games we play.

    WoTC already has the rights to MtG and there is plenty to read/watch over what kind of shitstorm is going on there. The world of the tabletop RPG isn’t exclusive or immune from the people who run the company. Honestly it feels like the premonition of this situation was in the storyline of the comic Fables in the history of how the characters came to the point where the story begins. Slowly one by one the realms of make-believe in stories were overtaken by the authoritarian forces of The Adversary that led to the characters of the comic taking residence as exiles in a NYC neighborhood.

    I don’t want to be a mental refugee,  a self cognizant minority.

    Just play my games with my friends all fine, no bother to the world on/offline

    The push against powers that be is here and the strange angles with which pressures are manifested makes the mind spin. Call of Cthulhu makes a little bit more sense in the meta-analysis.

    #1324858

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    I’m not particularly pointing any fingers of blame, but it’s impossible to deny that the supposed culture war is pretty much the Politically Correct left vs everything else (including as often as not, themselves).  In gaming this usually means changing existing genres, settings, IPs and characters to suit a particular narrative and while I don’t recall anyone taking political correctness OUT of a product recently I can probably name countless examples where it has been put INTO a product, usually to the frustration and annoyance of the existing fan base.  In terms of entertainment that’s generally the culture war expresses itself.

     

    If this were something limited solely to gaming or entertainment then like you I would be uncaring;  nobody is forcing me to buy anything and nobody is taking away that which I have already bought.  If something changes and I don’t like it I go somewhere else.  Sure I might grumble a bit to people I know or roll my eyes in frustration but I just spend my money elsewhere.  Sadly it’s a much bigger problem than just games and entertainment, they’re just the tip of the iceberg and it’s the rest of the iceberg that we should really care about.

    Not that this really has anything to do with Al Qadim or Oriental Adventures

    • This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by  onlyonepinman.
    • This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by  onlyonepinman.
    #1324871

    mecha82
    Participant
    10037xp

    As some one who plays MtG in some degree I have seen that shitstorm on internet and it makes me stay away from it as well and that includes MtG Youtube community because it tends to feed drama over opposing opinions and opposing political agendas since both sides like to force they own. So I have seen how bad both right and left can be while being hypocritical.

    That said going off topic is easy when ever some one brings politics into things by even mentioning them but yeah we did end up going really off topic did we because this snowballed so much. Then again maybe some one who knows more about Al Qadim and Oriental Adventures can make some theories what those might end up being like. I would love to read those.

    #1324875

    koraski
    Participant
    1971xp

    Thor was a duckbilled alien for a while and no one cared. A woman wields the hammer for a time and the sky is falling? When you have a comic book story running literally for decades you need to switch things up a bit from time to time.

    I think in most of these “diversity” cases it’s merely companies trying to expand their customer base. There’s huge untapped markets just waiting for smart businesses to reach out to them.

    As I mentioned previously, I am really hoping for a refresh of the Al-Qadim setting. As long as they do it respectfully I doubt there will be any significant uproar. Doesn’t one of the MtG settings have an Arabian theme?

    #1325075

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    @koraski I think most diversity drives are done so companies can be seen to be doing something, certainly the ones that cause all the outrage.  The reason I believe that is that they’re usually so poorly handled.  If, as a business, you do something that pisses off a load of existing customers in an attempt to widen your market you probably did it wrong.  But that’s how we keep seeing, time and again, large companies in the entertainment industry (particularly in Video Games and Film) handling things.  Generally speaking, I think by forcing diversity changes through that annoy fans you will, at best, break even in terms of gaining as many customers as you lose but probably lose more than you gain.’  Im not really against inclusion in games but really that comes from the people playing the game not the game itself.  I certainly don’t support sweeping and suddenly changes within a particular game or game franchise to support “diversity” because I think existing fans, the ones who make these things successful enough to actually be able to afford to muck about with things like “diversity and inclusion” (and trust me, this isn’t something small businesses can afford to mess with), should be respected and valued.  I like to think that GW are currently handling this situation quite well.  There’s been massive calls for them to provide better representation of ethnicity and gender for years.  They have been quite vague and non-committal with some of their answers, with very little other than “yeah, it’s probably going to happen”.  Slowly and mostly without fanfare (Sisters of Battle aside) it is changing.  They’re starting to produce more female miniatures, there is a wider range of skin tones on their models.  And they haven’t made a song and dance about it, they just put them out there. There’s some lines that I am unsure whether GW will ever cross (female Space Marines for example) but for the most part they’re doing their best to keep their fans happy while at the same time they’re changing with the times so to speak. Wizards of the Coast typically takes the exact opposite approach and just says “we’re doing this, if you don’t like it we don’t want your business” and so they frequently find themselves embroiled in needless controversy and I don’t think it’s a surprise that MtG is in a bit of a state of decline at the moment (although I don’t think that this is the ONLY reason, it’s certainly a contributing factor).

    @mecha82 the original post was slightly political as it did reference diversity and inclusion as a possible motive for reintroducing certain parts of the Forgotten Realms world, so we’re not as far off topic as one might think.

    As for the settings themselves, the Kar-Tur setting was never particularly well defined and there’s never been a great deal of support for it.  I certainly don’t remember there being anything available for it throughout the AD&D 2nd and D&D 3.0/3.5 edition periods which is most of the 90’s and early 00’s.  Looking at the Forgotten Realms wiki site, there was one source book in the mid ’80s so writing a new one now they probably have a fair amount of creative freedom; as long as they don’t change the geography they can probably do whatever they want.

    Al Qadim was a little more fleshed out because it was essentially a separate campaign setting. Other than being unique as an Arabian Nights setting, I don’t remember it being particularly ground breaking. It is for Arabian Nights what Forgotten Realms is for Medieval fantasy – an easy way in. It has all the things you might expect from such a setting; flying carpets, genies, scimitars and lots of sand. But I think it’s been so long now since Al Qadim was in print, and so much has happened in Forgotten Realms as a setting, they probably still have a lot of creative licence. It’s pretty much fallen out of public view for so long that they can almost reboot it anyway they like. One thing that it didn’t ever really focus on, and something I would definitely expect to be absent from any new setting, is some of the more conservative attitudes of the present day middle east. It paints a much more positive picture, more akin to what we might like to envisage the Islamic world was like at its peak, the Islamic Golden Age, when it was at forefront of science and philosophy. It’s true that the more negative aspects of Muslim culture that seen to so often be at the forefront in the news were, without any doubt, present in medieval Muslim world, they weren’t in Al Qadim – I would expect the new Zakhara source book(s) to have a more western, egalitarian slant to their societies. This is very much in keeping with the way Faerun is presented and in keeping with the general presentation of D&D settings in general. This is why, as someone has pointed out, Dark Sun is probably a little too “spicy” for today’s more delicate audiences so either don’t expect to see it any time soon or expect any future offering to come with either a trigger warning or be so Watered down as to be unrecognisable as Dark Sun.

    #1325326

    mecha82
    Participant
    10037xp

    @onlyonepinman What you wrote about Kar-Tur is interesting to me. It does make me wonder why they didn’t support it more and why they chose to give so much open options for DM over guiding them more. I can only assume that back then fleshing out Kar-Tur just wasn’t priority to them. So Al Qadim is basically easy to enter with all tropes that one can expect from setting like that which can be both good and bad thing. That said it would be nice if it would help to remind people about history and things that Arabs did back then that has helped western world as well like creating alphabet system that we are currently using and saving works of Ancient Greece philosophers.

    #1325487

    onlyonepinman
    18051xp
    Cult of Games Member

    Kara-Tur probably wasn’t published for the same reason Al Qadim went away – sales.  Al Qadim wasn’t a source book it was a full on campaign setting with a fair number of books.  It wasn’t quite on the the same scale as Forgotten Realms but it was treated like a stand alone product even though it was the same world as Forgotten Realms.  But I don’t think D&D was popular enough to really support all the campaign settings TSR were producing at the time; Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dark Sun, Greyhawk and Al Qadim that I can recall, maybe Spelljammer?  Anyway you can see my point, I think it was buckling under its own weight and something had to give.  I think Al Qadim went out of print before the introduction of D&D 3.0 but by the time 3rd Ed came along WotC rationalised most of that stuff away and went down to only a few settings and although Forgotten Realms survived the cull, it shrank back to what you might consider the core world. D&D 3 probably did quite a lot to save the RPG industry by going open source and I think RPGs have been on the increase in terms of popularity for the last 15 years or so. Maybe now is a good time to expand the boundaries of what WotC can support and also instead if making it a full campaign setting, a source book will probably suffice because most of the game won’t be too dissimilar to any other d&d game. The classes will be broadly similar, magic in terms of spell casting isn’t going to be noticeably different, weapons and armour will work the same. All you really need is a good description of the places, notable characters, a few unique monsters, maybe some interesting new magic items and some pre-packed adventures. The same applies equally to Kara-Tur, Shaar and Zakhara. Al Qadim as a setting probably won’t make a come back, I suspect there will simply be a source book or two for each of the locations under the Forgotten Realms brand and possibly a Tomb of Annihilation style campaign.

    I don’t really see any issues with tropes, like stereotypes they exist for a reason and they exist in all forms of entertainment. You don’t have to use them in your games if you don’t want.

    Kara-Tur probably wasn’t published for the same reason Al Qadim went away – sales.  Al Qadim wasn’t a source book it was a full on campaign setting with a fair number of books.  It wasn’t quite on the the same scale as Forgotten Realms but it was treated like a stand alone product even though it was the same world as Forgotten Realms.  But I don’t think D&D was popular enough to really support all the campaign settings TSR were producing at the time; Forgotten Realms, Dragon Lance, Ravenloft, Planescape, Dark Sun, Greyhawk and Al Qadim that I can recall, maybe Spelljammer?  Anyway you can see my point, I think it was buckling under its own weight and something had to give. It made more sense to print less books but sell more of them than to print more books but sell less of each. I think Al Qadim went out of print before the introduction of D&D 3.0 but by the time 3rd Ed came along WotC rationalised most of that stuff away and went down to only a few settings and although Forgotten Realms survived the cull, it shrank back to what you might consider the core world. D&D 3 probably did quite a lot to save the RPG industry by going open source and I think RPGs have been on the increase in terms of popularity for the last 15 years or so. Maybe now is a good time to expand the boundaries of what WotC can support and also instead if making it a full campaign setting, a source book will probably suffice because most of the game won’t be too dissimilar to any other d&d game. The classes will be broadly similar, magic in terms of spell casting isn’t going to be noticeably different, weapons and armour will work the same. All you really need is a good description of the places, notable characters, a few unique monsters, maybe some interesting new magic items and some pre-packed adventures. The same applies equally to Kara-Tur, Shaar and Zakhara. Al Qadim as a setting probably won’t make a come back, I suspect there will simply be a source book or two for each of the locations under the Forgotten Realms brand and possibly a Tomb of Annihilation style campaign.

    I don’t really see any issues with tropes, like stereotypes they exist for a reason and they exist in all forms of entertainment. You don’t have to use them in your games if you don’t want.

    #1325895

    limburger
    21533xp
    Cult of Games Member

    To further illustrate the effects of this ‘culture war’.

    One of the writers behind ‘Lamentations of the Flame princess’ dared to post a picture of himself and Jordan Peterson.

    Before the dust had settled fellow collaborators had withdrawn from projects associated with the game.

    More info :

    http://vengersatanis.blogspot.com/2018/11/free-speech-hate-speech.html

    (warning : Vengers’ site is not completely safe for work, so don’t browse any further … )

     

    As a reminder as to why fighting this insanity is important to all of us :

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

    – Martin Niemöller

    Yes … it’s Godwin territory here, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t apply here.
    And on a personal note … the culture war has already ruined what used to be a fun holiday event for kids as grown-ups have demanded that it be “more inclusive”. We’re just one step away of needing police in full riot gear at these events.

    //

    As @onlyonepinman already said the settings weren’t profitable when they were part of AD&D in its golden era.
    I think with the release of 3rd they only updated Ravenloft and Forgotten Realms. There was an attempt at rebooting Dragon Lance setting too.

    OTOH …. there are so many D&D clones out there these days that WoTC can profit from publishing a new setting and/or expansion.
    I just hope they don’t try to be overly inclusive just to please a vocal minority.

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