The Basics of Citation in RPG Discussions

 

This is me being a bit bitchy, TBH.

In discussing RPGs, you will frequently be called upon to back up your words. Sometimes, these are statements of fact regarding the rules.Sometimes, these are opinions based on personal taste. Either might involve specific examples, either hypothetical, exemplary, or textual.... "What if", "This one time", and "The Book says".

Hypotheticals are things that might happen... a scenario that could occur. Exemplary examples are things that did occur. And textual examples are things written in books, articles, or, depending on the subject, other mediums; if you're discussing Star Wars, textual examples will frequently include movies and episodes. And if you make a textual argument, you need to cite your source.

I'm not your high school teacher. I'm not going to insist on MLA format and a Works Cited page. But if you can't cite it, I won't bite it, and you've got to tell folks where your ideas come from. Is it by the book? Which book? Where? We may all understand what you mean when you say "the DMG", if we're all discussing the same edition, but that's a big book. Where on the hundreds of pages of information did you mean?

You might make a general statement "In the PH, the entry on dwarves says" tells me to look in the PH in the entry on dwarves; I don't have a page number, but if I can find the entry on dwarves (Table of Contents! Index!) I can find where you're talking about. If you reference a given monster in the Monster Manual, that's usually simple matter of alphabetization.

I often prefer to be more specific; I like parenthetical citations for discussion boards, since they are succinct, and we're often drawing from the same corpus. If we're discussing Dark Sun and I say (DMG p. 17), chances are I mean the 2nd or 4th edition DMGs, depending on the context. But I might say (3.5 DMG p. 17); it tells you quickly which book I'm referencing, so you can go reference it, too. So you can check my work, and the context of the statement.... maybe I'm misquoting. Maybe I've missed something. Maybe I'm lying. The citation lets you check, and makes the conversation fuller.

Cite your arguments. It makes for better arguments, better discussions, and if you won't cite it, why should I believe you?

If they won't cite it, you shouldn't bite it.

"The Edition that Shall Not Be Named"

This is not about 3rd edition. This is about Dragonsfoot's reaction to 3rd edition, especially about the semi-infamous abbreviation for it.

***
So, a discussion elsewhere got me thinking about TETSNBN, as an acronym in active use on Dragonsfoot. So, I fired up the search engine and typed in TETSNBN, to see what I can find.

There are 132* pages of posts that use that acronym. As near as I can tell, it heavily dropped off after 2014, which makes some sense... that's when the third edition from WOTC dropped, so TETSNBN was both less pressing and less topical. But let's look at it by page (though, obviously, me dropping it several times in this post, and the discussion thereafter, will shift these numbers a bit).

2025 had 3 entries.
The first page of entries goes until February of 2022... one page, out of 132, and we're back three years!
The second page goes back almost 5 years ago, to September 15th, 2020.
3rd page is 2018.
4th page to 2016... about the same rate between 2016 and 2020, if there's 1 page of entries for each 2 year span.
5th page is about half 2016/half 2015.
6th page is mostly 2014... and 2014 continues to page 13.

2013 goes from pages 13 to 16
2012 from 16 to 24
2011 from 24 to 35

I want to emphasize here that these are pages of entries. Not posts. Pages. About 50 posts per page.

2010 from 35 to 52.
2009 was 52 to 71. In 2009, half the uses of the acronym had been made.
2008, the year 4th edition was released, was from 71 to 93. 22 pages!
2007, the last full year of TETSNBN, was from 93 to 110.

2006: 110 to 124
2005: 124 to 132!
2004, it was used 4 times. Drexlorn may have used it first (as far as records go back) on April 4th, 2004. But this is in a table of acronyms, last edited in 2005, so it is likely that it is a later addition to the list. 

It's used three times in December of 2004 by MerricB and Cob37Jam. MerricB MAY have gotten it from northrundicandus, in a post where he calls it "THE EDITION THAT SHALL NOT BE NAMED!" Searching for "The Edition That Shall Not Be Named" has the first post of that being by RobertFisher, but Traveller used "The Game That Shall Not Be Named" in 2003; this may or may not be a reference to 3e, when compared to this post.

So, from a quick bit of research, it was most used in 2008, and the bulk of uses was 2007-2009, when 58 of the 132 pages were authored. The acronym, so far as I can tell, was first used by MerricB, and the name may following on a use by northrundicandus, or an original use by RobertFisher, both in 2004. Traveller's first use of it in 2003 is disputable.

Again, this is brief search, and I welcome more scholarship on the topic.

*There is a 133rd page of posts during my research, but that final page is a single post, so I'm rounding. Again, adding this post will move the pages a bit from when I looked at it.

"More Pratchett than Tolkien"

 I know this is going to be somewhat unpolished; it's a starting point, not a final declaration.

So, recently, I've started saying "More Pratchett than Tolkien" to describe my approach to D&D (and other RPGs, but it seems to be more an issue with those who prefer older versions of D&D). But what do I see that as meaning? I've got a few points on this; mostly what I perceive as being the core parts of a "Tolkien" mindset of game worlds, versus a "Pratchett" mindset. Note that I am not ascribing these opinions specifically to JRR Tolkien, but rather than Lord of the Rings is frequently invoked as defense of them. After this, I'll avoid referring to this as "Tolkien" or words derived from that; my statement is pithy, better for a signature than discussion.

1) Racism as a necessary component

One of the primary objections to playing a "humanoid" character is that the character will face insurmountable racism; the 1e DMG  says "So unless the player desires a character which will lurk alone somewhere and be hunted by adventurers", before going on to explain that one might want to play a gold dragon, because it can look human, but that no gold dragon would want to do this. The games will often include something like a "Basic Acceptability of Racial Types" table; 1e has one in the PH to cover humans and demi-humans, and the DMG has one to cover most types of humanoids in their interactions with each other; Hackmaster includes it in the PH. Without this, it is argued, the game wouldn't be "realistic".

Leaving aside the conception of a world which must, necessarily, include often violent racism, it also shows a lack of imagination, or consideration of the nature of the world presented in D&D and similar games... while many different species live in the world, Good and Evil are real and quantifiable things, and there are gods who can communicate relatively freely with their worshipers on the Prime Material (if they don't live there themselves). A view where violent, unexamined racism can leave one still aligned as "Good" is one that is alien to any understanding of the word "Good" that I have, much less the definition of "Good" as laid out in the 1e DMG. "Basically stated, the tenets of good are human rights, or in the case of AD&D, creature rights. Each creature is entitled to life, relative freedom, and the prospect of  happiness. Cruelty and suffering are undesirable." (p 23) How is this compatible with the idea that Good people can freely kill non-combatants of "evil" races?

A particularly evident argument of this is seen in half-orcs (and, in Hackmaster, half-hobgoblins). The 1e PH states that "some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels ore sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human." (p 17). Hackmaster has "Note that even where hobgoblins are acceptable, half-hobgoblins are mistreated and disliked by the locals. Half-hobgoblins share a special bond with half-orcs,alongside whom they are often persecuted as beastly monsters." (HM PH, 31) Despite both being specifically being called out as being non-sterile hybrids, the only consideration is that all half-humanoids will "will  always  have  an  human mother and have been born and raised in human lands" and be "The offspring of questionable parentage and violent couplings" (HM PH, 31); none will be, for example, the offspring of a mommy sil-karg and a daddy sil-karg who love each other very much. Hackmaster mentions that "The city of Prompeldia has developed a sizable sil-karg quarter that is threatening to become large enough to count as its own culture." (HM PH, 31). But all will be "The offspring of questionable parentage and violent couplings."

 A Pratchett-style view of the game does not pretend that racism does not exist, but rather disputes the idea that it is insurmountable. The dwarves and trolls of Ankh-Morpork do begin with hatred, but they reach an uneasy peace when forced into proximity by the city. Sam Vimes, like many in the city, is riddled with prejudices about non-humans and the undead, but he overcomes them as he deals with them as people. Some of this is inspired by Carrot, the human raised by dwarves, who still considers himself a dwarf in many respects... but also respects all people, learning their names and treating them as citizens, not as trolls or gargoyles.

2) Race as unbending identity 

"Humans with pointy ears" is frequently invoked when you have a non-human character who is perceived to act unlike their stereotype, or one of the acceptable range of stereotypes. Are your dwarves "not dwarven enough?" Does he like wine instead of ale? Does he shave his beard? Is he a dagger wielding tunnel rat, instead of a chain-mail clad warrior with an axe? You're playing a short human, not a REAL dwarf.

This also tends to get invoked when dealing with traditionally hostile non-humans. An elf or dwarf might violate their racial alignment, but a good orc? Unheard of. It's argued that it is impossible for any of the "humanoids" to be other than their Monster Manual entries, despite that never really being written anywhere, and several counter-examples, especially from 2nd edition (such as the Monster Mythology deity who prizes his good bugbear converts). Gary Gygax, revered by many old school gamers, even stated "The old addage [sic] about nits making lice applies", referring to noted proponent of genocide John Chivington's statements about Native Americans. As I have argued before, Dungeons and Dragons owes a lot to Westerns, and the attitude towards humanoids in a game tends to mirror the attitude towards Native Americans in contemporary Westerns; in Chato's Land (1973), you have a half-Indian protagonist, while Dances with Wolves (1990) presents the Native Americans as the sympathetic characters.

One objection to having the possibility of non-evil humanoids is the idea that a DM may use these as "gotchas"... "You killed all of these orcs but they were secretly good so now you're all evil!". But this argument fails, in my opinion, as one could also use that as an argument against DMs... "We found a vorpal sword in a crypt guarded by a skeleton with no legs!" The first is gotcha; the second is Monty Haul. Both of them are bad DMs, but of different types.

A more Pratchett-style game recognizes that the stereotypes exist, and may be the norm, but they are not the only way characters of that race can be played. Pratchett's dwarves are uniformly male-presenting, with beards and axes and iron boots, with one's actual sex being so concealed that the beginning of a dwarven courtship is "find out if the person is the correct gender." In Feet of Clay, however, we're introduced to Cheri Littlebottom, a dwarf woman who doesn't want that. She wants dresses and jewelry, lipstick and high heels welded to her iron boots. It is noted to be unusual. Other dwarves react with disgust... but it also doesn't make her impossible to exist as a character. Other examples include trolls who join the Watch, vampires in the Überwald League of Temperance who abstain from intelligent blood, and golems who buy their freedom to become their own selves. They are unusual, without being impossible.

3) Only certain races are proper. 

Some of this ties into the distinctions drawn between humans, demi-humans (elves, dwarves, gnomes, and halflings), semi-humans (half-elves, half-orcs, half-hobgoblins), and humanoids (orcs, goblins, gnolls, etc.). In the older game mindset, players should only be humans, demi-humans, and semi-humans; anything else is too weird or outlandish. For this, I will set aside the humanoids; I feel the objections to them are largely addressed above. This is addressed to what are often seen as the more exotic races... dragonborn, warforged, tabaxi, and the like.

The older mindset tends to describe these are unnecessary. I've even had someone describe the non-evil drow, minotaurs, and other uncommon races described as "played out", as if the dwarves with beards and axes griping at the elves of the forests isn't itself cliche at this point. The small stable of relatively human races is seen as a bonus... provided they don't go outside "appropriate" for their species, that they're human-like is enough. Orcs and humanoids are rejected as above, but there's also examples like Lizardfolk (who have always been Neutral, if cannibals) who are part of the world, but considered too out there for PCs.

The Pratchett-inspired game eschews this; while golems are unusual in Ankh-Morpork, and certainly powerful (more powerful than you might want in a low-level game), Warforged are a similar idea, but rendered playable. Tabaxi represent a different kind of character than "short and resistant to magic in some way". Dragonborn evoke the namesake of the game, again providing a different sort of character to play. That these exist don't invalidate the options to play elves, dwarves, and halflings. A Pratchett-inspired game will have a more cosmopolitan approach to races, both in terms of racism (as above), and in terms of options.

Loving and Living With your Shitty Familiar [Hackmaster]

So, You Rolled on Table E

Spellslinger’s Guide, Volume 2, has the rules for acquiring a familiar. Table A is the best table, offering the possibilities of magical and intelligent creatures. Table B might get you cool snakes, predators, elephants, or even humans (which is kinda less cool than you may expect)! Table C is pretty cool. Table D is standard for your “not awesome but still respectable” familiars… cats, birds, lizards, maybe even a goat or a giant squid. A couple bugs, but, ya know, kinda cool ones, like scorpions or spiders.

Table E is not that.

There’s crabs and snails. A wide variety of bugs, including fleas and termites and silverfish, sort of topping out at bees, wasps, and praying mantids. There’s some cool stuff in the water-bound category, like barracuda, pike, and swordfish… even piranhas and manta rays, which can be awesome if you live on or near the water. But, there’s also rocks. And plants. And these… kind of suck, especially if you’re an adventurer. You can’t exactly cart around a tree, and your careful devotion to your small pot of moss is gonna get weird.

There’s two reasons you wind up rolling on Table E: You don’t want to (or can’t) spend a lot of Familiar Points (FP) on getting a familiar, or your dice hate you. Table D requires almost three times the Familiar Points AND some Animal Empathy (only novice, but still some), which is going to cut into your Cool Things budget. Table C will cut into your budget even further at just shy of four times the cost of Table E, and requires a lot more skill (including advanced Arcane Lore mastery, which is its own cost). Table B and Table A are WAY more, and require a lot more skill. So, Table E might be where your comfort zone is for cost.

Your dice might also hate you. Every table above E has the possibility that you’ll get knocked down a table, and, if your dice are bad enough, you could wind up paying for a Table A familiar and still roll on Table E. At this point, bribes to your GM are recommended (though you also have the option to pay an FP or four for a reroll).

But Table E familiars ARE familiars, and they have some potential. But, first, we have to think about what they can do.


The Abilities of Familiars: A Recap

Spider-fam, spider-fam, does whatever a spider can.

A familiar can do whatever another member of its type can do. If it’s a bug, it will have statistics as on page 10 of Spell Slinger’s Guide. It will have a low animal intelligence (2-3), which is about as smart as many predators or herd animals. It won’t die of old age. It will share initiative with the mage, but that goes both ways… the familiar can let the mage know something is up, and can be put “on guard” if the mage is busy with something else, allowing the mage both a better initiative die and their own. With spell points, the mage can share the familiar’s senses, and even communicate with it. And getting a familiar even gives you a bit of bonus Honor. In addition, if you have the spare points, you might try to pick up a special ability or two for your familiar.

The ability to communicate telepathically with a familiar should not be underestimated. There is no range to telepathic communication and, while the creature might not understand words, it will be far more attuned to images and other sensory input, which are a lot easier to manage telepathically, and it will have the ability to communicate back the same way.


Critters and Creatures

Table E has several critters and creatures on it. Many of these are Miniscule or Diminutive, and none really qualify as combatants, except against others of their size… a crab may be able to give a pinch, but it’s not going to do even a point of damage. But the fliers can move faster than a human can walk, and, with a +18 to defense, they’re very difficult to hit. Crawling insects are a lot slower, but they’re also effectively invisible to most people; you seldom notice every cricket and crane fly you come across, so a small insect can be an effective spy. A tick, louse, or flea might live happily on its master for years.

Likewise, many bugs are adept at staying alive. Blessed with great intelligence (for a bug, anyway), they are more aware of things around them, and can better understand what big things are and how they might affect themselves and their masters. The senses of bugs can be far different than those of a human, and may allow them to sense invisible creatures by their displacement of the air, or subtle sounds at frequencies or volumes even elves can’t hear.

Of course, these are still bugs. They are fragile, and may have trouble if their master goes swimming (willingly or not). They’re prey for a lot of animals. A wise master keeps their bugs safe, acquiring or creating a small box for them to retreat to to avoid being squished. The master may wear this around their neck, keep it in their bag, or some other place where their familiar can find their way.


Crabs and mollusks have their own issues and advantages. Crabs, crayfish, and hermit crabs are not water-bound, but they can easily function there, and won’t suffer from a dunking; they should use the fish statistics, or have a swim speed of 10 if they’re miniscule crawlies. All are scavengers, and so will live easily off the detritus common to adventurers. More noticeable than insects, they are also stronger; an ant familiar cannot bring much to you, but a crab can, if the object is small enough.

Notably, the crustaceans are excellent at sensing vibrations; they will have excellent initiative scores and the Improved Awareness talent. They see relatively well in the dark, especially for movement, and have good senses of taste and smell. You may not want to taste what they eat -- nothing like 2 week dead rotted orc to wake you up in the morning! -- but those senses help to give them a great picture of the world around them.

Snails and slugs have more limited senses, and cannot hear at all, but they’re sensitive to shadows, and so notice predators and other threats quite quickly. Likewise, while they are not aquatic, both types can survive a dunking better than an insect, and likely better than their master (depending on the species, it may survive up to 24 hours, or even 2-3 weeks underwater).


The sea creatures of Table E are another kettle of fish (pun completely intended). Water-bound, they cannot travel as well as others, and some are quite sizable… a bluefin tuna might be 15 feet long and three-quarters of a ton, and sturgeons can grow even larger. But you might also wind up with a barnacle, or a coral.

Acquiring a water-dependent familiar can make life difficult for a mage, as it requires them to stay near the water. But, for a wizard at sea, it can be the ideal companion. With the increased intelligence granted by being a familiar, and the guidance of their master, the more mobile creatures can provide insight into the underwater world, even helping to locate sunken ships, lost treasure, or caves. If there are places beneath the water with air, the fish can lead their master or others to them. An aquatic familiar isn’t for everyone; it will limit you to the creature’s own environment far more than a terrestrial familiar will; but they can have great advantages if you can or do live on the water.


Let My Armies be the Rocks and the Trees

And now, we get to rocks and trees.

Rocks are difficult familiars to love. With certain special abilities, they can be formidable and useful familiars, and they’re also immune to a number of the flaws common to familiars… it doesn't matter if your rock is clumsy, or a coward, or lazy. Rocks really can’t have foul habits, bad eyesight, or bad hearing. Additionally, they cannot drown, and have a significant DR, so are difficult to kill accidentally. You can slip them in your pocket and carry them along, or even hold them in your hand for a bit of extra weight when you punch someone.

Their senses, though, are limited to vibrations, and perhaps warmth and cold. That vibration sense can come in handy; it can help locate threats approaching if placed on a surface, and may provide early warning of earthquakes, tsunamis, or flash floods. Your rock does not need to sleep, and so will keep a tireless… watch… for unusual vibrations that might harm its master. Their limited telepathic communication with their master allows the master to wake with far greater speed than they otherwise might, since their familiar is ever alert.

But, let’s be honest. They’re rocks. They can’t move on their own. They cannot see, smell, taste, or even really hear or touch. They cannot talk. While some special abilities can make them amazing, others are simply useless (“Oh, look… my rock can Dodge.”) More on rocks in “Special Abilities for Special Familiars.”


Plants, including, for these purposes, mushrooms and toadstools, are, at best, sessile, but have the potential to be absolutely huge. Weeds, flowers, and moss are relatively small, and might be relatively easily carried; a mage with such a familiar might keep them in a pot. Bushes and vines can also conceivably be treated as such, as well as some trees, mushrooms, and toadstools. But the potential of all of these becomes clear when they are in one place.

Plants are incredibly resilient; many can survive if much above ground is cut, or even burnt, off. Without removing the roots, which can be substantial, the plant will continue to grow, especially with a dedicated caretaker. Vines can remain the same plant across their length; cut one in two and you do not kill it, simply create a second plant. Trees can link themselves with another plant and survive horrible damage as a cutting. And you cannot kill a mushroom in a way that matters; more than just the cap and stem, a mushroom is a vast, underground, organism that can spread across miles and put fruiting bodies up wherever it needs.


These traits do not make these fantastic familiars; they make them “Not as horrible as you first feared” familiars, bordering on good in some circumstances. A non-adventuring mage might like having their familiar be a stone or tree; a mushroom that spans acres, or a wild patch of kudzu. A pirate-mage might enjoy being bonded to a barracuda, or gain prestige from being master to a marlin. But the adventurer might find less to enjoy about their friend the flea, or the supreme honor of being chosen by a semi-intelligent dandelion. But this is where special abilities come in.


Special Abilities for Special Familiars

Special Abilities particularly help Table E familiars. Obviously, they’re of great help to any familiar, but some of the unique nature of Table E familiars can make certain familiars pair very well with certain abilities. Others aren’t especially good for a given familiar, or are simply irrelevant. Especially notable for Table E familiars are:

Disease Resistant: The specifics of this ability make it amazing for those with mineral or vegetable familiars… while diseases can pass from humans to mammals or birds, it is far harder for humans to get diseases of plants, fungi, and rocks… you never hear of Mr. Peabody, who tragically died of Dutch Elm disease. In effect, this renders the mage (and their familiar) immune to disease.

Heartiness: While somewhat mediocre on rocks and trees, this talent is incredibly useful for more fragile familiars; adding 3-6 HP to your silverfish familiar, or a flower, can triple their hit points or more. They’re still not tough, but they’re far less fragile.

Ley Line Sense: In addition to the usual effects of Espy Ley Line, a Game Master might consider a bonus for those linked to stone or plants in locating Earth and Ore Ley Lines, similar to that granted to sylvan and fey types.

Life Bound to Master: With the tree-bound, mushroom-bound, or stone-bound, this particular ability, to pool hit points with a stone, a tree, or a mushroom, can be simply immense. Likewise, as the familiar’s life span is that of the mage, the mage’s life-span is that of the familiar. Trees might be hundreds of years old; fungal colonies thousands. While prudence will limit the mage to remaining near their familiar, “near” can spread across a large area. For kudzu, the mage may see their hit points increase exponentially in the first few days, with vines able to grow a foot a day, with deep, resilient, roots.

Stones have many of the same advantages, though perhaps smaller in scale. A rock will have many effective HP, though not as many as an acres-wide spread of fungus or an ancient oak.

Mage Bound to Master: Similar to Life Bound with Master, this can greatly extend the abilities of a mage; with large plants, their reach can be great indeed.

Shapechanger: The limitation that shapechanges must be of table E or lower is a significant one; your crab familiar cannot become a giant crab or seal herder, your silverfish cannot become a giant spider. However, plant and mineral familiars can make amazing use of this.

At 5 point shapechanging, a mineral familiar might become any tool it chooses; it remains a rock, but is now shaped like a knife or a hand axe. A tree may shape a branch into a useful tool, which it then sheds for its master to use; what better staff to enchant than one given to you by your own familiar? The ability to change size can also make a plant familiar more portable; a massive tree might be restricted to a smaller, or immature, version of the same.

As the power grows in potency, these abilities become even more pronounced; a tree may become a flower, or moss, or some other kind of vegetable matter to better suit the environment; your oak in the Rokk woods may become a cactus in the Khydoban, or a rosebush in Tharggy.

Other special abilities are of more or less use on a table E familiar; Ability Enhancement and Hit Point Bonus are nice no matter what your familiar is, and your tree being a deceptive defender is not, perhaps, terribly relevant.

The D&D Genre, Racism, and Westerns

(This is from a message board post, in response to Wizards of the Coast announcing that they were going to be taking a look at diversity and how some of the negative stereotypes applied to fictional races could be harmful to real people in the real world; that explains a bit why I am talking to someone who is not there. I have edited it slightly to provide some more context, and may edit it more in the future to more clearly express the ideas).

Orcs were not created in a game. They were created by an author who described them as "...squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

He literally described them as the worst stereotypes available of Asian people. It is, in fact, a stereotype that tends to change slightly in the details to describe everyone not of the dominant culture and ethnicity. So, descriptions of those fictional races which match up to real-life prejudices pose a problem of representation... who are these people, and are we perpetuating stereotypes by saying that they are, uniformly, rape-happy barbarians who couldn't pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel?

Secondly, in the game, they exist. I realize that the game is not real, but the game has a fictional reality in which the characters exist, and in which creatures like half-orcs, half-hobgoblins, and half-elves are also real. And, if you go with "Orcs are not people [in the fictional world]", you then have to ask "At what point are those who are of orcish descent" (q.v. half-orcs) "people?"

While people like to point to the swords and armor and knights and call D&D and its descendants "medieval", I see them as having a lot more in common with Westerns.* The class of free wanderers, righting wrongs and wronging rights, be they adventurers or cowboys. The social mobility, where a simple warrior could become king (or a poor cowpoke could become a rich landowner). And the broad assertion that race (or nationality) is personality. The only ones with significant variation are "regular Americans" (humans, in D&D-likes), while everyone else broadly adheres to their stereotypes... the Englishman, the Swede, the Indian. "You're not playing an elf; you're just playing a human with pointy ears" is a common charge leveled against people who go against type, because only humans are supposed to be varied in personality.

This gets more severe when you look at "Indians", which D&D-likes tend to cast as humanoids. Tonto, in the Lone Ranger, was cast as the "one good Indian"... every other Indian in contemporary Westerns (the Classical Western) was a ravening savage, there to kill the Good White Folks out to Tame the West. But, as the genre continued, you saw more nuanced portrayals of Indians... Charles Bronson as the noble savage half-breed of the revisionist Western, Indian-friendly protagonists (q.v. Dances with Wolves), and even crept into more classical comedy westerns (q.v. McClintock, where the Indians are honored enemies of the title character).

In a lot of ways, these "revisionist Westerns" are what you are seeing now, and a lot of other people started seeing in 1983... drow, orcs, minotaurs, and the like as people within the fictional world, with their own reasons for doing things; reasons that make sense to them, within their culture. In short, they're being viewed as people, not just creatures up from the deep to destroy good and beauty, without reason. If they're evil, it's not solely because they "deriv[e] joy from violent acts", but because that's who their culture turns them in to. The gods they worship push them in that direction... and those gods are individuals, who might be good or evil (which somewhat differentiates them from modern religions which are more social phenomenon).

Of course, there's still room for the truly alien. Hackmaster's Morlocks, for example, infect everyone with a fungus that makes them want to infect MORE people with the fungus. You can have the supernatural creature that's more or less made of evil. But if you're taking a humanoid creature and applying to it the stereotypes that are used to demonize real people? You're treading on very thin ice, and folks are going to call you on it... and the fact that YOU don't see a problem with it does not mean that no one else does.

*Fantasy, as a genre, tends to have a lot in common with Westerns; both tend to focus on the setting as a place and character of the story, as opposed to mysteries or science fiction, which tend to focus on ideas that are being explored.

Corpses and Caches [D&D, Castles and Crusades]

Another reblog from my old Cranky Gamer

Corpses and Caches:

The Afterlife and Burial Traditions in Dungeons and Dragons

One thing that has recently annoyed me about D&D cosmology is “Why on Faerun would you bury whole corpses?” That only the spirit survives into the afterworld is a provable fact, provided you have a high enough level wizard or cleric. Upper level clerics can even directly question their deities about life after death, to say nothing of visiting the souls of the dead in the Outer Planes, or interrogating them via Speak with Dead. The advantages to keeping bodies around is small; burials take up space, and, more importantly in D&D, corpses attract and become undead with disturbing frequency. A graveyard is likely to attract ghouls. Necromancers can use the various bodies for anything from simple skeletons and zombies to horrific flesh-born nightmares. This says nothing of the vast wealth that is regularly entombed with the dead... magic items, piles of gold, and tomes of eldritch spells are all regular found even in non-undead haunted graves. So why throw away useful magic items, usually only for the use of undead, necromancers, adventurers and similar reprobates?

To examine this, some assumptions remain the same from the D&D Standard Cosmology. Most notably, when someone dies, their soul travels through the Astral Plane to the home of their deity, or to the plane of their appropriate alignment (frequently, but not always, the same). Raise Dead and Resurrection call the soul back from this journey (or the destination), into a body repaired to receive it; reincarnate creates a body to receive them. I work from the assumption that preserving a corpse and grave goods of value serve some function; that leaving a body mostly intact and burying it with such riches as can be afforded is, in some way, useful to a person in their afterlife, and that purposefully eschewed the preservation of the corpse (such as through cremation) serves a purpose in the afterlife, as well.