Oh, and this is the title of the Polygon article:

Dungeons & Dragons' next anthology is written entirely by Black and brown authors

smells of virtue signalling to me.

Quote from: SHARK on March 22, 2022, 09:01:37 PM
Greetings!

I think the "Radiant Citadel" sounds like a wonderful place!

A Genghis Khan-like figure and his Horde, or a mighty Harold Hadrada and his Viking armies would wreck this place quick!

Just imagine all the fires burning everywhere, the screaming, the sobbing, and the lamentations of the women!

Loot being carried out in long wagon trains, or trains of weird creatures, heavy-laden with the booty of the conquered!

Long queues of sobbing inhabitants, broken to the yoke of slavery. Being marched off to eternal servitude by their new masters.

*Laughing*

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Funny you kinda described the plot of Champion of Garathorm, iddlyic peacful island is suddenly introduced to hordes of chaos warriors, including some Melniboneans.

Quote from: Shasarak on March 22, 2022, 08:57:05 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 22, 2022, 08:01:48 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 22, 2022, 07:55:33 PM
I think my favourite so far is this little gem:

QuoteSalted Legacy (1st level, Surena Marie). Rival merchant families are at war in the Night Market. Various challenges such as a timed cooking challenge.

Everyone get your pots, pans and freshest cooking ingredients - we are going to WAR!

I never thought I'd live to see the day when D&D turned into such a vacuous undertaking that it would feature cooking challenges as one of the key features in one of its published adventures. In fact the thought that such a thing could happen didn't even enter my mind. Yet here we are, and these people have taken over the game.

I had more faith in your longevity.

But I must say that it is brilliant of WotC to save so much money by only employing coloured people to write the book.  Genius!  Pay them in exposure.

I laughed.

Because it's probably true! 

Quote from: SHARK on March 22, 2022, 09:01:37 PM
Greetings!

I think the "Radiant Citadel" sounds like a wonderful place!

A Genghis Khan-like figure and his Horde, or a mighty Harold Hadrada and his Viking armies would wreck this place quick!

Just imagine all the fires burning everywhere, the screaming, the sobbing, and the lamentations of the women!

Loot being carried out in long wagon trains, or trains of weird creatures, heavy-laden with the booty of the conquered!

Long queues of sobbing inhabitants, broken to the yoke of slavery. Being marched off to eternal servitude by their new masters.

*Laughing*

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Now I wanna see this happen. And this place is located right in the Ethereal Plane, so there's gotta be a way to open up a gate to the Elemental Planes and funnel a bunch of Fire Elementals in there and set the place ablaze.

I can already see the horde busting into the place with a witch in toe to start the necessary rituals to open up the gates while their warriors start ransacking the place to the screams of the confused masses in the middle of their baking contests armed with nothing but kitchen knives to defend themselves.

It would be glorious! 

What drew me to alternative campaign settings like Spelljammer and Planescape is their uniqueness, creativity, thematic elements, and flexibility.  I never once had to wonder whether or not the author had the 7 pieces of flair in their bio because their works were far more important than their virtue signals.  The latest book from WotC "Strixhaven" was extremely lazy, and full of poor game design and weak narrative elements.  There's actually very little worth using, and I don't recommend buying it.  In fact, very few of these newer products can even compare to much of the 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D supplements that I've used and ported over to every edition since.  What really annoys me about this is there are great, imaginative settings and people not getting published because of this garbage.  So instead we get this tokenism version of Planescape. 

When newer DMs ask me how to create a campaign I always tell them, "Get the Silver Edition 'Return to the Keep on the Borderlands' and convert it.  As you do you will have to make choices what to keep and what to change or throw away.  Then it becomes yours."  I won't be tell them to pick up 'Horde of the Dragon Queen' and just run that.  It's garbage, and so is this.  D&D is supposed to be for everyone, and these narcissists are making everything about themselves. 

Quote from: Thorn Drumheller on March 22, 2022, 09:14:44 PM
Oh, and this is the title of the Polygon article:

Dungeons & Dragons' next anthology is written entirely by Black and brown authors

smells of virtue signalling to me.

They don't have to announce when it's written entirely by white authors, because that's usually true.

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 22, 2022, 08:01:48 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 22, 2022, 07:55:33 PM
I think my favourite so far is this little gem:

QuoteSalted Legacy (1st level, Surena Marie). Rival merchant families are at war in the Night Market. Various challenges such as a timed cooking challenge.

Everyone get your pots, pans and freshest cooking ingredients - we are going to WAR!

I never thought I'd live to see the day when D&D turned into such a vacuous undertaking that it would feature cooking challenges as one of the key features in one of its published adventures. In fact the thought that such a thing could happen didn't even enter my mind. Yet here we are, and these people have taken over the game.

You never played Oriental Adventures then. 

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 22, 2022, 10:13:21 PM
D&D is supposed to be for everyone, and these narcissists are making everything about themselves.

Those days have long passed... No more D&D for us vile and evil 'male' honkies.

So whats next. An adventure designed by an all cripple team? I mean they cant demean and degrade us enough as is by reducing us to a check mark on a quota list or their ridiculous attempts at 'representation' by sticking wheelchairs in a dungeon. Go the extra mile WOTC.

Quote from: Omega on March 22, 2022, 10:23:54 PM
So whats next. An adventure designed by an all cripple team? I mean they cant demean and degrade us enough as is by reducing us to a check mark on a quota list or their ridiculous attempts at 'representation' by sticking wheelchairs in a dungeon. Go the extra mile WOTC.

Funny you mentioned that...

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/12/22225381/dungeons-dragons-candlekeep-mysteries-wheelchair-accessible

From the article:

QuoteKretchmer said., "As an ambulatory wheelchair user, I wanted people to have the opportunity to see themselves represented in-game."

Edit: like I said before, these narcissists make it all about themselves.

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 22, 2022, 10:28:08 PM

Quote from: Omega on March 22, 2022, 10:23:54 PM
So whats next. An adventure designed by an all cripple team? I mean they cant demean and degrade us enough as is by reducing us to a check mark on a quota list or their ridiculous attempts at 'representation' by sticking wheelchairs in a dungeon. Go the extra mile WOTC.

Funny you mentioned that...

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/12/22225381/dungeons-dragons-candlekeep-mysteries-wheelchair-accessible

From the article:

QuoteKretchmer said., "As an ambulatory wheelchair user, I wanted people to have the opportunity to see themselves represented in-game."

Edit: like I said before, these narcissists make it all about themselves.

Well, in fairness if I was an evil overlord I'd want to make my dungeon as accessible as possible to would-be invaders. A bit like they did with all our medieval castles, honest.

For Christ's sake can we please get a vomit emoji for the forum? Words can't truly express how shite that concept is. lol

Greetings!

You know, it's interesting. For all of WOTC's "diversity efforts"--as well as the ebullient gushing from the occasional woman or minority "author" or game-developer involved in these more recent books--the constant cascade of praise and how wonderful these books are--I have noticed a definite trend with the recent books, say, Candlekeep, Strixhaven, the Witchlight Faerie book, and more, and now, presumably, this new book as well.

They are all screamingly "fun"; trivial, and petty. Very narcissistic.

And...entirely feminine.

All of these books largely focus on a content and presentation style that appeals to women and the rainbow people.

Books filled with scenarios where gossiping, fucking, makeup, fashion, and now baking and cooking are the primary content. "Hot Messes" and "relationships" in colleges swimming in debauchery, and coffee shops. Mostly all about fluff, and hyper-personalized petty trivia.

This definitely seems like the direction WOTC has been going. Talk about changing market focuses. This is far more than just not focusing on men over 30--it's about not even focusing on men at all. As others have mentioned, like Tenbones, their new market focus seems to be rainbow people, women, and kids.

I've started to see the marketing correlations in toys, crossing over into these WOTC books. Look at the books, dolls, and toys marketed to young girls, say under 14. The smiling, the big eyes, the bright, feminine colours, the pastel tones. Toss in all the marketing prompts for the rainbow people, and this is what you have. The themes explored in these books are also increasingly shallow and candy-coated. Pretty sad.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 22, 2022, 10:13:21 PM
What drew me to alternative campaign settings like Spelljammer and Planescape is their uniqueness, creativity, thematic elements, and flexibility.  I never once had to wonder whether or not the author had the 7 pieces of flair in their bio because their works were far more important than their virtue signals.  The latest book from WotC "Strixhaven" was extremely lazy, and full of poor game design and weak narrative elements.  There's actually very little worth using, and I don't recommend buying it.  In fact, very few of these newer products can even compare to much of the 1st and 2nd Edition AD&D supplements that I've used and ported over to every edition since.  What really annoys me about this is there are great, imaginative settings and people not getting published because of this garbage.  So instead we get this tokenism version of Planescape. 

When newer DMs ask me how to create a campaign I always tell them, "Get the Silver Edition 'Return to the Keep on the Borderlands' and convert it.  As you do you will have to make choices what to keep and what to change or throw away.  Then it becomes yours."  I won't be tell them to pick up 'Horde of the Dragon Queen' and just run that.  It's garbage, and so is this.  D&D is supposed to be for everyone, and these narcissists are making everything about themselves.

Hard agree with everything except what I put in bold. Ran a campaign well over a year doing to HotDQ exactly what you described with Keep. Made the cultists actually cult-like, cruel, and pure evil. Zoomed way in on the elements. Years later still my most talked about campaign. Out of the box tho...you're absolutely right.

Quote from: pawsplay on March 22, 2022, 10:13:53 PM

Quote from: Thorn Drumheller on March 22, 2022, 09:14:44 PM
Oh, and this is the title of the Polygon article:

Dungeons & Dragons' next anthology is written entirely by Black and brown authors

smells of virtue signalling to me.

They don't have to announce when it's written entirely by white authors, because that's usually true.

Nah, the real reason they don't have to announce when a book is written entirely by white authors is because nobody cares.

An author's immutable characteristics have never been a factor in RPGs and nobody even checked until the people pushing this crap made it a factor. I didn't even know the guy who designed the Cyberpunk line of games was a black guy till they started promoting Cyberpunk 2077 a few years ago and it wouldn't have made a difference* if I did back in the 90s when I got Cyberpunk 2020.

Now they're handing out race specific writing assignments to match the author's race with the racial or cultural backdrop that they're writing about, which is disgusting. Now only black authors can write black characters and only Asian authors can write about Asian cultures, etc., in truly racist fashion.


*actually it might have, but only cuz Maximum Mike comes across as a cool guy with a deep narrator voice. But I wouldn't have been able to know that till I saw him in a video promoting Cyberpunk 2077, so I wouldn't have known that back in the day.

Quote from: Omega on March 22, 2022, 10:14:55 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on March 22, 2022, 08:01:48 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on March 22, 2022, 07:55:33 PM
I think my favourite so far is this little gem:

QuoteSalted Legacy (1st level, Surena Marie). Rival merchant families are at war in the Night Market. Various challenges such as a timed cooking challenge.

Everyone get your pots, pans and freshest cooking ingredients - we are going to WAR!

I never thought I'd live to see the day when D&D turned into such a vacuous undertaking that it would feature cooking challenges as one of the key features in one of its published adventures. In fact the thought that such a thing could happen didn't even enter my mind. Yet here we are, and these people have taken over the game.

You never played Oriental Adventures then. 

I never got around it. But now I remember they had stuff like tea ceremonies and things like that in that setting. That would've been different, though, cuz that was more like an added cultural touch. But at the end of the day you were still playing a badass samurai ready to bust out his sword with lightning reflexes if enemies showed up to interrupt his tea.

Quote from: AtomicPope on March 22, 2022, 10:28:08 PM
Funny you mentioned that...

https://www.polygon.com/2021/1/12/22225381/dungeons-dragons-candlekeep-mysteries-wheelchair-accessible

From the article:

QuoteKretchmer said., "As an ambulatory wheelchair user, I wanted people to have the opportunity to see themselves represented in-game."

Edit: like I said before, these narcissists make it all about themselves.

Even funnier is theres no such thing in the actual book far as I ever saw. It was complete baiting and false virtue signalling. Totally disgusting.