Does anyone think that perhaps 5E Players Handbook had he agenda stuff mentioned to make it LAW in convention games?
I mean everyone knows you can do whatever you want at your table no matter what it says in the books so beyond insurance against cancelation, or pushing an agenda, that seems a third possible option.

I would say Mythras is currently one of my favourite RPGs, and not just for fantasy. Not sure it is actively anti-woke as the star of the running examples is a female warrior and there is plenty of artwork featuring non-Caucasian individuals, but it certainly doesn't ram identity politics down your throat.

Or Advanced Fighting Fantasy for rules-light. Hard to separate my liking for its stripped-down but rich mechanics from the nostalgia factor, admittedly.

Quote from: Simon W on November 17, 2022, 05:13:02 AM
Just saw the usual suspects coming out to have a go at this product (Mythic Polynesia by Design Mechanism). I've been looking forward to it for a while, so bought it quickly in case it gets "cancelled".

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/413791/Mythic-Polynesia?src=hottest_small

I am motivated to support TDM but on the other hand I have no interest in a Polynesia setting. The answer I think is to plump for a few Mythras products that I've been on the fence on for a while, like Logres and some of the adventures. 

Edit: veering off topic, but I wonder if the driving force of the wokist flashmob here is that Mythras is something of a competitor to nuChaosium's RQG. That is probably reading too much into it though.

Quote from: Marchand on November 19, 2022, 05:16:03 AM
I would say Mythras is currently one of my favourite RPGs, and not just for fantasy. Not sure it is actively anti-woke as the star of the running examples is a female warrior and there is plenty of artwork featuring non-Caucasian individuals, but it certainly doesn't ram identity politics down your throat.

Or Advanced Fighting Fantasy for rules-light. Hard to separate my liking for its stripped-down but rich mechanics from the nostalgia factor, admittedly.

Quote from: Simon W on November 17, 2022, 05:13:02 AM
Just saw the usual suspects coming out to have a go at this product (Mythic Polynesia by Design Mechanism). I've been looking forward to it for a while, so bought it quickly in case it gets "cancelled".

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/413791/Mythic-Polynesia?src=hottest_small

I am motivated to support TDM but on the other hand I have no interest in a Polynesia setting. The answer I think is to plump for a few Mythras products that I've been on the fence on for a while, like Logres and some of the adventures. 

Edit: veering off topic, but I wonder if the driving force of the wokist flashmob here is that Mythras is something of a competitor to nuChaosium's RQG. That is probably reading too much into it though.

It wouldn't surprise me, these people are a virus. Mythras and design mechanism seem pretty neutral but there are a fair bit of wokists who hang around their discord I've noticed. The constant bitching about the Primitive culture and now this

You only need 1 fantasy game.

The KING of sword & sorcery roleplaying...

BARBARIANS OF LEMURIA MYTHIC EDITION

Quote from: Batjon on November 21, 2022, 05:07:22 AM
You only need 1 fantasy game.

The KING of sword & sorcery roleplaying...

BARBARIANS OF LEMURIA MYTHIC EDITION

I've been seriously considering this one as a go to for my s&s games. The fact that it's creator frequently posts here is a big plus

Quote from: Batjon on November 21, 2022, 05:07:22 AM
You only need 1 fantasy game.

The KING of sword & sorcery roleplaying...

BARBARIANS OF LEMURIA MYTHIC EDITION

Why would you recommend that setting? Honest question, as I'm curious about it.

It is primarily the mechanics.  It is rules-lite but very robust and screams sword & sorcery flavor.  It does stuff like Conan, Elric, etc. justice.  The magic system is genius and has all the tropes of how magic should work in S&S fiction, being dangerous, unpredictable, and corrupting.

The setting is also quite interesting and well-made.  It is also lite in that it is just enough fleshed out to hit that sweet spot for me but not so overly fleshed out like Forgotten Realms, that makes it very intimidating to try to run.  I also dig the implied notion on the setting that the game actually takes place in the far-flung future but now society is back at an ancient tech level overall.  That also means there are very cool things to be discovered and figured out from futuristic civilizations past.

Quote from: Batjon on November 21, 2022, 09:09:05 PM
The magic system is genius and has all the tropes of how magic should work in S&S fiction, being dangerous, unpredictable, and corrupting.

I don't get this trope.

When people say that magic should be dangerous and unpredictable, they seem to mean that it should be prone to backfiring on the user. I get the appeal of this, but I really don't think its a sword and sorcery trope. In all the S&S fiction I've read, magic is dangerous because it's unknown and mostly unavailable to the protagonists, not because it's unreliable. The Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are full of wizard antagonists, and their magic seems to pretty much always work as intended. Solomon Kane even employs a bit of magic on his own side, and it never backfires. Poul Anderson usually has clear delineations between white and black magic in his stories, and the white magic usually isn't dangerous at all.  I'm not claiming to have perfect knowledge of the literature, but in all of the stories I've read by Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Robert Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, I can only think of one or two examples of a spell misfiring. The idea seems to have come from Jack Vance, in which spells can be miscast and backfire on the caster, but that's just one author, and I'm not sure I'd even call the Dying Earth series "Sword and Sorcery".

The idea that magic should be corrupting seems to come from Michael Moorcock (though even there, Elric's magic rarely backfires on him, and I don't think Myshella's ever does). In his stories, using chaos magic brings people under the sway of chaos, but that is more a case of moral/spiritual corruption. Warhammer Fantasy picked up that idea up and made it physically corrupting, and then 40k took that even further. As far as I can tell that's the sole source for the idea that magic physically corrupts its wielders.

Again, I don't hate these tropes (except for the physical corruption thing. I find that most often just produces silliness). I just feel like people in the RPG world are suffering from the Mandela effect, where they think that's how it works in classic fantasy literature, when it mostly isn't. 

I read something about magic in Fafrd and the Grey mouser, i think its less that the magic itself is dangerous and more that its the trope of the sorcerer muttering a curse over a cauldron to conjure a deadly mist on the other side of the city rather than the instantaneous fireball.

In Elric saga humans cant do magic, only magical creatures can. Humans call on magical creatures for favors and pacts. So it's actually unreliable i cant count how many times Arioch denied Elric's request or some elemental lord basically told him to lose their number.

Conan magic and lovecraft magic are basically the same, they take a toll on the users sanity and drives them to evil.

I think it's a feel thing too, it feels like magic as opposed to feeling like x-men or something.

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 21, 2022, 10:36:50 PM
The Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are full of wizard antagonists, and their magic seems to pretty much always work as intended.

In Lords of Quarmall Grey Mouser casts a spell from a scroll. It backfires; instead of killing the enemy wizards, it kills the wizards on his own side.

The 1e AD&D Lankhmar book in the mid 1980s had black magic be physically corrupting. There is only weak support for this in the books, eg the shrivelled appearance of Khakht (sp?), and the possibility Sheelba used to have eyes and Ningauble didn't have 7.

Half of "magic corrupting", or maybe more, is supposed to be feel more than mechanics.  Which is hard to do in a game where the players have the mechanics.  So things get a little over the top with the mechanics to invoke the feel.  In this way, it's similar to how undead energy drain works in early D&D.  It's deliberately, overly punitive in the mechanics in order to invoke the feel of horror and hopelessness and fright with certain undead. 

Naturally, anything with such techniques is going to appeal to some people while others will hate it.  Do you like it, for example, when a director uses blatant shock techniques in a movie to oversell the effect he wants?  How often and how far?  Same kind of thing.

Quote from: S'mon on November 22, 2022, 02:24:32 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 21, 2022, 10:36:50 PM
The Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are full of wizard antagonists, and their magic seems to pretty much always work as intended.

In Lords of Quarmall Grey Mouser casts a spell from a scroll. It backfires; instead of killing the enemy wizards, it kills the wizards on his own side.

The 1e AD&D Lankhmar book in the mid 1980s had black magic be physically corrupting. There is only weak support for this in the books, eg the shrivelled appearance of Khakht (sp?), and the possibility Sheelba used to have eyes and Ningauble didn't have 7.

It's been a minute since I read Lords of Quarmall, but I thought that the spell killed the wizards on both side. Also, isn't that more a case of the Mouser not understanding how the spell works, rather than him miscasting it? The other example I was thinking of is a Clark Ashton Smith story (can't recall what it's called now) where a wizard summons some kind of demon from the outer void that ends up destroying him. It's a small distinction, but in both cases the unpredictability of magic is less about the spells themselves being random in how they behave, and more about the characters messing with powers they don't understand.

Granted that would be a difficult thing to replicate in an RPG context, unless you're going to put the spell descriptions in the GM's guide and not let the players read them. As far as replicating the S&S tone, I think the best approach  is for the book to just say that you shouldn't let PCs play wizards. That's what Barbarians of Lemuria does, and I respect that. Modiphius Conan does a somewhat worse job by putting a magic system in the player's book, but writing it in such a convoluted and unclear way that most players just won't bother with it.

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 21, 2022, 10:36:50 PM

Quote from: Batjon on November 21, 2022, 09:09:05 PM
The magic system is genius and has all the tropes of how magic should work in S&S fiction, being dangerous, unpredictable, and corrupting.

I don't get this trope.

When people say that magic should be dangerous and unpredictable, they seem to mean that it should be prone to backfiring on the user. I get the appeal of this, but I really don't think its a sword and sorcery trope. In all the S&S fiction I've read, magic is dangerous because it's unknown and mostly unavailable to the protagonists, not because it's unreliable. The Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are full of wizard antagonists, and their magic seems to pretty much always work as intended. Solomon Kane even employs a bit of magic on his own side, and it never backfires. Poul Anderson usually has clear delineations between white and black magic in his stories, and the white magic usually isn't dangerous at all.  I'm not claiming to have perfect knowledge of the literature, but in all of the stories I've read by Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Robert Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith, I can only think of one or two examples of a spell misfiring. The idea seems to have come from Jack Vance, in which spells can be miscast and backfire on the caster, but that's just one author, and I'm not sure I'd even call the Dying Earth series "Sword and Sorcery".

The idea that magic should be corrupting seems to come from Michael Moorcock (though even there, Elric's magic rarely backfires on him, and I don't think Myshella's ever does). In his stories, using chaos magic brings people under the sway of chaos, but that is more a case of moral/spiritual corruption. Warhammer Fantasy picked up that idea up and made it physically corrupting, and then 40k took that even further. As far as I can tell that's the sole source for the idea that magic physically corrupts its wielders.

Again, I don't hate these tropes (except for the physical corruption thing. I find that most often just produces silliness). I just feel like people in the RPG world are suffering from the Mandela effect, where they think that's how it works in classic fantasy literature, when it mostly isn't.

The two are not incompatible.

The antagonist sorcerer's spell will work as intended. When the PC's street urchin character takes up sorcery, the risk of backfire is high. One is a master and the other is a student. Magic is both dangerous and not, depending on who is practicing it. DCC does this well, in that as you level up your chance of misfire decreases.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on November 22, 2022, 07:06:56 AM
Half of "magic corrupting", or maybe more, is supposed to be feel more than mechanics.  Which is hard to do in a game where the players have the mechanics.  So things get a little over the top with the mechanics to invoke the feel.  In this way, it's similar to how undead energy drain works in early D&D.  It's deliberately, overly punitive in the mechanics in order to invoke the feel of horror and hopelessness and fright with certain undead. 

Naturally, anything with such techniques is going to appeal to some people while others will hate it.  Do you like it, for example, when a director uses blatant shock techniques in a movie to oversell the effect he wants?  How often and how far?  Same kind of thing.

Yeah, I figure the reason why games tend to lean into the physical corruption side, is that it's such a pain in ass to try and make players roleplay their characters becoming more morally corrupted. Maybe you could do it with some kind of "Humanity" mechanic, similar to the way that Cyberpunk does cyber-psychosis, but it's far from optimal.

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 22, 2022, 09:18:33 AM

Quote from: S'mon on November 22, 2022, 02:24:32 AM

Quote from: ForgottenF on November 21, 2022, 10:36:50 PM
The Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser stories are full of wizard antagonists, and their magic seems to pretty much always work as intended.

In Lords of Quarmall Grey Mouser casts a spell from a scroll. It backfires; instead of killing the enemy wizards, it kills the wizards on his own side.

The 1e AD&D Lankhmar book in the mid 1980s had black magic be physically corrupting. There is only weak support for this in the books, eg the shrivelled appearance of Khakht (sp?), and the possibility Sheelba used to have eyes and Ningauble didn't have 7.

It's been a minute since I read Lords of Quarmall, but I thought that the spell killed the wizards on both side. Also, isn't that more a case of the Mouser not understanding how the spell works, rather than him miscasting it? The other example I was thinking of is a Clark Ashton Smith story (can't recall what it's called now) where a wizard summons some kind of demon from the outer void that ends up destroying him. It's a small distinction, but in both cases the unpredictability of magic is less about the spells themselves being random in how they behave, and more about the characters messing with powers they don't understand.

Granted that would be a difficult thing to replicate in an RPG context, unless you're going to put the spell descriptions in the GM's guide and not let the players read them. As far as replicating the S&S tone, I think the best approach  is for the book to just say that you shouldn't let PCs play wizards. That's what Barbarians of Lemuria does, and I respect that. Modiphius Conan does a somewhat worse job by putting a magic system in the player's book, but writing it in such a convoluted and unclear way that most players just won't bother with it.

It leaves the enemy wizards untouched, so their curses do horrible things to Mouser's Lord.