Remove ads

Cliches you can't stand

The real secret about RPG settings is that nobody actually cares about the details because they don't actually matter any more than you want them to.

They just tend to be very permissive of a wide variety of character concepts because fundamentally; they exist to facilitate whatever the GM and the players want to do. No more, no less.

Lore is whatever you want to make of it, cohesion, whether aesthetic or whatever, is buzzword that is primarily the concern of weird nerds and I'd rather have respectful representation than "coherency". I don't care if your setting is supposed to be focused on the aesthetics of medieval France, if you have nothing but European aesthetics and people and excise all non-European culture and mythos from your setting; I am still judging you negatively. Stop making excuses to not acknowledge the world beyond western Europe and post-colombian North America.

I don't really care about the sectionalised nature of Golarion or the more unitary nature of Faerun. I don't like Faerun because it's a rather racist setting where the non-white parts of the world literally don't matter and are tiny and irrelevant outside of some obscenely orientalised east-asia equivalents. Like, the whole of the Africa equivalent is this small peninsula almost nobody actually cares about rather than a substantive part of the world and that's just abysmal. Golarion's equivalent of Africa is a large and substantive part of the world and that's cool with me.

Also because Ed Greenwood is a perverted freak who fills the setting with grotesquely horny details straight out of hentai and just absolutely will not ever stop. Anytime I read about Faerun lore I cannot stop thinking about how it is undeniable by the power of Greenwood's contracts canon that most people have had incestuous sex for fun and whatever the protagonist is; they probably fucked their sister/brother or took a daddy/mommy kink way too literally.

Thanks to Greenwood's deep lore I cannot see Faerun as anything but medieval-fantasy Alabama.
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
Also because Ed Greenwood is a perverted freak who fills the setting with grotesquely horny details straight out of hentai and just absolutely will not ever stop. Anytime I read about Faerun lore I cannot stop thinking about how it is undeniable by the power of Greenwood's contracts canon that most people have had incestuous sex for fun and whatever the protagonist is; they probably fucked their sister/brother or took a daddy/mommy kink way too literally.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Didn't he literally write articles in Dragon Magazine where he hangs out with his own FR self insert and Gygyx's self insert in El Greenwood's house? I heard that he did that.Which is peak self indulgent fan fictions and wrote a long novel series of his self insert wizard character Elminster who has fathered many children. and also fucking the goddess of magic.
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
The real secret about RPG settings is that nobody actually cares about the details because they don't actually matter any more than you want them to.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

You don't understand if I don't get the exact price of wool from the Sardinian region of 13th century Italy and convert it mathematically to my own fictional currency, I will cry.
 
Konradleijon said:
Didn't he literally write articles in Dragon Magazine where he hangs out with his own FR self insert and Gygyx's self insert in El Greenwood's house? Which is peak self indulgent fan fictions
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Honestly the self-inserts don't really bother me, people can write what they want. It's that the setting was written with one hand that bothers me because it's really creepy and it basically ruins every character in the setting.
 
One thing I cannot stand in Fantasy is metaphors for anti-semitism that try to make it nuanced by giving some rational reason for the majority to hate the Jewish people metaphor beyond them being an easy scapegoat due to being corralled into ethnic neighbourhoods separate from the majority, being relatively invisible and thus making it easy for propaganda to stir fear about how they could be anywhere, and medieval social engineering through barring us from a very long list of jobs to push us towards certain forms of high-training requirement labour to become a management ethnicity.

Stop giving justifications for why your Jewry metaphors are hated. That's not how antisemitism works and has never been how it works. We are insular because we were forbidden from interacting with most of Christian society except in specific conditions and we tended to do educated professional labour because we were barred from just about everything else to ensure that medieval Kingdoms had a steady pool of people able to handle those things. It is incredibly dangerous to make bigotry metaphors a morally grey matter and moral greyness is baby's first nuance to begin with.

Nuance is about there being room to make the audience think about what is told in the story and from those thoughts, form more detailed interpretations and feed discussion. "Hrm both sides have points" does not automatically make something nuanced and is in fact, its own form of simplistic narrative when that's about all you have to say on the matter. More than that, it's also cowardly. "Maybe the victims aren't perfect you know?" takes zero courage to say, wow thank you there's no such thing as a perfect victim what an incredible insight you absolute clown, my third eye has never been more opened by your never before stated wisdom.

Also, for the love of every deity I pay homage to, stop calling evil shadowy conspiracies "the Cabal". Kabbalah and other forms of esoteric Jewish mysticism and Jewish secret societies did nothing to the various gentile authors to be done this dirty.
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
One thing I cannot stand in Fantasy is metaphors for anti-semitism that try to make it nuanced by giving some rational reason for the majority to hate the Jewish people metaphor beyond them being an easy scapegoat due to being corralled into ethnic neighbourhoods separate from the majority, being relatively invisible and thus making it easy for propaganda to stir fear about how they could be anywhere, and medieval social engineering through barring us from a very long list of jobs to push us towards certain forms of high-training requirement labour to become a management ethnicity.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Check out Valkriya Chronicles which we discussed earlier in this thread their Jewish metaphor is unjustified hated because of likes made by people in power How hard is it to show discrimination as unlogical

yes I hate how stories both sides systematic oppression.

speaking of this topic villains hiding behind a civil rights/equality cause while just using it to justify their pity spite, which is surprisingly common in fiction. Like has anyone IRL ever pretended to care about the plight of their fellow /Jews/Asians/Sami/Gays erct, just as a power ploy. It also shuts down discussion of the discremtion because evil villan
 
Last edited:
Spartakrod said:
The real secret about RPG settings is that nobody actually cares about the details because they don't actually matter any more than you want them to.

They just tend to be very permissive of a wide variety of character concepts because fundamentally; they exist to facilitate whatever the GM and the players want to do. No more, no less.

Lore is whatever you want to make of it, cohesion, whether aesthetic or whatever, is buzzword that is primarily the concern of weird nerds and I'd rather have respectful representation than "coherency". I don't care if your setting is supposed to be focused on the aesthetics of medieval France, if you have nothing but European aesthetics and people and excise all non-European culture and mythos from your setting; I am still judging you negatively. Stop making excuses to not acknowledge the world beyond western Europe and post-colombian North America.

I don't really care about the sectionalised nature of Golarion or the more unitary nature of Faerun. I don't like Faerun because it's a rather racist setting where the non-white parts of the world literally don't matter and are tiny and irrelevant outside of some obscenely orientalised east-asia equivalents. Like, the whole of the Africa equivalent is this small peninsula almost nobody actually cares about rather than a substantive part of the world and that's just abysmal. Golarion's equivalent of Africa is a large and substantive part of the world and that's cool with me.

Also because Ed Greenwood is a perverted freak who fills the setting with grotesquely horny details straight out of hentai and just absolutely will not ever stop. Anytime I read about Faerun lore I cannot stop thinking about how it is undeniable by the power of Greenwood's contracts canon that most people have had incestuous sex for fun and whatever the protagonist is; they probably fucked their sister/brother or took a daddy/mommy kink way too literally.

Thanks to Greenwood's deep lore I cannot see Faerun as anything but medieval-fantasy Alabama.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Ummmm…. WTF are you even talking about. I can't recall even a single instance of incest in Greenwoods writing. He's definitely an old "free love" hippie, but that's about it. (And writing Elminster as genderfluid all the way back in 1994 was pretty bold)

Likewise, in earlier editions the (as you put it) non-white sections got significantly more respect, with the primitive Chult of 4th-5th being the exact opposite of "hey, the Africa equivalent is not only civilized, it's got the world's oldest Mage University and is ruled by badass immortal paladin kings who ride dinosaurs and hold back the end of the world" from 2e.
 
Last edited:
Arawn_Emrys said:
Ummmm…. WTF are you even talking about. I can't recall even a single instance of incest in Greenwoods writing. He's definitely an old "free love" hippie, but that's about it. (And writing Elminster as genderfluid all the way back in 1994 was pretty bold)
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Oh you are in for a treat.

It all comes from Ed Greenwood's one hundred percent canon responses to fan queries on candlekeep.

I can provide the link but I'm unsure if it would be allowed on the site due to the material in question. So you might have to contact me off site? Dunno, up to you.
 
Spartakrod said:
Oh you are in for a treat.

It all comes from Ed Greenwood's one hundred percent canon responses to fan queries on candlekeep.

I can provide the link but I'm unsure if it would be allowed on the site due to the material in question. So you might have to contact me off site? Dunno, up to you.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
"100% canon" but only on an unofficial fan site. Right…………
 
Arawn_Emrys said:
"100% canon" but only on an unofficial fan site. Right…………
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
These are official, verified responses from Ed himself though and as per Ed's contract with WotC everything he says about the Forgotten Realms is canon. This is a general list of them so you'd need to dig through a lot of mundane queries and answers but I can directly link to the less than wholesome stuff.

 
Spartakrod said:
These are official, verified responses from Ed himself though and as per Ed's contract with WotC everything he says about the Forgotten Realms is canon.

Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
In which case everything in FR still runs as per 2e because he's said that too. So I'm not sure how much that really works.

EDIT: regardless, after going through the 1st several sections of your links, I find no statements from Greenwood,just a guy posting tgat he totally asked him and got an answer about (random stuff in each section)
 
Last edited:
Arawn_Emrys said:
In which case everything in FR still runs as per 2e because he's said that too. So I'm not sure how much that really works.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
As for Incest; by word of Ed:



"It's important to remember that many of the Realms deities encourage "sex for fun" (or even "sex for religious rapture") and their priests have magical and pharmaceutical meals of preventing contraception, so "it's only incest if the female partner gets pregnant." This, by the way, usually means family members satisfy their curiosity and indulge feelings of mutual affection, and then go looking for less "safe and familiar" but far more exciting partners, elsewhere."

So all your faves in the forgotten realms fucked their own families. I'm sorry.
 
Spartakrod said:
As for Incest; by word of Ed:



"It's important to remember that many of the Realms deities encourage "sex for fun" (or even "sex for religious rapture") and their priests have magical and pharmaceutical meals of preventing contraception, so "it's only incest if the female partner gets pregnant." This, by the way, usually means family members satisfy their curiosity and indulge feelings of mutual affection, and then go looking for less "safe and familiar" but far more exciting partners, elsewhere."

So all your faves in the forgotten realms fucked their own families. I'm sorry.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
bruh
 
Konradleijon said:
speaking of this topic villains hiding behind a civil rights/equality cause while just using it to justify their pity spite, which is surprisingly common in fiction. Like has anyone IRL ever pretended to care about the plight of their fellow /Jews/Asians/Sami/Gays erct, just as a power ploy. It also shuts down discussion of the discremtion because evil villan
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
Depends on how far you're willing to stretch "pretend to care" and "civil rights/equality cause".

The International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of Central Africa was an essential part in convincing Europe of Leopold II humanitarian principles and desires, and despite the fact the organisation itself fell apart quite quickly (being nothing more than a smokescreen) it succeeded in securing Leopold's rule over the Congo Free State , and covered up the resulting atrocities for a good decade or so. They had an entire propaganda war about it.

Lots of other colonialism was justified under the same cause.

Aside from that, I think you might have the examples of hollow corporate PR, the Soviet Union's deflection of human right claims by calling out racial discrimination in the US, and maybe a cult or two?
 
Last edited:
Gentlemen, this is the war room; you can't fight in here.
 
Konradleijon said:
Like has anyone IRL ever pretended to care about the plight of their fellow /Jews/Asians/Sami/Gays erct, just as a power ploy.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...
A rather famous example would be the entire concept of the "White Man's Burden", which managed to fit faked altruism, imperialism and racism all up in a single package. When people write about fictional imperialists talking about conquering "lesser people" for their own good, they didn't make that concept up out of whole cloth...
 
Avernus said:
A rather famous example would be the entire concept of the "White Man's Burden", which managed to fit faked altruism, imperialism and racism all up in a single package. When people write about fictional imperialists talking about conquering "lesser people" for their own good, they didn't make that concept up out of whole cloth...
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

Ayup.

And it's not even the only style of "preople pretending to care for power". A thing that has been known to happen, multiple times, goes basically like this:

- Movement starts due to legitimate grievances
- As movement gains relevance, movement gets co-opted by ambitious assholes mouthing alliegance but actually just out for their own gain
- Movement makes ambitious asshole boss/dictator/president/whatever on promise that they will make things better
- Ambitious asshole does not, in fact, make things better, puts their own posse in power

It's practically a rhyme, at this point.
 
Last edited:
Drascin said:
- Movement starts due to legitimate grievances
- As movement gains relevance, movement gets co-opted by ambitious assholes mouthing alliegance but actually just out for their own gain
- Movement makes ambitious asshole boss/dictator/president/whatever on promise that they will make things better
- Ambitious asshole does not, in fact, make things better, puts their own posse in power
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...

can you give me examples? I'm not good with history or geopolitics. And I'm taking about things where the person themselves is part of the oppressed group
 
You must login or register to reply here.
Remove ads
Back
Top