Wednesday, April 27, 2022

The Nentir Vale (NSFW rant)

https://scots-dragon.tumblr.com/post/185426933202/the-big-fucking-dd-4e-rant

This.

This hurt to read. And it is about this:

It seems like heresy, but what the Trans Dragon Goddess (TDG, she/her) is saying is the 4E base setting is a lazy bastardization of Greyhawk. A lot of the 4E modules reimagined the classic Greyhawk modules and those were sloppily placed around the world.

To top it all off, we never got a world book for the 4E world. One was planned, but it never came out. That was the one book we were waiting for too.

Now, my brother and I loved this valley and setting, and it felt like home to us in our 4E days. We wanted a break from the mess D&D 3E had become for us and this seemed new and fresh. We did have a lot of fun here, but ultimately the lack of world info led us to make up a lot, and it never really meshed well with the modules or other official content, and all of the releases started plane-hopping and this world got left behind and put on the back burner as a "home base."

We loved it, we tried to expand it, but every book they released undercut our efforts. The version floundered, they went Essentials, and we knew the game was dead.

But what TDG is saying is painfully right. She goes on to talk about the changes to Planescape and the worse wrecking ball of a job 4E did to the Forgotten Realms, collapsing the entire Underdark (FU Drizzt!), shoehorning in dragonkin and eladrin into the setting, and how these places can never really be the same. Some of the changes just felt spiteful and mean.

And yes, she is right.

And I get this feeling there is little respect for earlier works and new creators constantly wreck and try and reinvent them to chase fads, like 4E's courting of the World of Warcraft crowd. There is this revisionism each new edition, where the AD&D Greatest Hits get replayed through 5E, 6E, and so on. The entire modern dungeon-punk faux-anime aesthetic - that started in 4E and is amplified today - feels wrong for Greyhawk and the Realms.

As if they would ever do a setting book that large again, they seem averse to the entire idea. What I want to see is a "new" Tomb of Horrors type module from these creators. Where are the new classics? Where are the new and original dungeons and adventures? At least Paizo puts its stock in new experiences and new adventures and experiences like Rise of the Runelords and Kingmaker as this generation's "classic module experiences."

Otherwise, Wizards feels like a Hollywood nostalgia remake outfit.

Even the Forgotten Realms in a way was a "reinvention" of Gary Gygax's work with Greyhawk, and you can see a new group of creators coming in and trying to one-up everything he did in the original setting. We have Lolth and the classic GDQ series! Well, we have Drizzt. We have Mordenkainen! Well, we have the "more Gandalf like" Elminster. And then the GMNPCs from the books ended up being god-like problem solving un-killable characters who eliminated the need for the PCs at all.

Bleh.

It is like going to a restaurant all your life and loving it and then finding the better place they were trying to copy and realizing you can't eat at the old place anymore because everything they tried to do to change things made it worse.

Derivative changes to be hip and cool. The turkey dinner in the hip faddish place that sprinkles inedible, sour cranberries all over the dish because "it looks cool."

You aren't supposed to eat them!

What a waste.

And the place you like now sticks to the basics. Good, hot food. No waste. Completely edible. Local sourced, and they make note of it so you can help small family farms too. Tasty. They aren't doing anything faddish or fancy, but the food is solid, tastes great, and is nutritious without going overboard on fats and salt. Sensible portions. They give you nicely seasoned vegetables too. And you get a small dessert as a treat.

You walk out feeling fed.

The fad place overdoes it, you love the giant plate of food and it is full of fat and salt, but an hour later you feel sick.

There are parts of the Realms I love and would take home to my games, but other parts that just felt too much like metaplot to explain away edition changes and the entire setting felt corporate and like it was trying to "support the company's current products" instead of being a place of imagination and storytelling.

But the modules I love, the ones I keep coming back to, are never from the Forgotten Realms setting era. They are from the classic Greyhawk and Mystara eras of the game. The Giants series. The Tomb of Horrors. The B-series. All of them are greats that stand the test of time, and they are recreating those for 5E. I can't really name one series of modules from the Realms era that really stuck with me over the years and has had this cultural impact on my life.

But I know going back is just trying to relive those moments, and what I really need are new adventures that amaze me for the first time again. I found some of those in Paizo's adventures.

And yes, we were big on AD&D 2e, but we never played modules. This was all character-driven plots and pulp adventure, and we ignored the FR setting adventures for the most part. These days, even if I play in classic Realms, I know what is coming and it casts a shadow over that setting - even if I say it never happens there are those things in the back of my head like a poorly written sequel movie that ruins the charm of the original.

The Trans Dragon Goddess wrote a great article, thank you. My world feels a little upside-down today, but that is okay. When you start to realize the lies you have been fed all your life were a bit hollow and there are better things out there to spend your time with, it hurts a little, but you get over it.

The Nentir Vale still feels like home, but if I were ever to go back here and adventure again, I would bring this little piece of home back with me to Greyhawk, where it belongs.

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