That's the whole point of the book though.... the new name of the races chapter kinda spells it out. They're no longer "Monster Races", but now "Fantastic Races" and yes, they filled everything that was interesting about them off and is now leaving it up to the individual group to put what they want on it. Do you want your orces to be savage monsters that rape and pillage? Great! Also, please stop blaming us then for perpetuating stereotypes.
I appreciate what they're trying to do, I really do. And even applaud it. But the knock on effect is absolutely going to be that everything is vanilla AF now.
Really, if this was done as part of 6th launch I'd be fine with it since new editions = new ideas and fresh starts. My issue is that for a bunch of these races we have a rather prodigous amount of lore that has been put in within this edition of the game. And that lore is wonderful! Like volo's goes to great lengths to articulate the whys and wherefores of Yaun-ti, Kobolds, Goblinoids and Orcs and as a player you can understand how that is all reflected in the stat blocks of the corresponding races; The direct brutality of orcs that revolts against civilization, the desperate need for co-operation of Kobold in a world that is so scary or the martial nature of hobgoblins.
100% agreed. There is so much great fluff in those two previous books that its a damn shame to throw them away and I'm seriously considering printing my fluff sections of those two books direct from chrome against the inevitable day when DNDBeyond pulls them entirely instead of listing them as "Legacy" content.
That's the whole point of the book though.... the new name of the races chapter kinda spells it out. They're no longer "Monster Races", but now "Fantastic Races" and yes, they filled everything that was interesting about them off and is now leaving it up to the individual group to put what they want on it. Do you want your orces to be savage monsters that rape and pillage? Great! Also, please stop blaming us then for perpetuating stereotypes.
I appreciate what they're trying to do, I really do. And even applaud it. But the knock on effect is absolutely going to be that everything is vanilla AF now.
Really, if this was done as part of 6th launch I'd be fine with it since new editions = new ideas and fresh starts. My issue is that for a bunch of these races we have a rather prodigous amount of lore that has been put in within this edition of the game. And that lore is wonderful! Like volo's goes to great lengths to articulate the whys and wherefores of Yaun-ti, Kobolds, Goblinoids and Orcs and as a player you can understand how that is all reflected in the stat blocks of the corresponding races; The direct brutality of orcs that revolts against civilization, the desperate need for co-operation of Kobold in a world that is so scary or the martial nature of hobgoblins.
100% agreed. There is so much great fluff in those two previous books that its a damn shame to throw them away and I'm seriously considering printing my fluff sections of those two books direct from chrome against the inevitable day when DNDBeyond pulls them entirely instead of listing them as "Legacy" content.
They're legacy if you already own them, but otherwise they've been totally pulled from sale. New players can't get 'em on Beyond which is a shame. Volo's in particular is head and shoulders the best 5e book for simply reading - the hag and beholder sections are especially good.
I suppose the upside to this well-meaning dreck is that if I wind up in a position wherein I need money my copy of Volo's is going to be worth a small fortune to people who actually give a shit about lore.
That's the whole point of the book though.... the new name of the races chapter kinda spells it out. They're no longer "Monster Races", but now "Fantastic Races" and yes, they filed everything that was interesting about them off and is now leaving it up to the individual group to put what they want on it. Do you want your orcs to be savage monsters that rape and pillage? Great! Also, please stop blaming us then for perpetuating stereotypes.
I appreciate what they're trying to do, I really do. And even applaud it. But the knock on effect is absolutely going to be that everything is vanilla AF now.
I think what would have been a lot cooler is give us "generic goblin", but also give us 5 or 6 goblins from specific additional settings of the multiverse have lots of lore about them, and the "final feature" that goes onto the base race to represent their culture.
Then, after giving us a few cool examples that have lore for each of the races, have a section that is literally just a pile of cultural features that we can bolt onto the generic statblock for any of the races to make one "our own" on the fly if we don't want to use any of the examples. Make sure to tell the player the DM gets to ultimately decide which cultures of a given race exist in their world
I don't give WOTC any credit for fixing problematic elements by just deleting things in a book that's already incredibly lackluster in other ways, this is a big profitable corporation, not some DMsguild self publisher. The bar, for me, is Pathfinder 2's races, and WOTC is short of that.
I also, personally, think that any kudos Wizards is getting for being progressive on this front is kind of squicky, deciding that it's racist to say all goblins are evil but then saying all goblins are proficient at killing larger creatures because of their "innate fury", or that kobolds are "naturally crafty", is like... what? Lol? If you're accepting the narrative that fantasy races are equivalent to real life races you don't get off the hook just by saying they're not evil, you need to treat them like people in that case and separate their cultural and linguistic knowledge from their physical characteristics, I don't see any of this as less shitty (if you tell me "black people aren't criminals! black people are amazing athletes!" you're still doing a racism).
Basically, if fantasy races have no intrinsic culture to them, every race should just be variant human and get a feat, but some of them can see in the dark. Or some effort should be undertaken to split culture and birth up like every modern crunchy ttrpg like this is doing
I mean, getting rid of racial stereotypes is an unambiguously good thing. Getting rid of evil races is a good thing.
But like, there are ways to do it and still have a LOT of lore! More, even! Now you have different factions of goblins in different societies you can talk about or whatever. Get into it, have fun with it. You can have a mostly evil civilization or city or whatever, talk about 'em. There's no good excuse for reducing the lore of the different races.
I mean, getting rid of racial stereotypes is an unambiguously good thing. Getting rid of evil races is a good thing.
But like, there are ways to do it and still have a LOT of lore! More, even! Now you have different factions of goblins in different societies you can talk about or whatever. Get into it, have fun with it. You can have a mostly evil civilization or city or whatever, talk about 'em. There's no good excuse for reducing the lore of the different races.
It's honestly kind of amazing how little lore there is for each of the different races; Most barely get 2 paragraphs that are so vague and generic that It's kind of amazing (Goliaths get 1!) to the point where the art takes up more space then the actual descriptor text.
By comparison, *humans* as presented in Heroes of the fallen lands (4e essentials handbook 1) has fucking loads and loads of text describing Human culture, attitudes, beliefs and communities.
Oh and In case anyone was curious, the races presented inside of this are all kinds of ridiculous with what they can do relative to what's in the PHB, Like check this out for Bugbears:
Darkvision: 60 feet blah blah balh
Fey ancestry: advantage on charm saves
Long limbed: extra 5 feet reach
Powerful build: count as a size class larger
Sneaky: stealth proficiency and can squeeze into small spaces.
Surprise attack: Extra 2d6 damage per hit to any creature you've beaten in initiative in the first round of combat.
Like I sat down and crunched the numbers on this one and it came out that a bugbear monk at level 2 can do an average of 36 damage while unarmed with flurry of blows
Kenku got this lovely number:
Kenku recall: 2 proficiencies of choice + Give yourself advantage on a sskill you are proficient in a number of times per long rest =your proficiency modifier.
Oh and Tortles are set up in a way now wherein I can see them being stupidly good casters or barbarians since they basically get splintmail for free and don't have to worry about Dex modifiers on their AC.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I am utterly fine with just removing alignment since it's kind of vestigial anyway and judging any given creature you run into by their actions
Also Wizards still hasn't and never will put out a campaign dealing with an orc society and their struggles with the one eyed god and trying to build something in the modern world, a story I crave so much it's going to be a major part of my drow campaign I'm starting this weekend
What the orcs went through in the novels was very much what a lot of less rich countries have gone through in the last century, where they're finally coming together in spite of their challenges and the CIA drow house Baenre comes through and assassinates the reformers and gives weapons to gives dragons to the hardliner conservatives and I find the "and then what" afterwards very interesting and I can't wait to run with that
I'm of the mind that there are two directions to go with Alignment: either scrap it (because go go morale relativism) or do a better job of articulating it (because holy shit do they do a bad job with this).
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
This is one of the reasons I like Golarion a lot, is that their first order of business was establishing a bunch of different nations and their cultures and ideologies. And yeah some countries have more of one race than others but, like, everyone's fucking everywhere.
That being said, Pathfinder's most popular adventure path is still Kingmaker, the colonizer campaign where everything was fine until you showed up, and then you gotta murder all of the locals because they're bad and your'e good. Why are they bad and you're good? Well because they're where you want to be, that's why.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think the orc king even says that the reason why dwarves aren't safe walking around many arrows is because half the time they're there to pillage and slaughter, which leads to reciprocity and mutual hatred. I'm running the orc nation's problems as now being completely free of Gruumsh, so we're just in a secular conflict where mutual distrust and conflict have led to evergreen warmongering
as to high elves its so discordant that in the history of D&D, high elves are responsible for the greatest and most far reaching atrocities and genocides, and yet the PHB is like "Lol they're good ". In one of the books the high elf leaders are like "Why don't we just kill all humans?" and the progressives are like "we tried that it's too hard, they breed too fast", not "holy shit wtf is wrong with you?". They tried to overthrow their government because their ruler changed the law from "kill all humans" to "only kill some humans"
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
Okay so while I think I agree with this for the most part, are you against saying dwarves are resistant to poison or elves can sleep for 4 hours instead of 8?
Like, they're not all humans, they live in a fantasy world where everything's warped by magic and shit, should they not actually be different? And if not, I dare ask, what's the point of having them? Is humanity not diverse enough? If not, why not? What do fantasy races add if they have literally zero traits?
Like I get not wanting orcs, as a race, to be a Mongol warband. Similarly I understand not wanting the elves to have their own forest kingdom in the middle of the deep green forest of Forestlandia, where everyone else is flatly not pretty or sexy enough to be there. I fucking hate how races get their own cultures in fantasy settings instead of just establishing cultures and nations and organizations and letting everyone be part of them. I don't even necessarily mind that some races, like tieflings, get marginalized occasionally due to their origin, so long as those marginalizing them are clearly coded as dumb pieces of shit.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
And my point is that stereotypes come about for a reason. Those reasons might not be pretty or great or what not but they do exist for a reason.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
Well they killed the lore and the races are still stereotypes - "Crafty" kobolds, etc, so WOTC has done the worst of all worlds
I feel like they should have left it as is until a new edition, or all races should be stripped of anything cultural and their attributes should be something that's biologically essential (like an elf's trance), and races that suck biologically like humans get a feat, and give us a bunch of new feats we can use at character creation that are heavily tied to a character's upbringing
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Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
And my point is that stereotypes come about for a reason. Those reasons might not be pretty or great or what not but they do exist for a reason.
But all this is why it's so irritating that WOTC is just making everything flat, grey, boring, and mechanically unbalanced - as opposed to giving us a robust system for assigning culture to our character like we assign background. Like here's what some of my my players are playing for my upcoming Drow focused campaign from my notes (this just holds skill and language choices, obviously you get more mechanically from these):
This is so much better than just "goblin, half orc, human", and the orc player still chose to be a traditional orc (he doesn't follow their evil god) - more or less exiled from the swell of traditionalist zeal that swept up Many Arrows during his teen years (half orcs no longer welcome) and should be fun when we go back there
I'm disappointed that I had to turn to homebrew + third party to get this kind of character creation
I mean, I could get behind a Culture tab for different races. Sort of feels like something that should be covered by background but if you were to implement it properly sure.
Still feels like it should be connected to the data entry for a race so that we're not just getting the equivelant of a Physical aptitude test result.
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
Okay so while I think I agree with this for the most part, are you against saying dwarves are resistant to poison or elves can sleep for 4 hours instead of 8?
Like, they're not all humans, they live in a fantasy world where everything's warped by magic and shit, should they not actually be different? And if not, I dare ask, what's the point of having them? Is humanity not diverse enough? If not, why not? What do fantasy races add if they have literally zero traits?
Like I get not wanting orcs, as a race, to be a Mongol warband. Similarly I understand not wanting the elves to have their own forest kingdom in the middle of the deep green forest of Forestlandia, where everyone else is flatly not pretty or sexy enough to be there. I fucking hate how races get their own cultures in fantasy settings instead of just establishing cultures and nations and organizations and letting everyone be part of them. I don't even necessarily mind that some races, like tieflings, get marginalized occasionally due to their origin, so long as those marginalizing them are clearly coded as dumb pieces of shit.
No, I'm not saying there can't be mechanical stuff like what you mentioned or darkvision or whatever. And I'm also totally up for the idea of certain races being seen as whatever stereotype, like what you mentioned with tieflings, because people do stereotype stuff and that's OK to have in your world. Although I think that should be optional and based on the table; some people get enough racism in their day-to-day lives and really don't need it in their gaming times, but that's pretty much always what you should do with any tough topic, make sure the table is all on the same page with it.
I have to at least somewhat disagree with you, @kime. I'm ok with short guys, pointy eared guys, hairy guys, green guys, cerebral guys, etc. D&D is never going to be the granular tool for the measurement of humanity in monstrous races or elsewhere - that's not what it's for. The reality is that this conversation comes from the fact that D&D's roots in myth, Tolkein, and war-gaming were never selected with the intent for us to elevate monsters into people. We're doing a good job.
The Witcher books ask these kinds of questions really well, and, on the very, very bright side, I think there is loads of fertile ground to explore who is the true monster? in game. Maybe there will be a module But, really, Wizards is packaging a mass market product and needs accessible handles for ages 13+. The rest of us are going to have to write the rest of the stories.
I have to at least somewhat disagree with you, kime. I'm ok with short guys, pointy eared guys, hairy guys, green guys, cerebral guys, etc. D&D is never going to be the granular tool for the measurement of humanity in monstrous races or elsewhere - that's not what it's for. The reality is that this conversation comes from the fact that D&D's roots in myth, Tolkein, and war-gaming were never selected with the intent for us to elevate monsters into people. We're doing a good job.
The Witcher books ask these kinds of questions really well, and, on the very, very bright side, I think there is loads of fertile ground to explore who is the true monster? in game. Maybe there will be a module But, really, Wizards is packaging a mass market product and needs accessible handles for ages 13+. The rest of us are going to have to write the rest of the stories.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be pointy eared guys? Just that not every pointy eared guy should be the same.
Or more specifically, not every dark skinned tribal person should be evil and savage
I mean, I could get behind a Culture tab for different races. Sort of feels like something that should be covered by background but if you were to implement it properly sure.
Still feels like it should be connected to the data entry for a race so that we're not just getting the equivelant of a Physical aptitude test result.
I mean you can pick different wording to describe it, culture being who you identify with and background being in what circumstances. If you pick culture: high elf, you were raised to learn elven and a magic cantrip, but that doesn't describe if you were a farmer, criminal, sage, etc. Some don't really mesh like, if you're a cosmopolitan outlander - because you can't be both at the same time, but that's still great because it suggests a major change in your character's life at some point
there is a bit of overlap but it's mostly distinct, and I think an outfit with as many talented writers as WOTC could make them more distinct and worthwhile, something like how Pathfinder does it these days would work great as wel
Also, I'm of the mind that if you and your players don't like the lore for a given race then that's fine, go ahead and homebrew it to your heart's content! Make Drow Buddhists and dwarves into lanky basketball players! Have everyone fight it out with water balloons and towel whips! Have a fucking blast!
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
And my point is that stereotypes come about for a reason. Those reasons might not be pretty or great or what not but they do exist for a reason.
The next time you feel compelled to post that stereotypes are good, actually, just back out and delete the draft. I don't even care what the context is.
Jeez, this discussion of relating cultural identity to racial identity is exactly why we need to move away from racial language.
physiological differences between ancestries make sense, and its fun as a game piece - but appending moral and cultural norms onto physiological traits is clearly wrong and bad for all the obvious reasons.
The language we use matters, because regardless of how you slice it, we will bring that with us into the world. and it's super important that rules language doesn't reflect these myopic ideas.
Humans from a certain area will have a shared cultural identity and background, and like-wise orcs will too.
Everyone fully understands that we can have human steppe nomad cultures and human desert nomad cultures and also human frontier type humans, but also feudal western europe type humans and that these will be completely different from each other besides the statblock, But orcs regardless of their place and location and interactions with other factions will always be savagely evil, because god said so and it's written in their genes, just doesn't make sense and is all the types of yuck we want to avoid as rules language and normalized text. For I hope obvious reasons.
That's not to say that in your game, the orcs from the region you're playing in can mainly be the orcs you expect etc, and I believe it's fine if campaign settings frame certain ancestries as "evil" in their specific setting as long as they do so through the lens of cultural language and/or through a divergence of goals and not through a racial lens.
Here's my take: this is a game about killing monsters and taking their stuff. I don't want, either as a player or a DM, for the players to need to have an existential fuckin crisis every time they draw their sword. You can only fight mindless undead so many times before it starts getting boring.
That said, I would have no problem with WOTC separating out character building into "race" aka "species" (offering the physiological bonuses like darkvision, up to and including stat bonuses/maluses) and a more elaborate version of background including cultural upbringing (offering things like languages, proficiencies, etc). Have a couple that are unique to each species (Kobold Trapper, Tiefling Outcast) and a bunch of generic ones (Smith, Farmer, Guard) plus a "raised among another species" which lets you pick a different species-specific upbringing.
Let me put this another way WRT race entries in the monster manual: They're their to represent the most common traits and behavior exhibited by a given entry as culture. Are they written in stone, completely immutable? Of course not and D&D has had variations on just about every race out there that buck those trends; Dark sun has it's xenophobic halfling cannibals', Ebberon has it's Druid orcs, Al'Qadim has a menagerie of different monster races integrated into the various cities, Dragonlance has minotaurs modeled after the romans and becoming a nautical empire after the war of the lance.
Hell, I often put my own spins on stuff so that NPC's and factions are more grey and less obvious in their goals and motivations then "I AM GOOD THEREFORE I DO GOOD THING AND FIGHT EVIL GUY BECAUSE HE DO EVIL THING" because I don't think players should have to have everything that broken down and devolved into the most nuance free pablum.
Now why doesn't WotC do this with their official materials? Putting aside the lazy and demeaning answer of "All the folks with any actual talent for world building are gone" the most obvious and practical reason is that to do this you'd need to write an absurd amount of material; Like if we were talking about 2 pages per individual Goblinoid/orc/ogre/giant tribe present in a region like the spine of the world, you'd be looking at probably around 500+ pages of data a lot of which is going to just start to bleed together. And that's just for one section of the Forgotten realms and not even an especially prominent one.
Let me put this another way WRT race entries in the monster manual: They're their to represent the most common traits and behavior exhibited by a given entry as culture. Are they written in stone, completely immutable? Of course not and D&D has had variations on just about every race out there that buck those trends; Dark sun has it's xenophobic halfling cannibals', Ebberon has it's Druid orcs, Al'Qadim has a menagerie of different monster races integrated into the various cities, Dragonlance has minotaurs modeled after the romans and becoming a nautical empire after the war of the lance.
Hell, I often put my own spins on stuff so that NPC's and factions are more grey and less obvious in their goals and motivations then "I AM GOOD THEREFORE I DO GOOD THING AND FIGHT EVIL GUY BECAUSE HE DO EVIL THING" because I don't think players should have to have everything that broken down and devolved into the most nuance free pablum.
Now why doesn't WotC do this with their official materials? Putting aside the lazy and demeaning answer of "All the folks with any actual talent for world building are gone" the most obvious and practical reason is that to do this you'd need to write an absurd amount of material; Like if we were talking about 2 pages per individual Goblinoid/orc/ogre/giant tribe present in a region like the spine of the world, you'd be looking at probably around 500+ pages of data a lot of which is going to just start to bleed together. And that's just for one section of the Forgotten realms and not even an especially prominent one.
I mean, the alternative is that they stop coding race and culture as the same fucking thing.
Like the whole problem is that you have Orc culture and Drow culture and Dwarf culture. It really shouldn't be a thing that's coded to a race.
That being said, I do recognize that FR has a ton of lore at this point and it'd be next to impossible to retcon all of it properly, so wotc should probably just move on with a new setting. I hate FR though so I'm kinda in the "nothing of value will be lost" camp.
I mean, Drow Culture makes sense when you realize that 95% of Drow live in one city and they're just elves
I don't think most people realize that most of them live in a single isolated city state and would have a pretty homogenous culture, even if as the lore has progressed more and more of them have discovered that the state-run education was a lie and escaped - because they aren't natural evil and I think there are literally like forty novels about this (nobody told the 5e PHB writer)
the Drow are just elf north korea with a matriarchy and spider god, there's only like, 30,000 of them after all, it's not like orcs where there are millions and millions of them which would lead to a lot more diversity of culture - the big problem with Drow (that they were the "Black skinned elves") was retconned, for the property's benefit I believe, so they are simply grey or dark purple skinned now
And this sentiment that they should just start over seems to be entirely from people who hate the Forgotten Realms and also who, no offense, aren't very familiar with it because they don't want the "vaguely renaissance Europe" to start with, but it's still the most popular setting and not everyone hates having a "Shared universe" with already understood reference points to use as a playground
Let me put this another way WRT race entries in the monster manual: They're their to represent the most common traits and behavior exhibited by a given entry as culture. Are they written in stone, completely immutable? Of course not and D&D has had variations on just about every race out there that buck those trends; Dark sun has it's xenophobic halfling cannibals', Ebberon has it's Druid orcs, Al'Qadim has a menagerie of different monster races integrated into the various cities, Dragonlance has minotaurs modeled after the romans and becoming a nautical empire after the war of the lance.
Hell, I often put my own spins on stuff so that NPC's and factions are more grey and less obvious in their goals and motivations then "I AM GOOD THEREFORE I DO GOOD THING AND FIGHT EVIL GUY BECAUSE HE DO EVIL THING" because I don't think players should have to have everything that broken down and devolved into the most nuance free pablum.
Now why doesn't WotC do this with their official materials? Putting aside the lazy and demeaning answer of "All the folks with any actual talent for world building are gone" the most obvious and practical reason is that to do this you'd need to write an absurd amount of material; Like if we were talking about 2 pages per individual Goblinoid/orc/ogre/giant tribe present in a region like the spine of the world, you'd be looking at probably around 500+ pages of data a lot of which is going to just start to bleed together. And that's just for one section of the Forgotten realms and not even an especially prominent one.
I mean, the alternative is that they stop coding race and culture as the same fucking thing.
Like the whole problem is that you have Orc culture and Drow culture and Dwarf culture. It really shouldn't be a thing that's coded to a race.
That being said, I do recognize that FR has a ton of lore at this point and it'd be next to impossible to retcon all of it properly, so wotc should probably just move on with a new setting. I hate FR though so I'm kinda in the "nothing of value will be lost" camp.
I'd 100% support WotC creating a new setting. I'd buy it, get a feel for it's themes and ideas and then see about running it for my players.
Thing is though, their hasn't been a new setting since Eberron. Which was released almost 18 years ago. You might want to turn around and cite Strixhaaven or Mythic Theros, but those were already existing settings in MTG and all thus all the actual work was basically done for them in advance; Hell ravnica even felt like it was fan wankery of eberron!
Which frankly leads me to the conclusion that the Creative team simply doesn't have the ability to create a whole new world setting OR they're simply too lazy to try when they can just nostalgia bait folks.
Either way I doubt we're getting anything in the foreseeable future.
I am wholeheartedly in favor of Wizards making a new campaign setting, though I don't think they will
I still think binning the forgotten realms would be a bad decision, just in general and a business decision, but they could have a partner company take it over and I wouldn't be upset (whoever wrote Minsc and Boo, give them some more editors and put them in charge, they seem to get what I want out of a FR book) - in fact it might be for the best given the lack of enthusiasm for the setting at WOTC
I mean, Drow Culture makes sense when you realize that 95% of Drow live in one city and they're just elves
I don't think most people realize that most of them live in a single isolated city state and would have a pretty homogenous culture, even if as the lore has progressed more and more of them have discovered that the state-run education was a lie and escaped - because they aren't natural evil and I think there are literally like forty novels about this (nobody told the 5e PHB writer)
the Drow are just elf north korea with a matriarchy and spider god, there's only like, 30,000 of them after all, it's not like orcs where there are millions and millions of them which would lead to a lot more diversity of culture
And this sentiment that they should just start over seems to be entirely from people who hate the Forgotten Realms and also who, no offense, aren't very familiar with it because they don't want the "vaguely renaissance Europe" to start with, but it's still the most popular setting and not everyone hates having a "Shared universe" with already understood reference points to use as a playground
As I recall, there are other cities then Menzoberanzan, but the only major one left (most haven't held up well between the spellplague, the silence, and the lady penitent debacle) that significantly deviates is Sshamath, which is indeed different in that it's a male dominated mobocracy where they are primarily motivated by an overwhelming deisre to develop magic and have consideable respect for anyone who has (or at least the potential for) wizardry.
They're also pretty foot loose and fancy free when it comes to morale constraints on the use of magic or the personal freedoms of Non-wizardry inclined races so not exactly good guys either.
I am wholeheartedly in favor of Wizards making a new campaign setting, though I don't think they will
I still think binning the forgotten realms would be a bad decision, just in general and a business decision, but they could have a partner company take it over and I wouldn't be upset (whoever wrote Minsc and Boo, give them some more editors and put them in charge, they seem to get what I want out of a FR book) - in fact it might be for the best given the lack of enthusiasm for the setting at WOTC
I think if they were going to do it they would have by now; maybe when 6th rolls around they'll launch with one but right now they're more interested in nostalgia baiting... and then doing inexplicably weird shit.
Like how spelljammer is looking like they plan to throw out a whack of the mechanics involved with the setting and instead just having people hopping around in the astral plane.
Which probably means we're never going to get planescape which I'm actually thankful for since I can't imagine them getting that one right.
Most drow cities got f'd during the time of troubles/spellplague/second sundering, Menzobenzo did okay because lolth visited in person during the time of troubles
Ust Natha is still around as well, but still, drow are the least populous "race"
So far in 5th edition we really only have confirmation that we have Menzoberanzan, some small colonies, Ust Natha, and enclaves of Eilistree and Vhaerun worshippers living on the surface. Sshamath is around but they don't follow Lloth and their society is less evil than most giant human cities (they don't have unrestricted chattel slavery unlike Thay, Athkatla, or Calamshan)
Crap like that is what annoys me, they really don't want to engage with the lore they already have that paints more diverse portraits of potentially problematic races, they just want to select the word evil and hit the delete key and pat themselves on the back
oh and Calidae that is the size of New York city and is basically Iain M. Banks' The Culture, but I'm not counting them
Most drow cities got f'd during the time of troubles/spellplague/second sundering, Menzobenzo did okay because lolth visited in person during the time of troubles
Ust Natha is still around as well, but still, drow are the least populous "race"
So far in 5th edition we really only have confirmation that we have Menzoberanzan, some small colonies, Ust Natha, and enclaves of Eilistree and Vhaerun worshippers living on the surface
oh and Calidae that is the size of New York city and is basically Iain M. Banks' The Culture, but I'm not counting them
Reading up on Callidae is actually hilarious over on FR wiki, Let me quote the article:
Callidae
EDIT
Callidae
Geography[1]
Type
Enclave
Region
The North, Faerûn
Society[1]
Races
Drow (Aevendrow)
Callidae was a secretive icy enclave in the North that was populated by Aevendrow.[1][2]
Contents
Description
History
Appendix
Appearances
References
Description
This enclave was almost completely unknown, and as such, held multiple secrets.[1]
History
When the majority of drow followed Lolth's ways and descended to the Underdark, a small group instead travelled northward. Here they established the enclave of Callidae.[1]
That's literally everything from the entire article.
it's got a population 7 times larger than the city of spiders, they are post-scarcity, don't use money, are uninterested in trading because (Navi from James Cameron's Avatar), and are innately good indicating that they don't have free will like humans - none of them possess the capacity for greed for example
I'm guessing orcs will get the same treatment next, where it will be revealed that actually orcs were better than humans all along
To be clear, they are drow, it's just that they're the more noble Aevndrow as opposed to those Udadrow commoners (or those tree hugging hippy jungle lorendrow).
Also I just love the idea that a city that is super isolated under a glacier with no one ever coming or going has a 40% bigger population then waterdeep, which is a major trading port on the surface, incredibly cosmopolitan and principally populated by humans who propagate much faster then elves.
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100% agreed. There is so much great fluff in those two previous books that its a damn shame to throw them away and I'm seriously considering printing my fluff sections of those two books direct from chrome against the inevitable day when DNDBeyond pulls them entirely instead of listing them as "Legacy" content.
They're legacy if you already own them, but otherwise they've been totally pulled from sale. New players can't get 'em on Beyond which is a shame. Volo's in particular is head and shoulders the best 5e book for simply reading - the hag and beholder sections are especially good.
I think what would have been a lot cooler is give us "generic goblin", but also give us 5 or 6 goblins from specific additional settings of the multiverse have lots of lore about them, and the "final feature" that goes onto the base race to represent their culture.
Then, after giving us a few cool examples that have lore for each of the races, have a section that is literally just a pile of cultural features that we can bolt onto the generic statblock for any of the races to make one "our own" on the fly if we don't want to use any of the examples. Make sure to tell the player the DM gets to ultimately decide which cultures of a given race exist in their world
I don't give WOTC any credit for fixing problematic elements by just deleting things in a book that's already incredibly lackluster in other ways, this is a big profitable corporation, not some DMsguild self publisher. The bar, for me, is Pathfinder 2's races, and WOTC is short of that.
I also, personally, think that any kudos Wizards is getting for being progressive on this front is kind of squicky, deciding that it's racist to say all goblins are evil but then saying all goblins are proficient at killing larger creatures because of their "innate fury", or that kobolds are "naturally crafty", is like... what? Lol? If you're accepting the narrative that fantasy races are equivalent to real life races you don't get off the hook just by saying they're not evil, you need to treat them like people in that case and separate their cultural and linguistic knowledge from their physical characteristics, I don't see any of this as less shitty (if you tell me "black people aren't criminals! black people are amazing athletes!" you're still doing a racism).
Basically, if fantasy races have no intrinsic culture to them, every race should just be variant human and get a feat, but some of them can see in the dark. Or some effort should be undertaken to split culture and birth up like every modern crunchy ttrpg like this is doing
But like, there are ways to do it and still have a LOT of lore! More, even! Now you have different factions of goblins in different societies you can talk about or whatever. Get into it, have fun with it. You can have a mostly evil civilization or city or whatever, talk about 'em. There's no good excuse for reducing the lore of the different races.
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It's honestly kind of amazing how little lore there is for each of the different races; Most barely get 2 paragraphs that are so vague and generic that It's kind of amazing (Goliaths get 1!) to the point where the art takes up more space then the actual descriptor text.
By comparison, *humans* as presented in Heroes of the fallen lands (4e essentials handbook 1) has fucking loads and loads of text describing Human culture, attitudes, beliefs and communities.
Oh and In case anyone was curious, the races presented inside of this are all kinds of ridiculous with what they can do relative to what's in the PHB, Like check this out for Bugbears:
Darkvision: 60 feet blah blah balh
Fey ancestry: advantage on charm saves
Long limbed: extra 5 feet reach
Powerful build: count as a size class larger
Sneaky: stealth proficiency and can squeeze into small spaces.
Surprise attack: Extra 2d6 damage per hit to any creature you've beaten in initiative in the first round of combat.
Like I sat down and crunched the numbers on this one and it came out that a bugbear monk at level 2 can do an average of 36 damage while unarmed with flurry of blows
Kenku got this lovely number:
Kenku recall: 2 proficiencies of choice + Give yourself advantage on a sskill you are proficient in a number of times per long rest =your proficiency modifier.
Oh and Tortles are set up in a way now wherein I can see them being stupidly good casters or barbarians since they basically get splintmail for free and don't have to worry about Dex modifiers on their AC.
But for a bunch of us having races that are good or evil, noble or savage, powerful or weak... that's important to us for helping to establish the setting and having goals and aspirations not just for players but for the myriad nations and factions within the confines of the setting and moreover make the moments when things go against type stand out so much more. Like the FR orcs of Many-arrows are struggling with their identity as they try to secure a permanent nation for themselves in the north; long term planning and stability have been anathema to the orcs for millenia, with most existing in a hyper accelerated colonization/industrialization mind set that encourages a more nomadic nature, but the orcs of Many-Arrows are holding on after nearly a century of relative peace.
That's neat! That's grounds for making all kinds of cool forward thinking counter trope characters while at the same time not completely dismissing nearly 5 decades of lore or having to do a great big explanation about your treehouse interpretation of the race that runs counter to what the GM may have in mind.
I don't really agree that it's important to have races defined like that. Racial stereotypes are bad. Calling a race of people "evil" is bad. Calling a race of people "savages" is bad.
Like I get the defense is it's all just pretend and doesn't mean anything, but it does. At a subtle level, you validate that way of thinking. But on a more real level, if you look at it you find that nearly every time, the "evil" and/or "savage" races are just coded as "non-white". It gets really gross.
And then beyond all that, it's just lazy world building. If you need a race of evil, savage, (dark-skinned) people in order to help you establish a setting and goals and aspirations for the world? You need to get better at world building. (Generic "you")
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Also Wizards still hasn't and never will put out a campaign dealing with an orc society and their struggles with the one eyed god and trying to build something in the modern world, a story I crave so much it's going to be a major part of my drow campaign I'm starting this weekend
What the orcs went through in the novels was very much what a lot of less rich countries have gone through in the last century, where they're finally coming together in spite of their challenges and the CIA drow house Baenre comes through and assassinates the reformers and gives weapons to gives dragons to the hardliner conservatives and I find the "and then what" afterwards very interesting and I can't wait to run with that
I think it's important to have an understanding of what a race values and how their society works because as a GM I have enough on my damn plate without having to go and spend hours and hours writing up stuff so that they have narrative coherency when my players interact with them as well as having a common understanding.
Ya know, as opposed to having High elves who are high minded scholars who believe in quiet solitude in nature but also raging war mongering barbarians and also a technologically advanced space faring race favoring diplomacy.
Maybe with just a slight rephrasing, we'll be on the same page.
It's cool for a culture to have specific values they prize, and specific ways the culture works. That's different from the race valuing things. Because you know, it's good to have some high elves are are scholars, and some who are war-mongering barbarians. But maybe the culture of the High Elves' home country really values learning and education and whatnot.
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That being said, Pathfinder's most popular adventure path is still Kingmaker, the colonizer campaign where everything was fine until you showed up, and then you gotta murder all of the locals because they're bad and your'e good. Why are they bad and you're good? Well because they're where you want to be, that's why.
I'd argue that the most prominent culture is what gets used as race standard within the context of D&D races, with off shoots representing cultural variations of a core identity. Which is why I cite Something like Many-arrows wherein you have Orcs who have gone against the grain of their species for multiple generations with a sedentary nation as opposed to the locust like behavior of most orcish tribes (IE pillaging and killing everything they can readily get their hands on before moving on). They're still orcs and as such liable to mangle stray adventurers within their borders, but given the right context they would likely be one of the most formidable allies the lords alliance could hope for.
The bigger concern I have (and which I tried to cite in my High elf example) is that when you lack a consensus on what the identity of a race is, you are going to create serious problems at your table since you will have to reconcile wildly incoherent interpretations which all get to be equally valid because lore is dead.
as to high elves its so discordant that in the history of D&D, high elves are responsible for the greatest and most far reaching atrocities and genocides, and yet the PHB is like "Lol they're good
I think trying to define "the identity of a race" is problematic. Like, what this post is saying is that if you don't get to have racial stereotypes, then lore is dead. I just strongly disagree with that. Stop trying to create traits and assign them to an entire race of people!
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Okay so while I think I agree with this for the most part, are you against saying dwarves are resistant to poison or elves can sleep for 4 hours instead of 8?
Like, they're not all humans, they live in a fantasy world where everything's warped by magic and shit, should they not actually be different? And if not, I dare ask, what's the point of having them? Is humanity not diverse enough? If not, why not? What do fantasy races add if they have literally zero traits?
Like I get not wanting orcs, as a race, to be a Mongol warband. Similarly I understand not wanting the elves to have their own forest kingdom in the middle of the deep green forest of Forestlandia, where everyone else is flatly not pretty or sexy enough to be there. I fucking hate how races get their own cultures in fantasy settings instead of just establishing cultures and nations and organizations and letting everyone be part of them. I don't even necessarily mind that some races, like tieflings, get marginalized occasionally due to their origin, so long as those marginalizing them are clearly coded as dumb pieces of shit.
And my point is that stereotypes come about for a reason. Those reasons might not be pretty or great or what not but they do exist for a reason.
Well they killed the lore and the races are still stereotypes - "Crafty" kobolds, etc, so WOTC has done the worst of all worlds
I feel like they should have left it as is until a new edition, or all races should be stripped of anything cultural and their attributes should be something that's biologically essential (like an elf's trance), and races that suck biologically like humans get a feat, and give us a bunch of new feats we can use at character creation that are heavily tied to a character's upbringing
Whoooo buddy this is a take right here.
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This is so much better than just "goblin, half orc, human", and the orc player still chose to be a traditional orc (he doesn't follow their evil god) - more or less exiled from the swell of traditionalist zeal that swept up Many Arrows during his teen years (half orcs no longer welcome) and should be fun when we go back there
I'm disappointed that I had to turn to homebrew + third party to get this kind of character creation
Still feels like it should be connected to the data entry for a race so that we're not just getting the equivelant of a Physical aptitude test result.
No, I'm not saying there can't be mechanical stuff like what you mentioned or darkvision or whatever. And I'm also totally up for the idea of certain races being seen as whatever stereotype, like what you mentioned with tieflings, because people do stereotype stuff and that's OK to have in your world. Although I think that should be optional and based on the table; some people get enough racism in their day-to-day lives and really don't need it in their gaming times, but that's pretty much always what you should do with any tough topic, make sure the table is all on the same page with it.
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The Witcher books ask these kinds of questions really well, and, on the very, very bright side, I think there is loads of fertile ground to explore who is the true monster? in game. Maybe there will be a module
I'm not saying there shouldn't be pointy eared guys? Just that not every pointy eared guy should be the same.
Or more specifically, not every dark skinned tribal person should be evil and savage
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I mean you can pick different wording to describe it, culture being who you identify with and background being in what circumstances. If you pick culture: high elf, you were raised to learn elven and a magic cantrip, but that doesn't describe if you were a farmer, criminal, sage, etc. Some don't really mesh like, if you're a cosmopolitan outlander - because you can't be both at the same time, but that's still great because it suggests a major change in your character's life at some point
there is a bit of overlap but it's mostly distinct, and I think an outfit with as many talented writers as WOTC could make them more distinct and worthwhile, something like how Pathfinder does it these days would work great as wel
The next time you feel compelled to post that stereotypes are good, actually, just back out and delete the draft. I don't even care what the context is.
physiological differences between ancestries make sense, and its fun as a game piece - but appending moral and cultural norms onto physiological traits is clearly wrong and bad for all the obvious reasons.
The language we use matters, because regardless of how you slice it, we will bring that with us into the world. and it's super important that rules language doesn't reflect these myopic ideas.
Humans from a certain area will have a shared cultural identity and background, and like-wise orcs will too.
Everyone fully understands that we can have human steppe nomad cultures and human desert nomad cultures and also human frontier type humans, but also feudal western europe type humans and that these will be completely different from each other besides the statblock, But orcs regardless of their place and location and interactions with other factions will always be savagely evil, because god said so and it's written in their genes, just doesn't make sense and is all the types of yuck we want to avoid as rules language and normalized text. For I hope obvious reasons.
That's not to say that in your game, the orcs from the region you're playing in can mainly be the orcs you expect etc, and I believe it's fine if campaign settings frame certain ancestries as "evil" in their specific setting as long as they do so through the lens of cultural language and/or through a divergence of goals and not through a racial lens.
That said, I would have no problem with WOTC separating out character building into "race" aka "species" (offering the physiological bonuses like darkvision, up to and including stat bonuses/maluses) and a more elaborate version of background including cultural upbringing (offering things like languages, proficiencies, etc). Have a couple that are unique to each species (Kobold Trapper, Tiefling Outcast) and a bunch of generic ones (Smith, Farmer, Guard) plus a "raised among another species" which lets you pick a different species-specific upbringing.
Hell, I often put my own spins on stuff so that NPC's and factions are more grey and less obvious in their goals and motivations then "I AM GOOD THEREFORE I DO GOOD THING AND FIGHT EVIL GUY BECAUSE HE DO EVIL THING" because I don't think players should have to have everything that broken down and devolved into the most nuance free pablum.
Now why doesn't WotC do this with their official materials? Putting aside the lazy and demeaning answer of "All the folks with any actual talent for world building are gone" the most obvious and practical reason is that to do this you'd need to write an absurd amount of material; Like if we were talking about 2 pages per individual Goblinoid/orc/ogre/giant tribe present in a region like the spine of the world, you'd be looking at probably around 500+ pages of data a lot of which is going to just start to bleed together. And that's just for one section of the Forgotten realms and not even an especially prominent one.
I mean, the alternative is that they stop coding race and culture as the same fucking thing.
Like the whole problem is that you have Orc culture and Drow culture and Dwarf culture. It really shouldn't be a thing that's coded to a race.
That being said, I do recognize that FR has a ton of lore at this point and it'd be next to impossible to retcon all of it properly, so wotc should probably just move on with a new setting. I hate FR though so I'm kinda in the "nothing of value will be lost" camp.
I don't think most people realize that most of them live in a single isolated city state and would have a pretty homogenous culture, even if as the lore has progressed more and more of them have discovered that the state-run education was a lie and escaped - because they aren't natural evil and I think there are literally like forty novels about this (nobody told the 5e PHB writer)
the Drow are just elf north korea with a matriarchy and spider god, there's only like, 30,000 of them after all, it's not like orcs where there are millions and millions of them which would lead to a lot more diversity of culture - the big problem with Drow (that they were the "Black skinned elves") was retconned, for the property's benefit I believe, so they are simply grey or dark purple skinned now
And this sentiment that they should just start over seems to be entirely from people who hate the Forgotten Realms and also who, no offense, aren't very familiar with it because they don't want the "vaguely renaissance Europe" to start with, but it's still the most popular setting and not everyone hates having a "Shared universe" with already understood reference points to use as a playground
I'd 100% support WotC creating a new setting. I'd buy it, get a feel for it's themes and ideas and then see about running it for my players.
Thing is though, their hasn't been a new setting since Eberron. Which was released almost 18 years ago. You might want to turn around and cite Strixhaaven or Mythic Theros, but those were already existing settings in MTG and all thus all the actual work was basically done for them in advance; Hell ravnica even felt like it was fan wankery of eberron!
Which frankly leads me to the conclusion that the Creative team simply doesn't have the ability to create a whole new world setting OR they're simply too lazy to try when they can just nostalgia bait folks.
Either way I doubt we're getting anything in the foreseeable future.
I still think binning the forgotten realms would be a bad decision, just in general and a business decision, but they could have a partner company take it over and I wouldn't be upset (whoever wrote Minsc and Boo, give them some more editors and put them in charge, they seem to get what I want out of a FR book) - in fact it might be for the best given the lack of enthusiasm for the setting at WOTC
As I recall, there are other cities then Menzoberanzan, but the only major one left (most haven't held up well between the spellplague, the silence, and the lady penitent debacle) that significantly deviates is Sshamath, which is indeed different in that it's a male dominated mobocracy where they are primarily motivated by an overwhelming deisre to develop magic and have consideable respect for anyone who has (or at least the potential for) wizardry.
They're also pretty foot loose and fancy free when it comes to morale constraints on the use of magic or the personal freedoms of Non-wizardry inclined races so not exactly good guys either.
I think if they were going to do it they would have by now; maybe when 6th rolls around they'll launch with one but right now they're more interested in nostalgia baiting... and then doing inexplicably weird shit.
Like how spelljammer is looking like they plan to throw out a whack of the mechanics involved with the setting and instead just having people hopping around in the astral plane.
Which probably means we're never going to get planescape which I'm actually thankful for since I can't imagine them getting that one right.
Ust Natha is still around as well, but still, drow are the least populous "race"
So far in 5th edition we really only have confirmation that we have Menzoberanzan, some small colonies, Ust Natha, and enclaves of Eilistree and Vhaerun worshippers living on the surface. Sshamath is around but they don't follow Lloth and their society is less evil than most giant human cities (they don't have unrestricted chattel slavery unlike Thay, Athkatla, or Calamshan)
Crap like that is what annoys me, they really don't want to engage with the lore they already have that paints more diverse portraits of potentially problematic races, they just want to select the word evil and hit the delete key and pat themselves on the back
oh and Calidae that is the size of New York city and is basically Iain M. Banks' The Culture, but I'm not counting them
Reading up on Callidae is actually hilarious over on FR wiki, Let me quote the article:
That's literally everything from the entire article.
I'm guessing orcs will get the same treatment next, where it will be revealed that actually orcs were better than humans all along
Also I just love the idea that a city that is super isolated under a glacier with no one ever coming or going has a 40% bigger population then waterdeep, which is a major trading port on the surface, incredibly cosmopolitan and principally populated by humans who propagate much faster then elves.