|
Woolie Wool posted:counterpoint: who cares about this disposable garbage book for miseducated children from 30 years ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5Q7CcINC8M
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:26
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 14:46 |
|
|
ruddiger posted:Honestly surprised we never got a "Jesus was a half-alien hybrid" storyline out of x-files. I don’t think Fox execs would have gone for something like this even now or back then
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:29
|
|
|
A man in a dark suit and sunglasses jabs Jesus in the back of the neck with a spike; green foams from the wound as Christ crumples to the ground. The man in the suit speaks into a cuff: "It's done." "Excellent work, Agent Longinus."
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:33
|
|
|
scully: victim died in a state of sin mulder: *throws her a file* ever heard of our lord and saviour Jesus Christ
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:33
|
|
|
FreudianSlippers posted:Didn't the EU have Space Cenobites that were immune to Jedi stuff because they were from another galaxy (presumably further further away) and thus outside the force? Aren't those creatures the reason (in old EU) Palpatine created the Empire? Like...he had a vision when he was a young Jedi about the galactic invasion, and thought the only way to repel the invasion was to create a giant, Galaxy-spanning empire? And the only way to do THAT was to go to the Dark Side, infiltrate the Republic, and eliminate the Jedi so nothing could stop the growth of the Empire?
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:38
|
|
|
but why nurse a grudge over an F-list decanonized star war novel that nobody today would read when Warhams is worse in every way and a huge cultural institution? Goons have silly priorities even in the space of pop culture nerd trash.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:39
|
|
|
I like Star Wars and enjoyed a good bit of the old EU (Zahn’s early books are great, as are all of Aaron Allston’s Wraith Squadron related stuff), nothing more than that 
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:45
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Aren't those creatures the reason (in old EU) Palpatine created the Empire? Like...he had a vision when he was a young Jedi about the galactic invasion, and thought the only way to repel the invasion was to create a giant, Galaxy-spanning empire? And the only way to do THAT was to go to the Dark Side, infiltrate the Republic, and eliminate the Jedi so nothing could stop the growth of the Empire? Not sure how I feel about "(Space) Hitler Was Right" as a plot point
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:47
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Not sure how I feel about "(Space) Hitler Was Right" as a plot point It could be a lovely and misguided plan based on an imperfect, biased interpretation of a vision.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:51
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Aren't those creatures the reason (in old EU) Palpatine created the Empire? Like...he had a vision when he was a young Jedi about the galactic invasion, and thought the only way to repel the invasion was to create a giant, Galaxy-spanning empire? And the only way to do THAT was to go to the Dark Side, infiltrate the Republic, and eliminate the Jedi so nothing could stop the growth of the Empire? "This whole scenario stinks of Warhams" I yell as I turn May the 4th into May the poo poo
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:56
|
|
|
Asterite34 posted:Not sure how I feel about "(Space) Hitler Was Right" as a plot point I believe that was presented not as the correct idea, but the actions of a greedy deluded man who was going to fall anyway. Instead of alerting anyone and exploring the visions he just went "only I am smart enough to save everyone my way". And then did more damage than if he had never had the visions at all. Absurd Alhazred posted:"This whole scenario stinks of Warhams" I yell as I turn May the 4th into May the poo poo It's all dune.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 16:57
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:"This whole scenario stinks of Warhams" I yell as I turn May the 4th into May the poo poo
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 17:21
|
|
|
John Murdoch posted:Even as someone who loves to dig into the minutia of pop culture stuff, I've never understood the pathological need to treat shows/movies/comics as absolutely real, logically coherent universes that must be exhaustively catalogued and all inconsistencies judged from within the fiction itself. So there's one big reason for this being something that's valuable: it's a setting for a roleplaying/miniatures/other creative game. Like I dunno how familiar you are with it, but my big fictional setting thing that I know a lot about is the Forgotten Realms, one of many settings (worlds/multiverses) for Dungeons and Dragons. And when you run a game of Dungeons and Dragons (being the Dungeon Master who sets up challenges and plays the monsters, instead of being a player who generally has a single Player Character they play for a long time), then you're asking people to collaboratively tell a narrative in that shared setting together. Continuity matters in that respect, from the very basic "no, I can climb this wall because I wrote down that I have rope and a grappling hook on my equipment list" to "the evil Zhentarim fortress of Darkhold is here in the setting and they send out patrols in these directions for these reasons." The distinction here is that the continuity matters specifically because the action of the game itself is interacting with these continuity elements and enjoying telling your own stories inside that, as a group. It's not just a place for Internet fights, continuity/plot holes/narrative dissonance is a surprisingly big problem when you're actually playing a roleplaying game at the table (or online) with friends. Keeping this stuff straight is pretty important - and very rewarding for everyone involved, if it's done well. (There's a saying about RPGs that you know the players like your game when they actually remember the barkeep at the inn and speak with him by name the next time without any prompting.) I mentioned the Forgotten Realms in particular, because it's infamous for being so detailed and so exhaustive a lot of people dislike it, hate it, or are fearful of it. But that's honestly a mistake, and I'll tell you why - the setting was created by a Canadian, Ed Greenwood, prior to Dungeons and Dragons, for him to write his own fantasy stories in, and then Greenwood adapted it to use as a setting for his Dungeons and Dragons games with friends. Greenwood's articles about the setting in the Dungeons and Dragons magazine were quite interesting for other readers, and when the owners of Dungeons and Dragons needed a new setting, they bought it from Greenwood - but let him keep writing and detailing the setting. Much of this exhaustive detail comes from him - Wookiepedia is mocked for having pages on "breasts" and "milk", but I can tell you (from reading it myself) that there are Forgotten Realms sourcebooks (books about the setting for use in roleplaying games) that also cover such things, written by Ed himself. However, the approach Ed and the fan-favorite designers of the setting have taken over the years is one of collaboration with the players who actually play the game. It's explicitly stated in the very first Forgotten Realms gaming product that you should change the world and whatever's in it to fit your tastes and how you want to play the game. There are lots of materials in the Forgotten Realms sourcebooks that are implicitly or explicitly "hooks" - jumping off points for you to create your own adventures for your D&D group. (Someone's found a fabled dungeon and wants to hire adventurers to go explore it with them being an easy example.) Similarly, the worldbuilding details about the setting (what do undergarments look like, what kinds of milk are there) are detailed in order to create immersion and allow for fun, interesting play in the game itself. And that's all fine and good, but you may be asking what is the necessity to be having a built up "canon" or continuity like in so many other nerd interests. Well, simply put, people want more ideas to pull from, more magic items or monsters or interesting things they can use in their own games (if you're the one running a game of D&D it's a surprisingly large amount of prep work for the actual session of playing the game) - and awkwardly, the time scales of producing real life sourcebooks and how people digest them in actual play is surprisingly different. If you take a single "hook" from a sourcebook, that's likely one session (usually played for about four hours once a week) if not more of these weekly sessions in terms of gaming time, but writing it down in the actual sourcebook might have been a few sentences, and before you're done with the weekly sessions of playing that "hook" out, there's probably another sourcebook coming out with more cool new things. So the editorial group responsible for the Forgotten Realms figured out pretty early (like 1989 early) that they needed basically a "traffic cop" role - someone who looked at every "canon" product and kept it in the right areas of the map, of game design, of product releases - so that people weren't producing things at cross purposes and that if your group was still working on "Volo's Guide to the Dalelands" stuff they wouldn't be dropping "Volo's Guide to the Dalelands II" on you too quickly. This gives you, your players, and your story as a whole - the actual game these products are for - room to actually happen. And it also illustrated pretty quickly that canon was extremely important to designing these game sourcebooks, because a continuity error could actually be really disastrous to the act of playing the game. If you and your players have spent months playing a game based on this map that has this dungeon here in the world, but a new sourcebook comes out and the dungeon is actually across the river ten miles that way, it really fucks up your fiction! That's the designers of the game loving with your immersion and your storytelling, instead of helping you. Therefore, we go back to your original point, specifically that "all inconsistencies must be judged within the fiction itself" - this is crucial for RPGs, because the fiction is the shared action of play between participants, and the products the company is selling are meant to facilitate that play. It's rough as hell when something just gets retconned out of existence, because it undermines and undoes a lot of actual play at the table. It should be noted that human errors just happen. Mistakes with canon do happen. No one's perfect. But there's a particularly unique burden when you're creating canon for tabletop RPGs* or wargames (at least, I think this would apply to stuff about say Warhammer 40k) where the action is actually participating in the narrative and the setting itself as an act of creation. *I don't think this applies the same way to RPGs created for licensed properties, though. Those follow the dog, they don't wag it - the continuity of Star Trek shows is Star Trek shows and movies itself, not the need to hold fast to the Star Trek Adventures roleplaying game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 17:27
|
|
|
I'm one of the people kinda grateful that Disney axed the EU, because by the time I decided I wanted to try reading any Star Wars books, there were so many that I'd have had no idea where to begin. Pretty sure the only EU novel I ever touched was the Revan novel back when I was really into the Old Republic MMO. I was hoping for some new official books about Luke's new Jedi order, but Rian Johnson pretty well ruined that for me.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 17:51
|
|
|
the_steve posted:I'm one of the people kinda grateful that Disney axed the EU, because by the time I decided I wanted to try reading any Star Wars books, there were so many that I'd have had no idea where to begin. I read a lot of EU books as a kid, and I walked out of TFA going "okay, they've got their own plans and they're doing their own thing and it's cool that a new generation of fans gets to see a girl jedi on screen instead of needing to collect crumbs about Mara Jade." Honestly I thought they were doing pretty okay, from what I'd heard, but from what people in this conversation are saying, it's turned pretty bad, and that's honestly a sad thing.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 18:07
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:There's a bit of a trend in recent iterations of fan favourite classic genre IPs to set right past 'mistakes' which often goes along the lines of "That thing which has been the butt of people's jokes all these years is actually baddass and cool, so there That's pretty much what they are, yeah, somewhere between that and savage Arab bandits, especially given they're pretty much Fremen. I do like the idea that Din gets along with them well at least partly because he's also from a culture that always covers their whole body. ruddiger posted:Honestly surprised we never got a "Jesus was a half-alien hybrid" storyline out of x-files. Twist is that the alien half is from his mother's side Woolie Wool posted:but why nurse a grudge over an F-list decanonized star war novel that nobody today would read when Warhams is worse in every way and a huge cultural institution? Goons have silly priorities even in the space of pop culture nerd trash. Thing is trying to make fun of Warhammer for dumb sci-fi poo poo is like trying to make fun of a dog for being quadrupedal, the setting is literally built of and for that Arivia posted:I read a lot of EU books as a kid, and I walked out of TFA going "okay, they've got their own plans and they're doing their own thing and it's cool that a new generation of fans gets to see a girl jedi on screen instead of needing to collect crumbs about Mara Jade." Honestly I thought they were doing pretty okay, from what I'd heard, but from what people in this conversation are saying, it's turned pretty bad, and that's honestly a sad thing. Ironically some of the sequels' many, MANY problems might come down to NOT paying at least enough attention to the EU to get some ideas and see what's been done, and they ended up repeating a lot of their mistakes. New superweapons showing up every five minutes, either overusing the OT cast or new characters that are basically OC do not steals of them, trying to keep up the OT tone to the point where it feels like nothing the heroes did actually mattered, writers at war with each other because there's no overall structure...
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 18:31
|
|
|
John Murdoch posted:That's how you end up with Wookiepedia. And like at least two decades of unnecessary EU crap explaining the deep and intricate backstories of every. single. background character. DAVIN FELTH. DAVIN GODDAMN FELTH. WE DID NOT NEED A BACKSTORY FOR THE STORMTROOPER WHO SAID 'LOOK SIR, DROIDS!' https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Davin_Felth/Legends I hate this poo poo so much.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 18:52
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Aren't those creatures the reason (in old EU) Palpatine created the Empire? Like...he had a vision when he was a young Jedi about the galactic invasion, and thought the only way to repel the invasion was to create a giant, Galaxy-spanning empire? And the only way to do THAT was to go to the Dark Side, infiltrate the Republic, and eliminate the Jedi so nothing could stop the growth of the Empire? Hey look, it's the plot of Starcraft 2! At least as far as the Zerg retcons went (most especially for the Overmind and it's reason for finding and infesting Kerrigan)
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 18:57
|
|
|
Arivia posted:It should be noted that human errors just happen. Mistakes with canon do happen. No one's perfect. George Lucas was perfect when it came to Star Wars canon.  That's not my opinion, that used to be the official LucasFilm stance towards the many levels of canon they assigned to every aspect of Star Wars lore that appeared in any licenced Star Wars publication. The most official level was G-canon (George Lucas canon) which applied to the 6 original films and elements in other works originating from Lucas plus direct declarations made by him, this overruled any other works that might happen to contradict them. The next level down was T-canon (TV series) then C-canon (continuity canon, basically everything in the EU) then S-canon (secondary works that predated the EU such as the Marvel comics) and then N-canon (non canon, "what if" stories). LucasFilm actually employed a guy called Leland Chee whose official title was Keeper Of The Holocron and his job was to officiate over Star Wars continuity and decide what counted as canon and clear up discrepancies. Here's a crazy example: Obi-Wan Kenobi's homeworld always used to be listed as Coruscant but if you check his Wikipedia page you'll see that since 2010 his homeworld has been listed as a planet called Stewjon . That's because George Lucas was once being interviewed by Jon Stewart and he made a flippant remark that Kenobi's homeworld was called Stewjon and he jokingly confirmed he had always intended it to be and Leland Chee subsequently ratified this and made it official.  (This has subsequently been downgraded to "Legends" status, ie: the older canon which has been superseded by the new Disney canon and doesn't really count any more) It's pretty funny that George Lucas was pretty much the infallible Pope of Star Wars whose word was law/lore
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:04
|
|
|
Snowglobe of Doom posted:George Lucas was perfect when it came to Star Wars canon. Ed Greenwood actually had a similar status in his contract about the Forgotten Realms - anything he wrote or said was canon, except if there was something already published by the company that owned D&D that would contradict him. Ed's also historically been much nicer about not contradicting the works of others, he goes to lengths to not disagree with existing work, and openly compliments the things others have brought to the setting that he didn't come up with - like he's obliquely said there's some stuff TSR/WotC has done that he disagrees with, and sometimes he'll say "in my home campaign" (so pre-official publication) about something to make clear it's not official canon. Ed didn't undercut the pre-existing work of others with his own equivalents of midichlorians or "Stewjon," though. (Like Star Wars legends, the Forgotten Realms is now in kind of a new canon stage that Ed Greenwood isn't involved with. It's the result of the arguably worst retcon in the setting's publishing, and certainly the most embarrassing, if anyone cares to hear about it.)
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:14
|
|
|
Arivia posted:(Like Star Wars legends, the Forgotten Realms is now in kind of a new canon stage that Ed Greenwood isn't involved with. It's the result of the arguably worst retcon in the setting's publishing, and certainly the most embarrassing, if anyone cares to hear about it.) Is this the 4e retcons or did they do an even bigger and dumber retcon? (I care to hear about it.)
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:24
|
|
|
I’ll be honest I kind of liked the Star Wars tier system, even if it probably wasn’t necessary.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:32
|
|
|
The extended universe was dumb as hell, but I appreciate now that it actually moved things forward. The New Republic was established and the characters adjusted into different roles, and even if most of it was terrible it was still advancing. The sequel trilogy literally blew up the Republic and Luke's Jedi Order and then just wallowed in nostalgia forever.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:33
|
|
|
My favorite thing about Star Wars lore is that until the Disney acquisition it was by far the most consistent, cohesive collection of actual canon I think I was aware existed. There was something really unique about knowing that the Mara Jade I read about is the same Mara Jade someone else read about it another book, that her fate is the same, that it all isn't just multiverses and different studios and different versions. I loved that Star Wars was the antithesis to comic books' "anything goes, nothing matters" approach. Religions didn't put this much work into maintaining a consistency. I love that there is new Star Wars stuff though I'm absolutely oversaturated by it and probably won't care about Star Wars for another decade, and I know Disney is a profit machine and it's all about making money. But the pre-Disney acquisition of Star Wars is something I don't think we'll ever see again.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:35
|
|
|
Randalor posted:I checked wookiepedia, the first time someone had it, it was dropped into a gas giant. THEN it was pulled out with the force, and flown into a black hole because... that was the only way to destroy the prototype Death Star? For reasons? And that Death Star is different than the third Death Star that was almost completed. Which is also different from the time some Hutts built the Death Star's big laser and built a ship around it. That's just part for the genre. Star Wars, (the Green Lanter Corp and Nova Corps as well) was inspired by The Lensman series of pulp sci fi novels. Each novel had a recurring or new villainous Empire coming back with an even bigger super weapon until the last book where it was powered by a proto-Dyson sphere encapsulating and entire galaxy. It's also a series perfect for not aging well since the writer was a eugenescist and the hero was the end result of eons of selective breeding.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:35
|
|
|
Byzantine posted:The extended universe was dumb as hell, but I appreciate now that it actually moved things forward. The New Republic was established and the characters adjusted into different roles, and even if most of it was terrible it was still advancing. Also really funny that Disney has attempted to do some EU stuff but because they couldn't get their poo poo together in the slightest when it comes to any actual broader context or stakes in the movies, their trilogy is a complete dead end.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:37
|
|
|
Vandar posted:Is this the 4e retcons or did they do an even bigger and dumber retcon? I think it refers to the spell plague, some event where all magic disappeared for close to a century, and then the story starts back up after. For a setting that is literally defined by magic it was a stupendously terrible idea.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:38
|
|
|
DrBouvenstein posted:Aren't those creatures the reason (in old EU) Palpatine created the Empire? Like...he had a vision when he was a young Jedi about the galactic invasion, and thought the only way to repel the invasion was to create a giant, Galaxy-spanning empire? And the only way to do THAT was to go to the Dark Side, infiltrate the Republic, and eliminate the Jedi so nothing could stop the growth of the Empire? There was an insane amount of effort made to make the Yuuzhan Vong the culmination of the entire SW series. They were mentioned in Kotor 1, there was a one off book set during the prequels that had a tie in that wasn't known until later, the whole Palpatine vision thing, and then the Vong themselves being 100% organic technology who are immune/invisible to the force so it's the greatest threat ever. Also I think some later books kept including them as reasons for things, like Outward Bound, there was some Old republic character who shows up having been living as a Vong slave for decades.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 19:47
|
|
|
Vandar posted:Is this the 4e retcons or did they do an even bigger and dumber retcon? No, but it was a repercussion of the 4e changes (and nothing in the 4e stuff was technically a retcon, anyway. [again if you want more information happy to provide, but then we're getting to the point of me directly quoting from books instead of just making funny posts]). So, let's explain the Spellplague to everyone! Remember what I said about the Forgotten Realms feeling too detailed and too much for a lot of people? Well, WotC (Wizards of the Coast, the owners of Dungeons and Dragons) came up with a plan to fix that. In 2008, WotC released the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons - editions in D&D mean complete revisions of the ruleset, so it's pretty much a reset of the entire game as a game. As part of this, it's traditional to update and release a new version of the campaign settings the game takes place in, and as the flagship D&D setting since its introduction, the Forgotten Realms was first for an update. Except, WotC had in mind a bit more than an "update." Basically, they pulled a giant apocalypse event on the entire setting, overlaying it with regions from another planet, killing the goddess of magic and destroying the rules and ideas of how magic worked in the setting (this is the Spellplague), and then also moving the in-setting timeline forward about one hundred years. Weirdly, it's this last one that's actually the most destructive - people have mentioned absolutely tiny background characters from Star Wars like Osleo Prennerth and Davin Felth, and how it feels absolutely useless and counterproductive to focus on these characters so much. However, a lot of time and energy was spent on developing characters like that in the Forgotten Realms. Why? Because having a cast of background characters to engage with is actually really useful for playing D&D (again, see my previous note about how you know you've got a good game going when the players call the bartender by name.) As an aside, this is definitely the one change WotC's ever made to the Forgotten Realms that Ed Greenwood disagreed with, because he loves writing about these kinds of everyday people and all of them were dead after the time skip due to old age. So this new updated setting comes out, in-world 100 years later, with lots of changes (and some of them are some genuinely cool, interesting new things.) However, WotC didn't take this as an opportunity to change how products for the Forgotten Realms were produced - they made less sourcebooks (for gaming) but still lots of novels (fantasy novels for reading on airplanes*). Basically, to reiterate, it was an update - a good comparison is the various DC Comics Crises. The status quo has changed, there's new villains and heroes, it's a jumping point for new readers, old fans are annoyed, Superman is Black now, but there's still tons of new comics and stuff and it's all kinda gonna go back to the mean over time. And indeed, that happened - there was still a Forgotten Realms line developer acting as "traffic cop" (I believe it was still Rich Baker in 4e but I'm not 100% sure), canon was still actually the same, just pushed forward with a bunch of new stuff, and long time writers for the setting were still getting work doing game sourcebook stuff and also novels. With these new sourcebooks and novels, people picked up old details of the setting they liked and went "okay, what's happened to this in the intervening one hundred years." And here's where our thing that is going to get retconned gets involved. The "signature" big city (you know, the obligatory one every fantasy setting needs) in the Forgotten Realms is named Waterdeep. And Waterdeep has a very involved history that I'm going to recount absolutely none of to you except to say that it has a bunch of enchantments on it to protect it. And one of those enchantments, Ahghairon's Dragonshield, means no dragon can get into Waterdeep without the direct spoken permission of the wielder of the magic item that controls the enchantment, the Dragonstaff of Ahghairon. A novel got written about Waterdeep and in that novel, the writer established that a noblewoman had the staff and was using it responsibly. (A very popular novel, I should note.) There was a problem, though. A lot, a lot of long term D&D fans didn't like 4th edition D&D (a can of worms I'm not going to get into in this post). Suffice it to say, when 2014 rolled around and the new edition (5th edition) of Dungeons and Dragons was being developed, the lead designer (Mike Mearls) was under personal and corporate direction to make it a "big tent" edition and get all the D&D fans back to playing 5th edition. As part of this, the 5th edition team announced another update to the Forgotten Realms - not quite as big an update as the last one, but another update nonetheless. And it was very transparently a "we're moving things back how you like them!" update. It wasn't a retcon, it wasn't a reset, it was "okay, we've advanced the timescale ANOTHER ten years and the goddess of magic is back alive and we unmerged those parts from the other planet and everything cool you like is back PLEASE COME BACK" kind of update. (It was actually even worse than the 4e update in effect, as we'll kind of see.) As part of moving D&D forward to 5th edition, the actual production staff for D&D got cut to the bone. WotC was infamous for doing Christmas-time firings of their game design staff, but this was like the smallest it ever got. (It's been built back up since.) WotC shut down the novels division after one last series of books covering the update to 5th edition in setting, and stopped producing Forgotten Realms dedicated sourcebooks after the update as well. But, they did keep producing big hardcover deluxe adventures (basically pre-written games for a Dungeon Master to run and players to enjoy), a large number of which were set in the Forgotten Realms. And it's one of those hardcover deluxe adventures that lead to the new canon policy. The adventure at hand is called Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. Basically, the ruler of Waterdeep stole the city's treasury and a bunch of various secret societies want it back. (This is why it's called Dragon Heist, since the standard coin in Waterdeep is called a "dragon.") The players go on adventures in the city, eventually figure out that the treasury is hidden in a secret vault under the city and it's guarded by a dragon. (This is why it's called Dragon Heist, since it's a heist and the guardian is a dragon.) Okay, it's not great or well-written, you can tell they didn't do a ton of research on Waterdeep because some of these characters are acting very unusually for them, but WotC basically has no D&D staff any more and they outsourced designing this to another RPG company with some legit creds in general. Fine. Wait. There's a dragon with the heist? A dragon. In Waterdeep. What about Ahghairon's Dragonshield? Well, the designers thought of that, don't worry, the dragon is a GOOD dragon and it got the staff from Maaril the Dragon Mage, who had it back before the Spellplague/the 100 year time jump. Oh, well. Okay. Wait, what about that novel where it was established Nazra Mrays the noblewoman has the Dragonstaff now? What? What novel? They didn't tell us anything about any novels for this job. What loving novels? There's novels about this? Uhhh yeah we hosed up, so here's a quick edit to the book to cover for this. This was just an out-and-out retcon to fix the adventure design team's mistakes about who had the Dragonstaff. This was pretty much unheard of in Forgotten Realms canon, where retcons were an absolute last resort and instead they used a bunch of fun narrative/historical techniques to fix errors instead of saying something was wrong. The entire D&D staff (and the contractors who actually wrote the adventure) got pretty embarrassed. Shortly thereafter, at a big D&D fan event, they announced a "fan-friendly canon policy." Now, nothing except game sourcebooks with the 5th edition D&D logo on them were officially canon. Everything else could be referenced, but unless it was specifically included in a 5e sourcebook, it was no longer canon. Amazingly, this also fixed the issue with the Dragonstaff and prevented further embarrassment! Also, it meant that 25+ years of carefully designed shared setting material to be played in was no longer "canon," so gently caress you if you had your own games using that stuff WotC was just gonna do whatever they wanted. So that's the moment when the Forgotten Realms had its own "Disney/Legends" canon split. (I stick to the old stuff, if it wasn't obvious.) You might ask what happened to Ed Greenwood's Lucas-canon arbiter-ish status if this was the new policy. Something, and we don't know quite what (because again, Ed is publicly a very nice respectful guy and won't actually publicly say bad words about WotC) happened around the time of 5e's release to change Greenwood's contract for selling the Forgotten Realms to the owners of Dungeons and Dragons. We know that the contract changed because one very public (and publicly known) clause of it no longer applied: that the company that owned the setting would contract Ed Greenwood to write/design one book/supplement for publication every year. They released one novel by him in 2015, and that was it. Ed Greenwood no longer has anything official to do with the Forgotten Realms, although whatever the current contract terms are, they allow him to write unofficial Forgotten Realms stuff for sale (he's now running a Patreon for ubernerds to ask him questions.) I personally suspect that WotC effectively bought out the contract, as Ed was reaching retirement age and his wife was facing significant medical issues (a big financial burden, even in Canada.) *I didn't mention Forgotten Realms novels in my previous post because it would have extended it for basically no reason, but everything I wrote about sourcebooks also applies to them - they're canon, the traffic cop guided them, all of that stuff. There's like maybe one novel that's been decided to be non-canon ever, and I'd have to look up what it is because I can't remember off the top of my head and it's incredibly unimportant. I have to mention a novel now, because it's relevant. Arivia has a new favorite as of 20:32 on Jun 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:26
|
|
|
Vandar posted:DAVIN FELTH. My favorite go-to example is Dr. Evazan, who actually really does have the death sentence on twelve systems, among other insane details.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:28
|
|
|
pentyne posted:There was an insane amount of effort made to make the Yuuzhan Vong the culmination of the entire SW series. if I remember correctly, Outward Bound was the story of how Grand Admiral Thrawn found out about the Yuuzhan Vong, and why they scared him so much that he tried to reconquer the galaxy after the Emperor's fall. It was done from Thrawn's perspective, as opposed to Luke and Mara Jade finding out from the heroic side in the Hand of the Empire duology that served to set up the Yuuzhan Vong/New Jedi Order stuff. WHY DO I REMEMBER ALL THIS. Basically, I haven't read it but it would make sense for Outward Bound to include Vong/Vong-affected people, because it was actually a missing story prequel about Thrawn's planning for the Vong.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:29
|
|
|
Byzantine posted:The extended universe was dumb as hell, but I appreciate now that it actually moved things forward. The New Republic was established and the characters adjusted into different roles, and even if most of it was terrible it was still advancing. Wallowing in nostalgia is what the nerds want and what makes money. The Mandolorian completely abandoned what little new ideas it had to go back to Ahsoka and (horrific CGI) Luke and people lost their minds. People buy lightsaber toys and stormtrooper t-shirts, so that's it. Subscribe to Disney+ for more characters you've seen before doing familiar things!
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:31
|
|
|
I've only seen Star Wars 1-7 and they had kung fu and explosions and space magic and lasers in it. And in the end, that's all any of us need or any of you deserve. I hear 8 and 9 are bad though, but it was like all chuds that hated 8, and everyone hated 9?
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:44
|
|
|
Aramek posted:I've only seen Star Wars 1-7 and they had kung fu and explosions and space magic and lasers in it. JJ Abrams directed 7, and in typically JJ Abrams fashion left a bunch of open plot points but also didn't give anyone working on the next movies any answers to anything. Rian Johnson directed 8 and went 'okay, here's my answers to them, and most of them involve going HEY IT'S TIME FOR STAR WARS TO MOVE FROM NOSTALGIA AND TRY NEW AND DIFFERENT THINGS WITH NEW CHARACTERS.' JJ Abrams came back for 9 and went 'lol lmao nah I'm going to undo everything that 8 did and also just make a bad movie in general.' It was kind of a really big mess! You would think that, given how much care and planning they were putting into the MCU at the time that Disney would have went 'okay, we need to have a long term plan for this new Star Wars stuff' but no. No. There was no plan and they were flying by the seat of their pants the entire time. (I like 8 though. )
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:52
|
|
|
Aramek posted:I've only seen Star Wars 1-7 and they had kung fu and explosions and space magic and lasers in it. Chuds hated 8, but it had some very big problems that would require deft handling to follow up on, and then JJ came back and said "Lol, nope, not even gonna try," and there was basically no coming back from that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 20:53
|
|
|
Aramek posted:I've only seen Star Wars 1-7 and they had kung fu and explosions and space magic and lasers in it. Accurate. 8 went in some interesting new directions but didn't exactly execute perfectly, and happened to do a lot of things that piss off chuds so naturally it became hated and the studios evidently decided to pivot hard away from it. Because of that, and also because apparently the studios had zero overarching plans when they started making the sequel trilogy, 9 then ended up being a huge mess where nothing made any sense, and apart from having like one or two good action scenes, was pretty much the worst thing ever to come from star wars. I mostly liked 8 but YMMV. I haven't seen all the tv shows but I will say that Andor is easily the best thing to come out of Disney era star wars; I highly recommend it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 21:00
|
|
|
The Star Wars EU at least succeeded in keeping Star Wars alive in the massive gap between the original trilogy and the prequels. Some fans didn't even have a movie released during their lifetimes until episode 1 came out. Some of the best Star Wars video games came out in that period. Shadows of the Empire was a media project that was basically all the associated media of a new movie without an actual movie, starring Dash "we have Han Solo at home" Rendar. Then Episode 1 came out and all those enthusiastic teenage fans immediately regretted everything.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 21:16
|
|
|
ponzicar posted:Then Episode 1 came out and all those enthusiastic teenage fans immediately regretted everything. Here's a documentary from 2000 following some Star Wars super fans in Australia as they prepared for the premiere of Phantom Menace, the part where they interview them immediately after they've watched the film for the first time and are leaving the cinema is pretty funny. Some of them are obviously disappointed, some are trying to come to terms with what they just saw and convince themselves they might have liked it, some are determined to defend George Lucas no matter what https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HNfAoQbs4w&t=1440s E: I should also mention that I was a member of that Star Wars fanclub at the time, you don't see me at any point in the documentary but there's several scenes where I was just slightly off screen. I pretty much stopped going to the fanclub meetings soon after Phantom Menace came out Snowglobe of Doom has a new favorite as of 21:47 on Jun 7, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 21:26
|
|
|
Randalor posted:Didnt Kirk only flirt or have sex a handful of times over Star Trek's run? For someone with the reputation he has, he was really faithful to his true love his ship. I mean his ship. Guy really wanted to make love to his ship. Sex and kissing only a few times. But it's implied a lot. He had a tendency to run into a lot of his exs for instance.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 21:39
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 29, 2024 14:46 |
|
|
Shadows of the Empire was great, and its also funny now because they added Rendar's ship to Mos Eisley in the special edition as an Easter egg, so the ship is still canon but Dash and all the events of Shadows aren't.
|
|
#
?
Jun 7, 2023 21:47
|
|