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Libertad! posted:What about Gully Dwarf PCs? Do those actually exist? I've never seen them, because while you need to hate your party something fierce to inflict Kender or Tinker Gnomes on them, you need to hate yourself even more to be a Gully Dwarf. And I think you'd have just  'd yourself out of existence long before you reach that point.
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Jul 20, 2019 20:51
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So what are Gully Dwarves anyway? I've heard of them a couple of times, and the fact they're in the same breath as Kenders is a bad sign, but I've never got an example of what they really are. Or should I just wait for some of them to spill out onto the pages?
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Jul 20, 2019 21:00
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Omnicrom posted:So what are Gully Dwarves anyway? I've heard of them a couple of times, and the fact they're in the same breath as Kenders is a bad sign, but I've never got an example of what they really are. They're a race of dwarves who are essentially forced to play low-INT Fallout characters - and people treat them accordingly. Some of their learning disabilities are played for laughs to boot.
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Jul 20, 2019 21:45
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LuiCypher posted:They're a race of dwarves who are essentially forced to play low-INT Fallout characters - and people treat them accordingly. That is real ugly sounding.
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Jul 20, 2019 22:07
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Omnicrom posted:That is real ugly sounding.
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Jul 20, 2019 22:42
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Gully Dwarves show up in the very first book, I believe, so we’ll have plenty of room to dig into them sooner rather than later.
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Jul 20, 2019 22:51
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I read a ton of Dragonlance in my youth (it's what got me into all three of fantasy, D&D and tabletop gaming) and I still reread some of it pretty much every year. And every time I do, I find something new to say "I thought I liked that, but it's not good" about. I'm probably on the defender side, nonetheless. Chronicles is a mediocre telling of a railroaded campaign, but I still genuinely like Legends. And for all Weis and Hickman's flaws, they had a bunch of ideas that were legitimately interesting. The gods are fuckups, and even when we learn what they're up to, the mortals who were/are calling them out frequently aren't wrong. The Kingpriest is an unusual antagonist for the time. Sometimes the hero is a dick, and not in a cool way, in a selfish or cowardly way. Seldom Posts posted:There was a series of D&D video games from SSI in the late 80s (pool of radiance etc) and the one set in Dragonlance was great. One of the things it did was have the three moons waxing and waning across the top of the screen all the time and your wizards power would wax and wane automatically with them. The SSI Dragonlance games were the best of the Gold Box games, absolutely. dwarf74 posted:It's a thing which flew in the 80's but probably wouldn't today. I hope. I feel like they thought they were doing an interesting "literacy and math aren't the only ways to be intelligent" thing with the gully dwarves, but the way they actually wrote it, it came out way more "fantasy white man's burden."
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Jul 20, 2019 23:32
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Gully dwarves are just the logical conclusion of D&D's racial stat system.
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Jul 21, 2019 00:09
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W.T. Fits posted:Also, The Legend of Huma and all of Knaak's stuff involving minotaurs ruled, and I will die on this hill. Fight me. Also Kang and his draconians also kicked rear end.
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Jul 21, 2019 05:05
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Draconians survived into 4E (somehow, when nothing else Dragonlance did) and were low-key one of the best races due to constant sort-of flying. Also you could lick your weapon and cause it to do poison damage, or play your trap card when you die and explode.
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Jul 21, 2019 06:44
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Mr. Humalong posted:I’m definitely a latecomer to D&D (never played until 2017), but what’s the general opinion of the Dragonlance setting? I know next to nothing about any of the settings besides Forgotten Realms (seems like a kitchen sink setting) and Eberron (rules imo). I know this was on the first page but just a brief overview for people wondering 1. It's pretty much on the same tier as the Forgotten Realms as far as an innovative fantasy setting goes. FR probably edges it out now, since it's absorbed some other, less popular settings over time, and had more fantasy novels to expand on the different parts of the setting goes. The general presumption is a fairly standard High Fantasy world though. 2. Maybe because of how similar the setting is to the Forgotten Realms, it was deliberately introduced as a setting where the all gods had abandoned the world for a long time after mass genocides were done in the name of the good gods. 3. The Cataclysm the gods inflicted on the world caused lots of deaths, diseases, rapes, etc. of innocents, too. This might seem a little hypocritical of the good gods to allow and is best explained by: 4. Tracy Hickman is a devout Mormon and that leaks all over the setting, but particularly in its approach to gods, good and evil, and other moral issues. 5. This is also why Kender exist, because Tracy felt stealing was wrong, so he contrived of a race that compulsively and unwittingly nicked things and therefore were blameless. Normal halflings don't exist in the Dragonlance world, either, and rulebooks have even declared if a halfling traversed to the setting from another reality, they'd turn into a kender. Some other distinctive takes on D&D races were the tinker (steampunk) gnomes and a subspieces of dwarves called "gully dwarves" which, like LuiCypher said, were like making a whole race out of a Low-Int classic Fallout player characters. 6. There are three moons that are also gods, but only worshiped by the wizards of the setting: a white moon, a red moon, and a black moon (but most people don't even think the black moon is real because they can't see it in the night sky too well). The wizards of the setting draw their power from the moons. During the Catacylsm they vanished, too, but they came back eventually. I don't remember if this disrupted the wizards' abilities to cast magic at all. 7. Dragonlance was conceived out of effectively re-play stories/campaign summaries that were turned into the original module series and novels, and therefore could be considered a precursor of the modern youtube/podcast playthroughs that are all the rage now. 8. The tone of the iconic campaign, the immediate tie-in fiction, and the surge in interest from new waves of players drawn to both caused a kind of early grognard backlash from people who felt it wasn't in the spirit of ~True D&D~.
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Jul 22, 2019 13:11
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Nuns with Guns posted:
I don't think the moons vanished with the Cataclysm, I do think that happened when the gods left the second time though after Summer Flame. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Jul 22, 2019 |
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Jul 22, 2019 13:53
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Yeah, the gods of magic were always seen as separate/other despite definitely being part of the pantheon (since people always distrust magic), and even a lot of non-mages who knew that still didn't think of the connection with the moons as more than symbolic, so even though the moons were still there after the Cataclysm, nobody outside of the wizards bothered putting two and two together.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:04
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Nuns with Guns posted:4. Tracy Hickman is a devout Mormon and that leaks all over the setting, but particularly in its approach to gods, good and evil, and other moral issues.
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Jul 22, 2019 14:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm hoping people get into this as we go, because I hear it all the time but I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs so I don't know specifically what things in the books are being called out. I know I'm the one who pointed out "mortals calling the gods out aren't always wrong" as a plus, but Tracy Hickman's intent was indeed that the mortals were always wrong in that situation. That's why every true believer comes around to "the mortals abandoned the gods, the gods didn't abandon us," no matter how much time they spend pointing out that the gods were cruel for spending 350 years ignoring the world because the people begging for help weren't doing it right/needed to learn a lesson. There's also the appendix to Dragons of a Vanished Moon, which claims that all the gods were created by the High God (the Abrahamic one, in all but name; he even speaks in "ye"s and "thou"s), and Chaos wasn't actually the "father of all and nothing," he was just the most esteemed of the created gods until he rebelled and was cast out, and Reorx had a mental breakdown during Summer Flame and all the times he implied and outright stated that Chaos was somehow the highest of all were just what he believed in his delusions. This one got slapped with the non-canon label so quickly that I don't even think it made it into the softcover release (it helps that Weis had no part in it; it was Hickman and Matthew L. Martin, who's noted even in comparison to Hickman for really, really wanting Dragonlance to be Christian).
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Jul 22, 2019 15:15
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm hoping people get into this as we go, because I hear it all the time but I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs so I don't know specifically what things in the books are being called out. Mormons, like draconians, have a special garment that brings them closer to Takhisis, and when they die it turns them to stone/causes them to explode/puddles them into acid.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:29
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Dragonlance's morality is, in general, pretty screwed up - I suspect it's less the Mormon influence as D&D alignment wackiness. It leans very heavily into the idea that Neutrality should be a balance between Good and Evil, and that this is somehow better than everything being Good.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:37
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I feel like the neutral balances good and evil thing is the result of people completely misunderstand some assorted light/dark yin/yang positive/negative duality poo poo without realizing that good and evil do not map onto that. No one should want to balance evil with good. It probably made more sense back when law/chaos was the only alignment axis.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:49
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tzirean posted:I know I'm the one who pointed out "mortals calling the gods out aren't always wrong" as a plus, but Tracy Hickman's intent was indeed that the mortals were always wrong in that situation. That's why every true believer comes around to "the mortals abandoned the gods, the gods didn't abandon us," no matter how much time they spend pointing out that the gods were cruel for spending 350 years ignoring the world because the people begging for help weren't doing it right/needed to learn a lesson.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:56
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Even as a kid I realized that the Cataclysm made zero sense at all. Punishing generations of people because some rear end in a top hat was really arrogant and petitioned management for the ultimate promotion was nonsensical, only the most die-hard fundie "God has a plan that involves little toddlers in Africa dying of AIDS" apologists would go for that poo poo.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:19
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Glagha posted:I feel like the neutral balances good and evil thing is the result of people completely misunderstand some assorted light/dark yin/yang positive/negative duality poo poo without realizing that good and evil do not map onto that. No one should want to balance evil with good. It probably made more sense back when law/chaos was the only alignment axis. It comes from having alignments be things - like, real factions that you belong to - instead of moral descriptions you put on peoples' actions.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:30
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Glagha posted:I feel like the neutral balances good and evil thing is the result of people completely misunderstand some assorted light/dark yin/yang positive/negative duality poo poo without realizing that good and evil do not map onto that. No one should want to balance evil with good. It probably made more sense back when law/chaos was the only alignment axis. Law/chaos being the only alignment axis predates Dragonlance, and indeed, AD&D by quite a few years.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:53
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Madurai posted:Law/chaos being the only alignment axis predates Dragonlance, and indeed, AD&D by quite a few years. Which reminds me of Shin MegaTen, which uses the same single axis and posits neutrality as being more about ensuring that neither side achieves total dominance - hence, the endgame for the neutral path sees you beat the poo poo out of Michael and Lucifer.
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Jul 22, 2019 17:57
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Glagha posted:I feel like the neutral balances good and evil thing is the result of people completely misunderstand some assorted light/dark yin/yang positive/negative duality poo poo without realizing that good and evil do not map onto that. No one should want to balance evil with good. It probably made more sense back when law/chaos was the only alignment axis. Early D&D derived the whole alignment system from Moorcock. Moorcock intended Law and Chaos as cosmic forces that influenced human agency invarious ways. His characters were often bound to follow one path or the other, never being happy in having their lives dictated by forces beyond their control. Moorcock’s point was, as you point out, that the best way was a then trendy new-age inspired ideal of finding a balance within the self, independent of outside forces. Following on what Dwarf74 wrote, the idea of a law/chaos dichotomy becamse an artefact in D&D, being kept from the earlier editions without the creators really understanding the point. The idea of neutrality being ‘there much be as much good as evil’ being the utterly dumb end result. You see, neutrals must believe that if you get a nice ice cream cone then you should also get punched in the face, to balance things out. A totally sensible position.
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Jul 22, 2019 20:03
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Dragonlance actually predates Forgotten Realms as an official published setting, it should be noted. TSR bought the Realms from Ed because they wanted a new setting to put products in that was less complicated than Dragonlance, and wasn't burdened by their ongoing litigation with Gygax.
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Jul 22, 2019 20:18
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homullus posted:You'd think that people would have had enough of silly tinker gnomes; Your house explodes. Again. (Why did I stuff my whole bed with guncotton?)
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Jul 22, 2019 21:11
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Battle Mad Ronin posted:You see, neutrals must believe that if you get a nice ice cream cone then you should also get punched in the face, to balance things out. A totally sensible position. Not helping matters is the idea that "neutral" is not just the idea of balance, but also not caring about anything because "true neutral" is the nature/druid alignment.
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Jul 22, 2019 21:15
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Battle Mad Ronin posted:You see, neutrals must believe that if you get a nice ice cream cone then you should also get punched in the face, to balance things out. A totally sensible position. This feels more like what people picked up on as uproariously funny when they were introduced to D&D at age 10, and then later they didn't mature, and well...
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Jul 22, 2019 21:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:I'm hoping people get into this as we go, because I hear it all the time but I don't know anything about Mormon beliefs so I don't know specifically what things in the books are being called out. Oh, we'll get there. Just you wait for Goldmoon and Riverwind.
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Jul 22, 2019 22:04
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Even as a kid I realized that the Cataclysm made zero sense at all. Punishing generations of people because some rear end in a top hat was really arrogant and petitioned management for the ultimate promotion was nonsensical, only the most die-hard fundie "God has a plan that involves little toddlers in Africa dying of AIDS" apologists would go for that poo poo. coughNegroDoctrinecough
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Jul 22, 2019 23:17
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remusclaw posted:I don't think the moons vanished with the Cataclysm, I do think that happened when the gods left the second time though after Summer Flame. Oh yeah you're right I'm getting the first and second Cataclysms mixed up, my bad. The moons just hung around the first time and nobody thought much about it. Battle Mad Ronin posted:Early D&D derived the whole alignment system from Moorcock. Moorcock intended Law and Chaos as cosmic forces that influenced human agency invarious ways. His characters were often bound to follow one path or the other, never being happy in having their lives dictated by forces beyond their control. Early D&D's law/chaos logic more likely came out of Three Hearts Three Lions, which was kind of convergently created at about the same time as the first Elric stories. The law/chaos divide there is a more explicit good/evil split.
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Jul 22, 2019 23:35
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I'm ashamed to say I never made the connection. Thank you very much, the minute you posted it I was like "ah poo poo, yeah, exactly."
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Jul 22, 2019 23:43
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Re: Moorcock, are the Elric books any good? Do they hold up at all? I've known about how influential they are since I was a teenager and used them as a touchstone for like, explaining to people what a Hexblade is or whatever, but I've never actually read any of them.
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Jul 23, 2019 00:22
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homullus posted:What's wrong with tinker gnomes, aside from ubiquity? Before those, gnomes were "essentially dwarves, but you'll only ever meet one, and they'll be an illusionist." Tinker gnomes are a series of endless unfunny jokes about over-engineering that only engineers like. And they directly inspired World of Warcraft's gnomes, which are the same tired joke, but more of it. Even putting aside the obnoxiousness, both in play and in the books, of the gnomes that make weird useless devices that don't work right and are constantly speaking in technobabble, I would always prefer a magical forest gnome to one that just does steampunk inventing in a setting that poorly accommodates it. David the Gnome ruled, High Tinker Mekkatorque does not rule. Meinberg posted:Gully Dwarves show up in the very first book, I believe, so we’ll have plenty of room to dig into them sooner rather than later. They show up for a brief comedic interlude, but there's an entire book about Flint's backstory with them and it is so much worse. Lurdiak fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 02:15
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Yeah, tinker gnomes could have been pretty cool, but... They use catapults and nets to get up and down levels in their dumb mountain lab. Someone says "why not stairs" and they're all "Stairs, what are stairs? OK so we should look into this stairs thing maybe, but maybe not because the catapults work just fine about 5% of the time. But stairs you say? Hmmm, what a novel concept! How could they be "improved" in a comedy way that kills the user 3/4 of the time though?" and they're all like that all the time about everything and that's it, there's no actual payoff, that's the only joke and it's the whole joke. Like, you're waiting for the guy you've seen to be an exiled fuckwit gnome, or the whole dumb thing to be a weird way of misdirecting the enemy, or something, anything to make it less stupid, but nope, it's exactly as idiotic as it looks. And I feel like that's a microcosm of the Dragonlance setting. It shows you something, and you think "that sounds like it's gonna be neat!" but it's only ever exactly what it looks like and it's usually kinda dumb. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Jul 23, 2019 |
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Jul 23, 2019 02:22
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IIRC Tinker Gnomes were created by a magic chaos rock turning an entire dwarven city into a group of damaged fuckwads.
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Jul 23, 2019 02:36
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Zeroisanumber posted:IIRC Tinker Gnomes were created by a magic chaos rock turning an entire dwarven city into a group of damaged fuckwads. A "magic chaos rock" turns an otherwise industrious city into a madhouse full of deranged maniacs? Written in the 80s? What could it mean?
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Jul 23, 2019 02:40
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Re: Moorcock, are the Elric books any good? Do they hold up at all? I think they're pretty okay to good. Like most pulp series it can vary a lot, and you have to be tolerant of the conventions of pulp stories or else you'll probably just hate it. As far as that goes, I think Elric's stories are some of the better Influential Pulp. It more regularly does crazy weird poo poo, and is often less blatantly racist (but it's still racist).
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Jul 23, 2019 03:06
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Zeroisanumber posted:IIRC Tinker Gnomes were created by a magic chaos rock turning an entire dwarven city into a group of damaged fuckwads. This is also the origin of kender, and I believe gully dwarves as well.
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Jul 23, 2019 03:41
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No. 1 Apartheid Fan posted:Re: Moorcock, are the Elric books any good? Do they hold up at all? I love the Elric books and can only recommend them. They are very imaginative, and while you can see how a lot of them has become cliches, it is interesting to see how differently the original ideas play out compared to what later became the accpeted trope. Also they are generally short, 120-150 pages is the norm, which is nice as a contrast to modern fantasy fiction where the publishers apperantly insist that a book cannot be wrapped up in less than 500 pages. If you are into that kind of thing, there’s an excellent French comic adaptation currently coming out, published in english by Titan comics. Beautifully drawn and captured the character to a point where Moorcock himself has said he now consider the comics better than his own work. If you read an Elric book and like it, or just want to dig deeper, I would recommend some of Moorcock’s other fantasy heroes, all part of the same multiverse. There’s the Corum series that I enjoyed greatly. Also Hawkmoon is some epic fantasy set in post-apocalyptic Europe being menaced by a resurgent British Empire ruled by aristocrats that might be the most unambiguously evil human characters ever written in fantasy.
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Jul 23, 2019 06:36
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