[VRGtR]: Alhoon's ramblings and discussions of them

[Five]

I want someone to explain why is it so important to have an equal amount of evil characters of all genders (although, correct me if I am wrong but I didn't hear about any transgender or gender-fluid NPC appearing in the new book, unless if Hazlik finaly managed to take over Eleni's body*). Yes we know that what most people define as evil can be found everywhere in any place of the world , in any social class and gender becuase it is as diverse as people are, but why is it so important to be represented as evil and why is the new book congratulated as being diverse by making people belonging to "all"(?) genders and racial backrounds evil.

Here's my crack at it: because emos are cool now, and they like to digitally cut themselves and bleed out over the internet. Logic has no place in their world.

Wizards tapped the trend and are roleplaying with them. It's an in-house joke. Profitable game, that.

I dunno. I'm being a bit facetious here. I really don't care. I just like to think Ravenloft when I'm thinking about Ravenloft. Can't wait for the shithawks to fly away so I can see what's what.

I have the book now, but I'm 7000+ kms from home/it. Seven month contract. It is what it is, but I refuse to pay $30 for a digital file. The least they can do is grease it first...

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I guess my point is that if they cared at all about making a product that better appealed to long-time Ravenloft fans, they certainly know where/how to find us.

certainly, but I don't think that was their goal.

[onmyoji]

certainly, but I don't think that was their goal.

Oh of course. That "if" in my comment you quoted was meant to be an absolute hypothetical. Apologies for not writing clearly.

— onmyoji

[kourkenko]

I guess my point is that if they cared at all about making a product that better appealed to long-time Ravenloft fans, they certainly know where/how to find us.

certainly, but I don't think that was their goal.

Let's face it, the book wasn't written for us and it is understandable, we already have almost every product that can interest us. I hope it is a book to test the viability of relaunching the setting but i highly doubt it.

DOes someone knows how are the reactions about it ? As 80% of the population I don't have any social media so i don't know.

[lowfyr]

We already had LGBT characters, for years.

Oh I know. I didn't say there weren't any. Just that there weren't as many minority / female / LGBTQ+ characters as there were presumably straight white men. Of course there were some, but not as many as there probably should be by today's standards.

And I still say that the best way to fix that would've been for WotC to give us 6-12 completely new domains instead of trying to re-work the old ones.

— onmyoji

The Problem is that outright saying that someone is gay for example was not really an option during the 90s or before in an US RPG. In comics you could imply stuff like Mystique living with a woman but outright saying it would not have been possible. That started to change in the 90s but it was still a long way to what we have today.
And the RPG industry would have the same problems esp. after they had the "RPG equals devil worshipping" idiocy earlier. Avoiding anything that could get them into hot water was a thing after that.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

I guess my point is that if they cared at all about making a product that better appealed to long-time Ravenloft fans, they certainly know where/how to find us.

certainly, but I don't think that was their goal.

Let's face it, the book wasn't written for us and it is understandable, we already have almost every product that can interest us. I hope it is a book to test the viability of relaunching the setting but i highly doubt it.

DOes someone knows how are the reactions about it ? As 80% of the population I don't have any social media so i don't know.

Reactions are very mixed. Sites like Polygon are calling it stunning and brave, but fan reaction is mixed.

Though I can guarantee if it wasn’t for the genderflipping and race switching, Polygon, Vice et al. would barely be mentioning it.

[alhoon]

To be fair Drinnik, that sites are calling it "brave" instead of "good and imaginative" speaks for itself.

Disclaimer for those that didn't follow my earlier posts: I like the book regardless, but I won't blindly say it doesn't have a lot of flaws. Also, this is not a product of love like the Kargatane-written Gazetteers were. This is a commercial undertaking, with Public Relations with the "new generation" of players as the main focus of the book.

[kourkenko]

[

DOes someone knows how are the reactions about it ? As 80% of the population I don't have any social media so i don't know.

Reactions are very mixed. Sites like Polygon are calling it stunning and brave, but fan reaction is mixed.

Though I can guarantee if it wasn’t for the genderflipping and race switching, Polygon, Vice et al. would barely be mentioning it.

I find strange to see people apllauding the "new" Drakov as stunning and brave. So, they are applauding the fact that the worst of the worst is now "diverse" rather than withe male. Hitler is now a woman, the abusive relationship is a lesbian one (Mordenheim), Bluebeard is now tortured by his wifes and the victim now, the only one black darklord is killed and the darklord of Staunton Buff ("rewarded" for his cowardice) is now a woman...

They are welcoming this with open arms rather than thinking about how this characters are the ennemis and are created to show the worst part of mankind. I will never understand them ^^.

To be fair Drinnik, that sites are calling it "brave" instead of "good and imaginative" speaks for itself.

Disclaimer for those that didn't follow my earlier posts: I like the book regardless, but I won't blindly say it doesn't have a lot of flaws. Also, this is not a product of love like the Kargatane-written Gazetteers were. This is a commercial undertaking, with Public Relations with the "new generation" of players as the main focus of the book.

The crunch is good but imo the way WotC wrote the fluff can bring them a bigger and worst backlash than the "orcs are black people" (it was proved this peoples didn't even played the game lmao). Just put a healine with "WotC depict a certain person from WW2 as a woman". and it would be a freaking disaster. But since Polygon and co don't even know what they writing, it should be fine...

If only they had created new domains rather than use gender swapping...

Btw i didn't find if the Domains of Dread are still in the shadowfell or something entierly different.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

I should point out that I’m being hyperbolic when I say “stunning and brave”. It’s a phrase from South Park.

What they’re actually doing is saying “this is the best D&D book ever [and that’s not my hyperbole] and this is the way D&D should go forward with inclusion.”

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

I find strange to see people apllauding the "new" Drakov as stunning and brave. So, they are applauding the fact that the worst of the worst is now "diverse" rather than withe male. Hitler is now a woman, the abusive relationship is a lesbian one (Mordenheim), Bluebeard is now tortured by his wifes and the victim now, the only one black darklord is killed and the darklord of Staunton Buff ("rewarded" for his cowardice) is now a woman...

I'll grant you it's a weird thing to celebrate, but in a perfectly diverse world, the range of evil characters and the range of good characters would look largely the same from a demographic perspective. I've no doubt there are people would would want all villains to be written as white hetero males, but that's not an honest goal of the majority of the inclusion crowd. As mentioned, making all the Vistani paragons of virtue to avoid offense is not progress, and it wouldn't be so with LGBT or other minority groups. And lets face it, we have a weird relationship with the darklords as fans. They are all by definition reprehensible, but also by definition tragic and relatable. So we find ourselves rooting for some very bad people a lot of the time. As DMs, we roleplay the bad guys. In novels, like I Strahd, or Baroness of Blood they are sometimes what passes for a protagonist. How many of us here "love" Strahd or Azalin or Harkon, despite them being mass murderers? Heck, we have emojis of the darklords here. (aww, what a cute, happy, laughing evil tyrant: ) It's fun to play the bad guy sometimes. People like to dress up as Darth Vader, and watch movies/shows centered on Hannibal Lecter and Dexter and Walter White. Remember, no NPC in and RPG has ever ACTUALLY killed someone, it's all just make believe. So again, it is indeed weird to want to see yourself in the bad guys, but many of us do.

Btw i didn't find if the Domains of Dread are still in the shadowfell or something entierly different.

Yes, the domains are explicitly in the Shadowfell still. "The Domains of Dread consist of innumerable demiplanes hidden amid the Plane of Shadow." VRGtRL p.6

[FiranDarcalus]

Just to piggyback on what GonzoRon said, real representation means portraying the bad and good guys diversely. I'm drawn to the funny line Chris Rock said when he was on Ken Burns' baseball series on PBS. He was talking about integration in baseball and saying real integration did not happen because of Jackie Robinson, but that real integration happened when super mediocre black baseball players joined the MLB, because that meant that marginal black players were able to replace marginal white players.

Same thing here to an extent; real diversity means you have POC & LGBTQ+ characters that are horrific villains as well as heroes. I of course still wish they would not have flipped existing characters and just created new ones who are their own people instead of being stigmatized as the gender flipped Vlad Drakov, but I totally agree that representation means representing EVERYONE, even the bad guys.

Just my two cents....but seeing as how here in Canada we no longer have pennies, I'll say that's my 5 cents!

[onmyoji]

The Problem is that outright saying that someone is gay for example was not really an option during the 90s or before in an US RPG. In comics you could imply stuff like Mystique living with a woman but outright saying it would not have been possible. That started to change in the 90s but it was still a long way to what we have today.
And the RPG industry would have the same problems esp. after they had the "RPG equals devil worshipping" idiocy earlier. Avoiding anything that could get them into hot water was a thing after that.

Oh I'm aware of how that couldn't be portrayed. And it's one thing to take a character who was inferred to be gay back then (like Alanik Ray) and finally say it explicitly in a guide like this. I have ZERO problem with that. It's quite another to just suddenly saying "Oh yeah, by the way, Strahd is gay now" for no reason other than diversity and inclusivity. (Note: I am well aware that Escher is a thing in 5E.)

— onmyoji

[onmyoji]

Same thing here to an extent; real diversity means you have POC & LGBTQ+ characters that are horrific villains as well as heroes. I of course still wish they would not have flipped existing characters and just created new ones who are their own people instead of being stigmatized as the gender flipped Vlad Drakov, but I totally agree that representation means representing EVERYONE, even the bad guys.

I'm with you on that, but one thing to remember is that this book is in no way designed for its players to actually play as any of the various darklords. If that were the case, I could imagine a greater necessity to portray them as diverse and inclusive. But it's still a really weird flex to take a character initially based on equal parts Vlad Tepes and Hitler and *poof* make them a woman for the sake of diversity. I mean, societally, we know evil is not restricted by gender, or skin color, or sexual preference. But I certainly agree with whomever earlier asked how it's a victory for representation to say that women and minorities can be inhumanely evil too.

And further, swapping the gender of someone based on Hitler then provides alternate negative angles by which this change can be read that are unlikely to have been intended. I'll leave it to your imagination what might occur if they had instead made Drakov black and the public then found out he was originally based on Hitler. Scandal waiting to happen if you ask me. Regardless, constructing a new powerful female or minority darklord would have been a different story altogether. WotC could've just left the problematic material by the wayside and populated Ravenloft with what they deemed better.

Surely, it might have also been much better to focus on altering gender or race among NPCs—not that there aren't already a lot of strong women in Ravenloft, many of which are never mentioned in VRGtR. It wouldn't have been difficult for WotC to create more minority NPCs, like perhaps a black character who is a scholar and sometimes-friend-sometimes-rival to Van Richten. Populating the NPC list this way would've been a breeze, and thus demonstrate that there are more strong women and minority figures in Ravenloft—ones that are not immediately defined by the fact that they've performed reprehensible actions the likes of which history sees only rarely.

— onmyoji

[alhoon]

Ah... New Hazlan. I like the new place BUT I would certainly tone down down the magic. Magocracy yes, powerful mages yes, evil-harry potter vibes yes, but no floating towers by the dozen and moving fortresses etc. I will keep the "spam fabricate for what we need" part of Sly-var though, but I will make it a center for trade. The "Magic factory" part where a mage walks in a warehouse bored, chants for 10 minutes over logs and walks away 10 minutes later leaving the muggles to haul out the 30 tables the mage made.
Also I don't understand how Hazlik got Azalin's curse and I honestly don't like it. Frankly, I think Hazlan needs a new darklord. I will probably go with Eleni of Toyalis / Hazlik symbiot.

I also find ... annoying the "roll an extra dice, and then go roll another one and check a table" for the wild surges. I never liked them in sorcerers and I don't like it now. I wish there was a system I would like for unpredictable magic.

Anyway, I noticed the new Hazlan is about 1000 sq. miles. France is supposed to have in present borders 18-20M people before the plague. I.e. France had about 90000K people in Hazlan-sized area without magic to support the farms and without magic to turn the farms to wasteland. That would give us probably around 60K people.
Which means, Hazlan is being quickly depopulated. The darklord (Hazlik officially but I will go with Eleni post Hazlik's kaboooom ritual in the Gaz) has reasons to be worried.

Anyway, I think this domain is one of the easiest to add to the canon. Namely: Hazlik's big ritual went kaboom, Hazlan was ripped from the Core, it turned many Rashemani to powerful mages, it caused the wild magic and indeed wiped out the Mulan. The Rashemani mages mostly fell under Eleni and established a magocracy. Eleni - spurred my Hazlik's thoughts - wants to escape or at least get Hazlik out of her head, but she can't cause she's a darklord. So, she drinks the same potions Hazlik drunk and curses at him when he berates her for her inability to get the heck out of the dying domain.
15 years later... this is how Hazlan now is.

[alhoon]

Call me crazy, but I prefer the new Falkovnia from the old one. If only it had more time...
Anyway, it is very easy to throw new Falkovnia in the old. Simply assume Azalin had enough of the foolish merc and sent his endless hordes. Drakov's curse blocked him from winning (we go with the 'he was never more than a bloody merc boss; he had his moments but he was no genious) and he was quickly killed as a big loser by Vladeska that was better than him in every regard and was biding her time.
And here we are.

PS. "The party discovers a town where zombies have begun acting strangely: plowing fields, tarrying in shops, and congregating in the crumbling temple. What’s causing this odd behavior?"
Toben!?

Question: Do you guys think the people she kills/sacrifices show up in the next zombie wave?