Shyfer

Saw this on Reddit. Wondering what people think about it here.

https://i.imgur.com/zUR6PQM.png

I was surprised there was no mention of it here. This announcement comes from the Dungeon World+ Discord.

For some context, Luke Crane is most well known as the designer of the Burning Wheel rpg, and used to work at Kickstarter as VP of Community (and some controversies with it).

He also bought it alongside someone else, who seems to be a friend of Luke and coworker at kickstarter.

There's now a 2e channel/thread in the Dungeon World+ Discord where he's answering questions.

Any people familiar with Dungeon World here?

cross-posted from: https://ttrpg.network/post/7946465

From a blog post by Ben Riggs. I thought it was interesting.
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“Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men… They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care.” -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975

Do TTRPG Historians Lie?

The internet has been rending its clothes and gnashing its teeth over the introduction to an instant classic of TTRPG history, The Making of Original D&D 1970-1977. Published by Wizards of the Coast, it details the earliest days of D&D’s creation using amazing primary source materials. Why then has the response been outrage from various corners of the internet? Well authors Jon Peterson and Jason Tondro mention that early D&D made light of slavery, disparaged women, and gave Hindu deities hit points. They also repeated Wizards of the Coast’s disclaimer for legacy content which states:

“These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”

— Making OD&D

In response to this, an army of grognards swarmed social media to bite their shields and bellow. Early D&D author Rob Kuntz described Peterson and Tondro’s work as “slanderous.” On his Castle Oldskull blog, Kent David Kelly called it “disparagement.” These critics are accusing Peterson and Tondro of dishonesty. Lying, not to put too fine a point on it.  So, are they lying? Are they making stuff up about Gary Gygax and early D&D? 

Is there misogyny in D&D?

Well, let's look at a specific example of what Peterson and Tondro describe as “misogyny “ from 1975's Greyhawk. Greyhawk was the first supplement ever produced for D&D. Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, the same Rob Kuntz who claimed slander above, it was a crucial text in the history of the game. For example, it debuted the thief character class.  It also gave the game new dragons, among them the King of Lawful Dragons and the Queen of Chaotic Dragons. The male dragon is good, and female dragon is evil. (See Appendix 1 below for more.) It is a repetition of the old trope that male power is inherently good, and female power is inherently evil. (Consider the connotations of the words witch and wizard, with witches being evil by definition, for another example.) 

Now so-called defenders of Gygax and Kuntz will say that my reading of the above text makes me a fool who wouldn’t know dragon’s breath from a virtue signal. I am ruining D&D with my woke wokeness. Gygax and Kuntz were just building a fun game, and decades later, Peterson and Tondro come along to crap on their work by screeching about misogyny. (I would also point out that as we are all white men of a certain age talking about misogyny, the worst we can expect is to be flamed online. Women often doing the same thing get rape or death threats.) Critics of their work would say that Peterson and Tondro are reading politics into D&D.  

Except that when we return to the Greyhawk text, we see that it was actually Gygax and Kuntz who put “politics” into D&D. The text itself comments on the fact that the lawful dragon is male, and the chaotic one is female. Gygax and Kuntz wrote: “Women’s Lib may make whatever they wish from the foregoing.”

The intent is clear. The female is a realm of chaos and evil, so of course they made their chaotic evil dragon a queen. Yes, Gygax and Kuntz are making a game, but it is a game whose co-creator explicitly wrote into the rules that feminine power—perhaps even female equality—is by nature evil. There is little room for any other interpretation. The so-called defenders of Gygax may now say that he was a man of his time, he didn’t know better, or some such. If only someone had told him women were people too in 1975! Well, Gygax was criticized for this fact of D&D at the time. And he left us his response. 

I can’t believe Gary wrote this

:(

Writing in EUROPA, a European fanzine, Gygax said,

“I have been accused of being a nasty old sexist-male-Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gendered names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging[’] section, in the ‘Whores and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part dealing with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought perhaps of adding an appendix on ‘Medieval Harems, Slave Girls, and Going Viking’. Damn right I am sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room. They can jolly well stay away from wargaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.”

— -Gary Gygax, EUROPA 10/11 August-September 1975

So just to summarize here, Gygax wrote misogyny into the D&D rules. When this was raised with him as an issue at the time, his response was to offer to put rules on rape and sex slavery into D&D.    

Peterson & Tondro are truth-tellers

The outrage online directed at Peterson and Tondro is not only entirely misplaced and disproportional, and perhaps even dishonest in certain cases, it is also directly harming the legacies of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz and the entire first generation of genius game designers our online army of outraged grognards purport to defend.  How? Let me show you.

That D&D is for Everyone Proves the Brilliance of its Creators

The D&D player base is getting more diverse in every measurable way, including age, gender, sexual orientation, and race. To cite a few statistics, 81% of D&D players are Millenials or Gen Z, and 39% are women. This diversity is incredible, and not because the diversity is some blessed goal unto itself. Rather, the increasing diversity of D&D proves the vigor of the TTRPG medium. Like Japanese rap music or Soviet science fiction, the transportation of a medium across cultures, nations, and genders proves that it is an important method for exploring the human condition. And while TTRPGs are a game, they are also clearly an important method for exploring the human condition. The fact the TTRPG fanbase is no longer solely middle-aged Midwestern cis men of middle European descent, the fact that non-binary blerds and Indigenous trans women and fat Polish-American geeks like me and people from every bed of the human vegetable garden find meaning in a game created by two white guys from the Midwest is proof that Gygax and Arneson were geniuses who heaved human civilization forward, even if only by a few feet.

So, as a community, how do we deal with the ugly prejudices of our hobby’s co-creator who also baked them into the game the world loves? 

We could pretend there is no problem at all, and say that anyone who mentions the problem is a liar. There is no misogyny to see. There is no shit and there is no stink, and anyone who says there is shit on your sneakers is lying and is just trying to embarrass you. I wonder how that will go? Will all these new D&D fans decide that maybe D&D isn’t for them? They know the stink of misogyny, just like they know shit when they smell it. To say it isn’t there is an insult to their intelligence. If they left the hobby over this, it would leave our community smaller, poorer, and suggest that the great work of Gygax, Arneson, Kuntz, and the other early luminaries on D&D was perhaps not so great after all… We could take the route of Disney and Song of the South. Wizards could remove all the PDFs of early D&D from DriveThruRPG. They could refuse to ever reprint this material again. Hide it. Bury it. Erase it all with copyright law and lawyers. Yet no matter how deeply you bury the past, it always tends to come back up to the surface again. Heck, there are whole podcast series about that. And what will all these new D&D fans think when they realize that a corporation tried to hide its own mistakes from them? Again, maybe they decide D&D isn’t the game for them.

Or maybe when someone tells you there is shit on your shoe, you say thanks, clean it off, and move on. 

We honor the old books, but when they tell a reader they are a lesser human being, we should acknowledge that is not the D&D of 2024. Something like, “Hey reader, we see you in all your wondrous multiplicity of possibility, and if we were publishing this today, it wouldn’t contain messages and themes telling some of you that you are less than others. So we just want to warn you. That stuff’s in there.” Y’know, something like that legacy content warning they put on all those old PDFs on DriveThruRPG.  And when we see something bigoted in old D&D, we talk about it. It lets the new, broad, and deep tribe of D&D know that we do not want bigotry in D&D today. Talking about it welcomes the entire human family into the hobby.    To do anything less is to damn D&D to darkness. It hobbles its growth, gates its community, denies the world the joy of the game, and denies its creators their due. D&D’s creators were visionary game designers. They were also people, and people are kinda fucked up.   So a necessary step in making D&D the sort of cultural pillar that it deserves to be is to name its bigotries and prejudices when you see them. Failure to do so hurts the game by shrinking our community and therefore shrinking the legacy of its creators. 

Appendix 1

Yeah, I know Chaos isn’t the same as Evil in OD&D. But I would also point out as nerdily as possible that on pg. 9 of Book 1 of OD&D, under “Character Alignment, Including Various Monsters and Creatures,” Evil High Priests are included under the “Chaos” heading, along with the undead. So I would put to you that Gygax did see a relationship between Evil and Chaos at the time. 

Page 9 of Book 1 of OD&D. Note that the “Evil High Priests” are also chaotic.

I've been invited to join a game of Daggerheart. I like the critical role people, but otherwise know nothing about the game. I haven't read much about it or anything yet. And I haven't seen a thread about it on Lemmy yet, so I'm wondering what the different opinions on it so far are.

People enjoying it? Not liking it? Mixed reviews, making it a sort of niche game? Any good or bad comparisons with other fantasy ttrpg's?

It's a cross-post from lemmy.world. Hope I'm doing it right.

I saw an interesting post on Reddit related to worldbuilding and I thought I'd reproduce it here for the fediverse. It's from /r/Userfaulty and it's about where natural resources would appear normally in the world. It might not be completely accurate but it's a great start and inspiration.

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A Guide to Placing Resources on Fictional Worlds

Resource

I recently watched a great video on youtube by Artifexian where he showed how to place Fuels and Metal Ores on a fictional world. But I was left in a lurch. What about stones? What about valuable gems? What else should I at least make a note of that could be of strategic importance? Well...I did the digging and below is my abstract, I haven't taken geology classes in 20 years, guide to placing resources on your fantasy world maps. If you find something below that I grossly misjudged then let me know and I will try to fix it but keep in mind that these don't need to be accurate to the real world. They are just suggestions to help the worldbuilder that just wants help in placing it in a somewhat believable area. I tried to be as accurate as I could. The below locations will contain the highest quality of the materials or will be the easiest to find for your early hunter gatherer societies. edit Added more wood types for bows and arrows. Included areas for Iron. Added Clay and Tar.   Fuels

Coal remains of ancient tropical and subtropical swamps that then become compacted over lots of time remains become Peat then when buried further becomes Lignite Lignite buried further becomes more concentrated and becomes Bituminous Coal Then becomes Anthracite

Place Coal in areas that were low-lying tropical and subtropical swamps Higher quality coal in foothills of mountain belts that formed in those regions do not place Coal in interior of mountain chains

Graphite will form in interior of mountain chains instead of coal

Place Peat reserves in modern day low-lying wetlands

  Oil & Gas derived from remains of ancient plankton remains fell to bottom of ocean buried and compacted to form Shale Shale then becomes Oil Shale Oil Shale at greater depths becomes Oil and Natural Gas Oil will try to escape through the water table to the surface forming Gas/Oil Seep

Place Oil in locations that were once shallow tropical seas and lakes also normally forms along tectonic plates

  Metal Ores

Deposits of Copper forms around volcanic plate boundaries Copper, Copper-Gold, Copper-Molybdenum, or Molybdenum will also form near Volcanic Hotspots These will contain minor amounts of Lead, Zinc, Silver

Place a couple Tin-Tungsten deposits here too

Gold Place near the Copper deposits but still close to volcanic active plate boundaries

Place Gold with minor amounts of Silver and Copper Farther out place Gold with minor amounts of Silver, Lead, and Zinc Farther out place Gold with Minor amounts of Silver and Mercury Farther out place Iron-Copper-Gold deposits, will become sources of Uranium

Place Nickel-Copper and PGE-Chromium (Platinum, Palladium, Rhodium, Ruthenium, Osmium, Iridium) in the middle of stable plates

Place Iron around old mountain chains (this can be lone sections of hills or mountain bands that are not near active volcanic boundaries). Also can be placed around swamps and marshlands. Iron can be found almost everywhere but these locations will contain highest quality or be the easiest to find for early hunter gather societies.

Place Lead-Zinc-Silver in sedimentary basins along outskirts of coasts (fairly uncommon)

Place Aluminium in rain forests or very wet regions

Place some secondary deposits of all ores downstream from mountain deposits or inland a ways from the main source

  Stones

Ancient Chalk beds formed on the floor of ancient seas.

The Chalk later solidifies into Limestone. Can be placed where hills meet grasslands in non wet areas.

Flint (also called Chert) forms as lumps between layers and in cavities left in the sea floor in these Chalk beds.

Marble is formed from Limestone that has been subjected to intense heat and pressure. Marble will be placed near mountain ranges.

Jade is placed not too far inland along ancient or current convergent plate boundaries that occur or occurred along a coastline. They will be located on the steeper parts of drainage basins where erosion reveals the uplifted mineral. Was also used as stone age tools.

Obsidian is formed when water flows over volcanic lava to cool it rapidly. Placed near volcanic plate boundaries that no longer have large amounts of water. Water breaks down obsidian over time.

Granite is formed when molten rock is slowly cooled. It forms the bottom layer of all land continents. Placed along two land type convergent boundaries on the uplifted side where it is raised to the surface, making quarrying easy.

Sandstone is formed when sand is deposited in large quantities and under goes large amounts of pressure, heat, and drainage causing the sand and other minerals to "cement" together. Placed near ancient drainage basins that deposited sand from deserts or beaches, or alternatively where hills or mountains meet a dry desert.

Clay can be placed on hillsides, on lake and sea bottoms or on shores, and near volcanic hot spots that heat a water source.

  Gems

Agate place near ancient volcanic flows that met active drainage basins.

Amber occurs in ancient pine type forests then carried by rivers and tides to deltas in coastal regions, where they were buried over time.

Amethyst can be placed where ancient lava would flow near an iron deposit.

Aquamarine normally found in the interiors of tectonic plates and located near Granite and contains a Tin - Tungsten deposit in the same water shed.

Carnelian normally located near ancient volcanic plate boundaries with iron deposits and then are washed down to river beds in current times

Citrine is formed by heat treating purple Amethyst or can be found where Amethyst has been naturally heat treated

Coral is normally found between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn (the equator to the lower and upper temperate zones) but can be farther out where warm currents flow out of tropics.

Diamonds will go in the middle of stable tectonic plates (near Nickel-Copper and PGE-Chromium, make them rare)

Emeralds almost the same as an Aquamarine but when a PGE-Chromium deposit is in the same water shed.

Garnets can be found in Granite but is also found where two tectonic plates converge.

Jade is placed not too far inland along ancient or current convergent plate boundaries that occur or occurred along a coastline. They will be located on the steeper parts of drainage basins where erosion reveals the uplifted mineral.

Jasper is formed when ancient volcanic flows possibly met with ancient sea beds that then get reburied, are relifted, and then are washed down to river beds in current times.

Jet is similar to coal but is formed differently. Coal is from ancient wooded swamps, Jet is from wood material being washed into a body of water, becomes waterlogged, sinks and is covered by organic rich sediment.

Lapis Lazuli can be placed in high naked mountain valleys along plate boundaries and is somewhat rare. formed when underground magma contacts limestone.

Obsidian is formed when water flows over volcanic lava to cool it rapidly. Placed near volcanic plate boundaries that no longer have large amounts of water. Water breaks down obsidian over time.

Onyx is formed in the same way as Agates and can be placed in the same manner.

Opals are placed near or in sandstone deposits.

Pearls can form in any mollusk like creature in any body of water.

Peridot/Olivine is normally found around active lava flows near tectonic hot spots or where lava has fallen during a pyroclastic blast around an erupted volcano and cooled quickly.

Rubies are placed near convergent plates that has no iron but has trace amounts of Aluminium and Chromium. They are extremely rare. They should be placed in stream beds or watersheds leading away from the creation site.

Sapphire is the same as Rubies but has trace amounts of Titanium instead of Chromium.

Shells are found in tropical coastal areas with shallow tide pools.

Topaz can be placed near volcanic convergent plate boundaries.

Tourmaline can be placed similar to Granite. Can also be found in stream bed long distances from the source deposit.

Turquoise is is formed when copper deposits are transported through a watershed that contains aluminium deposits in arid environments.

  Wood

There is a large amount of wood and it would take much longer than I want to discuss all the types of wood. You should keep in mind at least the following historic common uses for wood but its up to you:

Dyes - Brazilwood

Paper - Mulberry, Bamboo, Beech bark was also used as a writing tablet

Glassworks - Beechwood

Shipbuilding - Elm for capstans and mastheads. Larch and fir for internal planking, masts, and spars. Oak for hulls. Walnut for rudders.

Weapons - Ash for spear shafts. Hickory for weapon hafts. Osage, Bamboo, Ash, Black Locust, Oak, Maple, Yew, Elm, or any flexible hardwood or animal horns for bows. Pine and Cedar is common for Arrows. Walnut for gun stocks.

Bridge Pilons - Alder

Construction - Sycamore, Oak, Bamboo, Poplar, Hickory

Forges for Iron and Bronze - Charcoal, Coal, Coke, Any abundant wood will do

  Oils

Olive Oil

  Glues

Pitch, Tar, Bitumen, Asphalt, Resin - Pine, Petroleum, Coal Tar, or Plants. Can be collected from Charcoal production, Tar pits where Oil Seeps occur. Resin is made from plants. Bitumen and Asphalt is Petroleum (crude Oil).

  Whales   Furs   Spices   Salts

can be placed along low-lying ocean beaches or inland in deserts that formed from evaporated inland seas

  Sources

Most of the information was gathered from these sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9qvQspSbWc&t=582s by Artifexian

http://www.stoneagetools.co.uk/what-is-flint.htm https://geology.com/gemstones/jade/#geology http://dianahurwitz.blogspot.com/2018/03/worldbuilding-gemstones.html https://www.getty.edu/publications/ambers/intro/4/#:~:text=Amber%20is%20formed%20from%20resin,hardens%20and%20forms%20a%20seal. https://sciencing.com/how-amethyst-geodes-formed-4913351.html https://www.minerals.net/mineral/amethyst.aspx https://www.gemrockauctions.com/learn/technical-information-on-gemstones/what-is-aquamarine-made-of#:~:text=Aquamarine%20Formation,magma%20which%20forms%20the%20gemstone.&text=Almost%20all%20aquamarines%20are%20formed,world%20where%20there%20are%20mountains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegmatite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryl#:~:text=While%20gem%20beryls%20are%20ordinarily,miarolitic%20cavities%20of%20the%20rhyolite. https://www.gemselect.com/english/gem-info/carnelian/carnelian-info.php https://coral.org/coral-reefs-101/coral-reef-ecology/geography/#:~:text=Most%20reefs%20are%20located%20between,in%20Florida%20and%20southern%20Japan. https://www.ga.gov.au/education/classroom-resources/minerals-energy/australian-mineral-facts/garnet#:~:text=Most%20garnet%20forms%20when%20a,and%20cause%20minerals%20to%20recrystallise.&text=Garnets%20can%20also%20be%20found,such%20as%20granite%20and%20basalt. https://www.minerals.net/gemstone/chalcedony_gemstone.aspx https://geology.com/gemstones/jet/#:~:text=Jet%20does%20not%20form%20in,degraded%2C%20and%20heated%20in%20isolation. http://www.gemstones-guide.com/Lapis-Lazuli.html https://nature.berkeley.edu/classes/eps2/wisc/Lect16.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl https://www.gemselect.com/other-info/about-peridot.php https://geology.com/gemstones/ruby-and-sapphire/

I just discovered Kobold Press's Black Flag Role Playing system and Tales of the Valorant game being made. I had no idea that was a thing.

Added with the ones I did know about:

• Critical Role's Daggerheart
• MCDM's new RPG (Matt Colville's company)
• And we can count the Pathfinder 2's updates if we want

I wonder how many other RPG's are being made as a result of that debacle.

It does seem like a lot. WotC really shot themselves in the foot spawning all this new competition, didn't they?