The Dragon's Bookshelf

Or, ‘That Time Wizards of the Coast Fucked Up D&D’s Lore’ 

At the risk of raising the spectre of edition war again, I feel like it’s worth going back and exploring that time that Wizards of the Coast fucked over basically all of their lore to chase a trend that wasn’t there. Admittedly this comes with the (begrudged) acknowledgement that quite a bit of of this is likely to be out of date now that fifth edition has been out for a good several years now, but that edition has its own problems and while I’m not really going to touch upon it now, my problems with it are many and numerous.

It should be noted from the outset that this is going to talk about fourth edition in a negative and critical context, but I’m not going to be talking about the rules of the actual game as a game. This is entirely centred on story, worldbuilding and lore, and how those were handled in fourth edition as compared to what came before. That being said, if you like fourth edition, and especially if you like its lore, I would not suggest reading further.

I’m going to go far beyond being critical in this; I’m going to get outright mean.

A shout out must go to Susanna McKenzie (@cydonian-mystery) for input and feedback on this.

I suppose the most important place to start is, in many ways, the beginning, by which I mean my own introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. Mostly because it’s directly linked to the main reasons why I consider the lore to have been ruined, but before I even start off with that, I’m going to have to tell you where the lore was before I can really adequately explain its downfall.

Fortunately, there are a lot of options. I’m gonna list basically some of the big ones that I’m familiar with outside of those two, so I’m sorry if this repeats stuff you’re already familiar with.

One of the biggest names in sword-and-sorcery is Fritz Leiber, the mastermind behind the various Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. A classical sword-and-sorcery double act between a barbarian-bard and a failed wizard’s apprentice turned swordsman-thief. You can find a decent collection on Amazon under the title Lankhmar, and it’s well worth checking out. 

On the hugely gritty end is the work of David Gemmell, especially with his character Druss the Legend who’s more or less the de facto protagonist of the Drenai series. His stuff is violent, brutal, and unflinching, and has almost no actual magic with the few fantastical elements being extremely subtle or even entirely absent at times. I’m usually mostly a fan of the high-magic stuff, so my fondness for his stuff is a pretty big outlier.

A little more magical but no less gritty is the work of Michael Moorcock, with his Elric of Melniboné stories. It’s about the emperor of an ancient, decaying kingdom, a cursed and physically weak man kept alive only through drugs or the presence of a vastly powerful black sword that drains the souls of its victims. In many ways he can be seen as a mirror opposite to Conan, frail, cerebral, himself a dabbler in evil sorceries, and a god who has far less distance and far more direct manipulation in his life. It’s great stuff.

Like I run a D&D blog. I understand that D&D is the most well-known and popular RPG in the world. But a lot of the time I see people going like “Hey I want to run a D&D campaign and throw out all the D&Disms and here’s all the notes I have for running a campaign about courtly romance and chivalry in a historical setting” and I’m just like STOP YOU DON’T NEED TO RUN THIS USING D&D

There’s a sort of a mistaken assumption that because D&D is the biggest game on the market and that it’s fantasy that it should be the go-to fantasy game but look it’s not D&D isn’t a generic fantasy game it’s a very specific kind of fantasy all of its own, one that steals liberally from swords & sorcery and high fantasy and adds fucking extradimensional cube robots for good measure

So next time you’re thinking about a fantasy campaign in a decidedly non-D&Dish setting consider instead of jamming the square peg that is D&D into a round hole trying to find a system that actually supports what you’re trying to do

All right then. I’ve been meaning to dust off my own D&D sideblog for a while, so here we go with providing some examples. I’m limiting this specifically to other types of fantasy outside of the standard high fantasy and sword & sorcery millieu.

Courtly Romance and Chivalry

There are a number of options for this, and they range from standard secondary world fantasy to more historical and mythological settings. My list here shouldn’t be treated as fully extensive.

Blue Rose - based on the romantic fantasy subgenre, specifically as seen in the works of Tamora Pierce and Mercedes Lackey. A lot of courtly drama and intrigue and swashbuckling, based in a fictional world.

Pendragon - naturally based off of Arthurian mythology, and having a lot of stuff given over to the court of Camelot and the chivalric adventures of the various knights. The same company also has a kickstarter for a spin-off called Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne that might be worth checking out.

Historical Fantasy

This one’s a bit more prominent as historical settings serve as an inspiration for a variety of fantasy worlds and games, and this of course invariably extends to settings that actually use historical settings with a degree of fantasy elements thrown in. Note that I’m going to emphasise Europe here simply due to greater familiarity with games in that millieu, and as a European myself I’m ill-equipped to judge how accurate or respectful games using other settings actually are.

Because of this, feel free to add other examples in reblogs

Chivalry & Sorcery - one of the early tabletop games inspired by D&D, taking a more pseudo-historical approach. It’s based on 12th century France and strives for a degree of historical accuracy and medieval politics.

World of Darkness, Dark Ages (including Vampire and Mage) - while the World of Darkness has earned some negative attention lately (and for good reason), the dark ages RPGs are still an old favourite of mine. Also worth checking out is Mage: The Sorcerer’s Crusade, set during the Renaissance. The Mage stuff has a really cool open-ended magic system worth checking out.

Artist Raven Mimura sure knows how to illustrate a tiefling. What is great about this piece is how topnotch every aspect is. This would be a great illustration even if it were of a boring old human. The pose is so evocative and the background so engaging. Everything in this really grabs your attention. 

This artwork was first printed in the 4th Edition Player’s Handbook in the spells section. It highlights the spell Tenser’s Floating Disc back when Tenser still owned the rights to the spell. In 5E the spell is just called Floating Disk.

image credit: Lucas Durham

A “Gemerator,” if you will. Since there is already a way to roll randomly for gemstones in the DMG (p. 134), this series of tables is for creating brand new gemstones that might not even exist in nature. These are the gems as you might find them in a dungeon. To determine their worth, I would use the DMG. The appearance of the gem might not affect its overall worth since we are inventing new gems, so just make it worth as many gold pieces as is appropriate for the circumstance. You can also use this with my jewelry generator.

Gem Type

Most precious stones and minerals considered gems come in two varieties, either a stone or a crystal. Roll 1d6 to determine the gem’s type:

1: Stonelike (Matte)

2-3: Stonelike (Glossy)

4: Crystalline (Opaque)

5-6: Crystalline (Translucent)

Gem Size

First roll for the gem’s size. Since this is D&D, the gemstones can afford to be much larger than in reality. Fun thing I never really thought about before making this is that gemstones are a good way for adventurers to carry around gratuitous amounts of wealth in a smaller amount of space. Imagine carrying around a one-centimeter diamond instead of 5000 gold coins in a one-ton chest. Don’t ever dismiss the importance of gemstones.

Gem Shape

Although a gem’s shape does come from its cut, to simplify this series of tables and increase the variety it generates, I’ve separated the gem’s cut and its shape into different tables.

Gem Cut

Most valuable gems found in a dungeon have already been cut unless said dungeon is a natural cave system. To determine how the gem was cut, roll on the table below. Before modern advances, most hard gems were “cut” by abrading two gems together of similar hardness, beveling the natural crystal’s corners into facets. The gem dust from the abrasion was gathered and mixed with water or oil for polishing the gems into their finished form.

Gem Color

Next roll for the gem’s color. I could have just gone with ROYGBIV colors but gems can come in many varying hues. If you roll a 20, the gem has two colors. Roll again, ignoring further values of 20. Then roll on the next table to determine how the two colors interact.

Gem Pattern

Duo-colored gems are common, especially among stones rather than crystals. Think things like banded agate or tigers eye.