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 Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:37 am
It had been a while since Yuki had had the chance to run Dungeons and Dragons for anybody.
Well……anyone more than a couple-odd kids at a gaming store, with a D&D Next Adventure League module that had a bunch of attached lore the kids in question generally were not up on understanding—an experience that Yuki largely hadn’t enjoyed very much. Trying to explain the significance of Ravenloft this, or Strahd von Zarovich that, or what the in-character current situation was in ways the players had actually comprehended without wasting the limited time they’d had available to them? That experience had almost broken him off DMing anything, ever again.
It had been even longer, frankly, since Yuki had tried to explain not only the hows, whys, and wherefores of setting lore, but also the basic mechanics of how to play. Yet, here he found himself: sitting at the kitchen table with a pile of dice, a couple stacks of hardback books (as well as a tablet with several relevant PDFs on it), ********, and one of his weird little magical girl friends—Liánlí, the one with the long braid, who sometimes ran around as a magical Knight of Saturn called Kaifeng and had more than a passing interest in ******** planet (whilst ******** had more than a passing interest in making friends with Liánlí’s significant soulmate from outer space, or whatever said guy was).
This should’ve felt like no big deal. Everybody was a noob at some point, and even if it had been a while, Yuki had taught the game to many noobs before. He’d felt like he’d prepared enough for this, but now that he had Liánlí sitting opposite him and tapping his long fingers along the edges of Yuki’s books with nary a visible sign that he had no idea what was going on? Something had Yuki feeling like he was gonna ******** up everything in ways that gave Liánlí the wrong idea, or worse, meant that he wouldn’t have a good time with the game.
Worse, Cersei seemed determined to help as little as possible, being more than slightly preoccupied with introducing Liánlí’s Táotáo to some of her favorite toys.
Trying not to sigh, Yuki helped himself to a long swig of coffee. He fiddled with a green star charm that ******** had brought home for him. It felt like nothing was helping. Noobs were one thing. People he hadn’t gotten to know very well yet were another. Putting them together was usually fine enough—but adding the extra need to teach Dungeons and Dragons 101 on top of it? To someone whom ******** had met because of Magical Girl Bullshit? Today, that decided to set Yuki’s nerves on edge.
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:37 am
……Oh, no. Kiyoshi recognized almost implicitly when Yuki’s nerves weren’t in the right place, or when he needed a little extra assistance with making something happen. Right now, the way he was hitting his coffee had Kiyoshi thinking (or at least hoping) that Yuki was in the latter place, mentally. With some social lubrication out of Kiyoshi, they could hopefully still make this happen and not either leave Liánlí feeling massively let down, or leave Yuki feeling like he’d ******** up by not getting into the right head-space as easily as he’d wanted to.
As Kiyoshi sniffed at his own mug of tea (not steeped enough yet), Liánlí kept perusing the books on the table. The one he slipped out from halfway down a stack had a weathered spine, largely gray with some hits of dark blue and bound with clear packing tape to try and keep the damage from getting worse. Kiyoshi recognized it even before Liánlí picked it up to read, thereby letting Kiyoshi see the back cover’s illustration of undead skeletons rising from a graveyard, and the front cover’s art of a twisted necromancer raising further skeletons from a crypt. The Libris Mortis: The Book of Undead wasn’t Kiyoshi’s most favorite supplemental book ever published for D&D, but Yuki had done some good things with it before.
“That’s not from the current edition of the game, so a lot of what it says is different from how we’d be playing,” Kiyoshi pointed out, fussing with his own amber-colored star charm and trying to keep his tone overall gentle, positive, conversational. Not chiding Liánlí or even really criticizing him, but only pointing out a thing he might not have known. “It’s also written with an audience in mind—namely, people who already understand how to play the game.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
Although he didn’t look up from the book he’d picked out to thumb through, Liánlí nodded firmly to indicate that he was listening. “That makes a lot of sense, yeah,” he said, more thoughtfully than such a statement probably needed, though he would have been the first to admit that his thinking energy was going more to the contents of the book than to what Kiyoshi was saying about it. “Not to judge the book by its cover or anything, but—I mean? That was what got my attention.”
Hoping to illustrate what he meant, Liánlí held up the book and pointed to the art of the skeletons rising. When this mostly earned him a bemused look from Kiyoshi’s Yuki, Liánlí smiled and explained, “Oh, it’s a Knight thing. Saturn is the planet of death, and I guess a lot of Saturn Knight Wonders are related to that? To caring for the dead, or housing them, or all kinds of things like that. My Wonder, Kaifeng? It’s a graveyard for people no one really wanted to claim or give a proper burial. And Knights get magic, so when I use mine, it calls up spirits like those of the people buried at Kaifeng. It’s really cool.”
Still smiling, Liánlí shrugged and spun a little pink star charm around on his finger. “So, seeing all the undead skeletons out here, I thought about my real life magic and got excited. Very interested.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
“That’s fair enough, yeah,” Yuki conceded, but only because he had been personally addressed with that explanation.
He still didn’t entirely know what to make of all the magical stuff that wasn’t directly related to ******** or one of their other housemates (and as much as Yuki liked Soren and Grieve, cared about Kyoya, and tolerated Elior for Kiyoshi’s sake while being open to the idea that he might’ve genuinely changed for the better, Yuki had to admit that he still filtered a LOT of things about them through the lens of his Favorite Boy). Hearing Liánlí had an interest in D&D’s necromancy, or at least in one of Yuki’s favorite books that had anything to do with the subject, because of his magical alter ego.……
It made perfect sense. It felt more than fair enough. But it still made Yuki feel nervous in a way that he didn’t want to feel. As if something about this going wrong might somehow put Kiyoshi in danger during magical girl things—something that Yuki could fully acknowledge was irrational and stupid to think about Liánlí of all people. So far, Liánlí hadn’t done anything to undermine the way that Kiyoshi had characterized him to Yuki: well meaning, open-minded and kind (maybe to his own detriment sometimes), not always well informed but definitely eager to learn and/or try anything once.
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
“Okay, well, that’s definitely a fair reason to take interest,” Kiyoshi agreed, trying to keep the conversation moving. Apparently undeterred—or at least politely ignoring any sense of awkwardness or anxiety from Yuki and pleasantly humming in the way he liked to do—Liánlí returned to looking through the Libris Mortis. Kiyoshi sort of envied that ability to let things go. But he couldn’t afford to have so little concern for how things were moving right now. Letting things lag too much felt like the worst idea he could’ve had, and it felt imperative that he keep the three of them from falling into too much silence. Conversational “The Floor Is Lava” or something like that, and the stakes were Yuki’s peace of mind.
“Well, different editions or not, you’ll see by reading it? But most undead in D&D work differently from the spirits of Kaifeng,” Kiyoshi explained. “Things in fifth edition aren’t quite as firm on the whole ‘all undead are inherently evil, even if they’re capable of independent thought and can in theory choose not to be like that’ thing that you see a lot in third edition and three-point-five. A lot of people pointed out how the way that entire concept got used wound up coming across as at least fantasy-racist—because it often got used against people like orcs and drow. Or worse, it sometimes risked reinforcing actual real-world racism because the mandatory evil alignment got applied to people or beings who were designed in ways that resembled real-life negative, racist stereotypes.”
All of that got Liánlí to look back up and tilt his head bemusedly. Fair enough, Kiyoshi guessed, and Liánlí would have to learn these terms eventually.
“Alignment is a way of identifying how your character generally tends to behave and the sorts of choices they’re likely to make. You’ve got two scales—Law vs. Chaos and Good vs. Evil, each with a Neutral option in the middle—and then nine alignments that come out of these different intersections.”
To hopefully help this explanation go over more effectively, Kiyoshi snatched up a piece of scratch-paper. He sketched a nine-box graph, with the rows labeled “Good,” “Neutral,” and “Evil” while he labeled the columns “Lawful,” “Neutral,” and “Chaos”. It wasn’t the prettiest image ever, but it would do the job well enough.
“Don’t go thinking about this kind of Chaos as being similar to the kind we deal with out in the city as Murikabushi and Kaifeng, okay,” he cautioned, making sure to catch Liánlí’s eye. “They can arguably overlap, but they mostly don’t. D&D’s idea of Chaos is more just a reference to how people and beings choose to behave, rather than some kind of big, unfathomable magical force that wants to eat energy, planets, starseeds, all creation, and so on. Lawful is the same way, and it can refer to literal laws, but it can also refer more to a personal code. Good and Evil can be defined differently from person to person, situation to situation, and so on, but a good general rule? Is that Good characters work to help others, and Evil characters work to screw other characters over. This doesn’t mean that there can’t be bad consequences from the actions of Good-aligned people or that Evil characters can’t create things that benefit others in order to advance a plan of their own. But”
As he went on, Kiyoshi wrote out the labels for every alignment. “So, Lawful Good is what a lot of people think of when they imagine the Paladin class, or your classic knight in shining armor sort of character. They want to help people and make the world a better place. They believe, on the whole, that the best way to do this is by upholding an orderly system of laws that prioritizes justice—punishing evil, rewarding good, protecting the innocent, that kind of thing. Any power they have, they want to use to help people and change societal systems for the better.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
“They can get played the fool and taken advantage of, though,” Yuki pointed out. “All the alignments have pitfalls or ways that they can fall short of their own ideals. One of the big ways for Lawful Good characters to do any of those things is if they emphasize the Law more than Good. It can easily get into Lawful Stupid territory if they try to enforce laws like ‘Well, you stole a loaf of bread to save your starving family, so you should lose your hand and go to prison for twenty years.’”
That example seemed to make Liánlí perk up—as much as Yuki could notice, anyway, when “perky” seemed to be Liánlí’s default setting—and Yuki took another long drink of his coffee. “Inspector Javert is the patron saint of Lawful Neutral. But ******** will get to that. He does a better job explaining alignments than I do.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
“Thank you, Gorgeous.” Taking a moment to consider, Kiyoshi weighed the pros and cons of using the example that he had in mind. But tying the system back to someone Liánlí loved seemed like a good way to make the whole system click more mentally for him. “Granted that I don’t know Helene—Huanxi—as well as you do? But from what I’ve seen of him, both dealing with him here and now, and in some of the past life memories of Airan’s I’ve recovered up on my world? He seems like a good example of Lawful Good: he has a code that he sticks to and uses to guide his choices and actions, and that code does prioritize a certain idea of law and order? But even more than that, he wants to help people, to dispense justice, to protect those who can’t protect themselves.”
Idly tapping his pen against his cheek, Kiyoshi asked, “Sound about right to you?”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:38 am
“Oh, absolutely,” Liánlí said, almost swooning and restraining himself exactly not at all. If one didn’t use every opportunity given to one to talk up one’s zhiyin, then really, what was even the point? Plus, Huan-ge finding him had been one of the unquestionable best things to happen to Liánlí ever in his life, and remembering that made it so much easier to radiate Good Vibes and Positivity, the way that Liánlí liked to do. “Huan-ge is so righteous, and so ethical, and so good. Never perfect, but he always tries his best, which means so much more than just being effortlessly perfect, right?”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:39 am
“Yeah.… Yeah, it does.” Partly, Kiyoshi gave up the easy agreement because he did generally support that sentiment (he kinda had to in order to emotionally survive his own existence as an objectively imperfect person). Mostly, though, he did it because letting Liánlí gush about Huanxi for too long stood a very good chance of derailing this entire attempt at an intro course and character creation session. Like, ********, Kiyoshi was happy for them and their love, but that didn’t mean he wanted to spend six hours listening to Liánlí go on about his man and come out of it without filling in anything on a character sheet.
“So, that’s Lawful Good. Next, let’s look at Chaotic Good. When my dad and my brother first tried to get me to play with them, Junsei’s favorite example of Chaotic Good was Batman. But that was during peak Nolanverse Batman era, when people were really overselling the vigilante aspect of Batman’s whole deal, and personally, I don’t think ‘Chaotic Good’ actually fits Batman as much as Junsei thought when we were twelve, thirteen.” Drawing a little Batman symbol in the Chaotic Good box, then putting it in a circle with a NO line crossed over it, objectively wasn’t necessary—but doing so amused Kiyoshi regardless.
“A better way to think of Chaotic Good is, like, the rebel with a cause sort of character. They believe in helping people and making the world a kinder, more equitable place, and they tend to see extant systems of power and hierarchies as inherently antithetical to that idea. They’re usually very ‘speak truth to power, with this kind of freedom comes responsibility, we gotta fight the powers that be, do you guys wanna check out my homemade zine about why you should join La Résistance’ sorts of people. Back in the French Revolution—more so during La Terreur—when Robespierre was all ******** up on executing everyone he vaguely suspected of counterrevolutionary, insurrection-adjacent thought, plus violently censoring and suppressing any writing that disagreed with him or called him out? When his childhood bestie Camille Desmoulins told him ‘Brûler n'est pas répondre’? That is, ‘Burning is not answering’?”
Kiyoshi pinched his fingers together, then pressed them to his lips. Making a kissing noise, he let the pinching gesture burst away from his mouth with a flourish. “Chef’s kiss, perfect Chaotic Good behavior right there.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:39 am
“Please keep in mind that ******** is extremely biased in favor of Chaotic Good,” Yuki editorialized, because frankly, someone had to. He was still trying to get settled here—part of him wondered if ******** was overselling his love of this particular alignment just to make Yuki interject and help him establish more of a rapport with ********, they were dealing with a noob who needed to hear opinions that could help provide balance. Not just Kiyoshi’s Chaotic Good propaganda. “Not that I don’t understand why he’s like this, because I do. His Obaasan is the most Chaotic Good person I’ve ever met in real life, he loves and looks up to her more than anyone else but his Mom—they’re basically tied for how much he stans them—and of course he idealizes Chaotic Good because it would be Dr. Murasaki Rokugin’s alignment if she were a D&D character.”
Sighing heavily, Yuki carded his fingers back through his hair. It didn’t really help him feel any calmer, but he needed to do something with his hands. “But it still bears considering that there are nuances and pitfalls to Chaotic Good, same as any other alignment. Like, you can easily have a Chaotic Good character who gets all ‘Fight the power, seize the means of production, revolution revolution revolution’ but who doesn’t have a plan for what happens after the revolution. A Chaotic Good character might follow their heart and their conscience without fully looking at all the facts. They and Lawful Good characters are both equally likely to inflict their own ideas of a good outcome on people without necessarily listening to the people about what they need. That’s not universally true, but it’s something I’ve seen a lot in play. People come to their characters with certain ideas about what ‘Good’ means and easily fall into a trap of playing them as if everything their character does is inherently good, even if they make huge mistakes, hurt people, and don’t listen to the people they’re allegedly trying to help.
“But when you see that happen with a Chaotic Good character specifically? It can often look a lot like them taking the side of people who seem like an oppressed underclass—they may even genuinely be an oppressed underclass—but then, there’s something off about the whole thing.” Yuki huffed, thinking about some of the less-good campaigns he’d played in before where this kind of twist had been utilized. “Some situations I’ve played in before have had it be like ‘Oh, actually, they’re being oppressed for very valid and fair reasons’—which, personally, I think is bullshit. A better take on that kind of story, in my eyes? Is having the characters run into unforeseen problems that, actually, they could have avoided if they’d looked around more thoroughly, listened better to people, and generally not acted like steamrollers.
“For example, maybe by failing to listen about what kind of help people actually need, or by failing to make a solid plan for what comes next? The Chaotic Good characters’ little revolution leaves a huge power vacuum that some new villain slips into. Yeah, sure, you ousted the corrupt local Baron, but now, a cult of Graz’zt or Asmodeus has risen up in his place and things are even worse and more exploitative for the people you wanted to help. Good job, noble heroes.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:39 am
“Graz’zt and Asmodeus are fiends,” Kiyoshi interjected, just to make sure that Liánlí had some kind of context for those names, “which, short version, means the Western, and usually but not always specifically Christian, idea of demons and similar. We’ll talk about them more when we get to the Evil alignments, but Asmodeus, Lord of the Nine Hells, is a devil, meaning a Lawful Evil fiend. They’re very all about rules-lawyering, and exploiting the corrupt systems of power in order to put themselves on top of any given hierarchy.” He doodled a little stick figure in the box of his chart labeled “Lawful Evil,” giving it glasses, a briefcase, a forked tail, and a set of cartoon devil horns atop its head.
“Graz’zt, on the other hand, is a demon, a Chaotic Evil fiend—though the way Yuki handles his backstory, he used to be a devil. Yuki’s Graz’zt is Asmodeus’s son with the ancient, mind-bending demoness, Pale Night, whose natural form is literally unfathomable to mortal minds. Either way, Graz’zt was raised in the Nine Hells, but ******** off to the infinite shifting layers of the Abyss because he was like ‘******** you, Dad. I’ll build my own Hell, with blackjack and sex workers, and I’ll have all the debauchery I want and nobody will tell me to brush soul-remnants out of my teeth or behave myself ever again.’”
Another stick-figure doodle with devil horns and a forked tail wound up in the box labeled “Chaotic Evil.” This one, however, Kiyoshi kitted out with a bottle (with “XXX” on its own little label to make it obviously alcoholic), little bubbles floating around the head and spirals for eyes to indicate intoxication, and a little rectangle in the other hand that Kiyoshi artfully labeled “PORN.” He huffed softly, looking up at Liánlí again.
“This isn’t to say that demons are completely stupid and useless,” he clarified. “But they’re Chaotic Evil, and in my experience, it’s harder to have variations in character motivations and behaviors with Chaotic Evil than any other alignment. Chaotic Good and Chaotic Neutral can both manifest in a lot of different ways. But—and we can touch on this more later if you want—what you get with Chaotic Evil is destructive jerkbags who enjoy hurting people, usually for no other reason than because they can, and who just want to watch the world burn.
“If people like these existed in real life, they’d likely have more widely varied motivations and backstories.” Kiyoshi needed to believe that was true. For several reasons—many but not all of them involving Faustite, and how his motivations and the lengthy list of atrocities to his name would have likely made a lot of people label him Chaotic Evil, even if that maybe wasn’t as true as they thought—he did classify it as a need.
“But in play, on a D&D table, that kind of nuance usually doesn’t exist for Chaotic Evil characters. Demons are a perfect case-in-point for this too, because despite all the work that different writers have put into fleshing out Graz’zt, and Demogorgon, and Juiblex the Demon Lord of Slime, and all the other big deal demons? When you get down to brass tacks, a lot of the things like ‘Demogorgon has two heads that are locked in war with each other, Orcus is literally undead because of this whole complicated and kind of ******** up plotline that went on back in the AD&D days of the late eighties and early nineties, Graz’zt is all about pleasure and debauchery and sometimes he gets all dolled up in drag as his on again-off again main squeeze Malcanthet’? It feels more like distinction without difference, because their ultimate motivations generally still come down to ‘******** the multiverse with barbed wire and let the ******** burn.’”
A deep breath, and a short sigh. “Any questions so far? Everything clicking in your head? Is there anything at all you want to ask about?”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:39 am
Liánlí hummed.…… Then, he hmmm’d.………
It was fair enough, he thought, for Yuki and Kiyoshi to put him a bit on the spot with a question of whether or not he was keeping up with what they’d said. In some ways, yes, what they’d told him about this made sense? On the other hand though—“Maybe we need a little bit of a pivot?”
Liánlí cringed slightly even as he made the suggestion. He didn’t need to do that, and the initial expressions he got in return said as much. Yuki’s face almost could’ve fit on Huan-ge for all the patience and understanding that Yuki radiated (though either the microexpressions here weren’t micro-expressing quite as much as Huan-ge’s did—maybe because Yuki just didn’t need to, if he was being totally forthright—or Liánlí simply didn’t know how to read the minute shifts in Yuki’s face very well yet). Then, Kiyoshi nodded and didn’t remotely look like he wanted to throw shade or say something remotely backhanded. They both just looked to Liánlí like they wanted to listen to him and let him direct the flow of this education sesh.
“So, what you’re saying all mostly makes sense philosophically,” Liánlí explained, voice lilting upward in a way that sounded the way trying to stagger home drunk often felt, “but it’s also feeling, like, disconnected? From a larger sense of context? Or what it all means within the world of the stories that we’ll get into? So, this all feels like it makes sense right now: Lawful plays by the rules, whatever those rules are, while Chaotic follows their own whimsy. Good tries to help people even at risk to themself, and Evil doesn’t care about screwing other people over as long as they get what they want. Devils and demons are different but one of the big deal demons is the son of a really powerful devil, or at least he is in the worldbuilding we’ll be using here. Demons are more likely to be all ‘Some folks just want to watch the world burn’ versus devils being like ‘Exercise gives you endorphins, endorphins make you happy, happy people just don’t shoot their husbands and by the way, how could your story as told have been the truth because your visibly intact perm means you literally could not have been in the shower’? But, like, in an evil way? The sort of lawyer-ing that makes people think lawyers are always fair game, even if they’re talking to an overworked, underpaid public defender?”
Idly—and not for the first time recently—Liánlí thought of his siblings. Not the cool one he’d chosen for himself, Dewey, but some of the ones he’d left back in Boston. Er-jie Xinyan and Qiang-ge Qiang-er had both gone to law school, once upon a time. Family law as a specialty for Qiang-er (which, begrudgingly, Liánlí had to admit probably meant that his da-ge wasn’t doing shady, unethical Lawful Evil type things for work, not unless he’d developed a habit of representing domestic abusers in custody disputes or something, which he probably hadn’t, even if mostly out of concern for reputation). But Xinyan had gone into tax and corporate law, so maybe she was up to something that could’ve been called Lawful Evil (part of Liánlí kind of hoped that she wasn’t, just as a personal preference? He and Xinyan had often struggled to get along, and she’d picked on him more than any of their other siblings—even the twins, who may have, on some level, gotten the idea that their er-ge was fair game to bully from Xinyan herself—but hurting other people in bigger, more materially significant ways than bullying your er-di would’ve been really ******** low, and he wanted to believe that, in spite of everything about how they’d been raised, his sister was better than that).
And then, without pausing to thank his mind for throwing those thoughts at him out of nowhere, Liánlí swiped them clean off his mental table like a cat who’d woken up and decided to commit Crimes.
A quick shrug, and then Liánlí sighed and shook his head. “But that being said, I’m pretty sure I will not be able to repeat any of this back later? Never mind trying to apply these ideas to new situations? Not unless we can connect it all with something more grounded. Like, where is the story going to be happening? What’s kinda going on in the world—which doesn’t need to be, like, granularly specific to start with? What are some of the possibilities for where our characters can fit into that? Like, is it all just sword guys, archers, and maybe a wizard, or what even are all the options?”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:40 am
Yuki nodded along with Liánlí, first to affirm that he was saying things that did, in fact, reflect an understanding of what he was being told. But the nods after that were slower and more pensive, as Yuki considered the barrage of questions that stood an actual chance of helping Liánlí retain the information. None of them were bad questions by any means. Very good questions, actually. Yet, it had been a damn hot minute since Yuki had actually needed to go over any of this with a new player, and he needed a moment to decide how best to approach what Liánlí was asking.
“Okay, so first off, I don’t expect everything to one-hundred percent click for you yet,” he said, after letting himself think. “There is definitely an element to D&D—to any tabletop game, if we’re honest—that’s about diving into the pool headfirst and learning as you go.” Thankfully, that made Liánlí grin and do an excited little bounce in his seat. Enthusiasm, Yuki could work with. “For right now? We’ll start with some of the world lore. ******** can introduce the weird little edgelord idea he’s been thinking about. And then maybe roll up an example character to help you see how that part works. Yours or his, either way. We could even try to get you both done today.”
Since ******** didn’t need to have the basics explained to him and he already had an idea in mind, that would probably speed up the process somewhat. But with the itinerary laid out, Yuki had other things to cover first.
“D&D has a lot of setting options out there,” Yuki said, taking a sheet of ******** scratch paper and a pen of his own to doodle with. “You’ve got Greyhawk, which was Gary Gygax’s baby back in the day. It’s pretty standard sword and sorcery fantasy; a lot of people use it as a basis for their own homebrew worlds because it’s so adaptable. Outside of fourth edition, which was on a lot of bullshit and a lot of people don’t like it, ‘Greyhawk without the serial numbers’ is usually the setting that a lot of the base game books have in mind.”
To illustrate this, Yuki drew three little stick figures. One had a sword, a shield, and the word “PALADIN” written where they should’ve had a face. The second had a pointy hat, a little rectangle attached to one arm with “MAGIC SPELLS” written inside its outline, and “WIZARD” written over their face. The third got an actual face—or at least they got angry eyes and a deep frown—and wavy lines to represent their bad vibes; Yuki used pointy arrows to label the stick figure “BIG BAD EVIL GUY” and the waves of Bad Vibes “NECROMANCY OR SOMETHING.” Above all three, Yuki scrawled out the name “Greyhawk.”
“If people aren’t using Greyhawk as the basis for their homebrew settings,” Yuki went on, making another similarly sword and sorcery-themed collection of stick figures, “then they might do the same but have Mystara in mind. It hasn’t been the primary design flavor for the game’s core books since Greyhawk supplanted it, but it was the main setting for AD&D—Advanced Dungeons and Dragons—so a lot of people who’ve played that system have some lingering fondness for it. I’m not especially attached to it, so I know that there are pretty big differences between Mystrara and Greyhawk? But aside from the fact that you can see the late Cold War era fingerprints all over the world-building—” Glancing up, Yuki caught Liánlí’s eye and jerked his head in Kiyoshi’s direction to indicate exactly why he could relay that fact. “—I can’t really tell you what those differences are offhand. If you’re curious, look up ‘Mr. Welch mystara’ on Youtube when you get home. The video isn’t fancy, but it’s very informative.
“Dragonlance is a similar story: it one-hundred percent looks like bog standard sword and sorcery European-based fantasy at a first glance. Dig a little deeper into it, though, and it’s actually pretty unique. So much so that a lot of the way that fifth edition D&D works would need some serious finagling to make it work with the world-building about how magic works in the world of Dragonlance. It’s not a setting that I’m particularly attached to, so I can’t really tell you a lot about it? But the fans are pretty enthusiastic, so if you’re ever curious, just poke around online and you’ll probably find something pretty easily.”
Instead of stick-figure humans, Yuki attempted to illustrate Dragonlance with a stick-figure dragon. It mostly looked like a collection of weirdly shaped blobs connected by single lines and nominally spewing a breath weapon (helpfully marked out because Yuki had labeled the substance exploding from the vaguely mouth-shaped hole as “FIRE, ICE, TOXIC GAS, ETC. ETC. ETC.”), but an attempt had been made.
“Dark Sun, I’m not even going to try to illustrate. It's a post-apocalyptic fantasy setting. Extremely edgy. The magic on the world of Athas is a pretty blatant allegory for real-world issues about overconsumption of fossil fuels and how humans are destroying the environment. Which I can get behind in a lot of ways, and there are some genuinely good things about the setting? Like, a lot of people come for Dark Sun over having slavery, but the setting we’ll be playing in also has slavery, and at least in Dark Sun, the slavery is pretty consistently painted as a bad thing, something done out of desperation and failure to regard another person as worthy of basic dignity. Which is, in fact, more than I can say for our game’s setting. Sure, the Thayan slave trade is generally painted as evil? But there’s still a book from third edition or maybe three-point-five where they presented rules for playing a Thayan slaver as a character.
“Comma, however.” Over the rims of his glasses, Yuki threw Liánlí an extremely Tired expression. “Dark Sun is extremely intricate and lore-heavy. There’s a lot about it that’s difficult to explain even to people who have Terran university educations. Considering ******** wants to extend invitations to your partner, Soren upstairs, and Fang? All of whom had to live through their own magical apocalyptic scenarios in real life, and the last of whom didn’t have a chance to go to any school, much less university, before his world got poisoned? I personally do not like the idea of homebrewing a five-E update of Dark Sun only to end up potentially triggering three out of five players. If you’re ever curious about it, I have books and old modules, I’m happy to let you borrow and read them? But we aren’t playing Dark Sun at my table. At least, not with this specific prospective group.”
Fortunately, that explanation of Why Not Dark Sun was met with a sympathetic, understanding expression and a nod out of Liánlí. There was, to some degree, a level of denying a choice to the space aliens who stood to become involved in this conversation. Yuki could admit that. He didn’t entirely like the idea of denying them their own choice……but he also didn’t know two out of three of them very well, which left Yuki feeling uncomfortable with the idea of shoving them into a Pretendy Funtime Game where the central conceit was likely to resemble things they had actually lived through. On top of that, he did know that it was very unlikely that any of them had played Dungeons and Dragons before, and it seemed better to introduce them to the game with a setting that wasn’t as heavy on complex lore, potentially triggering, and overall INTENSE as Dark Sun tended to be.
“Spelljammer is magic s**t in space. Mixing sci-fi stuff into DND goes all the way back to Gary Gygax and his Expedition to the Barrier Peaks module, at least. One DM I played under, once, used this monster from an old article in Dragon magazine that is just a straight rip-off of the Navigators and the spice melange from Dune, and it fit perfectly without needing to change literally anything about the larger setting. Same as any setting, Spelljammer absolutely can be fun, but personally, I hate running it. I’d rather borrow some of the cool creatures and concepts, then re-fluff them to fit in a different setting. Because I really do not like running Spelljammer itself.”
So much so, in fact, that Yuki only bothered to illustrate the setting in question by doodling a cartoon rocket-ship and writing “OOOH, IT’S MAGIC” on the hull. For flair, he added a speech bubble that read “I WANNA CAST MAGIC MISSILE!” but alas, Liánlí didn’t seem to recognize the reference.
With a soft huff, Yuki moved on and started drawing a new collection of stick figure people, similar to the Greyhawk and Mystara sets, but with more goggles and gratuitous gears all over everything. “Eberron has a lot of familiar fantasy elements, but it also has more advanced tech than you see in most fantasy. It’s not exactly steampunk? But its creator tried to avoid the medieval stasis that’s so common in fantasy settings, which usually ends up looking kinda steampunk-adjacent. Immediate post-war setting most of the time. Pulpy fun that gets in a vein similar to Indiana Jones, though there are also some film noir inspirations. It had a really big influence in helping push mainline D&D to be more flexible about alignment—”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:40 am
“Alignment used to be extremely regimented,” Kiyoshi interjected, noting the look of confusion on Liánlí’s face. “Gygax and a lot of the other original setting creators were not thinking too hard about some of the implications of alignment. They had their pulp fantasy ideas. They wanted to make a pulp fantasy-themed game. So, they did, and they established a system where entire groups of people—who are supposed to be sapient and have free will and all that—will get labeled as unilaterally Chaotic Evil. Which is especially not great when some of the peoples in question have historically been characterized with tropes that have their origins in real-world racism.
“Orcs were a big target of this for a long time. Not the only target, but a big one. And it has consistently been difficult to talk about because so many people only want to think about the intent, rather than the finished product. Like, yes, it’s likely that most of these writers were not deliberately trying to be racist in how they drew orcs, how they characterized orc culture, and how those ideas about orcs originated in real-world racism. Yes, they only intended to take an idea from Tolkien just like every other Western fantasy writer, add some ideas of their own, and call it ‘Macaroni.’ But the lack of intentionality doesn’t change how it’s still pretty shitty to take tropes associated with, for example, real-world First Nations people, then slap them on a fantasy people who you describe as unilaterally evil with no potential to be anything else.”
He huffed, crossing one leg over the other and his arms over his chest. “Plus, then you had the trend of players who had their characters act like ******** murder hobos all the time and justify it with logic like ‘Well, my character is Lawful Good, and those people are all Chaotic Evil, so I’m allowed to slaughter them with impunity.’ There are a lot of problems with the Warhammer universe, but the fact that they called this out by having most townspeople in their medieval to Early Modern European-adjacent fantasy setting think adventurers are dangerous until proven otherwise? Perfect, no notes.”
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Posted: Sat Jul 06, 2024 11:40 am
“Yes, but the closest we’re getting to Warhammer is that I might have Demon Lords inspired by the four Ruinous Powers and your baby-them Malal to share if you behave yourself.” While ******** succumbed to gay gasping and vibrating like he desperately wanted to ask about how Yuki had adapted Malal and Slaanesh, Yuki pretended that his boy wasn’t there and focused on Liánlí, who actually needed (or, more accurately, wanted) to learn things today. “Warhammer is completely immaterial to this conversation. ******** just really likes the world-building about their nefarious evil gods.”
Especially the one who was obviously queer-coded and threw a ton of orgies that would’ve made Eyes Wide Shut look like a parochial school student conduct manual, and the one who’d been banished to the Shadow Realm for decades over intellectual property nonsense but had the central character concept of Chaos Against Itself. Bless him, ******** had several tropes that would more or less always hit for him. Made him very easy to write for.
“As I was saying, though?” Yuki tapped the pen on his paper, down by the doodle he’d labeled “Eberron.” “Maybe Eberron isn’t the only reason why main-line D&D moved away from alignments being fixed in stone? But players who tried out Eberron when it first came out in the mid-aughts? They got a taste of how it felt to play without certain classes being completely restricted to one alignment or another. Paladins used to be exclusively Lawful Good, for instance. Any deviation from that specific moral and ethical framework was grounds for your Paladin character to lose all their spells and special abilities, especially if you had an a*****e rules-lawyer DM. Same thing applied to the Monk class, though they could be any of the three lawful alignments. Or, uh—that book? The one you’re flipping through?”
Helpfully, Liánlí held it up so Yuki could see the Libris Mortis’s familiar cover. “Yeah. Flip to chapter three. Some of the prestige classes in there offer some clear examples about restrictive alignments. I think the ones in The Book of Vile Darkness and The Book of Exalted Deeds might be clearer? But for now, just stick to the book you’re interested in.”
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