Absolutely not, all cities, towns and villages must all be as racially diverse as downtown LA, no matter how remote and isolated. So saith Hollywood who knows all.
@@mwjen Rings of Power really annoyed me with that. While it really worked with some groups like the dwarfs, it was just weird when some isolated hamlet was the same...
Fun fact; whether or not Athas is actually cut off from the wider multiverse is one of those D&D lore tangles that almost approaches Mystara for how bad it is. The famous idea that it's all but impossible to enter or leave Athas was never brought up at all until the sourcebook "Defilers & Preservers", one of the very last books TSR released for the setting, and even then was contradicted by the fact that extraplanar monsters were canon to Athas, and advanced beings (epic wizards-psions, clerics and druids) all needed to spend time off-plane as part of their metamorphosis. Not to mention that the interference was explicitly only with priest and magic-user spells relating to planar travel - *psionics* were completely unaffected, rules as written, so any character with the Psychoportation Science of Probability Travel can move from Athas to the Astral Plane - aka, the original multiversal travel hub - or back again with ease. The Planescape adventure "Faction War" even mentions that there's an entire ghetto community of Athasian migrants in the Hive Ward called New Tyr.
When I ran spelljammer I would joke about the diverse crew, but at the same time I had planets racially homogeneous. Planet Harengon, Tortugon, Tabaxia, etc.
the old TSR UK setting pelinore had a good way of balancing things by having its known world equivalent be the city league a trade route managed by a single merchant guild that turned into a city made from cities across an important section of the map for travel so you had a light cantina effect here and there but you mostly encountered half races (though demi-humans are still a thing) or humans with novel ancestry on the occasion you don't deal with humans to represent the nature of the alliance. When you encounter something outside of that it really hits, it is kind of the opposite of planescape.
One should also be sure to include the strife and problems if you do have a multiracial and/or multicultural soup of a city or kingdom. It's not gonna be sunshine and rainbows, and places like the OG Sigil are evidence to that.
The most cruel lie of the ideologies of our uncaring masters is that we are somehow supposed to look at a bland, grey gruel of a world where nobody really belong and see cities full of mistrust and decay and somehow think (and never question) that this is the ultimate reflection of the actual diversity of human cultures, their complicated histories and all the good and the bad. That we are supposed to see this sludge as the ultimate celebration of humanity, a grey world of interchangeable rootless people who believe in nothing, with no unique familial or cultural histories or ties. There used to be distinct cultures between even just the provinces and regions of countries, unique traditions. Now everyone is the same grey faced urban human. Somehow, we call this 'progress' and somehow we think this is something fantasy fiction should aspire to be.
As always, contrast provides context. If any race can be found anywhere, than it doesn't matter what you play. You're always normal, and that's boring. If you only find gnomes in gnome country, then suddenly being a gnome is interesting. It raises questions with potentially fun answers. Why did you leave? Who or what did you leave behind? How do people who've never heard of a gnome let alone seen one respond to your presence? How do other gnomes respond when you meet so far from home? How do people respond when you go back? These questions lose most if not all meaning if gnomes are ubiquitous. That's probably why Wizards starting putting Tieflings in everything. They'd made everything else too commonplace, so nothing stood out anymore. It's not exciting to meet an elf npc when 30% of the local population are elves. If the elf npc is the only elf for 100 leagues, the party excluded, then meeting an elf npc will get the players' attention.
Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina from the Star Wars universe Disney says doesn't exist is actually a pretty good book, with actual backstories for most of the cantina aliens that make sense.
D&D art is to make it clear that it is possible not that this is likely. But no one race has to be dominant or most around in a city or culture. It is possible and even likely that separate groups can merge for economic, military or cultural advantage. Two groups may merge because of wars that have happened and together their institutions work together for safety. In short, you can have have peoples in as many groups and looks as you can have reasons for them to be together. As long as you know the reason it helps you make the world building workout.
Colonialism is the main reason we see ethnic diversity in countries like the US and Australia. At least that's where it began. It's such a self-own for people of a certain political persuasion to insist all communities be diverse. Because neither the US nor Australia would be diverse if their indigenous populations were just left alone.
@@Frustwell, I think I agree, but to be clear, there have been ethnic minorities in most of the world’s cities and countries for millennia. E.g. traders and diplomats. E.g. my wife is black and I am white and we live in China because China pays workers (e.g. English-speaking teachers) more compared to the cost of living than most or all other countries, including our countries of origin. And China’s development is famous as an example of development without the exploitation of other countries that enabled the development of the West. Thus we see that a minority of ex-pats and immigrants can exist in a country without imperialism.
@@SimonAshworthWood Yes. Minorities. But that's not the point of contention here. If you watch the video you will see it's more about how every piece of art now makes it seem as if every location is an equal mix of even the most fringe of playable races. I live and work in Japan. Fewer than 3 percent of the population are not Japanese. And I am of Aboriginal Australian heritage. Wiradjuri. Outstations in Australia aside there are indigenous groups in other parts of the world living in some of the world's remotest and most regional areas in which their communities are 100 percent homogenous. "Most" does not mean "all." But Wizards would have us believe every corner of the globe looks like downtown Seattle. And let's be clear: there is an imperialist bent to that company's seeking to impose their dogmatic views upon the whole world.
@@SimonAshworthWood @SimonAshworthWood Yes. Minorities. But that's not the point of contention here. If you watch the video you will see it's more about how every piece of art now makes it seem as if every location is an equal mix of even the most fringe of playable races. I live and work in Japan. Fewer than 3 percent of the population are not Japanese. And I am of Aboriginal Australian heritage. Wiradjuri. Outstations in Australia aside there are indigenous groups in other parts of the world living in some of the world's remotest and most regional areas in which their communities are 100 percent homogenous. "Most" does not mean "all." But Wizards would have us believe every corner of the globe looks like downtown Seattle. And let's be clear: there is an imperialist bent to that company's seeking to impose their dogmatic view upon the whole world.
Slightly of DnD... but I thought about about logical diversity in my nation building for my fantasy book in a similar way. So for example, I have a place called Storm and Song, originally full of rather French styled humans, till it was invaded by a blue dragon with some more Chinese flavoured humans as his servents. Fast forward about 300 years. and both human ethnicity are now fairly even (through 'high culture' tend to lean in a Chinese style due to the early power imbalance), but blue dragonblood humans are the foundation of the nobility, while humans of either group tend to be measure in worth by how connected that are to the 'blessed bloodlines'. However complicating this are the more recently 'adopted' black dragonbloods, who where originally a exiled faction (whose dragon died), but made a deal with the blue dragon, to become his soldiers in a war he was losing. While the black dragonblood where original broadly Germanic in flavour, there generations of exile means ethnic wildcards and people of mixed and complicated heritage do turn up. Put all this together, and it gives me a complicated little melting pot of a young state with three broad cultural traditions to play with, two who consider themselves 'local', and one who still has the tag of 'other' to deal with, but has come to dominate the military. Obviously there's tension, both subtle and less so, and I can use to drive conflict and drama. DnD wise... I totally push that you write a short history for any important states and use conflict and time to build your relationships between different groups. Maybe your nation was once ruled by half fiend kings but that was toppled by some heroes a century ago and it become a goodly republic... which means random tieflings get treated as would be tyrants and/or cursed births.
Those people will always be mad about something though, which paradoxically means there's no point in ever trying to appease them. I've become so used to them throwing hissyfits that it now has no effect on me. I simply and literally do not care. It's become boring.
If I ignore the edition-war stuff in this video, the rest is arguably great advice, thank you. I could go on a several-hour tirade about this, that, and the other, but no one comes to these comment sections for that. BECMI has its flaws, hence why it isn't in common use today, and I'll just leave it at that.
You are required to rep the edition that got you started. It's in the Bible or one the back of the Declaration of Independence. I forgot which one, but it's in there.
The majority of OSR games are built on Moldvay/Cook (B/X) or Mentzer's revision of (BECMI). These typically come with changes and improvements. But it's wrong to say BECMI "isn't in common use today." It remains the best iteration of the game for many of us older players. It's the one I started with. And I used that one red box as my ruleset until the release of 2nd. Edition. A recent video in which Professor Dungeon Master ranked every edition gave Mentzer the top spot. And for good reason. BECMI (as well as B/X) is the most tinkerable and hackable of D&D editions. Without the rules bloat of later editions. Simple. Elegant. I stopped playing D&D for years with the release of 3rd. Edition. It and every edition since hasn't even felt like D&D to me. Gone is the sense of esoterica. Since 2000 it has read, looked, and felt like a video game.
@Frustwell I mean, that would be your perspective. Mine is very different. To me, BECMI just feels like a grind of constantly bringing in new characters because your previous one died. It's hard to get invested in a character when it feels like they'll just die instantly in the next hour or two. I had a very rough experience with both 1st edition and 2nd edition. I get BECMI is simple and elegant, but I'd rather have a ruleset that doesn't encourage me to just name my character 'Fighter Number Twelve' until they reach 4th level. If they get that far. Additionally, all the rules from back then feel so anemic compared to 3rd edition. I would rather have the complexity and crunch if it means I can get personally invested in the game.
Don't know if it is the tone, but others may misconstrue what you suggest as a hard-line-in-the-sand culture border (though you did mention including subcultures). I am personally fascinated by the concept of cultural drift & population migration. I agree that unjustified Kitchen Sink settings are boring. However, I find some of the monocultures of Old School D&D boring (it may be where I got my sources, the difference in priorities, or the publishers didn't care enough to elaborate). (I think you said) shouldn't have a location that has everything but still has some foreign subgroups (If you're confident about writing them) for some spice. Find fascinating stories about small pockets of subculture and races migrating to F*-all nowhere (for mundane reasons. and I prefer those kinds of reasons). Reading about them fills my imagination with the blanks about possible trade and cultural exchange. I hate the barebones world-building, stonewall, default answers of "they all just get along" or they are all monoculturely racist. (I want more "Ands" and "Buts" in the synopsis) I related to this and have been thinking about this more since reading Pathfinder Divine Mysteries (think back; Golarion deities do feel similar to how immortals on Mystara behave with mortals [when done by a good writer, and minus the god vs. immortals schism, and continued survival not usually predicated on # o followers... which makes them oddly more admirable (or horrific for Unholy gods) exemplars of ways on how a PC could live life while give other reasons worshipers and soul claims still feel important]) I dislike how other settings make most gods feel locked to a particular region or race, with zero meaningful presences outside that demographic (it is probably more of a phrasing and presentation issue, and the world operates under the rule of religion being a zero-sum Henotheism game rather than historical Pantheism). You can have a few gods whose only claim of fame is being a nation's patron, 1-to-3 racist elf gods, but not all of them. In Warhammer Fantasy, it is more interesting that Sigmar's main following is only in his empire but has a smaller cult outside the borders that follows different missionary doctrines or how the human gods Kane & Manann are clearly human interpretations of Khaela Mensha Khaine and Mathlann respectively. I'm sorry if the rant ends up unfocused. You do good work. I wish Mystara hadn't gotten Squatted so soon. Maybe I would reconsider my thoughts on some settings if the complete history were presented as a world map presentation, complete with Arrows and color legends.
to be pedantic, I think it only really counts as segregation if it's enforced artificially, otherwise it's just preference of company, and ultimately like demographics will gravitate to each other.
@@johnbalk6091 A city in which more than a few Black residents have been caught on film punching elderly Asian women in the face is a city where "multiculturalism" is not working.
It's also worth noting that you can, and should, have multiple centers of culture/species when possible. The Elf Empire is far less interesting than El'Th'Ladan sharing a border with the High Kingdom of the Children of the Forest.
The only really important thing regarding this is to not watch upon races as race supremacists and radical leftists do. You can have an all-white metropolis, but have it incredibly diverse (different cultures, stations, bacgrounds, political affiliations, differences between sexes...). Skin colour does not make something diverse, it's just radical and harmful view upon the world.
in a way you just said that race based on skin color is a made up idea , which is cool. Here's an idea too , in an oligarchy , you can push "diversity" based on race / skin color , but at the same time that new face has all the same old ideas.
@@SwiftJustice @SwiftJustice Are we supposed to believe your paying attention to what know-nothings on Twitter or Facebook say is really any better than watching FOX? I am not American least of all a FOX viewer. But can see how millions of Americans of your persuasion believed the absolute dumbest lies about what happened in Kenosha because tribalism was more important to you than the truth.
@@johnbalk6091 I actually write these for newer people getting into the game. I'm just doing these from experience, people ask me to share what I've learned over the years so I do. UA-cam targets videos like this at people who aren't my subscribers. 80% of the people that commented don't normally frequent my channel. But I also love to throw shade, however these suggestions apply to any addition of the game.
"Elves live in Elftopia, Dwarves live in Dwarfheim, Halflings are from Halflingville" isn't worldbuilding. It's simply taking racial splats and putting them on a map. You might as well say Druids only come from Druidhome and Rogues from Rogueland. It's lazy, it's thoughtless, it's unimaginative. "You need a reason!" well... yes. That part is worldbuilding. That's the work of building a world. Actually building it instead of generating a map and putting Vikingholm at the top and Deserts of al-Arabianightsia at the bottom. Every nation is going to be heterogenous. Unless it's some tiny isolated nowhere that no one wants to come to... but even then, they probably will (consider Svalbard, the Arctic Norwegian islands which have one of the highest per capita Thai immigrant populations on Earth). The same with most cities; while a small hamlet is probably built around some (probably related) families, cities are by essential nature diverse and metropolitan. If you have a citywide festival, sorry champ you're gonna see elves and gnomes and tabaxi and a Gith or god knows what in the crowd scene, becuase that's how it WORKS. The capital of Dwarfheim, let's call it Hammeraxe, since we're being fucking increative anyway, can either just be a bunch of dwarves dwarfing it up with big beer-soaked braided beards and art deco architecture talking about mining and tradition and hitting orcs with axehammers or whatever. You can do that. You might as well just tell your players "Imagine a dwarf, that's every NPC here, moving on." Congratulations on your worldbuilding bro. Or you can have a substantial population of elves in Hammeraxe. Why? I dunno, but there's a reason since you need one for that I guess. Jewelers moving in to have better access to gems and ore. Perhaps Hammeraxe has one of the greates libraries in existence since - of course - it's carved into a mountain and the stable air lends to preserving books well. Maybe elves in your world just fucking love beer, who cares, get a reason and use it. It's literally the least important part. What IS important is, what impact does this substantial elf population have in Hammeraxe? What are their influences in art, language, architecture, governance? How have their own cultures - and that's a plural because fuck you if you don't give your races as many disparate cultures as you can dream up - changed from living in Hammeraxe? They're certainly not going to be identical to the elves of Crystaltree in Elftopia, are they? If you want credible worldbuilding, you look to reality for inspiration, and modern societies are multicultural and multiethnic... And have been for far longer than the modern era. This would still be true if we shared the world with multiple sapient species. Your task as a worldbuilder is not to erase that and create homogenous "Zoos" for your fantasy world, but to take that reality and give it the fantasy spin. And that can be just as surprising as anything else. I guarantee you your players will be more interested in the orcs who populate Halflingville (at a 3:1 ratio to halflings!) and why that is, than they will be with "Just the Shire I guess" and "Chief Bloodskull Thunderfucker and his tribe in the mountains"
And in that kind of RPG environment you'll just have PCs running around yammering about racism this and bigotry that, because it's what they do IRL in spite of America being exactly as diverse as the world you say you want. Birds of a feather flock together. Like attracts like. It's been that way ever since the beginning of history because that's how human nature works. And all PCs are human, which is going to override the imaginary non-human thinking of non-human races every time.
Most D&D is set in a time period reminiscent of medieval Europe, Renaissance at the latest. One of the defining differences between those times and today is speed and ease of transportation. Therefore, no, Axehome will not have a large contingent of elves. Why? because no one wants to spend the literal weeks it would take to walk there even if the roads are safe and the dwarves aren't prejudiced. I don't care how good the library is. You're not going to get more than a handful of foreigners traveling there over the course of a lifetime outside of maybe diplomats. Cosmopolitan cities that feature subcultures and mixed heritage families from all sorts of disparate places are something that just did not happen until _very_ recently in modern history outside of a few locations, and those exceptions were due to unique geography, namely navigable waterways such harbors and rivers on the Mediterranean Sea for example. Even then, you walk a day inland off the major trade roads and suddenly no one's ever seen a foreigner. That said, if your setting is such high magic that anyone can hire out a magic carpet or enchanted carriage to travel from town to town for just a silver or two, then you'd get mixed places happening a lot more frequently. If there's some sort of fantasy UN that set up a bunch of permanent teleporters mirroring today's air travel. That could accomplish what your talking about, so it absolutely could be done. You just have to have equivalently abundant and inexpensive travel as we have today. Even then, you still won't end up with multicultural communities everywhere. Even modern America is still regionally distinct amongst its own citizenry partially because it was regionally settled. Even after a couple hundred years, it's still not homogenized despite the ease of travel. There's no reason to expect a fantasy setting would be any different outside some setting specific justification.
@@CowCommando People forget or refuse to believe, that extreme diversity is a relatively new thing. There are millions of living Brits, who haven't seen a Black person until the 1960s or later. And Lovecraft was raving about endless foreign hordes from a New York, that was more, than 90% White.
Hate to break it to you. But modern metropolis with multiple cultures are only large cities. The news is full of crime and racial strife. Orcs showing up in a town originally established by Hobbits. The Scouring of the Shire. Start throwing multiple races within a walled city. There's going to be blood fueds, grudges, and a militant city guard. In case you haven't noticed. All of this modern immigration is thanks to Air and ship travel. Where people can travel a few hours and cross hundreds of miles. Modern society is not a great example for a setting set in a high middle ages with fantasy races. Humans tend not to trust outsiders. Afghanistan is just lines drawn on a map with tribal warfare. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition was a reaction to various invasions by several Muslim Caliphates. Today Poland and Hungary don't follow the EU policy of letting in illegal migration or so-called refugees. Japan is a homogeneous nation with a very small immigrant population. Travel to the countryside in any modern nation and it's nothing like the Cosmopolitan cities. People the resent foreigners being dropped into their small towns by the federal government. If anything. A D&D setting should be about conflict and racial prejudice. Fiddler on the Roof is a great example of a small town with two distinct cultures and their troubles.
Everyone has some trope that bothers them. I get that. But when I hear people complaining about the unrealistic and immersion-breaking horror of all the races living together, this is what I hear: "I was playing in this game with magic, ghost, faith healing, resurrection, magic items, dragons, and gods. But I had to leave. It had a lot of multiracial cities and I found it unrealistic."
Nice try. But the real racists here are those so convinced of the infallibility of their dogmatic beliefs they seek to impose them on all others. Just like colonialists sought to do. When you want to remake the whole world in your own image you don't get to accuse others of racism.
Its unrealistic (or rather makes no sense) when its every city, every town, every little hamlet. Unless there is an historical reasoning for how and why a small population center is mixed (be it culturally, ethnically or in the case of fantasy with 'races' aka species), it is complete nonsense when its everywhere in the world unless magic allows for instant or near instant travel and GENERALLY in most settings such travel is limited in scope. The trading port cities and bustling metropolis of empires stretching continents are a completely different scenario and nothing like insisting that an isolated mountain town that dislike outsiders must somehow reflect the demographics of 2020s Portland.
Tossed Salads, not Melting Pots.
Melting pots are reserved for trade towns with lots of far flung ships and/or caravans.
Well when you say it that way, I'm guessing you brought dressing! 😂
Absolutely not, all cities, towns and villages must all be as racially diverse as downtown LA, no matter how remote and isolated. So saith Hollywood who knows all.
@@mwjen lol
@@mwjen Rings of Power really annoyed me with that. While it really worked with some groups like the dwarfs, it was just weird when some isolated hamlet was the same...
You can't diverse metropolitan cities without homogenized motherlands.
Fun fact; whether or not Athas is actually cut off from the wider multiverse is one of those D&D lore tangles that almost approaches Mystara for how bad it is. The famous idea that it's all but impossible to enter or leave Athas was never brought up at all until the sourcebook "Defilers & Preservers", one of the very last books TSR released for the setting, and even then was contradicted by the fact that extraplanar monsters were canon to Athas, and advanced beings (epic wizards-psions, clerics and druids) all needed to spend time off-plane as part of their metamorphosis. Not to mention that the interference was explicitly only with priest and magic-user spells relating to planar travel - *psionics* were completely unaffected, rules as written, so any character with the Psychoportation Science of Probability Travel can move from Athas to the Astral Plane - aka, the original multiversal travel hub - or back again with ease. The Planescape adventure "Faction War" even mentions that there's an entire ghetto community of Athasian migrants in the Hive Ward called New Tyr.
"It may be a broken-down, dirty, crime-infested hive of scum and villainy... But, at least it's not home."
Best title ever and an even better argument
D+D Known World Gazetteers did this well
The Gazetteers were so good, it brought me back from AD&D.
Great video for world building…thank you and happy new year! Looking forward to more videos in 2025. Thanks for all you do!
When I ran spelljammer I would joke about the diverse crew, but at the same time I had planets racially homogeneous. Planet Harengon, Tortugon, Tabaxia, etc.
incredible title btw
Proof that our side's winning the culture war as well 😊
4:00 You also need a reason that said extremely diverse places haven't turned out like Indonesia.
the old TSR UK setting pelinore had a good way of balancing things by having its known world equivalent be the city league a trade route managed by a single merchant guild that turned into a city made from cities across an important section of the map for travel so you had a light cantina effect here and there but you mostly encountered half races (though demi-humans are still a thing) or humans with novel ancestry on the occasion you don't deal with humans to represent the nature of the alliance. When you encounter something outside of that it really hits, it is kind of the opposite of planescape.
One should also be sure to include the strife and problems if you do have a multiracial and/or multicultural soup of a city or kingdom. It's not gonna be sunshine and rainbows, and places like the OG Sigil are evidence to that.
The most cruel lie of the ideologies of our uncaring masters is that we are somehow supposed to look at a bland, grey gruel of a world where nobody really belong and see cities full of mistrust and decay and somehow think (and never question) that this is the ultimate reflection of the actual diversity of human cultures, their complicated histories and all the good and the bad. That we are supposed to see this sludge as the ultimate celebration of humanity, a grey world of interchangeable rootless people who believe in nothing, with no unique familial or cultural histories or ties. There used to be distinct cultures between even just the provinces and regions of countries, unique traditions. Now everyone is the same grey faced urban human.
Somehow, we call this 'progress' and somehow we think this is something fantasy fiction should aspire to be.
No one ever accused these ideologues of being the most history literate of people.
I died laughing when I saw the full title 😂😂😂. Haven’t watched the video yet put the title alone deserves a like
As always, contrast provides context. If any race can be found anywhere, than it doesn't matter what you play. You're always normal, and that's boring.
If you only find gnomes in gnome country, then suddenly being a gnome is interesting. It raises questions with potentially fun answers.
Why did you leave? Who or what did you leave behind? How do people who've never heard of a gnome let alone seen one respond to your presence? How do other gnomes respond when you meet so far from home? How do people respond when you go back?
These questions lose most if not all meaning if gnomes are ubiquitous.
That's probably why Wizards starting putting Tieflings in everything. They'd made everything else too commonplace, so nothing stood out anymore. It's not exciting to meet an elf npc when 30% of the local population are elves. If the elf npc is the only elf for 100 leagues, the party excluded, then meeting an elf npc will get the players' attention.
I've been trying to tell this to people for years, but they think they know better.
My friggin man. And hilarious call to action, will do so.
Kinda sad you even have to make a video like this. But here we are. Happy happy joy joy!!
Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina from the Star Wars universe Disney says doesn't exist is actually a pretty good book, with actual backstories for most of the cantina aliens that make sense.
Most of them are good. Not the SOUP guy though.
D&D art is to make it clear that it is possible not that this is likely. But no one race has to be dominant or most around in a city or culture. It is possible and even likely that separate groups can merge for economic, military or cultural advantage. Two groups may merge because of wars that have happened and together their institutions work together for safety. In short, you can have have peoples in as many groups and looks as you can have reasons for them to be together. As long as you know the reason it helps you make the world building workout.
Colonialism is the main reason we see ethnic diversity in countries like the US and Australia. At least that's where it began. It's such a self-own for people of a certain political persuasion to insist all communities be diverse. Because neither the US nor Australia would be diverse if their indigenous populations were just left alone.
@@Frustwell,
I think I agree, but to be clear, there have been ethnic minorities in most of the world’s cities and countries for millennia. E.g. traders and diplomats.
E.g. my wife is black and I am white and we live in China because China pays workers (e.g. English-speaking teachers) more compared to the cost of living than most or all other countries, including our countries of origin. And China’s development is famous as an example of development without the exploitation of other countries that enabled the development of the West. Thus we see that a minority of ex-pats and immigrants can exist in a country without imperialism.
@@SimonAshworthWood Yes. Minorities. But that's not the point of contention here. If you watch the video you will see it's more about how every piece of art now makes it seem as if every location is an equal mix of even the most fringe of playable races.
I live and work in Japan. Fewer than 3 percent of the population are not Japanese.
And I am of Aboriginal Australian heritage. Wiradjuri. Outstations in Australia aside there are indigenous groups in other parts of the world living in some of the world's remotest and most regional areas in which their communities are 100 percent homogenous.
"Most" does not mean "all." But Wizards would have us believe every corner of the globe looks like downtown Seattle.
And let's be clear: there is an imperialist bent to that company's seeking to impose their dogmatic views upon the whole world.
@@SimonAshworthWood @SimonAshworthWood Yes. Minorities. But that's not the point of contention here. If you watch the video you will see it's more about how every piece of art now makes it seem as if every location is an equal mix of even the most fringe of playable races.
I live and work in Japan. Fewer than 3 percent of the population are not Japanese.
And I am of Aboriginal Australian heritage. Wiradjuri. Outstations in Australia aside there are indigenous groups in other parts of the world living in some of the world's remotest and most regional areas in which their communities are 100 percent homogenous.
"Most" does not mean "all." But Wizards would have us believe every corner of the globe looks like downtown Seattle.
And let's be clear: there is an imperialist bent to that company's seeking to impose their dogmatic view upon the whole world.
Ok, your subscribing tips are great. I'll sub. Now have fun and do a good job. Dance monkey, muwahahaha!
Slightly of DnD... but I thought about about logical diversity in my nation building for my fantasy book in a similar way. So for example, I have a place called Storm and Song, originally full of rather French styled humans, till it was invaded by a blue dragon with some more Chinese flavoured humans as his servents. Fast forward about 300 years. and both human ethnicity are now fairly even (through 'high culture' tend to lean in a Chinese style due to the early power imbalance), but blue dragonblood humans are the foundation of the nobility, while humans of either group tend to be measure in worth by how connected that are to the 'blessed bloodlines'.
However complicating this are the more recently 'adopted' black dragonbloods, who where originally a exiled faction (whose dragon died), but made a deal with the blue dragon, to become his soldiers in a war he was losing. While the black dragonblood where original broadly Germanic in flavour, there generations of exile means ethnic wildcards and people of mixed and complicated heritage do turn up.
Put all this together, and it gives me a complicated little melting pot of a young state with three broad cultural traditions to play with, two who consider themselves 'local', and one who still has the tag of 'other' to deal with, but has come to dominate the military. Obviously there's tension, both subtle and less so, and I can use to drive conflict and drama.
DnD wise... I totally push that you write a short history for any important states and use conflict and time to build your relationships between different groups. Maybe your nation was once ruled by half fiend kings but that was toppled by some heroes a century ago and it become a goodly republic... which means random tieflings get treated as would be tyrants and/or cursed births.
I am here for the title. This is no doubt going to make some people mad, and I love it. 10 out of 10 trolling, and the video ain't even started yet.
Those people will always be mad about something though, which paradoxically means there's no point in ever trying to appease them. I've become so used to them throwing hissyfits that it now has no effect on me. I simply and literally do not care. It's become boring.
I have a problem when I can't tell the adventuring party from the monsters they encounter.
The guys on the upper left corner are enjoying the show.
Happy New Year! ... Woodshteps! Woodshteps! Woodshteps!
9:37
As it should be. We do have Superman, after all.
7:37 yes, Deadwood in Mystara
If I ignore the edition-war stuff in this video, the rest is arguably great advice, thank you. I could go on a several-hour tirade about this, that, and the other, but no one comes to these comment sections for that. BECMI has its flaws, hence why it isn't in common use today, and I'll just leave it at that.
You are required to rep the edition that got you started. It's in the Bible or one the back of the Declaration of Independence. I forgot which one, but it's in there.
@Mr_Welch You know what? Fair. I got started in 2nd edition, played all the others, though I think 3.5/Pathfinder is still my favorite.
The majority of OSR games are built on Moldvay/Cook (B/X) or Mentzer's revision of (BECMI). These typically come with changes and improvements. But it's wrong to say BECMI "isn't in common use today." It remains the best iteration of the game for many of us older players. It's the one I started with. And I used that one red box as my ruleset until the release of 2nd. Edition.
A recent video in which Professor Dungeon Master ranked every edition gave Mentzer the top spot.
And for good reason. BECMI (as well as B/X) is the most tinkerable and hackable of D&D editions. Without the rules bloat of later editions. Simple. Elegant.
I stopped playing D&D for years with the release of 3rd. Edition. It and every edition since hasn't even felt like D&D to me. Gone is the sense of esoterica. Since 2000 it has read, looked, and felt like a video game.
@Frustwell I mean, that would be your perspective. Mine is very different. To me, BECMI just feels like a grind of constantly bringing in new characters because your previous one died. It's hard to get invested in a character when it feels like they'll just die instantly in the next hour or two. I had a very rough experience with both 1st edition and 2nd edition. I get BECMI is simple and elegant, but I'd rather have a ruleset that doesn't encourage me to just name my character 'Fighter Number Twelve' until they reach 4th level. If they get that far.
Additionally, all the rules from back then feel so anemic compared to 3rd edition. I would rather have the complexity and crunch if it means I can get personally invested in the game.
@@Mr_Welch I think it's in the US Code Section 69 Paragraph 420. 😂
Don't know if it is the tone, but others may misconstrue what you suggest as a hard-line-in-the-sand culture border (though you did mention including subcultures). I am personally fascinated by the concept of cultural drift & population migration. I agree that unjustified Kitchen Sink settings are boring. However, I find some of the monocultures of Old School D&D boring (it may be where I got my sources, the difference in priorities, or the publishers didn't care enough to elaborate). (I think you said) shouldn't have a location that has everything but still has some foreign subgroups (If you're confident about writing them) for some spice. Find fascinating stories about small pockets of subculture and races migrating to F*-all nowhere (for mundane reasons. and I prefer those kinds of reasons). Reading about them fills my imagination with the blanks about possible trade and cultural exchange. I hate the barebones world-building, stonewall, default answers of "they all just get along" or they are all monoculturely racist. (I want more "Ands" and "Buts" in the synopsis)
I related to this and have been thinking about this more since reading Pathfinder Divine Mysteries (think back; Golarion deities do feel similar to how immortals on Mystara behave with mortals [when done by a good writer, and minus the god vs. immortals schism, and continued survival not usually predicated on # o followers... which makes them oddly more admirable (or horrific for Unholy gods) exemplars of ways on how a PC could live life while give other reasons worshipers and soul claims still feel important]) I dislike how other settings make most gods feel locked to a particular region or race, with zero meaningful presences outside that demographic (it is probably more of a phrasing and presentation issue, and the world operates under the rule of religion being a zero-sum Henotheism game rather than historical Pantheism). You can have a few gods whose only claim of fame is being a nation's patron, 1-to-3 racist elf gods, but not all of them. In Warhammer Fantasy, it is more interesting that Sigmar's main following is only in his empire but has a smaller cult outside the borders that follows different missionary doctrines or how the human gods Kane & Manann are clearly human interpretations of Khaela Mensha Khaine and Mathlann respectively.
I'm sorry if the rant ends up unfocused. You do good work. I wish Mystara hadn't gotten Squatted so soon. Maybe I would reconsider my thoughts on some settings if the complete history were presented as a world map presentation, complete with Arrows and color legends.
Fashion mfs: Prada or Nada
Role-players: Mystara or Nada
At last a voice of reason
He's always been a voice of reason, where ya been? 😋
Great vid
to be pedantic, I think it only really counts as segregation if it's enforced artificially, otherwise it's just preference of company, and ultimately like demographics will gravitate to each other.
The only place IRL I can think of in which having multiple races wasn't some sort of problem was ancient Rome. I could be wrong, though.
Ever been to NYC?
@@johnbalk6091 NYC is woke, therefore they have a race problem.
@@johnbalk6091 A city in which more than a few Black residents have been caught on film punching elderly Asian women in the face is a city where "multiculturalism" is not working.
It led to the fall of Rome.
@@Akeche No it did not.
It's also worth noting that you can, and should, have multiple centers of culture/species when possible. The Elf Empire is far less interesting than El'Th'Ladan sharing a border with the High Kingdom of the Children of the Forest.
Everyone knows Dwarves are the superior race.
3:30 🤘😎
Ahh, just make them Bland Monoliths. Got it.
Only then will the exceptions stand out.
The only really important thing regarding this is to not watch upon races as race supremacists and radical leftists do. You can have an all-white metropolis, but have it incredibly diverse (different cultures, stations, bacgrounds, political affiliations, differences between sexes...).
Skin colour does not make something diverse, it's just radical and harmful view upon the world.
Fox News is a helluva drug
in a way you just said that race based on skin color is a made up idea , which is cool. Here's an idea too , in an oligarchy , you can push "diversity" based on race / skin color , but at the same time that new face has all the same old ideas.
@@SwiftJustice @SwiftJustice Are we supposed to believe your paying attention to what know-nothings on Twitter or Facebook say is really any better than watching FOX? I am not American least of all a FOX viewer. But can see how millions of Americans of your persuasion believed the absolute dumbest lies about what happened in Kenosha because tribalism was more important to you than the truth.
I'm designing a high elf city, but Elon Musk unlocked H1B visas and 150k Earth Genasi are pooing in the streets.
Reading the comments makes me think you're preaching to the choir and going on another 5e rant. Was this really a topic that required a whole video?
@@johnbalk6091 I actually write these for newer people getting into the game. I'm just doing these from experience, people ask me to share what I've learned over the years so I do. UA-cam targets videos like this at people who aren't my subscribers. 80% of the people that commented don't normally frequent my channel. But I also love to throw shade, however these suggestions apply to any addition of the game.
"Elves live in Elftopia, Dwarves live in Dwarfheim, Halflings are from Halflingville" isn't worldbuilding. It's simply taking racial splats and putting them on a map. You might as well say Druids only come from Druidhome and Rogues from Rogueland. It's lazy, it's thoughtless, it's unimaginative.
"You need a reason!" well... yes. That part is worldbuilding. That's the work of building a world. Actually building it instead of generating a map and putting Vikingholm at the top and Deserts of al-Arabianightsia at the bottom.
Every nation is going to be heterogenous. Unless it's some tiny isolated nowhere that no one wants to come to... but even then, they probably will (consider Svalbard, the Arctic Norwegian islands which have one of the highest per capita Thai immigrant populations on Earth). The same with most cities; while a small hamlet is probably built around some (probably related) families, cities are by essential nature diverse and metropolitan. If you have a citywide festival, sorry champ you're gonna see elves and gnomes and tabaxi and a Gith or god knows what in the crowd scene, becuase that's how it WORKS.
The capital of Dwarfheim, let's call it Hammeraxe, since we're being fucking increative anyway, can either just be a bunch of dwarves dwarfing it up with big beer-soaked braided beards and art deco architecture talking about mining and tradition and hitting orcs with axehammers or whatever. You can do that. You might as well just tell your players "Imagine a dwarf, that's every NPC here, moving on." Congratulations on your worldbuilding bro.
Or you can have a substantial population of elves in Hammeraxe. Why? I dunno, but there's a reason since you need one for that I guess. Jewelers moving in to have better access to gems and ore. Perhaps Hammeraxe has one of the greates libraries in existence since - of course - it's carved into a mountain and the stable air lends to preserving books well. Maybe elves in your world just fucking love beer, who cares, get a reason and use it. It's literally the least important part. What IS important is, what impact does this substantial elf population have in Hammeraxe? What are their influences in art, language, architecture, governance? How have their own cultures - and that's a plural because fuck you if you don't give your races as many disparate cultures as you can dream up - changed from living in Hammeraxe? They're certainly not going to be identical to the elves of Crystaltree in Elftopia, are they?
If you want credible worldbuilding, you look to reality for inspiration, and modern societies are multicultural and multiethnic... And have been for far longer than the modern era. This would still be true if we shared the world with multiple sapient species. Your task as a worldbuilder is not to erase that and create homogenous "Zoos" for your fantasy world, but to take that reality and give it the fantasy spin. And that can be just as surprising as anything else. I guarantee you your players will be more interested in the orcs who populate Halflingville (at a 3:1 ratio to halflings!) and why that is, than they will be with "Just the Shire I guess" and "Chief Bloodskull Thunderfucker and his tribe in the mountains"
And in that kind of RPG environment you'll just have PCs running around yammering about racism this and bigotry that, because it's what they do IRL in spite of America being exactly as diverse as the world you say you want. Birds of a feather flock together. Like attracts like. It's been that way ever since the beginning of history because that's how human nature works. And all PCs are human, which is going to override the imaginary non-human thinking of non-human races every time.
Most D&D is set in a time period reminiscent of medieval Europe, Renaissance at the latest. One of the defining differences between those times and today is speed and ease of transportation.
Therefore, no, Axehome will not have a large contingent of elves. Why? because no one wants to spend the literal weeks it would take to walk there even if the roads are safe and the dwarves aren't prejudiced. I don't care how good the library is. You're not going to get more than a handful of foreigners traveling there over the course of a lifetime outside of maybe diplomats.
Cosmopolitan cities that feature subcultures and mixed heritage families from all sorts of disparate places are something that just did not happen until _very_ recently in modern history outside of a few locations, and those exceptions were due to unique geography, namely navigable waterways such harbors and rivers on the Mediterranean Sea for example. Even then, you walk a day inland off the major trade roads and suddenly no one's ever seen a foreigner.
That said, if your setting is such high magic that anyone can hire out a magic carpet or enchanted carriage to travel from town to town for just a silver or two, then you'd get mixed places happening a lot more frequently. If there's some sort of fantasy UN that set up a bunch of permanent teleporters mirroring today's air travel. That could accomplish what your talking about, so it absolutely could be done. You just have to have equivalently abundant and inexpensive travel as we have today.
Even then, you still won't end up with multicultural communities everywhere. Even modern America is still regionally distinct amongst its own citizenry partially because it was regionally settled. Even after a couple hundred years, it's still not homogenized despite the ease of travel. There's no reason to expect a fantasy setting would be any different outside some setting specific justification.
@@CowCommando People forget or refuse to believe, that extreme diversity is a relatively new thing. There are millions of living Brits, who haven't seen a Black person until the 1960s or later. And Lovecraft was raving about endless foreign hordes from a New York, that was more, than 90% White.
Hate to break it to you. But modern metropolis with multiple cultures are only large cities. The news is full of crime and racial strife. Orcs showing up in a town originally established by Hobbits. The Scouring of the Shire. Start throwing multiple races within a walled city. There's going to be blood fueds, grudges, and a militant city guard.
In case you haven't noticed. All of this modern immigration is thanks to Air and ship travel. Where people can travel a few hours and cross hundreds of miles. Modern society is not a great example for a setting set in a high middle ages with fantasy races. Humans tend not to trust outsiders. Afghanistan is just lines drawn on a map with tribal warfare. The Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition was a reaction to various invasions by several Muslim Caliphates. Today Poland and Hungary don't follow the EU policy of letting in illegal migration or so-called refugees. Japan is a homogeneous nation with a very small immigrant population. Travel to the countryside in any modern nation and it's nothing like the Cosmopolitan cities. People the resent foreigners being dropped into their small towns by the federal government.
If anything. A D&D setting should be about conflict and racial prejudice. Fiddler on the Roof is a great example of a small town with two distinct cultures and their troubles.
@@Nightbreed24 racism doesn't really need to be a factor either , it's just too far or too dangerous to travel there.
Everyone has some trope that bothers them. I get that. But when I hear people complaining about the unrealistic and immersion-breaking horror of all the races living together, this is what I hear:
"I was playing in this game with magic, ghost, faith healing, resurrection, magic items, dragons, and gods. But I had to leave. It had a lot of multiracial cities and I found it unrealistic."
Nice try. But the real racists here are those so convinced of the infallibility of their dogmatic beliefs they seek to impose them on all others. Just like colonialists sought to do. When you want to remake the whole world in your own image you don't get to accuse others of racism.
Its unrealistic (or rather makes no sense) when its every city, every town, every little hamlet. Unless there is an historical reasoning for how and why a small population center is mixed (be it culturally, ethnically or in the case of fantasy with 'races' aka species), it is complete nonsense when its everywhere in the world unless magic allows for instant or near instant travel and GENERALLY in most settings such travel is limited in scope.
The trading port cities and bustling metropolis of empires stretching continents are a completely different scenario and nothing like insisting that an isolated mountain town that dislike outsiders must somehow reflect the demographics of 2020s Portland.
@@Skritz-mt9zb People have never accused the "anti-racist left" of being the most history literate of people.