Chamomile Has A Blog

Elves are dicks. I wrote an article about it and I stand by it – in nearly every D&D setting, elves have been somewhere between moderately and extremely dickish (Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, two of the biggest D&D settings around, lean towards the extreme side). So, when I say that elven lifespans should be a huge deal and that middle-aged elves should logically have crazy-high character levels even if they’re bog standard elven guards or the local apothecary or whatever, that’s not because I’m an ardent supporter of the “misunderstanding Tolkien” school of worldbuilding, it’s because being able to live for a very long time is a huge advantage which is pretty thoroughly underestimated by D&D. I use elves as an example here, but dwarves are quite similar.

Continue reading “Elven Lifespans Should Be A Bigger Deal Than They Are” →

This one is actually a forum post, which is why it references a conversation that this blog isn’t actually having. Other than the weird segue at the beginning, it’s a pretty self-contained post.

Continue reading “The Importance of Fluff” →

Of the big three D&D settings (Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, and Dragonlance, ignoring meta-settings like Planescape), Dragonlance is the setting used to exemplify epic fantasy. A titanic struggle between good and evil rocks Ansalon down to its core whenever Wizards can find the money to pay Hickman and/or Weis to squeeze out another trilogy, bold heroes facing off against tyrannical overlords, whose triumph is inevitable. The tyrannical overlords, I mean. Good guys never win lasting victories in Dragonlance.

Continue reading “Dragonlance: In The End, Evil Shall Always Triumph Over Good” →

So here’s this bizarre idea that crops up now and again, the idea that you can make an MMO, an RPG society of some kind, or some other shared-universe experience more “realistic” by offering most or all content on a very limited time basis, “as it’s occurring.” So if it’s the old 3rd edition Living Greyhawk, for example, whenever you show up to your friendly local gaming store on game night, there’s going to be some kind of adventure going on, but each week it’ll be a different one. If you miss the week, you miss the adventure forever because it already happened and is now over. Or, an MMO where every two or three months the game updates and old content gets removed in favor of whatever’s going on right now.

This can seem genuinely immersive at fist glance, but it falls down so quickly under scrutiny that it really isn’t worth the costs (which we’ll get into later), because these “living worlds” never have the dedication to be genuinely alive. Except EVE Online. EVE Online totally does have a truly living world, and it has that by putting things almost entirely in the hands of the players. A living world doesn’t just mean that all events are limited time, it means that how the populace of players reacts to an event is the determining factor in how it resolves and that players can start events on their own initiative just by starting large scale conflicts between factions, whether those factions are built by the players from the ground up or pre-determined by the devs and then turned over to player leadership.

Continue reading ““Limited-Time Content” And “Living World” Are Not The Same” →

So I’m going to talk about some Forgotten Realms lore. Specifically I’m going to talk about how elves are total dicks. Like most fantasy worlds riffing on Tolkien, Faerun used to be ruled by elves back in the era before humans were a big deal. Before that, though, was the era when dragons and giants battled one another for control of the world. How did we get from one to the other? How did elves take over from a world ruled by dragons? Numerical superiority? Aid from friendly metallic dragons? Alliance with the giants?

Unfortunately, the answer is dickishness.

Continue reading “Elves Are Dicks” →