sugaredcosmos

[sugaredcosmos]

I mean, it's at least little bit funny how Hasbro's efforts to position Dungeons & Dragons as a universal entry-level game have managed to undo thirty years of development in D&D's culture of play and we're back to litigating whether "you should create characters who actually have a reason to go on adventures rather than expecting the GM to do backflips to justify their presence" is unreasonably imposing upon the player's creative freedom like it's fucking 1994.

[sugaredcosmos]

You seem to be knowledgeable of this sorts of things, so if you don't mind. I'm trying to learn about real-life druids. I'm barely starting, but still, from what little I've read I have no idea of how they ended up being stereotyped as "nature clerics" by DnD. Would you know how that happened?

Druids aren't "nature clerics" in Dungeons & Dragons; they share some of the same game mechanics with clerics, but the actual media inspirations the two classes are drawing on have very little overlap.

To the point, however, the greater part of the reason D&D druids are Like That is because they're basically Merlin (i.e., the figure from Arthurian folklore) as interpreted though a very specific pop-cultural lens. At the time that D&D was taking shape, it was often asserted by New Age writers that Merlin was a real, historical druid who was later incorporated into the Arthurian myth-cycle (a claim that's now generally regarded as false), and this idea got tangled up with popular media depictions of Merlin to produce a picture of druids almost entirely divorced from the historical reality.

Some of those media depictions are quite recent, too; for example, while you can point to precedents for the D&D druid's weaponised shapeshifting shtick in various folk-tales, the way it actually works in the game is nearly a direct lift from Merlin's shape-changing duel with Madam Mim in T H White's 1938 novel The Sword in the Stone (though most folks reading this post are probably more familiar with the 1963 Disney adaptation).

[sugaredcosmos]

so how did DnD get the race science bs in it? was that just a norm when it was made or was one of the devs racist or something?

A little bit of column A, a little bit of column B.

In the "A" column, it's important to understand that Dungeons & Dragons isn't anything close to being a generic fantasy game: it's very specifically inspired by American literary sword and sorcery fantasy in the period roughly spanning the 1930s through the 1970s, with a particular emphasis on the late 1960s and early 1970s strand of the genre. Other inspirations have crept in over time, but that core has remained largely unchanged.

Like most Western pulp fiction, sword and sorcery fantasy frequently featured scenes of lantern-jawed heroes manfully slaughtering their way through nameless hordes of jabbering, spear-chucking, dark-skinned savages. Even at this early date, however, the explicitly racist dimension of this trope wasn't necessarily playing well with contemporary audiences, so over time, depictions of these groups tended to drift away from direct stand-ins for real-world "races" and toward fictional ethnic groups, eventually culminating in the tribes of swarthy hobgoblins and degenerate lizard-men and such populating the pages of the Monster Manual. Such literature freely invoked the assertions of race science to explain why these creatures were morally okay to kill, and that carried over into Dungeons & Dragons.

In the "B" column, Gary Gygax was the kind of person you might invent as a cartoon parody of a racist game designer if he didn't already exist. Like, this is a guy who was quoting John Chivington's infamous "nits make lice" remarks in order to explain why it was okay for paladins to kill orc babies in forum threads as recently as 2005; one might think "not citing the Sand Creek Massacre as an example of morally praiseworthy conduct" would be a very low bar to clear, but he managed to tunnel right under it. Certainly, he didn't originate the race science that's present in D&D's worldbuilding, which is also amply present in its core inspirational media, but he also had no interest in pushing back against it!

[sugaredcosmos]

why doesn't every social app have shadow banning / blocking. its so powerful. i love it sm.

[sugaredcosmos]

Did you know you can get yard signs made that say basically anything

[sugaredcosmos]

Saw it was make a terrible comic day today (June 24 2025) so meet my cats

[sugaredcosmos]

Trump trying to psychically manifest a ceasefire into existence instead of actually negotiating one

[sugaredcosmos]

Ok, loves, so we've all got the message that joking about suicide is bad for your mental health. Now we need to get on "joking that the planet/all of humanity has no future" is bad for societal health/encouraging resistance to bad shit."

[sugaredcosmos]

cracks open my espionage cyanide tooth but it's actually one of those sponge dinosaur pills and instead of dying I just cough up a spinosaur onto the floor

[sugaredcosmos]

Genre-savvy horror protagonist figures out they're in a slasher movie, simply turns around and leaves; realises too late that they're actually in an artsy character-driven psychological horror film about them slowly being driven mad by existential uncertainty over whether they've successfully escaped the narrative.

[sugaredcosmos]

You can either take it easy, take it personal, or the secret third thing: Both. That's where you assume that whatever someone said, they meant it as an insult, but you don't respect them enough to care about their opinion of you.

[sugaredcosmos]

Democrats cannot win back working class voters by putting forth more corporate backed politicians. There's a better path forward. It's one paved by leaders like @zohrankmamdani who stand up to the oligarchy and fight to make life affordable for working people.

[sugaredcosmos]

play toys ?

[sugaredcosmos]

[sugaredcosmos]

when you cook for everyone and they tell you how much they like the food