Radiant Citadel: A Diverse Hodgepodge Mess
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- Опубликовано: 5 фев 2025
- Journeys through the Radiant Citadel is a...book to say the least. While I've only touched on DnD in one other video (to which I'm less satisfied with each day), I had an urge to talk about DnD a bit more and might as well get more of my negativity over the "modern" route WotC has been going with it.
I'm a lot more confident with this one. Afterwards, if I end up wanting to talk more, it'll probably be on older products or earlier 5E content to add some positivity to the mix.
"What if we did planescape, but it all depended on race" is the general gist of this book.
"We need an adventure written by persons of the Roy G. Biv variety because white people can't do it right" might ring more true if they didn't do a surface level treatment of their culture's biggest festivals etc. I want adventures with their craziest deepest lore. That would be awesome. I don't care about pretending to go to Dias Los Muertos in an RPG.
The biggest beef I had when I read through was more or less what you pointed out, it's all bland and pastel. The bad guys are rarely actually bad, it's all circumstance and magical mishaps. All well and good if there's actual stakes for you as a player, but it feels like you're just there to be witness to the creators writing. Almost like stage props and an excuse for the plot to play out.
All the 'good' things about the settings cultures are played up, all the 'bad' things are shoved in a basement and not mentioned. Another commentator named Mr.Welch did a pretty good job of summarizing the setting and the nature of its creation. He also pointed out its biggest flaw in that it takes one or more of the 'cultural reps' being missing (not dead but kidnapped or held hostage) to prevent the Citadels defenses from working. No army or civil defense means it's a turkey shoot and all the adventures acting as guardians can be overmatched through attrition.
It feels like a surface level look into the cultures represented and nothing more.
So, you have an entire book dedicated to a perfect world in which the only problems are misunderstandings and there is little evil or corruption.
The only reason i would use this setting is to introduce problems and play out what breaks.
Instead of telling us that European medeaval culture equals bad why not use the diverse and expansive cultural folklore of the rest of the world. West Africa has a massively interesting folklore to draw upon. Aboriginal Australia as well.
I mean if they wanted to not just culturally appropriate European folklore (because European medeaval culture equals rasist... I meant bad... bad is what I meant to say) use other story plot and characters to draw upon. The hero's journey is not unique. Just look at the story of Monkey from China.
It's odd that Neil Gaiman has done more for most culturally isolated pale skinned people than anything the angry school marms of the (very) liberal left are pushing. Look at american gods and the character of Spider.
Honestly I want more diverse stories, characters and settings. They are a new 'flavor.' I like new. I just don't like being called an ahole because i do 't like what is force fed to me. I want characters and well thought out plot lines, not agendas.
It almost feels like the only characterization a lot of stories have is, "I'M GAY!" or "I'M NOT OF EUROPEAN DESENT!" or "WOMEN CAN BE EMOTIONLESS, GOAL ORIENTED DICKS TOO!" Why would anyone want to be lectured at in thier free time? I have to spend two hours a year dealing with that for work already.
Mörk Borg
Ok so I think most of it is in good faith, but not being able to pronounce words that are not that hard and criticizing every little detail makes for a bad review. Just edit your video and don't repeat three times a word. You say things are compressed in so you can't really delve into cultures but when they do with names you automatically treat it as something alien.