iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

There are 14 dwarven gods in the Forgotten Realms! I wouldn't know it from reading anything recent. I understand that from an editorial policy truncating is a necessity. Baldur's Gate 3 snipped Druids who venerated Eldath from the game to cement Silvanus as the major deity of the Druids grove.

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I feel like all I'm ever going to see from Wizards of the Coast in the future is always the loudest and most obvious character options. Always the safety of the Feywild or Shadowfell, never the old and messy lore of the Gods with racial blood feuds. I don't even need the game to be only that.

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Gruumsh is boring. More like Gruumsh One-note. He's an Odinic parody, his wife Luthic is ignored and cuckolds him, his son Baghtra is a Thor or Hercules like parody of oafish strength. The other three Orc gods are so esoteric and inert, redundant to major deities of the Faerun pantheon.

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Urogalan, a Halfling god of death and earth, a gentle and unfeared god, with a black hound as his symbol. Why a black hound? Will the Forgotten Realms ever impress upon that meaning something to a potential player? Is it lore for the sake of posterity? Why include it at all?

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Urdlen having a hatred for all life is political! Corellan Larethian being a non-binary god with he/him pronouns is political! Angharradh being a triple aspect goddess is political! The lore has politics buried within it, but never spoken aloud. To whom does this game belong? To whom it panders to?

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Does 5e have space for a Gnome Barbarian Zealot in the service of the blind genderless albino mole god Urdlen? Can 5e acknowledge that a genderless god (admittedly an evil one) is punk rock, is queer by point of not mandating to a heterosexual norm, even in an adversary role?

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Like sure, I can write adventures dealing with Moradin and Garl Glittergold and Yondalla, but we can all do that. Editorial has no real intent of ever digging into the lesser deities of those pantheons and trying to square the circle of how those faiths and churches exist under the current rules

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But a setting like the Forgotten Realms of Faerun, with over 100 deities across multiple pantheons and counties and continents suffers for this, its lore buried in the annals of 2e/3e material, always to be on the wiki but never engaged with in modern official materials.

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So fine, the Wizard subclass Bladesinger is no longer exclusive to elves or people with elven ancestry. I get that a gnome or halfling exclusive class wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on for 95% of players. Dwarves and Orcs (Half-orcs) are in the same situation.

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Dungeons and Dragons thoughts (again) Wizards of the Coast's 5e policy has been to disentangle race and ancestry from character builds, cementing class and subclasses as the intended mechanical path for players to engage with the game. This has consequences that bury the lore of many settings.

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The Yuan-ti Anathema, Grey Slaad or Death Slaad, Beholder and Aboleth all works as boss monsters with built-in lore for their minions. Attaching them to as plot is as easy as giving them a literal mutation, a philosophical change, or a practical need to make them actively attacking others.

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The Yuan-ti are meant to use a network of proxies before ever revealing themselves but a branch of yuan-ti that are more aggressive easily works to bring them forward as enemies. Their motivation is radical self-improvement for their society which means they pursue radical magic and transformations.

-first as a blue slaad, and then later molt into a stronger form. Also, they have a stone in their forehead that if surgically removed grants the owner control over the slaad. So your blue/green slaad nemesis can in fact be a pawn of a mystery character. The party nemesis can turn into an ally.

Slaads or Slaadi have an optics problem in that they are big colorful frog monsters. But they have some of the best lore. A green slaad when killed turns into a blue slaad, which after a year and a day can regenerate back into a green slaad. Which means a nemesis character for the party can appear

Beholders are often loners but also prone to strange fixations. A beholder that has mutated to grow small extra eyestalks and grafts them onto grimlocks (normally blind) and overwhelms them with religious ecstasy as their brains can't process having sight and a gaze attack.

An Aboleth being aquatic is a hindrance given that 5e dnd sort of breaks doing underwater combat. But an Aboleth frozen in a glacier, or trapped in a chasm drained of water is the perfect boss lair. And gives it the motivation to attack the surface world with mind controlled minions.

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Baldur's Gate 3 used the illithid as the face of the game, and it's a missed opportunity for Wizards of the Coast to not repeat that formula. Although anyone with the pen & paper game can do the same thing. The Aboleth, Beholder, Slaad, and Yuan-ti are all ripe to build an entire campaign story.

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