A lot of the stuff that Wizards has done recently has been ludicrous- banning "Crusade" from Magic: The Gathering, etc, worthless and hyperbolic virtue signalling....
But one of their latest canards, the removal of baseline or fundamentally evil races, such as orcs, and recasting them as just humans with different skin colors, is actually a complete rework of the game into a truly shitty form. Future D&D stories and places will forever be tainted by this idiocy; it will never get better, because they don't even understand why the game needed that sort of thing to begin with.
While obviously there are old school systems that don't suffer from this, or reprints of older editions of D&D and the 80s and 90s systems that were contemporary at the time, I want to know... is anyone making tabletop games currently without all the social justice horseshit? Is there anywhere I can go on this?
Aside from the handful of creators that frequent therpgsite not really. The way that the rpg industry is today disgusts and angers me because it was something that I held dear. The people in charge of most of the major companies have outwardly expressed their distaste for anyone who does not follow far-left ideologies. At the end of the day, we need to create our own settings that people can't turn into mouthpieces for communist ideologues. We have to make new alternatives not simply dwell on the dumpster fire that rpgs have become.
In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I have for the last 4 years, been working on my own tabletop RPG. The basic premise is that the characters take the role of mech piloting knights in a sci-fantasy world featuring a huge mashup of Western religious and mystic traditions (Everything from Kabbalah to Gnosticism). It's currently sitting at somewhere around 350 pages, with 95 pieces of art done and more on the way.
Here's some samples of art:
Mechs : https://ibb.co/749khjM , https://ibb.co/d0VrC7V
Character Classes: https://ibb.co/pQF10vG , https://ibb.co/1szZS49
I'm hoping to send out some pdfs for playtesting sometime in the next few months and get a lovely hardcover edition out sometime next year. If you guys want to hear more I can answer questions as well as post up world details and lore.
Okay but lemme tell you what I'm not hearing in all that.
Mechanics.
This is a problem. Everyone is so eager to world build but what really makes a game is mechanics. So who's are you cribbing off of and what are you changing?
Case in point, Iron Kingdoms d6 should have been the shit but it turned out to be just shit because of mechanics.
Why would anyone bother making new mechanics when the existing systems are fine? Just pirate 5e books and run your own campaign as you damn well please, like I do. Worldbuilding and developing well-implemented and deep characters is by far the most important thing in D&D, not mechanics.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve always used a world that was heavily inspired by forgotten realms, I just keep the lore ideas I like and change everything that I don’t. It’s perfectly easy to ignore all the woke bullshit, at my table orcs still are and always will be bloodthirsty savages.
My orcs were always relatively civilised, just somewhat more savage on average - before any of the woke shit told me that that's how it has to be. Probably because my world was (at first) more inspired by WoW's ideas than by old D&D and LOTR, though that's changing as I slowly realise how damn creatively bankrupt WoW's lore is.