1980's D&D Cartoon characters in Honor Among Thieves!

 (Spoilers, other than the one in the post title, follow)

I don't really feel like reviewing the new D&D movie. Suffice it to say it exceeded expectations. 

I will say I like the nods to classic monsters (though they seem to be in most cases somewhat altered, though maybe not as much as the character classes), and tropes like leveling up (maybe multiple levels). And it was pretty funny, and sailed along in large part on Chris Pine's "silver fox" charisma. 

The only real signs of woke was that the two straight, white leads were buffoonish dipshits, but I was able to swallow it. And that is pretty much the way of Hollywood now, even in non-woke things. Yeah, whatever. The kind of folk who designed and built most of the world are the enemy, so dipshit-them up. 

The one jaw-dropping thing was the inclusion of the kids from the 80's cartoon. 

I know they are teenagers, but
acrobat is pretty damn hot. 

I'm lucky I noticed, because you could miss it. They are seen a couple of times in the final acts maze (dungeon I guess)  scenes; one of several groups who are trying to make it out of the hellish automated labyrinth. 

Clearly they are older. Did they make it out of D&D world in the cartoon? I did watch it, but don't remember. And how older? They all have that "25 year old playing a teenager" thing going on. Fine, but the youngest one now looks the oldest. 

The glimpses of them are literally seconds, but even then I thought that cosplay I've seen in the past captured them better.

The Cavalier dude for sure has that bitchy 
look that suits him from the cartoon. 

Based not on the movie version, but the cosplay photo above, I'd kind of like to see a live action version of the cartoon. Maybe its a couple years later and they having been a world devastated by Venger. 

I'm kind of glad to have not seen the little whiney baby unicorn from the cartoon. I hated that little thing. YMMV.

Cheers

The Question of Race in D&D and other Woke issues

 

So I read yesterday that they will be removing the term "race" from D&D.

I'm not here to rant on that. You can go to The RPG Pundit's Blog, or Venger Satanis', or any number of more conservative (does it sound logical for a satanist to be conservative? I mean, is "do what thou whilst" conservative?) spots for more passion about it. Me? I get over these things fairly easily. 

I mean, race was never the proper term. And "species" seems more appropriate, though sounds more science-fictiony. I recently had to go through the "no more racial modifiers" thing with my Roll20 material. And you know what? I love those race-based modifiers, but in the grand scheme of things? I just want to run games and make fun for others. So now you get plus 2 to something and plus 1 to something. Big whoop. Let the players decide if a mod is based on what they are. 

The main thing that irks me is how the left wants very badly to instill real world race issues into gaming. They are the ones who decided orcs and drow represent black people. It's kind of tragi-comic how the left seems to actually be the ones with racist thoughts. But whatevs.  

I'm fairly on the left for many social issues. Things I can't believe we still have to talk about in this day and age. Gay marriage. Legalization of marijuana. But I lean more to the center on most other things. Though I believe there is a lot of racism in the country (no worse than most other nations), I think the current wokist ideals at their heart include a lot of racial grift and liberal profiteering. Indoctrination of children into believing they are racists at heart and their reading of way too many Twitter posts on the issues are making them do things they will one day regret. I mean, those dicks don't grow back after you cut them off. 

The regular Roll20 campaign I've been doing for months does not seem to have especially woke players, though I don't try to test them on it. But I have tried a couple of campaigns that were nonstarters that were made up of folk heavy on the pronouns. It's bad enough that in a lot of cases off the Roll20 forums you will get people who want to go by nicknames that are awkward for me to call them, like Morpheus, Goat Cheese, or Sucknuts, but toss in an endless variety of pronouns and it starts to get kind of surreal. I'm open to learning more about people, but for games I just want to call people Mary or Joe as our campaigns roll along. DMing can be stressful enough without worrying that using the terms "He" or "She" might be taken as ignorance. 

Again, whatevs. I'm accepting of le differance. When I left SoCal I had a transgender neighbor, and she was the first person who called me when I moved to a new state to see how I was doing. My friendship there sort of opened my eyes to more acceptance of differences. 

But the long and short of it is I just want to run a game that is fun for all. I don't want all these worries of the real-world intruding. I want orcs to be nasty and evil, and I want everybody to hate them. Even other orcs. 

YMMV. Cheers.