I have been collecting Dragon from its early days until about 120 after which I stopped. I started collecting again after the recent refurbish. I also own all the PDF Dragons available (1 to 200). I have also read all these Dragon magazines. One of my favourite sections has always been the ecology series and it was one of the main reasons I started buying Dragon again with the guarantee of one ecology an issue. After the comics its generally the first thing I read.
I have noticed something with all these new ecologies which never happened (as far as I can recall) in older issues. Evolution keeps peeking its ugly head into these articles. The origins for all the recent monsters have all involved evolution somehow (as opposed to the tried and true mad wizard experiment gone wrong for the chimera style monsters).
I just wanted to ask, am I the only one that finds mention of evolution (or any kind of modern reference, for example in the recent Far Realm articles the elves had an R&D centre? R&D?!) kind of distracting? I don't think it meshes well with the idea of fantasy and magic. Why invoke natural processes that purportedly take millions of years in an article about a monster that has been around for 30 years? (e.g. the Chuul). Its like the writers feel they have to mix in some modern ideas and concepts to make the monster more "real" when 21st century realty is not really something I am looking for in a D&D game.
I just wanted to ask, am I the only one that finds mention of evolution (or any kind of modern reference, for example in the recent Far Realm articles the elves had an R&D centre? R&D?!) kind of distracting?
Okay, stuff like "R&D center" would be annoying to me. But evolution doesn't. After all, evolution was happening all along, we just named it in the 1860s. :-) There are only so many Mad-Wizard-Creating-Abomination-That-Gets-Out-Of-Control that I can take before I get annoyed... Having the evolution of the creature explained helps me put it into a specific niche, helps me understand exactly where it might be encountered and why, and helps make the world more natural. Even the escaped experiments have to fit in with the world somehow, or they'd go extinct again. Simply mentioning that the creatures came about through evolution doesn't jar me out of the fantasy setting, whereas "R&D center" implies a particular type of societal structure that doesn't quite fit with a fantasy world, and is thus a little jarring.
I just wanted to ask, am I the only one that finds mention of evolution (or any kind of modern reference, for example in the recent Far Realm articles the elves had an R&D centre? R&D?!) kind of distracting?Okay, stuff like "R&D center" would be annoying to me. But evolution doesn't. After all, evolution was happening all along, we just named it in the 1860s. :-) There are only so many Mad-Wizard-Creating-Abomination-That-Gets-Out-Of-Control that I can take before I get annoyed... Having the evolution of the creature explained helps me put it into a specific niche, helps me understand exactly where it might be encountered and why, and helps make the world more natural. Even the escaped experiments have to fit in with the world somehow, or they'd go extinct again. Simply mentioning that the creatures came about through evolution doesn't jar me out of the fantasy setting, whereas "R&D center" implies a particular type of societal structure that doesn't quite fit with a fantasy world, and is thus a little jarring.
I tend to agree.
Remember, D&D is not Earth history. Just because the power of one extremely-influential religion kept the western world from acknowledging the simple fact that living things change over time in response to their environments for so long doesn't mean that the biological sciences would be artificially stifled in a similar way in a typical D&D world.
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
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No, seriously, I'm not a creationist. I just thought that would be funny, and sitting here at work on a Saturday trying to finish the Shackled City hardcover, I'm allowed to be loopy.
Sorry about the "Research and Development" reference in the Far Realm article. Somehow it must have slipped by, since I agree that the term is jarringly anachronistic.
As for evolution creeping into Ecologies, we'll, that seems to me a bit like complaining about references to gravity in the magazine, but I'll keep an eye out for it.
--Erik
Keep an eye out for gravity? Erik, its invisible . . . oh wait, for references to it . . . gotcha.
I actually AM a creationist, but I think the way God created a great many things was by inventing this thing that we clumsily call evolution . . .
In my recent "Will-o'wisp" ecology, and in some other ecologies I wrote that haven't been printed, I did a lot of reading on science and biology to explain the physical characteristics of the monsters I described. I studied up on lung nodes (now I've gone and forgotten their technical names) and various types of gases (methane in particular) for the will-o'-wisps, and I studied the anatomy of the human shoulder/collarbone/forearm for a monster with unusual arms. I consider articles to be more realistic if they're grounded in fact. I don't consider myself limited by what could really happen (my will-o'-wisps certainly couldn't "really" work on earth!), but I consider a base of fact to be a solid foundation to build fantasy on. You can only say "it's magic!" so many times.
I feel much the same way about evolution.
-Amber S.