I would have expected a lot of misogyny but not as much bigotry against POC. Of course, I have no experience at all in the scene. This has been an interesting thread.
I was active on the IMDb at the time; a lot of that had to do with “stealing” the plot of a Bugs Bunny cartoon. Especially those that came when there was no movie to see yet.
True, it’s more of a social justice issue with all those 10s cast to counter the 1s.
LOL! 
Okay, so I went over in my head. I belong to three gaming groups, with 20 players but some overlap of course (they all have me, a moderate liberal):
One MAGA, four Conservatives (Voted trump 2016, Biden 2020), the rest liberal. No one seems to be a bigot, except maybe the MAGA. But we are all “in person” table top gamers (we play online for one group. And all Californians of course.
Yes, mostly that, but also some despise what they call “woke”. One D&D product got many one star reviews as one NPC coupel is gay.
I was in a really great LARP/Battle organization based in northern VA/southern MD in the early nineties. I once heard the following joke
“What are Drow?”
“N*****r elves!”
I was stunned. I reported the ‘joke’ teller to the head of the organization. There was a whole group that role-played as Drow. They wore black (literally black) facepaint and pointy ears. There was no intent to be racist (other than that Drow were evil). I doubt very much they would wear the same makeup today.
I take heart from seeing that all the young players I interact with are progressive as fuck. At least around here, but it seems @Johnny_Bravo has seen the same thing.
I’m probably fortunate in where and with who I play, that it hasn’t been a direct issue here.
I definitely see a lot of progressive young players. But my fourth-grade daughter just left an afterschool D&D group which was all boys and where one of the boys was like, “Why is a girl in our D&D group?” so we still got room to grow.
So Bugs Bunny fans were mad that a movie was made that was inspired by one of the cartoons?
While grossly inappropriate (And good on your daughter!), I’ll give some slight understanding to them still being in 4th grade. 4th graders can be quite dumb.
By “younger”, I was meaning teens/young adults.
That was the excuse. I suspect it had more to do with the Wayans Brothers being involved.
Totally, and I get what you mean, I guess I’m still pretty salty about that incident.
There definitely are some asshole young players in their teens and young adults, but I’m optimistic that there are fewer, and that they’re getting stronger pushback.
For me, it’s difficult to determine how many nerds are actually upset by some of the changes. Granted, I don’t like all the changes, but the whole “go woke, go broke” crown seem to exist almost exclusively online. I don’t hear many people at the game store complaining about this kind of thing.
Greater Internet Fuckwad theory. Mass audience + anonymity = fuckwad behavior from a lot of people.
Absolutely. On top of that, the internet amplifies minority views by eliminating geographical distance. Great news most of the time. But if I’m the only garbage human in my local community, on the internet I’m in the same room as hundreds of other garbage humans who hold the same garbage views.
My problem (well, one of my problems; that book has a lot of problems) with Candlekeep Mysteries is that they sort of vaguely tried to be woke, but just did a really, really bad job at it. Like, gender isn’t specified for any of the NPCs, so the DM can just choose a gender for all of them. Which means that old gamers who are used to male-dominated fantasy worlds will probably subconsciously end up assuming that they’re all male. Like the writers themselves did: Every so often, they slip up and use a pronoun for one of the NPCs, and the pronoun is always “he”.
At a quick glance through Candlekeep Mysteries, I’m seeing NPCs of both genders.
I have to admit that as an old gamer and DM myself, I sometimes have to force myself to remember that not every minor NPC I create has to be male. It’s just what my mind defaults to.
I am an “old gamer” in fact a Grognard, since I have been playing and DMing since 1974. We always had "girls in our games (okay, we were in the 17-20 age range, so “girls” isn’t so bad), and today in one game our DM is female, and in our FtF game we have two females.
Note that in some style guides “he” is considered the gender neutral term, but that is “thankfully” going away .
I do tend to make big tough thugs always male.
@Johnny_Bravo commented on part of this, but I want to comment further. I skimmed through each adventure looking to refute the general statements you make.
- Your statement is correct for the 11 (out of 220ish) pages that describe the location. The editors did mess up there, starting out with a several “gender unspecified” NPCs and then three(?) males and a female monster. But even if someone is running the whole book as a campaign those pages are fairly insignificant when it comes to who the players will interact with.
- There isn’t even a single adventure in the book where no NPC is gendered by the author.
- The most frequently used pronoun is probably “Him”, but there are plenty of “She”, a few “They” and I spotted only one NPC who was just referred to by name in the adventure. Other NPCs in that adventure were gendered by the author though.
If you meant to comment on just the campaign setting you weren’t very clear, and if you weren’t you’re just dead wrong.
To be fair, the book has 20 different authors, and I didn’t read all of the adventures (mostly just a few that were close to the level range I wanted, plus the introductory material). Some of them probably were better. But the ones I read had all of the significant NPCs either male or unspecified.
By no means is that book one of WotCs best.
But giving it one star simply because “It is too woke” is bigoted and wrong.