There's this thing that I find very displeasing about D&D lore that I've realized is sorta *the* thing I find displeasing about D&D lore. It's the game's obsession with boxes, and fitting things into them.
I mean seriously, the game is utterly chock full of needlessly extensive taxonomy; every element of the fictional world is categorized and sorted to hell and back. Each creature belongs to one of fourteen different types. There are three types of magic, (arcane, divine, and primal), and eight schools of spell, and ten different levels of said spells. There are nine alignments, created via the intersection of the three moral categories of good, neutrality, and evil and the three inclinations towards order, law, neutrality, and chaos. There are three families of dragons, and about five species of dragons within each of those three families. On, and on, and on, and on, ad infinitum. It would not be particularly hard for me to find more examples, but I won't allow myself to get sidetracked by my own whinging.
This is a staple of nerd fiction, of course, and while I am on the record as hating it, I understand that for some folks this sort of rigidity in fiction is actually quite pleasing. Fair enough. If you like this sorta thing, great! The rest of this article is going to be me complaining about it, and I probably won't change your mind on the subject, so don't feel the need to stick around and get angry.
For my own part, I hate diegetic spells and spell schools, I hate alignment, and lord do I hate the three types of dragons. I think that in general the sorting and measuring and labeling of the game works against creating a world that feels full of magic. Dragons could be terrifying apex predators of man and beast, but instead, they're just big color coded reptiles with pretty much exactly the personality you'd expect a [red/green/gold] dragon to have. Magic could feel powerful, scary, and mysterious, but every caster knows the name of your spell and basically what it does, as though D&D wizards are all playing MTG with scryfall open. In a similar way, explicitly labeling any of the actors in your campaign as "good" and "evil" cheapens the moral dimensions of things and dulls any sense of actual benevolence or malevolence.
This style of worldbuilding is very common because it's both easy to make and understand. We tend to think in terms of discreet categories because we are pattern seeking and nuance and texture is hard. Or, more specifically, blurry lines are hard. Most people think about animals as being amphibians, birds, bugs, fish, mammals, and reptiles, for example, because even if they know that the categories are man made, and fish aren't real, and birds are just reptiles, it can be hard to hold all of the nuance around these taxons in your head, and you usually don't need to. The difference here, is that in fiction, so often that blurriness doesn't exist. The categories of D&D are not like our world's natural hierarchies and family trees, because those systems are lines we have imposed on a pre-existing world, whereas the categories of D&D are baked into the game from the get go. There's no bleed, there's just boxes. To make matters worse, the lines are like, really shitty and boring, man.
For example, a lot of D&D taxonomy is overly concerned with balance and parity, so the fiction gets predictably bland in another way. If everything rhymes, you don't have to guess how things are going to end, it just sorta falls on your plate like slop. The three supertypes of dragon each correspond to good, neutrality, and evil, just as the three types of fiends correspond to the evil takes on law, neutrality, and chaos, wouldn't want any alignment to feel left out! We have the Feywild, which is colorful and zany, so now we need the Shadowfell, which is dark and scary. If underground elf, why not underground gnome? It's needless box checking that leads to uninspired fiction.
Now, I’m not proposing anything in D&D needs to be as messy and lopsided as real world evolutionary trees, but I am encouraging you to color outside the lines you create in your world, and, when possible, maybe just throw those lines out the window. Does your wizard knowing that Fireball is a third level evocation spell improve your experience? No? Throw that shit out! I tell all of my players that spell schools are fake and essentially an out of character way. Do “demon” and “devil” need to be words with strong definitions? I’m pretty sure in my setting (at the time of writing) they’re just whatever weird creatures villagers are afraid of. Yugoloths, on the other hand, suck hard, and as such do not get a place in my setting. When you must categorize, try to unbalance things, make your fiction asymmetrical. The classical four elements are way too pretty. Have you seen the periodic table? That shit is ugly as hell. Through some combination of blurred reality and lopsided systems, your world might start to feel a bit more free.
Tangent: Screw Vampires
I have this bone to pick with the way D&D writes monster lore. Similar to this but sorta unrelated. I don't know what you'd call this. Naturalization? Overwriting? It's where a writer will concretely state a list of definitive things about a monster like they're a real animal, and there's a whole bunch of them out there somewhere. Like, manticores act like this, and they eat that, and they breed like this, blah blah blah. I'm not totally against some of this but I do think you can strip some of the magic from your monsters if you just make them scary animals. More and more I favor the idea that magical beasts are unique and in 99% of cases, probably can't reproduce super effectively. For a while, it was very frustrating to me that I couldn't find an underlying logic that every single werewolf in my world could work under, before realizing there's no reason lycanthropy had to be a defined or consistent thing. Werewolves are lots of things now. I think there's probably more to say on this one, but it's still percolating. Will think about this later. In any case, I think I would prefer if most monster books had like, at most 10 words of lore (half of which could always just be "these motherf***ers are bad news").
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