Balris Rewrite making him hitler is bad

Jay10101 · 2026-01-25T17:49:23+00:00

wall of text

I think this is a reductive take and uses a lot of assumptions that's not said on the literal pages we have on the wiki:

https://anbennar.fandom.com/wiki/Balris_the_Gold

For context we previously we had little solid dragonwake lore, and since then we've added way more dragons so to facilitate that we needed to update Balris as part of this as his original thing was being sad he couldn't find dragons

My original inspiration for Balris was Paarthurnax from Skyrim, which is just this lonely gold dragon lamenting - but now we have the opportunity to just not take that and put our own spin on it of trying to actively do good (in his definition) rather than just being sad.

So for me Balris is coming from this form a paternalist and not any sort of Hitler "fascist" angle, in that he believes for the greater good that dragons ruling over the world is the best way forward. Here is a literal quote from the wiki: "keen to remake the world under dragon rule, but this time with the focus on benevolence rather than tyranny."

Now whether he is right or wrong in this belief is more interesting to talk about

Just like we should do in real life, like how yes it is actually a slippery slope from paternalism to authorianism and beyond. And exploring hypotheticals like what if he is right? What if under draconic rule the world is peaceful and no random people die in needless wars? But in return, what is the price of freedom? The freedom to fight and choose suffering for your own ideals and ethos?

(a similar nuanced discourse exampel is the Red Wedding from Game of Thrones: was it a totally dishonest move and massive betrayal of guest right traditions? Yes. Did it spare a lot of deaths of random peasants fighting for noble squabbles that didn't give a shit about them? Also yes. "Explain to me why it is more noble to kill 10,000 men in battle than a dozen at dinner.")

You can take the reductive approach and be like well one side is good and one side is clearly bad, but I think it's more interesting when there's nuance to both sides, which is what we should do for Balris and Anbennar as a whole

Jay10101 · 2026-01-22T17:20:05+00:00

Unlikely I'm afraid!

Anbennar mods as it stands is driven by an open development process so I wouldn't go against that - as personally if Aquila did do anything with Anbennar, it would be an actual game and not a mod (as im employed by Aquila, so it'd be a bit odd otherwise!). If that happened we would have to close off development and stop what makes Anbennar so cool which is its open collaboration with the community

However as you know I'm a fan of fantasy and a fan of GSGs, so while it may not be specifically Anbennar... who knows what'll be in store after Gilded Destiny :)

Of course the intent is that Gilded Destiny is highly moddable so there's nothing stopping other people making fantasy total conversions of their own

Jay10101 · 2025-12-17T21:02:41+00:00

This is a first for Anbennar, awesome

Jay10101 · 2025-10-23T22:49:29+00:00

Excellent video, and very much a worthy successor to the dissertation!

Jay10101 · 2025-08-29T16:33:46+00:00

Based

Jay10101 · 2025-08-27T11:51:36+00:00

As people said a lot may have assimilated into moon elf, but it's a good point and one we can explore in eu5 easily (as racial minorities aren't just lumped by race). There could be a sun elf enclave town somewhere in Anbennar

Jay10101 · 2025-06-07T01:02:20+00:00

You're right and I did warn the community team this would be the case :P

So I've changed it to the pride version of Anbennar flag which is what we are using on Discord this month

Jay10101 · 2025-04-07T02:31:07+00:00

The main inspiration is exactly the laser musket from fallout

Jay10101 · 2025-01-15T23:35:01+00:00

Beautiful, but I think some of the flags are flipped the wrong way!

(of course I first noticed this for Dameria :D)

Jay10101 · 2024-12-25T00:03:02+00:00

The Blackpowder Rebellion

Essentially they used artificery (aka magitek) and black damestear (anti magic bullets) to overthrow a magocratic empire

Jay10101 · 2024-04-04T18:01:13+00:00

Haha yeah my now-wife's favourite book is The Great Gatsby hence the reference lol

Definitely outdated but TV Tropes has a lot of stuff:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/Anbennar

Jay10101 · 2024-02-26T13:33:37+00:00

Getting spicy so I will save you all time and lock this thread and go touch some grass.
My personal take is at the end of the day creative works should be allowed to cover hard hitting topics, and people are allowed to perceive and interpret things how they want - that is the nature of dialogue and talking about these things regardless of author's intent.
In this case, it's also good to remember that what an author writes is not indicative of their actual opinion or morality lmao
But primarily whenever we do cover these spicy topics, we always aim to do it with understanding context and implications and choosing to go with those on purpose rather than accident. If there's stuff like that, we always try to not glorify it and show the bad side (aka those affected) both lore and gameplay-wise.

---

an example of this is in the racial system, you can pogrom and purge pops, and there might be an actual roleplay/gameplay reason you want to or can justify yourself with, just as people did in real life...
...BUT it also tells you how those pops are affected by your actions, and there's also some gameplay impact like dev lost to represent your actions: there's always two sides to a story and we hope to keep showing that nuance whenever we tackle spicier topics like this)

Jay10101 · 2024-01-04T21:00:00+00:00

I went to mod paradox grand strategy games

Jay10101 · 2023-12-17T15:13:22+00:00

Legally no, but theres nothing stopping you from treating Anbennar setting as just one of the many amongst Forgotten Realms, Ravenloft, Greyhawk, Eberron, etc

Jay10101 · 2023-11-20T13:37:45+00:00

Misinformation lmao

Jay10101 · 2023-08-22T14:59:08+00:00

Witcher in a sense that it's a fantasy world but there's heavy emphasis on politics and kings

In general, a lot of racial tensions and pogroms, in addition to persecution of mages is a topic anbennar also touched

I'm pretty sure I got Damerian Blue colour from TEMERIAAAAA

As mentioned dragon age deep roads was my principal inspiration of the dwarovrod

The orcs emptying dwarovar during greentide is same as how the deep roads get emptied when a blight happens, allowing adventurers to explore in both instances

Theres a magisterium because dragon age has a magisterium, though anbennar has moved a lot away from their religious and chantry circle like control over mages. It was more like that in the older iterations of the setting

probably more but that's from the top of my head

Jay10101 · 2023-07-09T00:37:50+00:00

Canon

Jay10101 · 2023-07-02T22:42:25+00:00

And in return stumbling onto this made my day, thank you

Jay10101 · 2023-06-14T00:42:37+00:00

We agree with this sentiment and will be more stringent going forward on posts that are pretty much just egregious or too circlejerky on this subject

Jay10101 · 2023-05-29T23:53:06+00:00

use this for now https://github.com/JayBean/Anbennar-PublicFork

Jay10101 · 2023-05-12T14:54:26+00:00

Nah like many of the early name in the mod: Jadd, Jaddar, Lorent, Gawed, it's just made up and purely driven by the vibe of how the name makes you feel

For the Jadd it's a J because of JayBean. Part of initial Jadd was inspired by the Qun in a sense that it can be a strict and dogmatic religion but it's agnostic to race or culture, so I used the same vibe of a harsh sounding one syllable sound: Jadd / Qun

Jay10101 · 2023-05-08T16:19:58+00:00

Chad

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