I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can’t have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered “good” in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of “oh shit wait wtf am I saying”. I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of “sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered” is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it’s high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That’s it I guess. That’s the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren’t built from around breaking into others’ homes to kill them and take their stuff.
We already have a group of semi-intelligent four-limbed upright-walking baddies you can mindlessly slaughter, they’re called undead. Works great too because the undead masses generally don’t have free will. Replace undead with robots for a sci-fi setting.
If you’re killing and plundering sapient (is that the right word?) creatures for no good reason, you’re the baddies.And if you do kill sophonts, there should be consequences! But the D&D system is entirely killing-focused and the concept of “surrender” baffles the average player.
Even undead were conscious in Discworld, which I found always compelling in it’s willingness to sympathize with (almost) all creatures. But they were a subset which had maintained consciousness when undead, while some had no such capabilities (I think?)
I guess you run into the issue though, which many zombie things run into) that the only way to make unconscious zombie fights harder is increased health and more of them. Anything else starts to not make sense, because any strategy/skillful use of something starts to make one reconsider.
Is there a solution to this anyone can think of? Zombies great in logistics/traps but somehow not consciousness? Is that possible? Zombies who can cast spells in directed ways without consciousness?
PF2e has, among other zombie types:
- Shamblers, slow old brain biters
- Husks, more predatory, like L4D Leapers
- Shock zombies that are temporarily supercharged by electrical damage
- Sulpher zombies that can spew blinding smoke and explode on death
- Tar zombies that can cover PCs in flammable tar to slow them
Plus you can add extra abilities to them, like sickening attackers, an aura of rot that putrifies open wounds, limbs that fall off on a crit and start attacking independently of the zombie, swarms that spill out on death, and the classic acid spitting.
Sounds fun! Is there a way this is explained in any lore sense for RPG senses? I guess we already have to believe warlocks and wizards and shit, but they usually have explanations
Some are the result of their condition on being raised (bodies that dried instead of decomposing become husks, and stuff that died in a tar pit becomes a tar zombie), others are made with different magic that changes with their abilities, or might be animated by nontraditional methods.
swarms that spill out on death
“I have a missive for you, and you’re not going to like it.”
Even the undead can have story and feelings. The shambling horde isn’t shambling 24/7.
I think there was a bit in Guild Wars 2 where one sector is under the rule of a necromancer, but it’s mentioned that families appreciate that they don’t have to leave their beloved ancestors.
Well if inherently evil races aren’t real, how do you explain white people?
I’m gonna make a hotep tabletop game where the orc equivalent are yakubians.
Islamic Golden Age: The RPG
TTRPG writers need to learn the lesson that video games learned in the 90s: the universally-acknowledged acceptable target of unlimited violence is the nazis. The D&D shorthand for this are the mortal worshippers of demons and evil gods (there’s usually at least one obvious fascist god of tyranny or something), characters that are consciously choosing to side with unfathomable cosmic evil because they’ll personally get some small benefit.
Tolkien honestly fucked up and ruined fantasy with orcs, I wish Le Guin was the defining influence
One of my favorite parts of LotR was that conversation between orcs complaining about their shit bosses and lamenting having to be part of Sauron’s stupid war! It’s so humanizing, and yet Tolkien still couldn’t commit to that because of…Catholic guilt & anxiety?
His Catholic guilt is why he started to reconsider them though. His view of orcs as inherently evil was something he regretted expressly because it went against his views as a Catholic. He didn’t like the implication of beings that are irredeemable, and had changed his original idea of them being created evil since he rejected the premise that evil can create new life. The fact that Orcs hated their masters gave him a reason to settle on them being pre-existing, but corrupted. Then there is shit about “rational souls” and more of the Legendarium or whatever that I cannot fathom.
So it is quite literally the opposite
True! I think I worded it poorly in my lack of sleep lol. I think I was more on about the weirdness of Eru just 100% importing the all knowing/all powerful/all loving god issue and ofc that’s not gonna get resolved by Tolkien in his fantasy books
In that scenario, D&D probably still exists but is even worse because they hew closer to stuff like Conan and have all the not-even-metaphorical racism present in that. I suppose there could just as easily have been a reckoning against that racism earlier in time.
Yeah, what-if’s are endless
I guess part of the struggle will always be that right-wing people are attracted to the same stories of standing up to authority, but with racism/sexism-coloured glasses
All evil races worship evil gods though, so they fall under this rule.
The difference is that it’s usually every member of those races who worships the evil patron/matron god of their race (PCs and dual-scimitar-wielding chaotic good types notwithstanding), which also happens to be the only major god of that race. The default should be that most people are neutral, and “racial” gods probably either shouldn’t exist or should at least be one option among many for that race.
Every good DM I know basically ignores alignment and gives characters at least a hint at a realistic set of motivations. A few months ago I ran The Sunless Citadel for a group that I recruited on this site, and one of the characters in that module is a were-rat (Alignment: Always lawful evil according the 3rd ed monster manual) known as the rat king who attacks the players on sight, and the most memorable thing he can possibly do is land a bite attack and make a character roll a fort save against lycanthropy.
In my interpretation, the rat king was a solo adventurer who had also come to the ruins looking for the golden apple that cures all diseases. When they and the party first bumped into each other, they actually did shoot at each other - a result of everyone being on edge from fumbling around in the dark, fighting skeletons - but when they and the party realized that they didn’t actually have to kill each other, they stopped fighting and talked it out. The rat king joined the party, helped them fight some actual non-sapient monsters and capture the necromancer at the bottom of the dungeon, and then at the end of the adventure the party rewarded him by giving him the golden apple to cure his lycanthropy.
…which he didn’t actually want to do, so he pocketed it with a “…thanks!” and then ran off with the valuable loot before they could change their mind. Way more interesting of a side story than “a big rat jumps out at you, roll initiative”, and it played out just because I asked myself “what would this character be doing in this dungeon” and played them accordingly.
Fuck yeah, that’s awesome. I always try to approach encounters that way. Why are these characters going to fight you, what are they trying to gain, at what point will they consider it no longer worth it to fight, and what will they do once they’ve reached that point?
i mean what kind of loser doesn’t want to be a rat-man adventurer
I say this loving Baldur’s Gate 3, but it was super disturbing to me that all the goblins are treated as straight up evil to the point where you’re allowed to kill goblin children without consequence.
It’s a deeply problematic thing in D&D that they’ve never really bothered too hard to deal with
Even as every other competitor completely blows past them in terms of complexity and nuance
Hell, fuckin’ Pathfinder elevated goblins to one of the playable ancestries, with the alchemist class being represented by a goblin!
Pathfinder started by giving goblins on the whole a base personality beyond “small evil thing”. It might just be “luv fire, luv pickles, 'ate dogs, 'ate 'orses, simple as”, but it’s more culture than FR has ever given them.
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Was very disappointed that I couldn’t really make an evil scheming necromancer, it felt like the only choices were to be nice and recruit companions, or be a murderhobo and piss everybody off.
I can relate to this, I too enjoyed the game overall but was deeply put off by the way goblins were portrayed.
for those unfamiliar:
Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old addage about nits making lice applies. [emphasis mine] Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before thay can backslide :lol:
Cheers, Gary [Gygax]
that’s a particularly chosen turn of phrase, innit? comes from the sand creek massacre in which hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were murdered and mutilated by white settlers.
In November, 1864, a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington (1821-1894), fell on a group of Cheyennes at Sand Creek, where they had gathered under the governor’s protection. “We must kill them all, big and small,” he told his men. “Nits make lice” (nits are the eggs of lice).
anyway you’re exactly right and it’s one of the reasons i’ve pretty much stopped played d&d and pathfinder.
Thanks for actually sourcing that crap, the nits make lice line was exactly what I was thinking of when I wrote the post. As I said, Gygax was a piece of shit. He also had horrible views regarding women, who he considered as biologically hardwired to not take much interest in ttrpgs. rip in piss asshat
He’s very aware of the origin too. Later in that conversation he added:
Chivington might have been quoted as saying “nits make lice,” but he is certainly not the first one to make such an observation as it is an observable fact. If you have read the account of wooden Leg, a warrior of the Cheyenne tribe that fought against Custer et al., he dispassionately noted killing an enemy squaw for the reason in question.
Cheers,
Gary
Gygax was originally a war gamer if that tells you about the kinda chud energy he was bringing to the table. DnD, originally called chain mail, was supper to be a system for small unit and complex terrain battles. The role-playing elements were grafted onto the system later. Quite a few of the problems are directly related to that. Interestingly in thr first few sets of rules there was no XP system. It was all gold. Which is a specific kind of elegant. A figter with more gold has had more time to train and has better equipment. That is why killing things yielded xp. It was a fungible resource. It makes the spending xp to craft magic items work better as well.
The race trope in D&D was inherited from Tolkein’s racializations in his LOTR. To preface, I don’t care for the work nor for the author. LOTR was way before my time and I never vibed with the weird insistence from the r/fantasy crowd that I need to “like” it to get their “fantasy fan starter pack.”
Tolkien was a massive racist POS for the racializing and racial coding in his works. Orcs are, by his own admission, inspired by 19th and 20th European racial caricatures of Asian and African peoples. He sees no problem with characterizing them all as canonically irredeemable and the definition of “evil,” this coming from a clown who apparently professed to be a “Roman Catholic,” who should then know then the importance of the Christian redemption doctrine. He himself later admitted it was problematic that he antithetically made the orcs irredeemably evil when the LOTR is supposed to be a Christianity referenced work… but then did nothing about it.
Fantasy today portrays goblins and orcs and trolls and whatever races as inherently vile, down to even their physical appearance. This is a racial characterization that has absolutely no material basis in reality other than in the racist caricatures of every non Anglo-American race during Tolkein’s time which he directly lifted from in his work. Seeing a non-white person back then produced the same conditioned revulsion that fantasy today makes people feel about those “monster” races.
It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkein in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples, simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkein admitted).
All this would have just been a simple rant on a problematic media tradition if it isn’t now being reverse applied onto real world designated enemy groups, like how Russians are now being called “orcs.” Fantasy through this trope has basically preserved through fictionalized cryo-statis, the conviction that an entire race can be genocided so long as they look “monstrous” and act “pure evil” used at the height of 19th and 20th century settler-colonial imperialism.
Without exaggeration, I’d argue it has contributed to how easy it has been for regimes like Israel and their Western apologists to resurrect the “shut your brain off, the entire population is inherently monstrous and worth exterminating” mentality, embedded particularly in the younger generations through media consumption of the fantasy genre, by invoking atrocity propaganda (similar to how “evil” races always have the inciting incident in the first chapter/episode where they do “the bad thing” to justify their subsequent extermination by the “hero” protagonists) to justify the Palestinian genocide.
The stuff you said about Tolkien is incredibly damning and it doesn’t even touch on him being a monarchist who supported the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
He is the only anarcho monarchist. Strider is a king. Not a king of anything. Just sitting around in a tavern drinking a beer and better than everyone else because he is a king.
Which funnily enough makes him a better person than other kings. Better to be getting drunk and not kingly than literally being a monarch with subjects
I can’t begin to describe how much it makes me want to strangle someone when I say the racial elements in DnD (etc.) are off putting and reminiscent of real life discriminatory ideas, and they respond
"What about Orcs/Goblins/Kobolds/etc. make them like black people /Jews/indigenous peoples/etc?? Sounds like you’re the real racist
"I had a migraine session on reddit back when hogwarts legacy was released from arguing how blatant the racial coding of the goblins was. The game actually encapsulates how mindless it has become for this “head empty, genocide ready” mentality for designated “evil” races in modern fantasy to be readily used by writers and accepted wholesale by apparently most of the audience.
Beyond the already odious Jewish caricature borrowed from the original Harry Potter representation as greedy moneylenders, classic subconscious British liberal chauvinism by JKR, the game went further by making the goblins an antagonistic faction which uses militant means to secure their species rights. This is viewed by the protagonists through the same light that liberals view real world armed resistance groups of marginalized peoples like the Black Panthers and, of course, Palestinians.
The goblins canonically live in an apartheid state where they’re relegated as financial serfs for the humans, with restrictions on magic use and unable to access the same educational institutions that humans do. Yet, because Ranrok (their leader) chose violence (along with doing plot nonsense bad things to justify their elimination), the usual liberal exclamation of “they’ve gone too far and ruined the purity of their victimhood” comes up. There is literally a comprador goblin by the name of Arn who opposes Ranrok’s movement and bemoans (in a chud dialogue scene) that “While I would like to see goblinkind treated by wizards as equals, bloodshed is not the answer.”
This typical liberal sentiment, the same one even MLK denounced in his Birmingham Jail letter, is wildly hilarious when applied to the Harry Potter universe. Ranrok is defeated, so certainly his violent ways must be disproven by a vindication of the liberal “peaceful gradualism” theory right? Except the game is set a full century before the books, and so we know that canonically absolutely nothing has changed in human-goblin race relations nor would goblin rights improve even a single inch. Dumbass comprador Arn’s fantasy of a “diplomatic end to the discord with wizardkind” still has predictably made zero progress in a hundred years, and ever onwards considering J.K. “Elves love slavery” Rowling never cared about addressing the racial apartheid of the setting.
Also, the protagonist is a full blown psychotic terrorist who literally shouts “Your blood is on Ranrok’s hands” as they murder goblinfolk- all while being an underage Hogwarts student. This last bit tore apart the cognitive dissonance far enough that even the reddit crowd started memeing about it (and of course, there were the customary apologists in there explainbroing how this was all still OK and kosher).
We love child soldiers don’t we folks, we loooove them
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I mean you yourself just said Tolkien did have a problem with his making Orcs irredeemable. His earlier work was much less Catholic, and so the orcs are just created by evil to be evil. However once he starts aligning things to his religious beliefs he struggles with that. He cannot have evil create, only corrupt, but if the orcs are corrupted then they mustn’t be killed indiscriminately.
Like he never resolved the dilemma, but the very fact that he struggled with it and DID do something about it, changing the origin multiple times means he…well wasn’t ok with it and DID something about it. Something unsatisfying for sure, but it is just silly to treat his back and forth on the matter as “doing nothing about it”. It wasn’t like he wrote another full book that could’ve fixed things, he just had his appendices.
Like he should’nt be praised for realizing the obviously bad shit with that, but it is such a weird way to put it. He literally did see it as a problem, and did something about it. He was racist sure, but his Roman Catholicism DID cause him to reconsider the Orcs. Again shouldn’t throw a parade for him over that, but it hardly makes him a “clown who professed to be a Roman Catholic” when you just admitted his faith is why he reconsidered the matter.
My issue is that I view the legacy of past works from a consequentialist perspective and see things this way: every public figure has two sides to them. Tolkein, the private man, may have had a genuine crisis of faith with what he produced and some of his writings suggest something to this like. Tolkein the author however, never expressed any substantive reservations in his canonical publications to correct his original portrayal of the orcs as categorically evil and irredeemable. This is his public side and the legacy that we are left to contend with, as it is the only one which the general population would see through his published works. Through this, the fantasy standard of “evil” races which he popularized (and basically created, frankly) for posterity, and the consequences of that legacy, is an absolutely vile outcome of a so-called “Christian” referenced work and his pretensions to such does make him “clownish.”
There’s an endless amount of written mental masturbation by “Tolkein scholars” how poor Tolkein was “so confused” and “so conflicted” with how his worldbuilding ended up conflicting chiefly with Christian redemption doctrine through his racial characterizations. There’s an entire natopedia page on his so-called “moral dilemma.” If you’re interested in engaging with the topic on his own terms as he presents them, you may check that out, though I’ve read all of it, I personally have no interest in assessing him on that sort of register.
Crucially, neither did he ever consider it problematic that he drew inspiration for the orcs from European caricatures of African and Asian peoples- in fact, through his entire moral dilemma, he never once considered why he needed to make them, in his own words, “squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned (a.k.a. yellow and brown skin), with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types.” This compounds the “dilemma” as he explicitly admits to race coding the orcs.
The bottom line is that no one forced him to write things that were antithetical to his professed faith other than himself and his partial self realization of this being expressed through private musings rather than being made plain and explicit in revisions of his work or canonical publications that made explicit a corrective to the portrayal is not a mark in his favor. The latter was a path he could have chosen if so inclined, if the dilemma was really as serious to him as Tolkein scholars, with an agenda of rehabilitating him for the modern age, allege him to have felt.
The best thing to do was simply not write such problematic material, and it’s always important to keep in mind that there were contemporaneous writers and people in every age ever who thought differently to whatever “dominant” local prejudice, contrary to the belief of the “man of their time” cultural relativism fetishist crowd. Especially by the mid 20th century, where there was no shortage of people even enclosed in the confines of the perpetually chauvinist terf island of imperialist Britain that did not view portrayals of the “other” in such a Manichean perspective as Tolkein did.
The second best course would have been to issue a corrective, either through a sequel or outright revision. On this front, Charles Dickens wrote problematic works with countless prejudical tropes. For one of them at least, the characterization of the greedy antagonistic Fa#in as an explicit Jewish caricature eventually gave him pause either through personal reflection or reportedly through lobbying by a Jewish acquaintance. He later revised his work to remove every reference to Fa#in as a Jew.
Tolkein did not choose to do that. He was clearly too much in love with what he created (more unfavorably said, I’d say he frankly liked the smell of his own flatulence too much) to revise his canonical works. Instead, he tried to bend Christian doctrine to fit his own pre-established problematic worldbuilding rather than tear down and adjust what he developed to re-align with his faith. These are the half-assed “contradictions” that Tolkein scholars attribute to his latter renditions on the etiology of the orcs.
TL;DR, Tolkein is a clown because he rejected any substantive praxis of his faith onto his works. Instead, he tried to have his cake and eat it too, calling his work Christian-based when he refused to allow Christian doctrine to alter what he already wrote. To put it crudely, he sharted on a plate, and upon realizing his mistake, he decided to sprinkle some parsley on top rather than remove the plate and sanitize it. This self conceit is why I have no patience for engaging with his contradictions on his own terms and why I don’t hold reservations for viewing him as I do.
However, I recognize his work is a permanent fixture on contemporary literature and his tropes are now standards of the fantasy genre. I have no issue with people who are fans of his work and would personally prefer to accomodate his (half-baked, in my view) expressions of his “dilemma” in more a favorable light than I do. Yet, I would never pretend to see him through such lens personally.
It’s incredibly disturbing. Beyond the moral aspect: it’s fucking lazy. It’s like running a modern setting and everywhere you go there’s ninjas to fight, and none of them have names or faces. Rather than making a world where different factions have different motivations, or this culture is superstitious about X because this thing happened a long time ago, it’s just “the enemy race is here, eradicate them.” Bland, repetitive campaign.
Yeah it sucks, what sucks more is how many people stubbornly ignore the parallels to real-world fascism. It’s something I would never put in any of my creative works.
what sucks more is how many people stubbornly ignore the parallels to real-world fascism
That’s what gets to me the most. People will literally make Generalplan Ost into a fun dice throw game and see nothing wrong with it. And they continue to do this when there is a real world genocide going on that closely parallels their creative output down to the very words used to describe the others.
The “Beast tribes” in FF14 are portrayed that way… until your character interacts and realizes you are also a colonizer to them, the same as the villains are to YOU.
Basically If a mainstream mmo has better handling and dynamics of orcs and kobolds than these books, the books are bad.
I’m currently playing through that game and though it’s better than Wizards of the Coast it still kinda sucks on this point. At least early on, I just finished ARR, so I’ll see if it gets better later.
In particular I’m thinking of a part of the game where one of the faction leaders is talking about the beastfolk menace and another npc goes “they’re literally just defending their homes, you broke the peace treaty you had with them” and the faction leader is just like “yes that is correct. anyway, about the beastfolk menace–”
There’s a bit later on where Emperor Galvus calls all of the Alliance leaders hypocrites to their faces for how they’ve dealt with the beast races, which is a really cathartic moment even if comes from a guy whose explicitly committed genocides. Without spoiling too much I’ll say that it never really gets resolved but it does get better over time.
Sounds like a good excuse to link this article:
Voldemort does the same thing. He exploits the injustices upon which the Wizarding World is based – the oppression of elves, goblins, giants, etc. – but which it never talks about or faces up to. He acknowledges the existence of social class, aristocracy, biological racism and unaccountable, undemocratic politics within Wizarding society – something that beneficent wizards like Dumbledore are prepared to countenance in silence, with the occasional homily about how wizards have behaved badly. Like Richard, his villainy stems from his awareness and his lack of hypocrisy. Like the others, he exists to be silenced. Like the others, he lets the radical howl be heard, even if in a distant and garbled form.
These characters exist to raise challenges that cannot be safely ignored forever, then to be ritually crushed and silenced so that the status quo can be resumed with an untroubled feeling of virtue triumphant. The challenge is assimilated and digested, made into nutrition and the excreted, keeping the organism going. The wizards keep their house elves; Gotham City gets the chance to build some new orphanages and stave off its reckoning indefinitely. Sauron brings back the king. Shinzon tries to lead his people to freedom and just ends up helping the Federation make peace with the Empire that enslaved him. We should be allowed to sympathise with the leader of a slave rebellion against an empire, but Star Trek Nemesis makes Spartacus into a mass-murderer […] But even so, it lets Spartacus in – just for a moment.
Also later you see those same beast races in another planet where their relations with the more human-like races developed differently, and no-one really treats them any differently so the game reinforces the point that their treatment in most of the game is due to colonialism and nothing more. The game suffers from being written by multiple people really, because that expansion was pretty left-leaning compared to the previous ones with class consciousness and the handling of climate change by the 1st world as themes among other things.
God I wish I could forget everything and play Shadowbringers again
This and also the way “Bandits” are used as generically evil People You Can Always Kill
In World of Warcraft it’s even worse. The Defias Bandits that are like the stock enemies to kill as a human originated from a construction union that formed after the king of Stormwind stiffed them on their pay. You play the role of Pinkerton and go and smash their headquarters and kill their leader in Dead Mines, and then you go into the Stormwind prison to slaughter the rest of them that have been captured because they organize a prison revolt after not being fed.
It’s sloppy ass writing because they are trying to do that Liberal thing of making a sympathetic villain who goes too far and has to be stopped, but in this case your character is a mass murdering Pinkerton thug who is worse by any definition than the Defias were.
I don’t remember as many details, but last time I played WoW I was struck by how many of the Tauren stories talk about their struggle and the threat this and that species are to them, and so you go and massacre centaurs, quillboars, etc. Meanwhile, the Tauren have fucking Thunder Bluff where the others have some tents or dens under overgrown trees. Its straight up Zionist shit.
i seem to remember there was something about a dragon manipulating things behind the scenes but that’s not an excuse
generally Blizzard seems to be allergic to good writing, for one good thing there are ten bad things
SI:7 is also an incredibly stupid name for a fantasy setting
God, blizzard always had the worst writing didn’t they? Half of all their stories are about people being brainwashed by Lazer into being hot and evil. Somehow they found a way to do so much worse
Blizzard had decent writing until like Frozen Throne, everything after is just bad and it is getting worse year by year no matter what franchise they’re doing. Fucking Starcraft 2 with “Kerrigan is a jesus angel now
”Maybe, but every single blizzard game does have a major plot point where a character is brainwashed. Millions of dollars spent on one of the writers mind control fetish. Kerrigan is the perfect example of their hentai tag writing system
Brainwashed or just “went craaaaazy!!” it’s real fucking bad, i agree
I once read a thread on
where a guy was complaining that another player in his party was derailing the session and trying to be the main character because… they were trying to treat bandits as humans whose material conditions led them to banditry and who could be reasoned with instead of banditry elementals that bandit around because that’s what they do so you just need to shut up and kill/imprison them.I’ve been watching Critical Role campaign 1 recently and I think the way the DM addressed the party killing a fleeing enemy was relatively cool. Yeah, the old lady attacked them, but she was trying to flee and was put to sleep wherein someone then brutally killed her. The NPCs were all like “woah, that’s a bit much for heroes.” Old lady was basically just a faceless mercenary working for someone doing shady shit.
If I was ever in a campaign with people who didn’t do that I would take that as my cue to leave
under communism you’re not allowed to do ‘bandits’ until they’re phenotyped into outlaws, para-legal authorities, rural military resistance, or seasonally induced poverty alleviators
I would love to play a campaign of bandits
This is only tangentially related, but I just played my first campaign with my brothers and couple of friends, most of them completely new to ttrpg’s, and it was pretty funny to see the borderline murder-hoboing coming from left-leaning guys testing the limits of the game with their chaotic whatever-is-funniest characters
The most memorable part of the campaign was when my brother-in-law, who we elected as the mayor of Neverwinter (because he missed the session and everyone present hated responsibility), was tasked with judging a guy for stealing bread from the local merchant to feed his kids
He ended up executing the merchant for hoarding food and giving the store to the thief so he could feed his kids
Just take the math stuff and reskin everything to your liking. It’s fucking weird DnD has so much lore and shit anyway, aren’t you supposed to be telling your own stories? Even if you wanna play a crunchy kill stab game, just tske the monster manual, cross out ‘goblin’ and replace it with ‘revenant’ or ‘French person’, things that don’t have weird implications to kill indiscriminately.
Orcs and goblins and their stereotypes are used so often in the real world that its hard to make anything “pure fantasy” about them the way you can elves or fae or certain other races.
Its so easy to make the monsters actual monsters in a way orcs and goblins arent. Undead, darkspawn, corrupted, infected, make them a force of nature instead of a sapient creature. It makes everything make so much more sense.
[Parisian accordion music stops abruptly]
or ‘French person’, things that don’t have weird implications to kill indiscriminately.
the french people thing is going to vary wildly between, say, former french colonies vs. other colonial powers… just sayin’
Having a level 7 party get ambushed, defeated, captured and put on trial by goblins was a real fun way to fuck with ppl.
Don’t overthink it too bad, just have a good time.
Having to turn an entire species into low budget demons to justify some of them being bandits is a pretty large skill issue. I don’t understand why your suprised that some people find that a turn off.
Kinda hard to not think about the fact that all the “races” in western fantasy are clearly based off of existing human groups according to the admission of Tolkien himself. He literally modelled the language of the Orcs on Turkish ffs.
Evlish is celtic, dwarvish is hebrew. Yes the gold hoarding race is jewish. SIGH. The good men are from the west and the bad ones are from the east. At least he made gondorians mediterranean.
One I’ve been keeping in the ol’ back pocket for a hat trick monster inclusive party and late addition to the players is having the latecomer be from far away (bonus points if they’re a weeb doing some weeb shit) and have opposite monster prejudices from the party and their world.
dramatically swishes kimono “why are you massacring peaceful kobolds? You should be killing this disgusting goblin trash” points at party’s shaman
You know if goblin slayer wasn’t made by Japan I would’ve sworn that the goblins were some thinly veiled racial caricature of the Japanese.
some Korean rpg’s going to give all the goblins toothbrush mustaches and give them names like “yoshida goblinjima” any day now.It is weird that goblin slayer is actually kinda good about it. The goblins seem to be exactly that. Chimpanzees with some fantasy elements. Which to be clear, chimpanzees do seem to be a purely evil race. Adding obligate brood paracitism to them like some wasps have is reasonably realistic. Overall the effect is too tryhard and grimdark. If the direction was like 20% begtter they could have something like alien where they had something intresting to add to the discource. They handle it way better than most media though so it’s weird.
The goblins can talk, make tools, domesticate animals. They even have a religion ffs. they’re a sentient sapient race. They literally kill the baby goblins in that show and depict sparing literal babies as a foolish choice. Also chimpanzees aren’t “evil”, everything bad that chimpanzees do humans also do.
Maybe it was from the light novels. They can’t talk. They are like chimpanzees with mosquito elements. There isn’t a real life thing it is an analogy to because it is fantasy. Kinda like how the Xmen are supposed to represent something, but no one can shoot lazers so they actually don’t. If we accept that the writer was a terrible nerd that lacks social understanding, which is not a hard thing, the rest of what it does is intresting with the idea of extending natural evil onto the human scale. Like Alien, they are obviously intelegant. They are just inimicable to life as we understand it. Watch a video of chimpanzees hunting monkey, it is terrifying. Depending on the adaptation of thr work goblins either represent cosmic horror or liberalism
I had one of those. My table killed an orc hunting party. Who were simply hunting to feed their family. This resulted in a border war between the orc people and the nearby settled kingoms. The running joke for a while was them being paid by both sides to find who did these murders and bring them to justice to help with the peace process.
Lol that’s cool.
Mine was right before Obama in like peak Iraq war times and it was a fucking struggle to plan anything that didn’t seem ripped from the headlines.
Tbh probably same for a person trying to fuck with their party now. “If they weren’t enemy combatants then why were they in the dungeon?” “Mf what’s a dungeon? This is a bugbear camp”
Everyone’s saying far more eloquent shit than me so I’ll just add that I agree with you and beyond the “evil race” trope being problematic it’s also lazy af
It’s so lazy that I don’t know who would find it compelling to just walk into a cave and obliterate a bunch of what are basically flesh automatons set to kill rather than have the chance to talk to some characters with even minimal depth
