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.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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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!
One of my top 5ish complaints about BG3 is its simplistic politics. Not because of a big cry I’m having over it not being perfectly suited to me, but more that its annoying that a setting shown in otherwise such texture, decides to largely handwave things all the way down into examples like you bring up. People also complained about wanting to be evil in a displayed nefarious way, but Larian’s (public) view on the matter is just very Trump Bad in tone - you do bad things, its obvious Evil Evil Evil Death Murderhobo, so you lose people around you (the walls closing in!) and don’t gain much and don’t have much of a network (impeachment any day!). But we know very well here that evil does gain people around you, it can involve no direct killing, and it can be richly rewarding for those that participate in it. Evil isn’t just a dark god that sits alone muttering Murderrr, nor a tribe of goblins existing as evil because they’re evil because they’re goblins.
Its really a whole Sword Coast, Forgotten Realms thing though.
I can relate to this, I too enjoyed the game overall but was deeply put off by the way goblins were portrayed.
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.
How do you feel about ‘always evil’ races that are later given more nuanced development? My case study are Lurkers from the Jak and Daxter series.
Lurkers are essentially demons and were your standard cannon fodder for Jak in the first game. However, I could tolerate it as they were more of a ‘force of nature’ of dark eco, an energy that essentially is evil juice. Then in the second game, you find out that lurkers are rational, thinking entities. There’s a quest where you abolish the lurker slave trade and ends with you even befriending a lurker shopkeeper. While on the surface level, it’s cool that this race is given more nuance and development. But on another, it just worsens the implications of their portrayal in the first game.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
[Parisian accordion music stops abruptly]
