|
Nessus posted:Right, while they were hardly presented in a positive light, you had a number of distinctive cultures, and tellingly, they even had their own agendas contra one another. Let's see, you had the Misty Mountain folks under the Goblin-king (same as under Azog later), you have the Uruk-hai, a number of other groups coming out of Mordor, whoever Shagrat and Gorbag were... There's also the Anduin hobbits (Gollum was one of these) and the Easterlings, which apparently are separate from the Haradrim and the Variags. I mean, yeah, the latter group is still basically a racist Evil Orientals conglomerate but still, at least they're not a single monolithic entity.
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 05:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:Why would you do this, instead of just having orcs, goblins, gnolls, etc. be as culturally diverse as the boring default races? So, it's possible, especially as more pieces of fiction have expanded on those species and what traits they have. But a lot of how the "evil races" were defined early on was rooted firmly in real-world racism, so it can be difficult disentangling them from the lovely tropes they sprung from. It's a lot like using Lovecraftian fiction in that sense; it's tough (but not impossible) to use the tropes there without tripping on the racism. This isn't helped because a lot of it is from implicit assumptions racists make about the world that non-racists might not recognize. That's what makes a dog whistle a dog whistle. The people the stereotypes are of usually recognize them, since racists like to throw them into their faces, but people who have the privilege to ignore the racists don't see it. So, to use species like orcs, goblins, gnolls, kobolds, trolls, and so on, you need to first identify any racist assumptions that are baked into their concept and discard them. For some of the less-well developed ones, that might not leave much left. But hopefully you're still left with something cool you can build on. "People on the fringes still blamed for the evil their ancestors were forced to do," "small, ignored creatures, who nevertheless bear the blood of dragons," "matriarchal warriors surviving in deserts where others fear to go." Find out what makes them cool and expand on that. But still be careful. You might not recognize all of the stereotypes, especially if you're not part of the group being targeted. Sometimes, something that seems cool in isolation still has a racist root you need to be careful with.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 06:12
|
|
|
JackMann posted:"small, ignored creatures, who nevertheless bear the blood of dragons," Just want to note that kobolds are really the MVPs of 'generic minion fodder who inexplicably ended up with more personality than elves.' Are there any games that really do well with the little lizards? (I strongly prefer the modern lizard kobold to the historical dog kobold)
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 06:25
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:Just want to note that kobolds are really the MVPs of 'generic minion fodder who inexplicably ended up with more personality than elves.' Not related to traditional games at all but I love the small community of Dwarf Fortress players that adore Kobolds, of which I am a part of. "Adorable" isn't a word traditionally associated with Kobolds but gosh dang if they ain't the most adorable little fellers ever.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:02
|
|
|
PinheadSlim posted:"Adorable" isn't a word traditionally associated with Kobolds Extremely wrong opinion. quote:but gosh dang if they ain't the most adorable little fellers ever. Extremely, heroically correct opinion.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:19
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:Just want to note that kobolds are really the MVPs of 'generic minion fodder who inexplicably ended up with more personality than elves.' I mean, Kobolds Ate My Baby is right there.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:27
|
|
|
Azran posted:There's also the Anduin hobbits (Gollum was one of these) and the Easterlings, which apparently are separate from the Haradrim and the Variags. I mean, yeah, the latter group is still basically a racist Evil Orientals conglomerate but still, at least they're not a single monolithic entity. JackMann posted:So, to use species like orcs, goblins, gnolls, kobolds, trolls, and so on, you need to first identify any racist assumptions that are baked into their concept and discard them. For some of the less-well developed ones, that might not leave much left. But hopefully you're still left with something cool you can build on. "People on the fringes still blamed for the evil their ancestors were forced to do," "small, ignored creatures, who nevertheless bear the blood of dragons," "matriarchal warriors surviving in deserts where others fear to go." Find out what makes them cool and expand on that. I do think that there is a sort of emergent, positive image of orcs, in large part from Warcraft, which could be leaned into, but it has its own set of baggage, it's just making use of things closer to positive stereotypes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:29
|
|
|
Who doesn't think Kobolds are adorable, though?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:36
|
|
|
When you need an irredeemably evil horde of enemies for an evil wizard, Nazis are certainly cathartic, but you know what are also cathartic? Skeletons. Mindless, already dead, sword-swinging skeletons with spooky animation and cool music that plays while they march towards you. I feel like this is something fantasy and sci-fi (in the form of robot minions) solved in a pulp way long ago, while if you're willing to have any degree of humanity/commonality between your heroes and the minions, you should either have a coherent ideological account or just accept that low fantasy means stabbing people who are people.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 07:42
|
|
|
My current fantasy game has neverborn. Kinda like terminators, but magic. The battle minion ones are what you'd expect a sketched skeleton warrior to look like. The advanced ones can wear flesh masks.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 08:32
|
|
|
Nessus posted:What blows my mind is that for all people dog on JRRT, JRRT does this. There are multiple distinct cultural groups for both elves and orcs/goblins throughout LOTR and the Hobbit. Dwarves less so, but dwarves are also explicitly insular and all the dwarf characters with significant dialogue are in one broad family/culture group. Yeah, Tolkien isn't the issue here, it's the legions of imitators that copied the style of Middle-Earth without any of the substance. JackMann posted:So, to use species like orcs, goblins, gnolls, kobolds, trolls, and so on, you need to first identify any racist assumptions that are baked into their concept and discard them. For some of the less-well developed ones, that might not leave much left. But hopefully you're still left with something cool you can build on. "People on the fringes still blamed for the evil their ancestors were forced to do," "small, ignored creatures, who nevertheless bear the blood of dragons," "matriarchal warriors surviving in deserts where others fear to go." Find out what makes them cool and expand on that. Honestly, there's enough to go with in "buff people who respect strength of arms," "sort of like goblins but draconic," "hyena people," etc. to make something interesting, and as a bonus it'll at least be slightly more original than regurgitating the same D&D "orcs are a warlike tribal race that worships Gruumsh, but some of them don't!!!" you get when D&D tries to add "good orcs." 4E making the kobolds genetically engineered worker drones bred en masse by the dragons was cool, as were Eberron's swamp hermit druid orcs who defend the world from extradimensional threats and the not-Roman hobgoblin empire that the Five Nations were built on. (Not to say Eberron didn't have other issues.) Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Apr 28, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 08:44
|
|
|
JackMann posted:But still be careful. You might not recognize all of the stereotypes, especially if you're not part of the group being targeted. Sometimes, something that seems cool in isolation still has a racist root you need to be careful with. This, 1000%. Hell, Eberron, for all that it's generally more conscious of these issues, hit a pretty big whoopsie with its take on gnomes. See, in the setting, gnomes are known for two things: first, they invented newspapers and various forms of magical communication/information dissemination. That's cool! Eberron is supposed to feel like a fantasy 1930s, so tabloid broadsheets and newsreels about the derring-do of adventuring parties are totally in-theme. Second, they have an incredibly powerful spy network, reaching all over the world and working covertly to influence geopolitics in their nation's favor. This is also cool! Gnomes have often struggled to find a niche in D&D settings, and a) secret agents are cool, and b) it dovetails nicely with the first point in the context of information-collecting. However, what you've now ended up with is a species that effectively controls the global media and operates secret conspiracies to control the world, whose primary distinguishing features are being diminutive and having large noses.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 08:59
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:When you need an irredeemably evil horde of enemies for an evil wizard, Nazis are certainly cathartic, but you know what are also cathartic? Skeletons. Mindless, already dead, sword-swinging skeletons with spooky animation and cool music that plays while they march towards you. 
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 09:08
|
|
|
Nessus posted:Yeah like part of how I resolve this when I GM is: I do not generally GM classic pure "dungeon scenarios," and if I do I usually do not put significant numbers of "people" in the dungeon. Which is, honestly, a highly underrated way of solving the issue Yeah, I haven't run a game of dungeon crawling in ages, but if I were to get a bug to run, say, Torchbearer or something, I'd be populating dungeons exclusively with eldritch horrors summoned up by long-ago sorcerers, undead, etc. IIRC this is the approach Blades Against Darkness takes, too, while games like The Nightmare Underneath and gnome7's upcoming Skull Diggers flip the script by having the dungeons and their denizens invading you rather than the other way around.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 09:14
|
|
|
Personally the closest thing to dungeon crawling I've run have been Exalted tomb-raiding (which has an elaborate social framework to trouble it and set it in the context of the setting, which can range from 'defeating automata to reclaim my previous incarnation's treasures' to 'yeah we're totally crashing into someone's place of worship to steal their poo poo, we're heroes but not the good guys here'), Mage the Awakening time before ruin-delving (a combination of archaeology and fighting undead, with a weird god at the bottom and the primary villains being rival occult archaeologists who are using the site for their own ends), and my personal mechanical rewrite of Troika! which is picaresque enough that when I actually get to run a dungeon delve in it, it'll be weirder and less combat-centric than the standard. I actually had a really lovely game of paraTroika which was just about bumbling around in the woods hunting an escaped alzabo, and that was basically a dungeon in a lot of ways while not being one at all really. So I feel like the vague tropes can be useful but they really need some kind of reframing or larger context to not have them devolve into Extracting Resources From Locals (or in Exalted, it's just explicitly that you're doing that and you could be huge jerks).
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 10:14
|
|
|
FF14 kobolds are pretty great too, being little weird rat guys who live in big underground burrows in a literally regimented lifestyle under a monarch. They're big into explosives, which weirdly means using Bomb monsters to make explosive devices. Their current situation is explicitly the result of centuries of imperialist expansion by one of the starter cities; Kobolds are perfectly capable of living peacefully with other peoples, but now they're desperate and just barely holding onto the scraps they have. Also, they made the Bomb Palenquin mount, so you really can't hate them.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 10:51
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:FF14 kobolds are pretty great too, being little weird rat guys who live in big underground burrows in a literally regimented lifestyle under a monarch. They're big into explosives, which weirdly means using Bomb monsters to make explosive devices. Their current situation is explicitly the result of centuries of imperialist expansion by one of the starter cities; Kobolds are perfectly capable of living peacefully with other peoples, but now they're desperate and just barely holding onto the scraps they have. I bounced so hard off of FF14 and that mount makes me want to reinstall. I won't do that but I'll roll a kobold next time I game!
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 11:04
|
|
|
GimpInBlack posted:Yeah, I haven't run a game of dungeon crawling in ages, but if I were to get a bug to run, say, Torchbearer or something, I'd be populating dungeons exclusively with eldritch horrors summoned up by long-ago sorcerers, undead, etc. IIRC this is the approach Blades Against Darkness takes, too, while games like The Nightmare Underneath and gnome7's upcoming Skull Diggers flip the script by having the dungeons and their denizens invading you rather than the other way around.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 11:36
|
|
|
textbookOrigins posted:I bounced so hard off of FF14 and that mount makes me want to reinstall. I won't do that but I'll roll a kobold next time I game! The next major patch (out in two months) will significantly streamline the 2.0/2.x content (removing 13% of the quests, i.e. the bulk of the fetch quest stuff) so that'll be a pretty good time to get back into it.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 11:45
|
|
|
Spire's treatment of the drow remains my gold standard of how to take something full of racist horseshit from D&D and make it a fascinating and fun to play in well developed culture. Nessus posted:What I usually do when there's something that places the PCs against "intelligent beings in their general league" (orcs or similar, as opposed to, say, a dragon, which may well be very intelligent) is frame it so that they're infiltrating some kind of military or quasi-military facility. Everyone's taste varies, but for me I have no major qualms with the PCs killing guards in the COBRA base/evil wizard's tower etc., vs. just kind of loving up some dudes in a squat in a dungeon. This is a good way to contextualize things compared to the average dungeon crawl.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 12:05
|
|
|
An idea I've had bashing around in the back of my skull for the past few months is a fantasy world where magic, and thus non-human races, was forcibly suppressed by one of the gods until recent-ish. So people start being born as dwarves or elves or what have you. Create cultures not races. You still have population centers of certain races but due to a few thousand years of cultural drift maybe the majority dwarf region is in the forest or something and there's also a few halflings and elves running around but they don't care because that elf is someone's cousin.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 14:58
|
|
|
e: nm
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jul 22, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 15:04
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:Just want to note that kobolds are really the MVPs of 'generic minion fodder who inexplicably ended up with more personality than elves.' Edit: Except I just checked and Adam Koebel worked on it. Never mind. Servetus fucked around with this message at 15:16 on Apr 28, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 15:13
|
|
|
Servetus posted:
I mean, he doesn't appear to be in the credits, other than the author (Steve Wallace) sourced the "unit level combat" mechanics from Koebel and LaTorra's Inglorious. Edited by Mark Diaz Truman; I don't recognize any other names in the credits. Unless there's something I'm not aware of, it doesn't look like Koebel "worked on it" any more than he did any other game inspired by Dungeon World. I support not giving Koebel money, but, like, let's not cancel a huge chunk of the PbtA ecosystem just because a lot of people's first exposure to the mechanics was via Dungeon World.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 15:27
|
|
|
Ratoslov posted:FF14 kobolds are pretty great too, being little weird rat guys who live in big underground burrows in a literally regimented lifestyle under a monarch. They're big into explosives, which weirdly means using Bomb monsters to make explosive devices. Their current situation is explicitly the result of centuries of imperialist expansion by one of the starter cities; Kobolds are perfectly capable of living peacefully with other peoples, but now they're desperate and just barely holding onto the scraps they have. FF14 is weirdly one of the better crafted setting's overall for dealing with racism and fantasy cultures. None of the starting cities are racially homogenous, and "humans" refers to basically all the races that live in the nations. "Beastmen" by contrast is at least in part a political term; there are "human races" with animal traits, and while the beast tribes are a little more extreme in physiology, it's more a classification born out of history as their tribes were displaced and marginalized by the city states in question. The beast tribe questlines for each of the groups also highlights how there are deep divisions in their societies, and having significant disagreements about how to deal with their plight. The only ones who are essentially "evil" are the ones who summon their gods, and in turn are sort of mind controlled by them. Even here however, this is treated as a tragedy; the beast tribes who summon their gods do so out of desperation, after being persecuted for so long, and ultimately end up slaves to their god in a bid for freedom. The quest lines very much treat this as an unjust situation, and the PC actively aiding the beast tribes as a positive step towards rectifying the tensions between the cities and the beast tribes.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 15:27
|
|
|
Absurd Alhazred posted:Aren't you describing Shadowrun? I guess, but fantasy so 100% less dystopia and megacorps?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 15:46
|
|
|
CitizenKeen posted:I mean, he doesn't appear to be in the credits, other than the author (Steve Wallace) sourced the "unit level combat" mechanics from Koebel and LaTorra's Inglorious. Edited by Mark Diaz Truman; I don't recognize any other names in the credits. Unless there's something I'm not aware of, it doesn't look like Koebel "worked on it" any more than he did any other game inspired by Dungeon World. You're right, I just saw that he was credited in a quick net search and didn't dig into my own copy to see what he was credited. The credit to him is from Dungeon World and Inglorious, he didn't actually work on No Country for Old Kobolds My Mistake.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 16:17
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:I guess, but fantasy so 100% less dystopia and megacorps? Then kinda Earthdawn. When the races had to hunker down to avoid the Scourge for however many centuries or more, while there were some racial enclaves mostly you went where it was safe.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 16:56
|
|
|
So regarding the race discussion that has been blighting twitter in the last few days, I shall not address much about it, as it's a dead horse that has been brought back every few months or so and has been solved millennia ago with the simple solution of "just change the setting", I shall instead problematize it by bringing out something that I noticed and have discussed in other channels as meta commentary on such a matter. Why is it that whenever the discussion comes out about DND regular setting species being brought out and complained at for being born evil, it's only the Orcs and Drow that are used as examples? Regarding the Orcs you have of course several other mook species that are used as cannon fodder for early/mid level adventurers, such as Goblinoids, Kobolds, Ogres, Trolls, Hill Giants, Gnolls, Lizardfolk, Sahuagin, Minotaurs, Centaurs and so on. They are also humanoid races who are smart enough to form civilizations and societal groups but are by nature brutish and violent and thus an inconvenient to their neighbors. Yet of course it's orcs, and maybe, just maybe, Goblins who are said to get the short stick when talking about the problematic nature of DND. And then you have the Drow. Several other "high civilized" races have their own dark mirrors. Humans have the Vashar. Dwarves have the Duergar. Gnomes have the Svirfneblin and even the Halflings have the Jerren. Yet of course, exception is taken only for the Drow for being a civilization of spider loving freaks who love to backstab each other and be born with quite a way of camouflaging themselves in the dark. The reason, of course, it's because it's a 'player race'. Orcs and Drow have slowly become more popular as player characters, likely because of pop culture (Drizzt novels! Warcraft!), and thus people take offense at looking at the player race and realize "wait, these guys like to loot and kill/backstab and poison"! Could such reactions and surface analysis of DnD's racism apply to the Illithid society, which is based on tentacled face freaks using their psychic powers to enslave people, eat their brains and then join a giant brain in a jar when they die? Or (Chromatic) Dragons for being complete assholes who love to hoard as much gold as possible and force lesser reptilian races into obedience? Or Beholders who can barely stand each other and are completely murderous against anything that differs from them? Of course not. They are not player races, or humanoids, and therefore you can't empathize with them. Makes u think. This is a serious post by the way.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 17:56
|
|
|
Night10194 posted:Spire's treatment of the drow remains my gold standard of how to take something full of racist horseshit from D&D and make it a fascinating and fun to play in well developed culture. How does Spire handle the drow?
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 17:58
|
|
|
Sionak posted:How does Spire handle the drow? Honestly it's not that special. They are just a kind of elves, they aren't at all disposed to evil but the sun harms them. The games default assumption is that you are Dark Elves living in a giant building/city that is majority dark elf but recently conquered by the high elves so the dark elves are now an underclass. It's handled fine but it's not really innovative beyond switching up which elves after the baddies.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:04
|
|
|
neaden posted:Honestly it's not that special. They are just a kind of elves, they aren't at all disposed to evil but the sun harms them. The games default assumption is that you are Dark Elves living in a giant building/city that is majority dark elf but recently conquered by the high elves so the dark elves are now an underclass. It's handled fine but it's not really innovative beyond switching up which elves after the baddies. It quietly drops the matriarchal "all males are enslaved" stuff, and the priestesses having sex with demons, and the "their dark skin is the result of a curse from the Gods for being evil" crap. Spire just casts the Drow as an ethnic group with a triple-aspect moon goddess and some religious practices around spiders. This is a significant step forward.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:17
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:This is a serious post by the way. To cover the bases, goblinoids, kobolds, gnolls, lizardfolk, minotaurs and centaurs actually do get a fair old amount of chat about them. There are elements to their backstory/ usage in the "official" lore that is no different from a huge number of human societies. The funniest one for me is the whole bit about how Hobgoblins organise a militaristic society built around warrior prowess, and is supposed to be in contrast to a freaking Feudal system. It's the spiderman pointing at spiderman meme. I started playing with 5e, but I have never even heard of the Vashar. The problem isn't that their are evil humanoid's per say, it is the idea that evil humanoids exist outside of the society that raised them. Take for instance the idea of the Duergar. If they were raised in a standard dwarf hold would there be any higher likelyhood of them being evil? Dwarves in the universe might believe differently, but it should be laid out that it is not so and is due to prejudice on the dwarves part. It's also because when you code a society of "evil spider worshipping elves that are all different to all the good elves because they are black skinned" you are... you are kind of running into things that cause people to raise an eye brow and go "pardon?" Like make a point about evil societies sure, but there needs to be at least some level of going "wait, how could this look to other folks?" Perhaps their should be a bit more critique applied to the world than "see [thing], stab [thing], profit". To go "well your only doing this because they are humanoid" seems to miss that it is just kind of good to chat about it, to have ideas that you haven't heard be heard, can be an inducement to growth. Josef bugman fucked around with this message at 18:28 on Apr 28, 2020 |
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:25
|
|
|
Loxbourne posted:It quietly drops the matriarchal "all males are enslaved" stuff, and the priestesses having sex with demons, and the "their dark skin is the result of a curse from the Gods for being evil" crap. Spire just casts the Drow as an ethnic group with a triple-aspect moon goddess and some religious practices around spiders. This is a significant step forward. Also they lay eggs and have some particular cultural and religious instutitions as a result of that.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:26
|
|
|
Spite is also specifically about a colonial struggle against elfpartheid and while the aelfir are the colonizing power they’re not biologically evil, though they are kind of weird due to their own biology. This means elves in general are weird, not just the Drow, and the structure of colonial prejudice is explicitly dealt with and considered. Spire isn’t wildly innovative but it uses the symbolism of Drow carefully and to good effect, then fleshes out the setting elaborately and with an almost Pratchettian balance of empathy for everyone and absolute, unbending rage for injustice. Aelfir are people, but they’re people benefitting from a monstrous system of colonial power, and their upper class are villains not because lolcrazy Lolth worship but because they benefit from the subjugation of the Spire for 300 years now. The city must fall. Also, yes Plutonis, the ones people care more about are the ones that are more popular and better known. Shocker.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:33
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:So regarding the race discussion that has been blighting twitter in the last few days, I shall not address much about it, as it's a dead horse that has been brought back every few months or so and has been solved millennia ago with the simple solution of "just change the setting", I shall instead problematize it by bringing out something that I noticed and have discussed in other channels as meta commentary on such a matter. every one of the species you listed has people out there who think they get a bad rap and would like to see them get the same treatment as elves and dwarves etc. i made a comment about how gnolls seem to get shafted in d&d and was surprised at how many gnoll fans there are out there. i always considered them one of the more obscure monsters but people really dig them
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:39
|
|
|
Serf posted:every one of the species you listed has people out there who think they get a bad rap and would like to see them get the same treatment as elves and dwarves etc. i made a comment about how gnolls seem to get shafted in d&d and was surprised at how many gnoll fans there are out there. i always considered them one of the more obscure monsters but people really dig them I think it was a big thing before 5e came out that there were a lot of gnoll arguments. 5e made them specifically demon-esque creatures that erupt spontaneously from various places. I am unsure as to whether that is a good thing or not.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:41
|
|
|
Josef bugman posted:I think it was a big thing before 5e came out that there were a lot of gnoll arguments. 5e made them specifically demon-esque creatures that erupt spontaneously from various places. I am unsure as to whether that is a good thing or not. sounds pretty bad to me
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:43
|
|
|
big gnoll fan here
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:51
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 7, 2024 00:31 |
|
|
Serf posted:sounds pretty bad to me It's not the best. It makes gnolls not a "species" so much as "randomly occurring demon based event". At least in the books as written. Personally prefer the "just happen to be people covered in fur" approach that Spire does.
|
|
#
?
Apr 28, 2020 18:51
|
|