[OSSR] Shackled City

[rasmuswagner]

Guys, come on, you are way overcomplicating this. This is just lazy videogamey quest writing, where you are asked to bring ten bear assess and no one questions what did the bears do wrong. You are not supposed to think about this quest for longer than it takes to say "UPDATED MY JOURNAL".

I'm pretty sure that this whole argument Rej and Kae are on about isn't about over reading the actual quest. It's more like Rej said having racist people in the game is fine and setting appropriate and Kaelik not liking that idea.

Kaelik gonna Kaelik. Rej is making the mistake of engaging with her while she's on the hate-roll. She's rolling out all her usual shitty behaviour.

[deaddmwalking]

Rej shouldn't have used Shackled City as his example without reading it - it really did make him look like a clueless idiot. There is no attempt to make any perceived racism bad. I don't know why realizing that you shouldn't have stabbed all of those goblins in the face because they were mind-controlled slaves would improve the game, but the narrative seems content with 'you shouldn't feel bad because they were goblins'.

[SlyJohnny]

At risk of repeating the arguments that got the thread split off into WH40K ejaculate, this is why I accept genocide of goblin for the most part, but get weirded out when we're portrayed as Champions of Light for doing it.

Like either say you don't care about morality in games, or give it a treatment more complicated than "green is bad".

Here's the deal.

Goblins' role in the setting is providing cannon fodder that can be stabbed in the face without feeling guilty.

If you move goblins out of that category, you will have to move another race into it as long as facestabbing is the core of your gameplay. In fact this is an observable phenomenon in WoW and other settings that decide that traditional enemy races should not be irredeemably evil.

If you go "but, but, but I don't feel righteous stabbing creatures that did not really do that much bad things (but I still play the game about stabbing and clearing dungeons)" authors are left with no choice but to give the current designated fodder races the Pathfinder treatment - i.e., make absolutely sure these creatures provide you with ample reasons for stabbing.

However, I, personally, prefer not to fill my game with excessive amounts of rape and torture.

And for those who want more complicated morality in their games, like you do... well as it seems the industry, has no middle setting between "black&white" and "full grimderp". Or at least doesn't use it much. That is not because of some whim, I believe. It's again the function of the default TTRPG gameplay mode being super violent. When PCs' path in life is paved with skulls, either the setting gives them an ironclad justification for their actions, or the game strongly risks slipping into pure "might makes right".

You're missing the point. You CAN say "this game is not going to deal with morality, we aren't going to get philosophical about whether stabbing goblins is the right thing to do" and I will say "fine". I will play a character who's not inclined to think about those sorts of things, or has only ever encountered goblins who want to kill him, or whatever. If you want to write a plothook for the adventure that involves finding a bunch of goblins and killing them, just tell me that my character is getting paid to do it, or that the goblins did something bad to his community, or literally any reason, really- I'm not going to weigh their goblin sins against a feather and decide whether it's just or not.

Or you can say "this game IS going to deal with morality, about Good vs Evil, about themes of heroism, and the PCs are either going to be card-carrying champions of light or morally grey characters who are nevertheless batting for the whitehats", but then you actually have to come up with a moral reason why we're exterminating goblins.

I don't need complicated morality if you don't want to do it, I just don't want some weird "best of both worlds" approach where we're good people for committing genocide due to some contrived racist reasoning. It's honestly okay to shrug and say that the goblins are dying because it's a harsh world and we're harsh people who aren't treating each other fairly.

Either completely ignore the moral implications of our characters treatment of goblins, or engage with the issue intelligently.

[hyzmarca]

Question. Why not join the goblins, convert to the worship of Bargrivyek, unite the tribes into a coherent army, and slaughter all the traditional PC races?

I could very easily come up with a cleric of Bargrivyek character who started out of a cleric of Pelor or some other standard human deity, got captured and enslaved by Goblins, eventually converted to worshipping the Goblin pantheon and started fighting for the tribe, rose to a position of power, and following the precepts of Bargrivyek united the various tribes against their enemies. Call him Dances with Worgs.

[Mask_De_H]

Hold up, is Kaelik actually female or is rasmuswagner just being a fucker?

Also please RelentlessImp post something to end this dumpster fire of shitty people being shitty.

[RelentlessImp]

Here's the thing, on this derail: The author has a hate-on for a valid PC race and makes no qualms about treating sapient creatures as nothing more than sub-sapient creatures. Even if the setting treats goblins as nothing more than cannon fodder, they have sapience-capable intelligence scores. Fantasy racism is one thing; author racism is another. Drakthar's Way has lots of author racism that is thinly filtered through fantasy racism.

That said, it's been a rough week, having to deal with my grandfather in a nursing home and my grandmother recovering from pneumonia, and then coming down with a 24-hour bug that left me bedridden. I'll have something out sometime next week, and hopefully get back on track.

[Kaelik]

Here's the thing, on this derail: The author has a hate-on for a valid PC race and makes no qualms about treating sapient creatures as nothing more than sub-sapient creatures. Even if the setting treats goblins as nothing more than cannon fodder, they have sapience-capable intelligence scores. Fantasy racism is one thing; author racism is another. Drakthar's Way has lots of author racism that is thinly filtered through fantasy racism.

Here is how James Jacobs thinks is the best way to introduce an adventure path with goblin antagonists in a completely different adventure path that he also wrote for:

1. H O R S E HATE: Goblins excel at riding animals , but
they don't quite get hor s e s . In fact, their hatred
of all things hor s e i s matched only by their fear
of hor s e s , who tend to step on goblins who get
too clo s e .
2. D O G H AT E : Although goblins rai s e horrible ratfaced
creatures called (creatively enough) goblin
dogs to use as mount s , and ride wolves or worgs if
they can get them-goblins are quick to explain
that wolve s are NOT dogs-their hatred of plain
old dogs nearly matches their hatred of hor s e s .
T h e feeling is mutual. If your dog's barking a t the
woodpile for no reason, chances are he smells a
frightened goblin hiding in there s omewhere.
3. G O B L I N S RAID JU N KYARDS: Garbage pits, gutters,
sewers-anywhere there's garbage, you can bet
goblins are nearby. Goblins are weirdly adept at
crafting weapons and armor from refuse, and are
fond of killing people with what they throw away.
4. G O B L I N S LOVE TO S I N G : Unfortunately, as catchy as
their lyrics can be, goblin songs tend to be i' bit too
creepy and disturbing to catch on in polite society.
5. THEY'RE S N EAKY: An excited or angry goblin is a
noisy, chattering, toothy menace, but even then, he
can drop into an unsettling silence in a heartbeat.
This, matched with their diminutive size, makes
goblins unnervingly adept at hiding in places you'd
never expect: stacks of firewood, rain barrels, under
logs, under chicken coop s , in ovens . . . .
6. THEY'RE A LITTLE CRAZY: The fact that goblins think of
things like ovens as good hiding places reveals much
about their inability to think plans through to the
most likely outcome. That, and they tend to be easily
distracted, particularly by shiny things and animals
smaller than them that might make good eating.
7. T H EY ' R E VORAC I O US: Given enough supplies , a
goblin generally takes nearly a dozen meals a day.
Most goblin tribes don't have enough supplies to
accommodate such ravenous appetites, which is why
the little menaces are so prone to going on raids .
8. T H EY LIKE FIRE: Burning things is one o f the great
goblin pastimes, although they're generally pretty
careful about lighting fires in their own lairs,
especially since goblins tend to live in large tangled
thistle patches and sleep in beds of dried leaves and
gras s . But give a goblin a torch and someone else's
home and you've got trouble.
9. THEY GET S T U C K EAS I LY: Goblins have wiry frames
but wide heads. They live in cramped warrens .
Sometimes t o o cramped.
10. GOBLINS BELIEVE WRITING STEALS YOU R SOUL: The walls
of goblin lairs and the ruins of towns goblins have
raided are littered with pictures oftheir exploits. They
never use writing, though. That's not lucky. Writing
steals words out of your head. You can't get them back.

The entire first adventure literally has an aside comment about how dumb, stupid, crazy, insane, hilarious, ect goblins are literally every 3 paragraphs.

Paizo just really thinks goblin racism is the height of high comedy.

[FatR]

The WAAAGH-Tang Clan is a group of bandits who think your stuff should be their stuff.

If you think that most people consider "they want your stuff to be their stuff" the grounds for killing on sight and feeling no guilt you're factually and sorely mistaken (in fact you don't need go farther than this thread to find an example of that treated as an atrocity). If that was the case most people would be completely a-OK with killing every last goblin and orc in DnDland, and large portions of humanity as well. But they don't.

In fact, an attempt to enact genocide on humanity and allied races is generally not enough to provoke this reaction. It certainly wasn't in my games - accidentally in the last campaign PCs have dealt with a devil-controlled goblinoid empire that tried its best to wipe out everyone else on the continent (in rather nasty, though mostly left to players' imaginations, ways, when they had opportunities), and PCs still haven't retaliated in kind (merely wiped out actual fighting forces and condoned massive purges of people associated with the old regime after conquering the goblinoids).

The only beings that no player (except those more interested in being contrarian for the sake of it) would feel guilty about killing are those who are not merely an existential threat, but cannot help being an existential threat by their very nature.

As long as the gameplay model of an average DnD adventure presumes going into dungeons and clearing them of everything that moves (which it fucking does, in the current PF adventures adversaries that can be dealt with without murderizing them are exceptions, and in half of those cases violence is still the best solution), there would be a need of such beings. You only can choose whether these beings are just generically Evil and nasty. Or whether they are biological killing machines engineered to murder-rape everything that is not them (or their masters) in the style of Second Apocalyplse series.

[Whipstitch]

Even then notice how your argument ends up boiling down to "We know these goblins did something."

[DSMatticus]

If you think that most people consider "they want your stuff to be their stuff" the grounds for killing on sight and feeling no guilt you're factually and sorely mistaken (in fact you don't need go farther than this thread to find an example of that treated as an atrocity).

Are you fucking insane? If a bunch of people leap out of the woods and start stabbing you (i.e., the modus operandi of bandits), you are wholly justified in stabbing back. Self-defense is quite possibly the only unambiguously "justified" violence, because in practice no one is going to sit there and let themself be stabbed to death, so if your system of ethics calls for people to do that it is useless. You're seriously bitching that when the vikings roll up on your lands and start pillaging everything you'd be in the wrong to fight back.

If that was the case most people would be completely a-OK with killing every last goblin and orc in DnDland, and large portions of humanity as well. But they don't.

The fuck? There are orc turnip farmers and orc midwives and orc children. Orc turnip farmers do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to grow their fucking turnips. Orc midwives do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to take care of pregnant women and their babies. Orc children do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to pretend swordfight with sticks and whatever else children do.

Waitwaitwaitwaitwait. Are you being deliberately stupid in order to pretend that when I say the "The WAAAGH-Tang Clan is a group of bandits who think your stuff should be their stuff," the reason that it's okay to fight the WAAAGH-Tang Clan is that they want your stuff to be their stuff, and not because they are a group of bandits who will stab you to make that happen? Are you trying to twist my description into some kind of "thou shalt not covet" strawman, in which merely wanting other people's things is a capital offense?

Dumbass.

[Kaelik]

I think the problem is he doesn't get that it is a Wu-Tang Clan joke, so he thinks that "Clan" means a specific group of people born to specific people that compromise a sort of self sufficient society, rather than "a group of people who joined an organization dedicated to murdering people for things."

[Rejakor]

The point here is that you seem to be living in some sort of alternate universe where criticizing one specific story that treats racism as "not really that big a deal" and "kind of funny" which it totally does, and you totally even defended it for doing, counts as a claiming that no story can ever be about racism.

Nope. The point here is that I said that people being nasty is a factor of human behaviour that can be used in storytelling, and that where there's mind control there's room for anti-racist moral lessons via storytelling and PC guilt, and you called me a rapist.

And it's been long enough that I forgot that the Kaelik response to people disagreeing with Kaelik is enough strawmen and anger that people in the thread have multiple times thought i've been saying things said and implied only in your posts.

If you have moral outrage against an author who is clearly being racist and using storytelling as an excuse to do so, sperging that hate all over me for saying things related to but different from that just proves you're not a person able to actually discuss anything even close to things you dislike. Which is pretty much my opinion of you overall, and stops any sort of analysis that actually leads to changing or improving anything ever. You know, the kind I was trying to do. Where a racist adventure (apparently) can instead be turned into a moral lesson about not mindlessly trusting authority and assuming a bunch of goblins are evil when they are, in fact, mind-controlled, and despite being sent out to thief shit for an evil vampire, took pains not to kill anyone. Which makes their deaths at PC hands a healthy dose of angst, a hint that the government of the town isn't on the up-and-up (see: THE MAIN PLOT), and a lesson about not judging books by their perceived covers. Combined, even, with a nod to history and verisimilitude by having assholes be present in the fantasy setting, as they were in history, and are in real life. If you want my little pony with violence, the rpg, that's great, but not everyone does, Kaelik. And people don't deserve to be called rape apologists because of that.

There is no attempt to make any perceived racism bad.

I'm not going to read shackled city over this. But whether or not you should try to make PCs feel bad for stabbing some mind controlled goblins depends on your table. Some people don't want to feel bad, they want the hollywood action movie style plot. In that plot, the goblins are evil, the mind control is incidental, the lack of deaths is incidental. Some people want Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and to feel bad about things where they fucked up, even if it wasn't really their fault. In that plot, the goblins are neutral and terrifically terrified by their situation, the mind control is what's making them steal shit, and the lack of deaths is that they didn't want to kill people.

I don't know why realizing that you shouldn't have stabbed all of those goblins in the face because they were mind-controlled slaves would improve the game,

It rewards players for doing investigation and not judging situations simplistically, which are two things I see a lot of the time GMs having trouble finding reasons to do (and/or bemoaning players not doing it). It drops clues and foreshadowing about the main plot. It makes the players feel something about npcs, which is the absolutely most important thing to have your game be more than a tabletop skirmish wargame. The games people have talked about for years are almost solely the ones where they cared about the npcs in them. Similarly for other forms of storytelling, such as movies, books.

There are so many advantages that I immediately seized on it as the way to run that adventure, and am still dubious that it wasn't intentionally set up that way. Goblins doing evil stuff being subverted in a way that draws on another trope (the townsfolk being controlled by fear of the vampire) is bloody brilliant.

Given that 'fantasy racism' is a hot button topic especially on the den, that adds to my dubiousness that it's really herp-derp racism and not simply being taken as such.

This is a weird point to make. Like sexual assault, racism is also a thing that people experience entirely too god damn often. If rape is a concern because it might cause unnecessary discomfort to some part of the target audience, well...

Some discomfort is good (for storytelling, also for humans in general). Discomfort where you get to punch that discomfort right in it's face is extra good (catharsis). Too much discomfort turns your audience off. Horror movies walk that line. Sometimes people have enough trauma about an issue that you can't bring it up at all - you can't mention it around them. That's rare, though. Mostly people have different comfort levels and tolerances.

Part of GMing is building that into your game. Reading audience. Putting things into the game that interest, titillate, frighten, make tense, etc, your audience, to keep them focused and interacting with the game. People give a lot of cues if you're going too far. You have to be pretty oblivious not to read them.

[maglag]

If that was the case most people would be completely a-OK with killing every last goblin and orc in DnDland, and large portions of humanity as well. But they don't.

The fuck? There are orc turnip farmers and orc midwives and orc children. Orc turnip farmers do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to grow their fucking turnips. Orc midwives do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to take care of pregnant women and their babies. Orc children do not want to stab you and take your stuff. They want to pretend swordfight with sticks and whatever else children do.

Most humie turnip farmers in history never really wanted to grow turnips, they just did that because the alternative was often death by starvation and they would gladly do anything else for a living given the chance. And "whatever else children do" has changed quite a bit between different times and human societies.

If you were born a spartan, you wouldn't have pretend fights, you would be made to do real fights against other spartan children, where if somebody got killed it was their own fault for being too weak, and also purposedly left starving so that you would want to steal food from wherever you could, all in order to breed the master humie warrior race. Turnip farming/midwifes was a job for slaves.

This is, Genghis Khan started his conquering spree when he was barely in the double digits of age. Which means he had to start learning riding and archery and whatnot as soon as he was able to walk.

In old Japan there were lords that supported that noble children to perform executions of condemned criminals so that they could get used to cutting living human flesh.

Many german kids were given guns and thrown against adult soldiers to kill and be killed just some 60-70 years ago.

Heck, one of my country's national heroes is a baker lady who killed seven enemy soldiers who were just trying to hide in her house after a defeat (and historically the local farmers did most of the killing of said enemy army after it was routed, since selling second-hand wargear was a pretty nice boost of income to the turnip harvest, plus you know righteous revenge).

And even nowadays child soldiers are a thing.

So yes, if orcs are your setting's mongols/huns/spartans, even their children and turnip farmers will want to stab you and take your stuff given a chance. Because their society taught them that's the best path to glory and status amongst their peers.

[Prak]

That's kind of how I envision orc childhood. Less(ish) running around with pointy sticks playfighting, and more running around with sticks with sharp metal actually fighting. But that's after the age of 5 or 6. Until then, they're sort of treated like camp dogs, just... things with mouths that follow you around for food and can occasionally be useful, until they distinguish themselves in some way that makes an adult orc care about them as an individual, or they hit 5 and someone says "ok, time to learn to be cannonfodder, kid."

That said, they're orcs, so childhood is a lot rougher, and seriously results in death sometimes.

[Rejakor]

So yes, if orcs are your setting's mongols/huns/spartans, even their children and turnip farmers will want to stab you and take your stuff given a chance. Because their society taught them that's the best path to glory and status amongst their peers.

/or any other group. Far more people were willing to murder for gain in the past, because violence was less vilified and opportunities for gain were much rarer and starvation was much more likely. There are generally always downsides to murdering someone (like you might get murdered back, people might find the body and think it's another hun rather than a stranger/bandit, and kill you, you might receive social stigma, religious stigma, general human empathy and aversion to it etc) but when the chips are down, anyone would do it*. From french peasants to roman officials to hunnic herders. Even in the modern day, the 'missing persons' rate indicates that it's not entirely uncommon.

(*some people have notably resisted using violence, even in circumstances that would otherwise warrant it, but they are a very small outlier in the population)

[FatR]

Are you fucking insane? If a bunch of people leap out of the woods and start stabbing you (i.e., the modus operandi of bandits), you are wholly justified in stabbing back. Self-defense is quite possibly the only unambiguously "justified" violence because in practice no one is going to sit there and let themself be stabbed to death...

(1)The defintion of "self-defense" when discussing societies, not criminal definitions, is quite elusive and contented for the reasons already outlined above in the thread. Probably because if you don't want it to be as impractical as typical superhero codex, then even in our world, without orcs and shit, your societal right to self-defense should extend as far as conquering whole peoples and extirpating most of their culture, if you want to ever stop the raids.

(2)And people want to clear fucking dungeons (as evidenced by them buying adventures which consist of dungeons with just a sprinkle of everything else, like the one this thread is devoted to), not to merely react when bandits jump them, and they want to feel good while doing so. I believe I already explained what it takes to ensure feeling good when wading through massive amounts of corpses of creatures you actively attacked.

Hmmm, to think of it within 2-4 sessions in my current game PCs would be overruning a human village of fiend-worshipping, dark power-addicted cannibals in a situation where any authorities are on the other side of the sea. I wonder how exactly uncomfortable players would be if their NPC allies/underlings ask them point blank what to do with the survivors, instead of achieving the tacit understanding that PCs would look the other way while the wounded and the children are being shanked.

[Mask_De_H]

Look: when I come to play an elfgame with friends, I don't want to have to grapple with potentially incendiary views on human atrocity or racialism or whatever the fuck the players have. I just want to be a murderhobo. And when you write something that brings those issues to a table, especially when you just sort of cockslap the players with it, you're bound to create some acrimony. Especially in a multi book series people buy sight unseen.

Yes, whitewashing real cruelty is terrible; so is shoving real cruelties in where they aren't expected or welcome. Given the lineage of D&D fantasy, snatching ears off of any potentially playable race is all sorts of fucked up. Defending that makes you kinda look fucked up. Realizarm is no excuse mechanically, so why would it be an excuse in a shared narrative?

Also, what the fuck are you even saying, FatR? It's not even offensive, it's just word salad.

[Kaelik]

and you called me a rapist.

...

And it's been long enough that I forgot that the Kaelik response to people disagreeing with Kaelik is enough strawmen

...

And people don't deserve to be called rape apologists because of that.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Can we go back to making fun of the AP now?

[DSMatticus]

(1)The defintion of "self-defense" when discussing societies, not criminal definitions, is quite elusive and contented for the reasons already outlined above in the thread. Probably because if you don't want it to be as impractical as typical superhero codex, then even in our world, without orcs and shit, your societal right to self-defense should extend as far as conquering whole peoples and extirpating most of their culture, if you want to ever stop the raids.

I think the problem is he doesn't get that it is a Wu-Tang Clan joke, so he thinks that "Clan" means a specific group of people born to specific people that compromise a sort of self sufficient society, rather than "a group of people who joined an organization dedicated to murdering people for things."

Okay, so either Kaelik was right, or you're a goddamn sociopath.

Listen, the WAAAGH-Tang Clan is not a society. It's a punny name based off of the Wu-Tang Clan, which is also not a society. It's a group of private individuals who banded together behind a common cause - "stabbing you and taking your things" for the former, and "being wildly successful musicians" for the latter. It's not a fantasy "race war," you fucking idiot. It's a bunch of random dudes who met eachother and collectively decided that looting and pillaging sounded like a fun way to make a living. If you tracked down the families of the WAAAGH-Tang Clan and bombed FREEDOM!!1! into them or whatever, that would make you the asshole. If the Kingdom of Orctopia was literally paying the WAAAGH-Tang Clan (either directly in money or indirectly in support like weapons and armor and a safe haven to retreat to), then that would be a legitimate casus belli for a war against Orctopia. It would still not be a legitimate casus belli for rounding up orcs into concentration reeducation camps.

(2)And people want to clear fucking dungeons (as evidenced by them buying adventures which consist of dungeons with just a sprinkle of everything else, like the one this thread is devoted to), not to merely react when bandits jump them, and they want to feel good while doing so. I believe I already explained what it takes to ensure feeling good when wading through massive amounts of corpses of creatures you actively attacked.

The Church of the Black Hat is a literal fucking church. They probably even have a dungeon underneath that church with horrible monsters and apocalyptic plot MacGuffins in it.

The WAAAGH-Tang Clan is going to set up camp somewhere, either in a makeshift campfort somewhere in the woods or the old ruins of blah blah blah.

Now yes, if you really fucking wanted to you could have a debate about how adventurers aren't police and shouldn't be running around dispensing justice (spoiler: in the historical analogs of the fantasy societies we're discussing there are no "police" of the modern conception, and the law enforcement mechanisms are fundamentally fucked in a plethora of ways, so whether or not it's "proper" to invest murderhobos with the authority to dispense justice is the one of the least significant concerns you could have). You could also have a debate about defaulting to the use of lethal force as PC's will inevitably do (which is, again, one of the least significant concerns you could have about law enforcement in pre-enlightenment societies). But who fucking cares? At that point you've already gone from "is this racist?" "Shut up, don't think about it." to "is this vigilantism?" "Shut up, don't think about it." You've gone from playing fantasy skinheads to playing fantasy Batmen. I know which of those I'd rather play.

[TOZ]

Can we go back to making fun of the AP now?

Please. I need this for the next time I run it, to make it less shitty.

[hogarth]

Please. I need this for the next time I run it, to make it less shitty.

But this conversation is important. This is the first time anyone has ever discussed whether killing orcs is bad!

[deaddmwalking]

That's a mischaracterization. This is about whether when you build your world you can have a sentient, mortal race exist as 'kill on sight' or whether creating one makes you a bad racist.

It does make you a bad racist and defenses like 'I'm just following Tolkien's example' pretty weak.

I think this conversation has come up more than a few times as well. But it's still a more important consideration.

[FatR]

That's a mischaracterization. This is about whether when you build your world you can have a sentient, mortal race exist as 'kill on sight'

You can.

or whether creating one makes you a bad racist.

If so from now on I proudly proclaim myself to be a bad racist. If you are set on being morons, I may as well do my best to offend you.

It does make you a bad racist and defenses like 'I'm just following Tolkien's example' pretty weak.

Fuck you, I'm following examples of R. Scott Baker, Charles Stross and George Martin.

[Darth Rabbitt]

FatR, we've known you're a bad racist for a while now. This thread doesn't have anything to do with it, other than your attempt to twist it into a badge of pride.

Also, can we get back to the review?