Musings

[Dean]

I've been writing a lot of rpg stuff during the quar, I figured I'd start posting the system-agnostic stuff and anyone else doing any rambley quar writings is welcomed to do the same.

Humans and Half-Humans
Humans “thing” should be their fertility. Humans can have kids with anything. Orcs and Elves are clearly completely different species but their are enough children in human communities with Orcish or Elven ancestry to form whole sub-communities. In fantasy Humans have mixed with giants, fey, mermaids, harpies, even Gods seem most likely to mix with them over any other people's. The real world reason for this human centrism is obvious, but the most apparent in world reason really would be a unique and innate hyperfecundity in humans. Human traits appear to be generally dominant, with mixed parentage children only showing clear identifiers in the first generation. It would be a common sort of legend for humans to say that so-and-so’s family had an ancestor that was a giant (or siren or elf, etc) which, while possible, is more likely to be a completely unprovable urban legend about someone that happens to be unusally big (or unusually quick or a beautiful singer, etc).

These mixed parentage children can be called Half-whatever but a superior title would be ___-Kin. As it’s possible there are multiple generations of mixed parentage and no one cares if someone is half giant on ones fathers side and quarter giant on ones mothers side. If someone's got a provable giant relative they're Giant-kin and that's good enough. Elf-kin, Mer-Kin, Dwarf-kin, Fey-Kin and so on. In edge cases where "Kin" sounds unpleasant spoken aloud (like "Ork-Kin") One should use "Blooded" or "Folk" as alternate generic addendums so one can be Orc-Blooded or Orc-Folk. Obviously some people will continue to use Half to describe their character or others and that's fine, it's just specific to a degree that's kind of rude. So in setting a half elf could call themselves or another half elf that but you probably shouldn't do it for the same reason you wouldn't call someone half-asian.

Of course the vast majority of humans even in fantasy settings are the children and grandchildren of humans alone. But the differences between an Elfkin human and a full human child who happened to have slightly pointed ears and an athletic disposition is essentially nonexistent. As such humans don’t much trouble themselves with concerns over anyone's specific racial parentage. Obviously there’s many bawdy jokes told in taverns about at just what point of undress you can tell if a man is giantkin and many tables where universal agreement was found about how elfkin girls totally just feel different but these hold as much weight and scientific veracity as all other conversations that arise when spirits, laughter, and good stories have been placed above scholarly debate for the evening.

[Dean]

Doing Good Has Consequences
When you defeat evil there should be consequences. This seems counterintuitive but is true. If your party frees all the oppressed Orcs forced to work the Shadow King’s fields they’ve done an unquestionable moral good. They have also probably made it so that there’s going to be a famine later if they don’t do something about it.

An evil system is still a system and people’s lives rely on the systems currently in place. When the party changes the system they should be confronted with the consequences of it. Not to disincentivize them but to make the next adventure feel connected and logical. If the party removes the Shadow King from power their next adventure could be having to hold back the Lizard Queen’s advances into the outlands that the Shadow King’s armies held. When they take the Lizard Queens outlands fortress the next adventure could be hunting down the demonic cultists that were being successfully suppressed by the Lizard Queen and are now trying to perform ritual sacrifice to summon their master.

Obviously one shouldn’t focus solely on the negative consequences. It is assumed here that you are presenting the characters with the positive consequences of their actions and allowing them to see and feel the rewards of their efforts. Of course defeating the Shadow King lets a democracy flourish and gains the characters Knighthood, it just also resulted in an abandoned fortification. In a short time it should be assumed that competent leadership can handle the dramatically reduced problems that inevitably crop up in any region, but when seismic shakes occur as a result of player character choices the players should be met with the result of those choices. It will make their adventures feel fuller and more real and will increase their investment in the people or places they have helped

[OgreBattle]

Play Final Fantasy XiV, I really enjoy the 'afterwards' arcs where you help rebuild the nation you liberated, you help out the non-monotheistic beastmen against their fanatic brethren

[MGuy]

Is the consequences of doing good an example of considerations for adventure design or general GM's advice?

[OgreBattle]

"Aftermath rebuilding" can also be what you do during 'downtime'

Like you have a list of things the PC's could do such as using their mighty str 30 to restore irrigation, using their cure disease abilities to help overburdened hospitals, use their thieve's guild savvy to organize relief to a magiwar devastated land.

[Blade]

If you play "D&D: armed western intervention army in the Middle East", after destroying the Shadow King you just loot his treasury, cut a deal with the blacksmith to get his best stuff, and just leave the rest of the people deal with the Lizard Queen.

[Dean]

Is the consequences of doing good an example of considerations for adventure design or general GM's advice?

Obviously to some degree it's both but its true secret purpose is as a guideline to create rich roleplaying with NPC's. It's pretty normal in adventures to have the NPC's the players interact with serve a function and in a normal session they probably only have enough screen time to serve that function. The Crier who calls in the town square for help and the Mayor who tasks the PC's to aid them usually only get a few minutes of dialogue before the PC's move on, so it's rare for anyone to stand out. If the PC's roam from place to place they'll have the same experience as the kid who keeps moving during the schoolyear, they'll be trained not to form bonds with characters and that Player will lose out on the roleplaying they came to this hobby for.

If you can keep the PC's in one place then as a DM it's the easiest thing in the world to make NPC's the characters like and care about. The third time the Town Crier goes to shout for the PC's they will absolutely have picked out something memorable about the encounters with him and have something funny to say to him. A bullshit town crier NPC the players talk with in 3 separate sessions will become richer and more fleshed out than whatever swashbuckling thief-with-a-heart-of-gold NPC you built that they only interact with during one break-in. If players are confident they'll have a continued relationship with an NPC they'll stop thinking of them as low-key questgivers they have to mash the conversation button with to get to the adventure and start thinking of them as characters because they now have emotional permission to invest time into them.

[Dean]

Goblin culture is Capitalist and awful
Goblin culture in fantasy games is a Capitalist Fascist racial empire. The Goblins are mean, racist, bigoted, cruel, insecure, diseased, and warlike. Their leaders are bloated gluttonous monsters constantly calling for prisoners to be hauled before them. Concerned only with looking and feeling powerful. They eat in gluttonous trappings of faux-quality while their people starve. The goblin empire IS the fantasy world's capitalist regime. It’s why they’re inventors and huge fucking problems. The only thing they use their empires wealth on is weapon research. Their war efforts blight the land they go on, preach disconnect from nature. Their reputation is for thievery and selfishness because their society is cruel and unfair and obsessed with punishment over justice. Their soldiers ride rodents and their world has no beauty that hasn't been taken into the horde of some warlord. You wish you could help them, they’re all so wretched, but you probably can't. Individually they could be saved but a large portion of them need to be killed for Goblin society to have any hope of redemption. So Adventurers can kill goblinfolk with distaste but a clear conscious cause the camp they fought was full of genuine Nazi’s who excuse the torture of other goblins by their big strong chief. If you meet a goblin in the wilderness you don’t like them coming along with your party cause they’ll say racist shit about dwarves over the campfire and might steal your food if they think they can get away with it cause their moral core was never developed by their societies constant sneering toward any goals besides gaining coin. It means you can hate grown Goblins with lethal force without moral worry but know you shouldn’t kill their babies cause if you manage to kill most of the horrible ones the younger generation would be much less awful in like 20 years, but almost no one’s willing to spend 20 years around a bunch of nazi’s slowly teaching them to unlearn their elf genocide jokes. So inevitably the Goblins drift back to some new “big strong leader” Goblin or Orc or evil wizard who demands their fascist obedience and tells them to rise up and end the lives of those filthy halflings who stole all our wealth with their fat-bellied greed.

[Thaluikhain]

Not sure why fat people/goblins have to be evil. And I don't like the idea of being able to kill goblins on sight because "most" of them are Nazis/what the Nazis said their victims were. Claiming a group is a greedy, dishonest, diseased blight on society so we should kill them all...yeah, no, maybe not.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Do I hear goblin apologetics?

[Prak]

Personally, I prefer goblins as hyper-ancoms, to the point where they don't even have a concept of private property. They understand personal property to an extent, but it's literally just for, like, "Krark's blanket from his mom," or "Oh, that's Eddie's book he's reading."

[Thaluikhain]

Hmmm, a short race, that has no concept of private property, that everyone hates...I think Dragonlance introduced one of those.

[Prak]

Remember, there's a difference between personal and private property.

But also, it's basically Frank's "exceptionally cooperative" goblins from Tome taken a bit further.

Also also, it's not "shit, where's that ruby?" it's "Oh, I need a sword, here's one. I'll just leave it here when I'm done."

[Zaranthan]

The problem with kender wasn't the design, it was the roleplaying prompt. The way most people trolled their so-called friends was

DM: You take 43 damage from the fireball.
Wizard: Wow, that's a lot. I thought this ring granted 15 fire resistance?
DM: It does, but the kender stole it.
Wizard: <throws PHB at kender player>

The way they should have worked in tabletop play was

DM: You reach the fires of Mt. Doom. The ring screams in your mind, offering you untold power if you turn back.
Wizard: I'm not touching that thing again. I toss my whole sack into the lava.
DM: The ring keeps screaming.
Wizard: I turn the kender upside down over the lava and shake him until the ring falls out of his pocket.

[Dean]

Not sure why fat people/goblins have to be evil. And I don't like the idea of being able to kill goblins on sight because "most" of them are Nazis/what the Nazis said their victims were. Claiming a group is a greedy, dishonest, diseased blight on society so we should kill them all...yeah, no, maybe not.

This cowardly Nazi apologia can suck my nuts.

It's a game where you make a sword man and stab people. Get over your all lives matter bullshit.

There's been a lot of attempts to reframe goblins as actually sneaky and thieving and looting because they're some kind of misunderstood hippie commune. That shit falls flat cause the other half of their identity is riding plague rats and living in filth and hanging skulls from their mounts and having poisonous barbed spears and vocally fantasizing about wanting to LITERALLY EAT ELF AGAIN and all that shit. Goblins are horrible. That's literally their primary conceptual trait. When you interact with them it will normally be with them as antagonists who you need to stab to death. Their literal entire conceptual space was horrible awful people that were literal representations of ACTUAL fucking real world nazi's that heroes had to murder. Goblin culture is a capitalist racially intolerant regime so you feel absolutely no guilt for taking the distasteful task of killing them on yourself. No one is "Kill on sight". No one. When I've seen actual real world nazi's I've shouted at them and been open to violence but I'm not gonna kill a sentient being with no second thought cause I'm a moral being just like the PC's I hope your playing. But if I'm sent to clear out a camp of nazi's who've been raiding the people of Freedale I'm gonna do it with extreme force cause if some half elven girl wanders too close to that camp they might express their FAMOUS LOVE OF EATING ELVEN FLESH THEY CONSTANTLY TALK ABOUT. The Goblin empire is a capitalist fascist regime based around racial superiority that has fallen into terrible moral decay. That was their literal original authorial intention and it's useful to frame their normal culture that way for the roles they're written into.

Obviously an individual Goblin could be good or moral but contemporary Goblin culture when your game begins is a capitalist racial regime. So there can totally be smart goblins who got out and they're just tinkerers or whatever but if you interact with goblin Culture instead of a singular goblin you are facing something evil.

[Omegonthesane]

Your screed here is literally the actual first time I have heard of eating elf as a core part of goblin identity. Maybe just... write that shit out instead of producing "actual fascist propaganda draped in the trappings of antifascism". Because that is the thing you are doing when you tag a race, not a nation or culture but a race, as being so culturally horrible that you should assume they are enemy combatants.

It's also worth flagging that goblin appearances draw on a lot of literal antisemitic tropes. Having stupidly committed to the decision to make a race of evil capitalists, you are compounding the fascist propaganda by making them visually resemble the stereotype of Jews - you'd get more leeway if the evil fascist race was explicitly a privileged race typically coded as Good, like High Elves (not Drow).

Finally, you talk about the original authorial intention - have you considered that the original author can suck a barrel of cocks? There is no need to respect terrible authorial intent.

[Dean]

Your screed here is literally the actual first time I have heard of eating elf as a core part of goblin identity

Is it? It's in a billion dollar movie and book franchise and it's also a popular meme. All tolkein baddies talk mad game about eating sentients.

He's excited that meats back on the menu boys!

I have multiple times now said that these are not racial traits, but the result of a contemporary capitalist fascist racial culture. Multiple times. Those goblins aren't excited to eat a living sentient being because they're inherently evil, but they are excited to eat someone because their contemporary capitalist fascist culture expresses racial superiority and racial violence as good. They're literally destroying and carelessly free burning forest in the background of that shot. They're culture preaches consuming nature to fuel warlike aims, they're a racial capitalist regime, it really couldn't be more clear.

Drow are also capitalists in a regime that preaches racial superiority. But their version manifests in slave ownership rather than genocide of other races. Importantly as well: Goblins DO have a privileged wealthy class that manipulates them: Hobgoblins. Hogboblins are the feudal elite of the goblin society. The wealthy, the 1%. They are well dressed, well provided for, and have the stature and physicality of a goblin that's received the best their culture could provide at the expense of all the goblin people forced to live in squalor for it. Hobgoblins have decorum and culture and militant tradition but their culture is one almost entirely lacking empathy. So they can drink tea and talk strategy with other Hobgoblins but they use their position of privilege to lead war efforts instead of building aqueducts or whatever.

[Dean]

You can separate almost all creatures by their Capitalist, Feudal, Wild, and Socialist cultural subtypes. When you roll up a new region or faction you can just randomize it based on their leanings.

Goblins
Goblins lean capitalist so have no socialist faction.
Capitalist: Racial hatred, expansionist, the worst, ride rats, poison spears, surprising military advancements like bombs
Fuedal: Small communities, Warrens and Dens, traps
Wild: Shamanistic, isolationist, small communities

Orcs
Orcs lean hard Feudal, so are usually that but individual societies can lean more capitalist or more wild.
Capitalist: Rare but horrifying expansionist racially hateful Empire creating orcs
Feudal: Smaller communities, martial tradition, leading by strength but having rules
Wild: Living off the land, noble savage tropes

Elves
Elves lean a little socialist but not so much that every entry isn't on the table for them at least.
Capitalist: Drow
Feudal: Warhammer style elves, militant and warlike but not overtly evil
Wild: Wild elves, wood elves
Socialist: High elves, Galadriel and all that. A scarcity free society.

Humans
Humans lean a little feudal
Capitalist: The expanding Empire, big walls, lots of trade, highly militant
Feudal: Clan based society. A King or Jarl or whatever. Classic D&D.
Wild: Living off the lands, Vikings at home.
Socialist: Goodguytown. It's called the Avalon or Griffinspire or some shit like that. There's probably a confused system of government where there's a King I guess but also a council and also town halls, like how the Greeks brag about Theseus as the good guy who brought democracy but also want to write about how's he's King for life to the good people of Athens who love his good good democracy. *shrug*

[Chamomile]

Your attempted defense of your portrayal of goblins as non-racist is to say that you're emulating Tolkien's original conception? We know for a fact that Nazis get tons of mileage out of Tolkien's portrayal of goblins! They do that all the time! Tolkien based his orcs/goblins on his experiences with WW1, they were (loose) metaphors for English people who had been demented into something equal parts pathetic and dangerous by a terrible war machine that cared nothing for the lives of its soldiers or its enemies, but this did not stop Nazis from easily repurposing them into eugenics propaganda. JRR Tolkien is specifically the proof that personally hating Nazis doesn't mean they can't use your work as part of their narrative if you're sloppy about your worldbuilding!

In any case, D&D goblins have migrated a long ways from Lord of the Rings goblins, and people do not expect them to act like each other. They're not core, but they tend to be added as a player race option pretty quick. If goblins, as a race, are capable of being good people, then why is your default setting assumption that 100% of them are part of a cruel fascist dictatorship? Why are you putting it on players and GMs to make your own worldbuilding resistant to Nazi appropriation by adding in the good goblins?

Seriously, this is a basic tenet of acceptable modern world design, for both gameplay and moral purposes: The good guys should be a multi-racial coalition with representatives from lots of weird races already in it. There should be goblins living in good guy cities and there should be predominantly goblin communities and nations in the good guy alliance. Partly because that means when someone comes to you with some obscure race you hadn't considered, there is immediately room for them in the setting because you have established having lots of weird races in the good guy coalition already, but also because that is how you make it clear that the hobgoblin empire is a mono-racial (if we consider all goblinoids the same race, and if a hobgoblin is literally just a goblin with proper nutrition, we probably are) fascist capitalist state and not just the natural result of an inherent racial evil in goblinoids. But it necessarily means that you can't hate grown goblins with lethal force without first double-checking that they are in fact the bad guys, which should very obviously be the case anyway. Good people reject simple solutions like "goblins bad" and instead commit to the more difficult task of investigating the potential nuances of a conflict before committing to one side or another. And you can make the nuances be coincidentally super un-nuanced every time, because sometimes it is just really obvious that one side of a conflict is clearly the bad guys, but you have to actually do that, rather than saying blanketly "if you meet a goblin in the wilderness you don't like them coming along with your party cause they might steal your stuff if they think you can get away with it."

[Grek]

The best portrayal of goblins I've seen in years is in The Wandering Inn, in which the Goblins are viewed by the general public as being horrible little murder-ape vermin who need to be exterminated for the greater good, but who are actually illiterate refugee bands who wander the countryside eating rabbits and fighting off people out to collect the half a copper per ear goblin bounty. Their great dream is that some day another Goblin King will rise and complete the ambition of King Velan the Kind by forging a free goblin nation in which they can live without being hunted for sport. But mostly they just hide in the mountains and plot revenge raids against the people who have been trying to genocide them for the past dozen generations. The keeper of the titular Wandering Inn has a sign over the door saying "No Killing Goblins" and feeds them if they stop by.

[Dean]

The good guys should be a multi-racial coalition with representatives from lots of weird races already in it. There should be goblins living in good guy cities

There WILL be Goblins living in cities of Humans. That's how D&D Human cities are represented, with some elves and some halflings and some dwarves and all that. That's what good guys look like. Goblin cities are not represented as that. They are represented as mono-racial dwellings constantly on war footing with poor conditions. From this we infer that the human cities being presented seem to have some culture that doesn't express racial segregation and superiority as a tenet. Goblin cities seem to be expressly mono-racial and seem highly warlike. From these pieces of information we can infer that they seem to be operating within some culture that expresses racial segregation and superiority as a tenet. What would you call the sort of culture that has huge wealth disparities, expresses racial segregation and superiority, is highly warlike, and focused on the collection of wealth?

Good people reject simple solutions like "goblins bad" and instead commit to the more difficult task of investigating the potential nuances of a conflict

Hey neat, and when they do that now here's an answer: They're a part of a capitalist racially segregationist empire. It's literally providing exactly the guidelines for a person living in the modern day to give a nuanced description of the conflict rather than telling someone to improvisationally tell us the unique cultural pastiche of the single goblin camp we were tasked to wipe out as a tiny piece of our D&D adventure. Cause the conceit of the this game is that you will attack things with swords. So instead of telling everyone who has used goblins in their adventure to make up an impromptu sociopolitical history for every CR 1/8th encounter we could instead provide one which is: Goblin culture has historical problems with being used in capitalist racially segregationist regimes and that's gone on long enough in one form or another that it's really endemic to their culture unless a community has taken steps to separate themselves from it.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

This is a lot of words to say "I want to kill imaginary people without feeling guilty about it".

[Dean]

Yeah motherfucker. It's like the main job of DMing. It's a fucking crazy game conceit that you want to stab multiple different people every single gaming session and still be absolutely assured by the game that you are the good guy. But here we are so let's do the legwork.

[Chamomile]

There WILL be Goblins living in cities of Humans.

Then it is necessarily not true that when you meet a goblin in the wilderness you don't want him traveling with your party. He could be a perfectly regular dude from a multi-racial city, you don't know until you talk to him. Like, if you want to back up and say that there is a specific fascist goblin empire then sure, that's a perfectly good reason for having a war camp full of goblins who are raiding a hapless village (an adventure for levels 1-3!), but your original post had multiple general statements about the behavior of all goblins. Yeah, there was some handwaving about how there could hypothetically be good goblins, but it also said that if you meet any goblin in the wilderness then they are a product of a fascist capitalist empire. You can't just tack "but not in a race-essentialist way" onto the end of that. You have to actually demonstrate that goblins are perfectly capable of being non-evil by having there be non-evil goblins. And they need to have majority-goblin towns/nations, or else all your narrative has said is that living as minorities in human-dominated communities will repress the inherently evil nature of goblinkind.

Like, I totally believe that you weren't going for a race-essentialist screed here. Going Nazi all the sudden would be very weird for you. But your execution here was severely botched and you need to rewrite it.

[Dean]

Then it is necessarily not true that when you meet a goblin in the wilderness you don't want him traveling with your party. He could be a perfectly regular dude from a multi-racial city, you don't know until you talk to him.

No you are defensive until you learn he is the uncommonly not fascist goblin because in the fantasy world the Goblins culture right now is so fucked up and so widespread you assume some level of threat as a defensive measure. What's that called? Bigotry. Yes. But the thing people who play goblins want is to play a species that even the good guy people are trepidatious about. It's a safe-space way to play in a racist world. I have a player who is a goblin easily one out of three times. Goblin players have signed up to be goblins expressly for the DM to tell them the shopkeeper keeps an extra eye on them when they handle something expensive. The fantasy is to be viewed and treated as a danger, or outsider. To deliver the fantasy of goblins both in the way players expect to treat goblins and goblin players expect to be treated you need to have the goblin empire have fucked up massively and be a continued and active problem that is widespread among their people. By saying that their culture is consistently swayed by a capitalist racially supremacist regime you actually provide an answer why everyone seems very defensive and unpleasant around goblins. You provide a reason that isn't "they're born bad" which is actually racist.

Goblins and Drow are the same. Two empires who have had a capitalist racially segregationist regime become so large it's considered the default for their people. It doesn't mean a given Drow or a given Goblin is bad but it also means that when someone tells you "The Drow/Goblins have been spotted around the roads" you assume the worst and them being nice Drow or Goblins is a twist on that story. That's textbook bigotry but what we say to explain that is: Those two creatures are part of a racial capitalist empire