Two linked things that really bug me, and that have been reflected both in the attitudes of several of my characters and in several linears I have tried to run: portrayal of goblins and kobolds as by-default evil adversaries that can be slaughtered without moral consequences, and portrayal of Sordanites and Vivamortians as just misunderstood and fluffy really.
"Genuine monsters" ought to be a minority among an entire race of sentient human-type-things, and a majority among people who have deliberately chosen to worship mad, evil Gods. If you, gentle reader, are planning future PCs, plotlines or linears, I would urge you to take opportunities to use examples of goblins and kobolds as Real People, and of real, proper Sordanites and Vivamortians worshipping the way that their Gods prefer*, and to avoid mindless waves of enemies-by-race and fluffy Sordamortian-lites - sure, some of each clearly exist, but they ought to be a minority in the setting and - crucially - a minority among that part of the setting represented in uptime. --Jacob
*
Yes, I am aware that some people believe that fluffy worship is just as valuable to Sordan and Vivamort as non-fluffy. I think that this is a view that ought to be opposed, and that while they clearly do accept it, it should probably be clear to all that such worshippers are Not Doing It Completely Right. Little Wainton was in itself an interesting idea, but it's gone far, far too far.
Rant over.
- I actually quite like the current situation with kobolds and goblins. I'd argue that they weren't viewed so much as "by-default evil" as "by-default vermin" - they're not so much bad (although they are generally considered to be greedy and cowardly) as "not real people", and I find having things to be horribly prejudiced against/uncaring about quite fun. As to fluffy Vivamortians...yes, okay, they tend to annoy me too.--Felicity
- I agree with Felicity that Goblins are not necessarily viewed as Evil, 'just' as semi-animals, who therefore don't matter much. You can talk to an individual goblin (though it might well rob you or try to stab you up) because it is enough of a person to understand words and simple concepts and wear clothes and use weapons (and maybe much more, but you'd only realise that IC if you spent time with goblins looking for it), but you couldn't marry one, because, well, it's not actually a Person. Although they are protected under law, as Official Real People, young squeaky kender often fall into the same IC category of 'not a person' for my characters too, for example. The fact that the IC city law actually defines which races it applies to (including 'some orcs but not other orcs') implies to me that Personhood is an entirely IC culturally applied thing defined by humans - groups which are a bit like humans and care about similar things such as honour and morals and having a hierarchy and learning magic in colleges and paying taxes and keeping the law are recognised by humans as 'us' and all the other (clearly also sentient, that isn't the yardstick being used) races are grouped as 'them'. --Zebbie
- With regard to religions, yes, I agree that the majority of followers of gods-of-nasty-stuff will actively like nasty stuff and seek to promote it. However, until last year they were also illegal and liable to be killed on sight, so even if they are coming out of the woodwork now, I'd expect the current generation to represent the tactful and 'not stupid' ones - people who can happily get by without kicking puppies and cackling in everyday life, even as they mature their evil schemes on a grander scale. Also, it is worth considering that the followers of an evil religion probably won't think it is evil, but will be quite sanely considering that they are Right in a world that is just unfortunately generally Wrong. So they won't necessarily have different views to the man-in-the-street on everything, if it doesn't overlap with the remit of their divergent beliefs. --Zebbie
- Goblins first. In a society where being a nasty, thieving little bastard is encouraged and seen as the correct thing to do, most people are going to turn out as nasty thieving little bastards. Sure, there will be some nice ones (but they won't fit in with the malice inherent in everyday goblin socity), and genuinely sadistic goblins will be about as common as genuinely sadistic humans, but I think on the whole the portrayal of goblins and kobolds in the past few years has been about right for things that grew up in a society where being vicious and uncaring is actively encouraged. A goblin raised outside of goblin society has about a much better chance of growing up as a decent person, but they're still quite childlike in thoughts and attitudes (this is not a good thing, children aren't actually very nice). IC attitudes to goblins vary realistically as well, from people like Magnus who treated them as vermin to be destroyed on sight without pity, to Galwyn at the other extreme, with most people regarding them as not-quite-people. --Valtiel (will post about Sordanites later)
- I treat fluffy Vivamites as 'you are a deluded drug addict rendered untouchable by law, otherwise I would be using violence (or the threat of it) to force you to reconsider'. This is, I note, considerably more than I feel towards someone professing modern day Satanism (I've known a couple. They mostly get the nod-and-smile treatment). Goblins (etc) I consider to be... yes, 'vermin' is a good word. They are tolorated when they aren't a problem (unless you have an irrational grudge), but you don't feel any inclination to give them the benefit of the doubt (and showing up in the Arms is indicative of poor judgement and/or intended malice, so it's benefit they do poorly without). My reactions towards Vivamites couldn't be much more extreme without spoiling roleplay, and/or rendering my character unplayable (although this is by no means the only reason for my current stance). My opinion of goblins could be better, but I have no reason to do so (and am playing someone with a human supremicist education - I distinguish them from kender only in terms of legal protection afforded to them, and degrees of soul abomination). Then again, I'm coming at this from the PoV? of 'unconventional Lightist', which might make me a poor sample. --I (on behalf of Lawrence)
- For what it's worth, a lot of people are talking about how their characters see goblins and Sordamortians. That's interesting in itself, but what I was more aiming at was the other side of the equation - how people playing them, and perhaps more importantly how people writing them into plot, see them OOC. In particular, I'm worried about the incidence ration of fluffy to non-fluffy Sordamortians - goblins mostly get slaughtered fast enough that how people see them OOC is less relevant, but OOC perception of Sordamortians is important, I think. --Jacob
- My OOC perception of the four PC Sordanites I've seen is that none of them was fluffy. Vivamortians, yes, serious overdose of fluff. Goblins... for the most part have been set up for morally unambiguous slaughter. It's a genre staple. --I
- Goblins, demons etc = sentient beings with distinct culture and societies, which have different degrees of alien-ness to the dominant human/elven culture and society, causing misunderstandings or conflict when individuals from the two cultures meet (often caused by the aggressive humans kicking off, tbf). Internally, I expect each culture to be pretty stable and work fine, with a spectrum of individuals like any population, but different behaviours rewarded socially. However, the setting of TT atm is a time/place when for various reasons humans are not masters of cultural relativism but xenophobic and territorial (so are some goblins/demons etc too, everyone is out for themselves). Therefore goblinsmiting goes down fine, because fundamentally 'being different' is considered more significant than 'being aware'. On the other hand, when individuals make concerted efforts to actually seek out and treat goblins/demons as individuals and deal with them etc, it often works. Wrt Sordanites and Vivamortians, I agree with Inq - I have yet to meet a 'nice' Sordanite using real-world values, but I think that ancestor-worshipping/horror of death and finality/organ-donor-card-making Vivamortian is a valid way to approach the religion - it just might not be the primary one (it basically depends if necromancy is always objectively bad even if used for good, I'm not sure I have a rock-solid real world opinion on that). --Zebbie
- The one God I think the setting really feels the lack of (and you may remember my general 'too many gods' stance) is another god of undeath. Reinventing Triplicity as an ancestor cult would, IMO, be a serious gain for the setting. Vivamort isn't the right 'place' for fluffy undead-raisers, but the character archetype is quite a valid one. --I
- I am wary of tampering with the god list, as once that box was opened it might be hard to close again. That said, I have tended to believe that the Sordanites and Vivamortians are welcome to appear fluffy- it is very much in their interests to do so and I could see either temple making a determined effort to send their more socially acceptable members out to wage a PR war. I am put in mind of the Order of the Stick strip where the party are told 'all drow are now Chaotic Good rebels, yearning to throw off the shackles of their evil kin' since becoming a playable race. Note that the drow in OOTS then turns out to be an evil git. I look forward to many of my future characters being lured to their untimely deaths by supposedly fluffy Sordamortians. --TimB
- a) The lid is well and truly off that particular Box, to my regret. b) No, that isn't a serious request for an extra god. It's an observation that while I generally think killing most of them would be good, there is an actual bona fide gap. Putting revenant style undead within Balance's remit would also work, I guess. As for PR wars... to a point. People's experience of play is still mostly driven by what is actually there, and the genre calls for some sort of cackling maniac to shout defiance in the face of - if they're all pretending to be fluffy, you retain versimilitude, but lose fun. --I
- In many ways I agree with you. Where I am uncertain is that TT has a patchy approach to pvp and I think this could lead to it cropping up more. Social pvp is well supported by TT, but the cackling villains might well lead to escalation, which I don't think our system is very good for. A solution of having more cackling NPC lunatics is my preference. --TimB
- Absolutely. Cackling lunatics don't tend to make for good PCs; what I would like to see is refs and other people writing NPCs taking account of the fact that fluffies will be disproportionately represented among PC Sordamortians (Vivamites sounds like a type of insect), and hence that cackling lunatics should be disproportionately represented among NPCs to make up for it, rather than taking the "The PCs set the tone, if most PC Sordamortians are fluffy then most NPCs should be too" approach. I'm very glad to see you advocating it too. --Jacob
- Just thought I'd mention that the bulk of Ian's Vivamortian's work while he was playing the character was geared towards bringing the organised faith of vivamort away from the cackling lunatic angle and more towards a reasoned and sensible one. (at least this is what his character was professing to be doing in uptime.) It's perfectly fine for there to be a decent number of reasonable vivamortians, and the strictures can happily support this too. Of course, cackling madmen are more fun to have around, but it's not "unrealistic" to have "sensible" vivamortions. I'm unsold on Sordan at the moment. --Ahdok.
- I would agree, but the God is quite obviously a power hungry nutjob, and mostly chooses power hungry nutjobs. While you could quite obviously have a reasonable God in the same position, Vivamort isn't one. --I
- Ooc I sort of view Vivamortians as a group of people who see undead as the solution to their problems, with problems ranging from an intense fear of death to "I am not currently ruling the known world". Certainly I can see why many of them would outwardly appear like upstanding pillars of the community, as they would have probably learnt this is quite a good way to survive. Cackling maniac Vivamortians really do make for good villains though, and I can imagine a really great amoral mad scientist Sordanite. --Porange
Fwiw, when I wrote the goblin and the kobold races as a ref, I wrote them to be "by default evil creatures." Players were (in both cases) baying for some morally unambiguous monsters that they could kill without having to worry about it, so I wrote some. My OOC impression of both goblins and kobolds is that they are sneaky backstabbing thieving little bastards, because that's what I wrote and briefed when I introduced each of the races. It's fine for someone to play them differently if they want to, but it's not -wrong- to follow the original brief, and I'd certainly expect the majority of goblins to be vicious murderous bastards. I had at one point planned to make light uruk also be evil, and for air and earth uruk to be noble - but I never really felt like I needed to introduce more. --Ahdok.
- (A further aside on uruk. With the amount of play goblins, kobolds and orcs have seen, I figured that if I introduced an air uruk (and say, called it an imp) - people would immediately recognise what it was on sight, meaning I could throw them in as one or two encounters in a linear in a far away place, and not be saddled with making re-appearance a regular occurrence. Of course, as I never did this, I expect the common theory is that these uruk still do exist, but what they're like is currently undefined. I'd like another "good" uruk defined in the game at some time, but there's no rush. I also think that uruk are very heavily influenced by their surroundings and upbringing and other external factors, and that orcs in particular live in a place where the only way to survive is to work as a close-knit millitary organisation that's very truthful and trustworthy - if they backstabbed each other all the time, they'd be wiped out. Conversely, goblins grow up in an environment that's not got a lot in the way of resource, but a lot of targets. The easiest way to survive is to pray on weaker or unsuspecting creatures, so they tend to banditry. It kind of makes sense if you think about it. There are lots of examples of this floating around the racial briefs, because I put quite a lot of thought into it - it's not random that orcs are overprotective of their own customs and social structure for example - they're aware how easily influenced they are by outsiders, and their society is a little paranoid about it. (I could go on at great length about uruk culture, as it's something still rather unexplored - even after orcs have been on offer for two years. However, I'm going to be playing an orc this term, so I'd rather people interact with him and find out about them that way.) --Ahdok.)