Tuesday 1 September 2020

On the Unnecessariness of Evil Humanoids and the Virtue of the Tentpole Monster

We all love a goblin or ogrillon, and don't get me started on gnolls. But these days I increasingly wonder what function evil humanoids really have in a game. Humans can be evil and scary enough.

For example, I provide you with a link to a recent Sam Harris podcast on the proviso that once heard, some things cannot be unheard: https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/. (I hesitate to do so, but feel that this sort of thing needs to be known so we can somehow guard against it; needless to say, if ever there ought to be a trigger warning, consider this to be it. Don't listen to it if there is any indication the contents will upset you, because they will.) If you ever needed convincing that humans are capable of much worse than even the evilest of orcs, then you will be convinced by that. Others of you may prefer to look up the exploits of Fred West, Oskar Dirlewanger, or any of the other thousands of names in that infamous roll call of psychopaths and sadists which has plagued mankind since we split off from the chimpanzees. 

The ancients understood good and evil, because they lived in a world in which evil was inescapable. (I'm reminded of Romeo Dallaire's comment: "After one of my many presentations following my return from Rwanda, a Canadian Forces padre asked me how, after all I had seen and experienced, I could still believe in God. I answered that I know there is a God because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists, and therefore I know there is a God.") It was all around them and they knew it intimately. No goblins or orcs, there. Just each other.

I recently finished reading Flaubert's Salammbo. Here are some extracts:

But a cry, an appalling cry broke out, a roar of pain and anger; it was the seventy-two elephants rushing in a double line, Hamilcar having waited for the Mercenaries to be concentrated in one place before loosing them; the Indians had goaded them so vigorously that blood flowed over their great ears. Their trunks, daubed with red lead, stood up straight in the air, like red serpents; a spear was fitted on their chests, their backs were armoured, their tusks extended by curved steel blades like sabres - and to make them fiercer they had been made drunk with a mixture of pepper, neat wine, and incense. They shook their collars full of little bells, trumpeted; and their drivers bent their heads beneath the shower of fire-arrows which began to rain from the towers. 

The Barbarians rushed into a compact mass to offer better resistance; the elephants charged into the midst of them. The spurs on their chests, like the prow of a ship, tore through the cohorts, which flowed back in great waves. They choked men with their trunks, or tore them from the ground and delivered them to the soldiers in the towers; they used their tusks to disembowel them, and threw them up in the air, so that long entrails hung around their ivory teeth like bundles of rigging on a mast. The Barbarians tried to put out their eyes, to cut their hamstrings; others slid under their bellies, drove a sword in up to the hilt and were crushed to death; the boldest clung to their harnesses...Fourteen of those who were on the far right, maddened by their wounds, turned on the second rank; the Indians seized their mallet and chisel and drove  it with all their might into the head joint...The huge beasts toppled over, falling on top of each other. It was like a mountain, and on this heap of armour and corpses a monstrous elephant known as 'Baal's Wrath', caught by the leg between the chains, stayed bellowing until evening with an arrow in his eye.

*

The phalanx exterminated the remnant of the Barbarians at their leisure. When the swords came they held out their throats and closed their eyes. Others defended themselves to the end; they were killed from a distance, by stoning, like mad dogs. Hamilcar had recommended the taking of prisoners. But the Carthaginians were reluctant to obey him, finding it so enjoyable to stick their swords into the Barbarians' bodies. As they were too hot, they began to work with bare arms, like reapers; and when they paused for breath, their eyes followed a horseman galloping after a soldier running away in the countryside. He managed to catch him by the hair, held him like that for a time, then struck him down with a blow from his axe.

*

The two thousand Barbarians were tied up against the steles of the tombs in the Mappalia; and merchants, kitchen porters, embroiderers, even women, widows of the dead with their children, anyone who wanted to, came along to kill them with arrows. They took slow aim, to prolong the torment; they alternately raised and lowered their weapons; and the crowd jostled and screamed. The palsied were brought along on litters; many had the foresight to bring food with them and stayed until evening; others spent the night there. Drinking tents had been set up. Several people made a lot of money by hiring out bows.

*

He came out bent double, with the bewildered look of a wild beast suddenly set free.

The light dazzled him; he stayed still for a while. All had recognised him and held their breath. 

This victim's body was something special for them, endowed with almost religious splendour. They leaned forward to see him, especially the women. They were burning with eagerness to look at the man who had caused the deaths of their children and their husbands; and from their inmost heart, despite themselves, surged up an infamous curiosity, a desire to know him completely, an urge mingled with remorse, which transformed itself into an extra degree of execration...

From the place where he stood several roads led off in front of him. In each a triple row of bronze chains, fixed to the navels of the Pataeci Gods, stretched in parallel from one end to another; the crowd was crammed against the houses and, in the middle, walked the Elders' servants, brandishing lashes.

One of them gave him a great push forward; Matho began to walk...[They] cried that he had been allowed too wide a path; and he went, probed, pricked, ripped by all those fingers; when he reached the end of one street, another appeared; several times he hurled himself sideways to bite them, they quickly drew away, the chains held him back, and the crowd burst out laughing.

A child tore off his ear; a girl, hiding the point of a spindle under her sleeve, split open his cheek; they tore out handfuls of hair, strips of flesh; others with sticks on which were stuck sponges soaked in filth dabbed at his face. On the right side of his throat spurted a stream of blood; at once delirium began...The people's rage developed as it was gratified; the chains were too tightly stretched, bent, nearly broke; they did not feel the slaves hitting them to push them back; others clung to ledges of the houses; every opening was full of heads; and the harm they could not do him they shouted...

Shadows passed before his eyes; the town whirled round in his head, his blood streamed out from a wound in his hip, he felt he was dying; his legs folded, and he slowly collapsed on the pavement.

Someone fetched, from the perisyte of the temple of Melkarth, the bar of a tripod red hot from the coals and...pressed it against the wound. The flesh smoked visibly; the people's booing drowned his voice; he stood up... Drops of boiling oil were thrown at him with tubes; shards of glass were sprinkled under his feet; he went on walking. At the corner of the street of Sateb he leaned against the low roof of a shop, back to the wall, and went no further.

The slaves of the Council struck him with their hippopotamus hide whips, so furiously and so long that the fringes of their tunics were soaked with sweat. Matho seemed insensible; suddenly he gathered his forces, and began to run at random, his lips making the sort of noise people make when shivering with intense cold....

Except for his eyes his appearance was no longer human; he was just a long shape, completely red from top to bottom; his broken bonds hung along his thighs, but could not be distinguished from the tendons of his wrists which had been completely stripped of flesh; his mouth remained wide open; two flames came from his eye sockets which seemed to go up to his hair; and the wretch kept walking!


Lamentations of the Flame Princess eat your heart out, right? 

Humans are malicious and cruel to animals and each other; we not only inflict pain and misery as a matter of course, but we enjoy it - as Flaubert understood, given the right circumstances, we will fall over ourselves to get the chance to be the one drawing blood. Don't flatter yourself that we're any different to the people of ancient Carthage underneath it all. It's just that the thin red line of law, order and civilisation is a wee bit thicker for us than it was for them. It could break in an instant when the time is right, as the history of the 20th century showed time and time again.

Seen in this light, the worlds of D&D make much more sense imagined as a world not of multiple humanoid races, but one much more like the way the ancients imagined it: there are humans, and there are monsters, and the monsters are not monstrous because they are evil but because of what they symbolise. They are there to be defeated, so that mankind can demonstrate its strength and cleverness. Like the Hydra, the Sirens, or the Erymanthian Boar, they are there to make us fearful, but, ultimately, to conquer.

This means that I increasingly lean towards what you might called a Howardian view on monsters. They should be singular, special, and very difficult to beat - tentpoles, if you like, just as a campaign has its tentpole dungeons. Not there to be evil, but for the PCs to triumph over through wit, skill and strength. Evil, we can leave to ourselves. 

37 comments:

  1. The Greek monsters are agents of chaos, not evil. In that sense early D&D had it right. Introducing the notion of “evil” muddies the waters. You can probably put that down to Tolkien’s influence: Hobbits are clearly Good and Orcs, Evil.

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    1. Oof. That's too reductionist a take of both Greek mythology and Tolkien.

      Tolkien had a genius idea: what if folklore was real? If elves literally lived under the hill over there, what was the _stuff_ of their life? What language did they speak? What did they eat? How did they get the stuff they ate? Who did they trade with? What did they weave their clothes out of? When did they get married?

      He didn't invent elves, or trolls, or demonic humanoid monsters. Folklore is just so, so, so, full of them. Every hill and rill and tree in Britain has some ghost story associated with it: some elf, pukka, knocker, jenny greenteeth or other.

      If you apply a modern scientist's classification system to these monsters, some seem "wholly evil" whereas others seem "wholly good" and others seem "well, sometimes they drown you but sometimes they help you." The ancients DIDN'T apply scientific classification to them, but we're re-interpreting these myths like Tolkien did--wondering what happens if they were "real."

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    2. Picador: I don't know about that. I think there's more complexity in both hobbits and orcs than Tolkien gets credit for. And elves too - they're certainly not 'good' all the time. But yes, I've no doubt that the good/evil thing in D&D is primarily rooted in Tolkienesque fantasy rather than pulp.

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    3. There are men, dwarves, elves, and even a Ted Sandyman who get to be nasty and wicked in Tolkien's corpus. We don't get any orcs seeking redemption however, and I believe this caused Tolkien some consternation as that conflicted with his Christianity- that is if they are free-willed beings rather than automatons. There is a bit of a possible redemption arc with Gollum though.

      As for the elves of folklore, those elves are supposed to be amoral and driven by chaotic whims as they are denizens of Utgard, or the world of nature and primal forces. A troop of elves on the Wild Hunt should inspire awe due to their eerie beauty, but also dread. I don't get a lot of feelings of dread from Tolkien's elves. There's a little bit where Galadriel describes what could happen were she to take the ring. But that mingling of beauty and dread is more prevalent in Rider Haggard's Ayesha, who is supposed to have inspired Galadriel. Even Lewis' Jadis and the Lady in the Green Kirtle have a bit more of that combination of appeal and unease that the beings of faerie or elphame should inspire. I thought Poul Anderson's 'The Broken Sword' did a pretty good job of evoking elves in their amoral magnificence.

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    4. "He [Tolkien] didn't invent elves, or trolls, or demonic humanoid monsters."

      He didn't 'invent' the words/nouns but he did create and develop beings from poetic scraps, dense and vague, and imprint them vividly in more recent, explicit and lengthy, literary forms than the widely incomprehensible dark-age or early medieval poetics. The Norse notion of gods and giants and beings is dense, opaque and cryptic. Tolkien froze a specific interpretation and unfolded his vision in great detail.

      Everything he wrote is personal and unique. The sources can be unfolded in uncountable ways, and certainly the Elder Edda should not get credit for The Children of Hurin or LotR, which owes more to Wordsworth IMO.

      It will take many successful original developments of the Norse poetics to make clear how impressive Tolkien's achievement is.

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    5. The elves being 'good' in Tolkien is definitely a feature of the way his work has been interpreted than the text itself. It is certainly there in LOTR, but in the Silmarillion the elves are much closer to amoral than good, in my view, and even in the Hobbit and LOTR there is clearly something untrustworthy and dangerous about them.

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  2. You make a great case, and it's one I broadly agree with - at least for the creation of powerful fantasy stories and settings.

    But one important role that humanoids can play *in a game* is to reduce the grimness. When I think of all the slaughter in our 140+ sessions of lockdown D&D, I'm quite glad that it's mostly concerned pig-faced monsters or orange-faced ape-things with blue noses! A game that involves slaying lots of foes can be lighter-hearted precisely because those foes are just extras in rubber masks (and, to extend the metaphor, just pretending to be dead).

    It's the difference between the passage in Ithilien when Sam wonders about the fallen Man of Harad and the Tower of Cirith Ungol, when Snaga falls down the ladder. In a game, you can add poignancy through the former, but sometimes it's simply more fun to have lashings of the latter.

    Another is to add otherworldly qualities. Our campaign has taken the party to Tekumel; that setting's intelligent species (few precisely humanoid, admittedly) immediately add interest and flavour. Fairies/elves (especially of the Poul Anderson or Susannah Clarke sort) can do the same in a more traditional setting. Even the humble orc work in this role too, if made suitably alien.

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    1. Both of those points are true. Certainly it's interesting to have otherworldly 'people' to interact with, although it's often hard to avoid them ending up being just extras in rubber masks - like humans but looking a bit weird.

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    2. Yes - and I think "interaction" rather than "evil" might be where humanoids really shine. You can have a lot of fun with behaviour that's exaggerated beyond human norms: pompous but stupid ogres of the Perrault sort (or the slow-witted trolls of The Hobbit); goblins who *always* lie; orcs who are so unruly and aggressive that they're only ever moments away from fighting among themselves.

      Those sorts of traits can give PCs great opportunities for interacting with the PCs in interesting ways. I think it's a bit easier to do that with humanoid monsters than with even the most Vancian of human societies.

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  3. I banned humanoids from my games years ago. Just can't stand their ridiculously one-dimensional cultures. Sure, there are still dwarves, elves, etc. but they're magical faery creatures not equivalent to humans. You can't play one, they don't live in regular societies with which one trades & goes to war and such. They're mysterious & magical and you can't play one.

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  4. My Orcs are made, not born. Orc captives are bullied, tortured and abused by the Orcs; goaded to do the same to each other. After a few seasons, some are dead, some are newly-minted Orcs, horribly scarred, disfigured, toughened and strengthened.
    (In 3X terms, "Orc" is a template)

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    1. So orcs are in a way a little bit like a zombie plague which spreads.

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    2. Cross between Reavers and zombies--human-adjacent like reavers, reproduction-by-assimilation like zombies

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    3. Made me think of child soldiers.

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  5. Humans are not, generally speaking, a subterranean species. If your campaign is mainly aboveground, then there's not much reason to include the game's classic humanoids, except for the odd ogre or giant (large creatures need space).

    If you want adventures that take place in, you know, "dungeons" or something, well then I'd imagine you'll still need some underground species in your D&D game.

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    1. Fair point, but I was only talking about the unnecessariness of humanoids as the representatives of 'evil'.

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  6. One of the main uses for the classic humanoids (aside from letting you handwave the moral implications of mass slaughter) is that having a bunch of humanoid races is often easier to get across to the PCs than having a bunch of human cultures because a cliche is worth a thousand words. Of course you can do Howard style and have I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Pharaonic-Eygpt-Land right next door to I-Can't-Believe-It's-Not-Medieval-France which works but it's often easier to take the various D&D races and twist them into being interesting then trying to do something fun with a Hollywoodized version of a historical culture without letting my history geek side out and giving the playes more info-dumps than they can disgust.

    At the end of the day it's just easier for everyone to keep the difference between orcs and dwarves straight than it is for them to keep some random fantasy human cultures straight.

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    1. Yes, that's true, although I think there is mileage in the thumbnail descriptions of human cultures that you get in Herodotus and other ancient writers: this people eat bats and daub themselves in vermillion; this people eat their own dead and wear zebra skins; this people have no hair and eat apple blossoms... and so on.

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    2. Yes... I totally love Herodotus and all those other ancient travel writers, including Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta etc. They are great for this, as are 20th century updates like Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”!

      I agree that it’s super boring the way D&D and so many other RPGs use ‘fantasy races’ as a default assumption and this is one reason I prefer all those many other types of ‘fantasy’ that Tolkien (unwillingly) routed before him like defeated armies.

      OTOH, though this kind of drags your post away from the original topic, so many criticisms of ‘fantasy races’ are basically in bad faith and seem written by people who don’t understand, y’know, Symbolism. Not the specific critiques like the problematic blackness of drow or the trope of the ‘evil savage’, but the idea that somehow every fantasy ‘race’ must have infinite cultural flexibility, when basically the whole reason fantasy ‘races’ even exist is to be stereotypes. (Well, that, and to embody certain fetishes/fantasies about imaginary bodytypes, as any fan of anime like Monster Musume can tell you...) Obviously it’s totally possible to do everything with ‘just’ humans and to not lean on the tropes of Dwarf/Elf/Orc (though many people clearly love these tropes or they wouldn’t be so popular). But at the same time, this is fantasy, the definition of ‘human’ both in phenotype and culture can be incredibly broad (/weird/ridiculous) unless you don’t want it to be for whatever concerns of believability or atmosphere. And then if people *really* want to say “Not everyone from country X eats bats!” we’re right back in the same position where Symbolism becomes unnecessarily complicated by some idea of realism

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    3. Yeah, I totally agree with that. People who complain that elves, dwarves, orcs, etc. are "just monocultures" don't get expressionism. But nerds just have a hard time with expressionism and symbolism in general. That's one of Zak's observations that has stuck with me (to give credit where it's due).

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  7. You're cozying up to a censorship movement trying hard to undermine D&D: a new moral panic.  You should be ashamed of that.

    Your arguments are weak too; what in D&D isn't "unnecessary"?  No, it does not "make much more sense".

    Run your all-bandit game if you want but don't act like it's morally superior, while you're knuckling under to an outrage mob. 

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  8. I would have agreed with you that humanoids are not technically neccessary in one's own created fantasy world (I don't use them in Age of Dusk), and for S&S you want to use humans as much as possible but as representatives of evil they work very well BECAUSE they are automatically evil and you don't have to feel bad for killing them. Since 99% of real DnD is not about complex moral quandries or xenoanthropology they fit the model in a way that fellow humans simply do not. Try replacing them with ersatz native americans and gauge your player's reactions accordingly. Different game, much more brutal.

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    1. I like it brutal.

      But also, I'm not sure I agree with the premise. I've never known players to feel great qualms about killing bandits, evil monks, cultists, etc., to be honest.

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    2. You must resolve your inner turmoil regarding whether or not fighting men make a difference vis a vis humanoid fascimiles. Either it is more visceral, more realistic, thus also more brutal, changing the tone of the game, or it is not.

      I find there is a difference in how PCs treat humans vs how they treat Humanoids and it comes across when there is negotiation, surrender, capture, interrogation. Men can be reasoned within a limited extent, though they be evil, their motives can be divined. Alliances between humanoids and men are short-lived in my games, their nature too brutish, their evil too ingrained for trust to develop or have any foundation. Something that apes the human form but can only mimic its baser urges.

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    3. I wrote a long comment to this which the new Blogger ate, so I'll have to give you a shorter one - sorry:

      There is no inner turmoil because you're creating a bit of a false dilemma here. I'm not advocating using humans primarily as "bad guy" types because it makes the game more brutal. The point is that I think having a rough dichotomy between humans as bad guys and monsters as symbolic of themes is interesting and has resonance with the myths and literature that I'm interested in. It could make the game more brutal, or less so - that's immaterial. I only mentioned brutality because you happeend to bring it up, in the context of PCs killing "ersatz native americans". Undoubtedly such a camapaign would be brutal!

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  9. Perhaps one real benefit is that intelligent monstrous enemies let you literalize a metaphor, in the way Tolkien could do with the Uruk-Hai and industrialization (a simplification, I realize).

    This can lead you into trouble - for example, "the unknowable other who lives not as we do and who only understands the sword" is recognizable nearly word-for-word in moral justifications for colonial violence in the Americas.

    But the value can be great: a cunning ogre is blind, uncaring hunger. A band of marauding orcs embodies the perverse joy that can sometimes be found in destruction. A wave of chittering goblins intent on clawing out your liver is mob violence in the flesh. (Yes, old standbys, but still effective.)

    This doesn't contradict your main point, that humans are capable of more than enough evil on our own. But maybe there's value in having evil monstrous humanoids to hold up as mirrors, rather than simply as convenient displacement of the worst parts of our own nature.

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    1. Yes, I suppose in a way I was guilty of overlooking the fact that monstrous humanoids can also be symbolic in the same way a big 'tentpole' monster can. You're right about that.

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  10. Great passages. Always been fascinated by the Mercenary War. I think you're right about symbolism and monsters. For one thing, monsters can represent the unknown as such, and as such their monstrous form is perhaps an insurmountable part of how they deliver their nebulous effect; what better to represent the unknown than something you haven’t seen before and you don’t understand? Your brain recognizes their monstrous form and their symbolic meaning in tandem; without such a form, the hair-raising fascination a good monster makes you feel is weakened substantially, so usually monsters map onto primal danger forms that our physiologies are primed to react to. Spiders, leprosy, wolfsheads, syphilitic madness, all in novel contexts.

    If monsters can symbolically embody the hazardous and unknown elements of nature, life, and the human psyche, can dangerous monstrous humanoids do the same thing more specifically at the level of human culture? Must we sacrifice the mythological form?

    I'm aware of various reasons why people might want to do that, so I'll let others discuss that. I'm more interested in the importance of the monstrous form and its connection to the fictional embodiment of negative or shadowy elements of human culture / psyche. It will vary individual by individual whether or not the value of that form outweighs the arguments.

    It is difficult to create a monster that represents negative aspects of human culture and yet still maps onto culture in the mind's eye, because in point of fact such a monster tends to serve as a scapegoat for human sin rather than an embodied existential problem that faces human culture, which is what orcs and drow kind of embody.
    It tends to be more powerful for a piece of fiction to represent a pathological flaw in society as a polis that is characterized by that flaw, rather than as a singular monstrous manifestation of the flaw. The incarnated volksgeist-type monster comes off more like a symptom or byproduct of collective misbehavior; a bastard of the culture, rather than an illustration or exploration of the problem itself. When the *culture* itself is pathological, the nature of the evil and the ways it punishes its participants and their neighbors are more clearly thrown into light.

    The problem is that it isn't as effective to create a fascinating but pathological culture such as the drow/dark eldar if you then substitute in humans. Whatever evil and weirdness humans contain, we recognize when we're seeing a fictional society that is highlighting elements of human psychology rather than embodying actual human psychology, and there's kind of an uncanny valley effect when the former case involves actual humans. Picture the behavior and story of characters in Toy Story except in some kind of embodied human context, the nearest of which would be some kind of human slavery. Everything collapses and something valuable is lost. Stories like that need to be mythologized, although they can use human figures that are not entirely human (e.g. Olympian gods). Doing so frees our imagination and allows us to accept the *distillate* of the stories, which is meaningful to our lives even if it doesn’t come from a story about actual people. It’s not like we can’t accept mythological stories with only humans, but our minds are more discriminatory because they’re primed for something more grounded in reality. Hence why stories whose conflict is exclusively between people are necessarily grittier and narrower in scope than stories that involve monsters and alien races. That may be desirable for a particular work of fiction, and people of some temperaments prefer it that way, but it isn’t manifestly superior to the alternative.

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  11. (2) I want to actualize that idea a little more. The drow might not be a strong enough example, you could point to old Italian vendetta culture as a weak parallel in spite of drow being matriarchal and living underground (both extremely archetypal), so instead we can discuss duergar or kuo-toa, who live under circumstances even more inimical to humans.

    Kuo-toa and duergar usually represent an industrial/theological society that has become totalitarian at every level, but they also live in extreme environments, giving them a 1-2 punch for nebulous fascination. Should we replace them with humans, or racially diverse but ideologically united factions, or should we make them into humans who have mutated physically enough to live in such an environment and mutated psychologically enough to live in a way that would be socially untenable over generations in a human polity?

    Taking kuo-toa and duergar and substituting in humans is interesting but doesn't light up the brain in exactly the same way, it gives their culture a different valence (one closer to pity and aversion than the desire to infiltrate, see its wonders and then plunder it), and raises annoying questions because ironically such a polity of humans is somehow *less believable* to us than when we see fictional races doing it.

    Some questions:

    Is there a way to make clear in a game that when you defeat monstrous humanoids, you are in essence defeating the evil spirit that animates wicked people in a way that your brain is more inspired by than defeating actual human evildoers in their sordidness?

    If orcs were something like horse-sized spiders instead of green humanoids, but were still a sentient evil race, how would that change things?

    What about humanoid creatures that live in an alien manner and have cultural features or physiological needs that make war with human polities likely, but not absolutely necessary? As in, creatures that are *not* evil but are *united* and very *likely* to war with human polities, but not for uniquely evil reasons? Do these fall along a continuum towards orcs, or do you regard them as being in a different category?

    What do you think about about intrinsically good races? They’re easy to dismiss for obvious reasons.


    A coda: People sometimes say things like, “Why can’t human beings live like kuo-toa when there are owlbears in the setting? It’s all fantasy!” I will kindly explain to them: It’s because we have more leeway in the way that we depict owlbears than we do with humans. Owlbears are an embodiment of the territorial predator in the unknown wild. We have a lot of leeway there. Human beings are not an embodiment of a concept like an owlbear; they are an actuality and are far more specific and defined.

    We get even less leeway in the way that we depict humans; if we are dishonest when we’re writing human characters, the content won’t hold the interest of the reader over time. I don’t mean honest to real life; I mean honest to the human character, which encompasses all fiction that people find moving no matter how fantastic. So we have to map humans onto a narrower set of phenomena than most fictional content whether or not we would like to.

    If we depict human beings like kuo-toa, the affect of the setting changes to something resembling tragic madness and extreme weird fiction. That’s actually the appeal of a lot of OSR content, and I happen to like that sometimes, I had a game where the villains were a society of humans who lived like molemarians under a mountain with their mechanical powderkeg skeleton weapons and worshipped giant magical olm worms, but people find that kind of thing depressing and exhausting in large doses. If the majority of popular fiction was like that I’d probably spend the majority of my free time reading Brian Jacques.

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    1. I interpret your comments here really as a kind of challenge! Is there a way to map humans onto a broader set of phenomena, and do it convincingly? Only one way to find out.

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    2. I’m glad you see it that way, it seems like something you could do very well if you don’t already

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  12. I've gone back and forth on this a lot in life and decided that I just like having other species because that says something. If monsters can say something poetic, why can't a race of elves, or a clan of dwarves? Why does it have to be humans, and why does it matter if they have humanity, so long as they say something interesting about the world? The arguments provided, while interesting, makes me confused about why we just stop at race. Why not just make all classes an adventurer? Why even have magic when you can show humans doing amazing things with tools? What's the point of even adventuring at all?

    Ultimately, there is none. The point of Fantasy is to say "What if this existed" and then to explore how that effects the world. You can explore these concepts on a physical level, a spiritual level, you can look at the poetry of it, you can look at it as a thought experiment, etc etc, but at the end of the day one way is not more valid then the other, because the logic used to say that one > the other is reductionist to Fantasy as a whole.

    This is the conclusion I've come to on whether its better to have races or not.

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    1. The point of Fantasy is to say "What if this existed" and then to explore how that effects the world.

      Hmm, I'm really not sure about that! I always get worred about people who talk about "the point of Fantasy is..." It seems irreducible to me. But that actually leads me to agreement with your general point. Obviously all I'm saying with this post is what works for me. I'm not trying to be a demagogue. Anyone is in the end free to do whatever they want to do.

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  13. Interesting. I always thought the presence of "Ocs" and company was to have a permanent 'them.' Those types who are altogether evil and worthy of being put to the sword. Not exactly a foreign concept throughout the ages and across the globe. Nonetheless, by the mid-20th, that approach to 'those people' had fallen out of favor (for the most part), for obvious reasons. You just couldn't say 'it's us vs. those people and those people have got to go.' So Orcs, goblins, gnolls and others in the D&D world (and other fantasy) seemed to fill the need.

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