Baby war-forged melted for scrap!
Just because your people are a bunch of beady eyed midgets with impulse control problems doesn't me you have to get ...
(wait for it)
inflammatory... :)
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Mikaze I admire your empathy. I just felt that "goblin baby" is a disingenuous term. Its not cute. Its not biologically designed to tug at your heart-strings. Exactly the opposite, in fact. In Golarion, mind you. Golarion is (mostly) a traditional fantasy setting. Orcs and goblins are UGLY, representations of barbarism and corruption.If whirling and possibly eventually dizzy and vomiting goblin dervishes of Sarenrae weilding sactified dogslicers are wrong I don't want to be right.
Makes it easier as a GM too. You can just settle for a nightmare out of the Bestiary for the BBEG.
This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
Not really comfortable with the idea of wholesale baby murder being cosmically okay in one area of a setting and being verboten in another. If it's bad to kill 'em in Kaer Maga it's bad to kill 'em next to Sandpoint.
(our Crimson Throne group actually kept their goblin recruits in Kaer Maga as long as possible because of the scene there and because the city wasn't made of wood)
On threats to civilization, there's also human representatives of that like the Nolanders, but I wouldn't expect the murder of any of their children to be acceptable either.
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Mikaze I admire your empathy. I just felt that "goblin baby" is a disingenuous term. Its not cute. Its not biologically designed to tug at your heart-strings. Exactly the opposite, in fact. In Golarion, mind you. Golarion is (mostly) a traditional fantasy setting. Orcs and goblins are UGLY, representations of barbarism and corruption.If whirling and possibly eventually dizzy and vomiting goblin dervishes of Sarenrae weilding sactified dogslicers are wrong I don't want to be right.
Makes it easier as a GM too. You can just settle for a nightmare out of the Bestiary for the BBEG.
This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
Not really comfortable with the idea of wholesale baby murder being cosmically okay in one area of a setting and being verboten in another. If it's bad to kill 'em in Kaer Maga it's bad to kill 'em next to Sandpoint.
(our Crimson Throne group actually kept their goblin recruits in Kaer Maga as long as possible because of the scene there and because the city wasn't made of wood)
On threats to civilization, there's also human representatives of that like the Nolanders, but I wouldn't expect the murder of any of their children to be acceptable either.
Which is why it is up to the GM and should be known beforehand by the players.
Also have you ever done the "beautiful" race that is thoroughly corrupt and decadent? I tend to use Drow in this manner.
This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
This is an interesting subject, but your starting premise is flawed: goblins are suave, debonair and devilishly handsome.
[Strikes a pose]
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This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
This is an interesting subject, but your starting premise is flawed: goblins are suave, debonair and devilishly handsome.
[Strikes a pose]
You um, you got some um... drool there buddy.
That's not actually drool. It's more like a pheromone-secretion. It's actually quite the chick-magnet.
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Also have you ever done the "beautiful" race that is thoroughly corrupt and decadent? I tend to use Drow in this manner.
Yep, though again not to an "every single one down to the last child" degree. But as a general thing, that's how I'd run drow in Golarion and most D&D settings that aren't my homebrew.
I hate it but a lot of settings seem to have an easier time with "beautiful" races being evil than with "ugly" races being good. It's okay for evil to be sexy or hideous, but all too often good isn't allowed that full range for some reason.
It was mentioned either in this thread or the one before it, but that Drizzt short story(and I agree with the poster that mentioned it on it being the best story ever written about that character) absolutely skewered that concept. Good drow got all the "ooh exotic" reactions and eventual acceptance. Good goblin got "EW DO NOT WANT" and a sad end.
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This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
This is an interesting subject, but your starting premise is flawed: goblins are suave, debonair and devilishly handsome.
[Strikes a pose]
Well, even some muppets have their fangirls...
;)
Seriously, there's that goblin baby.
Some day, it will grow up to be a CE menace of local level 1 Commoners. A terrorist. Think Al-qaeda, sans the brains and with more torches. And we're supposed to fight such evil wherever it shows, right? That's what a proper Neutral Good would do.
It's lying on the ground, defenseless. My armored boot hovers over its tiny, football-shaped head.
If I crush it now, am I Evil? 1/10th of Evil? Chatoic Neutral with occasional "twitch"? Just fine? Or just a curious Gnome?
Of course, this isn't a serious thread, and shouldn't be taken so, or Mikaze will run in and start explaining that I should take care of that Goblin and rise him to become a LG Cleric of Iomedae... ;-)
You can't kill goblins! They are cute! But aboleths? Fair game. Kill away, Senor Gnome.
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I hate it but a lot of settings seem to have an easier time with "beautiful" races being evil than with "ugly" races being good. It's okay for evil to be sexy or hideous, but all too often good isn't allowed that full range for some reason.
Mongrelmen. Mongrelmen are almost always presented as an entire race of Quasis (the ugly-cute Quasimodo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame). Flumphs are another classic example of a hideous good creature.
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I hate it but a lot of settings seem to have an easier time with "beautiful" races being evil than with "ugly" races being good. It's okay for evil to be sexy or hideous, but all too often good isn't allowed that full range for some reason.Mongrelmen. Mongrelmen are almost always presented as an entire race of Quasis (the ugly-cute Quasimodo from Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dame). Flumphs are another classic example of a hideous good creature.
Dem Mongrels neutral though. Flumphs though, well Misfit Monsters took a really strong swing at elevating them from their "joke creature" status. I don't think they're entirely there yet, but if they actually get some play in serious storylines... Right now they're still....cute. They smell like battery acid but they're still adorable.
Planescape was really good for this. You had your alien and beautiful good creatures(zoveri, though YMMV) and your alien and frightening/ugly creatures(those black slime guys who were theorized to have been created explicitly to show that good can take many forms). Really hoping Pathfinder gets to that level of variety for Team Good.
On Neutrals, Dark Folk were a big favorite as a representative of Dark Is Not Evil(though it would be nice to have good representatives of that as well). But then Bestiary 2 came out and started to slant their flavor more towards evil with the whole Dark Slayer thing. Pretty much ignored that for our CotCT game. And then there's what happened to the Forlarren... Awesome art aside, I'd just rather keep using the Tome of Horrors flavor as the standard.
I'm guessing the Vanths from the blog are going to be neutral, so there's at least one pure example of "dark but not evil" in neutral's tent. I hope.
Mikaze I admire your empathy. I just felt that "goblin baby" is a disingenuous term. Its not cute. Its not biologically designed to tug at your heart-strings. Exactly the opposite, in fact. In Golarion, mind you. Golarion is (mostly) a traditional fantasy setting. Orcs and goblins are UGLY, representations of barbarism and corruption.If whirling and possibly eventually dizzy and vomiting goblin dervishes of Sarenrae weilding sactified dogslicers are wrong I don't want to be right.
Makes it easier as a GM too. You can just settle for a nightmare out of the Bestiary for the BBEG.
This is actually another big reason why I like nonevil goblins and orcs. Why should "ugly" have to be "evil"? Why should beauty equal goodness?
I've never been comfortable with those equivalences. We get enough of those judgments being pushed in the real world. Personally I could do without my fantasy worlds hard coding it.
Not really comfortable with the idea of wholesale baby murder being cosmically okay in one area of a setting and being verboten in another. If it's bad to kill 'em in Kaer Maga it's bad to kill 'em next to Sandpoint.
(our Crimson Throne group actually kept their goblin recruits in Kaer Maga as long as possible because of the scene there and because the city wasn't made of wood)
On threats to civilization, there's also human representatives of that like the Nolanders, but I wouldn't expect the murder of any of their children to be acceptable either.
Ok, you guys ended up going on a tangential adventure of the moral implications of relative attractiveness or the lack there of.
TO BE CLEAR, whether someone is ugly is not justification to kill their progeny. It was a description of how the average standard PC race commoner sees a baby monster in the "standard DnD setting". If they went googlie eyes for them, that would be a different world all together (half-orc babies being the notable exception).
I was also not trying to suggest that killing Goblin babies is ok depending on your location, but rather its the type of stories you tell that determines its relative acceptableness. A game that treats goblins as "others" ( a tradtitional one, mind you), treats goblins and their kin as monsters that need to be killed. That's not under debate, is it? Not saying its right, just that its the "standard practice".
When in that game the question of "do I kill a goblin baby?" comes up, the moral uncertainty it is presented with changes the game away from "traditional" into a post-modern one, where old racist/sexist/capitalist/ist-ist concepts are challenged and explored. If outside of sandpoint your character saves goblin babies, with the intent of raising them as champions of Sarenrae, more power to yah. But I would submit that is less of a traditional game, as you have blurred the line between the Monsters and Townsfolk.
BTW I love me some Planescape, Shadowrun, and Eberron (the shadowrun of DnD).
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Ah, sorry for misread/derail. :)
I guess it all depends on how one interprets "traditional game", since the expectations seem to have changed from one edition to the next. I agree that things get blurry as soon as babies/noncombatants come into the picture though. Someone else suggested that if one wants to keep the lines clean, it's best to just not have them show up in the first place. IMO and all that jazz.
BTW I love me some Planescape, Shadowrun, and Eberron (the shadowrun of DnD).
My biggest regret about Eberron is that we never got a book about their orcs. That was my most favorite take on them to ever show up in D&D canon at least.
Ah, sorry for misread/derail. :)
I guess it all depends on how one interprets "traditional game", since the expectations seem to have changed from one edition to the next. I agree that things get blurry as soon as babies/noncombatants come into the picture though. Someone else suggested that if one wants to keep the lines clean, it's best to just not have them show up in the first place. IMO and all that jazz.
My biggest regret about Eberron is that we never got a book about their orcs. That was my most favorite take on them to ever show up in D&D canon at least.BTW I love me some Planescape, Shadowrun, and Eberron (the shadowrun of DnD).
No problem at all. Indeed, part of the problem is when the GM unwittingly asks something like "what do you do with the women and children?". The morality meter dips into gray, and players are confronted with the possibility that they may have to do things that are unheroic. Of course if the players live in gray area morality they may answer "hear their lamentation..."
I also would have liked more orc info, especially their connection to druidic magic. They definitely had a shoanti "noble savage" vibe going, crossed with their lucrative and civilizing links to the House of Finding. It also helps that I love rangers and druids.
A goblin book would have been awesome too, seeing as they were the dominant culture for so long, and the source of most of the ancient ruins on the continent. Some more support for goblin PCs, feats, custom prestige classes, would have been pretty keen.
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Hmm. Killing evil is good. Killing good is evil. Is killing neutral folk just kind of a wash?
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Going by the 'rule' that ugly = evil, I would like to modestly propose that the Church of Sarenrae starts a new crusade to exterminate anyone who has one of those disgusting freakish bellybuttons that bulge outwards, instead of a proper, wholesome, Sarenrae-fearing 'innie.'
I cannot imagine a greater indication of evil than such a hideous sight.
It'll be the 'witches mark' for the new era!
Eczema? Lazy eyes? Warts? None of it compares to the perfidy of the 'outie,' irrefutable evidence that one trucks with fiends, such that your navel bulges with the evil you have taken into yourself!
Hmm. Killing evil is good. Killing good is evil. Is killing neutral folk just kind of a wash?
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Going by the 'rule' that ugly = evil, I would like to modestly propose that the Church of Sarenrae starts a new crusade to exterminate anyone who has one of those disgusting freakish bellybuttons that bulge outwards, instead of a proper, wholesome, Sarenrae-fearing 'innie.'
I cannot imagine a greater indication of evil than such a hideous sight.
It'll be the 'witches mark' for the new er
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Been thinking about your campaign setup, and I wanted to ask how you handle half-orcs. Do they exist? If not, do you use their stats for an alternate race?
Half-orcs in my campaign are always the product of rape (the father is always an orc, the mother is always a human, a necessity as there are no female orcs). Half-orcs are subjected to horrendous racism by humans, many of who refuse to believe that anything that looks orcish could possibly be good. A surprising consequence of this is that most half-orcs are really good people -- the vast majority of half-orc infants are left to die in the forest or actively killed (generally drowned) by their mother or their mother's family, and the half-orcs that aren't killed at birth are generally raised by people with passionate commitment to Good, which tends to result in a rather surprising number of half-orc paladins -- especially of the Shadow Stalker variety.
Cosmologically, half orcs have human souls.
