Playing treasure-hunting murderhobos would not satisfy my players, and the Paizo writers know this.
Since we are talking about orcs, let me present Pathfinder Adventure Path #86: Lords of Rust, 2nd module in Iron Gods, as an example. The blurb says,
The heroes of the town of Torch follow a trail of clues to the sprawling junkyard known as Scrapwall, where bands of desperate and violent brigands vie for control of the technological remnants and ruins found within. The Lords of Rust dominate Scrapwall, and their swiftly rising power threatens more than just the town of Torch, for this gang has the support of one of the terrifying Iron Gods of Numeria. What slumbers fitfully beneath the wreckage of Scrapwall could catapult the Lords of Rust into a new level of power if they're not stopped!The gangs in Scrapwall are largely divided racial: human gangs, ratfolk gangs, and orc gangs. The Lords of Rust started as an orc gang, but they have been recruiting heavily and became a gang of orcs, ratfolk, humans, and androids. One prominent sub-boss is a troll. The growth is because they converted from gang to cult and gained divine power boosting them.
Furthermore, absolutely no-one in Scrapwall has Good alignment. The inhabitants are descendants of bandit raiders or outlaws in hiding. Sympathetic NPCs are true Neutral and Chaotic Neutral. The leaders and rank and file of the Lords of Rust are Chaotic Evil like their god, with two exceptions at Chaotic Neutral and Lawful Evil.
And still the module works to goad the party into conflict with the Lords of Rust. The party went to Scrapwall because villains from the Lords of Rust tried to steal another town's technological power. Welcoming members of other Scrapwall gangs want to send the party against the Lords of Rust. If the party develops a reputation as a new authority in Scrapwall, the Lords of Rust will send an offer: join us or die. And the join option includes gladitorial combat to prove worth and conversion to their religion.
My party avoided the Lords of Rust until that ultimatum. They had entered Scrapwall pretending to be archeologists hiding from the Technic League, a legitimate but corrupt authority in Numeria, and had moved in with a friendly cleric of Brigh also hiding from the Technic League. They wanted to assess the threat of the Lord of Rust's god Hellion without initiating conflict themselves. Six weeks later in Golarion time, after holding a public concert, rescuing hostages, fighting off a raid of man-eating ogres, and defeating an attack by a rival gang, the party developed enough reputation for me to force the issue with the join-us-or-die offer from the Lords of Rust.
So, there's this really shitty place in Numeria where the mob has a god (I bet it's an ancient mecha? Or a person mutated and empowered by some alien tech? Both would be cool - it's too bad I read so few APs).
And the people there all suck. A bit grimdark, but okay, dystopia. Orcs, ratfolks, humans, a troll, androids... so essentially the orcs aren't any worse than anybody else. This is okay.
What I'd like to see is a reasonably nice orc culture. All combat, all tribes and scarifications and raids, but nice when you go trade with them, with powerful shamans and a real close relationship with their not entirely evil gods, with slaves who are sometimes treated poorly and sometimes treated better than the poor in so-called civilized nations, with some good weaponsmiths and armorers with some real innovations... very aggressive, very angry at the world for past wrongs, liable to run off as mercenaries or become raiders, but with good fathers who care for their children, and good mothers who are even more stubborn and angry and savvy than their men, because that's what you have to be to survive, there. Something like that - a mix of ME Krogans and TES dark elves and orcs.
Something angry, and violent, and warlike, but not without subtleties and empathy. Something not entirely evil.
Paizo does not rely on the excuse that orcs are irredeemably evil. If some orcs are the enemy, then they will have crimes to prove it and hostility to goad the player characters to combat.
But how often orcs are the ally? It's good that they write their villains well, but why should orcs be a ready source of villains only and not also of heroes, and of normal people too, just trying to make a living in a harsh world?
Yes, the generic orc in the Bestiary is Chaotic Evil. The entry says,
Bestiary, Orc wrote:
Along with their brute strength and comparatively low intellect, the primary difference between orcs and the civilized humanoids is their attitude. As a culture, orcs are violent and aggressive, with the strongest ruling the rest through fear and brutality. They take what they want by force, and think nothing of slaughtering or enslaving entire villages when they can get away with it. They have little time for niceties or details, and their camps and villages tend to be filthy, ramshackle affairs filled with drunken brawls, pit fights, and other sadistic entertainment. Lacking the patience for farming and only able to shepherd the most robust and self-sufficient animals, orcs almost always find it easier to take what someone else has built than to create things themselves. They are arrogant and quick to anger when challenged, but only worry about honor so far as it directly benefits them to do so.James Jacobs, the creative director at Paizo, has explained the Bestiary entries represent one sample of the race, a particular individual or tribe found in a previously published module, so that Paizo can re-use the art and stat block. GMs have asked in the forums whether they can give a creature a better weapon than a spear or better armor than hardened hide or different alignments than Chaotic Evil, and he said yes, though adjust the CR to match the improvement. Barbaric orc raiders are likely the first use of orcs in the Paizo material.
This is very good, that Jacobs lets you alter the alignment from what the Bestiary says, officially - it's important that it's official, you can look back at it and tell nay-sayers: "I have permission from the big man there, take your beef to him".
That description of orcs is... quite terrible. I don't know if I wanna run a game in a setting that has a whole people like that. But if I get what you're saying, that's a sample of orc raiders. It DOES sound a lot like they're speaking of the whole species, but if Golarion has a lot of different orc cultures and most are not like that, then I think it's okay.
Anyways, just for the sake of it, I'd rewrite it like this:
"Along with their formidable strength and keen senses, the primary difference between the orcs of Belkzen and most peaceful and ordered Avistani cultures is their attitude. As a culture, Belkzen orcs are violent and aggressive, with the strongest ruling the rest through fear and brutality, though if they don't rule wisely as well the rest of the tribe will rise up and dethrone them in the bat of an eye.
They take what they want by force, but stop short of slaughtering the defenseless, and mostly pour their seemingly endless violence upon armed defenders, or foreign attackers threatening their families.
They often raid for slaves, who have to work hard and often need to show serious reserves of cleverness and courage to deserve the honor of being freed.
They have little time for social niceties, but their camps and villages tend to be sturdy and clean, since they don't want them to fall on their heads, and even though their bodies are very vigorous, illness could down the best warrior and leave them dishonored.
They like drunken brawls as a past-time, being both lovers of strong beverages and of fighting, but these fights usually involve no lethal weapons and are a good way of letting out their constant, boiling anger at a world that shuns them.
Lacking the patience for farming, Belkzen orcs often sheperd hardy animals like goats and aurochs, and when they can't afford the latest implement of destruction forged by one of their pragmatic blacksmiths, they often challenge whole patrols of soldiers and parties of adventurers for the right of picking their corpses clean of weapons and armors, and take a welcome trophy as well.
They are convinced they're the only ones strong enough to make it and succeed in life, and are often maltheistic, seeing the gods as cruel and biased for condemning them to a life of war and hardship, so they often rebel against them by worshipping demons and similar enemies of the heavens.
They love a challenge allowing them to go all out on their opponents, but they're always very mindful of their personal honor, which dictates a big part of their standing in the pecking order - and that of their family".
I dunno, just off the top of my head. A little less all-negatives, no?
Numeria has a human tribe similar to the Bestiary description of orcs, the Sunder Horn barbarians. I put a few former slaves escaped from the Sunder Horns into Scrapwall to illustrate the weaker residents of that junkyard. In contrast, the Ghost Wolf barbarians are more noble, the Blood Gar barbarians are river-based pirate raiders, and the Black Horse barbarians are the current rulers of Numeria.
But those are human barbarians. We know that humans can behave both virtuously and disgustingly, even at the same time, but it's orcs who are too seldom good and neutral, and whose culture is all about killing, stealing, being good-for-nothings, dictatorship, sadism and arrogance. Although, again, if that sample is just the bad apples, great! I want to see the other sides of the equation too in Golarion, now.
Thanks for all the info, Mathmuse!
Seeing how Orcs don't have a unified culture. They've been represented in multiple lights. No I don't see anything offensive towards native cultures. They have had some tribal structures that look like real world ones (because, well I challenge you to come up with a fictional culture that someone can't link to some melding of real world cultures) but they've also had more feudal structures, warlord led structures, norse raiding based cultures etc. Orcs are not some monolith.
And yes, you can be racist to white people.
EDIT: To be clear I am totally against the use of alignment tags for sapient humanoid species. But I don't think we should be stripping out anything that might be offensive if you look to hard because then we end up with a setting with nothing in it.
If we portray orcs these ways but don't label them all CE, I'm with you. I only want playable orcs, I don't want Paizo to completely remake all their various cultures (I didn't even know on Golarion they had more than a couple!). I just want orcs like in WoW and in TES. Real people, with real cultures, some good, some wicked, some aggressive, some peaceful. If orcs must be generally violent, prone to rage, tribal... it doesn't matter one bit to me as long as all that isn't labeled Evil.
If we can portray orcs in a slightly more positive light, like Ulfen are portrayed, or Kellids, or Shoanti, maybe heavier on demonic worship and slavery but making up for it somewhere else, even better! Just... please... no more "Usually CE" orcs.
I'd be a lot more sympathetic to your argument if you didn't portray anyone who doesn't fully agree with you as a blatant racist. I generally play with alignment on the backseat, if there at all, which is also how I run my Orcs, Goblins and Kobolds. No 'Usually CE' if there's no such thing as CE. I just don't particularly like being called an uninformed racist because I generally cast them as my low-level villains.
As an aside, I'd say that TES Orsimer also tend towards chaotic evil, and that Warcraft orcs have been slowly run into the ground over the last decade or so due to being too prominent in their series. Then again, I played Alliance, so what do I know?
Mmm, I wouldn't say... that anyone who doesn't fully agree with me is a blatant racist. I never said that, actually. I think the portrayal of orcs in PF is racist, yes. Not that either you agree with me or are a racist. Hell, I can unintentionally be racist as well, so who am I to preach.
Orsimer, chaotic evil?... Have you played Skyrim? They have fortresses, you can go talk to them, if you prove worthy even trade with them. In ESO there's a huge number of orc npcs, they're all awesome. Very few are even remotely evil, honestly... none comes to mind.
It's not that I want orcs exactly like they are in WoW, but since they're keeping alignment, at least not categorized as CE, and with a culture that isn't all negatives, if possible. The way they read now is more like demons than people. It really breaks suspension of disbelief. And I think there is some racism hidden there, although, again, not conscious. I'm not saying the writers, or the players, are racist. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, a bit like the Varisians being "Hollywood Gypsies". Once I thought they were a cool ethnicity, then I noticed real Roma and Sinti have very different customs... of course it's not like the devs got up one morning and went, "Nice, today we write about those Hollywood Gypsies we've got in our setting!". We can be misinformed, and unaware. It happens. Hopefully one tries to get better.
As an aside, I'd say that TES Orsimer also tend towards chaotic evil, and that Warcraft orcs have been slowly run into the ground over the last decade or so due to being too prominent in their series. Then again, I played Alliance, so what do I know?I am not familiar with Warcraft, but I am familiar with The Elder Scrolls. Orc, formally Orsimer, has been a playable race since the beginning, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, which was too sketchy to illustrate culture. In the more recent and more popular The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, orcish culture is organized into enclaves that followed the tenets of Malacath. Malacath religion believes in clearly defined social roles earned by strength and skill, in strict obediance to his code of conduct, and in revenge against offenses. The Code of Malacath was set up to make the orcs strong enough to survive their enemies, because many people of other races want them exterminated as sub-human (er, sub-elven. The "mer" in Orsimer means they are an elf variant). In The Elder Scrolls Online, my wife plays an orc named Malacath's Mercy (which means a quick death), who scoffs at the rival Trinimac religion among the ESO orcs, which favors military nationalism. I have not tried an orc character in ESO yet.
This is not Chaotic Evil. Many orcs in Skyrim served honorably in the Empire's military and retired either to traditional roles in the orc enclaves or to blacksmiths and guards in the human cities. Orcs are also common among the bandits, but outnumbered by the human bandits.
I love your wife's character (from what you told us of her) and I love TES orcs!! XD They're so awesome... all of TES is so great. I need to try and play ESO again.
Taking the cue to threadjack again: I really don't know what character to play in ESO. My favorite character ever is an Alkenstar alchemist who fights with a crossbow and goes around with a clockwork bot, very good in all fields of knowledge (she's a bit of a crazy genius), enchanting, crafting, and so on. So I wanna be an awesome crafter, but I don't know what she could be - ranger feels too nature-y, dragonknight too fire and brimstone, sorcerer too overtly magical and nightblade, even though it's the closest combat style (sneak, shoot with a bow, shoot again, shoot till they're dead... maybe with some runes on the ground and a couple spells) - it's too vampire-y and shadow-y. The fact that hybrid are subpar doesn't help... What class could a PF alchemist be? They won't add any new ones... =(
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I feel like a good homebrew exercise is to design an Orc culture for your world for which most of the bad stuff people stuff people say about orcs (savage, warlike, uncivilized, etc.) was true, but that was thousands of years in the past and in the meantime the Orcs have forged a civilization with positive values, have become good neighbors, and have several extremely cosmopolitan cities in their lands but are still recognizably orcs.
I based my orcs on the one Mongolian wrestling coach who took his clothes off in protest and Ludwig Wittgenstein, made them a Str/Int/-Wis race; determined that they valued logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, the perfection of the body, and grappling. Orcish architecture is fantasy Brutalist, but buildings taller than 2 stories are exceptionally rare with the exception of universities, in which heated academic debates frequently culminate in formalized yet impromptu grappling bouts, less to resolve the point at issue, and more to blow off steam/build camaraderie.
I feel like a good homebrew exercise is to design an Orc culture for your world for which most of the bad stuff people stuff people say about orcs (savage, warlike, uncivilized, etc.) was true, but that was thousands of years in the past and in the meantime the Orcs have forged a civilization with positive values, have become good neighbors, and have several extremely cosmopolitan cities in their lands but are still recognizably orcs.
I based my orcs on the one Mongolian wrestling coach who took his clothes off in protest and Ludwig Wittgenstein, made them a Str/Int/-Wis race; determined that they valued logic, natural philosophy, mathematics, the perfection of the body, and grappling. Orcish architecture is fantasy Brutalist, but buildings taller than 2 stories are exceptionally rare with the exception of universities, in which heated academic debates frequently culminate in formalized yet impromptu grappling bouts, less to resolve the point at issue, and more to blow off steam/build camaraderie.
Mmm, PossibleCabbage, I like the way you think.
I could design an orc culture like that for my world, yeah.
I also could play in Eberron instead of Golarion, which is why I needed advice regarding homebrew ancestries in this thread. Because if I have to change too many things about Golarion for it to be palatable to me and my group... well, probably Eberron is a better candidate.
Or I could use Golarion but change some stuff. These goblins are awesome. The gnomes too, with those pointy hats they're giving them. The bugbears are total beasts. I like the iconics.
Daaamn.
I think I'll take Golarion but change what I don't like. Not too much, just enough for my sensibilities. Like, I think I'll have Belkzen orcs be more like TES orcs.
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That description of orcs is... quite terrible. I don't know if I wanna run a game in a setting that has a whole people like that. But if I get what you're saying, that's a sample of orc raiders. It DOES sound a lot like they're speaking of the whole species, but if Golarion has a lot of different orc cultures and most are not like that, then I think it's okay.
I thought that I might find a more balanced description of orcs in the Advanced Class Guide, which contains orcs as a playable race. No luck. The description there outright states, "Orcs have few redeeming qualities." Sadly, I was wrong. Barbaric orc raiders are the entire species.
I have run three Paizo adventure paths. Of them, Iron Gods was the only one with orcs. The orcs of Scrapwall appear to be the best of their race. Before Hellion, the Scrapwall orcs would have had to trade to survive, because raiding heavily-armed lawless neighbors would be suicidal. Some kept Rust Monsters, which could hunt for rare metals among the scrapheap if properly trained, implying that orcs could train them. Others had Scrapyard Robots--ancient robots repaired with scrap--as workers. That reinforces the image of orcs as slave masters, but giving orders to lamebrained robots implies persistence despite aggravation. After Hellion, the orcs recruited other species, which is more diplomatic than brutal even with the gladitorial arena. Kulgara, the chainsaw-wielding orc on the cover of Lords of Rust, mastered a technological weapon that requires recharging via a power cable. Nalakai, the half-orc high priest, was conducting historical research on the other Iron Gods.
Like Roswynn, I don't see the point of orcs that are too savage to be anything besides cannon fodder. No careful negotiations to cross orcish territory safely, no worries about an orcish army using good tactics, no revenge-crazed orcish chiefs to be a nemesis to a pary member. Instead, we get a race designed to be defeated by 1st-level characters with a few individuals that inexplicably gained character levels to put up a better fight. The dwarves have been fighting orcs for thousands of years, so why haven't they won yet?
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That's a very good bet. Good reasoning.
I thought so. :)
Agreed. That they don't caricaturize Roma and Sinti is the most important aspect.
Cool. Glad we're in agreement.
Okay, look, I don't need a hundred Garundi ethnicities, but why lump 4 of them as Mwangi? Doesn't it strike you as odd? Like, "Hey, we don't have time for these marginal ethnicities, let's just describe them in general and give pointers in the little they differ from each other!" - I'm sorry? Is that ethical in your opinion?
I don't think it's unethical given that books have limited word count so they can't give small groups the word count they give large ones, no. It's less than ideal and I'd definitely like to see them expanded on with full write-ups, but unethical seems a bridge too far in terms of descriptors.
Yeah, you're right, but again you can't really be racist against white people in a game played by a majority of white people, when white people in the west are not systematically subjected to racism. The way you present PoC though... that makes all the difference.
Right, but my point is that your choices are either getting some cultural stuff wrong (since nobody and nothing is perfect) or not including those kind of cultures at all. I'd much rather have non-European ethnicities and cultures included in the game (and often in a positive way) than see them left out. Inclusion is important. Having the Paladin Iconic be a black woman is awesome, for example, and that can't happen unless you have black people in the setting.
And if you have black people in the setting, you have to choose between them having a culture based loosely on real African cultures...or one based on European cultures. The latter is way more problematic than the former, IMO.
And if creating cultures based on real-world cultures, you're gonna run into stereotypes somewhere. For example, you mentioned that Keleshites being passionate plays into some real stereotypes about people from the Middle East (the whole 'belly dancer' stereotype among others)...but so does being repressive and controlling regarding sexuality. There's no degree of sexuality the Keleshites can display that won't play into some stereotype, because the stereotypes are irrational and contradictory.
You should clearly try and avoid the worst and most hurtful stereotypes, something I think Paizo does attempt for the most part, but it's never gonna be perfect.
Oh and I wouldn't hate more Avistani ethnicities... Celts anyone? But yeah, Avistan is pretty okay.
I'm fairly okay with it, too. And if you want Celts, Kellids aren't quite that but can be easily made to fit with Celtic theming.
My bad, I didn't read attentively enough. Thank you.
No problem. Happy to be of assistance. :)
But she's a visibly pregnant woman. Who messes with pregnancy. And the mother of monsters bit being an outgrowth doesn't make it any better, she still is, and prominently. Why can't we have a goddess of killers, or a goddess of war - they could still be evil but at least they wouldn't play into the demonization of pregnancy and femininity. Which is the real point of the original Lamashtu, btw. Why not someone like Kali, who definitely has a fierce, demonic aspect but is the last resort of evil against evil? Destruction to make place for growth? Something less obviously evil and just evil for its sake? The side of nature of the mother who eats her children?
The choice of Lamashtu had to do with legacy issues regarding the history of D&D where she'd always been a fairly major but somewhat underused Demon Lord. Does that choice have unfortunate implications? In some ways. But nothing and nobody is perfect, and frankly I think the high number of positive examples of femininity and motherhood (and there are bunches) among the rest of the deities and characters in Pathfinder counterbalance Lamashtu pretty well.
Additionally, using deities still worshiped by large portions of the world's population (as Kali most definitely is), has some serious potential to piss off or offend people, especially if you label them as Evil. Pretty much nobody worships Lamashtu, which makes it a lot less offensive in at least that way.
Complex is nice, morally grey is better than evil, I think, but, let's not grab old gods and use them as is, let's make new gods for what we're awed and disgusted by today. Most are fine. Erastil is a filthy sexist who's defined as LG somehow... Gozreh is awesome and I'd emphasize their hermaphroditism. I honestly like them all, except Lamashtu as she is at this moment. She could be altered in portfolio or alignment... Or I could demote her to archdemon and characterize her better... or I could play in another setting...
Actually, Erastil is not sexist. He was never intended to be sexist. The people who designed him specifically did not want that. The person who wrote his original deity article made an error, and that article is pretty much the only place this crops up. This has since been retconned/errata'd/gotten rid of. Just to be clear.
Lamashtu's characterization, meanwhile, is well established in setting lore in a dozen places or more. Changing it on an official or game-wide basis just isn't practical and it's not gonna happen. You can certainly change it in your own games, but doing so officially is a tall order, and not one I think they should even attempt (I'll go into why below).
Yeah, I know. But the 7 sins of Thassilon really smell of patriarchal religious dictatorship if you know what I mean. Greed is fine. Hate would be great. Lust? Even rage is useful. Pride? Pride is great, and hubris was invented to keep the masses in their places.
The Seven Sins of Thassilon were originally the Seven Virtues of Rule. Which are wealth, fertility, honest pride, abundance, eager striving, righteous anger, and rest.
The point of them becoming sins in-setting is that they are Virtues twisted out of their proper place into vices. Or something like that, anyway.
See, fantasy doesn't have to stay anchored to antiquated modes of thought forever... actually, to stay relevant, it should revolutionize the playing field, like China Miéville, Ursula K. Le Guin, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tamora Pierce, George R R Martin... science fiction keeps marching on... and we fantasy-lovers are left in the lurch.
It certainly doesn't. I'd strongly argue that several of the things Paizo has chosen to do with Golarion are fairly revolutionary, at least in terms of fantasy RPGs. They haven't been revolutionary everywhere, certainly, but their degree of inclusivity in regards to many real-world groups among the characters presented is pretty impressive, for example.
It wouldn't be a cataclysm if a goddess was retconned into something a little less sexist. Even just making her generally CN would work, or a more complex figure, like Baba Yaga, who at times does evil, at others does good... again, demonesses and witches abound through myth and folklore, and a lot of them are a lot more ambiguous than Lamashtu - even Lilith, who's her equivalent in Jewish myths, is more complex and interesting than her.
Lamashtu isn't inherently sexist any more than having a stereotypically demonized aspect of masculinity is (and there are a few of those...Kotschie, the Demon Lord of misogyny being perhaps the most obvious example). Not taken in isolation, anyway. As I said above, I think Golarion has plenty of positive examples of femininity to balance her out.
As for changing her...you can't just change a major setting aspect like that, which has been well established over numerous books (and Lamashtu's evil and unpleasantness has been so established) mid-stream without alienating a significant portion of your fanbase and damaging the verisimilitude of your world. It's not something I'd generally recommend doing under most circumstances and sorta cheapens the setting, IMO.
Changing small side notes that appear in one book is totally doable (and something they have, in fact, done)...but that's too big a change to have without an in-setting reason, and given Lamashtu's in-setting characterization that's really very implausible.
Yeah, I somehow didn't know! I love Pharasma.
Pharasma is very cool.
No, exotic doesn't equal exoticizing. Exotic means "originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign country", while exoticizing is "portray (someone or something unfamiliar) as exotic or unusual; romanticize or glamorize" and is in the 2nd meaning most of all that is harmful. Taldans, Chelaxians, Ulfen, they're all white, Scandinavians don't suffer systematic prejudice IRL, Chelaxians don't exist, and Taldor was Byzantium. They can be exoticized ad libitum.
I'm aware of the distinction. My point was that various ethnicities are exotic, but I don't feel that any are actually exoticized (with the possible exception of Varisians in some ways).
And it's not a matter of saying only good things - that's idealizing. Exoticizing can work in reverse too - "Oooh, the Mongols were really bloodthirsty barbarians!" (No they weren't). Orcs are an exotification of tribal native cultures, to negative effect. Varisians are an exotification parody of Roma and Sinti, "Hollywood gypsies" to tell it like it is. I think it's incredibly offensive and it spreads misinformation and racism.
Both of these can be unfortunate implications of Orcs and Varisians, and I'd definitely like to see things shifted a bit to reduce this problem, but I think you're overstating the case that they 'are and exotification', while the parallels are real, they are fictional groups and people reading the game know this. Very few people (I'd say nobody, but I'm sure there's this one idiot out there who'd prove me wrong) are gonna think that simply because Varisians have a certain cultural trapping that the real Roma have it.
That doesn't mean they won't potentially internalize certain attitudes (they certainly can), and removing the potentially problematic aspects would be good, but it's not a straight shot from 'Varisians resemble stereotypes of the Roma' to 'they are a straight up exotification of the Roma', and they're the closest to straight-up exotification the setting gets.
Making up cultures whole cloth actually is a great way of populating your setting with very interesting folks, just look at Eberron, but I agree that Golarion can't go that way at this point, and it's fine, if the cultural equivalents aren't romanticized. Adapt Arabs, Japanese, Chinese, Koreans to the fantasy world, but portray them faithfully and objectively. Learn about them as they are in the real world, preferably from books they wrote, not some white orientalist. Same for Roma and Sinti. You want real world analogues in your setting? You need to be willing to go the extra mile and do them justice. Be fair.
I agree that you need to be fair. But that doesn't necessarily equate to perfect accuracy. It equates to writing them as people rather than some exotic and mysterious unknowable creatures, and to not bringing in too many problematic stereotypes applied to the equivalent real world group, or inaccuracies presented by biased sources.
You definitely want to avoid creating a culture based on the writings of the British Empire about that culture, but doing something a bit divergent is not inherently bad. Vikings did not actually have their kings decided by who went out and killed the most impressive thing (indeed, they often didn't even have kings depending on when and where you're talking about), but the Land of the Linnorm Kings uses that as a method of deciding kingship anyway, and that's fine because that's not a negative stereotype anyone really applies to that group. Similarly, at least one country in Tian Xia is ruled by a council of Oracles who guide it (theoretically by predicting the future). That's not a real stereotype applied to any real group, so it's a fine trapping for a fantasy version of a culture to possess.
I'd rather making it clear that no orcs are inherently evil or stupid. Or friendly, as for that. Just treat their cultures like you do the humans: without judging. No long paragraphs of fluff telling how evil it is that a culture practices cannibalism for instance and how that is totally nefarious. Real world people practiced cannibalism and they certainly weren't evil. Cannibalism isn't evil. It's killing innocent people that makes you a murderer, but a whole culture can't be judged only on the merit of one single trait. Otherwise the Mongols were all murderers (nope) and the Romans were all slavers (much more complicated than that, it wasn't American chattel slavery).
They do treat Orcish culture like human cultures for the most part. Some Human cultures are similarly reviled, and should be. Certainly in a setting with real Gods, some of whom are Evil and demand Evil acts of those who worship them.
Nidal's culture, for example, is every bit as terrible as Belkzen's and portrayed as such. And they're entirely Human. Both are even terrible for more or less the same reason (Nidal is devoted to Zon Kuthon and Belkzen to Rovagug...who are both terrible).
I... don't see how you can be okay with a whole country of people being evil with a capital E honestly, being that Belkzen or Cheliax. We all know the chelaxian government and aristocracy are corrupt, but the commoners are normal people, fearful of devils and Hellknights and a bit too tolerant of halfling slavery, but certainly not evil. Belkzen? I can get behind orcs being violent, aggressive, warlike, and I can understand if Belkzen's culture employs slavery and degrades women and half-orcs - it's all right. From that to saying "THE HOLD OF BELKZEN IS EVIL"? Honestly? I think I'm gonna start a petition to ask the devs to change it.
A country's listed Alignment isn't the Alignment of every citizen of that country (though Alignments close to it will be more common), it's a measure of how the country as a whole behaves on the world stage and in regards to its own citizens. That's all it's ever been.
And by that definition Cheliax is LE and Belkzen is CE.
By the by, there's a better method of categorizing different species, it involves the following traits:
I'm not sure this is the route I'd go with, but a more complex set of criteria is certainly fun and interesting (and exactly the sort of thing I like thinking about), but it's not practical to do with every single species in a game like Pathfinder where there are hundreds of them.
This doesn't mean doing something like this for a few more common ones is a bad idea, but it does mean it's not ever gonna be universal.
Now, isn't this a more interesting and objective way to see a different species? And this is just biology, nature - consider how nurture could mess up everything, how different orcs in different circumstances would be completely... different!...
... almost like people...
Indeed. We actually already have a wealth of evidence that Orcs raised in different circumstances are quite different. Unfortunately, in terms of info on Orcs we've been given thus far in Golarion, we've had almost exclusively stuff from the Hold of Belkzen and that specific Orc culture.
And the Orcs in the Hold of Belkzen are, for the most part, culturally awful. They worship Rovagug, which makes actually creating anything except maybe implements of destruction a sin and destroying things and killing people a holy act of devotion to their God. That's...really terrible, and results in a lot of really terrible people doing awful stuff. Their culture also encourages murderous rage but discourages any showing of positive emotions (like loyalty or mercy) as a sign of weakness.
Really, raised in that environment, it's not surprising most of them are terrible (and it's worth noting that Half Orcs raised in that environment are usually equally bad).
Now, a few tribes worship Gorum instead (which is a bit better), and one worships Sarenrae (and are Good aligned)...but they're very much the exception.
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I have run three Paizo adventure paths. Of them, Iron Gods was the only one with orcs. The orcs of Scrapwall appear to be the best of their race.
There's actually strong evidence that the Orcs in the Mwangi Expanse are much more pleasant (fighting alongside local humans against demon problems and consensually interbreeding)...we unfortunately lack much information them beyond what I just said.
Almost all the info we have, if you read and look at it, is excluively about the Hold of Belkzen (or setting agnostic as in the Advanced Race Guide).
That description of orcs is... quite terrible. I don't know if I wanna run a game in a setting that has a whole people like that. But if I get what you're saying, that's a sample of orc raiders. It DOES sound a lot like they're speaking of the whole species, but if Golarion has a lot of different orc cultures and most are not like that, then I think it's okay.I thought that I might find a more balanced description of orcs in the Advanced Class Guide, which contains orcs as a playable race. No luck. The description there outright states, "Orcs have few redeeming qualities." Sadly, I was wrong. Barbaric orc raiders are the entire species.
I have run three Paizo adventure paths. Of them, Iron Gods was the only one with orcs. The orcs of Scrapwall appear to be the best of their race. Before Hellion, the Scrapwall orcs would have had to trade to survive, because raiding heavily-armed lawless neighbors would be suicidal. Some kept Rust Monsters, which could hunt for rare metals among the scrapheap if properly trained, implying that orcs could train them. Others had Scrapyard Robots--ancient robots repaired with scrap--as workers. That reinforces the image of orcs as slave masters, but giving orders to lamebrained robots implies persistence despite aggravation. After Hellion, the orcs recruited other species, which is more diplomatic than brutal even with the gladitorial arena. Kulgara, the chainsaw-wielding orc on the cover of Lords of Rust, mastered a technological weapon that requires recharging via a power cable. Nalakai, the half-orc high priest, was conducting historical research on the other Iron Gods.
Like Roswynn, I don't see the point of orcs that are too savage to be anything besides cannon fodder. No careful negotiations to cross orcish territory safely, no worries about an orcish army using good tactics, no revenge-crazed orcish chiefs to be a nemesis to a pary member. Instead, we get a race designed to be defeated by 1st-level characters with a few individuals that inexplicably gained character levels to put up a better fight. The dwarves have been fighting orcs for thousands of years, so why haven't they won yet?....
I just had a look at Kulgara - love PF art, why the setting must let me down so?
All the Scrapwall orcs you mention are pretty great, but I agree with you. Few redeeming qualities. Thank you, Paizo, I really needed a caricature of native tribal PoC to genocide.
I don't think it's unethical given that books have limited word count so they can't give small groups the word count they give large ones, no. It's less than ideal and I'd definitely like to see them expanded on with full write-ups, but unethical seems a bridge too far in terms of descriptors.
Sure, wordcount, I get it, but why lumping them up as Mwangi? Maybe not unethical, but damn it, the whites get 5 full pages ethnicities, the Blacks 1 for Garundi and 1 for all 4 Mwangi... sheesh.
Right, but my point is that your choices are either getting some cultural stuff wrong (since nobody and nothing is perfect) or not including those kind of cultures at all. I'd much rather have non-European ethnicities and cultures included in the game (and often in a positive way) than see them left out. Inclusion is important. Having the Paladin Iconic be a black woman is awesome, for example, and that can't happen unless you have black people in the setting.
And if you have black people in the setting, you have to choose between them having a culture based loosely on real African cultures...or one based on European cultures. The latter is way more problematic than the former, IMO.
And if creating cultures based on real-world cultures, you're gonna run into stereotypes somewhere. For example, you mentioned that Keleshites being passionate plays into some real stereotypes about people from the Middle East (the whole 'belly dancer' stereotype among others)...but so does being repressive and controlling regarding sexuality. There's no degree of sexuality the Keleshites can display that won't play into some stereotype, because the stereotypes are irrational and contradictory.
You should clearly try and avoid the worst and most hurtful stereotypes, something I think Paizo does attempt for the most part, but it's never gonna be perfect.
You're right, better to have them, and I too love Seelah (and Kyra!). But again... maybe a more equal share for POC and whites? And it's not like stereotypes are so hard to avoid if you try hard enough - you don't know much about sexuality in Middle Eastern culture? Either write about something else or do some research. It's not like you'll have to spend evenings in a dusty corner of some forsaken library. Google it. Buy a book by some Arabic author on Amazon. Get in touch with actual Arabic people on a forum. The GURPS books are really well researched, even though the system... well. If you wanna present the equivalent of real cultures, you owe it to them.
The choice of Lamashtu had to do with legacy issues regarding the history of D&D where she'd always been a fairly major but somewhat underused Demon Lord. Does that choice have unfortunate implications? In some ways. But nothing and nobody is perfect, and frankly I think the high number of positive examples of femininity and motherhood (and there are bunches) among the rest of the deities and characters in Pathfinder counterbalance Lamashtu pretty well.
Additionally, using deities still worshiped by large portions of the world's population (as Kali most definitely is), has some serious potential to piss off or offend people, especially if you label them as Evil. Pretty much nobody worships Lamashtu, which makes it a lot less offensive in at least that way.
No, not really Kali. Something like her. Even the Wiccans have an aspect of the goddess who is the mother who devours her youngs, it's not unique to the Indian subcontinent. She should only be a little more nuanced, not completely evil.
Also, okay, there's a lot of nice goddesses, but Lamashtu is so offensive, I swear!
Actually, Erastil is not sexist. He was never intended to be sexist. The people who designed him specifically did not want that. The person who wrote his original deity article made an error, and that article is pretty much the only place this crops up. This has since been retconned/errata'd/gotten rid of. Just to be clear.
Lamashtu's characterization, meanwhile, is well established in setting lore in a dozen places or more. Changing it on an official or game-wide basis just isn't practical and it's not gonna happen. You can certainly change it in your own games, but doing so officially is a tall order, and not one I think they should even attempt (I'll go into why below).
Yeah, I was reading about Erastil not being sexist anymore. Although I remember a thread in which one of the devs defended their decision to make a LG sexist god, but don't ask me a link, it was many years ago, one of the thing that kept me from Golarion and PF.
Yeah, Lamashtu's not going anywhere, I know. Sucks.
The Seven Sins of Thassilon were originally the Seven Virtues of Rule. Which are wealth, fertility, honest pride, abundance, eager striving, righteous anger, and rest.
The point of them becoming sins in-setting is that they are Virtues twisted out of their proper place into vices. Or something like that, anyway.
Yeah, I remember that part, but even the virtues don't make sense. Wealth, fertility, abundance, rest? What are we talking about here? These are not virtues, these are goals - and one benefit, rest. They could have gone like:
virtues - justice, charity, love, wisdom, awareness...
sins - corruption, greed, hate, carelessness, bigotry...
But, okay, whatever.
It certainly doesn't. I'd strongly argue that several of the things Paizo has chosen to do with Golarion are fairly revolutionary, at least in terms of fantasy RPGs. They haven't been revolutionary everywhere, certainly, but their degree of inclusivity in regards to many real-world groups among the characters presented is pretty impressive, for example.
Yeah, you're actually right, a lot of LGBTQ friendly content, a lot of characters of color... yeah, I like that. That's why it's so hard for me to let other parts of Golarion stay so... backwards.
Lamashtu isn't inherently sexist any more than having a stereotypically demonized aspect of masculinity is (and there are a few of those...Kotschie, the Demon Lord of misogyny being perhaps the most obvious example). Not taken in isolation, anyway. As I said above, I think Golarion has plenty of positive examples of femininity to balance her out.
As for changing her...you can't just change a major setting aspect like that, which has been well established over numerous books (and Lamashtu's evil and unpleasantness has been so established) mid-stream without alienating a significant portion of your fanbase and damaging the verisimilitude of your world. It's not something I'd generally recommend doing under most circumstances and sorta cheapens the setting, IMO.
Changing small side notes that appear in one book is totally doable (and something they have, in fact, done)...but that's too big a change to have without an in-setting reason, and given Lamashtu's in-setting characterization that's really very implausible.
Umm... yeah, Lamashtu is inherently sexist, mate. Believe me, I should know. And it's very hard being sexist against you guys - white hetero cis males are privileged compared to everyone else. As for Kosthschie or how the hell it's written, yeah, he's a big dumb ogre demon... didn't know he was a misogynist too, but he's a demon, it's not like the rest of them are nice and considerate towards us.
I'm aware of the distinction. My point was that various ethnicities are exotic, but I don't feel that any are actually exoticized (with the possible exception of Varisians in some ways).
Keleshites? Tians? No? Sigh - good for you.
Both of these can be unfortunate implications of Orcs and Varisians, and I'd definitely like to see things shifted a bit to reduce this problem, but I think you're overstating the case that they 'are and exotification', while the parallels are real, they are fictional groups and people reading the game know this. Very few people (I'd say nobody, but I'm sure there's this one idiot out there who'd prove me wrong) are gonna think that simply because Varisians have a certain cultural trapping that the real Roma have it.
That doesn't mean they won't potentially internalize certain attitudes (they certainly can), and removing the potentially problematic aspects would be good, but it's not a straight shot from 'Varisians resemble stereotypes of the Roma' to 'they are a straight up exotification of the Roma', and they're the closest to straight-up exotification the setting gets.
I think you're not critical enough of the things you like. But that's only my opinion. Maybe it is I who takes it too hard.
I agree that you need to be fair. But that doesn't necessarily equate to perfect accuracy. It equates to writing them as people rather than some exotic and mysterious unknowable creatures, and to not bringing in too many problematic stereotypes applied to the equivalent real world group, or inaccuracies presented by biased sources.
You definitely want to avoid creating a culture based on the writings of the British Empire about that culture, but doing something a bit divergent is not inherently bad. Vikings did not actually have their kings decided by who went out and killed the most impressive thing (indeed, they often didn't even have kings depending on when and where you're talking about), but the Land of the Linnorm Kings uses that as a method of deciding kingship anyway, and that's fine because that's not a negative stereotype anyone really applies to that group. Similarly, at least one country in Tian Xia is ruled by a council of Oracles who guide it (theoretically by predicting the future). That's not a real stereotype applied to any real group, so it's a fine trapping for a fantasy version of a culture to possess.
But Vikings won't be offended by that depiction. Scandinavian people aren't systematically oppressed in the west, and the linnorm-slaying is a cool thing anyways. Even the oracles are cool, that's not a problem. Those are cool fantasy things you can totally add. You know what I don't like - passionate Keleshites, too little room dedicated to PoC...
They do treat Orcish culture like human cultures for the most part. Some Human cultures are similarly reviled, and should be. Certainly in a setting with real Gods, some of whom are Evil and demand Evil acts of those who worship them.
Nidal's culture, for example, is every bit as terrible as Belkzen's and portrayed as such. And they're entirely Human. Both are even terrible for more or less the same reason (Nidal is devoted to Zon Kuthon and Belkzen to Rovagug...who are both terrible).
Yeah, but orcs are fictional. You don't need them to be evil to reflect reality. You can write them however you want. They could have made them as varied as humanity right from the start. Same holds for all species in the setting. The fact they CHOSE to leave orcs as evil demon-worshippers, fully knowing they look and act a lot like clichés of tribal native people, is bad.
A country's listed Alignment isn't the Alignment of every citizen of that country (though Alignments close to it will be more common), it's a measure of how the country as a whole behaves on the world stage and in regards to its own citizens. That's all it's ever been.
And by that definition Cheliax is LE and Belkzen is CE.
And I'm not okay with CE orcs.
I'm not sure this is the route I'd go with, but a more complex set of criteria is certainly fun and interesting (and exactly the sort of thing I like thinking about), but it's not practical to do with every single species in a game like Pathfinder where there are hundreds of them.
This doesn't mean doing something like this for a few more common ones is a bad idea, but it does mean it's not ever gonna be universal.
No, sure, doesn't have to be like this, but my point was that treating species a little more objectively would avoid demonization.
Indeed. We actually already have a wealth of evidence that Orcs raised in different circumstances are quite different. Unfortunately, in terms of info on Orcs we've been given thus far in Golarion, we've had almost exclusively stuff from the Hold of Belkzen and that specific Orc culture.
And the Orcs in the Hold of Belkzen are, for the most part, culturally awful. They worship Rovagug, which makes actually creating anything except maybe implements of destruction a sin and destroying things and killing people a holy act of devotion to their God. That's...really terrible, and results in a lot of really terrible people doing awful stuff. Their culture also encourages murderous rage but discourages any showing of positive emotions (like loyalty or mercy) as a sign of weakness.
Really, raised in that environment, it's not surprising most of them are terrible (and it's worth noting that Half Orcs raised in that environment are usually equally bad).
Now, a few tribes worship Gorum instead (which is a bit better), and one worships Sarenrae (and are Good aligned)...but they're very much the exception.
Yeah, but again, the writers CHOSE to make orcish culture evil (or to leave it that way, more precisely). It's not like Belkzen is a real place and they're documenting some horrific practices they've seen while there. They could've made Belkzen very warlike and ended up with almost the same scenario of constant human-orc war they have, but no, orcs are evil. Their culture is evil. They worship the god of total destruction. It's not a matter of fortune, Deadmanwalking - the devs wanted to have evil orcs. So we get evil orcs. There's no randomness involved here.
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Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that Paizo's use of orcs isn't problematic. I too have issues with them, though I'm more uncomfortable with their whole sexual violence as the norm thing. (Which can also have some unfortunate racial implications, I'll grant.) Just that orcs aren't ALL evil in Golarion.
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Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that Paizo's use of orcs isn't problematic. I too have issues with them, though I'm more uncomfortable with their whole sexual violence as the norm thing. (Which can also have some unfortunate racial implications, I'll grant.) Just that orcs aren't ALL evil in Golarion.
I get the fact that it's not something that PF2e can change really, but the older I get the more I respect 4e's stance on half orcs as a separate species that may have orc and human ancestry, but evolved into something new entirely. That whole mess is not something I necessarily want to have to confront at the table, and I can only imagine that it's something that isn't particularly great for people who have had experiences with sexual violence to have to deal with in their escapist fantasy.
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I get the fact that it's not something that PF2e can change really, but the older I get the more I respect 4e's stance on half orcs as a separate species that may have orc and human ancestry, but evolved into something new entirely. ...
The beginning of this thread discussed creating ancestries. I can tolerate orcs in the Bestiary being one-dimensional creatures designed as battle fodder, though the lack of roleplaying possibilities would guide me toward more interesting species in their place. But what does this mean for half-orc ancestries?
Half-elves could have an ancestry built on their two heritages. They could have even have four ancestries: one for raised by humans, one for raised by elves, one for embracing both human and elf cultures despite the differences, and one for the half-elf offspring of two half-elves.
I don't see the same options for half-orcs. Human-raised is possible, this is the origin of Imrijka, the iconic inquisitor. Orc-raised would lead to a character who could not function in a civilized party. That would work for an enemy, but not for a player-character ancestry.
If Paizo gave orcs more scope and culture, then half-orcs would have more possibilities.
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I get the fact that it's not something that PF2e can change really, but the older I get the more I respect 4e's stance on half orcs as a separate species that may have orc and human ancestry, but evolved into something new entirely. ...The beginning of this thread discussed creating ancestries. I can tolerate orcs in the Bestiary being one-dimensional creatures designed as battle fodder, though the lack of roleplaying possibilities would guide me toward more interesting species in their place. But what does this mean for half-orc ancestries?
Half-elves could have an ancestry built on their two heritages. They could have even have four ancestries: one for raised by humans, one for raised by elves, one for embracing both human and elf cultures despite the differences, and one for the half-elf offspring of two half-elves.
I don't see the same options for half-orcs. Human-raised is possible, this is the origin of Imrijka, the iconic inquisitor. Orc-raised would lead to a character who could not function in a civilized party. That would work for an enemy, but not for a player-character ancestry.
If Paizo gave orcs more scope and culture, then half-orcs would have more possibilities.
Part of my issue is that after listening to the Glass Cannon Podcast for 2e preview content, I started listening to their old stuff, and I don't know how to reconcile the Orcs portrayed there with this sort of notion. I can totally get down with the ideas of Nurture over Nature, and in my homebrew games, I don't even usually have half-orcs, just Orcs, some of whom fit into civilization and some of which who eschew it (not unlike most other races in those settings). But in the context of Golarion, it's hard to reconcile the way that most orcs are portrayed (with the non-evil orcs generally portrayed as exceptions, rather than the rule) with the Core race of half-orc, without being a little unnerved.
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Part of my issue is that after listening to the Glass Cannon Podcast for 2e preview content, I started listening to their old stuff, and I don't know how to reconcile the Orcs portrayed there with this sort of notion. I can totally get down with the ideas of Nurture over Nature, and in my homebrew games, I don't even usually have half-orcs, just Orcs, some of whom fit into civilization and some of which who eschew it (not unlike most other races in those settings). But in the context of Golarion, it's hard to reconcile the way that most orcs are portrayed (with the non-evil orcs generally portrayed as exceptions, rather than the rule) with the Core race of half-orc, without being a little unnerved.I get the fact that it's not something that PF2e can change really, but the older I get the more I respect 4e's stance on half orcs as a separate species that may have orc and human ancestry, but evolved into something new entirely. ...The beginning of this thread discussed creating ancestries. I can tolerate orcs in the Bestiary being one-dimensional creatures designed as battle fodder, though the lack of roleplaying possibilities would guide me toward more interesting species in their place. But what does this mean for half-orc ancestries?
Half-elves could have an ancestry built on their two heritages. They could have even have four ancestries: one for raised by humans, one for raised by elves, one for embracing both human and elf cultures despite the differences, and one for the half-elf offspring of two half-elves.
I don't see the same options for half-orcs. Human-raised is possible, this is the origin of Imrijka, the iconic inquisitor. Orc-raised would lead to a character who could not function in a civilized party. That would work for an enemy, but not for a player-character ancestry.
If Paizo gave orcs more scope and culture, then half-orcs would have more possibilities.
Yeah, I'm with you on this. I was actually a little shocked at one encounter they had in Treauneu in the GCP, and read that book and confirmed it wasn't in there; it was an addition by Troy. But while the cast not being as woke as I would like is probably my biggest criticism of what is otherwise a pretty stellar podcast, this didn't feel out of line with the Paizo material on orcs.
I think we might see PF2 start to move further away from the sexual violence thing for half orcs-- Half-orcs can start to form their own communities at this point, and I think they've said that orc blood is strong enough that quarter orcs or smaller fractions still tend to functionally be half-orcs. Also, goblins seem like they are going to be the most hated race core now, which means half-orcs don't have to carry that weight as much and by extension may lower orc hate a little.
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The ARG actually notes that the majority of Half Orcs outside Belkzen are the descendants of other Half Orcs (since Half Orcs breed true and the 'race' is really anyone between about a quarter and three quarters Orc) going back to thousands of years ago when the Orcs had an actual empire and bred them as a servant/slave caste.
That's unpleasant, but it's thousands of years ago historical unpleasantness rather than the more immediate kind.
There's also several other options, including the Mwangi Half Orcs who are the result of consensual (if somewhat businesslike) unions between the local Human and Orc tribes.
@Roswynn: I'll definitely do a full response to that post, but not tonight. It's late.
I'm a little confused by the seeming desire of some posters for various groups in Golarion to map directly to various groups on Earth. Golarion, and for that matter almost all other fantasy settings, are not and should not just be "historical fantasy Earth." It's supposed to be its own thing. And so any given group is going to have elements not mapping to any particular Earthly culture, or will be a combination of two or more different Earthly cultures. That's fine, it's great actually, up to a point.
Obviously you shouldn't fuse together an entire continent or entire "race" (whatever the actual correct term for that is) into one group. At the point where you have one single "pan-Asian" culture that is all of China + Japan + Korea + Mongolia + etc etc etc as a single nation or ethnicity, yeah, that's kinda offensive. But on a smaller scale, it's a worthy goal to separate it from the real world, AND separate it from the sorts of baggage that come with the history of interactions between various groups in the real world.
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Within this chaotic region, warlords vie for supremacy, adventurers plunder ruins long lost to orc barbarism, and those bold orcs who imagine a better life struggle for change.
The part in bold sounds like it would be a great campaign and wouldn't be nearly as compelling if Belkzen didn't start out as the warlord ravaged place where lives are nasty, brutish and short that it currently is.
Belkzen is a terrible place. It needs heroes to heal it. Be those heroes.
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There definitely are Orc tribes that aren't CE - the Steel Eaters are the smiths, and typically NE. You can see them here - Steel Eaters. There are also substantially less Evil orcs - the Burning Sun tribe are Sarenites are generally good people.
Just to show that Orcs aren't always CE in Golarion! :)
There definitely are Orc tribes that aren't CE - the Steel Eaters are the smiths, and typically NE. You can see them here - Steel Eaters. There are also substantially less Evil orcs - the Burning Sun tribe are Sarenites are generally good people.
Just to show that Orcs aren't always CE in Golarion! :)
Thank you, Arcaian. Yes, those are interesting details, particularly the Suns. I just wish... orcs weren't necessarily evil. Maybe with a brutal culture, subjected to harsh circumstances...
... but yeah, anyways, I'll keep the Eaters and Suns and most of the rest, although I'll make orcs as a species as varied as humans and give them a less fiendish culture. No probs - my table, my rules.
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There definitely are Orc tribes that aren't CE - the Steel Eaters are the smiths, and typically NE. You can see them here - Steel Eaters. There are also substantially less Evil orcs - the Burning Sun tribe are Sarenites are generally good people.
Just to show that Orcs aren't always CE in Golarion! :)
Thank you, Arcaian. Yes, those are interesting details, particularly the Suns. I just wish... orcs weren't necessarily evil. Maybe with a brutal culture, subjected to harsh circumstances...
... but yeah, anyways, I'll keep the Eaters and Suns and most of the rest, although I'll make orcs as a species as varied as humans and give them a less fiendish culture. No probs - my table, my rules.
This serves as evidence that the orcs as written in the Bestiary and the Advanced Race Guide do not fit the needs of Pathfinder campaigns. GMs work better with more variety in orcs.
I continued my reading, moving over to Wikipedia articles on orcs. The orcs originated in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. The similar race in The Hobbit were called goblins, but he distinguished between orcs and goblins in Lord of the Rings and the Silmarilion. Orcs were the mook soldiers of the dark lord Sauron, created by Sauron's predecessor Morgoth. They came in three varieties: regular, Uruk-hai, and snaga.
Tolkienesque orcs fit well as minions of a dark lord. They do not fit well as a species on their own. Tolkien had orcs without a dark lord only in The Hobbit where they were called goblins and acted like the D&D race called hobgoblins. Hence, further uses of orcs have changed the nature of orcs to make them plausible as a species on their own. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are behind the times in their depiction of orcs.
And I remember an interesting fictional rift on the principle of dark lord minion race. In David Weber's Oath of Swords, the hradani were created to be the army of a dark lord. When the dark lord was destroyed, they became a pariah race too numerous to wipe out. They aren't exactly orcs: they are 7 feet tall, elf eared, no tusks, and prone to uncontrollable berserker rages, but they fit the orc niche in this fantasy world. The plot of the first book is that the war god (god of just war, like Iomedae) chose a hradani as his paladin, because the race had changed enough to have one who qualified. It grew into a 5-book series.
There definitely are Orc tribes that aren't CE - the Steel Eaters are the smiths, and typically NE. You can see them here - Steel Eaters. There are also substantially less Evil orcs - the Burning Sun tribe are Sarenites are generally good people.
Just to show that Orcs aren't always CE in Golarion! :)
Thank you, Arcaian. Yes, those are interesting details, particularly the Suns. I just wish... orcs weren't necessarily evil. Maybe with a brutal culture, subjected to harsh circumstances...
... but yeah, anyways, I'll keep the Eaters and Suns and most of the rest, although I'll make orcs as a species as varied as humans and give them a less fiendish culture. No probs - my table, my rules.
This serves as evidence that the orcs as written in the Bestiary and the Advanced Race Guide do not fit the needs of Pathfinder campaigns. GMs work better with more variety in orcs.
I continued my reading, moving over to Wikipedia articles on orcs. The orcs originated in J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings series. The similar race in The Hobbit were called goblins, but he distinguished between orcs and goblins in Lord of the Rings and the Silmarilion. Orcs were the mook soldiers of the dark lord Sauron, created by Sauron's predecessor Morgoth. They came in three varieties: regular, Uruk-hai, and snaga.
Tolkienesque orcs fit well as minions of a dark lord. They do not fit well as a species on their own. Tolkien had orcs without a dark lord only in The Hobbit where they were called goblins and acted like the D&D race called hobgoblins. Hence, further uses of orcs have changed the nature of orcs to make them plausible as a species on their own. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are behind the times in their depiction of orcs.
And I remember an interesting fictional rift on the principle of dark lord minion race. In David Weber's...
Hah, that's interesting. Yeah, in most fiction there are no evil races or species, they just don't make sense. Sure, there can be cultures or factions which are antagonistic to the heroes, but I can't remember a single example of an actual culture where everyone, even the peasants, is evil. It's usually the dominant factions, the king, the high priest, the zealots, the assassins. Or it's demons or the local equivalent. Or the Borgs and the Cylons... but the Cylons end up working with the fleshbags and the Borgs are a peculiar case.
Oh, one example came to mind - DA's darkspawn. But those are strange. They're more like undead or werebeasts. They're born fully grown, have no real culture, no real individualism, no real... nothing. They're like demons.
Tolkien struggled all his life with his decision to make his orcs evil. "They can't be all evil" he would think to himself. But he didn't know any better. Those weren't very enlightened times.
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Hey folks, do you reckon it's gonna be very very hard to build new ancestries in PF2?
Usually, creating home-brew material and house rules is pretty easy and quite fulfilling. The problem comes when your players want/need to use some character generation automation, such as Hero Lab. Getting your home-brew material (or house rules) into the tools can be difficult to impossible.
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Sure, wordcount, I get it, but why lumping them up as Mwangi? Maybe not unethical, but damn it, the whites get 5 full pages ethnicities, the Blacks 1 for Garundi and 1 for all 4 Mwangi... sheesh.
Honestly, I think this just amounts to land mass. The Inner Sea region includes only a part of Garund but all of Avistan, so you get all the Avistani stuff, but only some of the Garund stuff.
Which inclines me to desire a Garund book, mind you.
You're right, better to have them, and I too love Seelah (and Kyra!). But again... maybe a more equal share for POC and whites? And it's not like stereotypes are so hard to avoid if you try hard enough - you don't know much about sexuality in Middle Eastern culture? Either write about something else or do some research. It's not like you'll have to spend evenings in a dusty corner of some forsaken library. Google it. Buy a book by some Arabic author on Amazon. Get in touch with actual Arabic people on a forum. The GURPS books are really well researched, even though the system... well. If you wanna present the equivalent of real cultures, you owe it to them.
Sure, but there's not one middle eastern sexuality perspective, there are dozens over different places and eras, and just about any version would potentially play into some stereotype. Also, Keleshites, while vaguely Arabic-themed, are not actually culturally Arabic. They're part of a pseudo-Persian Empire and matrilineal with a much stronger role for women than most Arabic cultures (indeed, they verge on matriarchal at times). Their religion is also obviously divergent.
All of which would make their sexuality being a direct copy of real world Arabic sexuality either now or in some other specific area more than a bit odd and off-putting.
No, not really Kali. Something like her. Even the Wiccans have an aspect of the goddess who is the mother who devours her youngs, it's not unique to the Indian subcontinent. She should only be a little more nuanced, not completely evil.
Also, okay, there's a lot of nice goddesses, but Lamashtu is so offensive, I swear!
I mean...there are a fair number of nuanced Evil Deities...as much as there are nuanced Good deities. Heck, Lamashtu has specific needs and desires, factions within her worship, enemies even among other Evil deities, and so on.
It's just that, in Pathfinder, if a Deity is Evil (or Good) they are not morally ambiguous. Good deities are actually Good, and primarily do positive things, and Evil ones are actually Evil and primarily do negative things. More 'cycle of life' deities are Neutral.
Yeah, I was reading about Erastil not being sexist anymore. Although I remember a thread in which one of the devs defended their decision to make a LG sexist god, but don't ask me a link, it was many years ago, one of the thing that kept me from Golarion and PF.
If it's the thread I'm recalling they were mostly arguing that Good deities can, despite mostly being Good, have bad traits (Cayden Cailean is kind of irresponsible, Iomedae is perhaps overly harsh, etc.) so sexism in a Good deity wasn't impossible.
Or maybe it was a different thread and I'm misremembering.
Yeah, Lamashtu's not going anywhere, I know. Sucks.
Lamashtu is gonna stick around, yeah.
Yeah, I remember that part, but even the virtues don't make sense. Wealth, fertility, abundance, rest? What are we talking about here? These are not virtues, these are goals - and one benefit, rest. They could have gone like:
virtues - justice, charity, love, wisdom, awareness...
sins - corruption, greed, hate, carelessness, bigotry...
That's fair enough I suppose, but it's a different culture, I can see end states/the pursuit of end states as being perceived as virtuous. Also bear in mind that even the Virtues were from a LN religion, so their standards are not precisely 'virtuous' in the sense of being unambiguously Good and positive in-universe (which makes their corrupted versions not necessarily Evil or negative, though the Runelords certainly were).
Yeah, you're actually right, a lot of LGBTQ friendly content, a lot of characters of color... yeah, I like that. That's why it's so hard for me to let other parts of Golarion stay so... backwards.
I dunno about backwards, but you certainly don;t have to use the setting exactly as presented (or at all, as you're obviously aware), but I think some of the issues are more in presentation than they are in the world. You can run a canonically accurate Golarion game focusing more on non-Evil Orcs than any existing Pathfinder books do, for example.
Umm... yeah, Lamashtu is inherently sexist, mate. Believe me, I should know.
By what definition? I personally don't think isolated elements of a larger work should usually be judged as sexist or not absent the context of the larger work. It's sexist if every woman is a terrible and unpleasant person, but equally sexist if every woman is shiny and happy and wonderful. Both men and women are people and have good and bad examples.
Yes, Lamashtu is specifically associated with birth, motherhood, and some other classically feminine stuff, and is portrayed negatively. Taken in isolation I agree she can come off as a sexist portrayal of women, but I don't feel taking one deity from a list where many of the most awesome and impressive deities are also feminine and judging them in isolation is appropriate.
It's like saying that a movie with a mother figure for a villain is sexist due to that villain's characterization when the protagonist (or at leas one of the people who aids said protagonist) is also a mother figure and turns a lot of the stereotypes used on their head.
And it's very hard being sexist against you guys - white hetero cis males are privileged compared to everyone else.
White hetero cis men are indeed privileged as compared to everyone else in current society. Being sexist against them has been known to happen, though. For example, men accusing women of domestic abuse are pretty universally not believed or taken seriously culturally. Women certainly get abused far more per capita, but the men who do experience that sort of thing are even less likely to be believed.
It's all part of the same system that puts everyone in these neat little gender role boxes (women must be weak, men must be strong, in the above case) with no actual consideration for the real people involved or the fact that categorizing things in neat little boxes seldom works out well.
Sorry, that got a bit off topic.
As for Kosthschie or how the hell it's written, yeah, he's a big dumb ogre demon... didn't know he was a misogynist too, but he's a demon, it's not like the rest of them are nice and considerate towards us.
Well, Lamashtu is also a demon and kind of unpleasant to everyone.
Keleshites? Tians? No? Sigh - good for you.
*blinks* Keleshites are, as I note above, more 'Ancient Persian Empire' than any current cultural group, and Tians don't seem to get exoticized by the game itself, at least to me (I can't speak to players with a Japan fixation).
I think you're not critical enough of the things you like. But that's only my opinion. Maybe it is I who takes it too hard.
I tend to think you're wrong. I disagree with Paizo on various stuff (I've mentioned a few times that I find the Varisian portrayal quite problematic, just to pick a single on-topic example), but then, everyone wants to think the best of themselves.
But Vikings won't be offended by that depiction. Scandinavian people aren't systematically oppressed in the west, and the linnorm-slaying is a cool thing anyways. Even the oracles are cool, that's not a problem. Those are cool fantasy things you can totally add.
Just clarifying the kind of changes I think are reasonable to a real world culture. Who rules them and why being prominent.
You know what I don't like - passionate Keleshites, too little room dedicated to PoC...
I'm not sure 'passionate' (usually regarded as a positive trait) is a negative stereotype in its own right. It can play into negative stereotypes, but that's a somewhat different thing.
As for too little space dedicated to non-European ethnicities I tend to disagree. The setting is primarily focused on the Europe analogue, and half the listed ethnicities still aren't white people (the Shoanti are distinctly non-European, despite being natives of Avistan, add in the Garundi, Mwangi, Keleshite, Tian, and Vudrani and that's 6 out of 12, and one of the 6 that are European themed is basically extinct).
Yeah, but orcs are fictional. You don't need them to be evil to reflect reality. You can write them however you want. They could have made them as varied as humanity right from the start. Same holds for all species in the setting. The fact they CHOSE to leave orcs as evil demon-worshippers, fully knowing they look and act a lot like clichés of tribal native people, is bad.
Obviously they chose to make them Evil, yes. They felt that many stories were already being told about Orcs who were good or pleasant (World of Warcraft, for example) and that they wanted to focus on Orcs who were more classically Evil for their own stories. That may have been a less than ideal decision, but IMO the real problem is not that decision but the long term lack of non-Evil counterexamples.
As for acting like cliches of tribal native people...I'm actually not sure Pathfinder Orcs do that. They're big into metal weapons, siege engines, and active conquest. Nor do they have a lot of stylistic elements that equate to most native peoples. They're barbaric, but in a strongly Conan-inspired way rather than a colonialist sense. The only thing I can find that you could argue fits with them fitting this mold is war paint...but the Celts did that, too.
I find the idea of any species being Evil collectively deeply problematic, and that being the case when they can easily be read as non-white (due to having a different skin color) makes it a bit worse, but saying they act like cliches of tribal native people is not really accurate. They're much more like Roman stereotypes of the Gauls, Visigoths, or other 'barbarians' than they are like any stereotype of non-Europeans.
And I'm not okay with CE orcs.
I'm fine with CE Orcs as long as it's clear that their Evil is cultural and non-CE Orcs are also around to counterbalance them. This is true in Golarion the setting. It is in many ways not as true in terms of published content.
And that's bad. I want a lot more non-Evil Orc content, and feel its very existence would make the Orc stuff a lot less problematic. And, given that they considered making Orcs a Core Ancestry before deciding on Goblins, I'm hopeful that we'll get such content in PF2.
No, sure, doesn't have to be like this, but my point was that treating species a little more objectively would avoid demonization.
It also allows for a more expansive and interesting view of the species. Which is neat.
Yeah, but again, the writers CHOSE to make orcish culture evil (or to leave it that way, more precisely). It's not like Belkzen is a real place and they're documenting some horrific practices they've seen while there. They could've made Belkzen very warlike and ended up with almost the same scenario of constant human-orc war they have, but no, orcs are evil. Their culture is evil. They worship the god of total destruction. It's not a matter of fortune, Deadmanwalking - the devs wanted to have evil orcs. So we get evil orcs. There's no randomness involved here.
No, there isn't. It's quite intentional. But it's not primarily a Race thing. It's an 'Evil Nations Are Bad' thing. Pathfinder is interested in telling stories where the villains are truly and objectively Evil. Where you fight bad people you can feel good about defeating, not simply people who happen to be on the other side. Where, for all the violence common in Pathfinder games, you can still be objectively heroic.
And that's a fine style of game to have that many people like.
There are also places on Golarion where things are more morally grey, but having both allows for a greater variation in what kind of games you can do, which is good.
It's unfortunate, in my view, that Belkzen and its culture are the only Orc culture we've seen. I would be notably happier with the presentation of the setting if, say, the Orc Tribes of the Mwangi Expanse had been detailed as a fairly friendly CN people to counterbalance the unpleasant CE Orcs of Belkzen from the beginning (as it is, we don't even know for sure that they aren't Evil, though evidence supports that conclusion). But Belkzen itself is only problematic because it's the only example, not inherently due to its existence.
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I'm late to this conversation, but it's a fascinating one. I think the idea of alignment being tied to race (or ancestry) in D&D is very difficult, because we keep approaching it from a 'real-world' perspective, where the idea that a single race/species/ethnicity/group is entirely evil has led to all sorts of atrocities.
Personally I'd abolish alignment, but that might create its own difficulties, especially when you have planes of existence specifically devoted to a particular alignment.
On the other hand... usually when I play D&D I want a carefully nuanced, shades-of-grey, campaign world where the labels 'good' and 'evil' don't mean very much as applied to an entire race. Other times? Other times, I'm entirely fed up with the world at large and I just want to escape into an adventure where I can gleefully cut down rampaging hordes of enemies without worrying about the morality of it, because "they're all Evil, so it's ok!"
Moral complexity is all well and good, but so (on occasion) is escapism. What I like about PF 1.0 is that its campaign world generally allows for both.
Tolkien struggled all his life with his decision to make his orcs evil. "They can't be all evil" he would think to himself. But he didn't know any better. Those weren't very enlightened times.
If I may come back to this: Tolkien didn't evisage orcs/goblins as evil. The goblins in The Hobbit don't like the dwarves, but it's clear that the feeling is mutual. The goblin king doesn't kill them on sight, but captures them and wants to find out why they're trespassing (not unreasonable). They do enjoy tormenting the dwarves a bit, sure, (whipping at their feet as they march them to the throne room); but I don't think that a party of goblins would have been treated any better if captured by dwarves.
As for orcs: it was their creator, Sauron, who was evil (and I think we can use that word: there's no evidence that Sauron had any capacity for empathy, kindness, compassion, generosity, or any of the other things that we regard as 'good'). The orcs he created therefore 'grew up' in an environment where they never experienced anything but abuse, and they paid it forward. Remember Gandalf saying "As for me, I pity his slaves?"
Anyway... moving the thread back to its original topic, I also hope that we don't have to wait too long before being able to create our own ancestries, for homebrew purposes if nothing else.