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in what whey are they culturally more advanced?
So my point is not that Golarion should be more advanced than earth in every way, indeed there are a lot of unique pressures on Golarion that make things turn out differently than they did on earth. I'm just saying that "historical accuracy" arguments fall flat for me, because there's no reason that Golarion *needs* to be like specific parts of earth in the distant past.
Like the current year on Golarion is contemporaneous to the 1920s on earth, so there's no good reason it needs to be like the 14th century or the 17th century.
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One of the interesting intersections between lore and mechanics is spells that compel people (sometimes permantelly) aren't considered innately evil, despite there not being any better word for it than slavery.
I know if I was playing a Liberator, my character couldn't tolerate a party member dominating an enemy.
Because it's entirely in what you do "hey stop killing people" isn't Evil and you're not forcing them to do tasks for you, it just has the potential for Evil (forcing them to do evil or making them your slaves), I don't know of any permanent compulsions off the top of my head (aside from curses), but yeah I can see Liberators having issues with this type of magic regardless.
Just going off what little of that conversation Vampy provided this is an OoC issue obviously that needs to be resolved before it devolves into PVP or worse, the other player is quite plainly being a jerk, again, going off what little was provided.
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*reads the crit fail of Dominate*
Okay yeah that is more or less permanent, I can see a Liberator having issues with that.
Again, in your own words "appalled at it's application", mind control has potential for evil, easily, but so do weapons.
It also has applications of "hey go over there so we don't have to fight", "stop trying to kill that person", "save yourself".
Permanent rewrites is a whole can of worms, forcing everyone to like you? Forcing everyone to be evil? Forcing evil people to be good? An ethical and philosophical conundrum for the ages (I'm against such a thing FWIW).
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I'd say "You must demand and fight for others’ freedom to make their own decisions." directly challenges Stockholm Syndrome and other abusive relationships, but I can see people arguing over this.
FWIW I agree completely. The Liberator will empower the enslaved to get back in touch with their inner strength, shatter the shackles on their minds and decide in full confidence and freedom what they choose for themselves.
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That doesn't change the setup that the series is built up on an evil woman going around making false rape accusations for funsies (what little I've heard and said say the character does it more than once).
Just because she's the villain doesn't change anything, the major plot being "woman makes up rape allegations for funsies" is so beyond the pale.
Not in any way helped that it's Isekai so slapped hard with male wish fulfillment with a harem of slave girls, some of whom are underage? Yeah this doesn't get any better the more I read, which I really don't want to do.
Edit: also reading some more, bleugh, said villain in question meets her end in the anime by being raped to death and having it recorded... so, uh... WTF?
Oh wow, okay, I hadn't seen far enough to see that bit, that is pretty awful. As far as I'd seen she'd gotten her comeuppance in a pretty severe (but not nearly that awful) way and I thought the show would leave it there.
Yikes.
Definitely agree the show has some issues - the main character is basically a villain, yeah. I would disagree with your premise that a piece of media is automatically awful just for including a woman who makes a false rape allegation for her own benefit, but definitely the show is problematic for plenty of reasons besides that.
And also this is now certainly off topic, since I think the original question of what would a Liberator do in such a situation is pretty easily answered (they'd work to change society so that the situation that results in someone being better off a slave is no longer the case, and then free the slave).
The danger, and probably the biggest fall risk for Liberators, is to assume that free will means agreeing with him and that everything else is a sign of indoctrination.
Where to draw the line between free will and coercion?
This is one of the silliest strawmen I have seen in a very long time. Free will, by definition, is not being required to agree with anyone. That's not a danger for any Liberator who isn't powerfully dumb.
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"Historical accuracy" falls flat immediately specifically because we're not dealing with historical Earth, therefore it's 100% irrelevant.
I strongly disagree.
We've all got an internal picture of what historical cultures were like. From some combination of movies, video games, novels, books, museum visits, school or university courses etc.
Golarion is NOT a world built up from scratch to be explicitly its own world (as, for example, Glorantha or Empire of the Petal Throne are). Instead, its very very deliberately built on a wide variety of common tropes ("Not vikings", "Not Transylvania", "Not Egypt", etc etc etc). That is all done so that the players have an instant feel for a place with very little work on the GMs part. When running a PFS scenario for new players I have literally described a location as one of the above "Not blort" and with a couple of seconds work, got enough of a vision of a shared world for us to play that scenario.
Golarion is as readily accessible as it is PRECISELY because many of its cultures are built very heavily on real world examples (or at least the versions of them in movies).
There are lots and lots of places where Golarion explicitly moves on from that historical base but that historical base underlies just about EVERYTHING in a great many parts of Golarion. And those places where Golarion has moved on from the base are pretty much explicitly talked about in the books.
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Here's the thing though, since you've already got the "not" in "not Vikings" or "not Transylvannia" then you can make that do work for you as you're already positing ways in which these cultures are different from their earth analogues (e.g. they have access to magic and there are elves around).
So since we're already making allowances to realism for things like "dragons can fly" or "the gods are real and actively influence the world" the only real reason not to make allowances for "modern sensibilities about certain things" is that you don't want to.
Or, succinctly, if your version of a fantasy world requires certain backwards notions about things then that is a "you problem."
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Here's the thing though, since you've already got the "not" in "not Vikings" or "not Transylvannia" then you can make that do work for you as you're already positing ways in which these cultures are different from their earth analogues (e.g. they have access to magic and there are elves around).
So since we're already making allowances to realism for things like "dragons can fly" or "the gods are real and actively influence the world" the only real reason not to make allowances for "modern sensibilities about certain things" is that you don't want to.
Or, succinctly, if your version of a fantasy world requires certain backwards notions about things then that is a "you problem."
As long as the "you" in the above refers to Paizo and not to me than we are in agreement.
Obviously if I am the GM I can choose to alter Golarion in any way that I wish. But that doesn't change what the default, "official" Golarion is in any way. I don't think it becomes my problem if I decide to run Golarion as it is published and not to spend the effort to alter it to better fit modern sensibilities
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Here's the thing though, since you've already got the "not" in "not Vikings" or "not Transylvannia" then you can make that do work for you as you're already positing ways in which these cultures are different from their earth analogues (e.g. they have access to magic and there are elves around).
So since we're already making allowances to realism for things like "dragons can fly" or "the gods are real and actively influence the world" the only real reason not to make allowances for "modern sensibilities about certain things" is that you don't want to.
Or, succinctly, if your version of a fantasy world requires certain backwards notions about things then that is a "you problem."
As long as the "you" in the above refers to Paizo and not to me than we are in agreement.
Obviously if I am the GM I can choose to alter Golarion in any way that I wish. But that doesn't change what the default, "official" Golarion is in any way. I don't think it becomes my problem if I decide to run Golarion as it is published and not to spend the effort to alter it to better fit modern sensibilities
I say "Gothic Horror Land" for Ustalav rather than "not-Transylvania." Golarion is a patchwork quilt of adventure settings. Playability is the main reason for all this mimicry of the real world and mythology. If I sent the PCs to the Land of the Linnorm Kings, then I want them to quickly pick up that they are in a land of raiders modeled after the Vikings. The building styles, the clothing, the noble titles, and many other hints will be copied from real-life old Scandinavia and fictional Viking stories.
But we cannot copy everything without creating an anachronism. Last week, I was writing some enemy notes and plans that the party had taken from the body of the enemy general they defeated. I added exact dates in the Absolom Reckoning calendar, such as Abadius 18 and Calistril 2, even though that meant explaining the calendar to my players. Well, my wife was familiar with the calendar already. She had once created a creepy character named Wealday Addams and her current character is Wealday's cousin Tollday Addams, who goes by Sam because he is a slave escaped from Dr. Addams' lab experiments in Nidal. If Golarion called its months January after the Roman god Janus and February after the Roman purification ritual Februa, and called its weekdays Wednesday after the Norse god Woden and Thursday after the Norse god Thor, then we players would wonder how the Golarians had learned the Roman and Norse words. Yet the Golarion year is 365.25 days very similar to Earth's 365.2422 days, its months are of the same length, and its weeks are 7 days.
The lack of major sexist obstacles in the PC ancestries of Golarion is another attempt to avoid an inconsistency. Paizo wants to let the players play as many different character concepts that they can imagine. This includes a female fighter in a culture where the source material had only male warriors. Actually, the setting has to be flexible: some players will want their female fighter without any fuss, and other players will want overcoming sexism to be a key part of their female fighter's backstory. Sexism baked firmly into the setting would reduce playability of character design.
I recall such an incongruity in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Some cities forbade the catlike Khajiit from entering the city, because of the Khajiits' reputation for theft. However, a Khajiiti player character can walk right into those cities without anyone batting an eyelash, because those rules don't apply to the player character. Likewise, the racism in some places don't affect the player character, beyond minor verbal insults such as calling reptilian Argonians "lizards." A smooth gaming experience was more important that consistency.
Paizo, on the other hand, decided that imposing modern sensibilities on a pseudo-medieval setting was better than inconsistencies between the setting's culture and the characters' backstories.
Also in the interest of playability, "slavery" in the edicts and anathema of a deity is defined by the modern dictionary definition, "the state of a person who is held in forced servitude; a situation in which people are entrapped and exploited." The colonial history of the United States of American had a practice of indentured servitude, the Headright System of Virginia and Maryland. A person who wished to migrate to the American colonies could voluntarily sign a contract to work for a landowner for a number of years to pay the cost of transportation to the colonies. Indentured servitude was a bad deal for the immigrants, who sometimes did not live out their term of service, but it did not count as slavery.
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“ We've all got an internal picture of what historical cultures were like. From some combination of movies, video games, novels, books, museum visits, school or university courses etc.
Golarion is NOT a world built up from scratch to be explicitly its own world (as, for example, Glorantha or Empire of the Petal Throne are). Instead, its very very deliberately built on a wide variety of common tropes”
This does the exact opposite of justifying “historical accuracy” arguments.
The land is a media quilt hodgepodge, historically accurate to earth has no basis.
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I started it to ask for advice on how to role-play a liberator encountering a slaver
The rules forum is an odd place to ask a roleplaying question. But the long and short of "how should a Liberator deal with slaver" the answer is "not charitably".
From a roleplaying perspective it's basically the question of "how should you deal with meeting the worst person in the world (from your perspective) if you're a good person."
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“ We've all got an internal picture of what historical cultures were like. From some combination of movies, video games, novels, books, museum visits, school or university courses etc.
Golarion is NOT a world built up from scratch to be explicitly its own world (as, for example, Glorantha or Empire of the Petal Throne are). Instead, its very very deliberately built on a wide variety of common tropes”
This does the exact opposite of justifying “historical accuracy” arguments.
The land is a media quilt hodgepodge, historically accurate to earth has no basis.
A world being built in order to accommodate different vessels for pulp and fantasy tropes doesn't that mean that said vessels aren't interconnected or that said interactions aren't consistent with the rules expectations establish by the setting. For example:
- Why do the forces of good don't stop the diabolist nation? Because there is a bigger and more immediate existential threat.- Why do prosthesis exist if there are spells and rituals that could make the need for said prosthesis go *poof*? Because said spells and ritual are way more expensive.
Humbly,
Yawar
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Almost certainly that would be a case of "work to change the problem i.e. society" for most liberators.
A Chaotic Good character especially shouldn't be a "one solution fits all problems" type. If it is clear that freeing a save will definitely cause more harm than not freeing a slave, the Liberator's goal should be to change whatever situation causes that to be the case, rather than blindly free the slave at the cost of the slave's own life/wellbeing.
The ultimate goal is still to free the slave, of course - but in such a way as to not cause harm (to the slave, anyway).
Ah, that makes a lot of sense. ...Also seems like it could be the basis of a good fanfic, too, now that I think about it: Even when things start to turn for the better later on in the series, there's a recurring theme of Naofumi being unable to truly trust people unless they're slaves (...something which is also because of the aforementioned character, the one that would've gleefully killed Raph to hurt him if she wasn't protected by slavery laws), with the reason that he still trusts slaves being a form of setting-specific magic that makes slaves unable to lie to their owners (or in general, really). Since Raphtalia actually likes him for being nice to her, the Liberator would probably need to help him with his trust issues, too. Could make for a very interesting take, that fixes a lot of the series' issues. xD
(And yeah, agreeing with Rysky & MaxAstro that the series has a lot of issues, some of which were thankfully removed from or toned down in the anime adaptation; the original webnovel is honestly a lot worse in that regard, going by all the discussion I've seen, and I wouldn't recommend looking for it. Just wondered about it because it's such an unusual situation that a lot of the standard "freeing slaves" logic just plain doesn't apply.)
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Thank you for that non-sequitur.
Is it? You were arguing that Golarion doesn't need to be historically accurate, because it was made to be its own thing and not some alternate history "but with magic".
We know how people in certain situations adapted and survive, so given the same situation should be similar unless there is a justification for that.
For example, you would expect something like medievalish rural marriage to have 9 to 12 kids and only 3 reaching adulthood, just ballpark numbers. Now, if they have a much modern family structure with 3-5 kids and literacy it needs a justification, they would need access to a contraceptives (Pinkberry extract is mentioned as being sold by alchemist in Sandpoint's Gazeteer so its), printing press and a way of distribution (its invented in Golarion and traveling book salesmen are mentioned at least in the Kingmaker videogame), some sort community schooling or pastoral schooling, and access to Healthcare (easy, via a local priest). Now if the family lives far away from any town (more than a half a day trip) then a parent will have to stay at to educate and take care of the kids and either would likely be trained on herbalism/ alchemy/ nature.
It is not argument saying Golarion "it was like this in the medieval period so Golarion has to be like this" . It is a question of "How is this part of Golarion different from the period and place it evokes or based off and how are the changes justified in-universe?"
Humbly,
Yawar
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“And its not just behaviour, many nations on Golarion are obvious copies of historic real world nations (Galt, Qadira, ...).”
In aesthetics, not copies of the nations and government themselves.
“So when even the autors say "this is France/Persia but with magic" you of course look at how the historic France/Persia looked like when you want to know details the source books do not provide.”
Where have the authors said that?
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“Galt's state of anarchy is a direct and exact copy of the Reign of Terror in France.”
A meme version of a constant bloody revolution, an exception, not the norm.
“And Qadira is a satrap. Dou you know what a satrap is? A form of provincial government used by Persians. It also has a Vizir with a lot of authority, another Persian specialty, although later coped by the caliphates.”
Way to misread, I mean specific governments, not that governments don’t exist. Qadira is satrap, and? Andorran is a democracy. Neither of which are the only ones.
“And right next to it you have Taldor, basically the Byzantine Empire including their history, use of prefectures, their complicated government and even having their own version of the Varangian Guard in the form of the Ulfen Guard with the exact same reason for existing.”
Other than the Ulfen Guard that distinction is baseless. They’ve said the Byzantine is an inspiration for Taldor, but claiming it’s an exact copy is nonsense.
Having prefectures and complicated governments is not something unique to the Byzantine.
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Funny, I didn't know that French post-revolution anarchy was caused by
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Funny, I didn't know that French post-revolution anarchy was caused by ** spoiler omitted ** but as usual with Ixal, you learn something new every time he spins his "Golarion is Earth with dragons" tale.
It is a fantasy version of the Reign of Terror, it is like saying that World of Darkness is not set in the equivalent of the real world because the equivalent of real world events in the Word of Darkness were influenced by vampires and mages.
Humbly,
Yawar
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Funny, I didn't know that French post-revolution anarchy was caused by ** spoiler omitted ** but as usual with Ixal, you learn something new every time he spins his "Golarion is Earth with dragons" tale.It is a fantasy version of the Reign of Terror, it is like saying that World of Darkness is not set in the equivalent of the real world because the equivalent of real world events in the Word of Darkness were influenced by vampires and mages.
Humbly,
Yawar
Really? You have any conclusive proof that events in real world weren't influenced by vampires and mages?