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So my initial impression was that Paizo was saying "we are completely retconning slavery out of our setting".
It sounds like it's more accurate to say "slavery still exists but we aren't going to focus on those stories".
That at least maintains my verisimilitude for the setting, so I appreciate the clarification.
Yeah I think that is common misunderstanding, its more like how Ogres are still the same they were in Hook Mountain Massacre, but bestiary book doesn't indulge in it (aka they imply it if you know about it but don't mention it at all)
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This speaks to total political correctness and is plain stupid. Canceling my subscriptions to lost omens and considering if I should cash in my VO card too.
Plain stupid and bad call. Real evil exists and I have seen it from real personal experiences around the world including parents trying to sell off their daughters. Slavery is a part of our real-world history and it still exists today. It's a horrid, evil, despicable thing.
Paizo Execs, think I am BSing you on the above, IM or email me, happy to share those stories that all occurred in the 21st Century to include one modern industrialized nation-state.
Paizo could have used this opportunity to write stories that show just how freaking bad and inhumane and dehumanizing slavery can be; instead, nope we are just gonna recon it all away. Totally missed the opportunity.
Hobgoblins, Orcs, Goblins and other ancestries are now all playing nice. What's next? Whispering Tyrant reconciliation and vampire appreciation week?
Bad call Paizo. You are losing my business and maybe my volunteerism also.
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Complaining that entire peoples aren’t kill-on-sight is a charming look at your wider politics.
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Way to puff yourself up while not knowing a thing going on, they aren't retconning a single thing.
And let's be honest, Paizo has almost never done a realistic show of slavery just because of how soulrending and despair inducing that is, you had fantasy slavery, which was just plot hooks.
So if no more slavery stories GOING FORWARD has you up in arms and frothing and clutching, can't say that I'll miss you.
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Keftiu, and what do you think my politics are? Is that what they call a red herring when having a dialogue on a subject, trying to divert attention away from the real subject? You know nothing about who I am.
Rysky, yes it does have me up in arms because Paizo could have chosen a higher path in my opinion, and missed an opportunity to use a fantasy setting to show how truly evil it is, but I guess it's just too tough and ugly so we just won't go forward and talk about it anymore, that to me is a recon. Glad to see you want to so easily cancel me out for my opinion.
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"to use a fantasy setting to show how truly evil it is"
They never did that and were never going to do that, the majority of content producers aren't since what you're asking for is straight up bile filled misery porn with little to no net good.
You can have evils to overcome and show, as long as the good it produces outweighs it. Constantly spamming slavery was accomplishing none of that, and the writers were tired of it.
"Glad to see you want to so easily cancel me out for my opinion."
Have better opinions.
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Keftiu, and what do you think my politics are? Is that what they call a red herring when having a dialogue on a subject, trying to divert attention away from the real subject? You know nothing about who I am.
Rysky, yes it does have me up in arms because Paizo could have chosen a higher path in my opinion, and missed an opportunity to use a fantasy setting to show how truly evil it is, but I guess it's just too tough and ugly so we just won't go forward and talk about it anymore, that to me is a recon. Glad to see you want to so easily cancel me out for my opinion.
Real people suffer just from being exposed to slavery in escapist fantasy because it hits so hard. That is how deep and strong the trauma is.
Paizo decided to care about this real suffering of real people.
I, for one, respect this deeply.
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... you're the one using a bad faith argument, which is especially odd since you made a more accurate statement in your previous post.
I'm not claiming and haven't claimed everyone who is against the change are racist or pro-slavery, though I wouldn't be surprised if some where given the heat, I have said they will have to get their oppression kin fix elsewhere.
You trying to reduce the "toxicity" of people angry at the pro-slavery story camp isn't accomplishing, if anything the opposite, trying to tone police a moral debate isn't going to work out well.
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So let's talk about another pretty big societal problem. Something pretty horrid, evil, and despicable that you still see quite a lot these days. That's right, I'm talking about rape.
If Paizo had said "actually, we don't want to do stories about rapists and the consequences of rape anymore", for some reason I suspect people wouldn't go screaming into the streets about how this destroys the chance to write stories that show how bad rape is.
Why should slavery be any different?
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Paizo's decision about slavery is not that slavery has disappeared from Golarion. The decision is that eradicating slavery is not going to be a quest in new modules and tolerating legal slavery is not going to be an obstacle in those modules. Slavery will be out of sight in other countries. It is rather like how the Worldwound was treated. The Worldwound opened in Sakoris in 4606 AR and the First Mendevian Crusade against it was in 4622 AR. The demons pouring through the Worldwound were a serious issue for all of Golarion. But the modules skipped that proplem until Wrath of the Righteous in 4713 AR. The adventurers in other adventure paths had other quests keeping them busy and never thought about the Mendevian Crusades.
A homebrew campaign can interact with slavery in the setting as the GM and players please. A player can build a slave-liberating champion and liberate slaves.
Or I could give a new PC a Bellflower Agent background in a new Paizo adventure path. my character would explain that he left Cheliax because the authorities were suspicious that he was smuggling slaves to freedom. He would like to still help people obtain freedom but he is keeping his distance from Cheliax and keeping alert against other forms of oppression.
I currently am running Ironfang Invasion and had a quandary. My players were clear that they would not make a peace treaty with the invading hobgoblins so long as the hobgoblins kept slaves. Those slaves were their former neighbors. The default ending of the adventure path is a peace treaty to end the invasion, with the hobgoblins holding some mountainous land stolen from the nation of Nirmathas and no mention of the slaves. Given the new Paizo attitude toward slavery, I decided to start considering more radical ideas for eliminating slavery in Ironfang territory. I will probably alter the hobgoblin worship of Hadregash, a god of conquest and slavery, in order to make them less fanatic about slave-holding, and they will agree to free all slaves as a condition of the treaty. This was my own decision, not mandated by Paizo.
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Keftiu, and what do you think my politics are? Is that what they call a red herring when having a dialogue on a subject, trying to divert attention away from the real subject? You know nothing about who I am.
There's a word for people who want fantasies about entire races of people they can slay. Paizo's elected to get away from that - the hobgoblins and orcs whose 2e depiction you're bemoaning - because the old fantasy tropes are and always have been racist as hell about it.
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Keftiu, and what do you think my politics are? Is that what they call a red herring when having a dialogue on a subject, trying to divert attention away from the real subject? You know nothing about who I am.There's a word for people who want fantasies about entire races of people they can slay. Paizo's elected to get away from that - the hobgoblins and orcs whose 2e depiction you're bemoaning - because the old fantasy tropes are and always have been racist as hell about it.
Please explain how all the old fantasy tropes are racist as hell?
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Actually they have, that was the crux of the argument on Folca for one thing.
Technically that one was more about child abuse (which may have included sexual components), whereas I was trying to make the distinction that people going "man, Paizo really doesn't have on-screen rape enough" would have been rightfully criticized for how fetishistic that is.
But yes, we did see tons of similar arguments for Folca.
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And these are the only reasons people would have slavery in a story of course. You're definitely being dismissive. Personally, I'd like my characters to be able to curb stomp priests of Asmodeus, because they're villains. They don't have to be slavers but it does make them pretty big villains and sets the stakes high. If used right, Slavery can be good for a story. Consider that example."Just like how you jump to label people as racist quickly,"
Y'all need to learn to read, it'll make you come across as less silly.
People will have to get their oppressions kinks off elsewhere, whether they're pro slavery, need a slavery fix or need an anti-slavery fix, doesn't matter, you shall have to seek elsewhere.
Well, that does seem to fall under the anti-slavery fix TBT.
Nothing wrong about it IMO. Risky was just stating that Paizo will not provide this in the future. Which is exactly what the company decided.
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Please explain how all the old fantasy tropes are racist as hell?Keftiu, and what do you think my politics are? Is that what they call a red herring when having a dialogue on a subject, trying to divert attention away from the real subject? You know nothing about who I am.There's a word for people who want fantasies about entire races of people they can slay. Paizo's elected to get away from that - the hobgoblins and orcs whose 2e depiction you're bemoaning - because the old fantasy tropes are and always have been racist as hell about it.
The stereotypical orc or goblin is a dark-skinned savage from outside of classic European-inspired fantasy 'civilization,' either invading you to menace you or possessing land and loot you want to take - and either way, they have no culture, no morals, and exist to die on your righteous swords. They are the monstrous Other, the colonialist pulp image of dangerous indigenous peoples who our daring heroes can kill and steal from while maintaining the moral high ground. "Real people" have priests; orcs and goblins have shamans, and lean on every "evil, primitive tribal" caricature out there.
2e has done the smart thing and started actually treating people-shaped things that can talk, think, feel, pray, and do all the other people things... as people, rather than cannon fodder and acceptable targets.
To say that it makes you upset that there aren't entire races of folk consigned to be Evil monsters in the same post where you demand slavery exist in this setting - and I should note, Pathfinder 1e absolutely loved to have folk from Fantasy Africa and the Fantasy Middle East be both slaves and slavers, which is its whole own can of worms - and it suggests a pretty startling lack of awareness of these issues, of how the traditional western high fantasy mold has historically been welcoming to cis straight white dudes and pretty actively hostile to anyone else.
EDIT: I always recommend these blog posts from a few years back, when there was a big moment of public discourse around the racist coding of orcs.
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Keftiu covered it much better than I.
Coding, and the fact the "I'm going to kill this humanoid because of their skin color" is racist. like, it doesn't get any more racist.
Your "defense" of monsters just mires you further, it's not a defense at all, claiming someone is a monster, othering, is also racism.
In Pathfinder alone Orcs and Goblins are humanoids with humanoid mind sets, not eldritch unthinking monsters.
And then you get into the history of them throughout media...
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There is also that explaining why humanoid people are "inherently evil" tend to go to really weird directions in attempt to "have it make sense and not be about racism".
Like Urdefhans are daemon created biological weapons that exist purely to kill and create new ways to kill in daemons' goal to cause the apocalypse. (though to be fair to pathfinder, even Urdefhans are shown to free will to have life and desires outside of just killing for sake of killing)
Orcs, goblins and such never really had convincing reason for it besides some narratives on "they are just inherently aggressive and violent" which is its own kind of skeevy racist sounding talk considering some people claim that in real life.
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Keftiu covered it much better than I.
Coding, and the fact the "I'm going to kill this humanoid because of their skin color" is racist. like, it doesn't get any more racist.
Your "defense" of monsters just mires you further, it's not a defense at all, claiming someone is a monster, othering, is also racism.
In Pathfinder alone Orcs and Goblins are humanoids with humanoid mind sets, not eldritch unthinking monsters.
And then you get into the history of them throughout media...
ahh quick to label a person a racist I see when there is a dialogue going on. Nice, I'll keep that in mind in the future. Just label a person racist cause we know that term gets passed around like witch in the 1600s or the proverbial scarlet letter.
SO when somebody here disagrees, let's label them a racist or some other name and move them in that "kind" of batch grouping to minimize and shut out any questions or dialogue they might want to have.
When did I ever talk about the mindless slaughter of anyone or anything in my dialogue here....please go back. Am I critical of traditional monsters and humanoids all being playable ...yes, based on the Golarion history and lore.
But as I read the comments to infer that because I disagree with the decision being made that I am also somehow racist or even something worse I disagree and you can go ahead and message me and I am happy to exchange phone numbers and we can have a real adult dialogue on this.
Perhaps Paizo needs to just create a whole new campaign world that shatters the paradign that makes the world more inclusive with all these comments mentioned.
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The kink discussion is dragging things off topic, folks. I don't know that it's productive.
Arklore, by all means - how are orcs and goblins "supposed" to be, in your words? I've made my case pretty thoroughly, so surely your perspective could use the spotlight. What's the issue with the 2e changes?