Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9637323" data-attributes="member: 4937">As far back as Dragon magazine articles on the Goblin deities as opposed to the orc deities, I picked up on this.  I was getting old enough that I was starting to wonder where all this kitchen sink diversity came from and whether it made sense as a story of a world.  In Tolkien orcs and goblins were just different ethnic groups (as it were) of orcs.  But D&D was making them increasingly distinct, while at the same time just kind of leaning into "They're orcs.  You know what they are.  Everyone's read Tolkien" while not acknowledging these weren't Tolkien orcs at all.  So around 1989 or so I came to the conclusion, "You know, D&D goblins are cool.  They have this caste system.  They come in all sorts of sizes and shapes.  They are part of a larger race of "goblinkind".  Orcs are just inferior more savage dumber hobgoblins with nothing scary about them or nothing to make them unique.  Goblins are the terror of dark tunnels.  Orcs are just rip offs of Tolkien.  I don't need two races of ugly evil cannibal creatures.  I can just have goblins."  So I never had to define what makes Orcs unique, and I had ready answers for what made Goblins unique: they are obligate carnivores, they were magically altered or through selective breeding or both to be these evil little gits, they have this complex caste system, their head deity thinks he was usurped from his throne as king of the gods, and he just wants every other race subjugated or gone. They think they are ugly even in their own eyes because this wasn't their original shape."  There was this whole tumbling out non-human culture that didn't have to be based on any real-world inspiration.  It was a science fiction sort of thing.  Goblins were a sort of aliens, like the more brutally uplifted client species in David Brin's "Uplift" universe, where they'd been hammered into tools rather than being respected as people.That actually ended up informing how I thought of all the races in my game.  If I couldn't figure out a way to make them alien and also complex persons without leaning in on inspiration from real world cultures, I didn't use them in my game.  I had no real worries about being "racist", it's just I also wanted to use real world cultures freely as inspirations for the humans in my largely humancentric world.  It made no sense for a whole race to be equivalent to a human ethnicity and would have been redundant anyway.</blockquote>

Verification