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<blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 7726440" data-attributes="member: 6683613">The comment was mostly a joke. In my campaign, demons are not widely known to be Pure, Living Evil, and tieflings are the ruling class of one particular nation, so the reaction in most places is &quot;decadent foreign aristocrat with unnatural breeding customs&quot; -- think Habsburg, not Faust.But as you say, Planescape is an intentionally cosmopolitan world. The fact that tieflings, and indeed full-blooded fiends, can be found casually browsing the market stalls alongside creatures of every other description is very much playing with the standard expectations by flipping them on their head. It's like a setting where dwarves live in trees, or halflings are cannibals. Given the genre context, those are not and cannot be neutral worldbuilding facts. Our prior understanding gives them extra meaning.And yes, some players do have designs to play with expectations like this. But others really just the powers, or maybe the badass look, without embracing the tiefling race as a whole. So my honest reaction would be &quot;Are you sure tiefling is what you want? Let's talk about what you're looking for in this character.&quot;</blockquote>

[QUOTE="TheCosmicKid, post: 7726440, member: 6683613"] The comment was mostly a joke. In my campaign, demons are not widely known to be Pure, Living Evil, and tieflings are the ruling class of one particular nation, so the reaction in most places is "decadent foreign aristocrat with unnatural breeding customs" -- think Habsburg, not Faust. But as you say, Planescape is an intentionally cosmopolitan world. The fact that tieflings, and indeed full-blooded fiends, can be found casually browsing the market stalls alongside creatures of every other description is very much playing with the standard expectations by flipping them on their head. It's like a setting where dwarves live in trees, or halflings are cannibals. Given the genre context, those are not and cannot be [I]neutral[/I] worldbuilding facts. Our prior understanding gives them extra meaning. And yes, some players do have designs to play with expectations like this. But others really just the powers, or maybe the badass look, without embracing the tiefling race as a whole. So my honest reaction would be "Are you sure tiefling is what you want? Let's talk about what you're looking for in this character." [/QUOTE]

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