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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theory of Games" data-source="post: 9724420" data-attributes="member: 7042201">That's a piece of it: the reality is - for LotR and D&D - it isn't about "Bioessentialism". It's about the gods: they created each races to be exactly as they wanted them to be.Never heard of either.Something different. Tolkien's & Gygax's Orcs are evil because an evil god made them that way. Lolth seduced the Drow into becoming Dark elves. 75% of the races and monsters were created by the gods to be exactly what the they wanted, with the remaining 25% manufactured by some insane wizard with too much time & money on their hands. You won't find many (if any) mention of "Evolution" or "Natural Selection" in most Fantasy rpgs or the Fantasy fiction that inspired them. What's easier: creating a genetic lineage of various species paired with a timeline spanning tens of thousands of years that pinpoints each evolutionary "jump" of each species OR --- just saying "the gods and magic did it"? The latter is far less complicated and allows the author(s) more time to focus on the stories, settings, or monster manuals. Well - "Monstrous" wouldn't normally be identified as "relatively normal" for most people. Outside of Sesame Street or a cartoon <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60f.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":sneaky:" title="Sneaky    :sneaky:"  data-smilie="21"data-shortname=":sneaky:" /> Hmmm. More like "mythological tropes as species". Tolkien & Gygax both were inspired by ancient mythology like that of Sumer and Greece. The monsters weren't just monsters, they were usually normal people transformed by a god into monsters due to some flaw (of the victim, or sometimes of the god). But myth was teaching lessons that escapes most ttrpgs. You can create, play and run races however your group likes. Never let outsider poopoo on your fun - and they will if you let them.</blockquote>

Verification