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<blockquote data-quote="Thommy H-H" data-source="post: 9733085" data-attributes="member: 6797019">I don't really believe there was ever a time when the canonical expectation was that all members of a given species (excepting various Outsiders) would be fair game for merciless slaughter. I cut my teeth on the little-remembered (revised) Basic D&amp;D introductory game Dragon Quest in the mid-90s, and even that had an orc in one adventure whom you could free from imprisonment and would join the party for a bit.I think the main change in the last decade has been to move away from proscriptive alignments and uncomfortable bioessentialist implications - all orcs being violent and &quot;savage&quot; raiders, etc. - but even back in the day there weren't whole cultures considered irredeemably evil, if only because of the occasional heroic exception. I mean, that's what Drizzt was, right? Proof that the drow weren't &quot;biologically evil&quot;. It was only ever players and DMs that treated an evil alignment in a stat block as a license to murder.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Thommy H-H, post: 9733085, member: 6797019"] I don't really believe there was ever a time when the [I]canonical[/I] expectation was that all members of a given species (excepting various Outsiders) would be fair game for merciless slaughter. I cut my teeth on the little-remembered (revised) Basic D&D introductory game Dragon Quest in the mid-90s, and even that had an orc in one adventure whom you could free from imprisonment and would join the party for a bit. I think the main change in the last decade has been to move away from proscriptive alignments and uncomfortable bioessentialist implications - all orcs being violent and "savage" raiders, etc. - but even back in the day there weren't whole cultures considered irredeemably [I]evil[/I], if only because of the occasional heroic exception. I mean, that's what Drizzt was, right? Proof that the drow weren't "biologically evil". It was only ever players and DMs that treated an evil alignment in a stat block as a license to murder. [/QUOTE]

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