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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7743479" data-attributes="member: 4937">Why can't you have both?   Why does it have to be either/or and not both/and?So, people keep using goblins as an example.   Let me explain what makes you "people" in my game.There are seven races and only seven races that are people in my game.   The first is the fairy and their kindred.   Broadly, this includes all the free will individuals that sprung from the tree of life, and includes the fairy, the genii, the gods themselves and (usually) the natural offspring off those beings such as the giants (though this is a big point of philosophical debate in some circles).  Out of respect, The Gods are usually put in a separate category.   The fairy are the "eldest and youngest" race, and are basically "little gods".  The other six races of "free people" were created as a result of a treaty that ended the God's War, and are the joint creation of many gods and were granted by the gods "free will", something that no other beings have.  Note that there is a philosophical dispute in some quarters whether fairies or all fairies really qualify as free people, and in some quarters they are not treated as such, but are classed like the gods generally are by their dominion.  And there is a further dispute among the created six over whether all fairies are really "people" because the fairy tree of little gods extends down to things with minds no greater than cats or mice, and even the fairies themselves tend to treat sprites, petals, and atoms more like pets than people.  The six races of free peoples don't even necessarily treat themselves like people at all times.  Slavery is common.  Murder is common.  Racial and ethnic animosity even between the races is common.  Not everyone thinks that is a problem.   Quite a few are like "survival of the fittest: deal with it".   The extreme end of that spectrum is the goblins.   The other five created races have a tendency to view the goblins as "not people".   The reason for this is that one of the fundamental things that is supposed to be true about free peoples is that they can worship any gods that they please.  But the goblins pretty much worship just one family of deities with a definite "survival of the fittest" outlook.  Everyone agrees that at one time goblins were people, but some people are like "They aren't people anymore."   And it's not a trivial dispute, because everyone agrees that present day goblins don't look like goblins used to look like (although no one really remembers what they used to look like).  The goblins as a people engage in selective breeding and perhaps magical manipulation of themselves.  They're changed, both physically and many believe in demeanor.   They are convinced that they are inherently superior to all other races, and will one day wipe the other ones out.  They long ago even tried to do that very thing.   So opinions vary by region.   Some regions treat them as people and they're even reasonably integrated into normal life, albeit often as second class citizens.  Other regions they are treated as less than animals, and as basically monsters.   As a campaign level secret, I don't casually answer this question for players, but I think it is a really big hint what I think that goblins are PC race and that non-people are not.  In practice, goblins have been treated as people by my players and not as monsters.  The PC's have a goblin henchmen.  Twos PC were in fact  hobgoblins.  They've encountered goblins in the wilderness and had complex interactions with them, and they've faced off against a tribe of goblins as the bad guys they have to kill.  But also probably the greatest act of mercy they ever did was when the PC's agreed to let a hobgoblin mercenary go with the promise that if he'd cooperate and the make himself scarce, they'd not kill him.  Considering how brutal they are normally to prisoners, this is a big deal.  They probably treated him better than they have any human.There are a couple of things to note about the above.   Since freedom is ideologically based in most people's minds on worshiping gods freely, the non-religious and monotheists are in some areas treated as non-people, or at least really weird.  So there is ideological persecution going on as well, and it's not obvious sometimes whose right or wrong because many of those religious minorities are weird and dangerous.But there are things that are expressly not people as well, and everyone agrees about it.  It's not even a point of philosophical debate.  On Kyrnn, Minotaurs are people.   On Korrel, Minotaurs are decidedly not people.   They are actually basically bodily extensions of a fiend lord, and they are incapable of acting in any fashion other than to express his will.   The same is true of Gnolls and Kobolds and Dragons.  They literally do not have free will.  They can't be any alignment that is contrary to their creator.  They are sentient and express the willfulness of their creator, and squabble with each other and so forth, but they are not people.  If you venerate their creator you still might respect them as representatives of their creator, but if you do it won't be on the ideological basis of all people having been created with certain inherent rights and dignities, because they literally don't have those dignities and don't share the same creation.   So you might find a race of not people that aren't evil, and you might respect them on the basis of who created them - the Phanaton were created by Dianciana the Flower Goddess for example - but they don't qualify as "free people" anymore.Where this gets really complicated for the philosophers and cultures of Korrel is hybrids.  What do you do with someone who has complex parentage?  For example, Sorcerers are magical precisely because they have some sort of heritage other than what is typical of the free peoples.   Fey or divine or genii parentage that might be mostly ok, but what about dragon?  What about something weird and unusual like being pulled as a baby from the body of a newly undead being or worse fiendish parentage (or depending on your perspective celestial parentage)?   What if your granddad was a Slaad, or your father was a Modron?  Are you still people?  In some areas, if they find out you are a sorcerer they will for a multitude of reasons just burn you at the stake.   In other areas, they'll take more of a "judge them by the content of their character" stand.  What is important about this is I am not intending any direct commentary on the real world.  There is actually vastly more diversity in this than in the real world.   Real world racial and ethnic problems are comparatively trivial, and I'm not really interested in exploring them in my play.  What I am interested in exploring is the big picture of that, which I think expresses itself in a very intimate way - how do two beings relate to each other.  What I'm asking is not for an allegory of the real world, but for the players to deal with complexity including problems that don't exist in the real world.  I'm much more interested how we treat anyone that is different than us for any reason than I am in something I consider a comparatively trivial problem like how we treat someone who looks very slightly different (amazingly slightly different) than us.  Yes, I know in the real world people are hung up on that and it's been and continues to be a huge problem, but I consider it just one special case with a pretty obvious answer and not the be all end all of morality.</blockquote>

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