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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7743631" data-attributes="member: 4937">It seems to be coming down to whether humanoids in your game are inherently humans with bumps on their forehead or big ears or some such.Or to put it another way, do your PC live in a 'Star Wars' world where no matter how differently shaped the alien thing is, it's not actually alien at all but just a funny looking human?Because I think you are willing to concede that the xenomorphs from the movie 'Alien' are, if not easily classified as evil are at least easily classified as always enemies.  So there is I think something that is a monster in your mind.  You haven't banished the idea of implacable enemy entirely, because you always hedge that you are talking about 'humans'.Even the 'people' of my game are not human.  For example, elves.  Elves age 1/9th as slowly as humanity.  They are inherently more individualistic and do not readily form close social associations or strong governments.  Left to their own devices, elves would solve most conflicts with themselves by simply moving away from whatever irritated them.  They have an inherent magical ability to commune with animals and plants from infanthood.  They can process high tannin foods like acorns without special food processing.  Many can empathically communicate with animals before they learn to talk, and could spend a decade toddling around the forest living off the land before they actually start talking with their parents.  That gives them an entirely different take on family and society than humans, and an entirely different relationship to nature.  They are an arboreal people, light of frame and lithe of limb, capable of climbing easily and sleeping on a tree limb comfortably.  They are a twilight people with cat like eyes that can see far into the night but which are often dazzled by the direct sun.   They can manufacture pretty much all their own essential nutrients and are quite capable of living off a vegan diet without much difficulty or making a special effort to acquire food stuffs like yeasts or legumes to get nutrients that are rare in planets.  They are fragile and prone to disease, so they rarely live in dense populations.  Their emotional life is fundamentally different than humans.  Some things that humans feel great passion about, say sex and death, elves view coolly, while things that are intellectual for humans are matters of emotional passion for elves.  An elf fundamentally needs to experience beauty in the same way a human needs to breathe or drink water.  An elf confined to a dark dank place will die in a few days even if they have food and drank.  They cannot be enslaved: they'll just die.  They cannot be made to work in horrid conditions: they'll just die.  That's not human.  It's a person, but it's not a human.  And it's not just a person that has a different culture.  They are biologically distinct and much of their culture has to be distinct from what humans consider normal.Consider the Idreth, one of my homebrew races.  Idreth have a collective consciousness.   Unlike other races, they are usually reincarnated - something rare in humans.  They are born knowing, or in the parlance of my world they are "Born Old".  They dimly remember their past lives and more dimly the lives of all Idreth.  They are capable of speech from infancy and they are capable and frequently do plot and plan their future lives as well as their present one, setting in motion multi-generational plans that they intend to be a part of.  They live primarily to gain knowledge and unique experiences.   Material goods have little value to them beyond their immediate utility.  They are pragmatic and little concerned with aesthetics beyond what makes for good function.  They are frail and avoid battle.  They have never founded a single nation of their own, and the largest institutions that they control might be equivalent to monasteries or universities.  They do not require or specially prize the association of their own kind, nor for that matter anything necessarily resembling what we'd think of as a social life, possibly because they are to some extent in communion with a mass mind.  That's a person, but it's not human.Goblins are at least as weird.  They are the product of what we'd think of magical genetic manipulation.  They have deliberately evolved themselves into something that even they think is grotesque because it's useful.  They have distinct physical castes created to serve different functions.  When you say that they are basically human, it would be like saying that a branch of humanity that had spent centuries genetically modifying itself until it no longer looked human, acted human, or had normal human motivations was human.   In many ways, goblins are anti-elves.  They can't process vegetable matter very well, and are obligate carnivores.  They are robust and disease resistant and prefer to live in filthy warrens practically on top of each other.  They are highly gregarious and social.  Their eyes emit rays which bounce off of what they view and allow them to see like they had radar even in perfect darkness.  By contrast, this means that they are nearly blind in full sunlight, viewing that world as being white the way we view darkness as black and scarcely able to see more than a few feet.  They live very short lives, mature rapidly, breed quickly, and generally do not value individual life.  What matters to them is the success of the group.  Their own lives and the lives of others they treat as fairly cheap, perhaps because biologically speaking they are fairly cheap.  They practice cannibalism because they can and perhaps need to, because meat can't be wasted.  They kill and eat elves because they know they can't enslave them.  The people of Korrel warn their children to be obedient "or the goblins might eat you".   Well it is I think instructive that goblin parents warn their children to be good with the same warning, and they mean it.That is a person, but it's not human.And that's the races that are considered people in my game.</blockquote>

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