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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6201400" data-attributes="member: 42582">I seem to be in the minority who enjoyed the thread, moslty because it canvassed an option - non-modernist explanations of society and environment - that I think are an important part of the fantasy tradition, but are so often ignored in D&D setting material.Speak for yourself!I've recently been reading a lot of REH Conan. A settig modelled on Hyboria would also incorporate REH's virulent racism and the biological concepts through which he expresses it. I think a degree of reactionariness is inherent in fantasy - it's an essentially backwards-looking genre - but I think I prefer Tolkien's to REH's when it comes to setting the basic parameters for play.Which means I'd rather the game build in supernatural or ad hoc social and environmental explanations by default, and then allow different groups to particularise these as they wish (including perhaps by their own versio of scientific explanation); than build in some default socilogical and biological explanations that, simply in virtue of that connection to realworld explanations, force me to confront the real-world politics of the designers.I think this is an interesting point. For me it's about whether it goes to the core or the periphery. As you note, Tolkien's philology is essentially peripheral to the mythic resonance of the work; if a fantasy author similarly expresses some sort of nerdish interest in architecture or metalworking I don't think that would bother me.But scientific biology and "scientific" social theory - at least in my experience - tend to make their way from the periphery into the centre. And I at least don't want that as the default. The default should be "anything goes" - and scientific explanation is one version of "anything" that some tables might want to use.I don't think so. When Sam puts on the Ring, and is able to listen to the orcs complaining about their lives as soldiers and expressing their hope for the future, I think this is meant to evoke a degree of empathy on the part of the reader. And Gandalf praises Bilbo to Frodo for not having killed Gollum when he had the chance.Orc warriors are legitimate targets of violence, of course - but that is just the traditional morality of warfare. And I don't think it's a coincidence that we never see orc women or babies. Tolkien is not really inviting us to speculate on the more subtle anthropology of orcdom.This I basically agree with, at least as the default. (And I think it is Tolkien's solution too.)I don't mind (and have GMed) games which treat orcs in a more serious anthropological way, but this shouldn't be the default for D&D, and when that sort of game is being played then we don't need any shorthand to tell us what to do with the orc babies than we need it to tell us what to do with the bandit king's baby.I think you may be confusing W&M with Races & Classes.</blockquote>

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