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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest&nbsp; 85555" data-source="post: 9434797">If I have a critique it would be the writer ought to have included mention of non-mnonsterous colonizers. Not because monstrous ones are a bad trope but because it just leaves out another interesting choice. But I don't think having monstrous colonizers in a fantasy RPG is a problem. Monsters as a trope exist because they are exciting and stir deep primal fears in us. Those can be used in any number of ways. It isn't bad to have monsters that are well, monstrous. And when people suggest that is an icky trope, I feel it is important to push back because having that on the table is an important tool in a fantasy RPG This can be interesting and fun. Is it more powerful? I don't particularly think so. Whether the campaign is 'powerful' will come down to execution, and not simply whether the GM subverts a trope (and given that this trope has been pretty well subverted in recent years, it is certainly not going to be surprising). That is almost old hat at this point. The campaign I mentioned where the elves were colonizing land inhabited by druids and ogre tribes had effectively been relegated to the fringes, that was one I ran in the mid-2000s for example. I ran a similar campaign just before that where the players were kobolds living in a continent conquered by humans. I put out an RPG in about 2012 or so that had similar type so of handling of the various races (i.e. not doing what was expected with them), and even then one comment I would hear was that twisting tropes like that was kind of all the rage, and it seemed like I was just jumping on a trend (I wasn't, I just liked what I was doing with the different races, but I did understand the critique and why people would make it). And to be clear I don't think that makes the trope uninteresting or unfun----I think part of why tropes stick is their utility in storytelling and entertainment. My view is people are sometimes too bent on being one step ahead of things when I feel often what works best is stuff that has proven successful in play (and twisting tropes like that can certainly be successful in play, but so can sticking with bog standard tropes).</blockquote>

Verification