I have a fun headcanon about dwarves: Their bones contain a toxic substance they call Stone-Marrow. Dwarves take pride in a potent Stone-Marrow, as any achievements a dwarf has are even more impressive if they were under the effects of a powerful poison at the time. This also ties into dwarven drinking culture, as alcohol resistance is a sign of strong marrow.

Stone-Marrow is even tied into dwarven funerals. When a dwarf dies, their bones are used to forge metal tools that are handed down to their descendants. The Stone-Marrow causes the metal to grow strong in ways other races can’t recreate, no matter how hard they try. Because the objects made from a dwarf are decided by the dwarf, they are said to carry the will of that dwarf with them. All of this combines to mean that when a dwarf fights with a steel axe left to them by their grandfather, they are literally fighting with their grandfather in their hand.

The only restriction on metals used for dwarven funerals is gold, as only royalty can be turned into dwarven gold. The throne and crown is made of dwarven gold, giving the current king a feeling for the support given by the kings of the past, and the weight of responsibility their position comes with.

So if you ever need an insult to give to an elf, call them “marrow-less!” But never insult a dwarf’s weapons in front of them.

This reminds me a lot of the conflict between dwarves and trolls on the Discworld. Essentially dwarves like to mine and follow seams of valuable minerals. Trolls are silicon based lifeforms that are essentially walking, talking mineral seams. A troll will be very annoyed to wake up to a pickaxe in the ear, and a dwarf will be very annoyed that the seam they found decided to stand up and kick them in the rocks. Do this for a few generations and all of the sudden you have the Battle of Koom Valley brewing. Again.

I miss Terry Pratchett

The thing is, this is still tying culture to race. If there is no racial essentialism to the traits you describe, then there’s no reason to say that some goblin cultures / sub-cultures do understand the concept of property - and disagree with what they understand to be stealing. Etc.

Something that crocodiles do has made them one of the longest lasting species on Earth, specifically by allowing populations to explode after massive disasters.

The way it works is: about 90% of baby crocodiles are eaten by… adult crocodiles. So, when a natural disaster (say) wipes out huge quantities of adults at once, baby crocks find themselves in world mostly without predators that eat them, this living long enough to become adults. These adults go back to eating new babies, preventing the population from running amok.

If you imagine the “evil humanoid species™”—kobolds or whatever—does this, you can imagine why the “good guys” are always surprised at how the “hordes” replenish so quickly after being “culled”. You can also imagine the “culling” of adults erodes and annihilates any culture that might have existed in an endless downward spiral.

But, oh, “that’s OK because they’re cannibals”.

I feel like some of the D&D writers have done a fantastic job of this, even where they have still tacked on the moniker of ‘evil’ as it fits with their system of alignment and planar cosmology. The drow are an especially well developed example of this, essentially taking all the assumptions of a traditional fantasy society and turning them on their heads.

The drow are certainly evil, but they’re not simply evil. They have their own set of values that they typically adhere to pretty fanatically, and a rather alien culture to go with it. The drow have no word for love (ssinssrigg translates to something closer to a possessive fondness), they view successful betrayal as virtuous, and ultimately the advancement of personal power for the glory of Lolth is their greatest ideal. They eat weird lichens, giant crickets, and cave cattle, and drink poison for fun. Despite typically leaning toward chaotic evil, they’re tied into this strict (if fragile) hierarchy that’s ultimately the most important factor in most of their lives.

The thing that jumps right out, of course, is the inversion of the typical gendered power dynamic in fantasy settings in the form of a violent and repressive matriarchy. This is something we literally do not see anywhere on Earth, and which reverses the relationship with institutionalized power on the basis of gender that we typically encounter in our own lives. While I don’t think it serves as any sort of decent example of a matriarchal power structure, I do think that that inversion has some value for bringing the backwardness of our own customs to light.

That, to me, is part of the fun of playing evil creatures: being able to take our own presumptions and shed a light on them from a different direction to make them a little less certain. This is something I tend to lean into with kobolds, goblins, and other similar creatures. To a kobold, their way of life is normal. The world is a dangerous place full of hateful beings that will kill them on sight, why wouldn’t they kill them first, take their stuff, and eat them? A human might protest that kobolds are only exterminated because of their violence toward humanoids, but it becomes something of a circular argument. Besides, a kobold may reason, humans hunt and kill and eat just like we do. What makes them so special? Clearing forests for roads? Indiscriminate slaughter of anything that isn’t compatible with trade and cities?

It may largely boil down to whataboutism in the respect of actually morally defending a kobold, but it does serve as an angle for examining the usually unexamined behavior of adventurers and civilization at large.

Oh. Also. This person’s proposed description of goblins are literally just kender. People in Dragonlance tend to treat them more like obnoxious children with poor impulse control than like monsters.

There is a lot of critic against the whole Good/Evil Lawful/Chaotic alignment and most RPG either don’t have any morality system, or different compass… A simplified D&D style alignment is great for board-gaming where you want to quickly says who is good and who is evil, but isn’t representative of real-life and doesn’t work for RPG, at least at the moment you want to write conflict a bit more complicated than Good versus Evil.

More important than culture, there is the point of view of various factions. Orcs are seen as dangerous barbarians who attack humans, but may-be orcs see human flesh very nourishing, need to give human flesh to kids if we want them to grow big and strong. Elves are at war against human, but may-be human are cutting the trees that elves need to live in. You example regarding property is pretty interesting. We’re on lemmy so let’s get political, in real-life many left-winger would agree that property is robberry Who is evil ? the person deciding that a piece of land and the cattle growing there is their’s or the person who cross that land and hunt that cattle to feed their family ? Isn’t the farmer asking gold to people wanting to feed their family the bad guy of the story ? Look at real-life, there is no such thing as good or evil only people with different opinion and objectives.

So when writing conflict, you need to take into account everybody opinion. Everybody needs the water from the river to water their crop, but the upstream clan decide to build a few canal to water more crop leading to drought in the downstream territories. There is plenty of real-life conflict based on that and it’s a very good pitch to start a war with things more complicated than evil orcs like to eat humans

Goblin culture doesn’t have a concept of “Property”. A stick on the ground and a tool in a locked shed are equally up for grabs if a thing needs doing. They casually take and leave things all over their communities, eat from communal pots, and genuinely Do Not Understand why the Core Races are so Angry and prone to Violence all the time.

This is nice. It reminds me of the Piraha notion of ownership. If they swing by someone’s place to use their boat, but the person isn’t there, they’ll just use the boat anyway. Once they return with a catch, the boat-owner gets the first pick (e.g. the biggest fish), because it’s ‘their boat’. So they still have property rights, but they overcome the potential waste of someone not using a boat.

I have cultures’/ races write-ups in BIND.

Here’s some snippets:

Roleplaying Dwarves

Check then double-check.

• Does this person really know where the lost temple lies? Ask him about the rooves, doors, and other items made of wood. If the temple was lost three centuries ago, those constructions must have degraded. Does his story match?
• Does the beer taste good? A really good beer still tastes good when you drink three in a row.

Roleplaying Elves

The various elven languages have no words for good', bad’, or `evil’. As a result, elves to not fully understand or use these words, even when speaking other languages.

Bread cannot go bad' -- it has mould. They will never call a song good’ – the song feels lively, or sounds like a Sunrise, or makes one think of home. They would never call someone evil' -- they might say destructive’ or useless', or selfish’, but never use language which characterizes anything with such a wide notion as good' or bad’.

If someone says your plan sounds good', make sure to clarify if they mean that they want the results of the plan, or if the plan seems likely to succeed, or if the plan has been stated clearly. And when you hear something is bad’, clarify that too.

Roleplaying Gnomes

Think sideways.

Can we apologize to the mage and make amends instead of killing her? Can you use a hammer to communicate? What else do shoes do?

Gnomes see the world from a different perspective. They look up people’s noses all day. Gnomes see the ceiling while others look down at the ground.

Gnomes travel slowly but it looks like a large space to them. From a relative perspective, a travelling Gnome has travelled farther than the rest of the troupe. Are we counting footsteps or miles? Did you know that every mile has 5.280 feet?

Where did the mage commission her traps? Is the architect still alive? Does he have standard schematics for his traps in a workshop where he builds traps for people?

What kind of contract do you make when you sell someone a trap to guard a dungeon? What happens if I roll a boulder down the stairs? Have these traps killed before? Where do the bodies go? Does someone climb down to get them out and do they use a ladder? If we dig out the stream nearby, we could flood the dungeon.

The latest version is a wip, available here (Chapter 4).

Am I… a goblin?