Evilsandwichman [none/use name]

  • 4 Posts
  • 13 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 12th, 2021

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  • It was so hard for me to grasp at some point over a decade earlier that in the past, in the middle ages and earlier for example, that people would publish all these educational books…and none of the info was copyrighted; literally anyone could find some book published by some random Greek or Arab person and just take all the knowledge, and release their own stuff that just freely builds on the knowledge contained within, or that inventions could be copied by anyone and no one was like ‘pay me for my brilliance’.


  • God, back when I was a kid my father used to be against me playing video games so I’d have to find some free way to game and I just lived on abandonware games. I downloaded games that were either kind of old and came out around the mid-90’s or even earlier, or had just been abandoned; that and a ton of gaming on emulators.

    So many fun old games, sooooo many fun old games. Also lots and lots of ASCII rpg games, lots and lots of ASCII rpg games.








  • Edit: actually I think race essentialism and stereotyping are fine setting and plot elements if they’re actually examined - it is absolutely great fuel for interesting stories and conflicts if the setting doesn’t treat it as universal truth, rather than the products of systems within the setting

    I made a few posts just now discussing this very thing; the idea that a universe’s genetic system where you have beings born evil and then as per that afterlife’s system design is that they also go to an eternity of suffering is inherently evil in and of itself and players should be aware of this issue and actually trying to tackle it, as this very system is more evil than anything they could possibly encounter in the setting. Alternatively a setting could emphasize that there are people (orcs and goblins for example) suffering because the medieval societies around them basically are playing ‘cowboys and Indians’ with their lives and the lives of their families, and the players could basically get sucked in (very easily) by being hired by people to kill off orcs only to realize they’re murdering a local population and that the very medieval societies that hire them are actually quite vicious and barbaric.

    The truth is that neither of the two ideas I’ve had aren’t offensive on one level or another, but I feel a lot of players don’t seem to realize that the old systems and views on race and inherent racial alignment most likely themselves came from people who saw the horrific history in a place like America and only saw basically ‘cowboys and Indians’, or John Wayne movies (never watched any; I’m assuming his movies were probably mostly about him killing tons of native actual American people), divorcing the humanity of the people whose lands were being taken and them being genocided down to even the youngest life.


  • I actually did have a story element I’d intended on dropping on my players’ hands (had my campaign lasted that long); the idea was that in the heavenly realm, divine beings were split in a debate in regards to whether creatures like orcs and goblins were innately evil or whether it was learned, so to create a controlled environment to test their views, they would have goblin babies be raised away from civilization with little influence on them up to the point where they could raise and take care of their own children and then immediately left to their own devices. It would be the players’ duty to watch over this tribe without influencing it and to ensure that no outside influence affects the village; the village does ultimately encounter outside influences, negative ones, but the idea was that regardless of the negative encounters, it doesn’t make the goblins lean towards evil or violence, instead they persevere and maintain a neutral society, perhaps more hostile to strangers, but not ‘evil’. I wanted to make the players think about the nature of evil in traditional fantasy settings and about the innate absurdity of ‘born evil’ races.


  • Unfortunately as I continued to write, I got sleepy and missed a few points I’d actually intended on including in my post; One of my additional issues that I took with orcs and goblins was…where do they go when they die? It makes no sense for them to go to the abyss or hell because that’s where evil beings go and like…orcs and goblins didn’t choose to be evil, so what are they being punished for? If you have a setting where beings can be born evil without the choice to become evil, and they go to hell because ‘they deserve to because they’re evil’, then it kind of means that any actual hero would be trying to tackle this system because there are beings being punished for choices that were never in their hands to begin with.

    You’d end up with a situation where you literally have evil babies, and if as a heroic character you literally see nothing wrong with the world operating like this, then your own character is either evil or insane.