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Can Colonialiam be stripped from the traditional "elves n orcs" high fantasy in any meaningful way? (hexbear.net)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Lately, we've seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming "race" into "species" and "ancestry," and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).

Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines -- If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god's decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.

Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

I think it's certainly possible, it's Sci Fi but Star Trek has a bunch of different species of humanoid who interact and exchange cultures and coexist and there's less of the biological determinism we see in traditional fantasy. It does lend itself to a more materialist view because of the science part of science fiction but I think it could be done with fantasy.