I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can't have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered "good" in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of "oh shit wait wtf am I saying". I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of "sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered" is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it's high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That's it I guess. That's the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren't built from around breaking into others' homes to kill them and take their stuff.
I've had this conversation a good dozen times; always evil races put me off games real hard sometimes. When I run standard fantasy settings in RPGs, even fi there are like "orc raiders" or what have you, they at least have reasons for doing what they do! If you're a bunch of mercenary adventurers, no matter how "good" you are, you're probably going to run into someone you are at odds with enough to come to blows with. I don't see why so many people are attached to "the orcs are evil because they are", it strikes me as such a boring excuse.
This issue is also why I love running the FFG Star Wars rpg, because aside from the built in huge narrative flexibility, you've got the blatantly Nazi Empire and shit like pirate slavers who are not a problem to blast on sight. Even fun for campaigns where the party are playing morally ambiguous smugglers and pirates, since they inevitably end up shooting the fascists anyway! Hell, I've run setups for "evil" party campaigns (playing sith, inquisitor recruits etc) with 100% expectations for the players to defect and start shooting fascists, because there's been a 100% success record of that happening in every "evil" themed campaign too.
Sith also have the benefit of embodying evil destroying itself. They eventually always butcher one another. Their social darwinism cannot let them do otherwise, any Sith who strays from that actively holds the sith back and weakens them like darth Gravvid who "fell" to the light side in Plageus' view