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?

  • Dessa [she/her]
    ·
    6 months ago

    I may have to check this out. Is commonweal a series name or a book name

    • Mardoniush [she/her]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Series name by Graydon Saunders. The first book is a deconstruction of military fantasy. The second and third a deconstruction of Magic School. After that it sort of merges as the Big(er) Bad becomes less of a threat on the horizon.

      Be warned in that the writing is deliberately opaque and obtuse, as if it was a direct translation from the Commonweal language (for example, there is gender in the language/society (broadly matriarchal in the local area), but it very, very rarely comes up, to the point that we still don't know the gender of some main characters, if they have a gender.) There are almost no info dumps unless a local citizen needs to be infodumped.