- @contemplate-everything
Hah, I had forgotten about him, but when it comes to "The Gods are Racist," he isn't what I had in mind. (I'll tag in @samueldays and @morlock-holmes as well.)
To put it simply, in any fantasy setting in which there are multiple sapient species (to call them 'races' suggests a smaller difference between them than there is, in my opinion), we must wrestle with the question of why there is any species less intelligent, less kind, and shorter-lived than the smartest, kindest, longest-lived humanoids.
There are a whole lot of different perspectives we can take on this, which makes it a fertile creative territory.
There are, broadly, four major reasons a species can be evil (or 'evil') in a fantasy setting: environment, culture, innate, or selected.
In a friend's setting, orcs are not less intelligent or inherently more bloodthirsty than humans, but have been pushed onto more marginal lands that have less productivity, making it harder for them to develop 'civilized' agricultural states. They end up more likely to raid as well, as their economic production for advanced goods is lower.
A species could also be otherwise normal, but are widely hooked on evil magic drugs that just aren't available in other areas, or have a local environmental pressure that murders kind people.
A species may worship an evil god and exist within a culture of self-sustaining evil norms, where social approval is based on being evil and altruistic people are considered exploitable morons. A member of that culture has, as their entire life experience, expectations formed on this basis.
A species may have a fundamental evil resource conflict with another species. For instance, a vampire who must murder one human a year to survive would have to be crazy moral in other ways (such as, I dunno, holding closed a gate to the infernal realms?) not to come out, on balance, quite evil just by surviving.
Alternatively, a species that has a very high fertility might quickly exhaust local carrying capacity and come into resource conflicts with neighbors more often.
This is basically an AI safety argument. A species could be designed to enjoy cruelty more, or to be more xenophobic, or more paranoid, or to have more bloodlust or less inhibition, just as an AI could be designed to be a paperclip maximizer. In a fantasy setting it can be an absolute binding, but it could easily just be an increased frequency. Imagine having an implant in your head that rewards being a bad person.
A species might also not be innately more evil, but have greater risk factors, such as a natural craving for power and complexity, or an ability to consciously control their own sense of empathy for others.
A species (such as fiends) may be impossible to become or impossible to remain as without being evil. Thus, the entire population of that species consists of evil people, or people who were once extremely evil.
I actually like all of these, as they provide a rich palette to paint with and can be used to create morally-challenging scenarios when used together. Giving orcs the capability to be good but having a tougher time of it will tie the clerics and paladins in knots - but also more clearly separates them from the neutral and evil characters.
And let's give four reasons for their existence as well.
In our world, humans ended up being the only sapient species, but in a world with magic, evolution might go in very different directions. It could be simply that no one made goblins on purpose, but a sapient species with short lifespans, small resource usage, and high fertility has an evolutionary edge in many regions, particularly when technology levels are low.
On the flip-side, elves living for such a long time allows them to access more magic and more complex magic, resulting in a feedback loop in environments where magic resources are rich. Same for intelligence, which is used for developing and casting spells - but also for finding mutually-beneficial arrangements.
In a magic-evolutionary environment, it's possible that the species create the gods rather than the other way around, so they tend to (probably accidentally) create deities that reflect their strategies and tactics, which then reinforce them both culturally and environmentally.
Evil deities are, well, evil. In the interests of spreading their evil influence, it would make sense to create evil sapient creatures, even if a handful of them will defect to good. The suffering of these creatures matters little to their creators, as evil deities are evil. This seems to be the usual reasoning.
If gods need prayers, then a logical thing to do is to deliberately create sapient species that will worship you. Creating an evil species is like creating a brainwashed population, only it's down to the innate level so it's even more effective. This evil species also won't have moral objections to spreading your worship by conquering the rest of the planet.
Alternatively, species may not be equally easy to create. Creating an elf species might cost Divine Points, which then can't be used for shaping mountains or adding oceans or building temples or something. It might also be high-risk - long life may mean low fertility, which could be devastating if there's some kind of depopulation event.
4. Mortals & Evil Mortals
In this scenario, both the long-lived species (like elves) and the short-lived or 'evil' species (like goblins) were deliberately engineered on purpose, probably by evil wizards. Who was going to stop them? Paladins? That sounds like a quest!
This situation may have occurred much earlier, in a more advanced body-hopping fantasy-transhumanist civilization, where elves were high-end 'sleeves' and goblins were cheap and expendable bodies that people would exit once the time period was up. Then that civilization collapsed, and the body-hopping technology was lost... until now...
This gives us multiple options for a "The Gods are Racist" campaign.
1. Undoing the Dark Gods' Handiwork - A group of adventurers set out to remove the evil influence that the Dark Ones exert over orcs and goblins, and possibly increase their lifespan and intelligence to be similar to that of humans (or even elves). The Good gods support this quest.
BRANCH: The Dark Ones do exist and do corrupt the orcs, but the original technology used by the body-hopping civilization to create orcs is discovered, calling into question just who or what the good deities are, since this is completely incompatible with the creation mythology.
BRANCH: Removing the evil influence is possible (and successful), but increasing the lifespan is not, imposing a moral dilemma.
2. Undoing the Gods' Handiwork - A group of scientific-rationalist transhumanist adventurers challenge the deities, which in a more Greek god type way, have made the different species different without appropriate moral evaluation.
BRANCH: Turns out the Greek gods are just very powerful and very obnoxious wizards that have become full of themselves over the millennia. No higher entity is discovered with certainty. Subsequently voluntary species-change technology is introduced; only thanks to vanquishing the wizards is its energy cost economically feasible.
BRANCH: Turns out the Greek gods were once mortal and they would really like to retire from this deity thing. They scout the adventurers as their replacements, who end up having to make a lot of similar decisions due to similar resource constraints, just like the last batch and the batch before that.
3. Elf Supremacy - A group of adventurers find a magical device able to turn other sapients into elves. They discover this when they accidentally use it on themselves.
BRANCH: This is part of a plot by the Elf Deity (who is Evil) to transform everyone into elves, thus taking all worship in the entire world for himself. The party must root out and stop this vile Elf Conspiracy; unfortunately being an elf is considered so desirable that the conspiracy has many backers and this proves difficult. They end up having to take assistance from rival evil deities.
BRANCH: At first they use this device for immense profit, because so many people want to be elves, before discovering the effects are contagious, unleashing the (involuntary) Elf (Transformation) Plague. It turns out this was why the technology was not used before, and they must embark on a quest to stop it on behalf of the Elf Deity, before the other deities go to war.
BRANCH: As a subversion, it turns out there’s nothing especially dangerous about the technology at all. The adventurers spend the rest of the campaign increasing their opportunities for their company, Elf Inc., to make huge amounts of money, and occasionally being challenged by conservative elements in other societies as they expand their markets.
4. Newly Unequal - All the species were equal until just a few hundred years ago.
BRANCH: This was the result of an elf supremacist wizard using magic to transfer other species' positive attributes to elves. The quest to stop him failed. Fortunately, this power is concentrated in a series of physical artifacts that can be destroyed. Elves aren't even a 'real thing,' but rather are descendants of a specific kingdom at the time of the switch, which has used this transferred power to subjugate the other 'species'.
BRANCH: Every kingdom in the world is still trying to figure out what happened as the global political situation has been rapidly destabilizing. It turns out that actually, this is what the species are normally like (in the absence of intervention), and a series of magical stations built by an ancient empire drained energy from more powerful species and transmitted it to less powerful species for the benefit of ideology and political stability. The adventurers face a moral choice in reactivating it, not least because the effect will rapidly kill some of the oldest members of the high-power species.
