askchapo

i've been thinking about this lately, as well. it's very difficult. elves n orcs may have deeper origins in northern european folk mythology, but the modern version clearly comes to us filtered through tolkein, and let's face it the guy was steeped in british imperialism and white supremacy. much easier to lampshade it and subvert it, perhaps.

a big part of the problem, i think, is that the characters and their stories are often far removed from the means of production within the game world. it's hard to craft a world in which people are motivated by materialist interests when those interests don't really exist. the economy, such as it even exists, is based on capitalist realist ideas about money and pricing. nobody really worries about who's doing the mining, farming, and so forth that keeps these societies functioning, so the economy is always at a remove or two from the in-game action. monster lairs are filled with treasure for the taking, but that devolves into an accounting problem on character sheets.

and that's before considering how real magic would affect all of that.

so i think you need to start with the worldbuilding and try to imagine a materialist history. how do societies in this world train new characters? will a class-based system inevitably result in class warfare, with one or more of the classes coming to dominate a society and using their institutional power to oppress other classes? how do these societies create and distribute the powerful magic items that everyone wants? like, of course the paladins and witch hunters say that theirs is a battle against evil, but it's really about controlling magic items. the paladin's "detect evil" ability is a projection, an active ability the necessarily reflects the paladin's ideology back, and this ideology forms the superstructure of a settler-colonialist empire, perhaps. the real world paladins worked for charlemagne, after all.

after all, it's much easier to justify killing "monsters" and taking their stuff when you've convinced yourself that they're all ontologically evil.

and it's a role-playing game, so how to the players react to that situation? maybe the paladins of the empire of good are telling them to go kill the evil kobolds that happen to be living in the mountains of shiny magic rocks, and after a few generations of this the kobolds are ruthless in their confrontations with outsiders, relying on traps and their tunnel networks to maintain their resistance against an ever increasing number of "adventurers" who seek the sweet lucre hidden away in their homes.