PeyoĪs our society has changed in how it discusses things such as race, gender, etc so has role-playing interactions. I also described his heraldry: A dark purple night with a shooting star coming out of the west, a yellow quarter claw moon in the eastern sky, over green rolling hills. As it turned out, most of the characters were weird. As a faithful servant to the god of war, my goblin was a mercenary for hire. He was sent to be raised by the church to become a cleric. My character was no longer rebelling against his people, but was fulfilling the bargain his parents made to the god of war. In addition to not being inherently evil or chaotic, they had typical inheritance rules for the chief of their tribes. So I implicitly made goblin society a bit more civilized. My dungeon master and I were co-designing a world and I had some freedom with back story. So next chance I got, I played a goblin cleric. For me it was intriguing to see how other characters would overcome their natural expectations of goblin behavior. I know it could be different, that goblins could act differently. When I see a group of goblins in a game, I don’t just dismiss them as cannon fodder. Whether it’s biological necessity or my personality, I find it easy to challenge the status quo of “us vs them” and to try to see things from the perspective of the other sides. Monsters provide conflict without true consequences. This mentality gives us enemies that are tactically challenging to face while easy to attack without questioning the morality of our characters. In addition, our species tends to group things to make life easier, and “us vs them” makes life a whole lot easier to navigate, despite the evil it may perpetuate.
Dungeons & Dragons is storytelling entertainment and conflict is what most of our stories are about. Of course, it goes deeper than Tolkien and that era. I’m not the first to examine this as Paul Sturtevant explores in Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre. In a lot of ways I feel that our fantasy follows the world’s example: humans are usually the growing European colonizers while elves, dwarves, etc represent the other types of cultures in our world. Goblins, orcs, and various other “monster” races have always been inherently evil by default.
No one likes orcs, yet we have half-orcs and half-elves and all that can entail. Gnomes hate goblins, dwarves sneer at elves, and of course elves look down at everyone else. In Dungeons & Dragons, while humanity didn’t have ethnic racism, it still set up biologically diverse fantasy races, each with their own preconceived prejudices and interactions. The benefits have outweighed the disadvantages. Make no mistake – despite some of the undesirable run-ins I’ve had, I am happy to be different. My life has been quite different than most in America. Growing up, some might call me mixed, or black and white. Moreover, it gave me a safe environment to explore an uncomfortable topic: race relations. My wife kept thorough notes and drew this from my description. I found the experience to be an exciting and welcome change from my ho hum quiet monk. Having killed nine goblins earlier on in the same adventure, the other players lacked much trust in goblins and kept Glink bound up and weaponless for quite some time. Not only was he a goblin, but he was a thieving rogue goblin. I still introduced my new player character, a goblin named Glink. The moment the players realized that it was a dream, they groaned, so… damage done. I had my reasons I wanted to throw in a lot of puzzles and other weird stuff into a world our regular DM was running without messing anything up. I did a double no-no on that adventure – introducing the goblin while setting them up in a dream adventure. In fact, the first time I introduced a goblin to the party, I had taken a turn at being the DM. If you’ve played D&D for any length of time, you can probably imagine that few groups appreciate the dude that keeps showing up with goblins when the rest of the party are elves, humans, and dwarves.
I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for 20+ years, and in that time I’ve managed to create and play three goblins out of my last five characters. Do you have a favorite race in your fantasy RPG? Read on to hear about Marcus' favorite race to play and find out why.