HATE, Goblin Slaying and Pacificism

We're talking about violence, racial killings and rape - Which uhhh, very heavy needless to say. I'm not sure I handled it all with the greatest grace, so if you don't have the energy for that right now don't read this.

There's a couple of discourses that occasionally make the rounds, and finally "hey so the whole killing orcs thing" has come back up again, this time in a much more interesting way. For those unfamiliar; killing orcs as a sentient race, indiscriminately and then saying "well hey they're orcs so it's OK" maybe parrots the genocidal tendencies of various empires and ethno-states a little too hard for comfort, and thus people try to moralize or fix it.

A common meme amongst my cohort is turning our noses at quick fixes like "just make the Orcs capitalists" or "fight corrupt guards instead of impoverished bandits." For them the distaste seems to be more at the idea of the eye-roll inducing virtue signaling of it all, and the painfully performative neo-liberal worldview. For me it's that plus discomfort  in the fact that there is a group of "people" the party is still willing to "un-people" then commit heinous acts of violence on. The only way to stop a bad wizard with a staff is a good wizard with a staff. And now we get Marcia's lovely post about "Monsters, Metonymy, Metaphor" - About how by combining signifiers we create a more three-dimensional vision of the adversary:

In other words, rather than "What is orc?", we should ask "Why is orc?" What do the terms of a setting and the relations between them suggest about the setting's deeper themes or "truths"? What relations does it allow the player to enter with other terms, and thus participate in one fantasy or another?

But where she asks the pertinent "why is orc?" my useless pacifist ass asks "why is violence?" I think this is why games like Monster Care Squad don't strike me as liberally tone deaf, they're actively about fighting to heal (even if sometimes through the verbs of combat), and about a greater paradigm of eschewing violence [and even touch on a multiplicity of experiences surrounding that - How would you feel about conservationists protecting the bear that killed your child? etc etc]

And to be clear most of my games get violent. I relish in it. But often I tie that violence directly to an ideology the game is trying to comment on. Burnout Reaper and Digital Angel tie that violence to the struggle for financial survival in a zero-sum hustle culture hell-scape. Steel Hearts ties that violence to orders from your superiors as players are caught in a vast political web of half-truths and national posturing. Demon Crawl: Gothic asks you kill and bleed to purge yourself of original sin, a game whose Catholic themes I'd love to eventually revisit. And finally Inheritors puts you in a dog-eat-dog world, where there are factions that can and will try to kill you in an even more desperate struggle for survival - It's a game that gives you tools to not kill, but throws you in to such a fast-paced world that often the violence and the trail of blood feels like an after-thought, the fever dream of attempting to reach your destination or even just tomorrow by any means necessary. It's your dream or theirs. None of these games (except for Steel Hearts) explicitly condemn that violence, and most of them have copious rules around them... as well as some smaller rules tucked away from avoiding that final act of killing. But we're not here to talk about that.

Orc Slayer

This all kicked off when Prismatic "Bird Man" Warren did a lovely little survey of various things we kill and I positively love. To be clear Warren (in my experience) is a devilish wizard with several other pseudo-clones named Warren that are out to get me specifically an awesome guy who runs an equally awesome community of tabletop gamers. "Killable Peoples" openly admits it's not meant to be judgmental but rather "what it says about a given setting when this or that humanoid is an open target for violence." which I think is an incredibly useful survey to have.[*2] In particular I love its chilling entry for orcs:

Orcs. I don’t mean just orcs, although they are the prime referent. Here, I just mean any quote unquote monstrous humanoid (which has its own history beyond mere fantasy). This also doesn’t indicate the setting is fantasy, as “orcs” easily describes super mutants in the Fallout universe. I am not talking about orcs that are murdered by virtue of some actions done by those specific orcs, but rather killing orcs because they are orcs. Even the monstrous children were presumed evil in early D&D adventures and, as Gary Gygax has quoted when asked about this “nits make lice”. If this is the case, you have a highly racialized setting, like in Lord of the Rings, where nations and (ethno)states are synonymous with their racialized populace. This isn’t just a village, it’s an elf village where the elves live and the elves are, of course, naturally, at war with the orcs, whom they hate, mutually.

Gosh if the "nits make lice" line doesn't say it all and absolutely get under my skin. It's why I don't think you can liberally moralize away that kind of murder of someone whose brain isn't fully developed, whose primary transgression is the nature of their birth, simply by saying "oh but they're capitalists" or "rich people" or any number of excuses. I've spent too much time analyzing Catholic ethics to buy in to that sins of the father bullshit.  

Which brings us to Goblin Slayer. Oh Goblin Slayer...

WTF is Goblin Slayer? Kumo Kagyu's light novel, turned manga, turned anime (turned TRPG I should probably read), Goblin Slayer is notorious for being dark, "edgy" and ultra-violent, often in an exhausting tactless way. The series opens with Priestess' fresh faced adventuring party getting mercilessly killed, mutilated and viciously raped by a pack of goblins. It's... a lot. It's a lot to read and it's even more to watch. I could spend a whole blog post analyzing just that opening and the way it simultaneously plays on voyeuristic tropes in horny otaku culture while attempting to build a deep-seated sense of disgust and hatred for the goblins to be slain. 

Priestess is the only survivor and we're introduced to an intentionally generic fantasy world where she recruits one of the world's strongest heroes, who's only willing to fight goblins (because as we later learn in an equally brutal scene, his sister was similarly raped and killed by goblins while he was watching under the floor boards... rape comes up like a LOT in this story which I have some feelings about[*3]). The above is from an excellent scene in that same first episode where the titular Goblin Slayer (yes that's his name) is clearing out a goblin cave with his newfound companion and successfully uncovers where the children are hidden. Frankly the scene speaks for itself and the line "nits make lice" would not be out of place here.

To me Goblin Slayer puts the same kind of pit in my stomach as seminal "edgy" films like Man Bites Dog or The Doom Generation, but where those films try to relieve some of that tension with bleak comedy, Goblin Slayer tries to relieve it with wholesome slice-of-life (in a way that so perfectly juxtaposes D&D's cozy pastoralism and ultra-violence). It's a truly miserable experience that I can't recommend (though if you're going to watch it, I'd say the first few episodes do the heavy lifting and the rest is frankly unremarkable until another crass shock scene of a buxom maiden nailed to a chair pops up or we get another look into the Slayer's psyche). And that misery is kind of magical in the world of art. It rides a thin line that Neil Druckmann's Israeli-apologist best-seller The Last of Us Part II stumbles over, one that doesn't just say "ohhh the cycle of violence" but rather comments on how hate itself hollows a person out.

Instead of moralizing on who or why or when or what is right to kill, Goblin Slayer (and the aforementioned films) investigate what being a killer does to a person. What buying into single minded hatred turns you into. We're not asking "why goblins" we're asking "why single minded violence." Why can there be no other solutions considered? Why can none be spared? Goblin Slayer, so consumed by hatred he ceases to be anything but a catalyst for violence, calmly answers "because nits make lice."

What I think makes Goblin Slayer accidentally magical is that we're given a chilling lens into what makes a genocidal sociopath a "hero" in the eyes of some, while on a textual level not flinching away from saying "He's miserable. All of this is so very miserable."[*4] Goblin Slayer knows he's not a hero, he knows what he's doing might be wrong and might not even be solving the problem, but he can't pull himself to do anything else for fear of losing more or worse that his proactive path of hatred and violence has been for nothing in the face of systems that constantly fail people and send them to horrific deaths. (Lordy I can't believe I'm going up to bat for Goblin Slayer, I promise it's really not as good as I'm making it out to be).

Heroic Adventures & Treacherous Expeditions 

Marcia is running a delightful little game jam presently called The Icon0clasm Ball ~ A jam that "challenges you instead to make something novel; to deface the memory of this text [0e] with concepts untenable to the Gygaxian imagination; to resurrect this corpse into a new body." As a semi-joke because Lord knows I have too much on my plate I postulated "I'd be way too tempted to write the 0e equivalent of Blood Meridian which like... idk if anyone needs to read much less play that" to which I got the only response a deranged writer like myself needs: "Yo do it"

Which brings us to now:

HATE (ironically) is my first foray into making something truly fantasy for publication. There will be 4 Classes (The Hero, Arbelist, Thief and Exorcist), a starting village on the borderlands and plenty of stuff you're expected to kill. Rather than subvert or revise the expectations of violence in 0e, HATE seeks to explore what makes violent people tic, what expectations their community puts on them, and how awful and unsavory the whole affair is. #itsallmiserable

A key part of this is of course the sentient races surrounding / threatening the village and the way leveling up works (which is quite simple) - You gather Glory and Gold by completing bounties (ex: Slay the Wizard in the Tower) or recovering scalps from the borderlands;

Human Scalps count for 1 Glory and gain 5 Gold.

Goblin Scalps count for 2 Glory and gain 5 Gold (With a 10 Glory bonus for scalping an entire nest, down to the last child).

The undead and animals provide no scalps.

Overland travel is (somewhat) simplified. You don't track rations or fatigue (though Random Encounters are possible), instead each Hex traveled accrues a certain number of Threat. Leaving no survivors in an encounter (even a peaceful one with a trader) reduces Threat by 1. When you return to the village you roll d20 + various mods against your Threat (which then clears) attempting to roll over. Did you succeed? It's business as usual! Roll on the Mundane Events table. Did you fail? Roll on the Tragedy table. A local child has been kidnapped. The blacksmith's daughter you were looking to marry was brutally violated and strung up in the forest. The home you've worked so hard on was burned in the night and your pets got their skulls caved in. Nasty stuff like that. Then you roll a d4, on a 1-2 it was Goblins, on a 3 it was Bandits, on a 4 nobody knows. And when I say "Goblins" or "Bandits" I don't mean anyone can identify a specific one, it could be any of them out there, it could be a goblin that's already dead or a Bandit that took their winnings and is living it up in a city you'll never see. Sucks to suck I guess.

Now the paranoid in your party may think "Oh well that means we should stay near the village to keep it safe" - WELL - Remember you're Heroes. You have to uphold Honor. The only reason you have rations and a place to eat and are treated well by the townsfolk is because of that same Honor - A set of codices and expectations of what a Hero should be.

Honor is tracked like HP but drains and recovers differently. Every day that passes you have a 1/2 chance to lose 1 Honor as your relevancy dwindles. Each class has a set of "Virtues" you need to uphold (ex: The Hero must be masculine, they must never back down from a fight or leave a challenge unanswered), and each time you go against a Virtue you lose 1 Honor. The primary means of recovering Honor is by collecting Glory in the field or completing class specific Honor challenges which must be done once between expeditions or you lose even more honor (Ex; for the Hero they could bed a woman [consensually or otherwise], they could challenge someone to a duel to the death and show no mercy, they could get trashed at the pub and roll on a mishap table to see what horrific deeds they did while inebriated - maybe you hunted the neighbor's dog with a crossbow to prove your prowess) - Of note killing or assaulting a villager outside these contexts or virtues will result in a loss of honor, even if the player may feel it's "justified". If this all sounds awful then good! I'm doing my job ~

When your Honor is at 3 or below the village and NPCs are wary of you. They see you as a coward at best, or perhaps a leech on the town's resources. When you hit zero honor, your character is excommunicated and is not welcome back in the village. Death by loss of HP can be undone via resurrection and magical medicines. Excommunication by loss of honor is immediate and permanent if you're at 0 Honor when you return to town (better make sure you find something else to kill so you're at least at 1!). 

And that's the rough spark notes for what I have for HATE so far! I'm a little worried the work may handle certain topics too bluntly[*1] and it really is the first thing I've felt actively uncomfortable writing, which is a good exercise! It definitely feels like a cathartic reflection on my own experiences with men and manhood (things Gygax revels in) and the violent presuppositions of most adventure games ~ What do you think?

[*1 : The one I'm worried the most about is sexual assualt, because like most gamers I'm desensitized to gore but rape feels a step too far. I think it also hits a bit closer to home because I know so many people who have been victims of assault, and have literally been there with a friend mere hours after she was raped. Shit's awful in a way that I think words fail to describe, and it's a reason I've always been hesitant to approach the topic. If I never release HATE or (more likely) release it in an "unlisted" format, it's likely because I'm still not sure the raw wrenching bluntness of it all is worth it.]

[*2: Except Demons Warren!! You forgot Demons!]

[*3: To say I have mixed feelings about Goblin Slayer would be like saying I like my friends. It's true but it elides so many levels of complexity. I'm still frankly not sure if Goblin Slayer handles its subject matter well. Its author definitely knows that there are few things as monstrous as rape, and is intentionally trying to get an audience desensitized to violence to buy into these creatures as absolute monsters. There's also admittedly a lot of sexism at play, the way Sword Maiden is handled is actually horrendous in my opinion, and at this point I think the author knew how to get a reaction but didn't have much to say past "hey while a global conflict is happening people are getting violated in your backyard" and also "lol what if hero just fights low level monsters" which like, is actually a pseudo-interesting point if the execution wasn't explicitly tied to a race of creature. -- There's honestly a lot to dissect and (as with a lot of "edgy media") the biggest interview I could find with the writer was remarkably dull. However something not lost on me is that Goblin Slayer released and got incredibly popular a mere month after reports of the mass sexual assaults that had happened during the 2015-16 New Years in Germany made their rounds. Assaults that were unfortunately largely divided on ethnic lines, then later fueled ethnic tensions with immigrant populations. This is a topic waaaay to big and sensitive for this blog post, but food for thought considering Goblin Slayer often pivots to rape as justification for genocide.]

[*4: And I'd be remiss not to mention the way Goblin Slayer explicitly parallels the American Frontier (from the architecture to the set-up) down to the fact that the main damsel Goblin Slayer starts fighting for is literally called "Cow Girl." The way he checks for goblin tracks eerily echoing the way a gunslinger may check for the tracks of "savages" in a dime novel. Goblin Slayer accidentally understood the assignment of commenting on D&D being a Western.]