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Old 07-07-2019, 08:35 PM   #11
evileeyore
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Default Re: Modular Racial Templates

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Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
I regard it as indispensable to have a distinction between a race's genetic template and their cultural ones. And for some time I have been uncomfortable with the way many fantasy and sci fi stories/games etc. tend to portray entire races as mono-cultural. It seems like a particularly 'colonial' kind of bias.
I'm fine with it when there is a supernatural basis behind it, the Goblins above are rather mono-cultural... however, most other races (the non-True Fae anyway) had Cultural Lenses to chose from.


The group in that game had four Dwarves (2 PCs and 2 NPCs) and each were from a different culture, despite 3 sharing a religion and thus a language 'of their own'...
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Old 07-07-2019, 11:16 PM   #12
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Default Re: Modular Racial Templates

Quote:
Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
I regard it as indispensable to have a distinction between a race's genetic template and their cultural ones. And for some time I have been uncomfortable with the way many fantasy and sci fi stories/games etc. tend to portray entire races as mono-cultural. It seems like a particularly 'colonial' kind of bias.
The aliens in Out of the Silent Planet are monocultural, but there's actually an in-universe reason given for this: three different races live on one planet, and race serves the same role on that planet that culture does on ours: the diversity of thought and custom that emerges from cultural variety on Earth instead emerges from racial variety on Malacandra. For a similar reason, none of the three races keeps pets: an otter-man's psychological need for the companionship of another species is fulfilled by hanging out with his armadillo-man buddy, not by pampering a captive space ostrich.

Incidentally, the book has some profoundly anti-imperialist themes, to the degree that it's not at all difficult to interpret the book as saying, "Colonialism is literally Satanic."

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Old 07-08-2019, 06:50 AM   #13
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Default Re: Modular Racial Templates

In my new Star Wars campaign I'm also making a species template and a cultural template. The species template is part of the species or race itself while the cultural templates will be part of the planet or region.

Some species have Lenses where you can choose between several sub-species or races. The cultural template would also have something like this. I'm still wondering if they should be different cultural templates or one cultural template per planet/region with lenses for social classes..
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