One thing I do appreciate about #OSR games is the way that magical items have become lateral-thinking engines rather than combat buffs.
I've always been horrified by the idea of swords of orc-slaying - Did the wizard who invented that experiment on live orcs?
In LOTR elf-made things burn orcs but Mordor-blades poison people and it's a reflection of materials and methods rather than design.
Genocidal D&D wizards like South African military scientists gene-hacking sickle-cell anemia.
@Taskerland I would argue that it's pure colonialism, it's eminent domain as a sword. Forces of "the good" euro-style empires designing weapons of mass population removal that only work on the "bad" indigenous populations, so they can civilise the place. The only reason you don't find more of the "of slaying" weapons is hundreds of years after the wars, the forces that be destroy them because it doesn't serve their folk-story psycho propaganda. Less lone racist, and more campaign backstory.
@Printdevil That's an interesting take... So it's not that D&D has stepped back from rhetoric of genocidal colonialism, it's that the colonists won and now there's no need for magical implements to discipline the ab-human filth.
Surviving orcs have all integrated the D&D settler-colonialism project and have opened up coffee shops.
@Taskerland @Printdevil coffee-shop orcs, hunting for the best beans, uncover ancient caverns. Each one has piles of this or that 'slaying blades. Mass graves are always nearby.
There's one spicy campaign hook.
@malin @Taskerland That's not hugely far from my campaign, there were five kingdoms that were "the classic euro-fantasy" feeling and some established enemies, and slowllly the cracks showed when you dug into "why the small elf kingdom is subservient to.." until you realised you were part of a genocide machine and actually it was gearing up again for the orc/darkelves etc.
@malin @Taskerland The hinge was actually that sometime in prehistory the God of War and Justice had been deposed by the God of Conquest and Revels and that had subverted the whole military elite for centuries
@Printdevil Is that taken from the Bible? 'Yahweh sabbaoth' and all that?
@Taskerland
@malin @Taskerland It evolved out of having random god domains as a story telling mechanism which really just wrote itself.
@malin @Taskerland Probably a heavy dose of the Cathari/Dualism though given when I was writing it.
@Printdevil Judaism had many gods. The Torah is a fusion of those gods, but mostly of Yahweh Sabbaoth - 'lord of armies'.
The God of War won, hence the long passages in the old testament where someone's clearly getting a rage-boner talking about war and the spoils of war like a fighter/ accountant dual class cunt.
There's a good book about the Canaanite myths and pre-Judaic gods in the Senate Range of myths. A lot of them read like Archie comics about Hotstuff and Caspar.
@Printdevil
This reminded me of something, and it just clicked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5J_qn93Nkc
@Taskerland
@malin @Taskerland Ah the scottish
@Printdevil
You know how copper wire was invented? A Scotsman and a Farengi got in a fight over a penny.
@Taskerland
@malin @Taskerland "Ouch, Ouch!"
I know crabs live on shore, but I never made the end of the pier show connection.
@Printdevil pier show? Never seen it.
@malin *wince*
@Printdevil @malin @Taskerland that's awesome theme
It really really upset some "Old School" D&D players when I ran it. @vdonnut @malin @Taskerland
@Printdevil @malin @Taskerland I get why it did but the same reason makes it cool
The Just War type followers were called the Knights Exemplar which probably tells you I was in my 20s when I wrote it and thought that was great. But as paladin types they didn't have Detect Evil, they had Detect Lie, so the religious/monarchy order made it their basic mission to get the whole knight hood orders destroyed because detecting lies was infinitely more dangerous to them than the hazy concept of evil @vdonnut @malin @Taskerland
Another thematic aspect of that game was the "good" (very notionally) gods were called the Indifferent Seven because they let humanity (etc) just get on with stuff and didn't interfere with free will or ordain things. Whereas the more evil ones were constantly trying to achieve a psychic unity which demanded constant meddling because they were a monoblock of original concepts that had been shattered and hated being in chaos.
That went down a storm with the D&D mob
"The gods you consider evil exist in a state of psychic tension which resembles chaos because they want to become a unified whole but as your human minds cannot fully understand that motivation they appear to just want to burn things down and drink goat blood - that is your race filtering the sensual experience of their revelations"
"So they're Lawful Evil really?"