Penus

We want to avoid typical fantasy writing pitfalls of coding certain species with inherent traits and aligning ourselves with gross white supremacist racial essentialist ideas. The inclusion of many different races raises a lot of different questions about biology, etc. and there are a lot of ways one could go about addressing that. The way we are going to choose to do that in Goblin is, quite simply: We won’t!

This is not to say that we want to close our eyes to the types of issues that are downstream of intersecting dynamics of privilege and power, far from it, and more on that in this very document. But we simply don’t want to explore those issues through the lens of fantasy races, because we don’t feel like that’s the right way to do it within the style of this world.

Instead, the role of fantasy races and species should be more a superficial expression that gets used kinda willy-nilly. Not unlike animals in a show like Bojack Horseman. They may acknowledge the fact that someone is a specific animal or has a specific trait (e.g. Mr. Peanutbutter loves chasing frisbees) or there may be hints at relations (Bojack’s parents are also horses), but there’s no deeper exploration of the power dynamic between dogs and humans in the Bojack universe. When the story gets dark, the focus shifts to universalized themes and interpersonal conflict and the fact that certain characters are represented by certain animals gets pushed aside apart from the occasional punchline.

This should be the guiding dynamic for how race is treated in Goblin. While we can acknowledge its existence, it should never be the focus for exploration in the narrative and should not be the driving force behind a character’s deeper ambitions or inherent traits.

One thing that needs to heavily inform the core of who a character is, however, is their cultural and social context. Goblin is a game about a community in transition and how different people in the same community react to a monumentally incomprehensible thing happening all around them.

It’s also a game about how we think about and perceive culture, which gets expressed by the many different ways we are asked to receive and process books about different cultures, written in different styles, from different perspectives, at different times, for different audiences.

To that end, while we want to present complicated, sensitive, and nuanced takes on this topic, we are going to have to do some wildly oversimplified abstraction in order to get some of these ideas across and are gonna have to rely on some pretty hard rules for certain cultures to use as identifying markers. These will be things like dress, turns of phrase, specific greetings, etc. The specifics of this will be outlined for the specific cultures listed later in this document, but in order to actually keep the game readable and get the themes across, some compromises to the nuance are going to have to be made in the name of legibility.

Now, having firmly established that cultures must be clearly defined and legible, it’s time to muddy things back up by stating that all of these cultures should, much like any real culture, of course be able to break or bend that rule.

This can be expressed both at the personal scale, sometimes you have a cultural outsider, someone whose personality is deeply informed by a certain way in which they’ve become alienated from their own culture, or it can be in the form of subcultures or societal movements within a certain culture. Perhaps practitioners of a certain religion within one geographic region differ in the visual expression than those within a different one, perhaps a recent social movement rejects a specific way of dressing within a culture, who knows. This can be expressed through either the books or the characters in the game. Not saying it has to, just saying that rule 2 shouldn’t flatten cultural expression to the point where this type of narrative is no longer possible.

In conclusion: We don’t want countries in the game that are Star Trek planets.

Basically, you can boil these down to a very simply summary:

1. Don't lean on race or species as your distinguishing cultural marker
2. Do establish clear cultural boundaries to create basic markers for the sake of legibility
3. Once established, bend and flex the rules to make it interesting