Sorry for the tortured English, but I just like the sound of it better than “be there monsters here?” and “there be monsters here?” and “here there be monsters?” are too-subtly questions.
The question is, does our Burning Wheel game need monsters?
I can think of at least two ways to tie orcs in to the setting thematically—neither of which i’ll mention here, because i’m pretty sure my players want to be able to discover some things along with their characters. So maybe they’re all the monsters we need? But they’re not really monsters—they’re still very much “people”. And they risk becoming caricatures, and letting humans off the hook by providing a convenient “other” to fixate on: “It’s unreasonable to refer to us as ‘cruel’. You need to look at an orc to see what ‘cruelty’ really is.” Continue reading