Traal Anno 10
Hey, look at that, another well-rendered party of five adventurers! Flo ordered up a a rogue/assassin type, a magician/wizard type, a healing priest type, and a crossbow user.
This is a particularly strong example of our fractal approach to storytelling in Guilded Age. The Five may be a bit special in that they’re linked to another world and only they can avert one particular apocalypse… but there are many more adventuring bands out there that you don’t get to see or hear about, and most of them would have equally exciting careers if we had decided to focus on them instead! So we could’ve done a story of Harky’s old band, or Ardaic’s days in the military, or the formation of the Kick-Backers, or Peter the Blest… the world’s full of exciting possibilities, and we could’ve gone on for decades without sampling them all.
Instead, this brief highlight reel tells us two things: one, Harky’s disillusionment with humans is grounded in his own experience, not just his people’s. And two, even more surprising: his relationship with Gondolessa antedates the World’s Rebellion.
Damn murder hobos, they’ve ruined questing!
I was always hoping for a Peter the Blest cameo at the end of the world.
The problem with Harky’s list of human failings isn’t that he’s wrong about them, it’s that he’s implying they’re unique in that regard. From what we’ve seen, the same is true about every race, including his.
What little we’ve seen of Avian culture in general makes them hard to place, Savasi seem fine with anyone but Humans, and Gnomes generally seem pretty accepting, until you do something to get yourself personally excluded (ie: Bandit’s kleptomania), but…yeah. Generally, this is a pretty universal thing.
Humans, Trolls, Wood Elves, Sky Elves, Gnolls, all pretty ‘monkeysphere’ (with individual or practical exceptions), Goblins seem culturally disinclined to even expand their sphere past ‘useful people’ and Landsharks…well, they don’t seem inclined to cannibalism, at least.
Well, they don’t seem inclined to cannibalism until they’re injured, anyway. Which is as fair as you can ask for
It’s pretty clear that while there is a larger conflict between the two cultures, this is very personal for Big Boss Harky.
What makes it a sticking point is that the other races are each minorities in their world. They came together forced by necessity as only then they could surpass the numbers and prowess of humans (who had been abusing their majority status exactly as Harky describes). That could inform someone looking not too hard enough that the “savage” races were more into diversity and coexistance than humans.
I have no doubts that any of these races (or rather, members of them) would equally abuse other races should they become the majority.