AAaA Tignos
You can follow this link or this one to see discussion of kobold sentience, which also cropped up in the comments to this one. No disrespect to anyone, but I’ve said all I wanted to say on that topic and don’t really plan to touch it again.
I’m more interested here in Tignos’ brand of capitalism, which works as barbed satire no matter what you believe about the above. I can have some sympathy for the guy as a fellow small-time businessman meeting day-to-day challenges with pluck and optimism (we here at Guilded Age likewise dealt with supplies of our product that exceeded demand). But “one has to… increase demand, and therefore introduce new products” sure sounds like the sort of neverending cycle that, writ large, explains a lot about Gastonia’s sins against other Arkerran nations and even its own people.
(Incidentally, I do slightly regret using Tim Gunn as the model for Tignos after learning Gunn was (and is) an outspoken critic of using animal fur in fashion. But I don’t think too many people even recognized the parallel, let alone thought we were trying to say anything about the real person from the behavior of the fictional character he loosely inspired. The Heads of Houses should not be read as personal attacks on their namesake game developers, either.)
We could argue about the sentience of a fictional fantasy race that was created specifically to *not* be sentient all day.
Or, we could appreciate the absurdity of the question by heading back to 2008 and checking out p. 688 of the comic Starslip.
(Link can be seen by clicking my name)
Damn, Starship is a work of art! Or is that… Culture?
Autocorrect… Starslip is a work of art….
FWIW, I absolutely did not “read” him as Tim Gunn
Yeah, I never read this as meta humor other than stupid crafting in games.
Thank you for providing us with links to the previous discussion on this topic, Mr. Campbell. I’m afraid I’m with Phil on this one, BTW.
It is problematic to define antagonists as “people”. Fantasy RPGs try to get away with this by presenting this kind of enemies as embodiments of evil, as intrinsecally ‘wrong’ beings (I remember my old AD&D supplement The Book Of Humanoids portrayed goblinoid races as unwashed, bloodthirsty, demon-worshipping savages), so a band of heroes are probably doing a service to the everyone by wasting them on sight, with extreme prejudice.
But in AD&D, kobold were classified as goblinoids, and even the least intelligent goblinoid races were considered sentient. In this comic, that’s apparently not the case. In one of the linked comments threads, Mr. Campbell stated that orcs are capable of agriculture, and we know landsharks are capable of speech (some more than others, but still…), so even if they’re not the smartest among the ‘savage’ races, they are sentient. Kobolds, OTOH, can’t farm and they don’t have a lenguage. If I’m reading this correctly, kobolds use tools and clothes because they mimic what smart(er) races do, but they can’t produce those items themselves. This is understandable. It is true that real world animals are known to use tools, or wear discarded shells of whatever as a house/armor/clothes. Emus are known to fight predators strategically, if the Emu War is something of an indicator.
But an animal that uses tools AND wears garments AND knows how to make campfires AND uses primitive weapons in coordinated attacks against their enemies is not really an animal, IMO. It is a pest, yes. A foe, for sure. But not an animal.
So, it’s OK by me if our beloved protagonists waste all those nasty kobolds, because they’re a menace that can’t be reasoned with. Wearing their skins, though? I think it would better to leave that sort of thing to Leatherface or Buffalo Bill (and I would leave the whole ‘eat the skin of their young for breakfast’ to Hannibal Lecter)
The only thing I’d add here is that AD&D was definitely not something Phil and I considered binding, any more than Tolkien before it. Sure, we used the old race-names, but we felt we had a free hand to rework those old mythologies as we saw fit.
I’m also closer to Phil’s camp on that conversation, but it’s largely been had at this point. The kobolds didn’t quite hit the mark they were intended to in the story, but I’d say that’s a hazard of publishing as you write.