The most dangerous question: What do you want?

[keybounce]

The 4 most dangerous words to use in a question.

Mr. Morden used it to find out who had the most drive to exploit back on Babylon 5.

Here we see that Goblins want ... well, ... err ...

Can anyone else figure out how to discus what the Goblins want without running afoul of the site rules?

[TheStranger]

We can discuss fictional characters in a fictional setting all day long. It’s only when you draw comparisons to real-world issues or make the fictional setting an obvious fig leaf that you get in trouble.

Which is wise. Redcloak is capital-E Evil and it shows in his worldview and the things he’s done in the name of goblin equality. Drawing any parallels to real-world groups would open up some very ugly counter arguments. To the extent that the Giant intentionally made Redcloak’s arguments in a way that invokes real-world issues, I’m not sure it was such a good idea for that reason. There are some pretty valid arguments that Redcloak’s goblins, just by virtue of the actions we’ve seen, really are evil monsters. Which... may not be a comparison you want anybody making with a group of real people.

Anyway, in this purely-fictional discussion Redcloak has a very legitimate complaint about the world being biased against goblins in fundamental ways that Durkon doesn’t even notice. To Durkon’s credit he actually seems willing to listen and consider what Redcloak says.

At the same time, I suspect that what Redcloak really wants is a thousand years of goblins killing humans to balance things out. He’s sacrificed too much for the Plan, it would take something on that level for him to actually feel like it was worthwhile. I don’t think he’s capable of actually negotiating rationally on behalf of goblinkind here.

[KorvinStarmast]

I don’t think he’s capable of actually negotiating rationally on behalf of goblinkind here. He's their only hope, though, and he's all they've got. Jirix is still getting his game on in running Gobbotopia/Gobland.

[Squire Doodad]

He's their only hope, though, and he's all they've got. Jirix is still getting his game on in running Gobbotopia/Gobland.

Just Gobbotopia, I believe

[TheStranger]

He's their only hope, though, and he's all they've got. Jirix is still getting his game on in running Gobbotopia/Gobland.

Well, we’re still at the start of book 7, so there’s no way anything is getting resolved right now. Maybe after a book’s worth of character arc I’ll have a higher opinion of Redcloak.

Besides, in the long run a few years of Jirix running Gobbotopia as a responsible and non-Evil nation is a more plausible path to improving the world’s opinion of goblins than anything Redcloak does here. Though I have some reservations about “conquering a city with an army of undead, enslaving the populace, and torturing prisoners for fun” as a means of addressing historic inequality.

Which is the thing that I guess gets me about Redcloak invoking the “fantasy racism” trope here. There are probably other goblins in this setting that could make that exact speech with some credibility, but Redcloak is trying to claim the moral high ground from on top of a pile of skulls. Redcloak complains about the “civilized” races treating goblins like evil monsters, but Redcloak (and by extension the nameless goblins following him) are acting like... evil monsters.

[rbetieh]

Im pretty sure the Giant has made clear that Redcloak leaves this discussion empty handed by having him make that "Surrounded by gold and gems" argument. Dwarves are rich compared to Goblins? Maybe, but this Dwarf?

Both sides need to hear each other out, Redcloak is incapable of that right now, maybe he needs to lose a ear too so he can hear clearly?

[Jasdoif]

Both sides need to hear each other out, Redcloak is incapable of that right now, maybe he needs to lose a ear too so he can hear clearly?I dunno...losing an eye hasn't stopped him from seeing what he wants to see; would losing an ear stop him from hearing what he wants to hear?

[KorvinStarmast]

Just Gobbotopia, I believe We have a thread about this (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24633680&postcount=1), and I picked "Gobland" for what I'd name the new Goblin state. :smallbiggrin:


Besides, in the long run a few years of Jirix running Gobbotopia as a responsible and non-Evil nation is a more plausible path to improving the world’s opinion of goblins than anything Redcloak does here. Though I have some reservations about “conquering a city with an army of undead, enslaving the populace, and torturing prisoners for fun” as a means of addressing historic inequality. It's a method (not offering any value statement on it) and now that the gobs and hobs have their city, they have a motivation to make it thrive. They'll either grow into it, or they'll end up as some kind of caricature "evil empire" that figures in various tropes/fiction. But it's early yet ... and maybe one book's arc isn't enough time for their style to evolve.

[Alcore]

Which is the thing that I guess gets me about Redcloak invoking the “fantasy racism” trope here. There are probably other goblins in this setting that could make that exact speech with some credibility, but Redcloak is trying to claim the moral high ground from on top of a pile of skulls. Redcloak complains about the “civilized” races treating goblins like evil monsters, but Redcloak (and by extension the nameless goblins following him) are acting like... evil monsters.Yet the "civilized" races act like monsters from the point of view of the goblins. And Redcloak can sit up there with his moral high ground; the Sapphire Guard did the same thing. Once apon a time they went out and murdered noncombatants without a care. The Order of the Stick also has no moral ground to stand on; they broke into someone's home murdered a teen that was defending said home and robbed the place.


Viewed through the gray lens of our real world everyone is a villain in the comic.


It can be relaxing (often vary fun) when we play as we boil it down to 9 alignments. And by smiting "always evil" creatures. Though taken seriously, as we tend to do in various threads, it just makes the majority Evil.

[KorvinStarmast]

as we boil it down to 9 alignments. 3 alignments was more fun, IME.
Law, Neutrality, Chaos.

Leave the 'good' and 'evil' labels for the politicians.

[Peelee]

The Order of the Stick also has no moral ground to stand on; they broke into someone's home murdered a teen that was defending said home and robbed the place.

They did try to retreat (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0181.html). After the teen was temporarily pacified, Vaarsuvius was the one who further prohibited the Order from leaving (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0185.html), and was the one who killed the teen (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0186.html) (I am hesitant to use the word "murdered" here, since there is a justification defense).

[Emanick]

They did try to retreat (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0181.html). After the teen was temporarily pacified, Vaarsuvius was the one who further prohibited the Order from leaving (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0185.html), and was the one who killed the teen (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0186.html) (I am hesitant to use the word "murdered" here, since there is a justification defense).

This. Also, it's a bit unfair to suggest that the Order "broke into someone's home" when they merely entered an unmarked cave and did not, in any meaningful sense, "force" their way in. One could argue that in the OOTSverse, any unmarked cave should be assumed to be the residence of some sentient creature... but I wouldn't find that argument very persuasive.

[C-Dude]

3 alignments was more fun, IME.
Law, Neutrality, Chaos.

Leave the 'good' and 'evil' labels for the politicians.
D&D definitely needs better axes for alignment. Good and Evil aren't even absolutely addressed, they change from the observer's perspective.

Possible other axes: Ascetic/Hedonist, Boastful/Modest, and/or Pacifist/Aggressor.

For instance, the Queen of Blood (that fat red dragon from "Blood Runs in the Family") is a Lawful, Boastful Hedonist Aggressor (give her what she wants, or you're lunch).

...Also, if our characters can listen to little Modrons and Slaadi encouraging them towards law and chaos, what fun outsiders would we get for these other axes?

(I know it seems like I'm just rambling, but this post would be a snore if I just said "I agree")

[TheStranger]

Yet the "civilized" races act like monsters from the point of view of the goblins. And Redcloak can sit up there with his moral high ground; the Sapphire Guard did the same thing. Once apon a time they went out and murdered noncombatants without a care. The Order of the Stick also has no moral ground to stand on; they broke into someone's home murdered a teen that was defending said home and robbed the place.


I don't think "they started it" even remotely justifies what Redcloak did in Azure City. No doubt the Sapphire Guard could offer a similarly empty justification for their actions by pointing at something goblins had done, which was probably in response to something humans had done, etc. It's atrocities all the way down, and nobody gets moral high ground by escalating that cycle.

Like I said, Redcloak isn't without a point here. It's just that he's unambiguously Evil. The things he's done in the name of "equality" have robbed his arguments of any weight. If he's not just paying lip service to the concept, he has a thoroughly warped worldview that makes it okay for him to kill innocents because he's the victim here. And maybe it's narrow minded of me, but when a central point of your argument is "I was justified in killing all those people," I'm going to be pretty darn skeptical of the rest of what you're saying.

Which is a shame, because as I said above, this argument would have some credibility coming from a goblin with less blood on his hands. The fact that it's Redcloak making the argument does more to make the argument seem empty than to make Redcloak at all sympathetic, IMO. As with all things, YMMV.

[understatement]

I don't think "they started it" even remotely justifies what Redcloak did in Azure City. No doubt the Sapphire Guard could offer a similarly empty justification for their actions by pointing at something goblins had done, which was probably in response to something humans had done, etc. It's atrocities all the way down, and nobody gets moral high ground by escalating that cycle.

Like I said, Redcloak isn't without a point here. It's just that he's unambiguously Evil. The things he's done in the name of "equality" have robbed his arguments of any weight. If he's not just paying lip service to the concept, he has a thoroughly warped worldview that makes it okay for him to kill innocents because he's the victim here. And maybe it's narrow minded of me, but when a central point of your argument is "I was justified in killing all those people," I'm going to be pretty darn skeptical of the rest of what you're saying.

Which is a shame, because as I said above, this argument would have some credibility coming from a goblin with less blood on his hands. The fact that it's Redcloak making the argument does more to make the argument seem empty than to make Redcloak at all sympathetic, IMO. As with all things, YMMV.

Huh. I interpreted the whole part with Redcloak as "just because he's evil does not mean he is entirely wrong." That's to say, whatever he does logically shouldn't automatically discredit what he's saying, which is what Durkon, as a high-wis character, alludes to: "I understand where you're coming from." Judging by the last few panels moving the discussion topic to Gobbotopia, in the next strip Durkon will try to counter Redcloak's claims with his atrocities against Azure City. Durkon doesn't have the luxury of debating Redcloak's moral character (or lack of), not when saving the world comes first at this very moment. He's on a time crunch here; fallacies and false justifications are unfortunately not going to be priority.

I imagine they could probably verbally duke it out when they're not mere rounds away from Xykon or the Order walking in upon them.

***

@OP's question: Looks like Redcloak wants the gods to directly do something about it...but it's been pretty set that they can't interfere directly on the Material Plane.

[TheStranger]

Huh. I interpreted the whole part with Redcloak as "just because he's evil does not mean he is entirely wrong." That's to say, whatever he does logically shouldn't automatically discredit what he's saying, which is what Durkon, as a high-wis character, alludes to: "I understand where you're coming from." Judging by the last few panels moving the discussion topic to Gobbotopia, in the next strip Durkon will try to counter Redcloak's claims with his atrocities against Azure City. Durkon doesn't have the luxury of debating Redcloak's moral character (or lack of), not when saving the world comes first at this very moment. He's on a time crunch here; fallacies and false justifications are unfortunately not going to be priority.

I imagine they could probably verbally duke it out when they're not mere rounds away from Xykon or the Order walking in upon them.

***

@OP's question: Looks like Redcloak wants the gods to directly do something about it...but it's been pretty set that they can't interfere directly on the Material Plane.

It’s not that Redcloak is wrong, it’s that whether he’s right or wrong is secondary to the fact that he’s an unrepentantly Evil terrorist who’s responsible for killing thousands of innocents and who is currently holding millions hostage with his Plan. As you alluded to, Durkon is negotiating with him under duress here.

In the context of the narrative, Redcloak’s case for goblin equality is just the justification he’s offering for killing a lot of people. It’s not a completely empty justification, but that’s irrelevant because in the context of what Redcloak has done, any justification is empty. It’s not unlike Crystal’s final scene, where “yes, but you’re murderously evil and need to die,” trumps all other considerations.

Whether he’s realized it or not, Durkon’s role here is hostage negotiator - his job is to build a rapport with Redcloak and get him to do one thing, not to actually address his grievances. Anything else validates wholesale slaughter as a tool for changing the status quo, which is the whole point of not negotiating with terrorists.

As I’ve said, that’s the crux of what I don’t like here. Rich has taken a very legitimate argument about systemic injustice and presented in a context where it really carries no weight.

[Alcore]

I don't think "they started it" even remotely justifies what Redcloak did in Azure City. No doubt the Sapphire Guard could offer a similarly empty justification for their actions by pointing at something goblins had done, which was probably in response to something humans had done, etc. It's atrocities all the way down, and nobody gets moral high ground by escalating that cycle.no no. I never spoke of justification. Don't warp my words and lay it on me. And the last sentence is my old post in a nutshell.

[TheStranger]

no no. I never spoke of justification. Don't warp my words and lay it on me. And the last sentence is my old post in a nutshell.
Apologies if I misunderstood you. I read your post as making the case that Redcloak has some valid claim to the moral high ground on this.

[KorvinStarmast]

...Also, if our characters can listen to little Modrons and Slaadi encouraging them towards law and chaos, what fun outsiders would we get for these other axes? I, for one, never listen to a Modron. At least Slaadi are entertaining.


(I know it seems like I'm just rambling, but this post would be a snore if I just said "I agree") I agree. :smallbiggrin:

This post title gave me a rather nasty flashback to the mid 1990's.
What do you want? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=gJLIiF15wjQ)

My daughter and her little fourth grade friends loved that tune ... and it just wouldn't end!
Where were noise cancelling head phones when I really wanted needed them?

[understatement]

It’s not that Redcloak is wrong, it’s that whether he’s right or wrong is secondary to the fact that he’s an unrepentantly Evil terrorist who’s responsible for killing thousands of innocents and who is currently holding millions hostage with his Plan. As you alluded to, Durkon is negotiating with him under duress here.

Yes.


In the context of the narrative, Redcloak’s case for goblin equality is just the justification he’s offering for killing a lot of people. It’s not a completely empty justification, but that’s irrelevant because in the context of what Redcloak has done, any justification is empty. It’s not unlike Crystal’s final scene, where “yes, but you’re murderously evil and need to die,” trumps all other considerations.

I don't think the narrative considers it a justification. I don't think Durkon does, either -- he just needs to know the reasons so he doesn't step on them in the next stage of negotiations.

Durkon is not here for the justification. He's here for what Redcloak wants.


Whether he’s realized it or not, Durkon’s role here is hostage negotiator - his job is to build a rapport with Redcloak and get him to do one thing, not to actually address his grievances. Anything else validates wholesale slaughter as a tool for changing the status quo, which is the whole point of not negotiating with terrorists.

Durkon definitely realizes it. That's why he lets the "poor dwarf" part slide, or why he says "I understand now." He needs to have Redcloak vent it out first. There is only one objective here: get Redcloak on his side, because if he fails then the entire world is destroyed and the multiverse will be doomed.

What makes you think Redcloak won't pay for his crimes? It does not have to happen right now, right at this table, especially when the stakes are so dangerously high.


As I’ve said, that’s the crux of what I don’t like here. Rich has taken a very legitimate argument about systemic injustice and presented in a context where it really carries no weight.

Ah, OK. I think that it's YMMV -- after all, Redcloak does have a legitimate precedent --


the slaughter of his village. The whole adventurer part implies, at least to me, that he's supremely pissed off that the Sapphire Guard were never punished for it at all.


he did not conjure his grievances from something minor or nonexistent. Evil people can very much still bring up valid issues. The grievance here addressed has nothing to do with Redcloak; he's the spokesperson of the goblins, not their spiritual representative.

[Conradine]

Still, I don't remember Redcloack killing children or civilians. The Sapphire Guard, instead, I remember doing that.

[hroþila]

This. Also, it's a bit unfair to suggest that the Order "broke into someone's home" when they merely entered an unmarked cave and did not, in any meaningful sense, "force" their way in. One could argue that in the OOTSverse, any unmarked cave should be assumed to be the residence of some sentient creature... but I wouldn't find that argument very persuasive.
Also, the area where they fought the black dragon was physically separated from the actual quarters where the dragons lived, which were only accessible through an underwater passage. The Order did not actually enter the dragon's house until after the fight.

[KorvinStarmast]

Still, I don't remember Redcloack killing children or civilians. The Sapphire Guard, instead, I remember doing that. Did you read War and XPs?
Are you aware that Redcloak was the leader of the hobgoblin army that overran Azure City?
Are you honestly asserting that no civlians, and no children, died during that battle?

[Conradine]

Are you honestly asserting that no civlians, and no children, died during that battle?

I can't be sure of that.

But I can assert with reasonable certainity that Redcloak army didn't engage in systematic cleansing of the civilian population, since:

1- we are never showed anything similar
2- we are confirmed most civilians have been enslaved

The Sapphire Guard instead methodically exterminated Redcloak's village, going as far as hunting for children hiding.

[Particle_Man]

I think it depends on which goblin (hobgoblin, bugbear, etc.) you ask.

But ultimately, they might want to be able to join a band of like minded folks and go on adventures as pcs, just like pcs of other races.

[Kruploy]

Equal standing with the other races and no discrimination.

[KorvinStarmast]

Equal standing with the other races and no discrimination. And I want a pony.
Redcloak's small problem in this matter is that the entity with whom he is speaking hasn't the authority to grant either of those, no less both.

Strip 1209 is kinda like when the union leadership arrive at the negotiating table and the deputized nice person, a supervisor from sheet metal bending area of the plant, shows up to talk.
That subordinate rep of management can't make a plant wide promise that is credible. And union leadership gets understandably frustrated that there isn't someone else to talk to.

But there's a different matter of 'want' that I find more useful to apply here. I had an old and salty chief of our maintenance effort. I or someone else at the more management level would tell him

"well, what I want is {x}" and sometimes he'd say "{x} coming up, we can have it done by Thursday."

Other times, he'd say in all candor: "You can want in one hand and crap into the other. Guess which one will fill up first?"

That's the situation that Redcloak is in. The gods are ready to pull the plug on the whole blinking world. He thinks he has leverage, but he doesn't have any leverage with the gods who done him and his wrong. For that matter, TDO hasn't got that leverage either, since he does not seem to realize (yet) that the gods have pulled the plug a million or so times before. He's new to the deity game. His learning curve is still kind of steep.

Redcloak has some leverage with the mortal races, but not lots and lots. He does have enough, though, to get a working deal with the Azurites to leave his claim to Gobbotopia as a given. (He won it in a war fair and square, all gates and otherworldly influences considered).

"But I want!"

Yeah, of course you do, and every spoiled child says the same thing.

[Kruploy]

And I want a pony.
Redcloak's small problem in this matter is that the entity with whom he is speaking hasn't the authority to grant either of those, no less both.


Then no deal. Simple as.

[Chronos]

It's not just that Durkon can't give him what he wants; no one can. If Redcloak walks into a bar and the patrons there view him as a monster, that's not on Durkon, or even the gods: That's on those individual patrons. Change their minds, and he still won't be able to walk into the next bar. Someone powerful and influential like a king or a god could say "All my followers, I instruct you to treat goblins as equals", and it still won't happen. And even if they can enforce how their people treat goblins, they can't enforce how they think of them.

[KorvinStarmast]

Then no deal. Simple as.
Indeed.
Sometimes, there's a strike.
"If we can't have it, nobody gets anything."
And everyone else in the world has to deal with it. (Example, rail strikes or truckers strikes, etc). The minor difference is that this analogy is incomplete, since in the situation in the comic the "nobody gets anything and the rest of the world has to deal with it" means the literal end of the world. There never comes the day when the strike ends and some improvement is seen. It's a lose/lose situation. Even Redcloak doesn't get a win. Nor does TDO.

I am getting a deja vu. We've been through this conversation before a few comics ago.
Redcloak's position certainly makes sense when seen through Redcloak's lens.

@Chronos: changing hearts and minds. That does not happen overnight, but it needs to start somewhere. One heart at a time, I guess.

[Kruploy]

It's a lose/lose situation. Even Redcloak doesn't get a win. Nor does TDO.

I am getting a deja vu. We've been through this conversation before a few comics ago.
Redcloak's position certainly makes sense when seen through Redcloak's lens.



You don't know that. Neither does Redcloak or Durkon or even Thor.
What's important is that Redcloak has belief and hope that his plan will get him what wants.
He thought it through and decided the risk was worth taking.
When the comic ends and we have hindsight, it will be easy to say Redcloak was a big idiot loser who should have taken the deal if the goblins get the short end of the stick but Redcloak doesn't know the future.
He is just doing the best he can with the things he has and the means he knows best.
A weakhanded loser who would capitulate and take Durkon's deal even if he doesn't think it's worth taking because he succumbed to the pressure would be much less worthy of my respect rather than someone who sticks to his principles even if the outcome turns out badly.
Still, that doesn't mean Wrong-Eye won't end up with regrets if everything goes bad. Ahahahaha.
I wouldn't want to be in his place, to be honest.

[keybounce]

And I want a pony.
Find those over here: Portal to Equestria (http://fimfiction.net/)


Redcloak's small problem in this matter is that the entity with whom he is speaking hasn't the authority to grant either of those, no less both.
...
He thinks he has leverage, but he doesn't have any leverage with the gods who done him and his wrong. For that matter, TDO hasn't got that leverage either, since he does not seem to realize (yet) that the gods have pulled the plug a million or so times before.

He does have some leverage. Not much, but some.

The point is, there are some gods that see this 4th color as a chance to end the cycle, and begin something new and different.

This means that he can ask for, and get, *something* from the gods. But he seems to have thrown that chance/opportunity away.

[Jason]

It's not just that Durkon can't give him what he wants; no one can. If Redcloak walks into a bar and the patrons there view him as a monster, that's not on Durkon, or even the gods: That's on those individual patrons. Change their minds, and he still won't be able to walk into the next bar. Someone powerful and influential like a king or a god could say "All my followers, I instruct you to treat goblins as equals", and it still won't happen. And even if they can enforce how their people treat goblins, they can't enforce how they think of them.

Redcloak says what he wants is to essentially eliminate racism (against goblinoids, not necessarily against other races) through threatening the gods. Success in this would require the gods to force everyone to not be racist against goblins - effectively to remove free will. Could the gods remove free will in stickworld? It doesn't seem likely.

Therefore no, no one can actually give Redcloak what he says he wants.

In any case, what Recloak really wants isn't equality for goblin kind anyway. What he really wants is to have been right all along, to prove that all the atrocities he has committed in the name of forwarding The Plan really were necessary, and therefore were justified.

[Worldsong]

Redcloak says what he wants is to essentially eliminate racism (against goblinoids, not necessarily against other races) through threatening the gods. Success in this would require the gods to force everyone to not be racist against goblins - effectively to remove free will. Could the gods remove free will in stickworld? It doesn't seem likely.

Therefore no, no one can actually give Redcloak what he says he wants.

In any case, what Recloak really wants isn't equality for goblin kind anyway. What he really wants is to have been right all along, to prove that all the atrocities he has committed in the name of forwarding The Plan really were necessary, and therefore were justified.

There are steps the gods could take that would improve the situation for goblinoids and lead to true equality down the line.

They could elevate goblinoids to the position of PCs (possibly with better racial traits for the weaker variants) and have their clerics spread the word that goblinoids are no longer free game.

They can't outright eliminate the discrimination in one go, but that doesn't mean they can't do nothing.

Also don't forget that Redcloak is a cleric, it makes sense that he'd believe that getting the gods involved is important for true change to happen. His entire life revolves around dealing with deities.

[Babale]

Was the Sapphire Guard justified in wiping out Redcloak's village, civilians and all? Absolutely not. But were they justified in attacking at all? I would argue yes, because the Crimson Mantle IS that dangerous. It's not like they attacked the goblins for no reason. Their cleric was essentially a self contained research facility that was looking into a weapon that could destroy the entire world, with the intent to use it. From AC's perspective, preventing this is necessary.

We saw what happened, and the Paladins definitely failed to minimize civilian casualties (or to even try to do so), and that's bad. But part of the blame must fall on the goblins, who were researching doomsday weapons from a civilian village in the first place!

[understatement]

Was the Sapphire Guard justified in wiping out Redcloak's village, civilians and all? Absolutely not. But were they justified in attacking at all? I would argue yes, because the Crimson Mantle IS that dangerous. It's not like they attacked the goblins for no reason. Their cleric was essentially a self contained research facility that was looking into a weapon that could destroy the entire world, with the intent to use it. From AC's perspective, preventing this is necessary.

After the bearer was killed (and even before), they did attack civilian goblins for...absolutely no reason at all.


We saw what happened, and the Paladins definitely failed to minimize civilian casualties (or to even try to do so), and that's bad. But part of the blame must fall on the goblins, who were researching doomsday weapons from a civilian village in the first place!

Singular. Only the Bearer knew of the Plan.

Redcloak is not justified in any way for sacking Azure City because of the actions of a secret few. And by that exact same logic, the Sapphire Guard is not justified in any way for sacking RC's village because of the actions of a secret person.

[Worldsong]

I just love how we keep blaming random villagers for the fact that the Bearer had a plan to hijack an eldritch horror to use it as blackmail material.

If this was a village of humans we also wouldn't assume that just because one of them has an evil masterplan the entire village is in on it. Why are we assuming it would be any different with goblins? Because it's convenient?

EDIT: Let's put it differently. There's a small village out in the middle of nowhere where people are just trying to get by. But as it turns out one person in that village, an influential person, secretly had an evil masterplan which could put the entire world at risk.

An outside force which is aware of the evil person's plan storms in to eliminate him before he can execute said plan, and then decide to burn down the entire village and put everyone to the sword, including children and infants. Their explanation for this is that they didn't know for sure who was in on the plan and they didn't want to take the chance.

There. The entire scenario, without referring to goblins and humans. Just people. Now can anyone look at this scenario and honestly say that the villagers being slaughtered was their own fault? Because in real life the force responsible for wiping out the village would probably be tried for war crimes.

[dancrilis]

After the bearer was killed (and even before), they did attack civilian goblins for...absolutely no reason at all.


Not no reason at all ...

... the paladins thought the goblins were the problem not the mantle or even the bearer.

They could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble, and saved the goblins a lot of suffering by confirming what the situation was before attacking, but based on what they thought at the time ...


... they did have a reason to kill all the goblins.

[understatement]

Not no reason at all ...

... the paladins thought the goblins were the problem not the mantle or even the bearer.

They could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble, and saved the goblins a lot of suffering by confirming what the situation was before attacking, but based on what they thought at the time ...


... they did have a reason to kill all the goblins.

How is that not genocide?

[Babale]

I'm not blaming the goblin village -- I'm blaming the goblin cleric, Redcloak's mentor, for doing his WMD research in a civilian village.

[Worldsong]

Not no reason at all ...

... the paladins thought the goblins were the problem not the mantle or even the bearer.

They could have saved themselves a lot of time and trouble, and saved the goblins a lot of suffering by confirming what the situation was before attacking, but based on what they thought at the time ...


... they did have a reason to kill all the goblins.

That's actually even worse. So they based their decision off of faulty, limited and unverified intel. They committed genocide because they had the suspicion that the village might be a threat instead of, you know, establishing a perimeter, keeping an eye on the village, obtaining some more intel, treating the villagers like people.

And let's not forget, withholding genocide as an absolute last resort for if every other method of containment fails and there's a realistic risk that bad things will happen in the near future if the village isn't terminated.

You can't exactly say "Oh yeah I killed the entire village because our intel didn't include a list of who was innocent and who wasn't."


I'm not blaming the goblin village -- I'm blaming the goblin cleric, Redcloak's mentor, for doing his WMD research in a civilian village.

The problem here is that people keep acting like the village as a whole somehow deserved to be wiped out for the Bearer's crimes, which in turn would mean that Redcloak's grievance isn't justified.

[understatement]

I really don't think the "well, the Bearer forced us to personally hunt down the fleeing goblins, and even after we killed him we continued to wipe them out, including going all the way to a cave and shanking a six year-old kid for our troubles" flies as well as you think it does.

[dancrilis]

How is that not genocide?

You said:

After the bearer was killed (and even before), they did attack civilian goblins for...absolutely no reason at all.


I merely pointed out that they had a reason - whether it is genocide or not doesn't change that there was a reason (although I suspect Redcloak would be less joyous about finding out the reason for his misery then Durkon was in panel 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1145.html) when he found out the reason for his misery).

As for whether it was genocide or not that is a more linguistic debate - i.e if people A are trying to destroy the world and have a real shot at succeeding and people B wipe them out before they do is the word genocide applicable to people B's actions, if people B were wrong in their rational (i.e people A were actually not trying to destroy the world) then if the word genocide become more valid.

[Worldsong]

You said:


I merely pointed out that they had a reason - whether it is genocide or not doesn't change that there was a reason (although I suspect Redcloak would be less joyous about finding out the reason for his misery then Durkon was in panel 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1145.html) when he found out the reason for his misery).

As for whether it was genocide or not that is a more linguistic debate - i.e if people A are trying to destroy the world and have a real shot at succeeding and people B wipe them out before they do is the word genocide applicable to people B's actions, if people B were wrong in their rational (i.e people A were actually not trying to destroy the world) then if the word genocide become more valid.

Well then it's definitely genocide because The Plan is not to destroy the world. It's to hijack an eldritch monstrosity to blackmail the gods. The Plan does not actually involve using the eldritch monster, especially not to destroy the world.

You see, The Plan could result in the world being destroyed, but that doesn't mean it's the end goal and it also doesn't mean that the person executing The Plan is an omnicidal maniac who wants the world to be destroyed. People keep pulling the whole 'the goblins are trying to destroy the world' out of thin air so far as I can tell.

Also it doesn't remove the point that there's a lot of actions you can take which don't involve wiping out a village based on limited intel and mere suspicion.

[understatement]

You said:


I merely pointed out that they had a reason - whether it is genocide or not doesn't change that there was a reason (although I suspect Redcloak would be less joyous about finding out the reason for his misery then Durkon was in panel 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 (https://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1145.html) when he found out the reason for his misery).

At this point it doesn't matter if they had a reason or not. That they do doesn't lessen their actions by one iota, and the reason was abysmally crappy, evil, and malicious anyhow.


As for whether it was genocide or not that is a more linguistic debate - i.e if people A are trying to destroy the world and have a real shot at succeeding and people B wipe them out before they do is the word genocide applicable to people B's actions, if people B were wrong in their rational (i.e people A were actually not trying to destroy the world) then if the word genocide become more valid.

Semantics? Really?

There is no "people A." There is a "person A," and then villagers being killed for the simple fact of being a goblin.

[dancrilis]

Well then it's definitely genocide because The Plan is not to destroy the world. It's to hijack an eldritch monstrosity to blackmail the gods. The Plan does not actually involve using the eldritch monster, especially not to destroy the world.

I am assuming that the 'then' is a reference to the linguistic debate about when it is appropraite to use the word genocide - I have basically chosen to stay away from that.

For reference I never said The Plan was to destroy the world - but that does seem to be what the paladins thought it was (with their limited knowledge).

Seperately from the paladins it would seem that if The Dark One gets a Gate - and uses it - then all five gates will be broken and so the world would likely get destroyed anyway via the other four rifts (over a presumedly a bit of time).

Nothing of which has anything to do with the fact that the paladins should have done due diligence before hacking apart children.



Semantics? Really?
I have had debates on genocide before - which tend to devolve into discussions of legal definations (what is a culture? etc etc), so I am basicially staying away from it (kindof wishing I had stayed even further away from it).



There is no "people A." There is a "person A," and then villagers being killed for the simple fact of being a goblin.
That would be the second element 'people B were wrong'.

[Worldsong]

I am assuming that the 'then' is a reference to the linguistic debate about when it is appropraite to use the word genocide - I have basically chosen to stay away from that.

For reference I never said The Plan was to destroy the world - but that does seem to be what the paladins thought it was (with their limited knowledge).

Seperately from the paladins it would seem that if The Dark One gets a Gate - and uses it - then all five gates will be broken and so the world would likely get destroyed anyway via the other four rifts (over a presumedly a bit of time).

Nothing of which has anything to do with the fact that the paladins should have done due diligence before hacking apart children.


I have had debates on genocide before - which tend to devolve into discussions of legal definations (what is a culture? etc etc), so I am basicially staying away from it (kindof wishing I had stayed even further away from it).


That would be the second element 'people B were wrong'.

Y...you were the one who brought it up.

You know what, never mind. At least we can be in agreement that while the paladins might have thought they had a reason to wipe out the village their reasoning was faulty and morally bankrupt.

And I say morally bankrupt because if you (you being the paladins here) are willing to commit to genocide based on mere suspicion clearly you don't have many objections to the idea of murdering children in the first place.

[dancrilis]

Y...you were the one who brought it up.


Not really, to paraphrase:

understatement: they had no reason
dancrilis: they had a reason
understatement: does that make it not genocide?
Worldsong: their reason was horrible
dancrilis(to understatement): whether it was genocide or not doesn't change that they had a reason
Worldsong: it was genocide
understatement: ok fine they had a reason, it was garbage
dancrilis(Worldsong and understatement): I am not sure why we are talking about genocide.
Worldsong: You brought it up.

My take - they had a reason, yes their reason was bad.
That is basically all I was saying.

[Babale]

The problem here is that people keep acting like the village as a whole somehow deserved to be wiped out for the Bearer's crimes, which in turn would mean that Redcloak's grievance isn't justified.

I didn't say that the village deserved to be wiped out, or justified what the paladins did. I'm not even saying that the goblin cleric is equally as responsible as the paladins are. All I'm saying is, if you are the Bearer of the Crimson Mantle, aside from the fact that the ritual is morally questionable in and of itself, you should be aware that working towards a weapon that's so dangerous and deadly to the whole world is going to make you a target; and therefore you shouldn't be placing your civilians in danger by doing your research in a civilian village.

[C-Dude]

It is a tactic in war (both in reality and in fiction), especially against opponents who wear the white hat, to use children as weapons. I can't give you a real-world example because of the rules of this forum, but I'll give you one from fiction:

Fallout New Vegas.
https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/Andy_(Ranger)

Caesar's Legion uses children against the NCR because they know the rangers will hesitate. Ranger Andy lost the use of half his body when a child--purportedly stolen for the purpose of slavery--dropped a grenade at his feet as Andy was 'rescuing' him.

In the Order of the Stick, the weapon is a reality bomb. You've got a paladin military fighting against a force that--as far as they know--is a threat to all reality, with limited intel by design (withheld by their order and their leader) and no knowledge who is orchestrating the threat or how it is to be executed.

We experience the scene from the perspective of Wrong Eye. As such, Wrong Eye is cast as the protagonist in the scene. This is a result of the narrative frame; when taken from an omniscient third-person perspective and with verisimilitude in hand, the situation becomes one with no clear "right". That's war. There are actors on both sides with reasons, good and bad, and their actions are tailored to their reasons.

[Babale]

It is a tactic in war (both in reality and in fiction), especially against opponents who wear the white hat, to use children as weapons. I can't give you a real-world example because of the rules of this forum, but I'll give you one from fiction:

That's essentially what I am saying. For people as Lawful Good as the Paladins claim to be, they didn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the gobbo civilians. But at the same time, that doesn't absolve the goblin clergy from using civilians as meatshields in the first place.

[Schroeswald]

That's essentially what I am saying. For people as Lawful Good as the Paladins claim to be, they didn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the gobbo civilians. But at the same time, that doesn't absolve the goblin clergy from using civilians as meatshields in the first place.

Maybe the previous Redcloak was using civilians as meat shields, or maybe he was living in the same town as other people because he’s a person who doesn’t solely think about the Plan and only the Plan

[understatement]

That's essentially what I am saying. For people as Lawful Good as the Paladins claim to be, they didn't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the gobbo civilians. But at the same time, that doesn't absolve the goblin clergy from using civilians as meatshields in the first place.

The goblin clergy didn't know about the Plan. Hell, the Bearer drew attention to himself so that the paladins wouldn't go kill the other villagers, for whatever reason.

Also, @C-Dude: the village scene is of third-person ominiscent POV. The Giant has pretty firmly stated that "everything we saw happened." Also also, this is not the paladin military -- it's a specialized strike force that knew exactly what they were doing (and not in any positive sense).

[Edea]

Was a consensus ever reached on just how much influence the Crimson Mantle has on Redcloak's thought processes?

There's precedent for major artifacts screwing with your head (The One Ring, the hand and eye of vecna, etc.); not implying that this absolves Redcloak of any wrongdoing (far from it), but the nature of major artifacts and the assumption that The Dark One's remote sense ability is probably locked onto Redcloak 24/7 anyway means I'm not 100% sure where 'Redcloak' ends and 'the Plan' begins.

[Babale]

Maybe the previous Redcloak was using civilians as meat shields, or maybe he was living in the same town as other people because he’s a person who doesn’t solely think about the Plan and only the Plan

Perhaps not -- it's possible that the current Redcloak is the first one to dedicate himself so thoroughly to the Plan. But when the Paladins show up, the prior Redcloak says he knew this day would come, and that the paladins are there for him -- just like they'd come for his master, and his master before him. If he didn't want to follow The Plan with all its doomsday implications, why didn't he cast the Crimson Mantle aside?


The goblin clergy didn't know about the Plan. Hell, the Bearer drew attention to himself so that the paladins wouldn't go kill the other villagers, for whatever reason. by Clergy I was referring to the prior Redcloak; you're right that our Redcloak, Whitecloak at the time, didn't know about the plan. But if the Bearer of the Crimson Cloak didn't want the paladins who would come after him to hurt innocent goblins as collateral damage, he shouldn't have sat around with a world-destroying artifact in the middle of a village full of innocent goblins. He knew it would attract paladins -- after all, paladins had come for at least the last two bearers, and for good reason.

[Babale]

Was a consensus ever reached on just how much influence the Crimson Mantle has on Redcloak's thought processes?

There's precedent for major artifacts screwing with your head (The One Ring, the hand and eye of vecna, etc.); not implying that this absolves Redcloak of any wrongdoing (far from it), but the nature of major artifacts and the assumption that The Dark One's remote sense ability is probably locked onto Redcloak 24/7 anyway means I'm not 100% sure where 'Redcloak' ends and 'the Plan' begins.
When Redcloak puts the cloak on, he learns the plan and seems to be in a daze where it is all he can think of. His brother snaps him out of it. On the other hand, Redcloak is on the cusp of giving up the plan when Xykon shows up at his brother's village near the end of the book. I don't think Redcloak gets that excuse to justify his actions; he's just that fanatic about carrying out the plan.

[understatement]

Perhaps not -- it's possible that the current Redcloak is the first one to dedicate himself so thoroughly to the Plan. But when the Paladins show up, the prior Redcloak says he knew this day would come, and that the paladins are there for him -- just like they'd come for his master, and his master before him. If he didn't want to follow The Plan with all its doomsday implications, why didn't he cast the Crimson Mantle aside?

by Clergy I was referring to the prior Redcloak; you're right that our Redcloak, Whitecloak at the time, didn't know about the plan. But if the Bearer of the Crimson Cloak didn't want the paladins who would come after him to hurt innocent goblins as collateral damage, he shouldn't have sat around with a world-destroying artifact in the middle of a village full of innocent goblins. He knew it would attract paladins -- after all, paladins had come for at least the last two bearers, and for good reason.

Still not following. The bearer paid for his mistake by getting killed. Why didn't the SG just seek him out personally instead of killing everyone in their paths?


Was a consensus ever reached on just how much influence the Crimson Mantle has on Redcloak's thought processes?

There's precedent for major artifacts screwing with your head (The One Ring, the hand and eye of vecna, etc.); not implying that this absolves Redcloak of any wrongdoing (far from it), but the nature of major artifacts and the assumption that The Dark One's remote sense ability is probably locked onto Redcloak 24/7 anyway means I'm not 100% sure where 'Redcloak' ends and 'the Plan' begins.

When RC donned the mantle, he probably had 2 questions in the midst of his family, friends, and neighbors being slaughtered:

1) why are the gods okay with this?

2) what can I do to prevent it from happening again?

The Plan via mantle essentially gave him the "perfect answer" of divine understanding: that 1) goblins were made to be XP fodder, and 2) hijack the world. Redcloak has followed these answers ever since, because to him it makes "perfect sense" that it's the right solution. To us and to other characters, it really isn't.

[Babale]

Still not following. The bearer paid for his mistake by getting killed. Why didn't the SG just seek him out personally instead of killing everyone in their paths?
Because the Saphire Guard is (or at least was at the time) apparently full of Miko-like sanctimonious pricks who think they are justified in killing all of the goblins due to them pinging as "evil" to their detection ability (when they announce their arrival, they yell about how the Twelve Gods have judged the goblins and found them Evil). Further, I think they're worried that any survivors might do exactly what Redcloak did -- salvage the Crimson Mantle and ensure that the Plan continues.

[Babale]

I do wonder what changed about the SG, perhaps under Shojo. Miko would fit right in with that SG unit, but I couldn't see Hinjo, Lien, or O'Chul doing that.

[Worldsong]

I do wonder what changed about the SG, perhaps under Shojo. Miko would fit right in with that SG unit, but I couldn't see Hinjo, Lien, or O'Chul doing that.

So far as I understand it O'Chul happened. His sheer badassery and genuine Lawful Goodness corrupted the SG into being actually Lawful Good.

[dancrilis]

I do wonder what changed about the SG, perhaps under Shojo. Miko would fit right in with that SG unit, but I couldn't see Hinjo, Lien, or O'Chul doing that.

There are two answers to this that I have seen.
1 (held by most people): O-Chul/Hinjo joined the order and all was right with the world.
2 (held by me and perhaps me alone): When the paladins fell after attacking Redcloak village they had to do determine why they fell for doing what was right, during this period of reflection they realised that a) goblins were evil people not worthless vermin and b) the Crimson Mantle was their true target ... and so they got a bit better (still fairly bad), then O-Chul/Hinjo joined and they slowly continues to improve to where before the invasion of Azure city, then Xykon killed the lot of them (some exceptions apply).

[hamishspence]

It seemed to me pretty unambiguous that

Gin-Jun, their current leader as of HtPGHS, saw goblins as worthless vermin - and that his attitude had not changed at all between SoD and HtPGHS.

[Babale]

It seemed to me pretty unambiguous that

Gin-Jun, their current leader as of HtPGHS, saw goblins as worthless vermin - and that his attitude had not changed at all between SoD and HtPGHS.
It's been a while since I read that story, but I think you're right.

[Peelee]

It seemed to me pretty unambiguous that

Gin-Jun, their current leader as of HtPGHS, saw goblins as worthless vermin - and that his attitude had not changed at all between SoD and HtPGHS.

Indeed. The only change he made was bare surface methodology - "we used to punch people but some got suspended for it, so now we just move forward swinging our fists and if people happen to be in the way as we do it that's on them", as I've put it before.

[dancrilis]

It seemed to me pretty unambiguous that

Gin-Jun, their current leader as of HtPGHS, saw goblins as worthless vermin - and that his attitude had not changed at all between SoD and HtPGHS.

Even he needed to make a case for killing non-evil goblins, and was fairly clear that they would kill hobgoblins that struck at them (although that seemed perhaps to be more a guildline than an absolute).

Effectively I see them as a group of amoral soldiers doing a job with little care about anything beyond that job, rather then immoral soldiers gleefully hacking down children - but again I may be alone in that view.

[understatement]

Because the Saphire Guard is (or at least was at the time) apparently full of Miko-like sanctimonious pricks who think they are justified in killing all of the goblins due to them pinging as "evil" to their detection ability (when they announce their arrival, they yell about how the Twelve Gods have judged the goblins and found them Evil). Further, I think they're worried that any survivors might do exactly what Redcloak did -- salvage the Crimson Mantle and ensure that the Plan continues.

So it is the Sapphire Guard's fault that Redcloak's village fell, yes?

FYI, they did not know the Mantle was the source of the power.


Even he needed to make a case for killing non-evil goblins, and was fairly clear that they would kill hobgoblins that struck at them (although that seemed perhaps to be more a guildline than an absolute).

Effectively I see them as a group of amoral soldiers doing a job with little care about anything beyond that job, rather then immoral soldiers gleefully hacking down children - but again I may be alone in that view.

Like we discussed before, at this magnitude of action it doesn't matter if he had a reason or not to kill civilians. It's still evil and malicious, but now there's some facade of reasoning. Doesn't make it better, and doesn't mean the SG improved in any way at all.

[Peelee]

Further, I think they're worried that any survivors might do exactly what Redcloak did -- salvage the Crimson Mantle and ensure that the Plan continues.

They were quite explicitly not worried about any survivors doing what Redcloak did, since they didn't realize the Crimson Mantle was important at that time.

[Babale]

So it is the Sapphire Guard's fault that Redcloak's village fell, yes?
Yes, obviously? I mean, they killed everyone in the village, so yes, it's their fault. No one is disputing that.


FYI, they did not know the Mantle was the source of the power.

They didn't know that the Mantle was an artifact that contained the special knowledge of the Plan, but they knew enough of the Plan to know that it involved the Snarl, and they knew that the goblin in the red cloak was the high priest of the dark one and in charge of the Plan. They just didn't realize that it was a single red cloak each time they killed a High Priest, as I understood it.


They were quite explicitly not worried about any survivors doing what Redcloak did, since they didn't realize the Crimson Mantle was important at that time.

They didn't know about the artifact, but they knew about the Plan.

Eta: I'm basing this both on what the goblin in the red cloak says throughout the scene, as well as what the paladin who looks like a beardless Hinjo says when he sees the red cloaked goblin.

[understatement]

Yes, obviously? I mean, they killed everyone in the village, so yes, it's their fault. No one is disputing that.



Was the Sapphire Guard justified in wiping out Redcloak's village, civilians and all? Absolutely not. But were they justified in attacking at all? I would argue yes, because the Crimson Mantle IS that dangerous. It's not like they attacked the goblins for no reason. Their cleric was essentially a self contained research facility that was looking into a weapon that could destroy the entire world, with the intent to use it. From AC's perspective, preventing this is necessary.

We saw what happened, and the Paladins definitely failed to minimize civilian casualties (or to even try to do so), and that's bad. But part of the blame must fall on the goblins, who were researching doomsday weapons from a civilian village in the first place!


Just making sure.


They didn't know that the Mantle was an artifact that contained the special knowledge of the Plan, but they knew enough of the Plan to know that it involved the Snarl, and they knew that the goblin in the red cloak was the high priest of the dark one and in charge of the Plan. They just didn't realize that it was a single red cloak each time they killed a High Priest, as I understood it.



They didn't know about the artifact, but they knew about the Plan.

Eta: I'm basing this both on what the goblin in the red cloak says throughout the scene, as well as what the paladin who looks like a beardless Hinjo says when he sees the red cloaked goblin.

Yes, so once the Bearer dies, the Plan essentially dies with them.

[Babale]

Just making sure.



Yes, so once the Bearer dies, the Plan essentially dies with them.

I think the bit you take issue with is that I said that part of the blame falls on the Goblins -- but that was a misstatement, in the same way that it would be wrong to put the blame of the crusades on the Azurites when in fact it was the Saphire Guard acting in secret. By the same logic, the portion of the blame that falls on the Bearer of the Crimson Mantle doesn't fall on the goblin village as a whole, since they aren't aware of his doomsday plot. But yes, part of the blame IS on him. You can't work on a world shattering plan while surrounded by civilians without taking part of the blame when the Paladins show up to stop said doomsday plot and end up killing civilians.

Obviously that doesn't excuse what the Paladins did. They aren't showing regard for the sanctity of sentient life in accordance with the Good alignment. There's plenty of blame to go around.

[understatement]

I think the bit you take issue with is that I said that part of the blame falls on the Goblins -- but that was a misstatement, in the same way that it would be wrong to put the blame of the crusades on the Azurites when in fact it was the Saphire Guard acting in secret.

Agree.


By the same logic, the portion of the blame that falls on the Bearer of the Crimson Mantle doesn't fall on the goblin village as a whole, since they aren't aware of his doomsday plot. But yes, part of the blame IS on him. You can't work on a world shattering plan while surrounded by civilians without taking part of the blame when the Paladins show up to stop said doomsday plot and end up killing civilians.

Disagree. Absolutely nothing external forced the paladins to kill civilians.

OOTS is a world that contains many real-life parallels, but this is one such situation where it could be stretched. The Sapphire Guard is comprised of some of the most powerful AC paladins, as well as clerics and other spellcasters. It's trivial to sneak in, gather intel, disguise themselves, etc. It's trivial to cast divinations to figure out what really is the cause of the Plan. There is a huge power inequality between the armoured strike force on horses and the mostly-unarmed caught-by-surprise villagers who were only planning on attending church services.


Obviously that doesn't excuse what the Paladins did. They aren't showing regard for the sanctity of sentient life in accordance with the Good alignment. There's plenty of blame to go around.

What sticks down RC's craw is the fact that a) the gods sanctioned this, b) the Fallen paladins are just that: not able to summon horses or magic anymore, while his family remain dead, and c) none of the SG ever offered reparations or apologies even when the error was revealed.

[mjasghar]

A hard boiled egg

[C-Dude]

Also, @C-Dude: the village scene is of third-person ominiscent POV. The Giant has pretty firmly stated that "everything we saw happened." Also also, this is not the paladin military -- it's a specialized strike force that knew exactly what they were doing (and not in any positive sense).
It may be in third person (as is necessitated by the format of the media) but it is most certainly not omniscient. How and when information is disseminated to the reader is just as important as the information itself, and the way the scene is framed is designed explicitly to engender attachment to Wrong Eye.

It came right out of the video RPG handbook: meekish protagonist in idyllic village is attacked by monsters and dragged by destiny into worldwide conflict. It appears so often in fantasy media as an inciting incident because it works so effectively; it bonds the reader to the target character and encourages them to project on said character.

Without Wrong Eye's investiture to white cloak as a preface to the attack, to the audience it would appear no different than a typical war scene. Conversely, had the scene been preceded with the paladins discussing their crusade, or followed with one of them discussing the assault, it would have triggered resentment towards Wrong Eye as a character... even with the same dialogue.

As for the paladins knowing exactly what they were doing, I would argue they didn't. They didn't know the cloak was a source of power, and heretofore had no reason to suspect any goblin was innocent or a non-conspirator (or even anything more than a monster). That kind of ambiguity increases the amount of force in an attack, because the paladins had no guarantee 'taking out the leader' would stop the threat to reality. As for your suggestion that they should have gathered intelligence first, these paladins don't work like that... sneaking around to learn about an enemy is exploiting ignorance as a tactical advantage and is dishonorable (as shown by Miko against the giants). The paladins announced themselves, and then attacked. This is not out of character for them.

As for the children being attacked, I again reference my allusion to Fallout New Vegas and other fictions where children (and other innocuous individuals) are used as weapons. When one can't tell if a civilian or a child might be an insurgent (or a threat to reality, as again the paladins didn't know the cloak was the important part), again extra force is employed. Heck, Wrong Eye deploys that very strategy of insurgency to crush the Azure Resistance! He disguises a hobgoblin as a prisoner, gets the rebels to rescue him, and then uses the intelligence gathered to obliterate their forces.

Lastly, do you check if a spider is a baby before you squash it? To those paladins the goblins were not sentient creatures. That perception colored their actions, even if we as an audience know it to be a falsehood.

Which is why the scene is framed the way it is, why we aren't reminded why the paladins are attacking before they strike. The situation is designed to communicate to the reader Wrong Eye's motivation and his primary conflict: the perception that he and his are monsters when they're not.

Ironically, "We want equality" is as uphill a battle as this discussion, because most everyone in Stickworld has a very different framing of the situation than Wrong Eye does. Just as the audience is unwilling to widen their gaze and consider what they might not be seeing between strips, most Stickworlders know goblinoids only as dangerous raiders, in part due to The Dark One's crusade before his assassination, and have little inclination to ask "why are they like that?" or "are some of them NOT like that?". Wrong Eye is guilty of this too, assuming all humanoids are lumped into the same lap of luxury and privilege and never stopping to wonder "why did what happened to me happen?" or "are there any humans who aren't like the paladins?". If he'd done the former, he'd have burned the token of his hateful self-serving god and sought his own retribution like Right Eye did, and if he'd done the latter he would have looked into making some allies to actually change the goblin perception (such as the Greyskiers) instead of crutching on divine power like pre-familicide Vaarsuvius did with arcane.

[understatement]

It may be in third person (as is necessitated by the format of the media) but it is most certainly not omniscient. How and when information is disseminated to the reader is just as important as the information itself, and the way the scene is framed is designed explicitly to engender attachment to Wrong Eye.


The events of Start of Darkness are not a narrative being told by Redcloak, except for the crayon pages (which totally are).

Link to forum here (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?145182-SOD-debate-between-me-and-my-friend-(spoilers-I-guess)&p=8081896#post8081896).

I'm going to respectfully snip some of the quote because it's a bit hard for me to keep track of what's what.


As for the paladins knowing exactly what they were doing, I would argue they didn't. They didn't know the cloak was a source of power, and heretofore had no reason to suspect any goblin was innocent or a non-conspirator (or even anything more than a monster). That kind of ambiguity increases the amount of force in an attack, because the paladins had no guarantee 'taking out the leader' would stop the threat to reality. As for your suggestion that they should have gathered intelligence first, these paladins don't work like that... sneaking around to learn about an enemy is exploiting ignorance as a tactical advantage and is dishonorable (as shown by Miko against the giants). The paladins announced themselves, and then attacked. This is not out of character for them.

I agree that it is 100% in character for the SG to do this. Isn't that the root of the problem, then? That the divinely-sanctioned Sapphire Guard didn't think of goblins as people, and didn't bother to do their research on an important mission before moving in to kill?


As for the children being attacked, I again reference my allusion to Fallout New Vegas and other fictions where children (and other innocuous individuals) are used as weapons. When one can't tell if a civilian or a child might be an insurgent (or a threat to reality, as again the paladins didn't know the cloak was the important part), again extra force is employed. Heck, Wrong Eye deploys that very strategy of insurgency to crush the Azure Resistance! He disguises a hobgoblin as a prisoner, gets the rebels to rescue him, and then uses the intelligence gathered to obliterate their forces.

Lastly, do you check if a spider is a baby before you squash it? To those paladins the goblins were not sentient creatures. That perception colored their actions, even if we as an audience know it to be a falsehood.

I have only heard of the Fallout games, but I really don't think these situations are comparable. People in D&D are practically superhuman. Kids don't gain class levels (unless you're Xykon, and even then it's a rarity); the paladins can Detect Evil at will, the only real threat to the SG had been the Bearer (and maybe Redcloak's brother and uncle). Nothing that couldn't be fixed with a resurrection spell.

The Sapphire Guard knew that one person was the Bearer. Their lack of intel was that they didn't know the power came from a legit piece of cloth.

Not sure what Redcloak and the Resistance have to do with this. Yeah, he's Evil...I don't think anyone said otherwise?


Ironically, "We want equality" is as uphill a battle as this discussion, because most everyone in Stickworld has a very different framing of the situation than Wrong Eye does. Just as the audience is unwilling to widen their gaze and consider what they might not be seeing between strips, most Stickworlders know goblinoids only as dangerous raiders, in part due to The Dark One's crusade before his assassination, and have little inclination to ask "why are they like that?" or "are some of them NOT like that?". Wrong Eye is guilty of this too, assuming all humanoids are lumped into the same lap of luxury and privilege and never stopping to wonder "why did what happened to me happen?" or "are there any humans who aren't like the paladins?". If he'd done the former, he'd have burned the token of his hateful self-serving god and sought his own retribution like Right Eye did, and if he'd done the latter he would have looked into making some allies to actually change the goblin perception (such as the Greyskiers) instead of crutching on divine power like pre-familicide Vaarsuvius did with arcane.

I don't disagree here.

[hamishspence]

To those paladins the goblins were not sentient creatures. That perception colored their actions, even if we as an audience know it to be a falsehood.

If they genuinely believed that goblins weren't sentient - were of animal intelligence - then they wouldn't have even bothered making announcements at them, and telling them to "prepare themselves".

[Worldsong]

It may be in third person (as is necessitated by the format of the media) but it is most certainly not omniscient. How and when information is disseminated to the reader is just as important as the information itself, and the way the scene is framed is designed explicitly to engender attachment to Wrong Eye.

It came right out of the video RPG handbook: meekish protagonist in idyllic village is attacked by monsters and dragged by destiny into worldwide conflict. It appears so often in fantasy media as an inciting incident because it works so effectively; it bonds the reader to the target character and encourages them to project on said character.

The fact that we know that everything displayed in this scenario is objectively true means that Wrong Eye deserves our sympathy, because as you said what we see here is a protagonist living a peaceful life before the monsters come in and slaughter everything. The fact that the protagonist is a goblin and the monsters are paladins doesn't change anything.


Without Wrong Eye's investiture to white cloak as a preface to the attack, to the audience it would appear no different than a typical war scene. Conversely, had the scene been preceded with the paladins discussing their crusade, or followed with one of them discussing the assault, it would have triggered resentment towards Wrong Eye as a character... even with the same dialogue.

Actually from how the paladins of the old Sapphire Guard have been portrayed focusing on them would just have reinforced that we should loathe them because those guys were corrupt and immoral. I haven't read Start of Darkness myself but supposedly one of the paladins was happy to try out their Cleave attack on some helpless victims. Putting the spotlight on them wouldn't remove the fact that they were the bad guys here.


As for the paladins knowing exactly what they were doing, I would argue they didn't. They didn't know the cloak was a source of power, and heretofore had no reason to suspect any goblin was innocent or a non-conspirator (or even anything more than a monster). That kind of ambiguity increases the amount of force in an attack, because the paladins had no guarantee 'taking out the leader' would stop the threat to reality. As for your suggestion that they should have gathered intelligence first, these paladins don't work like that... sneaking around to learn about an enemy is exploiting ignorance as a tactical advantage and is dishonorable (as shown by Miko against the giants). The paladins announced themselves, and then attacked. This is not out of character for them.

Refusing to put some effort into gathering intel because sneaking is dishonourable is Lawful Stupid. Deciding to wipe out an entire village because you can't be arsed to gather the intel necessary to figure out who exactly is guilty and who isn't is Lawful Evil.


As for the children being attacked, I again reference my allusion to Fallout New Vegas and other fictions where children (and other innocuous individuals) are used as weapons. When one can't tell if a civilian or a child might be an insurgent (or a threat to reality, as again the paladins didn't know the cloak was the important part), again extra force is employed. Heck, Wrong Eye deploys that very strategy of insurgency to crush the Azure Resistance! He disguises a hobgoblin as a prisoner, gets the rebels to rescue him, and then uses the intelligence gathered to obliterate their forces.

Pretty sure The Giant has stated that he really, really, really does NOT expect people to assume that the goblin children are dangerous and deserving of being cut down when he hasn't shown them being dangerous on screen. In fact children, regardless of race, should be presumed to be innocent until proven guilty with even more certainty than adults.

The fact that there's an example in Fallout New Vegas of someone using children as cannon fodder doesn't matter because that's a different group, different setting, different scenario. If the paladins are fine with cutting down the children just on the off chance that they might be dangerous that is, once again, Evil.

And yes that means they have to risk being stabbed once or twice by a goblin child or whatever. They're paladins with class levels, they're not going to keel over even if one of the children miraculously scored a critical hit. And that is besides the fact that the odds of a child coming up and stabbing you are extremely low because children are by default not combatants.


Lastly, do you check if a spider is a baby before you squash it? To those paladins the goblins were not sentient creatures. That perception colored their actions, even if we as an audience know it to be a falsehood.

Racism/discrimination is also considered Evil. Goblins talk and have civilization, they build villages and communities. Aside from the fact that Hamishspence has already pointed out that the Paladins gave the goblins a warning the village showed enough signs of sapience that any paladin who looks at them and genuinely thinks them on the same level of spiders is either so stupid as to require constant supervision or, once again, Evil.


Which is why the scene is framed the way it is, why we aren't reminded why the paladins are attacking before they strike. The situation is designed to communicate to the reader Wrong Eye's motivation and his primary conflict: the perception that he and his are monsters when they're not.

Yes, instead the paladins are the monsters because we seem them committing atrocities.


Ironically, "We want equality" is as uphill a battle as this discussion, because most everyone in Stickworld has a very different framing of the situation than Wrong Eye does. Just as the audience is unwilling to widen their gaze and consider what they might not be seeing between strips, most Stickworlders know goblinoids only as dangerous raiders, in part due to The Dark One's crusade before his assassination, and have little inclination to ask "why are they like that?" or "are some of them NOT like that?". Wrong Eye is guilty of this too, assuming all humanoids are lumped into the same lap of luxury and privilege and never stopping to wonder "why did what happened to me happen?" or "are there any humans who aren't like the paladins?". If he'd done the former, he'd have burned the token of his hateful self-serving god and sought his own retribution like Right Eye did, and if he'd done the latter he would have looked into making some allies to actually change the goblin perception (such as the Greyskiers) instead of crutching on divine power like pre-familicide Vaarsuvius did with arcane.

I'm pretty sure the idea was that the Dark One started his crusade because the discrimination against goblinoids was already in place. Granted the crusades might have made it worse (because obviously when the oppressed rise up and actually manage to win in a straight up war the message is that they're not oppressed hard enough) but the problem goes deeper than that.

And yes Wrong Eye is also guilty of discrimination, but the point is that this is a bad trait which requires fixing. However that at worst puts him on equal level with the people who consider all goblinoids bad, and personally I'd still consider him ahead in the game because at least he got his entire village burned down and his loved ones killed before he started thinking that (or at least acting on it).

The point here is that yes we can think of reasons why the paladins did what they did and yes those reasons can make sense... but they make sense in the way that people are flawed and in the case of the old Sapphire Guard their flaws are that they're horrible, horrible people who'll commit atrocities for convenience and because they simply don't care. At the end of the day they're still monstrous and everyone who participated in those raids deserved to die. Not just lose their paladin powers, actually get killed and prevented from resurrecting.

And yes I'm aware that doesn't justify attacking Azure City or blaming the reformed Sapphire Guard. But that's not the point here.

Also the information we've been given so far states that the Dark One isn't self-serving given that his grand plan is to blackmail the gods to get concessions which help the mortal goblinoids. Yes I'm aware that people have been going around giving arguments why the Dark One might secretly not give a damn about goblinoids and just be furthering his own goals, but until that's actually shown in the comic that's speculation and personally I consider it a bit too convenient an argument for why the god of the oppressed goblinoids is a bad guy who has to be treated as such.

[Jason]

Also the information we've been given so far states that the Dark One isn't self-serving given that his grand plan is to blackmail the gods to get concessions which help the mortal goblinoids. Yes I'm aware that people have been going around giving arguments why the Dark One might secretly not give a damn about goblinoids and just be furthering his own goals, but until that's actually shown in the comic that's speculation and personally I consider it a bit too convenient an argument for why the god of the oppressed goblinoids is a bad guy who has to be treated as such.

First of all, all of the information we have received about how the Dark One is really a caring and good god who wants the best for his fellow goblinoids is from his own priests. You can hardly expect them to have an unbiased perspective. Oona the bugbear seems to think the Dark One doesn't care about anyone who isn't green or orange. Right-Eye decides to abandon the Dark One's Plan in Start of Darkness, and the new hobgoblin Supreme Leader in How the Paladin Got His Scar, who is a cleric of the Dark One, is perfectly happy to let the humans alone and build the infrastructure of his city instead.

Second, we know that The Dark One is a bad guy because he's an evil deity created after his followers slaughtered a million souls in his name in the course of one year, after he had already fought a bloody war of conquest (even if you accept the justification that the goblins were oppressed, he was still attempting to take lands that belonged to other races by force). And no doubt plenty of human, dwarvish, and elvish children were included in the casualty lists for both the war and the massacre that followed his death. Evil and Good are easily-testable qualities in this world, and The Dark One and most of his followers definitely test as Evil. That is a major difference from how things work in the real world.

The Sapphire Guard were callous in their deeds, and their then-leader in How the Paladin Got His Scar is shown to be an obnoxious racist, but when they massacred Redcloak's village under a different leader they actually were protecting the world from the cult of an Evil god that intends to threaten all the other gods and the very fabric of existence, and chances are that all the adults in the village really did test as Evil. The statement by the paladins of why they were attacking the village ("the Twelve Gods are telling us that your hearts are evil and that your religious leader here is threatening to destroy the world") was not hyperbole. Every goblin in that village was either already a member of an evil, world-threatening cult or was a potential recruit. The Twelve Gods did not cause any of those paladins to fall that we know of, because despite being needlessly cruel about it in they end they were doing the job the Twelve Gods asked them to do. In fact it could be argued that they were not thorough enough in carrying out their duty, since Redcloak escaped and went on to threaten the other gods and ultimately the world with destruction.

If the paladins had performed a precision strike and taken out only the cult leader and immediate priesthood, what would have happened next? Exactly what did happen - some other goblin in the village would have taken up the cloak and then proceed to threaten the world again.

The massacre of Redcloak's village is by definition a special case because the Dark One's high priest lived there. You can't take it as the way the Sapphire Guard treated all other goblin villages and all other goblins in all other circumstances.
There is some evidence in How the Paladin Got His Scar that the later incarnation of the Guard found there probably would have treated all other goblin villages the same way, but that is under a different leader than the one who lead the attack on Redcloak's village, and he gets his comeuppance in the course of that story, with all of his paladins being unwilling to follow him anymore once O-Chul demonstrates his racism.

[dancrilis]

The Twelve Gods did not cause any of those paladins to fall that we know of, because despite being needlessly cruel about it in they end they were doing the job the Twelve Gods asked them to do.

I hold that some of them did (very likely) fall.


Oooo! Oooo! I know this one!

The events of Start of Darkness are not a narrative being told by Redcloak, except for the crayon pages (which totally are). You are right, your friend is wrong. Everything you see happened.

However, everything that happened is not necessarily seen.

Suffice to say that the Twelve Gods are not beholden to put on the same visual display they did for Miko for every paladin who transgresses, and that all transgressions are not created equal. It is possible that some of the paladins who participated in the attack crossed the line. It is also possible that most did not. A paladin who slips up in the execution of their god-given orders does not warrant the same level of personal attention by the gods as one who executes the legal ruler of their nation on a glorified hunch. Think of Miko's Fall as being the equivalent of the CEO of your multinational company showing up in your cubicle to fire you, because you screwed up THAT much.

Of course, while Redcloak is not narrating the scene, it is shown mostly from his perspective; we don't see how many Detect Evils were used before the attack started, and we don't see how many paladins afterwards try to heal their wounds and can't, because these things are not important to Redcloak's story. Whether or not some of the paladins Fell does not bring Redcloak's family back to life. Indeed, if we transplant the scene to real life, he would think it cold comfort that some of the police officers who gunned down his family had to turn in their badge afterward (but were otherwise given no punishment by their bosses at City Hall).

Dramatically, showing no-name paladins Falling at that point in the story would confuse the narrative by making it unclear whether or not Redcloak had already earned a form of retribution against them. To be clear, he had not: Whether or not some of them lost a few class abilities does not change the fact that Redcloak suffered an injustice at their hands, one that shaped his entire adult life. That was the point of the scene. Showing them Fall or not simply was not important to Redcloak's story, so it was omitted.

Further, it would have cheapened Miko's fall to show the same thing over and over--and Miko, as a major character in the series, deserved the emotional weight that her Fall carried (or at least that I hope it carried).

I hope that clears this issue up. I hope in vain, largely, but there you have it.

(Oh, and I leave it up to the readers to form their own opinions on which paladins may have Fallen and which didn't.)

[Jason]

It seemed to me pretty unambiguous that

Gin-Jun, their current leader as of HtPGHS, saw goblins as worthless vermin - and that his attitude had not changed at all between SoD and HtPGHS.

Gin-Jun was not the leader of the Sapphire Guard at the time of their attack on RedCloak's village in SoD. He was present at the attack but was explicitly not the leader at the time. Also he apparently did not fall from paladinhood as a result of his actions during the attack.

[Peelee]

Gin-Jun was not the leader of the Sapphire Guard at the time of their attack on RedCloak's village in SoD. He was present at the attack but was explicitly not the leader at the time. Also he apparently did not fall from paladinhood as a result of his actions during the attack.

Nobody said he was the leader during SoD, though. hamish said Gin-Jun was the leader during HtPGHS.

[Jason]

Nobody said he was the leader during SoD, though. hamish said Gin-Jun was the leader during HtPGHS.
Yep, I got that no one said that. Just making it clear we're on the same page here.
Also, while it could be argued that his attitudes didn't change between the two books, it's possible that they did change. He may have gotten much worse over time. That could help explain why he didn't fall from Paladinhood at the time of the earlier attack.

[Peelee]

Yep, I got that no one said that. Just making it clear we're on the same page here.
Also, while it could be argued that his attitudes didn't change between the two books, it's possible that they did change. He may have gotten much worse over time. That could help explain why he didn't fall from Paladinhood at the time of the earlier attack.

Ah, my bad!

I can totally see him getting worse. Especially with seeing some paladins fall for incomprehensible (to him) reasons, so he takes the wrong lesson - that being, methodology of killing innocents is more important than simply not killing innocents, and the goblins deserve to be killed even more now that they made some paladins fall due to not dying the right way.

[Worldsong]

First of all, all of the information we have received about how the Dark One is really a caring and good god who wants the best for his fellow goblinoids is from his own priests. You can hardly expect them to have an unbiased perspective. Oona the bugbear seems to think the Dark One doesn't care about anyone who isn't green or orange. Right-Eye decides to abandon the Dark One's Plan in Start of Darkness, and the new hobgoblin Supreme Leader in How the Paladin Got His Scar is perfectly happy to let the humans alone and build the infrastructure of his city instead.

If The Plan is really the Dark One's goal then he is working for the betterment for the goblinoids even if he isn't always on his best behaviour. Personally I feel like people are too quick to take every gripe againt the Dark One and go "Oh, clearly he's not invested in The Plan at all and doesn't actually care about the goblinoids in the slightest."


Second, we know that The Dark One is a bad guy because he's an evil deity created after his followers slaughtered a million souls in his name in the course of one year, after he had already fought a bloody war of conquest (even if you accept the justification that the goblins were oppressed, he was still attempting to take lands that belonged to other races by force). And no doubt plenty of human, dwarvish, and elvish children were included in the casualty lists for both the war and the massacre that followed his death. Evil and Good are easily-testable qualities in this world, and The Dark One and most of his followers definitely test as Evil. That is a major difference from how things work in the real world.

Okay, this might be my fault due to poor phrasing. When I say that the Dark One isn't the bad guy I mean he isn't the bad guy in this story. While he's definitely Evil I highly doubt that we'll find out that he's at fault for all the bad things in the comic and that getting rid of him magically solves all our problems. The reasoning being that him being the bad guy would undermine the story arc of the oppression of goblinkind. And we know that the oppression of goblinkind is real and that it's going to be addressed because The Giant has said so on a meta-level.

That said yes he was born from his followers going on a rampage, but I'm pretty sure what caused his ascension wasn't the slaughter so much as the sheer devotion his followers showed. Gods feast on things like belief, devotion and supplication. Most likely he could have ascended if they showed their devotion in another way.

And the reason his followers decided that the best way to show their devotion was through mass slaughter was... because the Dark One had been fighting a war against the oppression of goblinkind (which you call a bloody war of conquest) and was actually trying to get peace talks started when the PC races decided that they'd rather stab him in the back because their alternative was actually acknowledging the point that goblinkind has been fighting against oppression. The mass slaughter was, of course, a horrible thing, and the goblinoids who took part of it were horrible people, but I disagree with the portrayal that his followers did it just because they're evil.


The Sapphire Guard were callous in their deeds, and their then-leader in How the Paladin Got His Scar is shown to be an obnoxious racist, but when they massacred Redcloak's village under a different leader they actually were protecting the world from the cult of an Evil god that intends to threaten all the other gods and the very fabric of existence, and chances are that all the adults in the village really did test as Evil. The statement by the paladins of why they were attacking the village ("the Twelve Gods are telling us that your hearts are evil and that your religious leader here is threatening to destroy the world") was not hyperbole. Every goblin in that village was either already a member of an evil, world-threatening cult or was a potential recruit. The Twelve Gods did not cause any of those paladins to fall that we know of, because despite being needlessly cruel about it in they end they were doing the job the Twelve Gods asked them to do. In fact it could be argued that they were not thorough enough in carrying out their duty, since Redcloak escaped and went on to threaten the other gods and ultimately the world with destruction.

I don't agree with the notion that being Evil is enough reason for a paladin to strike you down. Yes Miko did it but Miko was called out on it (albeit in a somewhat comedic fashion) and The Giant has gone on record to say that Miko had been toeing the line between Lawful Good and just Lawful for a while now: Shojo's murder was just the tipping point.

They had no evidence that the goblins living in that village had done anything deserving of the death penalty. They suspected (or knew) that there was something bad in that village they needed to do something about but every source so far has told me that they were sorely lacking in good intel.

I'm just going to say it plainly: you're not going to convince me that genocide is justified when the best the paladins got was "There's something dangerous in that village, let's wipe it out. Including the children who are running away from us."

The reason being that convincing me that genocide is ever justified is already incredibly difficult because genocide is not supposed to be just another option for dealing with your problems. For me to even consider genocide as justified you need evidence. Concrete, detailed, irrefutable evidence. And THEN you need to prove that genocide is literally the only method to solve the problem. You need to systematically disqualify other potential solutions such as containment, sabotage, precision strikes. And yes that would be difficult and tedious and carry its own problems with it but all of that is justified because it means you're not resorting to genocide. Because genocide is an awful thing you shouldn't be doing. Seriously. I don't get how people keep coming back with "Yes but this instance of genocide was a good idea because..."


If the paladins had performed a precision strike and taken out only the cult leader and immediate priesthood, what would have happened next? Exactly what did happen - some other goblin in the village would have taken up the cloak and then proceed to threaten the world again.

This would be a very good argument if the paladins knew for a fact that this would happen. If they had solid evidence which proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that every single goblin in that village was capable and willing of continuing The Plan. They did not. The best they had was that a lot (possibly all) the goblins scanned as Evil. And as I've stated before, scanning as Evil is not justification for execution.

I actually think The Giant has stated somewhere that killing a person just because they're Evil is an Evil act in itself, because you're murdering someone who, for all you know, might have a strong inclination towards evil but who has never actually performed any crime deserving of the death penalty.

Of course I could start arguing whether the death penalty is ever deserved but I'll concede that in a DnD-like setting there are times when somebody just needs to die. Like Xykon.


The massacre of Redcloak's village is by definition a special case because the Dark One's high priest lived there. You can't take it as the way the Sapphire Guard treated all other goblin villages and all other goblins in all other circumstances.
There is some evidence in How the Paladin Got His Scar that the later incarnation of the Guard found there probably would have treated all other goblin villages the same way, but that is under a different leader than the one who lead the attack on Redcloak's village, and he gets his comeuppance in the course of that story, with all of his paladins being unwilling to follow him anymore once O-Chul demonstrates his racism.

We know on the meta-level that goblinkind has been oppressed throughout the ages.

We also know that the paladins have come for the last two Bearers.

We know that the paladins are willing to wipe out an entire village on the suspicion that there's something dangerous going on inside that village.

We have an admission from I believe Hinjo that the Sapphire Guard has a rich history of protecting the world (through killing things).

Yes we don't have direct evidence that they treat other goblinoid villages the same but all the evidence we do have strongly hints towards it with little in the way of evidence to the contrary. Especially since the only thing needed for the Sapphire Guard to go in with metaphorical guns blazing is for them to believe there's evil cultists in there doing dangerous things. And given that goblins usually scan as Evil they apparently don't need much convincing.

[Jason]

If The Plan is really the Dark One's goal then he is working for the betterment for the goblinoids even if he isn't always on his best behaviour. Personally I feel like people are too quick to take every gripe againt the Dark One and go "Oh, clearly he's not invested in The Plan at all and doesn't actually care about the goblinoids in the slightest."At the very least the Dark One is personally motivated to continue receiving goblinoid worship, so he must have at least some interest in their welfare. Still I can't help feeling that when Redcloak finally does understand his god's true attitude towards goblins and Redcloak himself that there will be problems.


Okay, this might be my fault due to poor phrasing. When I say that the Dark One isn't the bad guy I mean he isn't the bad guy in this story. While he's definitely Evil I highly doubt that we'll find out that he's at fault for all the bad things in the comic and that getting rid of him magically solves all our problems.Point taken. I agree that the Dark One appears at this point to not be the villain of the story.


The reasoning being that him being the bad guy would undermine the story arc of the oppression of goblinkind. And we know that the oppression of goblinkind is real and that it's going to be addressed because The Giant has said so on a meta-level.I'm curious as to where and how he said goblins really have been oppressed, as I either missed it or have forgotten where I read it.


And the reason his followers decided that the best way to show their devotion was through mass slaughter was... because the Dark One had been fighting a war against the oppression of goblinkind (which you call a bloody war of conquest) and was actually trying to get peace talks started when the PC races decided that they'd rather stab him in the back because their alternative was actually acknowledging the point that goblinkind has been fighting against oppression. The mass slaughter was, of course, a horrible thing, and the goblinoids who took part of it were horrible people, but I disagree with the portrayal that his followers did it just because they're evil.
What went down with the Dark One's death during peace negotiations is, again, the Dark One's perspective, as told by his High Priest. We don't know if that is really how it happened.


I don't agree with the notion that being Evil is enough reason for a paladin to strike you down. Yes Miko did it but Miko was called out on it (albeit in a somewhat comedic fashion) and The Giant has gone on record to say that Miko had been toeing the line between Lawful Good and just Lawful for a while now: Shojo's murder was just the tipping point.I agree, just being evil is not enough to warrant your immediate death. But being evil while living in the same village as an evil high priest who is planning to threaten the world might make your death a little more justifiable.


The reason being that convincing me that genocide is ever justified is already incredibly difficult because genocide is not supposed to be just another option for dealing with your problems. For me to even consider genocide as justified you need evidence. Concrete, detailed, irrefutable evidence. And THEN you need to prove that genocide is literally the only method to solve the problem. You need to systematically disqualify other potential solutions such as containment, sabotage, precision strikes. And yes that would be difficult and tedious and carry its own problems with it but all of that is justified because it means you're not resorting to genocide. Because genocide is an awful thing you shouldn't be doing. Seriously. I don't get how people keep coming back with "Yes but this instance of genocide was a good idea because..."Well again, this is a world where evil alignment is easily verifiable. That makes a big difference from our own world.


I actually think The Giant has stated somewhere that killing a person just because they're Evil is an Evil act in itself, because you're murdering someone who, for all you know, might have a strong inclination towards evil but who has never actually performed any crime deserving of the death penalty.I can accept that general idea. So what do we make of the fact that at least one of the paladins who participated (and probably many of the other survivors) did not fall? That would seem to mean that the Twelve Gods at least did not see everyone involved in the attack as guilty of evil acts worthy of removal of paladin status.

[Worldsong]

At the very least the Dark One is personally motivated to continue receiving goblinoid worship, so he must have at least some interest in their welfare. Still I can't help feeling that when Redcloak finally does understand his god's true attitude towards goblins and Redcloak himself that there will be problems.

That's definitely possible but I'm still doubtful that the revelation will be that the Dark One is purely in this for himself. Because yes he ascended on the deaths of millions but he also ascended on the belief of countless goblinoids who supported his crusade against oppression.


I'm curious as to where and how he said goblins really have been oppressed, as I either missed it or have forgotten where I read it.

Usually we combine these two comments which come from the same thread and reply to the same person.



Two, D&D is a world of black and white morality, in most cases. Even the concept of shades of grey was codified in neutrality, really an idea that's just as simple and straightforward (albeit annoyingly hard to actually implement) as good and evil. Trying to apply your real world morals to it (often resulting i the self-inflicted discomfort you're feeling) is like trying to determine the morality of a lion eating a gazelle; they're just not compatible.The primary purpose of Redcloak's characterization is to specifically prove that this point is completely and utterly wrong. That D&D cannot and should not begin and end at black-and-white, and indeed already doesn't, if everyone would just learn to look at things a little more complexly.

Obviously, I still have work to do on that point.

Further, your definition of "what the comic is about" is also wrong. You seem to think it should be about me regurgitating an accurate portrayal of how the game should ideally be played. Nothing could be further from my mind. The comic is criticizing not how the game is intended to be played, but how the game is actually played and has been for 35+ years. And how it is actually played 9 times out of 10 is that goblins are slaughtered because they are goblins, and the book says that goblins are Evil so it's OK. If you've never played in a game with people like that, then congratulations! You've had an exceptionally lucky D&D career, and that whole portion of the comic's subtext is Not For You. But there are plenty of people who maybe have never given it a second thought. Just because you've already learned some of the lessons of a work of fiction does not mean that there's no point to including them.

Now, if you want to rail on me because the first time Redcloak walked on screen, I didn't know everything I would later write in Start of Darkness, go right ahead. It would be a grossly unfair criticism being that it's common knowledge that I started this comic strip with no idea that it was going to last more than a dozen strips, but at least it would be an accurate one instead of one built entirely on one's own personal biases about the D&D game and how I'm not reading your mind so that I might live up to them.

Oh, and I will continue to veer back and forth from obeying D&D conventions to ignoring them when and as I see fit, so if that's going to bug you, you should probably stop reading now. Because I simply do not care about the level of consistency that you seem to find important.

Sorry, I missed this in my earlier post:

the inapplicability as satire (again I have to wonder why anyone gives a crap about whether it's fair to depict monsters are evil in fantasy games),
I CARE. I care, and every goddamn person in the world should care, because it's objectification of a sentient being. It doesn't matter that the sentient being in question is a fictional species, it's saying that it's OK for people who look funny to be labeled as Evil by default, because hey, like 60% of them do Evil things sometimes! That is racism. It is a short hop to real-world racism once we decide it is acceptable to make blanket negative statements about entire races of people.

Our fiction reflects who we are as a civilization, and it disgusts me that so many people think it's acceptable to label creatures with only cosmetic differences from us as inherently Evil. I may like the alignment system overall, but that is its ugliest implication, and one that I think needs to be eliminated from the game. I will ALWAYS write against that idea until it has been eradicated from the lexicon of fantasy literature. If they called me up and asked me to help them work on 5th Edition, I would stamp it out from the very game itself. It is abhorrent to me in every way.

So, complaining that I am failing to uphold it is the best compliment you could give me.

Honestly I've been considering putting this in my signature so I can pull it up every time someone suggests that maybe Redcloak's cause is false or wrong. The good news is that thanks to some helpful souls I can now quote from locked threads.


What went down with the Dark One's death during peace negotiations is, again, the Dark One's perspective, as told by his High Priest. We don't know if that is really how it happened.

The moment we get strong evidence that the Dark One has been twisting the story to make himself a lot more sympathetic than he actually is I'll change my tune. The reason why I'm pushing back so hard currently is because I'm strongly pro-equality and feel like people are quick to undermine the storyline about goblinoids being oppressed when they seek arguments why Redcloak and the Dark One are actually just villains to be removed from the game.


I agree, just being evil is not enough to warrant your immediate death. But being evil while living in the same village as an evil high priest who is planning to threaten the world might make your death a little more justifiable.

Well again, this is a world where evil alignment is easily verifiable. That makes a big difference from our own world.

I can accept that general idea. So what do we make of the fact that at least one of the paladins who participated (and probably many of the other survivors) did not fall? That would seem to mean that the Twelve Gods at least did not see everyone involved in the attack as guilty of evil acts worthy of removal of paladin status.

I still feel like being killed because you're Evil-aligned and live inside the same village as an evil high priest is not enough justification.

Also there can be several explanations for why the paladins didn't fall which can be stacked on top of each other.

The first one is that committing Evil acts does not immediately bump you out of Good territory. You can make mistakes and still recover from them. The ones that did fall were probably similar to Miko that they were already close to the edge and then jumped over the edge.

There's also the possibility that not all paladins had the same priority list. Some of them might have gone after innocent goblins who were just running away while others focused on those goblins who tried to fight back or struggle in some capacity. Which still wouldn't be very Good given that those goblins were fighting back against what was essentially an unprovoked ambush but it's probably easier to fly under the radar if you can claim that the goblin you killed was waving a weapon at you.

On top of that the Twelve Gods are deadly afraid of the Snarl and are probably willing to play loose and fast with the rules if it means ensuring that there's absolutely zero chance of the Snarl ever breaking free. As long as the Sapphire Guard is acting to stop the Snarl they could probably get away with things which the gods would otherwise frown upon.

And while the Twelve Gods want their servants to be virtuous they also want to actually have direct servants following their orders. Maybe more paladins would have fallen if the Twelve Gods hadn't decided that making them all fall would harm the Sapphire Guard's capability of acting against Evil and the Snarl too much.

The previous book has shown us (and Roy) that the gods aren't even remotely infallible: they act according to their own concerns, can keep secrets from each other and mortals, and the Good-aligned gods can make decisions which makes someone like Roy wonder about the morality. The Sapphire Guard gets their power from the Twelve Gods so while there's probably rules that prevent giving power to someone who is blatantly not Lawful Good they can prioritize their own goals over judging whether a paladin who hasn't quite left the Lawful Good territory actually deserves their support.

[Jason]

Thank you for the nice quotes from the Giant. They basically say that we the readers shouldn't consider characters attacking goblins to be justified just because they are attacking goblins and goblins are generally evil in the game system, which is an attitude I completely agree with. I have always supported having my players avoid killing "evil" races who weren't actually doing anything evil or attacking them at that moment in the games I have run over the years, and have awarded the same XP for defeating a threat by talking to it rather than killing it.
But what those quotes don't say is "goblins and hobgoblins in Stickworld really did get a raw deal from the gods as Redcloak believes, and really have been unfairly oppressed by the PC races throughout their history," which is what I was asking for.

[Worldsong]

Thank you for the nice quotes from the Giant. They basically say that we the readers shouldn't consider characters attacking goblins to be justified just because they are attacking goblins and goblins are generally evil in the game system, which is an attitude I completely agree with. I have always supported having my players avoid killing "evil" races who weren't actually doing anything evil or attacking them at that moment in the games I have run over the years, and have awarded the same XP for defeating a threat by talking to it rather than killing it.
But what those quotes don't say is "goblins and hobgoblins in Stickworld really did get a raw deal from the gods as Redcloak believes, and really have been unfairly oppressed by the PC races throughout their history," which is what I was asking for.

They're in my signature now so I don't have to keep searching for them.

And yes they don't explicitly state that, however I think that combined they paint a pretty clear picture: for The Giant the Order of the Stick is in part about how creatures like goblins get treated like monsters and how that's bad.

Now I can't think of any quote from The Giant which 100% states that goblins routinely have gotten their **** kicked in from the dawn of time for no reason. However I do personally feel like these two quotes combined hint towards it strongly enough that I can stick with the idea until The Giant himself proves otherwise.

It is possible that we get a massive twist and everything is different but I find that very, very unlikely.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

thanks to some helpful souls I can now quote from locked threads.

I say! I've never been so offended in my life! Helpful? And souled? Me? How dare you!
Sorry, I'm feeling silly today. Didn't get enough sleep.
GW

[Worldsong]

I say! I've never been so offended in my life! Helpful? And souled? Me? How dare you!
Sorry, I'm feeling silly today. Didn't get enough sleep.
GW

Search your feelings. You know it to be true!
That's fine, silly is good from time to time.

[Jason]

They're in my signature now so I don't have to keep searching for them.

And yes they don't explicitly state that, however I think that combined they paint a pretty clear picture: for The Giant the Order of the Stick is in part about how creatures like goblins get treated like monsters and how that's bad.

Now I can't think of any quote from The Giant which 100% states that goblins routinely have gotten their **** kicked in from the dawn of time for no reason. However I do personally feel like these two quotes combined hint towards it strongly enough that I can stick with the idea until The Giant himself proves otherwise.

It is possible that we get a massive twist and everything is different but I find that very, very unlikely.That basic message has already been demonstrated several times in the comic. I think it would remain intact if it turned out that goblins have in fact always been treated as equal by the gods, that the Dark One originally started a bloody war of conquest because he simply wanted to take the PC races' stuff, and that he concocted the whole "my entire race was created to be XP fodder" lie merely to justify taking what he wanted.

Also notice the way Redcloak presents the idea: in order to prevent another Snarl the gods agreed to limit their powers of interference outside their own territories to their clerics and then realized after a while that the clerics needed easy encounters to gain XP and so created the goblinoids. This works fine if Stickworld was the second world created and the gods found out an unexpected limitation to the new "clerics only" rules and then had to correct it. But we know now that literally millions of earlier worlds were created. Have the gods really used the same solution of "create sentient races as disposable XP fodder for our clerics" every time?

[Worldsong]

That basic message has already been demonstrated several times in the comic. I think it would remain intact if it turned out that goblins have in fact always been treated as equal by the gods, that the Dark One originally started a bloody war of conquest because he simply wanted to take the PC races' stuff, and that he concocted the whole "my entire race was created to be XP fodder" lie merely to justify taking what he wanted.

Also notice that the way Redcloak presents the idea: in order to prevent another Snarl the gods agreed to limit their powers of interference outside their own territories to their clerics and then realized after a while that the clerics needed easy encounters to gain XP and so created the goblinoids. This works fine if Stickworld was the second world created and the gods found out an unexpected limitation to the new "clerics only" rules and then had to correct it. But we know now that literally millions of earlier worlds were created. Have the gods really used the same solution of "create sentient races as disposable XP fodder for our clerics" every time?

The Giant has compared it to racism, so I figure systematic oppression is part of the package.

Also they may not have done it every single time but given that they seem fine with it (no suggestion that a significant portion of the gods has tried to put a stop to it) I wouldn't be surprised if they've done it before.

An important part of the previous book was to show that the gods aren't infallible and can't be relied upon to do the right thing. It's entirely possible that even now they're perfectly fine with the arrangement and consider it a good way for their clerics to get XP.

[Jason]

The Giant has compared it to racism, so I figure systematic oppression is part of the package.

Also they may not have done it every single time but given that they seem fine with it (no suggestion that a significant portion of the gods has tried to put a stop to it) I wouldn't be surprised if they've done it before.
None of the gods have directly addressed the idea on-panel that I can recall, and no mortals except the priests of the Dark One have either. Durkon admitted that he wouldn't be surprised if it were true, but that's not the same as saying it is true.


An important part of the previous book was to show that the gods aren't infallible and can't be relied upon to do the right thing. It's entirely possible that even now they're perfectly fine with the arrangement and consider it a good way for their clerics to get XP.Maybe. Another point made several times in the last book was that the neutral and evil gods together outnumber the good gods. So the good gods might very well be upset at the idea but unable to muster enough votes to change things when creating each world.

[Worldsong]

None of the gods have directly addressed the idea on-panel that I can recall, and no mortals except the priests of the Dark One have either. Durkon admitted that he wouldn't be surprised if it were true, but that's not the same as saying it is true.

True, but that doesn't mean I can't believe it's true. We're not in a court of law where anything which can't be proven with 99% accuracy must be dismissed. I personally find the idea that the gods have made horrible decisions realistic in the context of the story.

We're arguing about perspective and belief here. Neither of us has to capitulate just because we can't confirm our own hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt. Neither of us CAN be certain until the story has ended and it's become clear what's what.


Maybe. Another point made several times in the last book was that the neutral and evil gods together outnumber the good gods. So the good gods might very well be upset at the idea but unable to muster enough votes to change things when creating each world.

True, but would that change the outcome? It would still mean that the Neutral and the Evil gods might be fine with the idea and the Good gods couldn't stop him, and the goblinoids would be oppressed the same way.

[Jason]

True, but that doesn't mean I can't believe it's true. We're not in a court of law where anything which can't be proven with 99% accuracy must be dismissed. I personally find the idea that the gods have made horrible decisions realistic in the context of the story.I agree, it might be true. It even seems likely that it is true. I just find it a bit suspicious that we don't have much evidence that it is true. Since it's a major villain's primary motivation (or what he says is his primary motivation, at least), having it turn out to not be true could be a good way to provoke a last minute change of heart, which I think many of us are expecting from Redcloak.
As you say, we'll find out if it's relevant by the end of this book.


True, but would that change the outcome? It would still mean that the Neutral and the Evil gods might be fine with the idea and the Good gods couldn't stop him, and the goblinoids would be oppressed the same way.No it wouldn't change the outcome. Presumably the good gods aren't willing to have a world created without their input, or to push their objections against sentient XP fodder to the point of creating a new Snarl, but I was pointing out that it's not true to say "the gods" are all fine with it. Some of them most definitely wouldn't be fine with it - if it's true, that is.

[Babale]

That basic message has already been demonstrated several times in the comic. I think it would remain intact if it turned out that goblins have in fact always been treated as equal by the gods, that the Dark One originally started a bloody war of conquest because he simply wanted to take the PC races' stuff, and that he concocted the whole "my entire race was created to be XP fodder" lie merely to justify taking what he wanted.

Also notice that the way Redcloak presents the idea: in order to prevent another Snarl the gods agreed to limit their powers of interference outside their own territories to their clerics and then realized after a while that the clerics needed easy encounters to gain XP and so created the goblinoids. This works fine if Stickworld was the second world created and the gods found out an unexpected limitation to the new "clerics only" rules and then had to correct it. But we know now that literally millions of earlier worlds were created. Have the gods really used the same solution of "create sentient races as disposable XP fodder for our clerics" every time?

This is what I was going to say in response to some earlier posts, and I'm glad I read to the end of the thread to see that you've already said it. Redcloak's story was always full of holes, and now that we know that this isn't the second world it completely falls apart. I very much doubt that the whole "monstrous humanoids were only created after the fact to give the humanoid clerics an easy source of XP" theory is accurate. I mean -- who serves as a better source of first level XP fodder than kobolds? Yet we have a lizardfolk complaining that Tiamat has always preferred kobold to the other reptilians. It may have a grain of truth, but it isn't the whole story. So there's more going on here than just divine favor.

Also, Redcloak is wrong about goblinoids being killed on sight by humans. Right Eye goes to a human-owned circus and nobody murders him. In fact, he brings his children to the circus. You think a human could go visit the Hobgoblin Valley before the invasion of Azure City without being killed?

[Worldsong]

I agree, it might be true. It even seems likely that it is true. I just find it a bit suspicious that we don't have much evidence that it is true. Since it's a major villain's primary motivation (or what he says is his primary motivation, at least), having it turn out to not be true could be a good way to provoke a last minute change of heart, which I think many of us are expecting from Redcloak.
As you say, we'll find out if it's relevant by the end of this book.

No it wouldn't change the outcome. Presumably the good gods aren't willing to have a world created without their input, or to push their objections against sentient XP fodder to the point of creating a new Snarl, but I was pointing out that it's not true to say "the gods" are all fine with it. Some of them most definitely wouldn't be fine with it - if it's true, that is.

With this last book everything is coming to a head, so a lot of things which have been mysterious up until now will probably be revealed to us.

EDIT: personally I'm just hoping that those revelations will result in goblinoids attaining equality and Redcloak not just being stuffed in the fridge as nothing more than a bad guy.

[Jason]

Personally I'm just hoping that those revelations will result in goblinoids attaining equality and Redcloak not just being stuffed in the fridge as nothing more than a bad guy.
I have no doubt that a satisfyingly epic conclusion to Redcloak's arc will be forthcoming, but it seems likely it will also be a tragic conclusion. Goblin equality is also a likely outcome, even though it's possible they already have it, and have had it for the past million worlds.
Changing things so that the Dark One is no longer a pantheon of one seems a distinct possibility to me.

No, The Giant has proven himself an excellent storyteller, so I don't expect to be disappointed.

[Jason]

This is what I was going to say in response to some earlier posts, and I'm glad I read to the end of the thread to see that you've already said it. Redcloak's story was always full of holes, and now that we know that this isn't the second world it completely falls apart. I very much doubt that the whole "monstrous humanoids were only created after the fact to give the humanoid clerics an easy source of XP" theory is accurate.
You would expect at least that after the world where they came up with the idea that the gods would include goblinoids or their equivalent "cleric XP fodder" from the beginning in every subsequent world, instead of adding them like an afterthought after the other races.

[Jason]

The Giant has compared it to racism, so I figure systematic oppression is part of the package.
I would be remiss if I didn't note that racism and systematic repression while often going together are not really the same thing.
We have seen racism in Stickworld, noticeably from Redcloak himself against non-goblinoids. Tarquin's realm was one of systemic repression, but it didn't appear to be racist really. They were equal-opportunity repressors.

[Worldsong]

I would be remiss if I didn't note that racism and systematic repression while often going together are not really the same thing.
We have seen racism in Stickworld, noticeably from Redcloak himself against non-goblinoids. Tarquin's realm was one of systemic repression, but it didn't appear to be racist really. They were equal-opportunity repressors.

Fair enough, it is possible for racism to be present without it including systematic oppression, and it's possible for systematic oppression to be in place without it being racist.

That said whether systematic oppression is part of it or not I highly doubt that The Giant is going to be telling us that from the start Redcloak's quest was based on nothing but lies.

[Babale]

Fair enough, it is possible for racism to be present without it including systematic oppression, and it's possible for systematic oppression to be in place without it being racist.

That said whether systematic oppression is part of it or not I highly doubt that The Giant is going to be telling us that from the start Redcloak's quest was based on nothing but lies.

I think it definitely WILL turn out that Redcloak's quest is based on lies, even if the other gods DID create the goblins as XP fodder, because it seems pretty clear that The Dark One doesn't give much of a crap about the goblins. As Right Eye said:

Come now. You have to realize that the Dark One doesn't care about us. Why else would he let you throw goblin lives away on this plan?

[Worldsong]

I think it definitely WILL turn out that Redcloak's quest is based on lies, even if the other gods DID create the goblins as XP fodder, because it seems pretty clear that The Dark One doesn't give much of a crap about the goblins. As Right Eye said:

Come now. You have to realize that the Dark One doesn't care about us. Why else would he let you throw goblin lives away on this plan?

Leaving aside that that argument has some flaws in and of itself I somewhat doubt Right Eye has the right idea there.

Also imagine what it does to The Giant's commentary on discrimination against goblins in DnD if it turns out in this setting discrimination against goblins isn't real.

[Jason]

Also imagine what it does to The Giant's commentary on discrimination against goblins in DnD if it turns out in this setting discrimination against goblins isn't real.
Well, we know that there is at least some discrimination against goblins in Stickworld, because we've seen examples on-panel. The question is, were they really designed by the gods as disposable XP fodder? In other words, is that discrimination really part of the basic design of the world, as Redcloak believes?
The commentary on how many players of D&D don't think twice about killing monster races is still on target, no matter what the true situation is in Stickworld.

[Worldsong]

Well, we know that there is at least some discrimination against goblins in Stickworld, because we've seen examples on-panel. The question is, were they really designed by the gods as disposable XP fodder? In other words, is that discrimination really part of the basic design of the world, as Redcloak believes?
The commentary on how many players of D&D don't think twice about killing monster races is still on target, no matter what the true situation is in Stickworld.

True, although in that case I'd say that Redcloak's crusade isn't based on lies as much as he's blaming the wrong people. Which of course could also mean he's seeking the wrong way to address the issue.

That said I'd have another question: The Giant has stated that before the Dark One came along the goblinoids never worshipped anyone (or at the very least the goblins). Given that pretty much every single other intelligent race with screentime has shown themselves at least able to worship one god or another, what caused the goblins to not do so for as long as it took for the Dark One to come along? Given that The Giant was talking about before the Dark One existed it can't be a result of trickery from our favourite Big Purple.

[C-Dude]

True, although in that case I'd say that Redcloak's crusade isn't based on lies as much as he's blaming the wrong people. Which of course could also mean he's seeking the wrong way to address the issue.

That said I'd have another question: The Giant has stated that before the Dark One came along the goblinoids never worshipped anyone (or at the very least the goblins). Given that pretty much every single other intelligent race with screentime has shown themselves at least able to worship one god or another, what caused the goblins to not do so for as long as it took for the Dark One to come along? Given that The Giant was talking about before the Dark One existed it can't be a result of trickery from our favourite Big Purple.They probably practiced Animism like the island orcs (who later began worshiping Giggles) or the clerics who shaped the godsmoot temple, seeking the divine in the land and sky itself (or from the elemental planes).

Which, in the right frame, gives the gods an air of parasitism. Worlds such as Stickworld might coalesce out of the elemental chaos of their own accord, and in such instance denizens therein would have a fair claim to the resources that scatter from the outer planes... if the gods weren't staking claims and channeling that power themselves. With the current setup, paying homage to a pantheon appears more beneficial than drawing divine magic from the planes irreligiously, as seen most recently by the helpless vampirization of the stone worshipers during the "Utterly Dwarfed" godsmoot (they didn't even get a vote on whether the world should be destroyed!). In that sense, the gods are opportunistic middle-men, regulating power that isn't really theirs (or at least not theirs alone) in exchange for worship sandwiches. Since they dole it out in more concentrated bursts, the animistic cultures appear unfairly left out by comparison.

[JSSheridan]

More dangerous than, say, 'Who are you?'

Or, 'Do you have anything worth living for?'

[Babale]

True, although in that case I'd say that Redcloak's crusade isn't based on lies as much as he's blaming the wrong people. Which of course could also mean he's seeking the wrong way to address the issue.

That said I'd have another question: The Giant has stated that before the Dark One came along the goblinoids never worshipped anyone (or at the very least the goblins). Given that pretty much every single other intelligent race with screentime has shown themselves at least able to worship one god or another, what caused the goblins to not do so for as long as it took for the Dark One to come along? Given that The Giant was talking about before the Dark One existed it can't be a result of trickery from our favourite Big Purple.

Whether or not goblins were created by the gods to be chunks of XP for low level clerics has no bearing on whether discrimination exists and whether it is right or wrong. It DOES have bearing on whether using a god killing world ending abomination to blackmail the gods is the best way to go about fixing the situation, though.

[Worldsong]

They probably practiced Animism like the island orcs (who later began worshiping Giggles) or the clerics who shaped the godsmoot temple, seeking the divine in the land and sky itself (or from the elemental planes).

Which, in the right frame, gives the gods an air of parasitism. Worlds such as Stickworld might coalesce out of the elemental chaos of their own accord, and in such instance denizens therein would have a fair claim to the resources that scatter from the outer planes... if the gods weren't staking claims and channeling that power themselves. With the current setup, paying homage to a pantheon appears more beneficial than drawing divine magic from the planes irreligiously, as seen most recently by the helpless vampirization of the stone worshipers during the "Utterly Dwarfed" godsmoot (they didn't even get a vote on whether the world should be destroyed!). In that sense, the gods are opportunistic middle-men, regulating power that isn't really theirs (or at least not theirs alone) in exchange for worship sandwiches. Since they dole it out in more concentrated bursts, the animistic cultures appear unfairly left out by comparison.

Possible. Personally I interpreted it as them just having no real religion at all before the Dark One showed up but it's possible that they were doing something similar to the Giggle Orcs.

So now we're taking the avenue that the gods in their entirety are bad news? Interesting.


Whether or not goblins were created by the gods to be chunks of XP for low level clerics has no bearing on whether discrimination exists and whether it is right or wrong. It DOES have bearing on whether using a god killing world ending abomination to blackmail the gods is the best way to go about fixing the situation, though.

That's true. I'll admit that if it turns out the gods aren't responsible for the discrimination against goblinoids threatening them into concessions might not work very well.

Although Redcloak/the Dark One might still use his position as owner of the purple quiddity to get some agreeable terms from not only the gods but the mortal powers as well.

[C-Dude]

Possible. Personally I interpreted it as them just having no real religion at all before the Dark One showed up but it's possible that they were doing something similar to the Giggle Orcs.

So now we're taking the avenue that the gods in their entirety are bad news? Interesting.It's more of a thought experiment. A system exists (or apparently does) to handle outer plane energy on a material level. Gods enter the picture and intercede in that system, burrowing a place for themselves. From some perspectives that behavior would be seen as parasitic symbiosis: the gods don't actually add anything to the system... they simply occupy space and consume resources. Others might view it as mutualism, wherein the gods process a raw power that is generally difficult to use by the material mortals into something more manageable (divine favor).

Either way, though, their presence creates inequality simply by how they choose to distribute those resources. Entities who do not have gods to represent them (like the goblins or the flumphs) must rely on the old system of taking these primordial forces and shaping them on their own... or snatching said resources from those the gods favor (which leads to crusades and 'kill on sight' mentalities). Both options are significantly more difficult than divine favor, which limits the growth of their communities and cultures (when you spend more time gathering resources, you have less time for other pursuits like industry and art).
By comparison, then, it seems those with gods have a better lot in life, as they have more ready access to resources. A system emerging from chaos might have been more equal or could be more equal in the future, without the gods throwing off the balance.

But like Durkon points out, there are lots of kinds of equality and many of them aren't swell. The Snarl might make the biggest contribution to equality in existence by devouring all of the gods... but that's eye-for-an-eye equality, a scenario where everyone is equal because everyone has it bad. An equal world is significantly more violent; rather than the goblins not being 'attacked on sight', the status quo would be that everybody attacks EVERYBODY on sight. In a world without said gods, there are no protections for biological diversity: whichever species has the strongest drive for resources will drive the others extinct, either through famine or warfare... or homogenization perhaps; much like the Draketooths, eventually everyone on the planet would be a 5xGreen Half-Dragon Green Dragon.

That is the kind of world where Belkar stands victorious on a battlefield of corpses, the most equal because he's the only person left alive.

[Jason]

That said I'd have another question: The Giant has stated that before the Dark One came along the goblinoids never worshipped anyone (or at the very least the goblins). Given that pretty much every single other intelligent race with screentime has shown themselves at least able to worship one god or another, what caused the goblins to not do so for as long as it took for the Dark One to come along? Given that The Giant was talking about before the Dark One existed it can't be a result of trickery from our favourite Big Purple.
Does he mean no single goblin ever worshipped a god, or that the goblin people collectively never worshipped a god? I would guess the latter. There probably were individual goblins who worshipped one god or another from the other pantheons before the Dark One ascended, and probably there still are some.

If the gods weren't receiving any belief or devotion from them then they had no reason to bless the goblins, and without any miracles or clerics the goblins had no reason to begin worshipping any god. A stalemate until a god decided to try to attract the worship of the goblins or the goblins decided that a god was worthy of worship. The question then becomes, was it the gods refusing to bless them, or the goblins being ungrateful for what they had received?

[Fergurg]

Here's the big problem: alignment.

Good and evil are not abstract theories in Stickverse. They are part of the physical laws of the universe. Everybody knows this. Moreover, everybody knows that goblins are usually evil - and the goblins themselves are ok with this.

When the forces of good are oppressed, heroes are needed. When the forces of evil are oppressed, the heroes have won.

[hamishspence]

When "the forces of evil" are oppressed - then, because oppression is kind of evil behaviour in its own right, the oppressors are on track to becoming new forces of evil.

[ReaderAt2046]

Actually, I think a big part of Redcloak's problem is that he himself doesn't know what he wants, not exactly. He knows he wants equality, but he's never sat down and figured out exactly what that might look like in practice, or how to get from where the goblin race was at the start of the Plan to that hypothetical perfect world. This probably has to do with the fact that he never expected to be doing the negotiating himself, the Plan was always intended to put the Snarl in the hands of the Dark One and have him do the negotiating directly with the other Gods. Either way, when Durkon showed up and started talking about specific details and about the necessity of small steps and working towards a better society over generations, Redcloak didn't know how to respond and fell back on demanding that the gods fix everything in a deus ex machina.

Which also brings up the other problem I see in Redcloak's negotiations here, and that is that he seems to have a warped view of the other three pantheons and the role they play in Stickworld. He talks about "the gods" like they are a single homogenous group, instead of thirty-odd different entities with their own goals, personalities, and conflicting agendas. He likewise appears to be fixated on this idea that there is some kind of "favored race" class that goblins are excluded from, and that getting this classification will prevent crusades against them or adventurers attacking them, or even Evil nations trying to conquer them. He seems to believe that other races are attacking goblins only because these homogenous "gods" he believes in have given the OK, rather than because the goblins are Evil, or because the adventurers are Evil, or because of complex sociopolitical factors leading to conflict between different nations.


That basic message has already been demonstrated several times in the comic. I think it would remain intact if it turned out that goblins have in fact always been treated as equal by the gods, that the Dark One originally started a bloody war of conquest because he simply wanted to take the PC races' stuff, and that he concocted the whole "my entire race was created to be XP fodder" lie merely to justify taking what he wanted.

Also notice the way Redcloak presents the idea: in order to prevent another Snarl the gods agreed to limit their powers of interference outside their own territories to their clerics and then realized after a while that the clerics needed easy encounters to gain XP and so created the goblinoids. This works fine if Stickworld was the second world created and the gods found out an unexpected limitation to the new "clerics only" rules and then had to correct it. But we know now that literally millions of earlier worlds were created. Have the gods really used the same solution of "create sentient races as disposable XP fodder for our clerics" every time?

Not to mention that the gods didn't actually need to create dross races to act as XP fodder, even if they did need XP fodder. Human bandits would have worked just as well as goblin bandits for that function, or the clerics of Thor could hunt the followers of Sutur and vice versa.

Though on the other side of the argument: Yes, the gods have created millions of worlds, but not all of those worlds worked in the same way. There were cyberpunk worlds, talking animal worlds, sentient movie theater snack worlds, etc and so forth. The number of worlds which were built to follow RPG rules, and thus the number of worlds in which clerics in this sense existed or needed XP fodder to advance themselves, is probably very small. It may even be that this is the first world to try this tactic, and that that is part of why this was the first world to produce a "rebel ascension" such as the Dark One.


Here's the big problem: alignment.

Good and evil are not abstract theories in Stickverse. They are part of the physical laws of the universe. Everybody knows this. Moreover, everybody knows that goblins are usually evil - and the goblins themselves are ok with this.


And that's exactly the problem that Rich is trying to address. Goblins are not Usually Evil because of biology, as demons are. They are Usually Evil because the predominant goblin civilizations worship an Evil god and support Evil societal institutions. Goblins could be Usually Good, if their cultures and histories had gone differently.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

the clerics of Thor could hunt the followers of Sutur and vice versa.
I suspect that would be the one scenario they'd be trying to avoid by giving them a neutral, godless target that if gets killed won't anger any other god.

(bandits or rats of varying, sometimes unusual, sizes or even better mindless enemies like oozes would of course still work, and that is one of several reason why I don't believe TDO's story about XP bags in the first place)


It may even be that this is the first world to try this tactic, and that that is part of why this was the first world to produce a "rebel ascension" such as the Dark One.

Unlikely - if it was as simple as "the first time we create a species that isn't allowed to worship any of us, they generated their own god to worship, with its own quiddity" would be trivial to reproduce in the next world, but Thor declares this scenario to be so rare as to not be reproducible for billions of other tries. The most parsimonious explanation (other than "we didn't in fact create the goblins with the caveat that they aren't allowed to worship any of us", which I currently prefer) is that they have created walking sentient XP bags before, it never before generated their own gods, over billions of tries, and thus the gods don't know what changed that made the TDO appear this time.

Hopefully that makes some sense. Bit of a run-on sentence/stream of consciousness.

Grey Wolf

[Worldsong]

The most parsimonious explanation (other than "we didn't in fact create the goblins with the caveat that they aren't allowed to worship any of us", which I currently prefer) is that they have created walking sentient XP bags before, it never before generated their own gods, over billions of tries, and thus the gods don't know what changed that made the TDO appear this time.

Honestly I'd be fine with pretty much any explanation for why the goblinoids never worshipped anyone else, I'm just really curious what the explanation is and hope that it gets mentioned in the comic before the story ends. It sounds like it's important.

[Sebastian]

So it is the Sapphire Guard's fault that Redcloak's village fell, yes?

FYI, they did not know the Mantle was the source of the power.


And that is the problem
They knew that someway a high level goblin cleric keep reappearing after the previous one was killed, too quickly to be explained as a goblin cleric leveling up. Probably that is why they went to make tabula rasa rather then just going for the mantle bearer. They knew that the Mantle (as a title, nt as an object) had a way to propagate itself.

And the 'funny' thing is, if the would have been able to kill all the goblins their mission could have been successful, but (at least) two goblins escaped, and here we are.

[understatement]

And that is the problem
They knew that someway a high level goblin cleric keep reappearing after the previous one was killed, too quickly to be explained as a goblin cleric leveling up. Probably that is why they went to make tabula rasa rather then just going for the mantle bearer. They knew that the Mantle (as a title, nt as an object) had a way to propagate itself.

Sebastian, you (the SG) can't go around killing everyone to prevent one of them potentially becoming the Bearer.


And the 'funny' thing is, if the would have been able to kill all the goblins their mission could have been successful, but (at least) two goblins escaped, and here we are.

The even 'funnier' thing is that if they hadn't done what they did, then Redcloak wouldn't be here as he is today.

[dancrilis]

The even 'funnier' thing is that if they hadn't done what they did, then Redcloak wouldn't be here as he is today.

Yes he would.

Had The Giant never written SOD, or fleshed out Redcloak's backstory he would still be at the table acting exactly as he is acting because that is what the story requires and the story requires it while not requiring SOD to be required reading.

[understatement]

Yes he would.

Had The Giant never written SOD, or fleshed out Redcloak's backstory he would still be at the table acting exactly as he is acting because that is what the story requires and the story requires it while not requiring SOD to be required reading.

...no? If the Giant had never written SOD, then we the audience wouldn't know what Redcloak's backstory is (I believe you're the one that linked to me strip #480, where he alludes to his village) but it doesn't mean that it wasn't there.

The fact that he wrote RC's backstory -- and not Tarquin's or Malack's or Kubota's -- means it's important to the main narrative in some way, even if parts of SOD have to be later introduced in the story. Which they have been in the previous strips.

[dancrilis]

...no? If the Giant had never written SOD, then we the audience wouldn't know what Redcloak's backstory is (I believe you're the one that linked to me strip #480, where he alludes to his village) but it doesn't mean that it wasn't there.

The fact that he wrote RC's backstory -- and not Tarquin's or Malack's or Kubota's -- means it's important to the main narrative in some way, even if parts of SOD have to be later introduced in the story. Which they have been in the previous strips.

If he hadn't written or expanded on Redcloak's backstory - if The Giant had went 'goblin, doesn't like how goblins are treated, wants more divine recognition for his people, no more backstory needed' then Redcloak would still be where he is doing what he is doing.

Now it is important to the narrative in that it makes a better narrative - but it doesn't mean that Redcloak would be somewhere else now doing something else had it never happened.

[understatement]

If he hadn't written or expanded on Redcloak's backstory - if The Giant had went 'goblin, doesn't like how goblins are treated, wants more divine recognition for his people, no more backstory needed' then Redcloak would still be where he is doing what he is doing.

Now it is important to the narrative in that it makes a better narrative - but it doesn't mean that Redcloak would be somewhere else now doing something else had it never happened.

I'm thinking more along the narrative lines of "if the SG hadn't attacked his village, Redcloak would stay whitecloak and probably live in his village, and eventually die there, instead of being revenge-driven enough to embark on a divine Plan that will result in him meeting Xykon and having enough power to conquer Azure City, which will lead to him and Xykon trying to seize the Gates, which have them wound up at Kraagor's Gate, which has Redcloak and Durkon meeting face-to-face for the first time."

Nothing to do with meta.

[Jason]

Thank you, Minrah. There it is in the comic: Redcloak doesn't really care about goblin welfare, he cares about feeling bad that he doesn't care. He would like to appear like he cares, but he won't let any concern for actual goblin welfare stand in the way of what he really wants, which is vindication of his own bad choices.

Any altruism that Redcloak shows towards goblin kind is in fact only the appearance of altruism, to make him feel better about himself. If Redcloak ever does begin to care about actual goblins living now that will be the moment he gives up on The Plan.

[Worldsong]

Thank you, Minrah. There it is in the comic: Redcloak doesn't really care about goblin welfare, he cares about feeling bad that he doesn't care. He would like to appear like he cares, but he won't let any concern for actual goblin welfare stand in the way of what he really wants, which is vindication of his own bad choices.

Any altruism that Redcloak shows towards goblin kind is in fact only the appearance of altruism, to make him feel better about himself. If Redcloak ever does begin to care about actual goblins living now that will be the moment he gives up on The Plan.

I'm in favour of that development.

[keybounce]

More dangerous than, say, 'Who are you?'

Or, 'Do you have anything worth living for?'

Why, yes. Being able to understand your goals, what you will drive for, what you will sacrifice for, those are good things.

But "What do you want?"? There are plenty of stories that deal with the whole idea of "Satisfy one desire, and then ensure that there is another". Lead someone by controlling their wants. With no real goal, just step and step, you are a tool of whoever it is that is guiding you.

That's *NOT* inherently wrong. If your goal is to serve that leader, it's fine.

There are plenty of real-world examples of this being good; plenty of it being bad. I will not give any examples.

If your reason for living is to aid someone and their goals, fine.
If your goal is to get what you want, and you aren't able to understand how whoever is helping you get what you want can influence your next want and your next activity, then bad.

I would have seriously thought you'd understand this by now. Your whole "Lets make use of Telepaths in the war, and not even pay them" is a great example -- you wanted Leeta's help, and did not believe in the end goal of "Rewarding people for their help". You took one person's goals -- DeLenn -- and made her goals your own.

And the consequences of that ...

[Emanick]

I would have seriously thought you'd understand this by now. Your whole "Lets make use of Telepaths in the war, and not even pay them" is a great example -- you wanted Leeta's help, and did not believe in the end goal of "Rewarding people for their help". You took one person's goals -- DeLenn -- and made her goals your own.

And the consequences of that ...

Okay, fine, I'll watch that last season of Babylon 5 already. :smalltongue:

[KorvinStarmast]

Thank you, Minrah. There it is in the comic: Redcloak doesn't really care about goblin welfare, he cares about feeling bad that he doesn't care. He would like to appear like he cares, but he won't let any concern for actual goblin welfare stand in the way of what he really wants, which is vindication of his own bad choices. I find this to be a very narrow take on Redcloak. He absolutely cares about goblin welfare. He also has some personal issues. He's arrived at the level of "big hand, little map" - which is the political level or the high echelon of leadership level (the level at which Shojo operated for this story). Most great leaders (and the not-so-great leaders) of their people have to reach into that aspect of leadership - for the greater good - to achieve the collective's ends. However, the pitfalls at that level increase the higher one rises.

On the other hand, Minrah has identified clearly in-comic that he's not a perfect leader, and why he's not a perfect leader. When given another option, he rejects it based (apparently) on the momentum he's already established along his previous course. To get him to change course requires a top notch sales job. (Haley, where are you?)
Let's be practical here: the offer from Durkon wasn't without its shortcomings. The sales job was hardly gonna get that Cadillac off of the show room floor.

We, the readers, know Durkon was playing it straight and honest, but Redcloak does not know that. Showing the stakes, and getting him to listen to what keeps goblins alive in the long term, may take an event as profound as his own betrayal of his brother . I think (guessing here) that this event will be something that Xykon - his necessary ally - either does or does not do.

My other guess is that something the IFCC does or says will shake Redcloak up so much that he'll take a good hard look at his assumptions. What that might be is very uncleaer since we have not yet seen the artifact in question.