An ongoing topic of discussion amongst fantasy gamers - well, mostly D&D players - has been the concept of "evil races" or even "evil monsters", and the belief that such things are socially, historically, narratively, or ethically impossible. It's an interesting discussion that often turns vitriolic as people on both sides dig in, especially around the idea of evil races where there's just so much space to talk past each other in the various play styles and types of fantasy. How much of it is narrative, how much of it is simulation, how much of it is gameplay, to look at the old Threefold Model.
Lets say your want your heroes to be facing an existential threat to their civilization. So you take Nazis, you reskin them as Orcs to make it fantasy, and bang. It's always ok to punch Nazis, and always ok to kill them when they start the war. There's no appeasing them; only the complete destruction of their ability to threaten anyone around them will be sufficient. In a gameplay sense you have introduced adversaries that provide moral clarity to the combat. In a narrative sense you have actualized the threat of fascism into a physical form for you to engage and (hopefully) defeat. But in a simulationist sense, well, are all the orcs fascists? Are there good orcs? Why is orc culture like this? Underlying it all is the belief that there must be a way to engage past the wartime footing and get to the root causes of why the orcs are fascists, undo that, and convert them to "good"; you can't just kill all of them.
Well... yes and no. In wartime the goal is completely destroy their ability and willingness to make war. And that means a LOT of collateral damage. Many accounts exist of, even as the Allies were rolling into their territory and the war was clearly lost, 'good' Germans bemoaning the fact that Britain was supposed to have given up before the USA entered the war, sparing the Germans all this strife. Rooting out fascist ideology required the obliteration of the German state, de-Nazification of its politics, and a generation of work that's outside the scope of a fantasy adventure role playing game. At best, the PCs would need to deal with the combat aspect of the threat, and then leave the complete reconstruction of Orc society to the kingdoms that they act as heroes for, if you want this to be a simulation of that reality. This is, of course, a complete back projection of contemporary morals onto the ostensible 'age' of D&D, but that's a minor concern compared to the deformation of 'history' caused by active divinities, various arcane magic, and dipshits claiming there were only white people across Europe before the age of colonization, so run with it if you like.
But if you don't want to deal with that, it's why you make them Orcs, and not people. Orcs aren't real. Orcs are the actualized threat. They are monsters. They are endlessly cruel and completely uncaring because that is their narrative and gameplay function. And that's OK.
This a roundabout way to get to my main point: You are allowed to actualize threats into things that can be fought and killed. These things are monsters. They don't need a real world reason or explanation or tragic backstory. They are embodiments of real threats. You can have dire wolves stalking the deep dark forest as the actualization of the fear of starvation, or of getting lost and dying in the forest itself. You don't need to explain the circumstances that caused this particular wolf to turn to human predation. It is there because the woods are scary and dangerous.
Because deep dark woods in an era before human action had wiped out most of the apex predators, and there wasn't contemporary medicine, and accurate maps were hard to come by, and food identification was a hard won skill, ARE DANGEGEROUS. Big Bad Wolves in European fairy tales are the embodiment of that.
There's a great bit in Larry Niven's Beowulf Schaffer stories (Collected in the book Crashlander) where Schaffer is berating an Earth born companion for his ongoing terran-centric worldview, because the cold of space absolutely does not give a shit about you. Earth is your kind and loving mother where the gravity, air content, temperatures, etc. are all inside your tolerances, as are the pathogens and foodstuffs. In SF, Earth loves you and keeps you safe because you grew up inside it. But that's not the case in Fantasy.
In Fantasy, myth, faerie tale... Earth is dangerous. The woods are dangerous, storms are dangerous, the ocean is dangerous, food is dangerous, the very soil under your feet is dangerous as earthquakes can't be predicted or ameliorated. In the pre-science world, mythologies were invented to put a scaffolding around that chaos, to give us some hope of understanding it and transmitting what we learned about it from generation to generation. And in those myths, threats were actualized into Monsters. Things the heroes can defeat with stealth and cunning and steel (or bronze, or really big clubs...).
If you have actualized the earthquakes as trolls, then when the trolls rampage through they cannot be reasoned with, any more than the earthquake can. Sometimes they come, and destroy the village. But we're in myth, maybe there's a god of the earthquake/trolls, and really the issue is he's angry because we... STOP! Stop centering humanity. The universe isn't cruel, but it is uncaring. The earthquake/trolls didn't happen because you cut down the magic tree, or moved into this area, or whatever. It happened because earthquakes happen. The god of the earthquake/trolls just likes having trolls attack places, sometimes, if it's in the mood - better than the NFL, and it's bored. It is chaotic, and maybe evil.
Yes, Myths are built around the belief that surely something we can do will stop the earthquakes! In this model, you can stop the the earthquake by killing the trolls, as the trolls are the earthquake. That's the something you can do.
Not everything is simulation. Sometimes in gameplay and narrative things that are ethically OK to fight and kill is good design. Fantasy is like that. Sometimes let yourself have the fantasy.
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