Lately, we’ve seen DnD and Pathfinder move away from some of the more blatant signifiers, like renaming “race” into “species” and “ancestry,” and in the case of Pathfinder, having systems in place to mix ancestries in a character build. DnD has decoupled good and evil from species, and pathfinder has done away with good and evil entirely ( keeping a vestige of it present for things like demons and angels).
Race is almost alwys tied to a language and a culture, with, say, kobolds having the same certain cultural signifiers all over the world. To an extent, this makes semse because different peoples in these games can have different physical abilities, or have different origins entirely, which would naturally lead to them developing along different lines – If one people can breathe underwater and another was born from a volcano by a specific god’s decree, that would inform how these cultures behave.
Is it possible to have a fantasy along these lines with a materialist underpinning, or is this very idea of inborn powers anathema to that sort of approach?
People created by mages for battle fucking off to form their own little villages and stuff is one of my favorite tropes.
Star Wars dipped into this with a clone that went AWOL and started a family. Later on, a group set up their own littlw found family on what amounted to a war machine turned into a walking house that they walked around to different fishin’ holes
Clones in Star Wars is absolutely random and incoherent from top to bottom. Every way you can look at it, it’s trying to retrofit new stories around a really poorly chosen set of throwaway lines with a very poorly chosen scifi technobabble from the original trilogy.
It would have been so much better if they retconned those lines or found a different interpretation of “clone” to backfill content for a recent war.
The number of ways new star wars continues to eternally double down on clones is just embarrassing.
Star wars is so expansive that some incoherency is just bound to be there. That said I think there is underexplored potential in storytelling around clones and how fucked up it would be to make a race of genetic supersoldiers bred specifically to kill. How can you call Jedi the good guys when they’re so ready to exploit them?
Droids occupy a similar space, IMO