Bay 12 Games Forum

I don't think there's anything wrong with the "generic" fantasy consideration that certain species are psychologically disposed to certain behaviors. Dogs are outgoing, cats are reserved, mice are skittish. Goblins are like....wolverines. Or tasmanian devils. Their ecological niche has been to expand at any cost, and to exploit the resources of other sentients wherever possible, and their entire society as been built around it and dedicated to it. I can certainly see the possibility of finding an orphan or what have you, but Goblin-kind is the universal enemy of all free people. Their civic duty is to Always Be Attacking. Their culture demands that they attack anyone who isn't actively giving them things, or possibly another goblin. Even if you found a goblin you educated and taught to understand the basics of ethics and moral responsibility, everyone else in your entire city/realm/civilization has only ever seen one, or maybe two kinds of goblins before.

If they're very lucky, and very humble, they've only seen the ones who come to steal their children.

Maybe listen a little bit, but not get too close probably till I know what they are talking about.

I think you're all confusing darkspawn with the Innsmouth look.
And now i feel compelled to post the wiki explanation for the uninformed, and The Shadow over Innsmouth for the die-hard Crafties.

The eventual goal is to have procedurally generated metaphysics, so one game might have a Dream World, an Afterworld and an Underworld, whereas another game might have a plane for each deity, and another game might have parallel "real worlds" coexisting.

There is no particular reason that the afterlife rules need to be the same for everyone either.  Those that worship forces of nature might reincarnate while those that worship willful powers go one to some afterlife.  The requirements for entering the afterlife (i.e., not sticking around as ghosts) might vary as well.

One implication of an afterlife is that, as far as the game is concerned, no one ever leaves the game.  Those nineteen bandits you just killed?  Chilling out in the Pit of the Damned.  Those elven merchants?  Singing to each other in the Big Forest Retreat in the Sky.  Those eight squads of Goblins?  Gearing up in the Underworld to emerge from a spire and come after you again.

Anything that distracts the Green Menace from Tree Jihading all over everything is a good idea in my book. It just doesn't feel... Elfy, in the DF sense.
 You need to realize we're dealing with an extreme case of Our Elves Are Different. The elves we have now in Dwarf Fortress aren't your typical tolkenien supermodels, or Blizzard's glowy-eyed fanfiction fodder. These are Keebler Elves from hell that make cookies from your giblets if you so much as look at a tree funny. They don't care about the woodland critters, they just care about the woodlands. Killing and devouring every sapient creature on the planet is perfectly justifiable for them if it's in the defense of their precious trees. They've done it many times before and they're going to continue to do so at every opportunity.

Being given necromancy by a god is considered a gift in DF at least from the perspective of the donor/recievor, but not those around them.