I think adjusting the framing would help. Instead of thinking of them as "demon spawn", you could approach it with a more neutral framing, like attaching the origin concept from "abyss" or "void" that has some of the same denotations, but is less loaded in it's connotations.

Basically, I'd start just by looking at language concepts first.

"Ogre" has been swimming around in my head -- for being applied to many cultures' bogeymen and in particularly Oni from Japanese folklore -- but would that be too specific a term (even outside of Magic)? Ignoring the meme of Shrek, I feel like D&D and Tolkien-esque fantasy has built up a specific image of the "ogre" that I wouldn't want to invoke.

But let's say I do come up with another name to classify them as a whole (as opposed to specific tribe/nation names). Would it still be too on-the-nose to have them demonized by humanity? I know enough that fleshing out a full culture would avoid the main problem, but if they are then shown an an oppressed people, would that still be falling into an unintended trap?

Wouldn't it be easiest to just have them be demon people but have demon not be a necessarily bad thing? Maybe other people think that they're as bad as a reader might expect, but it's all propaganda. Or having horns is just not a big deal in your world- actually, there's a Pan/devil aspect you could play up there.

I think, in my tactic at least, it would be to demonize with a seed of truth. Have malefactors that play to the stereotype and become the most visible minority in the public perception. Obviously the majority won't deserve to be painted with the same brush, but have just enough of their ilk actually deserve that kind of reputation that it makes the public fear understandable, if hyperbolic and unjust.

I had a thought this past week about what to do with tieflings/oni/ogre/whatever-you-want-to-call-them, in terms of framing them as a peoples.

Basically, instead of shying away from the worry about accidentally being anti-Semitic, I thought I should lean all the way into it and have the physical markers (horns, brightly-colored skin, sometimes a tail, etc.) be the result of religious rites.

To explain it simply, tieflings would not be born as such, but instead the initiation rites -- equivalent to real-world initiation rites such as baptism -- to accept them into the religion would produce the changes, by way of it being magic and letting the spirits into their body or somesuch excuse. Many young children and even newborns would likely be brought into the religion as a matter of course -- like with Jewish bris -- before they can consent, but they would be born as their parents' race. Regional variations in the rites themselves would result in different prevalent physical changes -- i.e. some tieflings would be red-skinned with stubby horns while others would be blue-skinned with long thin horns despite them all being from the same religion.

I feel like this would make it easier to humanize them as a people, or at least I hope so.

A lot of pieces just fall into place if I accept it as true, too:

• It would be extremely obvious why they would be persecuted and discriminated against, because rather than just being "born different," they transform others into them
• This also moves the obvious and flat racism angle into one of religious persecution which is more befitting a Roman-style fantasy world
• Different sects of the religion could easily be explored as being at odds with one another, just as the Abrahamaic faiths have been doing for a few millennia, while being perceived as under one banner by outsiders
• Story possibilities easily open up about the duality of their religion (as most religions): of the community and family they foster on the one hand, and the more aggressive crusade-like religious zealotry it can produce on the other

Of course, I worry that framing it like that might make it more of a tightrope as it seems I'm literally painting devil horns on some certain religion (I'm not trying to here despite my distaste for organized religion). Maybe that won't be an obvious conclusion if I have a number of other religions developed alongside it for other people to worship, but I have yet to put that much thought into it. Am I being too cautious here, or is it a minefield best left undisturbed?

I think the answer is strongly linked to the visibility do you plan your world to have. The wider and more random the audience, the more likely you are to be judged by someone with very little grasp of nuance. In any case, adding some fundamental traits that make the fantasy religion appear drastically different from the irl one at a first glance might help. Having less obvious irl parallels for other cultures might help, especially if they all come from the same irl historical moment: if you have a Fantasy Roman Empire persecuting a specific religion in a world that also has Fantasy Gauls and Fantasy Carthage, it doesn't take much work to reach the conclusion that you intend that religion to be the fantasy counterpart of Judaism (or early Christianity).

Have you researched mystery cults? They may supply inspiration for symbols and aestetics to make your tieflings more distinct.



A question for y'all: how often do you get the feeling the section you're writing is bordering blatant self-indulgence? Like, it has basically no relevance to anything and is probably there only because you had fun writing it?

Another more grounded question: how do you figure out measure systems when standard options don't work? Specifically, viashino being digitigrade makes "feet" a rather awkward choice, but yards and meters don't sound that better...

I would just use that as an opportunity to drop in a term like "yoop yoops" or something.
I dunno, I'm not a writer.
Perhaps for a reason.

Maybe measure things in arm spans or strides, or such?

Another random question for English speakers: what term would you use to encompass all kinds of bad stuff that a character's body, mind and soul can suffer over the course of a story? A term that can mean any of the following and more:
-Black Eye
-Twisted Ankle
-Bruised
-Cracked Rib
-Distracted
-Concussed
-Obsessed
-Disoriented
-Laughingstock
-Paranoid
-Awestruck
-Furious
-Embarrassed
I'm thinking something like Adversity or Hardship, but they both sound like something external rather than internal.

Depends, are we talking legit descriptive words or fun internet tags for a story?

Misfortune
Suffering
To The Pain

A mixture of descriptive and comfy, I'm looking for a term to use in a potential ttRPG I'm writing Interestingly, Not the End, a narrative-heavy game with a similar approach to mine, also uses Sventure (italian for Misfortunes) as an umbrella term. It sounds a bit too luck-based for my liking, but if you arrived at the exact same term it must have something going on for it... admittedly fortune isn't necessarily tied to luck, it may be fortuna (=(good) luck) conditioning me against it.

The only word I can think of that covers all of your cases would be "trauma".

The phrase "Trials and tribulations" is often used in English to refer to a sequence of events that involve going through many difficult or negative experiences. By the dictionary definition, "Tribulations" itself would be the right word, but you rarely hear it used outside the phrase construction. It ends up depending on more precise context.

If I look at a ttRPG and it has the subtitle "A game of trials and tribulations" I would know at once that the characters are going to suffer in just about every way, sequentially or at once, and that said badness would be a big part of the experience. Misfortune would work here too in a construction like "A game of grave misfortunes". Trials and Tribulations would read more operatically, grave misfortunes would read potentially a little more tongue-in-cheek. This is because "trials and tribulations" is a very wrought phrase while "grave misfortune" though normally something serious, tends to recall things like A Series of Unfortunate Events or the card game Gloom, which are at least a little parodical in their misery.

If on the other hand you're looking at a game term, like picking these out as a specific flavor of character building disadvantage or narrative weapon, I would use "tribulation" on its own (no trials construction) or else "misfortune", with tribulation being the more general and the misfortune more externally caused. Without knowing any details of your ttRPG, let me pitch a few scenarios. In one, the GM or adversarial player has a deck of "Bad Stuff Happens" that they can play on a character to shape the story. This could pretty freely be the "tribulation deck" or "misfortune deck". Either one works. Tribulation is free to use here without the trials phrase because when you're making game terms you have lease to use more specific and uncommon words, since they'll have to be defined in context anyway. If on the other it's a case where a character must overcome N bad stuff to Y, I would use "Tribulations" and not "Misfortunes". Tribulations is okay for the same reason as before. Trials is ditched because trials are things to ultimately pass while tribulations can just be suffered, and misfortunes are ditched because there's less the sense of "this is coming at you" than there is with the idea of an adversarial action. Lastly, if it;s more "when your character suffers a bad stuff, get XP" I would lean torwards Tribulation, since misfortunes feel more purely arbitrary and not all (bad stuff) will be.

I might also suggest something like "physical and emotional injuries", though I think Tevish has the better advice here.


I missed this question a while back, and I think TPMan has it right even if it's phrased in a silly manner. IIRC the English "foot" was originally a measurement based on the length from the king's elbow to his wrist, so I honestly think that's an excellent thing to take inspiration from. Have your measurement be like "legs" or find some word related to tails or specific bones; alternatively use "strides" or something that does sound completely fantastical because of it being based on something else (I wanna use "cubits" as an example simply because it's a now-completely-unused system of measurement which to my knowledge has no trace in modern English). Sometimes you can also get away with silly plays on words like how Trigun used "iles" and "yars" instead of "miles" and "yards".