How do you justify a "pest race" like goblins or rat people in your setting? Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?
>>97213989They procreate by seducing human men
Too much effort ontop of not everyone being onboard with outright genocide
>>97213989Like any real life pest, they breed fast and in high numbers, a few always survive anything to restart a colony.>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?No, not really. It takes world-ending threats to unify them.
>>97213989Make them indian
>>97213989>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?outnumbered 50 to 1 and the only thing keeping them from overruning you is that they are dumb
>>97213989>in your setting?Did you think you were posting on /tg/ or something OP? Or do you expect an answer from a video game dev lurking here?
>>97213989They keep giant spiders in check
>>97213990post it
>>97213989Pests generally implies a nuisance but not enough of a threat to bother eradicating. Same reason humanity hasn't wiped our mice and rats even though we should theoretically be more than capable of doing so. Come to think of it what if the goblins fulfill an important ecological niche and wiping them out would upset the delicate balance of the food chain. For example maybe humans keep goblins around because roaming dragons find goblins to be easier prey than humans and so if there were no goblins dragon attacks on people would go up.
>>97213992If Alberta can find a way to be rat free I think any fantasy or sci-fy superpower can find a way to genocide the gobbos
>>97213989just read the news bro>verification: not required
if they live out in the wilderness you're never going to be able to exert enough effort to actually eradicate them, at best you keep them out of your walls.if they are integrated with society already, then your setting has already accepted them and the most you can show is fantasy racism
>>97213989Fodder species are great buffers against more dangerous creatures.Sure the goblin tribe across the hill is annoying but we keep them there because the griffons nesting in the mountains eat them instead of our people and cattle
Most fantasy settings don't really pass the easiest sanity checks, never mind actually being internally consistent, and when they do, it's probably for highly contingent idiosyncratic reasons. For that matter, most of these are built to provide archetypes people want to play or tropes writers want to use, so "pest races" were included for a reason that weighs heavier in the authors' minds than worldbuilding.But if we take the question seriously, here are several considerations:>These settings tend to take place in "medieval" (actually early modern) societies, and the state capacity is basically nil. There's no state bureaucracy and workings of a polity are based on competing claims to rights rather than a duty to centralized state: if the King of France tells Count of Toulouse or Duke of Burgundy to do x and the count and the duke don't wanna, they say "cba" and what's the King gonna do? Either just forget about x, or start a war to reign in his vassals at which point he doesn't accomplish x anyway. The mention of Count of Toulouse wasn't an accidental, because he didn't play ball when the King asked him to destroy cathars in the Albigensian Crusade, and while the King and the Pope ultimately got Simon de Montfort to do it, it wasn't easy for them to exert control! Note: the cathars usually didn't even fight back.
>Exterminating a population is actually really really difficult even for high state capacity societies! If you have some set of population in a city or a camp then yes, you can lock the gates and start the proscriptions, historical examples range from Second Triumvirate to Timurids to nazis, and it's pretty effective. But most people don't live in cities! If you try to do it in the countryside, people flee to the hills, the swamps, the forests, and your army supposed to commit genocide eats state finances every moment they are mobilized. Even when we're talking about proper states like Rome, they mostly can control cities, and little of much else. Even Imperial Japan, a modern administrative state with railroads and telecommunication, basically controlled cities and roads and nothing else in WW2.>Insofar as goblins and rat peoples, etc, are "pests", the powers that be might prefer it that way. For instance, they might provide services that aren't socially acceptable to citizen populations (spartiates might have thought of helotes as "pests", but since it was literally illegal for a spartiate to work without losing citizenship...). Insofar as "actually undesirable" activities like narcotics trade are concerned, they might have a deal to take a cut of the profits. And disenfranchised classes are useful as scapegoats, for taking a disproportionate tax burden, etc (for example, in Al-Andalus the muslim rulers kinda preferred the population to stay Christian so as to raise the jizya tax). Likewise, individual people who'd have to be involved in the cleansing might have personal contacts, friends, etc, and they don't want to work.Consider: Why can't modern states exterminate the nazi populations within?
>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?Because there are different factions in the dominant species that would rather screw each other over than band together.
>>97213998The goblins fulfill an important ecological niche of being cocksleeves for human men.
>>97213989They can be very useful.
Mods gay
>>97213989Pests exist in real life.
>>97213989Goblin Republic managed to finagle some sorcerous bloodlines into existence due to fast breeding and, well, became the Republic built around those families. They also made the first professional army to counter bigger and stronger people with numbers and discipline. Think Rome, but with even more backstabbing, magic and little greenish legions walking all over the land and fucking over everyone they meet. They wrecked the human kingdoms around them, until in the west they ran into a Thulsa Doom expy with proper military, in the east into mountain range, in the south into ocean and in the north into elven kingdom that spanked them through combination of magic, swords and griffon air cavalry. They are still the biggest polity around right now.
>>97213989>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?They control the banks so it's nigh impossible to dislodge them.
>>97213999Alberta is aided by it's geography, it's bounded on two sides by the Arctic, and the Rockies and for a large part of the year rats would freeze to death outside. It's pretty incredible what they've done but it's not feasible for someone in the Great Plains to enact the same policies and eradicate rats
>>97213989Their high population, insatiable sex drive, and sexy bodies make them great for gangbangs, blowbangs, bukkake, and other forms of orgies for people who can't afford sucg massive groups of dedicated prostitutes.
>>97214004They can't even exterminate the communists, how are they supposed to do that?
>>97213989Are we talking r-selection races or just "living in sewers" species?
>>97214005>Be me >Shitty but loyal knight or Bumfuckland>King recognizes my shitty but loaylness>King gets devilish idea>Gifts me land on the edge of Bumfuckland that just so happens to be bordered with Shitstainia>King fucking hates shitstainia so he also adds in a bonus gift>A carriage with 4-5 prime breeding age goblinsLong live the king
>>97213989Consider that rats still exist
>>97213989They live in hard-to-reach tunnels and mostly bother peasants in remote settlements, so they're just not worth it was far as anyone in power is concerned.
>>97214480In my headcanon they ARE more than a nuisance -quite a monetary loss, at the very least. but the problem is that the land isn't generally as densely poulated (by the good races) to say that a concerned effort can really eradicate them in most cases. Sure, they do cull their numbers, but there's always more.You end up with rough cycles of goblin explosions and relatively goblin-free years.
>>97214458>There are actually bumfuckians on this board
>>97213989It's like trying to eradicate rats if rats were 2ft tall and smart as a retarded human. The civilized races try but the vermin are hard to pin down and reproduce like mad. Take goblins for an example. If a male and a female goblin escape, within ten years there are five more goblins, and twenty years later, they've gone from two to twenty five goblins and are harassing villages again. If they aren't cracked down on, distracting from other, more urgent threats, in thirty years they'll be a dug-in goblin warren, in forty a goblin warband, and in fifty a roving horde of goblins to restart the cycle. In that same timespan two humans can raise ten more humans, and two elves are halfway through their elf-child's education.The flipside of this is that the trade-off for their fecundity is that goblins are weak, stupid, (if sadistically clever) and too short-lived to amass real professional skill. Any human army will cut down goblins many times their number by the score and do, constantly, to stop the emergence of another goblin tide reaching critical mass. This is not helped by many dark realms subjugating goblins to use them as cannon fodder and a cheap labour source. There is only so much that one shieldwall of twenty spearmen can do against one-hundred goblins led by a necromancer reanimating the dead as they fall. This is where heroes come in, and so on it goes. Many argue goblins are the grease that keeps the gears of evil grinding, and few can argue that they're wrong.
>>97213989There are efforts to eradicate them, it's just not quite working. There are many reasons why: Goblins are easy to kill but it's almost impossible to get all of them. And it's difficult to organise a force to actually go hunt them, par the course of a decentralised power structure. And the places bothered by goblins tend to be relatively poor rural areas in the first place, so nobody who isn't directly involved cares. The most effective goblin huntings tend to be privately motivated and funded.
>>97214573That poster is obviously a Shitstainian.Everyone knows Bumfuckland is too poor to afford internet.
>>97213989Because annoying pests like rats are for some reason impossible to get rid off, while all the species we like eat shit. Basically the more fugly and annoying an animal is, the more survivable.
>>97213989>Why wouldn't the dominant species make a concentrated effort to eradicate them if they were a problem?
>>97214458>King recognizes my shitty but loaylness>not shitty loyaltyYou really are a Bumfucker.
>>97213989Artist sauce?
>>97214458>>97214225
>>97213989>why arent the local kingdoms with a thousand issues both local, inter-state and global not pull their forces together for a long and arduous campaign of extermination>across the entire nation>in the mountains, the woods, in caves and all the other hardly accessible places>including all the logistics, the supply and all for all these armed men out in the wild places>while all the other problems wont just stay idle
>>97215014Saint Monster, on twitter.
