Okay, I guess I'll give my opinion on that Extra Credits video

So Extra Credits released a video claiming that "evil races are bad game design" and got massively ratio'd.

There's a lot to unpack about the video because it conflates a lot of things that aren't actually related. So I'm just going to present a massively simplified argument:

Firstly, our elf-games are violent murder simulators that require players to mow down hordes of mooks. The game is designed that way. Most tabletop roleplaying games are designed that way. If you don't like it, then play a game that isn't a violent murder simulator.

Secondly, while you could easily play a game where you go around scalping human bandits... orcs are just cooler. The use of orcs in fantasy has nothing to do with anti-black racism. Using orcs as your mooks of choice doesn't even imply that they're "inherently evil." The "orc baby dilemma" is a really old argument dating back to UseNet.

There's no way for the players to know that there are good orcs unless the GM goes out of the way to tell them. It's extremely inconvenient to stop and tell the players the backstory of Orc Mook #294 when they're just playing for the sake of violence.

Lastly, it's entirely possible that the "pretty" races like humans, dwarves, elves, etc are just racists the whole time. The game books might be giving hugely biased accounts, I don't know?

Congratulations! Your LIZARD evolved into BASILISK!

In previous posts I've talked about "monster evolution," the concept of monsters evolving into other monsters and non-monsters evolving into monsters. This concept has roots in real life myth, particularly qi cultivation by animals in Eastern beliefs (and I'll have a post on that someday). Right now I wanted to apply the idea to the basilisk (and cockatrice, assuming they're not the same).

Traditionally, the basilisk is believed to hatch from a cock egg incubated by a snake or some such. Of course, how often does that actually happen? Are alchemists the only ones responsible for the basilisks running around? Setting aside the messiness of the folklore, one suggestion I saw was that ordinary lizards could become basilisks by growing large enough. This is not unlike stories in East Asia of koi and snakes becoming dragons by achieving sufficient feats (which I discussed in a previous post), and coincidentally by some accounts the basilisk is a dragon itself.

Why do I like this idea? Well, I don't always like the idea of inventing pseudo-naturalistic ecologies for fantasy genre monsters. It always has weird assumptions and cascade effects. What niche does the monster occupy? Is the monster an invasive species or a native species whose demise harms the ecology? How do magical powers interact with natural selection? And so forth. I prefer to sidestep all that.

Have a nice day!