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?
The eu4 anbennar thing tries to address this by leaning in and exploring liberation of “monstrous” species as well as having a vast enough world where elves can be depicted as both primitive in some parts and classic eligheted trope elsewhere. There was also a crpg called arcanum that also had things like an underclass of orcs forming militant unions in a dnd but industrial revolution world. I remember this retrospective on it https://youtu.be/HMUugZ3DxH8?si=HeNGkI9Pi5vWVajg