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?
Last time I looked at the halfling lore I got much more of an impression they were analogous to Jews - often travellers and merchants, but mostly dispersed across communities with very few towns or villages of their own. Varisians are much more Romani coded, being pretty much just Romani people in a magical world - travellers who are often mistrusted and find themselves on the edges of society as a result.
I admit I haven’t done a deep dive. I’ll take your word for it. There is a LOT of Golarion lore
Might be worth doing now with PF2e. One of Paizo’s stated goals with PF2e was to unfuck the bits of lore that came from middle age white men trying to represent other people’s cultures, leading to massive expansions on the Mwangi and Tian Xia (fantasy africa and far east, respectively) and changes to the European based lore.
It’s not perfect, and definitely still has problematic elements (looking at you Extinction Curse), but I think the world does do a lot to show that you can have that orcs n elves, kitchen sink fantasy with material bases to the lore, it just requires a lot more context and work to avoid common tropes and cliches than is generally bothered with for a single story, which is what classic fantasy generally deals in, and D&D is almost exclusively built for. Because Pathfinder is designed to sell the world as much as the mechanics, they have a vested interest in making a more consistent and materially grounded world than most fantasy does - there are recognisable lines of materialist analysis in the rises and falls of the azlanti, taldor, and chelaxian empires, and it does a lot to emphasise local cultures with ancestral twists rather than ancestral cultures. It isn’t entirely an example of non colonially influenced fantasy, but I think it does a lot to demonstrate the possibility of making it.