Cannibalism in a fantasy setting

If it a) walks on two legs and b) speaks a language you could theoretically understand and c) isn't some kind of elemental/magical construct, it's cannibalism. A is kinda up for debate, but I think it's a little more intuitive for most people.

without seriously considering it, I suppose I'd adopted dwarf fortress's definition of cannibalism
>EAT_SAPIENT_OTHER:UNTHINKABLE

>>50426696
Cannibalism is the same as in the real world, consumption of members of your own species. Unlike definitions such as murder cannibalism is something that can already be extended to nonhumans (a dog eating a dog is cannibalistic. A dog eating a cat isn't, even though they have comparable intelligence.)

On a semi-related note, anything sapient can be murdered. Anything nonsapient can only be slaughtered.

>>50426696
I'd tend to go with >>50426735 for the definition. If they're humanoid aspirants that can speak, it's going to be looked on in the same way. Some races like Lizardfolk might not care though, and some humans might feel the same way in return.

You could make a similar argument for sapients of any shape, like dragons, but a dragon doesn't consider it low enough for that to cannibalism, and it probably wouldn't care anyway.

Taboos arise for a reason.

Cannibalism-taboo comes from the fact it's super bad to eat human meats with primitive cooking technology.

The word itself comes from a people's name, so we can be flexible here.

Thus the definition of cannibalism, in a fantasy world, would probably expand to include any creatures for which that also stands: particularly, anything with a strong degree of pathogen overlap with humans, or other common health risks (fantasy equivalent of prion disease and whatnot).

Depending on the diplomatic/cultural situation of things, cannibalism might then ALSO expand to include species that your culture considers people in a serious sense, or that might be considered another, different crime.

Why are you trying to set some sort of absolute definition for a phenomenon which is entirely cultural? Just think about the values of the society in question and draw the line wherever you think makes the most sense based on those values.

>>50426696
I think that eating anything you can have offspring with should be considered cannibalism.

>You can't eat him! He has aspirations!
Adventure time detailed how cannibalism works in the simplest and best way.

>>50426696
In a party of 5 when I was playing a Goblin in a game a few years ago myself and the Gnoll basically would butcher and eat anything we killed. Giant Spiders, Dragons, Trolls, Dinosaurs, Dolphins, Harpies, and a wide variety of humanoids.

And Zombies.

We wound up splitting the party and clearing a majority of a city of a zombie invasion/outbreak just the two of us when our supplies ran out through clever use of hooks/rope/traps/arrow crafting/throwing bricks off of roofs on the concept of "Is there some particular reason we can't hunt/eat zombies?" in place of rations while the Human, Elf, and Half-Drow hid out in the upper floor of a tower with the stairs burnt out trying to figure out how to escape. Even if PF's unlimited Cantrips did shit damage as long as you can sit on a roof an snatch bottles out of a bar across the street with mage hand to convert into molotovs in a city with stone buildings and snipe zombies with 1d3 acid and fire damage.

In the end we decided to repel down and harvest roasted zombie meat and since neither of us got sick eating it we used it to feed an entire Church full of hungry people two blocks over from the tower and our party members. As a group we decided that the only people who got "Evil" points for cannibalism where myself and the Gnoll but since we where already both LE it didn't fucking matter and if anyone got a little too curious we just told them "Don't worry about it." or "It's fish we caught from the roof of the Dock." All in all the eating people for survival was minimal evil points but we bottomed out on the E scale because apparently feeding people their dead neighbors was a black mark even if it was for the greater good and saved everyone. Knowing the Elf and Half-Drow player "Escort the townspeople through zombie hoards" was going to end in a lot more civilian deaths than "feed them and keep them safe while picking off zombies and sweeping the streets so they can all walk to safely down main street"

>>50430598
(CONT)

Basically it was a good thing that we got them all to safety and got paid and left town and that that campaign ended before all the townies full of zombie snacks all died of plague or wolf attacks or whatever peasants die to and all spontaneously happened to mass arise as flesh-eating Ghouls and know exactly who to blame for it.

The more important question about Fantasy Cannibalism isn't so much what it is as the Why. Why are your characters eating humanoids/people/talking noodle badgers? If the answer is survival then it's totally fine as long as you have one level of plausible deniability but someone has to make people-cake and they probs have to catch alignment shift points for it.

In my group wood elves are cannibals and murderers. They eat their dead in a ritualistic manner and kill and eat invaders to their forest realm