Quote:
Originally Posted by Amphimir Míriel  You think so? I thought the Cleric was kinda asian-looking, on a weird way |
Eh,
kinda, or he could just be grimacing in the midst of combat. It's pretty ambiguous, and that's the point: they all look white, there's no explicit diversity.
It's the same way with the races themselves: the dwarves have rare non-human skin tones (grey or sandstone red); eladrin have human skin tones but are overwhelmingly fair-skinned; elves are supposed to be "tan or brown" but are presented as white; half-elves have "the same range of complexion as humans and elves" but are presented as white, one of the halflings looks like she was modelled after a young
Penny Johnson Jerald (which is cool); both humans look white (although the woman looks like an attempt to do Asian eyes on a white girl); tiefling skin "covers the whole human range and also extends to reds" but both of them are white.
The issue is slightly confused by the fact that William O'Connor does not use naturalistic skin tones for his illustrations anyway, of course. Both humans, for instance, are pale-skinned and obviously so, but because the artist doesn't paint people's skin to look like people's skin it's impossible to say for sure what he was intending. Maybe the human woman was
supposed to look totally Asian (though the European colour of her hair suggests not).
Hell, apart from the halfling, the female dwarf fighter with geisha makeup at the beginning of the next chapter (p. 50) brings more diversity into the illustrations than the whole races chapter.
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