D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Faolyn]

No. You're wrong. Or, at least you're speaking from a false authority. What, are you the corporate seer of Wizards of the Coast? Why are you magically proclaiming that there are literally only two possible courses of action?

No, not a corporate seer. But I'm pretty sure that WotC doesn't own a time machine where they can go back to change what was written.

My Dad's a writer. He's written all sorts of stuff, but he mostly writes comics. Since he started writing in the late 60s (and still writing today!), he's probably written something that is questionable by today's standards. But he can't actually do anything about it. He can only change what he's currently writing.

Yet I appreciate that you propose here another option: of putting more specific warnings on some product labels. That's quite boring, but it would be slightly more than the present-day boilerplate.

Why are you hellbent on presenting only two boring options?

Reality doesn't have to be interesting to you.

But now I have to wonder why you are so "hellbent" about things being not boring. Why do you need this to be entertaining? Didn't someone else say that it looked like you wanted WotC to grovel for forgiveness. Were they right?

Let me tell you, being tapped by Wizards to speak for an article, and being paid a bit for the time, is great personal publicity. Of course, the amendatory interviews would be done very skillfully, with beautiful editing. Do you really think that R.A. Salvatore just woke up one day and randomly "chose to step forward" and make amendatory comments on the drow for the Polygon article? No. His comments were almost certainly coordinated and vetted by Wizards' own team. And they did a good job. The designer amends interviews aren't there to ruffle even more feathers and open more wounds. They're there for authentic healing and teaching the D&D principle that "diversity is strength."

I literally have no idea, have never read any of his books or, for that matter, any D&D novels outside of 2-3 Ravenloft novels, nor do I know anything about him as a person. Maybe Salvatore has been thinking about this for a long time and waiting for an opportunity to correct it. Maybe the idea never occurred to him until he was approached to write a new book and he suddenly realized "hey, this isn't cool." Maybe it was something else.

However, I'd like to point out that this article is half-apology, half-advertisement for an upcoming novel (which I assume has been published by this point?). I'm not saying that he's trying to win points with the audience so they will buy the new book. I am saying that the changes being made are being made because, as the article says, they are expanding the franchise into new territories. And they're doing this by introducing new drow cultures and saying only one of them was corrupted into demon-worshiping evil.

There is absolutely nothing being done with Gaz10 or, in fact, most of the legacy content that TSR and WotC have produced. There is nothing to expand. If they put out Mystara 5e, they're not going to be rewriting The Orcs of Thar so it's less problematic. I haven't read Gaz10, or if I did, it was so long ago I've forgotten in, but it doesn't look like there's anything in it that can be salvaged in the way that the drow have been salvaged. So for this hypothetical Mystara 5e, they're going to be tossing Gaz10 into the trash and starting fresh.

Some other poster in this thread spoke as if I were a legal nincompoop for saying that Wizards is the legal successor of TSR. Sweet jeezus. Regardless of what the technical term is, it's a fact that Wizards owns TSR and all its assets. Which means that Wizards owns all of TSR "debits" and moral karma as well. When a company buys another company, they don't just buy the benefits! They also gain the karmic responsibilities.

Sins of the (adoptive) father, eh?

And there'd of course be an overarching "managing/editorial team" for the process, which would bring the various specific threads into a coherent whole, so that the findings can translated into a readable DRAGON+ amends article, and the appropriately specific charities can be tapped for automated donations.

And what, exactly, would this Dragon+ article accomplish by doing this? The old material would still be there in all its terribleness. It would just be highlighted now, so that all the world could see that ages ago, some writers wrote some bad stuff.

Earlier, you wrote "The designer amends interviews aren't there to ruffle even more feathers and open more wounds. They're there for authentic healing and teaching". Since you apparently don't believe that any of these writers are capable or willing to apologize on their own (or you wouldn't talk about being tapped for an article, getting publicity from it, and being paid as well), you don't want healing. You want the company to be held up as an example, or possibly as a warning to others.

Your Dragon+ idea is text equivalent of putting people in stocks for public ridicule--but not even always for their own crimes. Didn't someone else say that it looked like you just wanted WotC to grovel for forgiveness. I'm thinking they might be write. Because your idea is great if you want things to not be boring.

 

[Zardnaar]

Tintin Au Congo was already widely regarded as racist and unacceptable in the UK even since the 1940s, and when other Tintins got translated over the decades, it did not. So that was so racist as to be unacceptable in the 1940s here, to be clear.

Finally in 1991 the B&W version did get translated as a sort of historical artifact with a fairly limited print run (and likewise with the 1946 colour version in 2005). I was like the world's biggest Tintin fan when I was a kid, and thanks to my mum liking the art style (she's an illustrator herself) I got all the Tintin books, including weird ones like the one about the Russian revolution (which I think never got inked and is thus B&W), and yes, Tintin Au Congo, which my mum took pains to explain to me was racist and unacceptable, but which we had to show how attitudes were messed-up in the past, and we needed to learn from. Even as a kid, even if it hadn't seemed racist (which it did - I was at school with Black kids and so the way they were drawn here was pretty insane to me), the cartoonishness of the portrayal of the Africans (and even the animals - I had the version with the rhino-dynamiting) was harshly at odds with the general Tintin vibe so I hated it.

(Also damn "Your country, Belgium" is indeed pretty special - that is really "a different era" stuff in the way 1988 was not - Wikipedia tells us that even the 1946 redrawn version Herge put out - the one I had - removed all that stuff. So that was unacceptable even for 1946! I'm surprised you were able to find that version in the 1980s.)

Tintin in the Congo - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There was also a lot of other less-extreme racism in the Tintin books, but weirdly a lot of it seemed to almost accidentally lampshade itself, like when Tintin is taking a photo of some poor Native American, the guy looks really put out, and it makes Tintin look like a tourist-y jerk. Even as a kid I remember thinking "Tintin, don't do that...".

(Also reminds me that there was an amazing Tintin-specific shop in Soho (or thereabouts) in London in the 1980s I remember going there on a dark/rainy night and just being amazed by it - it had white walls, bright lighting and a high ceiling, oh and minimalist decor as was common in the '80s, I remember that.)

The Asterix one is particularly messed-up because IIRC that's not from the '80s, that's way later, like the '90s or something, and should obviously never have happened. Asterix also has a weird problem where Roman slaves are disproportionately shown as Black, which was like, wildly historically inaccurate and kind of super-racist as a result (even beyond racist portrayals in terms of features and so on).

Lucky Luke wasn't as racist with its art (notice the leader of the Native Americans is about as handsome and well-proportioned as Luke himself, I guess as befits a "Noble Savage" ugh), but jesus the colonial attitudes in that panel are something else.


Tintin Au Congo was not good, but yeah, Tintin as a whole was, if sometimes a little fashy (as we would say now).

That one was in print here.

A key difference in the 80's though was no one took it that seriously. If one expressed views like that were I was the old man would have used the strap on me. Wasn't illegal to wallop your kids until the early 2000's.

So it was kind of an oxymoron casual stuff was tolerated but serious stuff wasn't.

I remember when some local white power turned up. "This place looks nice the people look like us". They kinda got run out of town though after an incident at the local KFC (early 90's).

Something similar happened at highschool some asshat insulted a foreign exchange student and got a free trip to hospital (said student knew Muay Thai).

 

[Maxperson]

I am all for awareness and analysis of GAZ10's contents. I believe awareness and analysis is useful.

I am very much against calls for GAZ10 being pulled.

How is keeping it any different from the continued use of the names Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians?

 

[CleverNickName]

It wasn't a review, it was a historical overview of the supplement, albeit one written in July 2014: my perspective and discussion would be quite a bit different now given the discussion of biological essentialism that has mainstreamed since then. But I find it likely that what I described was what people were saying about the supplement at the time.

So I mentioned the two main streams of response that I'd seen about the book. It's not an explicit either/or as you state: it's two responses that appeared in peoples' discussions. Obviously there can be more possibilities. If there were discussions of more problematic elements that I'd found at time it's likely I would have included them. (Can't say for sure that I didn't: that was seven and a half years ago, and I wrote 2+ histories every week for years.)

The Legacy Content warning was plopped atop all my product histories two years ago, so yeah it might not be totally in sync with the rest of the article. Unfortunately, I no longer have permission to edit them at this point, and haven't for at least a year or two (maybe longer, but sometime last year was the first time I went to fix a typo and discovered I no longer could).

The next version of these histories, with expansion and a more modern perspective, is going to appear in a series of "TSR Codices". GAZ10 is toward the start of Book IV, and I'm starting Book III next month. ffffffffff

Thanks for the clarification, Shannon. What you wrote about the two main streams of response does track with what I remember from the time. I grew up in the 80s, and "learn to take a joke" is a phrase I have heard far too many times. Unfortunately that attitude still carries over to today (and as recently as two weeks ago, with all the hot garbage from TSR3 regarding the Legacy Content notice). Which, come to think of it, is probably the reason why I was over-sensitive about it in my write-up.

I agree with what @Voadam said: I really appreciate the work you've done on the product histories on DriveThruRPG (and the history of our hobby overall). I'll look forward to reading about the expanded history of this product in the TSR Codices series.

 

[shannona]

I just want to say I really appreciate the individual product histories and context and enjoyed reading them as different D&D legacy PDFs were re-released.

I wish they had you continue with them as there are others without them that I would have enjoyed similar context and background on as well.

Thanks!

If there's a product without my history, it's for one of two reasons.

(1) Early on I had a compatriot in writing, Kevin Kulp, but he left the project after just a year or two. There was an interim where I hadn't yet taken over the products he was doing, and so some products ended up without histories.

(2) At some point, we'd published all the products that DTRPG had easy access to at the time, and they started appearing one every month or something when they'd manage to purchase and digitize a missing book. I write histories for a few of those, and then we gradually lost track of each other, so I didn't know what they were doing or when they were appearing (whereas I used to get regular spreadsheets of upcoming products during the "busy" couple of years when most of the PDFs went out).

So, DTRPG was really quite dedicated to keeping me on until pretty much the end, or at least until we got to the long part of the long tail.

As for seeing context for everything: I'm hoping for the 50th anniversary, in 2024, to have four books ready for your reading, covering OD&D, AD&D 1e, BD&D, and the tail end of Mystara publication afterward. I've got the OD&D and AD&D 1e books done, at least in draft, and start in on BD&D in early 2022. The histories are expanded, normalized, polished, and generally a big upgrade even from the work I did for DTRPG.

 

[Zardnaar]

How is keeping it any different from the continued use of the names Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians?

It's literature. Attempts to rewrite the past and hide or destroy it are normally associated with crappy regimes.

It will still be around you'll just have to pay heaps for it on eBay or go sailing on the internet Caribbean.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

How is keeping it any different from the continued use of the names Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians?

That's a good and fair question.

To me, the difference is this-

The Washington Football Team and the Cleveland Guardians (who formerly had the names you referred to) were continuing to use these names as part of their current identity, and this was inextricably tied into their current marketing, branding, and all efforts. It was a very public and ongoing ... well, slur.

On the other hand, things that were created in the past and are of their time ("art" - using the term loosely) are not the same. Whether it's a painting, or a piece of music, or a TV program, or a book, or even a gaming supplement (or even an old commercial), these are all artifacts of their time. There is a whole 'nother issue about capitaliss, and long tails, and availability to people that isn't worth going into, but suffice to say that (to use an easy example), the issues in a book like Huck Finn are integral to that book to that book and time. The issues in a John Hughes movie (just pick one... say, Long Duk Dong) are inherent to that movie and that time. And so on.

In order to learn about those issues, many of which continue to this day, we don't alter or change the past. Instead, we learn from it and improve the present. All things from the past will have issues; the key is to learn from that to inform the present.

But yes, if Hasbro ever decided to just make Mystara an official setting again and kept everything from GAZ10, that would be a massive problem.

 

[shannona]

Thanks for the clarification, Shannon. What you wrote about the two main streams of response does track with what I remember from the time. I grew up in the 80s, and "learn to take a joke" is a phrase I have heard far too many times. Unfortunately that attitude still carries over to today (and as recently as two weeks ago, with all the hot garbage from TSR3 regarding the Legacy Content notice). Which, come to think of it, is probably the reason why I was over-sensitive about it in my write-up.

Appreciate the understanding.

And I should note that what I remember about the negative reviews of GAZ10 were people who didn't like the Holloway drawings and who didn't like the jokes in the book not because they were racially insensitive, but instead because they felt like jokes didn't belong in a serious sourcebook.

So, yeah, if you were seeing a dichotomy between it's a groundbreaking sourcebook and you didn't like it because you don't know how to take a joke. Yikes! That would be pretty offensive. I'd more carefully clarify that if I rewrote it at this point, and probably use the book as a core place to talk about the problems of biological essentialism. (And that's what I expect to do when I get to my update of that part of the histories, probably in a year or so.)

 

[Neonchameleon]

To me one of the most telling examples is "Chief Sitting Drool". That name alone demonstrates that any claims that any of this nonsense is about the orcs paying respect to their adversaries by imitating them simply doesn't hold up in setting. If there's any respect at all involved you don't call your imitation "sitting drool".

And that the writers of Orcs of Thar felt the need for a fig leaf is just as telling. It means that the writers themselves knew that what they were doing wasn't acceptable and pretended it was something else. You don't need to say "this is respectful" if you think that open mockery is fine.

THEY DO WHAT?!?!?!

In Germany?!?! But you guys kicked their ass in the end!

Wow.

...

We have the same issue in the UK to some extent, relentless pro-Roman propaganda, which was really not because the Romans did anything great for Britain (they didn't, or nothing that lasted past the Saxons), but because the British Empire idolized and aped the Romans so hard (using them as a model and an excuse), that they basically built propaganda into our educational system for centuries and we're still not fully rid of it. Luckily we have Boudicca and thus there's at least some mixed feelings about it.

The Romans were outstanding at one thing by the standards of the ancient world (and no, it wasn't war). They offered multiple relatively easy paths to full Roman citizenship - which meant that two generations after they'd conquered a region the middle classes in that region were proud to be Roman citizens or were aspiring to become Roman citizens and knew that it was a practical goal. In short they assimilated conquered peoples in a way almost no one has either before or since. And that's why Rome lasted so long as an empire. (Well, that and some pretty excellent social mobility up to and including someone who was taken captive and paraded in a triumph going on to have a triumph thrown in his own honour).

Also, tying this back to the subject of Orcs of Thar (and "Chief Sitting Drool"), the Romans were very good at taking the successful tools of war from their foes and using them right back - or hiring them (such as the ballearic slingers) as auxilia. And on a general note we can see the Romans changing what was acceptable over time even in places like the gladiatorial arena; after Rome conquered the gauls the Gallus was probably turned into the more respectable Murmillo and also replaced by the Thracian as the new enemy heel gladiator.

And, folks, let us be clear about something - Roman occupation of these places isn't analogous to the issues highlighted in this thread. Because the Romans left those places, and didn't massively displace the native population. It is entirely reasonable for a modern German or Brit to view ancient Roman occupation differently, because, well, the Germans and people of the British Isles are still the majority populations in their spaces. The Native Americans... aren't.

So, maybe rethink whether this argument has much relevance?

You might want to check your Roman history there. Caesar claimed to have enslaved about a million and killed about a million more - and that was one military leader in one military career. Or you might want to check with the Carthaginians about the way the Romans didn't massively displace the native population (although salting the earth was a later legend). Or you might want to check with the Jews who had the province of Judea renamed the province of Palestine under Roman rule and were kicked out of Jerusalem. For that matter the Romans were forever founding colonies; one of the textbook things the Romans did (other than took slaves) after they conquered somewhere was gave a lot of it as farmland for retiring 20 year veteran legionaries. Which of course displaced yet more people and ensured inter-breeding with these land owning fit military veterans (who were already Roman citizens because they'd done their 20 years in the army) wanting wives and even if the wife wouldn't become a Roman Citizen their kids would.

There are plenty of Roman analogies to be used here. Although I'm not sure how relevant they are tbh.

 

[Faolyn]

How is keeping it any different from the continued use of the names Washington Redskins and Cleveland Indians?

Because football teams are still actively producing new games and new merchandise, while Gaz10 can languish on its virtual shelf not doing anything.