D&D 5E Thoughts on this article about Black Culture & the D&D team dropping the ball?

Dausuul said:

I haven't read Tomb of Annihilation, and I have no plans to buy it, so I don't know how well the article's criticisms apply in context; but assuming that it presents the material fairly, its conclusions are reasonable. I looked up Graeme Barber's review at https://pocgamer.com/2017/10/13/tomb-of-annihilation-review-part-1-chult-in-5e, which is sharply critical of the way the setting was executed.

The sum of the criticisms in both articles, as I read it, is that Chult remains a mash-up of African stereotypes. 5E avoided being blatantly offensive (apparently the 4E book actually described the Chulteans as a mix of "noble savages" and "depraved cannibals," which... I have no words), so that's progress, sorta. But it's still a stew of tired pan-African tropes.

One point that Barber makes is that ToA kept the setting material to a minimum, and that this has a very different impact on a setting like Chult which has been handled sketchily (in both senses of the word) in the past, compared to the Sword Coast which has been exhaustively detailed across the editions. I can understand WotC's reasoning here: They said they thought players and DMs would be bored by a big focus on the setting, and I think they're right. But that doesn't excuse being careless with the setting material they do include; quite the contrary.

(Again, this is assuming both reviewers are fairly presenting the content of the book, which I haven't and probably won't read.)

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Azzy said:

Personally, I'd like to hear more opinions from PoC about this, and get their perspective. Any conversation on this subject without their input would be mostly masturbatory and less than productive.

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Mephista said:

Now, I don't know about austrailia or pacific islanders either, but black fantasy is a great big question mark. I don't even have a starting point to even guess.

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Dausuul said:

I haven't read Tomb of Annihilation, and I have no plans to buy it, so I don't know how well the article's criticisms apply in context; but assuming that it presents the material fairly, its conclusions are reasonable. I looked up Graeme Barber's review at https://pocgamer.com/2017/10/13/tomb-of-annihilation-review-part-1-chult-in-5e, which is sharply critical of the way the setting was executed.

The sum of the criticisms in both articles, as I read it, is that Chult remains a mash-up of African stereotypes. 5E avoided being blatantly offensive (apparently the 4E book actually described the Chulteans as a mix of "noble savages" and "depraved cannibals," which... I have no words), so that's progress, sorta. But it's still a stew of tired pan-African tropes.

One point that Barber makes is that ToA kept the setting material to a minimum, and that this has a very different impact on a setting like Chult which has been handled sketchily (in both senses of the word) in the past, compared to the Sword Coast which has been exhaustively detailed across the editions. I can understand WotC's reasoning here: They said they thought players and DMs would be bored by a big focus on the setting, and I think they're right. But that doesn't excuse being careless with the setting material they do include; quite the contrary.

(Again, this is assuming both reviewers are fairly presenting the content of the book, which I haven't and probably won't read.)

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Ralif Redhammer said:

The works of N.K. Jemisin are wonderful – I love the Inheritance trilogy, but am also starting to groove on the Dreamblood series. Kai Ashante Wilson’s novellas are great as well. Going old-school, Charles Saunders’ Imaro series comes to mind. For Lovecraftian Horror, hit Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom.

For my part, I was pretty shocked to read that no POC worked on developing Chult. That seemed a no-brainer to me.

The thing about inclusivity and representation, is that it’s a continuum. You don’t say “oh, we’ve got enough POC, female leads, LGBTQA characters, we’re good.” We can always do better, and should always strive to do better.

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Consultation

Since we were using inspirations from a living culture, we decided to take a different approach than we did with civilizations inspired by mythos of the distant past, such as Theros. Additionally, the design team's artifact-centric theme took us to a more futuristic steampunk sort of feel than one that was focused on inspirations from the past.

To help us treat our cultural references with respect and care, we enlisted help from a team of Indian colleagues at Wizards, including Jisi Kottakuzhiyil, Sandeep Kedlaya, Narayanan Raghunathan, Sathish Ramamurthy, Basha Mohideen, and Trinadh Nemaniat. With their guidance throughout multiple phases of our process, we honed aspects of the world—from the look of a field in a basic Plains to the visuals for the races on the plane to the phonemes in names—to try to reflect Indian inspirations in Kaladesh. They oversaw our progress throughout the concept push all the way through to reviewing art that appears in the card set. They let us know what they found exciting and what were points to avoid. They guided us toward what they felt was an interesting mixture of elements from Northern and Western India in the patterned rhinoceros mount of Armorcraft Judge, and cautioned us against the use of colors or shapes with strong religious connotations, including saffron-colored robes or green domes in architecture.

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Ralif Redhammer said:

The works of N.K. Jemisin are wonderful – I love the Inheritance trilogy, but am also starting to groove on the Dreamblood series. Kai Ashante Wilson’s novellas are great as well. Going old-school, Charles Saunders’ Imaro series comes to mind. For Lovecraftian Horror, hit Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom.

For my part, I was pretty shocked to read that no POC worked on developing Chult. That seemed a no-brainer to me.

The thing about inclusivity and representation, is that it’s a continuum. You don’t say “oh, we’ve got enough POC, female leads, LGBTQA characters, we’re good.” We can always do better, and should always strive to do better.

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robus said:

It's especially surprising given how WotC was crowing about how carefully they'd worked on the Kaladesh plane for M:tG:



See: https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/magic-story/making-kaladesh-2016-11-09

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Ralif Redhammer said:

The works of N.K. Jemisin are wonderful – I love the Inheritance trilogy, but am also starting to groove on the Dreamblood series. Kai Ashante Wilson’s novellas are great as well. Going old-school, Charles Saunders’ Imaro series comes to mind. For Lovecraftian Horror, hit Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom.

Click to expand...