Racially diverse artwork in D&D...does it influence you?

[Imaro]

Lets not call into question the motives of those of us who prefer not to handwave differences in coloration and culture and have our fantasy cultures blended together into a homogenous brew that would actually make the entire setting, from nation to nation and place to place the same. You can go with the "gods did it" I'll go with tribal/cutural migration patterns.

I'm not going to comment on motivations, but the goalposts have been moved in this thread by certain posters. If you want tribal/cultural migrations that's great, if another person wants to use magic... great as well. But both justify more diverse artwork in the corebooks. The corebooks as well as core supplements are suppose to, especially with 4e's very shallowly implied setting, a generic base upon which each individual can build their individual campaign world. Thus, IMHO, the books should encompass a wide range of diversity to accomodate the most people. What's even more disturbing is the fact that D&D 4e now describes not only humans as having any complexion but also most of the non-human PC races... yet again this is not reflected in the artwork. This isn't something people are making up in their own worlds, it's suppose to be the default for the D&D PoL setting.

True but it was a very, very small number of well traveled cosmoplitan types compared to the number of people who never traveled more than a few miles from their villages. I have said in multiple posts on this thread that great trading centers would be ideal for a diverse blending of human racial/ethinic groups and customes. Outside of the centers of trade, nations were far more homogenous than not.

And then there was Greece and/or Rome, which just as much of D&D's implicit setting is based on. In fact I feel with the numerous ancient empires that have fallen, D&D has way more in common with the ancient world now than medieval europe.

It doesn't matter, the european references are rife throughout all of D&D fantasy. Just because there are wierd anomalies like the monk and a katana or two in the settings there is no doubt that the primary cultural assumptions of the core D&D experience is western ie. European fantasy a la Tolkien, Howard, Lieber, etc. A token weapon, class, piece of armor, etc. does real cultural blending make. There are knights, kings, dukes, western armor types, primarily western weapons (outside of those that are fantastic and even they cannot be assigned to another culture outside of the western imagination), Tolkienish elves, dwarves, orcs. There are the western folklore trolls, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins, gnomes, etc. There are of course those fantastic creatures outside the folklore of any culture and the random token critter from another land ie. the ogre mage which would have been an oni. Even the golden dragon has gotten away from the wingless oriental creature it once was.

Howard & Lieber=/= european fantasy, Lieber has peoples that encompass numerous ethnicities and in the city of Lankhmar they are all present. In fact this seems a common trope in swords & sorcery. EVen Howard, much as his depictions of other races was at time offensive, acknowledges they are present and mixed throughout his world.

You realize if you have enough anomalies... suddenly it's pretty hard to claim D&D is based on european fantasy. You've glossed over the influences from Greece/Rome/Mesopotamia/Africa/Japan and China that are a part of or have been a part of the game.

I also believe some of your references are in error...you realize swords, spears, shields, etc. are not inherently trappings of europe. Many cultures outside of europe developed these weapons and used them. There is no "knight" class, and there are quite a few monsters, demon names, etc. that are taken from other cultures. I think you are seeing the influences you want instead of looking at the bigger picture. D&D isn't about any one real world culture, it has it's own culture which is a mish mash of historic and purely fantastic tropes from everywhere.

I am not saying that D&D's western european vision is in any way accurate, but I am saying that is still strongly and primarily a western ie. european fantasy vision. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is the reality.

This is your reality, not the reality of D&D per say. I've said it once and I'll say it again, D&D has more in common with pulp sword & sorcery than any real world culture. Alot of the examples you give are universal, and not restricted to europe. The longsword, shortsword, bow, axe, scimitar, dagger, spear, shield, villages, towns, kingdoms, dungeons, wizards, warriors, hunter/trackers, rogues, holy men, holy warriors, warrior-commanders, sorcerers who made pacts, etc. are all found in cultures besides those in europe. Just a quick glance through the monster manual, in which I ignored animals without a european basis and wholly made up monsters... I found quite a few based off of universal, ancient world or the mythology of other cultures...
Cyclops, Oni, Chimera, Sphinx, Rakshasa, Ghost, Ghoul, Giants, Gorgon, Harpy, Hydra, Lycanthrope, Medusa, Naga, Minotaur, Satyr, Vampire, and Zombie.

Would anyone really want to see a reissue of Oriental Adventures of Rokugan with a bunch of white guys dressed up like shou lin monks, kensai, and samurai? Would anyone want to see the creation of an Aztek/Mayan setting made to be inhabited by Asians (I know these folks came over the land bridge from asia but you get my meaning)? Maybe you would, but I would bet that such abominations would not sell. Al Qadim was Al Qadim because it was Arabic (with some African types in the art as well because of the historic proximity of such cultures/ethnicities). I don't want the great sultan of the desert nomads to be white for the sake of diversity. If he is going to be white make it something interesting because he is an oddity.

You see the difference between a specific setting like Rokugan or a specifc sourcebook like OA... and a general game like D&D is that they try to emulate a specific real world culture... D&D disregards this by mixing and matching everything.

As far a feasability... Eberron sold and it does exactly what you claim would break most gamers emersion...Iron Kingdoms & Midnight sold and both these settings mix racial diversity without forcing a pseudo-real world culture to explain or justify themselves. Why? Because it's fantasy, and the creators are not trying to emulate the real world, and for me that pretty much explains it.

Why can't the various racial/cultural groups be valued unto themselves in a fantasy millieu instead of being artificially and arbitrarily made to fit into western fantasy/folkloric realities. The real world had enough examples of ethnic mixing where there was trade between peoples where such interchanges were both believable and satisfying. There is no reason to toss out real diversity just because it is fantasy. All good fiction, even fantasy has a baseline of plausability in regards to things that are non-fantastic.

Why do we have to be limited by real-world examples, when a world with magic would have evolved in a totally different way? Why would different skin tones have developed when a sorcerer or wizard could easily cast a spell to protect people from the elements? Why wouldn't people mix more and adopt each others cultures when you have magic that can span oceans and even other planes? With D&D 4e's preponderance for great fallen empires, teleportation circles, etc, IMHO, it seems the default would be vastly more mixing of ethnicities and cultures than what some are seeing as the "default". You know, sorta like Rome.

In the game settings we have all used (the published ones anyway) had histories of tribal migrations and a semblance of reality regarding ethnic distributions of humans. Greyhawk, Harn, Kalamar, FR, etc. all had notes as to the distribution of various tribal groups and by default the distribution of human racial characteristics.

And yet this diversity still wasn't reflected in the 3.x lines artwork.

The exception is not the rule and it is silly for folks to try to rationalize everything through the exception to the rule. Even in blondest communities there are brunettes and vice versa. African, European and Arab lands do NOT ever "pop out" random full blooded Asians...doesn't happen unless there is a mixed ethnic reality which will lead to cultural mixing as well. I am pretty sure that the entire world isn't fantasy quasi-europe so in any ethinically mixed society we should see evidence of other CULTURES coming together and not just randomly placed europeans who just happen to have different skin colors. The cosmopolitan hubs that are sparked by cross-culteral trade are the exception and not the rules. Most nations are homogenous outside of trade capitals and great cities.

When did "Africans", "Arabians", "Asians" and even "Europeans" become default in D&D? I can't find a reference to any of this in the core. And yet the default D&D 4e setting has had at least 3 great empires come and go, this, along with the exsistence of magic, in itself would lead to alot more of these "exceptions" of cultural and ethnic melding and mixtures, than what you imply. Wars are fought, slaves are taken, people are integrated into these empires over time, and their cultural and ethnic identities merge and combine until when these empires fall you have much more diversity... they may end up in totally different places than they originally came from, and may have accepted the dominant culture of where they end up.

If we are going to be diverse, be diverse with some depth and not just the United Colors of Benneton aound Arthur's Round Table. Lets see the actual influence of various cultures in clothing, custom, armor, weapons, laws, etc. (just having katanas lying around isn't Asian culture) and not just non-europeans in western fantasy (faux medieval european) armor/clothing. Lets see lords in a western based society picking up customs like the harem. How about eastern meditative spiritual practices adapted and adopted by priests of Bahamut (not the monk...real clerics with that flavor). Lets see the the influence of actual cultures on the traditional D&D settings and not just the token non-european face here and there.

Uhm, the thread is about artwork...and I really don't see how you could get what you are asking for in the D&D corebooks. There is no detail and specifics are left intentionally vague. I think where the artwork comes into play is that it shapes players and GM's perceptions of how the game can and/or should be played... I mean the MM relies almost totally on artwork to spark a DM's imagination. By including diversified artwork you pave the road for these things to appear in more specifc "campaign books" and they are accepted without people's suspension of disbelief becoming broken. It's steps and in the corebooks the first steps woiuld've been having artwork that actually depicted the different races more in line with the variety their descriptions state.

In my setting, where there is high degrees of mixing between human ethnicities, it isn't just black, yellow, red, and brown faces mixining with white faces, it is actual cultural realities. The exchange of customs, mores, and paradigms is what makes this mixing more than a PC tolerance exercise. This honors both a sense of believability in the settings as well as honoring real diversity.



Wyrmshadows[/QUOTE]

 

[S'mon]

Imaro, I was wondering if you'd be happy with 4e core rulebook art reflecting the ethnic and racial makeup of the modern USA, with ca 67% white European, 13% black African, 15% Hispanic (mostly white), and 5% east-Asian, Amerindian and other? If I were you I'd probably prefer the art to have more than 13% of characters looking vaguely like me.

 

[mmadsen]

I'm not going to comment on motivations, but the goalposts have been moved in this thread by certain posters.

Which posters moved the goal posts from where to where?

 

[Imaro]

Imaro, I was wondering if you'd be happy with 4e core rulebook art reflecting the ethnic and racial makeup of the modern USA, with ca 67% white European, 13% black African, 15% Hispanic (mostly white), and 5% east-Asian, Amerindian and other? If I were you I'd probably prefer the art to have more than 13% of characters looking vaguely like me.

You know S'mon, part of me wants to say... if it's cool artwork then it doesn't matter. But, this sentiment breaks down when you realize there are those in R&D that don't judge by this ideal and instead work purposefully against diversity.

IMHO, It's not even about my particular ethnic group, It's about there being at least enough diversity that when I show my friends, or my son ( who is half african-american and half puerto-rican) the PHB, he has something besides a white...human, dwarf, elf, eladrin or halfling that he can identify with. I want him to first and foremost see that people like him can be heroes in the game as well. I think that that is what D&D and rpg's in general are about, being heroes and I think when the artwork and setting are diversified it doesn't put one race on a pedestal as heroes while the others are oddities or non-existent. As an example I feel this picture would have been right at home in the PHB and IMHO, looks much cooler than Jozan.

Which posters moved the goal posts from where to where?

I feel we started talking about diversity in artwork of the generic corebooks (which do not have a default european setting...barely have a setting at all). Into discussions of having to justify the artwork with pseudo-real world campaign settings as well as how diverse artwork would break suspension of disbelief in very specific campaign settings, when this wasn't what was being discussed and is a whole other argument. If I knowingly purchase a setting or game to play in historic China, no I don't expect there to be diversified artwork. If I buy fantasy game 1 with no specific setting that draws from numerous mythologies and cultures...yeah I do. Two totally different situations.

 

[Desdichado]

I think Lockwood's comments now are certainly out of date. I was just flipping through the cover art galleries on Wayne Reynolds page, and there's certainly plenty of racial diversity there.

The comments earlier about pairing race with culture in the same way that our world has done so; why would we even have the same races at all that our culture does? The racial make-up of the earth is very much influenced by things that happened on earth, there's no reason to assume that humans on a completely different world would have developed the same way.

The only reason to use earth ethnicities is to promote identification for an earth audience. Realistically, humans should have developed completely different ethnicities altogether on another world.

 

[ShinHakkaider]

IMHO, It's not even about my particular ethnic group, It's about there being at least enough diversity that when I show my friends, or my son ( who is half african-american and half puerto-rican) the PHB, he has something besides a white...human, dwarf, elf, eladrin or halfling that he can identify with. I want him to first and foremost see that people like him can be heroes in the game as well. I think that that is what D&D and rpg's in general are about, being heroes and I think when the artwork and setting are diversified it doesn't put one race on a pedestal as heroes while the others are oddities or non-existent.

THIS.

I know it was a factor when I was watching the Justice League Animated Series that my son was able to see John Stewart (and later on Vixen and Mr. Terrific) as one of the heroes. That brown people CAN and ARE heroes (despite the griping of the fanboys about the choice). Also it helped that even in the background scenes there was a mix of colors and nationalities in the show. Now I know it's not fantasy, but it's something that can be replicated in a fantasy setting without too much trouble.

 

[Imaro]

I think Lockwood's comments now are certainly out of date. I was just flipping through the cover art galleries on Wayne Reynolds page, and there's certainly plenty of racial diversity there.

The comments earlier about pairing race with culture in the same way that our world has done so; why would we even have the same races at all that our culture does? The racial make-up of the earth is very much influenced by things that happened on earth, there's no reason to assume that humans on a completely different world would have developed the same way.

The only reason to use earth ethnicities is to promote identification for an earth audience. Realistically, humans should have developed completely different ethnicities altogether on another world.

Do you have a link?

 

[Desdichado]

I don't believe the Dungeons & Dragons settings published these days are or should be quasi-medieval.

Should be, that's one thing. Are you saying that Forgotten Realms isn't quasi-medieval? Or Greyhawk?

Eberron, maybe you've got a point (maybe) but speaking in broad terms, that's an extremely hard statement for me to take seriously.

Let me ask you this: do you require players who want to play a blond or redheaded character in a D&D analogue of medieval England to "justify" why someone with such an egregiously non-native ethnic appearance was around, or do you just accept that their ancestors showed up a couple of hundred years earlier?

Huh? Are you seriously trying to say that blond or red-headed people didn't exist in medieval England?

Let me just clarify before I say anything, because I don't want to misconstrue you and take a lot of effort showing how absurd that is if that's not actually what you meant.

And then there was Greece and/or Rome, which just as much of D&D's implicit setting is based on. In fact I feel with the numerous ancient empires that have fallen, D&D has way more in common with the ancient world now than medieval europe.

Are you trying to say that ancient Greeks and Romans weren't white too, though? I mean, where are you going with this?

Howard & Lieber=/= european fantasy, Lieber has peoples that encompass numerous ethnicities and in the city of Lankhmar they are all present. In fact this seems a common trope in swords & sorcery. EVen Howard, much as his depictions of other races was at time offensive, acknowledges they are present and mixed throughout his world.

[/QUOTE]
Howard most certainly is. True, Conan wandered in what was the Hyborian equivalent of the Middle East and North Africa a fair amount, but the Hyborian Age map was very clearly a map of fantasy Europe, with Europe's proximate neighbors thrown in as well.

Leiber may not have been as overt, but Fafhrd was clearly a Viking-esque character too.

It's a bit much to say that pulp fantasy is non-European. A bit too much, with some vague exceptions.

I'll grant that the style of storytelling was probably more heavily influenced by the Orientalism movement and Arabian Nights type stories rather than actual European histories or sagas, at least until Tolkien came along.

I appreciate what you're saying here, but lets not get carried away and make claims that are overtly wrong to support your position. Western fantasy is very heavily invested in European medievalism. D&D, as an extension of western fantasy, is as well.

If anything, I think the push to make D&D illustrations more multicultural is nothing more than trying to reflect the demographics of its largest market, the US.

 

[mmadsen]

IMHO, It's not even about my particular ethnic group, It's about there being at least enough diversity that when I show my friends, or my son ( who is half african-american and half puerto-rican) the PHB, he has something besides a white...human, dwarf, elf, eladrin or halfling that he can identify with.
[...]
I feel we started talking about diversity in artwork of the generic corebooks (which do not have a default european setting...barely have a setting at all). Into discussions of having to justify the artwork with pseudo-real world campaign settings as well as how diverse artwork would break suspension of disbelief in very specific campaign settings, when this wasn't what was being discussed and is a whole other argument. If I knowingly purchase a setting or game to play in historic China, no I don't expect there to be diversified artwork. If I buy fantasy game 1 with no specific setting that draws from numerous mythologies and cultures...yeah I do. Two totally different situations.

Let me clarify what I've said, because I'm not against racial diversity; I'm against "forced" diversity that doesn't fit an implied setting.

If you're playing a swords-and-sorcery style game, in the style of Robert E. Howard's Conan, you should have all kinds of diversity in races and cultures in the game world. You have analogs to medieval French knights, English longbowmen, American Indians, sub-Saharan Africans, Mongols of the steppes, Asian Indians, etc.

What you don't have is an African-American French knight -- for Diversity.

Is it impossible to have a character from quasi-Africa come to quasi-France and serve as a knight? No, but it's clearly improbable, and that character isn't just one of the many African-French knights in arms. He's an outlander, like Conan, and everyone will refer to him as such, etc. And the quasi-French countryside will not have a mix of races from around the world; it will have a few folks on the borderlands from the next closely related race over.

Another option is to create your fantasy world from whole cloth, with little or no reference to real-life historical cultures and races, like Edgar Rice Burroughs in his Barsoom stories. The red men and the black men aren't American Indians and Africans; they're just red men and black men. We can't conjure up an image of their clothing, culture, facial structure, speech patterns, etc. from those names, but that can be both good as well as bad.

Even in a setting like that though, I wouldn't expect a homogeneous blend of different races throughout the game world. I would expect the red lands to be red and the black lands to be black, with a good story explaining why a region might be mixed but not blended.

 

[eyebeams]

I'm already thinking of how I'm going to spend my reparations.

This would be because you face systematic discrimination now because the social relationships in your country have been altered to your disadvantage, because you're descended from slaves, right?