WotC Older D&D Books on DMs Guild Now Have A Disclaimer

If you go to any of the older WotC products on the Dungeon Master's Guild, they now have a new disclaimer very similar to that currently found at the start of Looney Tunes cartoons.

We recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website, does not reflect the values of the Dungeon & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.

The wording is very similar to that found at the start of Looney Tunes cartoons.

Edit: Wizards has put out a statement on Twitter (click through to the full thread)

 

[Fenris-77]

Hmm. I'm not even going down that rabbit hole. D&D Goblins aren't Jewish, nor is their depiction antisemitic. If you go looking I'm sure you can find some unfortunate individual examples of stuff, and there's the broad physical descriptors, which only fit some of the examples anyway, but it's being read in IMO, it's not actually there. It would never have even occurred to me to make this connection, and I'm probably more sensitive to antisemitic content than I am some of the other things that have been discussed lately.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Even setting aside how at the time, a german being associated as a nazi is a lot more complicated than just someone joining a political party, it was widely accepted that Germans were the enemy. As is pretty much every opposing force in the history of war ever as viewed by the opposing side.

Humans are tribalistic in our psychology. We tend to treat others as homogeneous groups without room for nuance. That’s still racism, isn’t it? I doubt you are arguing we should kill all the German babies. “Should we kill the baby [insert race]?” is a real recurring discussion in D&D fandom for decades.

Well, they haven't been because goblins aren't real. But in literature and fiction and media, they do stuff like this all the time. And worse Ever hear of Lord of the Rings? Or Warhammer FRP? I'm also not comparing fictionalized atrocities as being as bad as real life. I'm doing the opposite, and saying people don't have much objection to killing real people, but get more upset when a fictionalized creature gets killed in said fiction. That trivializes real atrocities more than anything I've said.

Firstly, you still haven’t shown me that typical published depictions of goblins run nazi-esque death camps and worse. How do you get worse than nazi death camps, btw? That’s what I mean when I said I feel like these statements trivialize real atrocities. You treat “nazism and worse” like an item on a shopping list in the supermarket of edgelords.

Secondly, you’ve shown absolutely no evidence that people in general care more about fictional depictions of genocide over real ones. Obviously, people who aren’t racists know that genocide is bad and that endorsing it is wrong. If I understand correctly (and my understanding is constantly evolving), the backlash is against endorsing genocide against fictional races.

 

[Aldarc]

@BoxCrayonTales, not to mention the JK Rowling’s use of greedy goblin bankers in Harry Potter.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

If I understand correctly (and my understanding is constantly evolving), the backlash is against endorsing genocide against fictional races.

And the angel of critical theory came unto me
Snatching me up from my place of slumber
And took me on high and higher still
Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest
And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil
One thousand nay a million voices full of fear
And terror possessed me then!

And I begged.... "Angel of Critical Theory, what are these tortured screams?"
And the Harbinger of Intersectionality said unto me
"These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!"
You see, Snarf Zagyg
Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust.


(apologies to that certain band)

 

[MGibster]

True that, and it's set in Rokugan, which is very intentionally a mish-mash of Asian elements (and some stuff from beyond Asia). I don't think that's what people are particularly concerned about though.

We've had some folks on this message board point to the mish-mash of Asian elements as one of the problematic aspects of OA.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Hmm. I'm not even going down that rabbit hole. D&D Goblins aren't Jewish, nor is their depiction antisemitic. If you go looking I'm sure you can find some unfortunate individual examples of stuff, and there's the broad physical descriptors, which only fit some of the examples anyway, but it's being read in IMO, it's not actually there. It would never have even occurred to me to make this connection, and I'm probably more sensitive to antisemitic content than I am some of the other things that have been discussed lately.

This is a common point of debate over the “space jew” trope in general. People disagree over whether fiction draws from stereotypes at all. Does that mean we’re always reading too much into it?

I prefer to play it safe and depict goblins as David Bowie and his muppet friends.

@BoxCrayonTales, not to mention the JK Rowling’s use of greedy goblin bankers in Harry Potter.

Or ferengi, volus, etc. The trope is called “space jews” for a reason. We don’t write fiction in a vacuum. Authors are products of their upbringing, and thus so are their writings.

And the angel of critical theory came unto me
Snatching me up from my place of slumber
And took me on high and higher still
Until we moved to the spaces betwixt the air itself
And he brought me into a vast farmlands of our own Midwest
And as we descended cries of impending doom rose from the soil
One thousand nay a million voices full of fear
And terror possessed me then!

And I begged.... "Angel of Critical Theory, what are these tortured screams?"
And the Harbinger of Intersectionality said unto me
"These are the cries of the carrots, the cries of the carrots!"
You see, Snarf Zagyg
Tomorrow is harvest day and to them it is the holocaust.


(apologies to that certain band)

As I said, my understanding is constantly evolving and I’m pretty sure there are actually several different arguments being confused with one another. James Hodes writes on the subject at length:

James Mendez Hodes

jamesmendezhodes.com

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

As I said, my understanding is constantly evolving and I’m pretty sure there are actually several different arguments being confused with one another. James Hodes writes on the subject at length:

At a very basic level, there will always be a tension between the following two positions:

C'eci n'est pas une pipe.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

I use that as a shorthand to describe the difference between meta-textuality and overreading. In one example, you have the pretty basic issue of something that demonstrably is not what it is (which forces you to consider the meaning and the metatext); in the other, an admonition and warning that over-reading is always possible (in other words, sometimes a person wants a cigar not because of an oral fixation, or because of the resemblance to male genitalia, but because they want a cigar).

More simply, you can always look to find meaning; that a person reads, say, Tolstoy and decides that the farming within it is actually a metaphor for WW2 and the Holocaust given the indiscriminate harvesting of plants would not necessarily mean that the person's reading is wrong to them, as they take their own personal meaning out of the work. But from a more general point of view, this could also be "over-reading" the work as it is unlikely that Tolstoy was a time-traveler (or could predict the future) and that this specific, and anachronistic, material was within the work.

Put more simply, we need to be careful to not overread and find things that we want to be in the material.

Just my two cents .

 

[Sacrosanct]

Google “goblins antisemitic” if you don’t believe me. Here are some choice links:

Space Jews - TV Tropes

The Space Jew is an alien, monster, animal, or other nonhuman creature that embodies stereotypical aspects of a real-world racial, ethnic, or religious stereotype, whether Jewish, black, Asian, white, or whatever. Sometimes this trope is played …

tvtropes.org

Goblins are not inherently antisemitic, but certain depictions were influenced by antisemitic stereotypes. E.g. in Cornish folklore, knockers (a goblin) are literally the ghosts of Jews. I only ask that we be conscientious that our fiction is never created in a vacuum.

You have it backwards. What you're doing is a version of the classic fallacy "dogs have four legs. Animals have four legs. Therefore, all animals are dogs."

I.e, since the dawn of time, human culture has depicted scary monsters as humanoids with exaggerated features to make them seem more scary. Eyes, noses, ears, fingers, arms, legs, etc. All human but misshapen. That doesn't mean they were depicted like that to disparage Jews. They existed before most of these cultures even knew who Jews were.

Instead, the pejorative depictions of Jews were done to resemble the monsters, for obvious reasons: to make people fear and hate Jews. This is true of every pejorative depiction of other ethnicities, from Africans to Japanese in WWII art. Exaggerated features to make them seem less than human. Does that mean every depiction of a goblin or orc or bugbear or kobold is based on those depictions? Of course not. That's silly. Just like it's silly to argue that the reason people don't like goblins is because they represent Jews. Monsters weren't meant to represent Jews, Jews were meant to represent monsters. Therefore, you can't argue with any authority that goblins are pejorative depictions of Jews because it's literally the other way around.

Also, there is plenty of evidence of games where Germans (or other religions or nationalities in wargames) are considered inherently evil and no one has expressed as adversity killing them as has people gotten upset about treating orcs and goblins as inherently evil. To say there is no evidence of what I suggested means you have no idea of gaming or games in general. I stand by my observation. More people have gotten more upset about the killing of fictional monsters than they do in games where real people are treated the same: inherently bad who need to he destroyed.

My suspicion about you not knowing about gaming history is doubled when you seriously argue that goblins in games and literature have never captured people and put them in prisons where they torture and kill them. That's a pretty common trope among monstrous humanoids. And appears over and over in just D&D alone. That, along with keeping people for food (which to my knowledge Nazi Germany never did)

 

[Parmandur]

Are you kidding? The ur-priest prestige class was great for min-maxing! It had a custom spell progression that got you up to 9th-level spells in only ten levels!

...or was that the sort of red flag you meant?

Multiple red flags flying in the wind there.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

We've had some folks on this message board point to the mish-mash of Asian elements as one of the problematic aspects of OA.

Yes but they're saying it about a book that isn't doing it. The criticism of the 3E OA is quite different from the 1E one.