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)

 

[Chaosmancer]

Let's fast forward to you cracking open a 1e adventure at the next big gaming convention. What's this? A disclaimer! You briefly read over it... Hm... Harmful stereotypes... Hm...

Okay, now you are ready! You know where the harmful stereotypes are and how to either avoid them or make your players aware of them. You are also better prepared to not perpetuate them! You start playing.

Someone walks over to your table. "1st Edition D&D?" they gasp. "I thought that was racist!"

"Ah ha!" you say, holding forth the disclaimer. "Some of the depictions and stereotypes can be harmful, my friend, but knowing this in advance we can still play the game without perpetuating negativity."

"Wow!" they say. "I'm sure glad there's that disclaimer! Can I play?"


Okay, that's a fantasy, but do you see how something like a disclaimer is actually a tool that can protect you and allow you to continue playing a game you enjoy, rather than harming you?

I love this example for what it is saying.

I'm also rolling on the ground picturing absolutely cheezy commercial advertisement tactics. Like, they gasp (camera zoom, foreboding music)

The disclaimer is taken out with a whipcrack and glittery special effects.

And it ends on a freezeframe high-five

 

[Sacrosanct]

This is gibberish. I guarantee I know far more about WW2 propaganda than you, given I've actually studied it. That's your problem. You're talking out of your bum here.

You're repeatedly claiming that "goblins" are this thing people are changed to look like. It's complete fiction. Goblins have no consistent appearance across cultures. No consistent traits. Very often they're tiny, but that's about it.

No-one except you is having an argument about whether people are given monstrous or animalistic appearances in propaganda. Obviously they are. It's not in question.

What is absolute gibberish, though, is the claim that these appearances were to make them look more like "goblins" or the like. It's absolutely false. They're generalized and most often they refer to animals (particularly rats and apes), not vague mythological concepts. Where they do refer to mythological concepts, it's typically simply in that they're given horns/fangs/hooves, and the usually the reference point is the Christian devil or possibly a vampire.

To prove your point, which is a positive claim, not a negative, you would need art of a goblin, from say, the 1930s, in a pop culture format, and then propaganda art which clearly resembled that. And you'd need multiple examples, because you're claiming this was widespread. It's absolutely trivial to do that with animals. I can find dozens of pieces where animalistic traits are put into propaganda art. I can find plenty where devilish ones (specific the devil) are, though they're rarer. But claiming they tried to make people look like vague mythological beings that even people within a culture didn't see the same way? Gibberish.

Obviously D&D goblins aren't of the anti-Semitic type, but there are plenty of goblins in other fiction which are. WoW's ones flirt dangerously with it, for example.

I suspect you might have less of a problem if you weren't arguing a massive strawman. If you actually looked at my posts instead of what you think I wrote, you'd see we are actually arguing the same thing.

I never said depictions were meant to make people looks like goblins. I said they were made to dehumanize and make people look less than human; more monstrous. Because it's easier to justify mistreatment and instill fear about them when you do so.

There is only one person who said goblins were depicted to look like Jews. I disagreed. Literally for the same reasons you also just gave.

Also, if you did read my posts, you'd have read that I have also studied the history behind depictions of people in propaganda. I said I literally studied the topic in my psyop courses (under military intelligence) I took in the military. So you can pull back on the "I know better than you" stuff.

At this point I don't know what to tell you. You seem insistent on not reading what I'm writing just to argue, so shine on. I'm done.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I never said depictions were meant to make people looks like goblins. I said they were made to dehumanize and make people look less than human; more monstrous. Because it's easier to justify mistreatment and instill fear about them when you do so.

What you said was:

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.

The last part is false, because it's not "the other way around" in some simplistic sense. The portrayals of goblins which hit racist stereotypes don't make any sense as general attempts to make someone "monstrous". Instead both Warcraft and Potter seem to be leaning pretty hard to racist stereotypes/propaganda about Jewish people, which are post-propaganda. Warcraft gets the general form and style of its goblins from Warhammer, but in Warhammer they're culturally East End working-class dodgy geezers (a few of whom were Jewish, but it wasn't a major thing), but turned down to a mental age of 10 and full of malice (and later they increasingly just become "mean children"). But Warcraft instead applies a bunch of anti-Semitic stuff like obsession with money and acquisition and so on. Potter does likewise (though one suspects her goblins derive more from Labyrinth and similar sources appearance-wise).

What we both agree on is that in terms of these monstrous races, D&D is largely in the clear (largely - not so much with Drow but that's a different question). But as a general principle, it is not true or correct to say that goblins in other settings are not perjorative descriptions of Jewish people, because the peculiar and actually quite odd dehumanized appearance of Jewish people in anti-Semitic propaganda is echoed by the appearance and traits of Warcraft and Potter goblins, and it really looks like they took an appearance and then assigned the traits they assumed went with that appearance (or vice-versa, doesn't matter, because both are post-propaganda and couldn't have avoided seeing it). They weren't just trying to make them monstrous - indeed, goblins in WoW are less monstrous and more civilized than a lot of species, they were trying to link to particular stereotypes (consciously or otherwise).

 

[MGibster]

Is it even possible to create a fictional group in a setting that someone can't correlate to a real life group?

 

[prabe]

Is it even possible to create a fictional group in a setting that someone can't correlate to a real life group?

I suspect it's possible. I expect it's immensely difficult, because even if the author tries to avoid correlation people will see it (and they might be right) because those are the reference points they have.

 

[ChaosOS]

For a high power company like WotC, that can afford cultural consultants, that's the solution - pull from RL cultures, but make sure people from them are happy with how it's done. Ideally you've got more than one, because any given person's perspective on their own culture is going to be a small slice of the pie. For Indie creators... It's a lot harder, and honestly you're just going to hope you can find people willing to have those conversations for free.

 

[prabe]

For a high power company like WotC, that can afford cultural consultants, that's the solution - pull from RL cultures, but make sure people from them are happy with how it's done. Ideally you've got more than one, because any given person's perspective on their own culture is going to be a small slice of the pie. For Indie creators... It's a lot harder, and honestly you're just going to hope you can find people willing to have those conversations for free.

I would think that pulling from multiple cultures--making all the cultures composites--along with some reading and some thought would be the safest way to go, if one couldn't afford much in the way of cultural consultants.

 

[Zarithar]

Is it even possible to create a fictional group in a setting that someone can't correlate to a real life group?

Nope... no matter what your intentions are nor the pains one takes not to offend... someone is going to be offended. Part of me thinks that cancel culture should come after Twitter as a whole and that we'd be better off without social media period.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Let's look at the biggest influence on modern fantasy: JRR Tolkien. The goblins there didn't resemble Jewish stereotypes. In fact, he modeled the dwarves after those stereotypes so we know without doubt that he did not model the orcs/goblins after them.

I wasn't talking about Tolkien specifically, and his work has its own problems.

Firstly, depicting the dwarves as semitic received its own backlash.

Secondly, Tolkien described orcs as "squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types." So now they're anti-Asian stereotypes.

And in those books, the goblins did pretty much everything the nazis did (limited to technology) and more, because they also kept their captives to eat. They invaded lands, murdered everyone they could, captured and tortured prisoners (same basic thing as as a death camp), etc.

That describes most warfare throughout history, including cannibalism. You are trivializing the atrocities committed by the Nazis.

The goblins aren't any worse than the Visigoths, the Mongols, the Aztecs, the Spanish, the French, or the British. They are hardly in the same league as the Nazis, unless you want to argue that all of those nations were as bad and/or worse than the Nazis... which both trivializes and normalizes the Nazi death camps.

More people are more upset about fictional monsters being treated as wholly evil and worthy of destruction, but we don't see hardly any of the same outcry when it's barbarian tribes in a historical wargame being destroyed.

Firstly, yes we do get upset. People were livid about Scramble for Africa because it trivialized the colonization of Africa, resulting in it being cancelled.

Secondly, wargames don't depict barbarians as "wholly evil and worthy of destruction." The wargames don't endorse genocide.

You might feel differently if you were a third-generation expat living in Japan and Japanese people treated you like you were a character from their pseudo-European fantasies.

Firstly, that's a problem with society being racist. To that I respond with this video:

Secondly, I don't think that's a good reason to discourage everybody from writing fiction about cultures other than their own. That would logically accuse the overwhelming majority of fantasy fiction as cultural appropriation, because most fantasy authors write about cultures other than their own.

George R.R. Martin, a white American, has appropriated numerous Native American, European, Asian, and African cultures while creating A Song of Ice and Fire. Should he be discouraged from writing any fantasy other than that which concerns white American culture like baseball and apple pie?

Mizuho Kusanagi, a Japanese woman, appropriated ancient Korean culture when she wrote Yona of the Dawn. Should her books be banned because she isn't Korean?

I strongly disagree with discouraging authors from writing outside their culture because that is both censorship and racist. Amélie Wen Zhao, a Chinese-American, had her reputation smeared during the publication of her debut novel Blood Heir because she tried to tackle human trafficking (based on her experiences as a Chinese national) without being an African-American woman.

Is it even possible to create a fictional group in a setting that someone can't correlate to a real life group?

I don't think the problem is that there are often parallels between fictional groups and real groups. I think that's going to be inevitable when you're depicting fictional groups as essentially human with qualities added or subtracted.

I think we should strive to avoid depicting fictional groups as caricatures, especially if they have any similarity to real world stereotypes.

 

[Mercurius]

Well, let's unpack this one shall we?

Woody Allen is perhaps a good example. Or, a better one might be Roman Polanski. While it's perfectly fine to like what you like, I'm not sure I'd start doing public showings of Polanski's works without some serious disclaimers.

"Because I like it" is hardly a justification for ignoring the problematic elements of a work. I LOVE Shakespeare. Adore it. But, that doesn't mean that I can't be cognizant of the extreme anti-semitism in his works, for example.

You made a leap there. I was responding to the idea that one should feel bad for preferring OA, and likened that to Woody Allen et al (Polanski works fine, too). I said nothing about "ignoring the problematic elements of a work."