Mana, Shamans, and the Cultural Misappropriation behind Fantasy Terms

[Olrox17]

It’s less about which edition it started but which did it well (or better). In 4e users of the Primal power source drew upon the Spirits who collectively were responsible for ending the Dawn War by telling gods and primordials to “Sit on it, Potsie.” Shamans had a legitimate place in the fabric of 4e’s worldview. It was less ancillary to it or presented as a primitive version of a cleric (hello, 1e).

Hey man, look, I'm also a 4e fan. I miss the shaman, I miss the warden, I miss the avenger, I miss the battlemind, and gawd do I miss the swordmage.
I just don't think making a big issue out of very iffy claims of cultural misappropriation is the way we're going to get these amazing 4e things back.

 

[Umbran]

You know, like mankind has done since the dawn of time.

This is old, but there's a point to be made - tradition is not in and of itself a reason to do things.

I mean, mankind has had bloody invasions and slavery since the dawn of time, too. We have been dying of malaria, smallpox, and various other communicable diseases since the dawn of time. But I think you'll have a hard time arguing that means we should keep on doing those things.

 

[aramis erak]

Shamans were less than clerics and only for humanoid races (including stone and frost and fire giants, not just evil primitive races) in 1e.

In the other editions from Basic to 4e they are full caster PC classes.

No, they are not.
Moldvay Basic - no reference to shaman at all, nor druids.
Cook Expert gives shamans as clerics or magic users leating tribes of "natives" and being at least 5th level. The native in question is essentially the Amazonian basin uncontacted tribe type.

Mentzer only uses shaman in the Master Set, but druids come in in the companion set. Mentzer Shamans have a different spell list from clerics or druids, and Wiccas from wizards, but working the same basic way. They get 1d6+2 per HD instead of 1d8+0, so tougher than priests or wizards, too. Not a playable class. Druids in companion only
Alston/Denning Cyclopedia and Basic: Wicca changed to Wokani. Still different list.

The Celts as a culture, are dead, last time I checked the Japanese were not.

Samurai Culture was terminated from within by Emperor Meiji. It's been dead well over 100 years. The Japanese Culture we know of now is more a product of WW II than of the samurai.
And it's not like samurai culture wasn't on the decline by 1700...
But Heian period was also different from the much overdone Tokugawa Era ... thank you James Clavell.

The Japanese no longer have an armor-wearing, katana-wielding warrior caste, but that's not the point. The connections between the samurai and modern japanese culture are direct and clear. The connections between the Celtic culture that contained the Druids and modern cultures that identify as 'Celtic' are not. If someone wants to be offended that I think they aren't 'Celtic' the same way the Japanese are still Japanese I'm fine with that. The differences between the two examples at hand are obvious enough that I don't think it's controversial.

The Links are neither clear, nor based upon the actual culture, nor even, really, the idealized culture referenced by Musashi in Book of 5 Rings.

The funny thing is, no one is really proposing that we get rid of shamans in D&D or our hobby, only that we think about how we frame and contexualize them, particularly in relation to other spiritual classes and various in-game cultures.

The first several posts, and a bunch between pages 13 to 17, sure seem to be just a hair shy of saying, "one should never use these terms"

1e PHB: "[Druids] are the only absolute neutrals... viewing good and evil, law and chaos, as balancing forces of nature which are necessary for the continuation of all things."
2e PHB: "Clerics are generally good"

The paladin class is also relevant.

2e PHB: "Throughout legend and history there are many heroes who could be called paladins: Roland and the 12 Peers of Charlemagne, Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain, and Sir Galahad are all examples of the class... A paladin must be lawful good in alignment"

If lawful good is the requirement, then that pretty much rules out Lancelot and the de Ganis boys... Lance was having an affair with a married woman, risking destabilizing the nation for his lust, and lying about his chastity to his best friend.
And the various groups opposed to Lancelot were no better...

Honestly I feel like WoW is flying under the radar and is kind of a ticking time bomb of eye-popping racial stereotypes, which Blizzard desperately bailed water on with BfA. But that's a whole other discussion.

Warcraft, and WoW, both fly under the radar. Woke culture has far less infiltrated the videogames industry than the tabletop one. And Bethesda's in Irvine, California, not the kind of liberal hotbed that Seattle is, but in diriving range of one.

Why are people arguing about some ancient AD&D source book? What does it matter now? I am much more concerned about the stuff the currently print.

They're almost all available in dead tree again, via PoD./

Again, that isn't true. Drow were a player race in 1e. I'm pretty sure Dragon had rules for playing humanoids.

Playable Drow were added in Unearthed Arcana for AD&D1e, not core. And of my white, native, and Japanese-american friends, not one of the put an african-american identifiable vocal trope in for them. One did do a yiddish accent... he gets a pass, tho', being a jew himself.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This post compares the lizard man/lizardfolk entries in AD&D/D&D across editions from 1e to 5e. It finds a correlation between shamans/witch doctors and evil actions, in particular eating sentient beings. Likewise there is a correlation between druids/mystics and a lower incidence of 'cannibalism'.

1e MM: "[L]izard men are likely to prefer human flesh to other foods. In this regard they have been known to ambush humans, gather up the corpses and survivors as captives, and take the lot back to their lair for a rude and horrid feast."

As per the 1e DMG rules for tribal casters, lizard men have shamans and witch doctors. Intelligence is "[l]ow (average)". My interpretation of this is that the 10% of lizard men that "evolved to a higher state" have average intelligence (8-10) while the remaining 90% are of low intelligence (5-7).

2e lizard men are very similar to those in 1e - the quoted text above is repeated in the Monstrous Manual. They have shamans but not witch doctors, the latter having been almost entirely removed from 2e. War leaders and potentially lizard kings are their leaders.

3e MM: "[P]opular lore holds that lizardfolk prefer humanoid flesh, but this charge is largely unfounded (though some tribes do eat captives or slain foes)... Shamans offer advice but rarely become leaders themselves… Most lizardfolk leaders are barbarians or druids. Lizardfolk clerics (shamans) worship Semuanya."

Druid is their favoured class. They have intelligence 9, due to an intelligence penalty of -2.

4e MM: "Some especially cruel and savage lizardfolk capture and eat other humanoid creatures, boldly launching raids against the lands of nearby humanoids to capture victims for their feasts... Shamans and mystics commonly advise the chieftain."

The lizardfolk controller is a "Greenscale Marsh Mystic". Intelligence scores range from 5 to 10, with 8 being most common.

5e MM:

Lizard folk… have a taste for humanoid flesh. Prisoners are often taken back to their camps to become the centerpieces of great feasts and rites involving dancing, storytelling, and ritual combat. Victims are either cooked and eaten by the tribe, or are sacrificed to Semuanya, the lizardfolk god... Lizardfolk shamans lead their tribes, overseeing rites and ceremonies performed to honor Semuanya.​

They have intelligence 7.

The only lizardfolk to engage in the sacrifice of sentient beings (5e) are also the only ones to be explicitly led by shamans. That sacrifice is part of shamanic religious practice. The lizard men and lizardfolk that are always 'cannabilistic' (1e, 2e, 5e) have shamans and, in 1e, witch doctors as their sole magico-religious specialists. Both of these have non-European associations. Lizardfolk that have druids and mystics (3e, 4e) are seldom 'cannibals' - "some tribes", "especially cruel and savage lizardfolk". "Mystic" has no geographical associations, while "druid" is associated with Europe. The 3e and 4e lizardfolk are also the most intelligent.

Supplemental note on lizardfolk religious sacrifices:
The idea of lizardfolk shamans performing humanoid sacrifice seems to derive from the 2e Monster Mythology (1992). In this book, the sacrifices are in honour of the demon, Sess’innek, who is worshipped by a small number of evil lizard men. "[Sess’innek’s avatar] is invoked by a shamanic servant in a carefully staged ceremony at which he receives homage and sacrifice." In the 5e MM this appears to have been transferred to Semuanya, a god worshipped by most lizardfolk.

 

[Voadam]

No, they are not.
Moldvay Basic - no reference to shaman at all, nor druids.
Cook Expert gives shamans as clerics or magic users leating tribes of "natives" and being at least 5th level. The native in question is essentially the Amazonian basin uncontacted tribe type.

Mentzer only uses shaman in the Master Set, but druids come in in the companion set. Mentzer Shamans have a different spell list from clerics or druids, and Wiccas from wizards, but working the same basic way. They get 1d6+2 per HD instead of 1d8+0, so tougher than priests or wizards, too. Not a playable class. Druids in companion only
Alston/Denning Cyclopedia and Basic: Wicca changed to Wokani. Still different list.

I had posted this before:

In Basic you had PC shaman classes in GAZ10 Orcs of Thar (plus a wicca class), GAZ12 Golden Khan of Ethengar, GAZ13 Shadow Elves, and GAZ14 Atruaghin Clans.

I recently got PC3 Creature Crucible: The Sea People and it has options for becoming shaman piecemeal to add on specific shaman abilities to existing characters, so more PC shaman options.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

There is nothing wrong with lizardmen doing human sacrifice and liking human flesh. Humans eat crocodile. Lizardmen eat human. They are explicitely neutral, not evil, in a game with absolute morality, so their human sacrifice aren't by themselves evil, whether it is because to them, human sacrifice isn't different from ox sacrifice or because they sacrifice for the greater good or because sacrifice isn't inherently evil in the D&D world.

(we could discuss the ethicality of doing human sacrifice in real life and whether humans were mostly evil until the classical antiquity and later somewhere (Mayans), but it wouldn't affect the objective morality system of D&D).

 

[Doug McCrae]

a game with absolute morality

Which is why cultural relativism, applied only to stone giants and lizardfolk, makes no sense. I discuss it in more detail in this post.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Warcraft, and WoW, both fly under the radar. Woke culture has far less infiltrated the videogames industry than the tabletop one. And Bethesda's in Irvine, California, not the kind of liberal hotbed that Seattle is, but in diriving range of one.

I think it's a little more complicated than that.

Blizzard are kind of moderately, safely, kind of woke these days. They didn't used to be, though also were not intentional bigots, I think, just prone to cheap stereotypes as a result of too much '90s and earlier low-brow entertainment as inspiration. But they've done stuff like put out unequivocal pro-feminist statements (in response to some kind of vaguely bigot-y criticism of Overwatch), made BfA largely about female characters and specifically female leaders, which ruffled a few feathers among the sexists and misogynists of the word (of which there are always an amazing number), Overwatch has, in its clumsy way, clearly attempted to be progressive (quite apart from being very international and fairly gender-balanced, Tracer being gay, which again, ruffled some feathers and lead to some hilariously demented criticisms). Even back in 2012, Diablo III was notable because not only did they have both genders for each class (unlike D1/D2), which sort of expected, they also didn't conform to norms of conventional attractiveness (so the female Barbarian isn't some Frazetta-esque character, but rather kind of a hulking shotputter-type like the male one). We can see with Diablo 4 they're not longer limiting the classes racially either (there were white, black and asian barbarians, for example).

It's more WoW specifically. And in a weird way. It's like if they acknowledge it, the spell will be broken, but they're free to do other "woke" stuff, like they're making it so changing the gender of your character no longer costs real-world money, and adding in more diverse skin-tones and faces for the humans (and also more diverse skin tones for all races - the only one which has ruffled feathers, of course, is the human-like Blood Elves, who have darker skin options as well as new tones, which has really upset a few er... my lawyer advises me to say "individuals"). So they do this stuff, and it clearly is a result of better understanding and what we're calling "woke"-ness (social consciousness or whatever).

But at the same time, the new expansion has a dungeon in it called "De Other Side". Starring our good friend Bwonsamdi (a faux-Jamiacan corruption of Baron Samedi, the voodoo loa). Because that's how Jamiacans Trolls speak, right? And it's like, is that okay? I kind of feel like it might not be. It's obviously not like outright racist or anything but it's a bit like... uncomfortable. Like 1990s or even 1980s.

To be clear I'm not actually complaining about it, but I offer it as an example of how weird WoW is about this stuff. I mean, the race stuff is really obvious (esp. as all the races that equate to "non-white" are on the Horde), and just no-one ever talks about it. There's no possible way Blizzard leadership isn't aware of it, but I guess they're hoping to get far enough ahead that when some major gaming site finally does a bit that's like "Um WoW seems kinda full of weird racial stereotypes, including anti-Semitic ones", they can go "Yeah, that was like 20 years ago and we're gradually changing/updating and have been for some years!". But Bwonsamdi etc. is not from that long ago and goblins only got more stereotypical when they became playable in 2010.

I mean, if WoW was released now, even if the exact same people started playing it, the fact that it was new and thus scrutinized more by everyone, would mean that stuff like the Goblins being the pile of stereotypes they are would not even make it through alpha.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Which is why cultural relativism, applied only to stone giants and lizardfolk, makes no sense.

Then it's simply absolutely neutral in D&D to sacrifice prisonners to a god. If we think of it, I got from reading the many threads about whether absolutely evil monsters were needed that most gaming groups would kill bad guy who, say, attacked a caravan. Some consciously, some "out of camera" (he fell, and he probably missed his death saves because the GM didn't have them wake up and ambush us on the way back), but there seems to be very little reluctance to using lethal force among adventurers, even when playing absolutely good characters. If "killing outlaws" is not absolutely evil, then the lizardmen killing trespassers in their lands aren't either. The step between killing convicts and sacrificing them to a god is just the religious ceremony around the death sentence. Maybe it's not enough to make a death sentence absolutely evil in D&D morality?

So we can have evil (who go out if its lair to raid people and sacrifice them to his evil god) and neutral (who finds that a fitting punishment for trespassers is being sacrificed to a neutral god) and maybe even good gods. The divide being how they behave to get the people they decide to kill, with the sacrifice to a god being just an irrelevant trapping of the big deal (taking people and killing them).

 

[Weiley31]

I can still use the 5E UA Rune Knight as a Nordic/Vikingesque type deal or is that gonna be an issue?