D&D General Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings of Color

[Azzy]

Hard to do skin tones well when most of the art was black ink on white paper.

There's a lot of color art in D&D, so that's hardly a defence.

 

[jasper]

There's a lot of color art in D&D, so that's hardly a defence.

Please open your 1E Monster Manual and show me a color picture.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hard to do skin tones well when most of the art was black ink on white paper.

Not really. Crosshatching, lines and dots have been used to depict grades of shading for centuries of B&W art in various media, including woodcuts and etchings. I’m a bit precocious in my skills, but I was doing that kind of stuff in 6th grade. It takes time, but it’s not outside of the realms of professional artists skillsets.

Here’s a panel from the Cerebus comic book, not even showing Gerhardt’s best inking job:
View attachment 1599683991980.jpeg

And in the color art? Well...D&D has had a whitewashing problem going back decades. It’s better than it was:

...but there’s still work to be done.

 

[Voadam]

Previously only Humans were ever shown as being non-European in D&D, and the other common core races of Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings were always depicted as being "white" even if some published campaign settings have for example said that some Dwarves have brown skin or that Wood Elves are "bronze" colored.

Minorities have generally been low on visual representation throughout D&D for humans and demihumans but a couple prominent images do come to mind.

2008 4e Player's Handbook Halfling entry:

2001 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Dwarf entry:

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I like the gnome picture from A Young Adventurer's Guide - Warriors & Weapons:

 

[Azzy]

Please open your 1E Monster Manual and show me a color picture.

First, the Monster Manual is not the only D&D product—even in 1e, there were color covers and more (and that's not even bringing the covers of Dragon magazine into this). Also, there are other editions of D&D. If you're unfamiliar with all this art, I'd recommend Art & Arcana: A Visual History. Then there's what Danny said about commonly used techniques to depict shades of color in B&W art.

 

[jasper]

Cool You can send me the book. Do you need my Address or should I put in my wish list on Amazon and send you a link?

 

[cbwjm]

I wouldn't be surprised if there is little variation, particularly in earlier editions, due simply to the environment of the various campaign settings. Most are set in a European like area of the world with knights, and kings so artists use European imagery to create their art which generally means Europeans. Had DnD been set primarily in Africa right from the start using myths and legends from there for their nonhuman races, I'd expect to see less looking like Europeans and more looking like Africans.

I do agree with that Egyptian image being incredibly whitewashed, they should have looked at actual images from ancient Egypt for the skin tones used and at least gave them a copper skin tone, though if that's Osiris then he should be green.

 

[Marandahir]

One way to do this would be to allow Dark Elves and other classically dark-skinned demi-humans to be a full-range of skin tones as well.

Record of Lodoss War OVA has pale-skinned, silver-haired Dark Elves (such as the one that gets his behind handed to him by Ashram at the Marmo camp) and brown-skinned, blond-haired Dark Elves (such as the most iconic Lodoss dark elf, Pirotess).

In that sense, Dark Elf doesn't literally mean darker-of-skinned (and might even mean pale-skinned, like the moon or like an underground creature with no need for melanin, a la Gollum or many cave-adapted animals!). Instead, it means Elf of Darkness - an Elf of the Underdark, or of the dark closed-canopy jungles of Xen'drik, or perhaps nocturnal Night Elves like in Warcraft. Even an elf borne in the Shadowfell like the Shadar-kai might be considered Dark Elves, as would elves of the Gloaming Court in the Feywild.

So Wildemount's Pallid Elves might be considered Dark Elves in that case, just as much as the Drow might be. Talking visuals, but doing this would require throwing out some of the elf ancestry statistics and reconciling them around this unified concept.

I could imagine that Sun elves (elves of light, high elves, etc) might be darker-skined than Moon elves (night elves, dark elves) due to their need for more melanin. Or they might both run the gamut depending on circumstances.

The important thing is pulling apart the threads of obvious-bad-guy-person from skin tone.

Ancestry features (genotypic inheritence) shouldn't necessarily correspond with phenotype, and these fantastical demi-humans should be divided in their ancestral inheritances on grounds other than what their skin looks like, imho.

Even The Elder Scrolls series has been moving in this direction: while in Arena, Daggerfall, and Morrowind they really stuck with gold-skinned High Elves, white-skinned Wood Elves, brown>teal-skinned Dark Elves, plus pale Nords, Bretons, Imperials and darkskinned Redguards, this just isn't the case since Skyrim, and even as far back as Oblivion allowed playing with the skin-tone shaders through a whole host of options for both human and elf groups. In Skyrim, there's actually not that much difference between the peoples of an individual grouping - you can have very darkskinned Bretons or High Elves, or light skinned Dark Elves or Redguards. Your High Elves can be gold skinned or they could be pale skinned like a wood elf. Your Wood elves could be brown skinned like bark or paler too. Redguard and Dark Elf do cover darker tones than the other human and elf peoples, and Orcs cover the whole gamut from Warcraft green to D&D grey & pink, but the idea is that skin tone and shading doesn't reflect your origin, and most Humans are mixed ancestry, just as many Elves are, too.

 

[Voadam]

I wouldn't be surprised if there is little variation, particularly in earlier editions, due simply to the environment of the various campaign settings. Most are set in a European like area of the world with knights, and kings so artists use European imagery to create their art which generally means Europeans. Had DnD been set primarily in Africa right from the start using myths and legends from there for their nonhuman races, I'd expect to see less looking like Europeans and more looking like Africans.

For the demi-humans I believe it is because they started off as nabbed from Tolkien where dwarves are Jewish Vikings, Halflings are little English farmers and gentlemen, and elves are Cate Blanchett templated. So not a lot of color in the base stock there. This gets compounded by the fact that Tolkien/Monster Manual demihumans already have fairly defined white ethnic subsets broken out for them (high/wood/mountain/wild elves, hill/mountain dwarves, hairfoot/stout/tallfellow haflings). Throw them into Greyhawk and you get an innovation and subversion, the partially norse Dokkalfar inspired dark elves being literally black skinned to get the ball rolling in the 70s with the GD series. Oriental Adventures gets hairy Asian dwarven Korobokuru in the 80s and Forgotten Realms then has a hinted at southern dwarf population in its 1e campaign setting, who later get revealed as the dark skinned gold dwarves.

For the most part the settings start out as mostly fantasy Europe standard with demihumans thrown in, sometimes with a little renaming for the setting. Greyhawk innovates drow and duergar, FR starts with the Monster Manual/PH/Tolkien base and then starts to expand with more everything. Even in Dragonlance, where they put Black Humans explicitly into the setting, demihumans were still just mostly renaming the base White D&D demihumans (Qualinesti/Silvanesti/Kagonesti Elves, Kender Haflings) without messing around with ethnicity beyond blue aquatic elves and skinny hobbits.