Vaalingrade
Legend
It's a faction based on and demonizing a real world marginalized people and I can't believe you wouldn't have grokked that from the decades of people discussing this issue.
D&D 5E Yes to factionalism. No to racism.
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Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
Elves:
- Among the Eldar/High Elves, the Vanyar, Ñoldor, and Lindar/Teleri all look different (blond vs black/red hair vs silver hair) and have completely different cultures (Contemplative vs Forge & Sword vs Singer-Sailors) even while being Elves of Light and speaking the same language (Quenya) and living in Valinor nearby each other.
- Among the Sindar, who are also Eldar/High Elves but not Elves of Light, the cultures of the Doriathrim, Mithrim, and Falathrim are completely different, despite sharing a language (Sindarin) and historical background (Teleri/Lindar who remained in Beleriand rather than travelling across the sea to Valinor). They all look somewhat similar as they were originally Teleri, but their nation-states are quite different.
- The Dark Elves or Avari are split into at least 6 different tribes that broke off of the Teleri and Ñoldor during or before the journey west because they didn't believe it was a good idea to travel to Valinor. Some got corrupted into Orcs, others remained in the wilderness, others travelled west later and were either good or not. We know little about their cultures, save for Eöl the Dark Elf.
- The Nandor or Wood Elves or Green Elves or Laiquendi or Laegrim or Silvan Elves are another group of Teleri and/or Avari and or mixed group that broke off and decided to live in the woods. There are dozens of these tribes that are similar but also different. the Laegrim or Laiquendi of Ossiriand may be different from the Silvan Elves in Mirkwood and Lothlórien, even if they shared an origin.
- In the 2nd and 3rd Ages, many of the great Elf kingdoms are gone, and there's a consolidation of Sindar and Ñoldor in Middle-earth since the elves have mostly travelled west to Valinor by now, but the remaining kingdoms are all very different from each other, despite being made of of mixes of different types of elves:
-- Imladris or Rivendell is the house of the Half-elf Elrond, whose ancestors include his grandparents Tuor (Hadorian Human), Idril (Ñoldorin High Elf), their son Eärendil the half-elf (so, daddy is Half-Ñoldorin High Elf), Beren (a Bëorian Human) and his wife Lúthien (Half-Doriathrim Sindarin High Elf, Half-Angel, possibly better statted as an Aasimar given this), their son Dior (1/2 Human, 1/4 Doriathrim Sindar High Elf, 1/4 Angel), his wife Nimloth (for all intents and purposes a Doriathrim Sindarin High Elf), and their daughter Elwing - Elrond's mother - who is thus 1/4 Bëorian Human, 1/8 Angel, and 5/8 Doriathrim Sindarin High Elf. This makes Elrond, wait for it, 1/4 (4/16) Ñoldorin High Elf, 1/4 (4/16) Hadorian Human, 1/8 (2/16) Bëorian Human, 1/16 Angel, and 5/16 Doriathrim Sindarin High Elf. Or all in all, 9/16 High Elf and 6/16 Human and 1/16 Angel, so Elrond could be statted as an Aasimar if you think the Angel drop of lineage is more important, but for the narrative he's a Half-elf because he's just barely more Elf than anything else. Given all this, Rivendell is a place that welcomes Ñoldorin High Elves, Sindarin High Elves, and their Laegrim Wood Elf kin (as Beren and Lúthien had lived amongst the Laegrim for a long time), as well as Human Númenorean Rangers and men of Gondor, as they are descended from the Houses of Bëor and Hador, and Angelic wizards like Gandalf and Saruman. It's a melting pot that welcomes pretty much everyone to stay in this house and is a main reason it's where the White Council and Council of Elrond met, and why Thorin's Company was welcome there and not in other Elven realms.
-- Speaking of, Thranduil's Woodland Realm in Mirkwood is mostly Wood Elves with an upper class leadership of Sindarin High Elves. And Thranduil built his realm in the manner of Doriath and Nargothrond given that he had lived in Doriath as kin to the King there. They're extremely xenophobic against the Dwarves but very friendly to their trading partners, the Lake-men, and are overall less wise and more cruel than Elrond's people. But Legolas comes from them, and he's not bad at all. They're not evil, but it's a very different culture from elsewhere, and these cultural clashes with Durin's Folk nearly causes all-out war between the Elves and Dwarves in the Battle of Five Armies.
-- Further south, while King Amroth and his father Amrod ruled Lórien for a long time, they are Sindarin High Elves while the people are mostly Wood Elves. Later, after the fall of Eregion, Galdriel and Celeborn came into Lórien and were welcomed, turning it into a forest of lights, and creating a melting pot of Ñoldorin High Elves that came with her, Sindarin High Elves that came with her husband, and the preexisting Sindarin High Elves and Nandorin Wood Elves that had lived there previously. And all of these elves then branded themselves as the Galadhrim - the People of the Giant Trees and/or the People who Serve Galadriel - because their culture was more important than whether they were Wood Elves or Grey Elves or Deep Elves.
-- Eregion itself, back in the 2nd Age, was almost ENTIRELY Ñoldorin, being the home of Celebrimbor the smith-son of Fëanor jewel-maker. Celebrimbor made the Rings of Power, and Galadriel was complicit there as she was with the kinslaying of the Teleri when she left Valinor. So she and Celeborn lived in Eregion for a while as well, and left when Sauron revealed himself to the 3 Elven Ringbearers as having deceived them. Despite the old animosities between the Ñoldorin of Nargothrond and the Dwarves of Belegost and Nogrod (over the issue of the Nauglamír necklace that included the Silmaril of Beren and Lúthien that is now the Eärendil morningstar/eveningstar in the sky), the Ñoldorin of Eregion and the Dwarves of Moria/Khazad-dûm were friends, and Celebrimbor wrote in Elven runes Cirth Ithil (Moon-runes) upon the west gate of Moria - speak friend and enter. Much of the wealth of Eregion and their great and lesser rings' jewels and metals likely came from the wealth flowing from Moria's mithril and the House of Durin's other holdings in Erebor and the Iron Hills, where gold and silver and jewels were more readily mined. But the Elves of Eregion would not have been friends with the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains, who are likely the descendants of the Dwarves of Nogrod and Belegost back in the 1st Age who had such major beefs with the Elves.
See where I'm going with all this?
That's just the Elven realms we know about in Middle-earth. There's essentially 3 subraces of Elves in Tolkien: High Elf (Vanyar, Ñoldor, Lindar, and Sindar), Wood Elf (Nandor, Laegrim, Silvan Elves), and Dark Elf (Avari). But the cultures and kingdoms all had their own alliances, their own architectural styles, their own mindsets, their own approaches to categorizing the elven peoples, even. I barely touched on the different cultures of the Ñoldorin kingdoms in Beleriand, but lets just say that Finrod's Nargothrond, Turgon's Gondolin, and Maedhros' Himring had VERY different approaches to the rest of Elvendom let along other free peoples, despite all being close kindred.
Then think of Eöl the Dark Elf, and his half-dark elf, half-Ñoldorin son Maeglin, who betrayed Gondolin to its ruin out of his lust for his cousin Idril Turgon's-daughter (who as you may recall from above, was already married to a Human of all people, Tuor, who had essentially been made an honorary Elf and for all intents and purposes is believed to be chilling in Valinor with Idril and the gods as if he were an elf because of his elfiness and service to the Sea Archangel Ulmo/Poseidon/Njördr/Varuna/Nuada).
This is what we need out of D&D.
We don't need this level of world building in the player's handbook. But we need PC lineage attributes that don't hamstring the player into thinking that all Wood Elves are like Legolas (who isn't even a Wood Elf, lol) or all High Elves like Galadriel and Celeborn. And not all Dark elves are like Eöl and Maeglin. A bunch are just integrated into Wood Elf communities, or doing their own thing, and yes, others are evil or even have been twisted into Orcs. Maybe. MAYYYYYBE.
We don't need the assumptions to be stereotypes. We do need exciting ideas to jump off with for characterization for players and DMs.
I'm not defending the old version of the Vistani, it's just one faction that had problematic language and description.
P.S. I've never been a huge Ravenloft fan, I know next to nothing about how the Vistani were portrayed.
Lyxen
Great Old One
And the orcs and drows are way older than the Vistani. The point here is that factions/cultures can be as offensive as races when they hit on real world stereotypes, so changing from races to factions would not solve any problem, while depriving the game of a great resource that does not cause any problem in 99.95% of the cases.
Vaalingrade
Legend
Yes, changing a race of people into a faction still has the same problem as just making fictional races stereotypes of real world peoples. That proves....?
I don't think you're contemplating the actual issue at hand.
On the internet, 99.5% of numbers are made up to make points sound good.
Bolares
Legend
I 99.83% agree with this!
It's not about imposing a change, it's about adding value. As people above have noted, it can be a lot of work to come up with multiple factions, some multiracial, that interact with each other. If I'm buying a pre-made setting, I'd like that work to be done for me.
Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
Going to assume good faith from all of ya. Vistani was a mistake made decades ago as they were trying to lean into gothic horror and Bram Stroker's Dracula featured Romani people in an offensively stereotypical way and the original module was literally a paint by the numbers adaptation of Dracula with new names for each faction and elves thrown in (but they're DUSK elves! see! Edgier!!).
(FYI, I think Dusk Elves are cool. The 4e write-up suggested a close connection with the original people who became Drow but being the ones that didn't leave with Lolth, which I think is a very interesting CULTURAL narrative to lean into while keeping with them being Drow, or even Wood Elves if you want to stick with the strict earlier interpretation that Drow are darkskinned because of the curse of Lolth, an idea that may of us including myself I abhor for being reminiscent of the racist concept of the Curse of Ham).
D&D is trying to fix this. But Oofta is right: Factions are not necessarily a solution to problematic elements of the game. There's a reason the word Barbarian is being wiped from Storm King's Thunder and other places. Honestly, I'm surprised the class hasn't been renamed to Berserker yet (though that would probably require 2024's refresh of 5e to make the primary subclass the class's name and give a new name to the primary subclass). The word has historical and current racist usages towards the nomadic peoples of the Sahara, and been used as a slur-gloss for any otherized people on the fringes of the viewpoint's society. The Uthgardt are a nomadic tribe from the north of Faerûn. This is a faction. It's mainly a faction of Humans. Calling them the "Barbarian Faction" is otherising and problematic.
Vistani are not bad for existing. They are bad because they were written as tropes that used Romani people as props for a western narrative. They can be good if they serve a similar narrative purpose without outright being cut and paste Romani, and they can also be good if they aren't accompanied with all the racist storytelling casting aspersions on Vistani because they're Vistani and nobody can trust a Vistani. That leans into and props up racist stereotypes of their inspiration because everyone knows that Vistani is just code for Romani. That's the problem. It's not a "Race" in the game's terms, it's a Faction! But it's racist nonetheless, and had to be fixed. And I still think it's not fixed enough.
Nobody is saying that we can't use cultural shorthands in our games. D&D thrives on shorthand depictions since the game is played on the fly in real time, and the DM has to be able to come up with mannerisms on the spot if the Players approach the NPC the DM didn't spend 10 hours writing a backstory for (and completely ignore the plotline the DM had actually prepared). Using shorthands is not racist, but it can become that when all anyone ever thinks of a particular lineage or faction is that one trope and plays it to death, and then that one trope is actually standing in for a real person (because its the one lineage or faction in the game with dark skin, or with a different facial structure, or that doesn't have the same gender roles, etc).
What we're saying is that WotC has the opportunity to reach a wider audience than our home games do by necessity, so they have an incentive to figure out how to make their published books anti-discriminatory by default. And that goes beyond race vs faction, because factionalism in game can still be racist in real-life if done poorly.
Factionalism in game, however, COULD be PART of a solution to racist caricatures in the game's core assumptions. And if so, then it COULD be worth leaning into. I think Oofta is right to warn us that the issue is not just simply solved by replacing Elves with Forest People Faction and Dwarves with Mountain People faction.
I totally agree with you -- I'm just leery about WOTC taking away stuff from the game, which potentially reduces the value. I think they should provide the materials, and then publish a good separate book (better than what's in the current DMG) with tutorials that support players trying out DIY stuff -- that way we could have base materials and teach newer players who think they can only use what's written in the book as canon, how to make their own stuff. This would support the broadest base of players, and keep the game accessible without alienating anyone.
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