D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[doctorbadwolf]

Not overly worried as it was a product of it's time.

Generally a bad idea to use real life cultures in games extinct ones are kinda safe (Egypt, Greece, Rome etc).

Latter half of the 20th century is not a time that can bet you a pass for being a "product of", in this context.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

The treatment of humanoids being revised was inevitable. Society was going to march on from those depictions and had been trying to for twenty-odd years when WoW became the watershed.

But it's a videogame and D&D explicitly has a weird one-sided beef for scapegoating videogames--specifically Diablo and WoW for whatever we don't like. I'm frankly shocked the most recent scapegoat is Critical Role (notably not a videogame) instead of Skyrim. Which says a lot about Skyrim. It was so good that people don't feel confidently safe making things up about it to insult something they don't like in D&D.

Critical Role is a weird one to pick because the first setting book leans hard into fantasy racism and making out orcs and such as pure monsters.

• The dwarves of Kraghammer have rock gnomes as a model minority and only allow people of other races to live in the "Otherwalk" section of the city. Also one of the Dwarven noble houses once responded to discovering a myconid colony in a cavern they opened up by sending in pyromancers to burn all the myconids alive.
• The elves of Syngorn have a "kill drow on sight" policy, don't even allow trade with dwarves, and refer to half-elves as "illbloods".
• Goblins are described as barely more than vermin who are brainwashed into serving as foot soldiers in their evil god's army from birth.
• The primary orc group is the Ravagers, who not only go around killing and destroying but also force strong captives to drink a brain-damaging poison that eliminates the ability to feel any emotions other than hate or rage. Half-orcs are noted as the subject of prejudice and that the rare stories of good orcs trying take their half-orc children away from the evils of orc society end with the orc parent getting killed and leaving their children orphans who usually grow up to be criminals.
• Drow society, in at least a minor subversion, is a hellscape where the nobles worship Lolth and the commoners worship Tharizdun, leading to constant peasant uprisings and a dwindling population. Becoming a drider is considered a blessing because that way someone can get strong enough to leave drow society without getting killed by aberrations. Some are so desperate to escape their home cities that they willingly let themselves be transformed into aberrations.

About the only subversion in the first book was the wood elf city of Lyrengorn, who welcome drow refugees from the Underdark as opposed to high elf majority Syngorn's "kill dark elves on sight" policy.

Of course, I'm sure most of this will be altered or retconned in the upcoming book, but the original Tal'dorei Setting Book definitely wasn't being re-released as is in 2022.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Gaz10 is a parody of lots of modern cultures. The kobolds, for example, are a parody of Italian culture. The possibility of you writing a post deriding any of that is exactly zero. I'm partly of Italian ancestry and it didn't bother me. At no point did I think Bruce Heard was actually being derogatory towards real world Italians. Many of Mystara's biggest fans are Italians and I'm unaware of any of them being offended by the Kobold Italian parody in Gaz 10.

Italians aren't being oppressed and marginalized, murdered more often than nearly anyone else in our society, arrested in greater percentages for lesser offenses, etc. Native Americans are.

Italians didn't suffer a genocide at the hands of the culture from which the work is being written. Native Americans did.

The difference is pretty damned obvious.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I was hoping that one of the things that the work of Peterson, et al., would do would be to curtail the essentialist narratives.

Early D&D was just as (if not) more diverse in terms of approaches and playstyles than we have today, depending on when and where you were. It was not just about "beating a dungeon, and was more viewed as a toolkit to enable play in the 70s. It is simply error to try and incorporate our views from today back then; even people who grew up playing in the 80s have a very poor view of what the game was like in the 70s.

In other words, most of this just isn't true. The Elusive Shift explores this in more depth, and there have been numerous threads on the subject.

Meh, I speak from experience, I was there. Not in the 'Ur Games' of Gygax or anything like that, but I played in D&D games starting around or even before Greyhawk. I agree, nobody can rightly say that it was done in 'one way', but I don't agree that there was as much range and diversity of play as there is today. And while there were some vocal champions of various things, as I went around the country in the last 70's and early 80's what I found at the tables in the schools, Boy Scout Troops, FLGSes, and friend's homes that I played in was, there was not that much characterization in general. Nobody really asked what the motives of a PC were, or how the events of the game effected them, not really.

Heck, I remember my friend started a campaign in around 1983 with 1e. For some reason I got in some solo play at the start, and he set me up with a Ranger, and 2 other PCs which are long forgotten. I ran into some sort of 'zealots' and they ended up murdering the other 2 PCs but the ranger got away. So, after he found out who these jerks were, I got dispensation to make them his 'favored enemy' instead of getting the bonuses for humanoids, I got it for killing Demogorgon worshipers. Forever more after that I played that character as being bent on exterminating Demogorgon from existence. He was so fanatical he eventually got to be 12th level or something like that, and by then he was batshit crazy, more vampire than ranger, and he finally got to slay Demogorgon! That was really the first that I remember of anything even close to 'character development'. There were other similar things going on with other players, but it sure wasn't that common and it rarely ever happened in the 70's, back then people were just amazed by the very concept of an RPG at all, that you could declare ANY MOVE and not just something someone else coded into the game. That was RP enough for us in the early days.

Again, I am not saying this was universal, and there are well-documented cases of people doing heavy RP, but the chance that you could throw a stick at random and hit THAT table, it was small.

 

[Voadam]

Italians are being oppressed and marginalised, murdered more often than nearly anyone else in our society, arrested in greater percentages for lesser offenses, etc.

I think you are missing a "not" in there.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Critical Role is a weird one to pick because the first setting book leans hard into fantasy racism and making out orcs and such as pure monsters.

• The dwarves of Kraghammer have rock gnomes as a model minority and only allow people of other races to live in the "Otherwalk" section of the city. Also one of the Dwarven noble houses once responded to discovering a myconid colony in a cavern they opened up by sending in pyromancers to burn all the myconids alive.
• The elves of Syngorn have a "kill drow on sight" policy, don't even allow trade with dwarves, and refer to half-elves as "illbloods".
• Goblins are described as barely more than vermin who are brainwashed into serving as foot soldiers in their evil god's army from birth.
• The primary orc group is the Ravagers, who not only go around killing and destroying but also force strong captives to drink a brain-damaging poison that eliminates the ability to feel any emotions other than hate or rage. Half-orcs are noted as the subject of prejudice and that the rare stories of good orcs trying take their half-orc children away from the evils of orc society end with the orc parent getting killed and leaving their children orphans who usually grow up to be criminals.
• Drow society, in at least a minor subversion, is a hellscape where the nobles worship Lolth and the commoners worship Tharizdun, leading to constant peasant uprisings and a dwindling population. Becoming a drider is considered a blessing because that way someone can get strong enough to leave drow society without getting killed by aberrations. Some are so desperate to escape their home cities that they willingly let themselves be transformed into aberrations.

About the only subversion in the first book was the wood elf city of Lyrengorn, who welcome drow refugees from the Underdark as opposed to high elf majority Syngorn's "kill dark elves on sight" policy.

Of course, I'm sure most of this will be altered or retconned in the upcoming book, but the original Tal'dorei Setting Book definitely wasn't being re-released as is in 2022.

That'd be because it's to blame because it's popular with new, unwelcome people, not its actual content.

Like videogames.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

That'd be because it's to blame because it's popular with new, unwelcome people, not its actual content.

What is this supposed to mean?

 

[Vaalingrade]

Attacking new popular things and blaming them for the 'wrongs' in the game is a form of gatekeeping.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

Attacking new popular things and blaming them for the 'wrongs' in the game is a form of gatekeeping.

Critique = gate keeping? Seems like a knee jerk reaction/reach.

 

[Malmuria]

Critical Role is a weird one to pick because the first setting book leans hard into fantasy racism and making out orcs and such as pure monsters.

• The dwarves of Kraghammer have rock gnomes as a model minority and only allow people of other races to live in the "Otherwalk" section of the city. Also one of the Dwarven noble houses once responded to discovering a myconid colony in a cavern they opened up by sending in pyromancers to burn all the myconids alive.
• The elves of Syngorn have a "kill drow on sight" policy, don't even allow trade with dwarves, and refer to half-elves as "illbloods".
• Goblins are described as barely more than vermin who are brainwashed into serving as foot soldiers in their evil god's army from birth.
• The primary orc group is the Ravagers, who not only go around killing and destroying but also force strong captives to drink a brain-damaging poison that eliminates the ability to feel any emotions other than hate or rage. Half-orcs are noted as the subject of prejudice and that the rare stories of good orcs trying take their half-orc children away from the evils of orc society end with the orc parent getting killed and leaving their children orphans who usually grow up to be criminals.
• Drow society, in at least a minor subversion, is a hellscape where the nobles worship Lolth and the commoners worship Tharizdun, leading to constant peasant uprisings and a dwindling population. Becoming a drider is considered a blessing because that way someone can get strong enough to leave drow society without getting killed by aberrations. Some are so desperate to escape their home cities that they willingly let themselves be transformed into aberrations.

About the only subversion in the first book was the wood elf city of Lyrengorn, who welcome drow refugees from the Underdark as opposed to high elf majority Syngorn's "kill dark elves on sight" policy.

Of course, I'm sure most of this will be altered or retconned in the upcoming book, but the original Tal'dorei Setting Book definitely wasn't being re-released as is in 2022.

I don't know much about the critical role world but I feel this deserves it's own thread! I've never heard this analysis before