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He says something similar in a column, From the Sorcerer's Scroll, in Dragon Magazine #38 (1980): Remember that good can be related to reality ofttimes, but not always. It might also relate to good as perceived in the past, actual or mythical. In the latter case, a Paladin could well force...

Gary Gygax expressed such a view in 2005 across several posts on pages 3 and 4 of the linked thread. Kay Wright Lewis, A Curse Upon the Nation (2017), on the 17th century origins of the term "nits make lice": John Nalson, an English clergyman and historian, was told by a captain in the...

It can be surprising just how much disagreement there was in the past, even among educated wealthy white men. In the excerpt below, James Beattie, a professor of moral philosophy writing in 1770, is arguing against the infamously racist footnote in David Hume's Of National Characters (1753)...

5e's problems with race aren't just a legacy issue. The MM entry for orcs emphasised sexual violence in a way that, afaik, no previous edition had done. Though it was always implicit in the notion of half-orcs.

Jeremy Crawford: "No rule in D&D mandates your character's alignment, and no class is restricted to certain alignments. You determine your character's moral compass. I see discussions that refer to such rules, yet they don't exist in 5th edition D&D." 5th edition D&D Player’s Handbook (emphasis...

I agree with this, though I'd extend the comparison to all the evil, tribal, primitive humanoids in D&D. It's been said many times that D&D is the "Wild West with swords". In fact a Google search on 'd&d "wild west with swords"' gives 2750 results. If that's true, then who are the "Red Indians"?

The Baker quotation looks a lot closer to the noble savage trope than to stereotypes of latinx people. Baker's orcs are like Conan - "barbarians by nature", passionate, non-urban, individualistic, reject authority and large organisations. Or the aliens in Avatar - non-Christian but this is seen...

Very well researched post. I learned a lot from reading it!

Source

Margaret St Clair, The Shadow People (1969), cited in Appendix N, is also a possible source. Here it is discussed in the Advanced Readings in D&D series.

That's a good article and it really gets to the heart of the problem - racial bioessentialism. That's very deep-rooted in D&D tho.

It could be that when HP Lovecraft was writing about the terrible alien horror of amorphous, tentacled things with lots of eyes, it was an unconscious metaphor for his fear of non-white people. I'll let him get away with that one. He concealed the metaphor sufficiently well.

Probably Nobilis. It has a gold bookmark and doesn't fit on most bookshelves, so you know it's fancy. <- rube

Regarding the "Why not aboleths, mind flayers, etc?" question: The problem is monsters that are similar to a racist's idea of a non-white person (particularly formerly colonised and enslaved peoples). What that idea boils down to is: like a white person but morally and mentally inferior. So we...

I think they were removed for much the same reason as the assassin class, demons and devils - fears over anything associated with evil, particularly evil PC options, following the Satanic Panic. Sexual violence in fiction was much less of a concern in the 80s than it is now.

Post #640 in this thread provides a quotation from Josiah Nott about the inferior “moral and intellectual faculties” of non-white peoples. This corresponds with the evil alignment and lower intelligence or wisdom scores of orcs, goblins, bugbears, kobolds, gnolls, and lizardfolk* (among others)...

1974 OD&D is the most Christian edition of D&D imo. There are, as yet, no pagan gods. The cleric's spells and level titles are strongly influenced by, respectively, Bible stories and church hierarchy. "Lama" doesn't fit, but I think it was just Gary resorting to his well-thumbed thesaurus. "One...

In my view all the primitive, tribal evil humanoids with less-than-human mental faculties are a problem. The #1 most pressing, and easily fixed, problem is the 5e MM art for goblins and hobgoblins as it's a caricature of East Asian people. Of these humanoids orcs are the biggest problem, because...