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Rifts (1990) -- a kitchen sink setting with both magic and high technology -- and Earthdawn (1993) are two well known examples. Rifts also uses the idea of leylines as a power source for magic.

The following changes have been made to D&D without the need to "dismiss an entire canon", so I don't see why further changes should: Class name "Fighter" instead of "Fighting Man" (1978). Removal of sex-based ability score limits (1989). Use of female pronouns as well as male (2000). Removal...

@transmission89 If you quote a long block of text from someone else I think it's a good idea to use INDENT tags, or alternatively, in the case of a post from a message board such as reddit, QUOTE tags: multiple paragraphs here or

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION This post is about the way features of D&D orcs and goblins — high fertility rates, dominant 'genetic' traits, and abundant population — correspond with racist ideas. These ideas may be found in the writings of late-19th and early-20th century...

"And Melchie! Still worshipping God? Last thing I heard, he'd started worshipping me."

Further to my post upthread about a theory of "little people" euhemerism – that European stories about fairies, dwarves, and other "little people" are based on a real, but now extinct, non-white race of small stature that once inhabited the continent – Bobby Derie's blog article Conan and the...

I'm not equating fictional monsters with real world ethnicities. I'm criticising others for doing so -- or, to be precise, associating the monstrous with real world peoples. I'm also criticising them for creating fictional worlds in which some of the ideas of racists are true. When I criticise...

Or make all evil individual rather than racial. But that would be getting very far from D&D as it has been up to now.

I enjoyed the essay – it was interesting and informative. But it doesn't properly confront this issue, from Roger Echo-Hawk's blog post Tolkien's Squinteyed Orc-men: When Tolkien's orcs / goblins made their debut in his earliest writings as monstrous soldiery of evil, they were not squint-eyed...

Gary Gygax thought so. Source

I hope I'm not being accused of pretending to be anything other than one of the "older white guys"! I'm upfront about being 50!

@Malmuria For an example, this post from a previous thread talks about how lizardfolk pulp-style 'cannibalism' (in the sense of eating other sentient beings), changes between editions. In OD&D and 1e they're 'cannibals'. In 3e that becomes a "largely unfounded" charge. But in 5e they are back to...

I think 3e and 4e did a decent job removing some of those tropes. But 5e brought them back, in some cases even making things worse, for the reason transmission89 gives: That had its downside!

Yes, the issue is not that they're identical. The issue is the combining of (real or perceived) characteristics of real world peoples with negative traits. For example WWII propaganda directed against Japanese people wasn't literally saying that Japanese people have fangs or that they are rats...

@transmission89 Here's a post from a previous thread on the ways in which evil humanoids were given characteristics perceived to be non-European in 1e AD&D (1977-1979), which was not the case in OD&D (1974). Summary: skin colours, witch doctors and shamans, non-state societies, "mongrel" used to...

Tolkien Letter #210 (1958): The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely...

Yes. With respect to the currently evil races, there's two ways to go imo: 1) Human* and not evil. 2) Alien and evil. The problem (or at least part of it) is: 3) Human and evil. So orcs, for example, can be improved either by removing the evil part (option 1) or by making them more like demons...