D&D General Al-Qadim, Campaign Guide: Zakhara, and Cultural Sensitivity

[Micah Sweet]

And really, once you bring in any sort of non-human PC race, magic, and active gods, the entire culture should change anyway. Its ridiculous to assume that a society of humans, elves, dwarfs, orcs, etc. would function exactly like a setting where there's only humans and no magic.

Sure. But would those changes always remove the less savory aspects of authentic human existence? Fantasy racism is still a thing, for example.

 

[Faolyn]

I don't have a problem with keeping the Harmonium. They're consistently depicted as largely not nice people.

Well, the Factol is a lawful good paladin, back in the day when knowingly associating with evil was a huge no-no. So his alignment would either have to change (to Lawful Neutral, with him being "pragmatic" about the attacks) or he would have to be written as truly ignorant of what's going on. Factol Sarin knowingly allowing (either outright or tacitly) Indeps to be attacked, extorted, murdered, and disappeared is not a Lawful Good act, especially since the Indeps are not an evil people.

Personally, I don't mind the Harmonium being bad guys either. I mean, they made an entire layer of a plane lose its Good alignment. Not even any of the actively destructive factions like the Doomguard or Mercykillers have done that!

 

[Guest 7034872]

Well, the Factol is a lawful good paladin, back in the day when knowingly associating with evil was a huge no-no. So his alignment would either have to change (to Lawful Neutral, with him being "pragmatic" about the attacks) or he would have to be written as truly ignorant of what's going on. Factol Sarin knowingly allowing (either outright or tacitly) Indeps to be attacked, extorted, murdered, and disappeared is not a Lawful Good act, especially since the Indeps are not an evil people.

Personally, I don't mind the Harmonium being bad guys either. I mean, they made an entire layer of a plane lose its Good alignment. Not even any of the actively destructive factions like the Doomguard or Mercykillers have done that!

I'd say ALL the factions can end up functioning as bad guys in Planescape, depending on circumstances. Similarly, almost any one of them conceivably could function as the good guys under the right adventure setting. The whole point of the factions is that none of them are just wrong about everything and none of them are just right about everything: each has its own philosophical slant that can bring them into conflict with other factions, but it's never a foregone conclusion.

I am unsympathetic to treating these fantasy settings as stand-ins for contemporary moral or political debates: that's not their purpose.

 

[Faolyn]

And the Anarchists faction, very similar to Antifa, was not an issue? Typical.

It's funny. The writeup of the Harmonium in the Factol's Manifesto says that they view the Revolutionary League as being more dangerous than the Free League. The writeup of the Indeps, however, have a whole story about how the Harmonium is trying to "arrest them out of existence," while the Anarchist's writeup only really talks about the Harmonium by saying they managed to plant a double-agent in that group and once he--after a long time--got caught, the Harmonium tried to pretend that they knew about it all along.

 

[Umbran]

"Slavery is not central or necessary to Islam" But it is, and still practiced today. Roughly 6 months ago.

Mod Note:
You are discussing real-world religion, which is against the board rules. You are spreading inaccurate, harmful stereotypes.
You are done in this discussion.

Repeat such behavior, and you'll be done on these boards.

 

[beancounter]

If people are offended by a product, they don't have to buy it.

 

[Faolyn]

Sure. But would those changes always remove the less savory aspects of authentic human existence? Fantasy racism is still a thing, for example.

It might.

Take a look at the real world. Women's rights got a big boost after the World Wars, because women had to join the workforce and many of them didn't want to go back to being homemakers after that. That gave women more financial independence, which allowed them more freedoms and the ability to control themselves.

Now imagine a fantasy world where humans have been at war with, say, orcs, for a very long time. Or with elves, or with demons, whatever. Or simply a fantasy world where travelers get eaten by random encounters willy-nilly so going from one city to the next is particularly deadly. If men are the ones doing the fighting or long-distance trading, then eventually women will gain the same sort of freedoms.

Then, imagine a fantasy world with active gods. It's one thing to believe in a god that believes in peace and justice and another thing for that god to manifest in the town square to prevent a racially-motivated attack, or yanking the spells away from a bigoted priest or paladin. Imagine a god of love deciding to smite a homophobe.

Then, imagine a fantasy world with magic. Sure, men may decide that women or people with a particular skin color aren't allowed to learn wizardry. But that won't stop women from being born magical, or from being chosen by a god, or even from making a deal with an eldritch being. And, well, The Nine Hells hath no fury as a women scorned who also knows how to cast fireball.

Now imagine that all of this happened in the past. Most fantasy worlds have hundreds or thousands of years of history. Even if the gods never manifest anymore, they likely did in the past. Even if humans hadn't been to war in ages, they were in the past. And then those changes get built on. And decades or centuries later, sexism, homo/transphobia, and racism are rare or at least highly frowned upon.

And then remember that there's no reason for most of this bigotry to exist in your world in the first place. Unless you are actively gaming in 8th-century Europe, there's no reason why you would need to have real-world 8th-century European values in your game. Many real-world cultures were not very sexist or homophobic. Use elements of those cultures as the basis for your campaign. And as for racism, well, as the late great Terry Pratchett said, "black and white live together in harmony and gang up on the green."

 

[Faolyn]

I'd say ALL the factions can end up functioning as bad guys in Planescape, depending on circumstances. Similarly, almost any one of them conceivably could function as the good guys under the right adventure setting. The whole point of the factions is that none of them are just wrong about everything and none of them are just right about everything: each has its own philosophical slant that can bring them into conflict with other factions, but it's never a foregone conclusion.

I am unsympathetic to treating these fantasy settings as stand-ins for contemporary moral or political debates: that's not their purpose.

Well, remember that The Facto's Manifesto was published in 1995, and it wasn't designed to be a stand-in for any then-contemporary debates. What I'm saying is if a 2e-era paladin was knowingly allowing people under his charge to harass and murder other people solely because of their (non-evil, non-violent) philosophical ideologies, then he should not be Lawful Good in 5e.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I see both sides of the issue. No, fantasy world doesn't need to have all the same prejudices and other horrible things than our real world, and like @Faolyn demonstrates, you can pretty easily come with rather plausible reasons for it. But on the other hand I also see the point that when depicting very close real life allegories, eliding certain negative aspects might come across as whitewashing or even worse, apologism. That Deadlands example of the Confederation banning slavery certainly was uncomfortable! Though it also seems pretty suspicious that this conversation sprung up when talking about fantasy Middle East analogy, whilst similar omissions in our fantasy Europes are rarely considered remarkable.

And then somewhat less importantly there are also matters of taste. When playing in a fictional world I don't necessarily want to deal with all the horrible facets of human history, but then again, fantasy worlds where the culture and social norms are just those of the modern western world with some fantasy trappings thrown in for flavour seem rather bland to me as well. And of course injustices existing in the world are good fodder for character motivations and conflict that creates interesting situations.

 

[Blue Orange]

And then remember that there's no reason for most of this bigotry to exist in your world in the first place. Unless you are actively gaming in 8th-century Europe, there's no reason why you would need to have real-world 8th-century European values in your game. Many real-world cultures were not very sexist or homophobic. Use elements of those cultures as the basis for your campaign. And as for racism, well, as the late great Terry Pratchett said, "black and white live together in harmony and gang up on the green."

I've actually thought about that. We wouldn't get too excited about differences between human subgroups if we had orcs to gang up against, right? Historically one of the best ways to unite group A and B is against group C. And of course orcs are more different from any group of humans than those groups of humans are from each other.

One other thing, though, is that we might actually have fewer reasons to fight a group that's very different, because there would be fewer conflicts over resources. Fish-people can't live on land, we can't live underwater, so we'd have little conflict over territory with fish-people. Elves, though? They like their forests, and we like the wood.