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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zander" data-source="post: 8083260" data-attributes="member: 1364">With regards to the D&D races, I suspect that if the game had called them 'folks' or some other term from the beginning (I find 'species' too scientific for a fantasy game), there wouldn't be a move to homogenise them. It's only because 'race' is such a politically charged term in the real world that differences between the fantasy ones are deemed unacceptable. When societies fail to make distinctions between reality and fantasy, the outcome is rarely good; witness, for example, the satanic panic related to D&D of the 1980s when certain religious groups denounced the game for having magic and fantasy creatures.On the matter of OA, I only have the 1E one and don't currently have access to it, but from memory, it was most certainly not racist. Racism is inherently malicious. Was it Gygax, Cook and Marcela-Froideval's intention to be malicious? No, very obviously not. In fact, they were celebrating Asian cultures, history and mythologies. More valid questions would be did they then (1985) or do they now cause offence however unintentionally? Offence is subjective. I remember when it was released and am not aware that anyone at the time found it offensive. Since then, being the offended party has given one the moral high ground and often also publicity, so it has become difficult to determine when offence is genuine, when it isn't or when it's exaggerated. Would a 'reasonable person' to use the jurisprudence term find the 1E OA offensive? No, I don't think so. It may conflate quite diverse cultures but as has already been pointed out in this thread, so does D&D more broadly. Your dwarf (Norse) character swooping in on a flying carpet (Arabic, Persian and Russian) with a sword of sharpness (English) to defeat a clay golem (Jewish) followed by a gorgon (Greek) and a tarrasque (French) is no less syncretic than anything found in OA.</blockquote>

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