D&D General Divine Invasion: A Proposal for an Anti-Colonialist D&D Setting

[TheSword]

Can I tell a story about local nobility to be replaced by döppelgangers, changeling or impostors as puppetrs with orders from secret lodges , or may I be reported by the skrulls because these can be offended?

Isn't colonialism when the Northamerican army crosses a Stargate and destroys an alien ship?

Or what if the newcomers stopped a genocide among natives?

You can tell any story you you want. But if you try and sell it, expect to have the heavens fall on you if haven’t been at least somewhat culturally sensitive.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

And what if I say the red paladins from the serie Cursed are "culturally sensitive"?

 

[TheSword]

Tell the producers and see what reaction you get.

 

[Mercurius]

Instead of attacking creatures coded as indigenous people and looting their ruins...

I've played in some pretty traditional D&D campaigns and none could be described that way, nor do most published adventures really fit that description.

in this outline you'd be driving out colonial forces and looting the ruins of their settlements. If you go into any other ruins it's to clear them of occupying colonialist forces and recover treasure belonging to the heritage of the player characters.

This is closer to the traditional archetype, and what I've played or run. Usually the creatures or other evil humanoids are invaders who over-run the ruins of ancient human, elven or dwarven kingdoms that have fallen in ages past, and sometimes had a part in that fall (e.g. Smaug took the Lonely Mountain from the dwarves - a classic trope in D&D history). Humanoids aren't indigenous peoples, but predatory raiders from other lands and/or serving evil gods. The PCs aren't invading the ruins of creatures, but taking them back from bygone eras. In other words, the PC races are indigenous, not the humanoids.

That aside, I haven't read through your whole post, but an interesting basic set-up.

 

[S'mon]

I think one common coding is Hobgoblins as Fascist-style conquerors and the PCs the heroic multi-species resistance, as in Red Hand of Doom. Orcs tended to be coded as Viking style savage reavers. I don't see much if any 'they live over there so let's kill them and take their stuff'.

Some of Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories might be inspirational - Erekose and The Knight of the Swords are both about evil Human invaders vs nice Elves.

 

[Zardnaar]

Crusader Kings 2 Sunset invasion. Aztecs invade Europe.

It's your game world do what you want. You're essentially set up race wars though.

 

[Bohandas]

It's no secret that there's been a lot of criticism lately about certain aspects of D&D, chiefly that certain "monstrous humanoids" are described in ways that are too close for comfort to how European colonists described the peoples of the lands they invaded.

Which is a loaded assessment. It's more of a generic insult. Plenty of white ethnicities have been described in the same or similar terms at various times, including but not limited to the germans, the british, the italians, and the scandanavians.

Hell, the D&D orcs are a race of marauding berserkers who worship a one-eyed god. Tell me how that's not white. If I gave that description without including the word "orc" you'd immediately imagine a bunch of vikings sacking Lindisfarne.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

The thing that kept popping up in my head when giving the OP's post a "solid skimming over" was this: "So, why do all these other races seem like humans in funny suits?".

The majority of what "vibe" I got from each 'race' as a motivation was basically human. That's it. I didn't get any sense of "not a human" from them.

I think if some sort of "defend our land from invaders" campaign was to be had, and it wanted to focus on non-human creatures, well, wouldn't the first thing be to distinguish all the non-human creatures as...er... not human?

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. But when I hear "Aaracokra" I don't think "just a dude with wings". They would have VASTLY different ideas of what is right/wrong, good/evil, acceptable/unacceptable, desired/undesirable, etc. For example, I can easily see the Aaracokra having a huge sense of superiority over any non-flight-capable race to the point where there would be specific rules/laws that are granted to Aaracokra, then "other flight-capable" creatures, then "ground-limited" creatures being their 'slave/serf race'. Aaracokra (or Dragonborn, Tiefling, Genasai, etc) are not human, and reducing them to nothing more than just "humans in funny suits", to me, is missing a potentially HUGE opportunity for a campaign.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[J-H]

In my current game, Aztec-ish Aaracokra invaded Spain. The party stole one of their flying skiffs and is trying to figure out how to prevent Huitzopochitl from manifesting on the material plane (very bad).

Unless your setting is at peace, which would probably be boring, somebody's always invading and exploiting someone else. Maybe it's Steppe nomads, or the Romans, or the Egyptians, or the Zulu, or drow, or dwarves, or hobgoblins, or elven imperialists, or the Scarlet Order, or whatever.

In a pre-industrial context without a meaningful financial system as a way to gain and maintain multi-generational wealth and capital and drive improvements in living standards, the best way to gain more wealth, power, and population is to invade someone else's land, take it over, and make them provide resources to their new overlords. Slavery/involuntary servitude/impressment/corvee labor is often part of the deal.

Historically, it's often been the case that the invaders were seen as less 'civilized' (Goths, Huns, Mongols+Turks+Tamerlane+Mughals+Manchu steppe nomads, Vikings, Barbary pirates, Magyar tribes, Macedonians invading Hellas, etc.) than the "civilizations" that they were successfully able to prey on.

As long as there is conquest and subjugation going on, some people are always going to find things to be offended at and to call nasty names. It's your choice as to whether or not you let that type of person shape your creative output and cause you to self-censor, or not.

 

[Malmuria]

The premise of B2 is essentially the opposite of that:



That seems rather anti-colonialist to me, unless one assumes that "more civilized" peoples are always colonizers of "less civilized" peoples, and never the opposite, but such a view would render much of recorded history unintelligible. It seems like there's an increasing tendency to conflate any conflict arising out of human(oid) migrations with 15th-19th century European colonization. It's a heinous part of history, no doubt, but it's not the only history...

That said, I like what you've done. There might be a temptation to have the Rightful Peoples of the World living in perfect harmony in a kind of peaceful stasis before the arrival of the aasimar colonists. This would make them less interesting, since they should have their own politics, conflicts, competition and history, but it might also be problematic. For example, one might unintentionally create the message that real-world victims of settler colonialism could have successfully resisted the colonizers if only they had been more unified.

B2 is the patient zero of settler colonialism in dnd. It mimics, in fantasy terms, the ethos of American settlers in places like Wisconsin and their false ideology of manifest destiny. Its genre is as much the Western as it is anything medieval.