Is everyone in Eberron white?

[dmcmanus]

Here's the picture of the Argonnessens.

 

[aurance]

Here's the picture of the Argonnessens.

Too bad more of the concept art didn't make it into the core book, there are some pretty nice sketches on that site.

 

[GSHamster]

Personally, I think the picture of the humans shows a reasonable racial diversity. Also, some human diversity seems to have leaked over to the other races (especially the elves).

I think another reason that Eberron may seem to lack racial diversity is that it strongly echos 1920s/30s Europe. Since most people in Europe are/were white, the parallel may unconciously come across, when the designers might not have intended it that way.

 

[Ahrimon]

Where can I find the concept and early art for Eberron? I've been looking for the large diorama that included a warforged wizard for a while now.

Thanks
Ahrimon

 

[mhacdebhandia]

The Forgotten Realms strikes me as handling the issue of non-European skin tones in non-human races pretty well - at least as far as dwarves go. Shield dwarves may be European-looking, but gold dwarves are very dark-skinned (ethnically they look to my untrained eye like dark-skinned Arabs - Moorish, perhaps, an African/Arab mix?). Grey dwarves are completely unlike any human ethnicity. Moon, sun, and wild elves don't resemble any human ethnicity, and their facial structure can make them look Asian or just "other". Heh.

It's true that skin tone seems to be the most variegated feature - grey dwarves still have European features.

Personally, I've played in a few games with the bog-standard pseudo-European village, but in that game I ended up playing three characters - one vaguely "Native American", another Arabic, both replacement characters for my original bog-standard pseudo-European villager PC.

 

[Pseudonym]

Where can I find the concept and early art for Eberron?

You can find links to the concept art from the various Dragon articles here.

 

[ForceUser]

I only asked because I like seeing different types of people presented in fantasy. From reading Eberron, I got the sense that all the humans were from the same stock, which I see as giving up a potential chance for giving a setting a unique flavor.

I'm not saying the book is racist. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to consider the fact that there probably oughta be different groups of people. If folks can critique the population density of the continent, then it also seems fair to critique the lack of racial diversity.

Well, look at it this way. IRL, the closer you get to the equator the darker skin tone becomes in indigenous groups. There is something called the Vitamin D Hypothesis to explain this: in latitudes near the equator, the sun is in the sky for more hours in the course of a year, inundating people with solar rays & UV energy. Vitamin D is essential for life but our bodies don't produce it, in fact, we absorb most of it from solar radiation. Humans from those regions developed large amounts of melanin (the biological device that blocks harmful solar rays and determines skin tone) as a way to handle elevated durations of sunlight, filtering out harmful UV rays while absorbing Vitamin D. As man spread to more northern latitudes where the sun is in the sky for fewer hours over the course of a year, the level of melanin in his skin fell so that he could absorb more Vitamin D in those fewer hours of sunlight. Thus, the skin tone of humans who settled in those far northern latitudes lightened over time.

One has only to look at a map of Eberron and find the equator and the poles to determine roughly the distribution of the skin color of indigenous peoples. Pretty fascinating stuff.

 

[ForceUser]

Originally Posted by RangerWickett
I only asked because I like seeing different types of people presented in fantasy. From reading Eberron, I got the sense that all the humans were from the same stock, which I see as giving up a potential chance for giving a setting a unique flavor.

I'm not saying the book is racist. I'm just saying it doesn't seem to consider the fact that there probably oughta be different groups of people. If folks can critique the population density of the continent, then it also seems fair to critique the lack of racial diversity.

Oh, and just as an aside, since modern science has determined that there is less genetic variation among humans than among almost any other living species on the planet (even chimpanzees, our closest animal relatives, have four times as much genetic variation as us), I'd like to note that the concept of the existence of different races of humans is more a social or mental construct than an objective biological fact. Given that, it stands to reason that anyone could play any type of human ethnicity in Eberron and it should remain germane to the setting.

 

[kirinke]

on a side note, i remember on discovery (insert cough, cough, geek here)
that they did a study on human genetics. sometime way back when there was a huge disaster that nearly wiped out humanity from say 2 million to maybe 2 thousand individuals (am fudging the numbers somewhat, because i don't quite remember them). something they call a genetic bottleneck? and after that, we spread out again. So, the matter of 'race' is pretty ridiculous given that.

also along the same lines, some scientist did a genetic study on several different people: an eskimo, caucasion, african american and asian i believe and found out they all had a common ancestor. In essence, they were all related. Distantly. but still related.

and if you look at just skin color, you'll see that people are just shades of brown, even 'caucasions'. looks at skin. yup am not really white. peaches and cream turning to brown in the summer.

 

[ForceUser]

on a side note, i remember on discovery (insert cough, cough, geek here)
that they did a study on human genetics. sometime way back when there was a huge disaster that nearly wiped out humanity from say 2 million to maybe 2 thousand individuals (am fudging the numbers somewhat, because i don't quite remember them). something they call a genetic bottleneck? and after that, we spread out again. So, the matter of 'race' is pretty ridiculous given that.

also along the same lines, some scientist did a genetic study on several different people: an eskimo, caucasion, african american and asian i believe and found out they all had a common ancestor. In essence, they were all related. Distantly. but still related.

and if you look at just skin color, you'll see that people are just shades of brown, even 'caucasions'. looks at skin. yup am not really white. peaches and cream turning to brown in the summer.

You're talking about the Eve Hypothesis. It's controversial, but goes like this: geneticists today have noted that humans from widely diverse populations have the same mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, or DNA from outside the nucleus of a cell, comes in 13 varieties and is only passed to offspring by human females. It is a very distinct genetic signature that allows scientists to trace human origins genetically. Thus, the hypothesis suggests that every living human on the planet has the same female ancestor (or small group of female ancestors), who is estimated to have lived in Eastern Africa about 120,000 to 150,000 years ago. It's wild stuff.