D&D General Reading Ravenloft the setting

[humble minion]

Which troubles me because it seems like a shift towards ethno-nationalism (the kind of thinking that ties the color of our skin to the kinds of cultural expressions we can have). I am not saying you can't have an african domain with people who look like real world people from Africa (I get the value of conveying that shorthand in a fantasy setting). But taking a domain that didn't connect culture and race, and using it to connect culture and race, I honestly think that is a little disturbing if the people doing it, think they are being more enlightened (cause it isn't).

But conversely, the old Valachan could be viewed as basically erasing African culture completely. The only dark-skinned nation in the core is basically generic fantasy-Europe? When even in the various obscure Islands of Terror etc to the best of my knowledge there'e no domain reflecting sub-Saharan Africa? (There's a bit of Egypt, and there's a voodoo/plantation themed domain in Souragne, but that's a close as we get)

I think (and as I've said, I'm a white Australian guy so I'm not exactly plugged into this stuff as much as some) there'd be fewer concerns about a dark-skinned generic-European-fantasy Valachan if there was also at least one dark-skinned African-fantasy domain. You can start to look at disconnecting race from culture once you've at least represented the culture.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But conversely, the old Valachan could be viewed as basically erasing African culture completely. The only dark-skinned nation in the core is basically generic fantasy-Europe? When even in the various obscure Islands of Terror etc to the best of my knowledge there'e no domain reflecting sub-Saharan Africa? (There's a bit of Egypt, and there's a voodoo/plantation themed domain in Souragne, but that's a close as we get)

I think (and as I've said, I'm a white Australian guy so I'm not exactly plugged into this stuff as much as some) there'd be fewer concerns about a dark-skinned generic-European-fantasy Valachan if there was also at least one dark-skinned African-fantasy domain. You can start to look at disconnecting race from culture once you've at least represented the culture.

I don’t find this very persuasive and think it steers thinks back towards tying culture and skin tone. My view is by all means you can have an African setting (I think the reason you didn’t have one, was gothic wasn’t strongly associated with Africa). There wasn’t a moral requirement to have domains that reflect all cultures of the world after all. But if you are going to take a domain that specifically disconnects race and culture, and reconnect them: that is a step backwards not forwards. What’s more: it is a false choice: you can add an African domain and keep Valachan.

 

[Remathilis]

I don’t find this very persuasive and think it steers thinks back towards tying culture and skin tone. My view is by all means you can have an African setting (I think the reason you didn’t have one, was gothic wasn’t strongly associated with Africa). There wasn’t a moral requirement to have domains that reflect all cultures of the world after all. But if you are going to take a domain that specifically disconnects race and culture, and reconnect them: that is a step backwards not forwards. What’s more: it is a false choice: you can add an African domain and keep Valachan.

I think the biggest problem to your argument is that there is no domain that is based on a nonwhite culture with predominately white residents. Rokushima Tayoo doesn't have European-looking residents or Darkord for example. If Ravenloft wasn't full of thinly-veiled pastiches of real world myths and ghost stories, I could believe the intention was to have dark-skinned humans with a vaguely-European culture and terrain as a subversion of cultural and racial tropes, but the rest of Ravenloft doesn't bear that out. Valachan's residents are black only because panther's are black, and that feels very insensitive. But if Ravenloft wants to strip out the pastiche's and aim for disjoining race and culture, that might be interesting too.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think the biggest problem to your argument is that there is no domain that is based on a nonwhite culture with predominately white residents. Rokushima Tayoo doesn't have European-looking residents or Darkord for example. If Ravenloft wasn't full of thinly-veiled pastiches of real world myths and ghost stories, I could believe the intention was to have dark-skinned humans with a vaguely-European culture and terrain as a subversion of cultural and racial tropes, but the rest of Ravenloft doesn't bear that out. Valachan's residents are black only because panther's are black, and that feels very insensitive. But if Ravenloft wants to strip out the pastiche's and aim for disjoining race and culture, that might be interesting too.

I think it wasnt intentional to disconnect race and culture in Valachan. I suspect it was a happy accident. But I don't; see why the lack of that kind of forward thinking elsewhere in the setting, would mean we ought to jettison the forward thinking in Valachan. I can only speak for myself, but I can testify that, even though Valachan was never my top domain, there was always something I found interesting about it, and when they made the inhabitants black with long hair (which was clearly intended to reflect the panther domain lord as @Faolyn pointed out), that very much opened my eyes to the fact that in a fantasy setting race and culture don't need to be tethered together (which matched my view of the real world, but it just wasn't something I had remembered really seeing much of in a fantasy culture). So sure, maybe there wasn't a domain based on a non-white society, that had white people; but it still, even if it wasn't intentional, made a point. It impacted my thinking about it enough that I fully embraced that concept as a GM (making lots of worlds where race and culture weren't connected, where ethnic and cultural connections were accidental and just due to history).

Maybe some people find the whole connection between the lord and the skin tone insensitive as you say (personally I don't see it as insensitive and i don't think many people thought it was insensitive when it first emerged). It wasn't like it was how the domain was originally presented either, so this was something that was an evolution over time. My memory, which admittedly could be wrong, was there was an adventure in Dungeon where they described the inhabitants as black (but my chronology here could be wrong). But I just distinctly remember how interesting that struck me, that the domain clearly was based on German, yet skin tone didn't matter at all (and given that blood and soil is so strongly associated with Germany, I couldn't help but see this as a rejection of that concept when I read it: again I don't know the intentions of the writers, I suspect it may have been accidental, but that connection leapt out at me at the time). Again, I just this is is a lot more forward thinking than the black domain needing to be African. There is no reason why in a fantasy world you can't have for example, a place modeled after England but that is inhabited entirely by people that look Thai or look Italian. I get why it might be useful to associate the culture with the real world race that culture tends to be. I am just saying it is a little backwards to have a domain that clearly disconnects these two things, with a German-like culture (or at least German like names) and say "No this needs to be African because inhabitants are black). That is the part that seems to me, deeply, deeply regressive.

 

[Voadam]

When even in the various obscure Islands of Terror etc to the best of my knowledge there'e no domain reflecting sub-Saharan Africa?

The Wildlands. From RR4 Islands of Darkness, became part of the Steaming Lands cluster in Domains of Dread with Sri Raji and Saragossa, renamed the Verduros Lands cluster in 3.0.

It doesn't have black people, but it is clearly Sub-Saharan African jungle.

 

[Faolyn]

Valachan's residents are black only because panther's are black, and that feels very insensitive.

Honestly, it's probably just more a lack of knowledge of horror tropes for non-European societies coupled with it being the 90s. So, insensitive, but more out of laziness than any cruelty.

 

[humble minion]

The Wildlands. From RR4 Islands of Darkness, became part of the Steaming Lands cluster in Domains of Dread with Sri Raji and Saragossa, renamed the Verduros Lands cluster in 3.0.

It doesn't have black people, but it is clearly Sub-Saharan African jungle.

The Wildlands always struck me as more subcontinental-inspired than African (there was a bit of a Jungle Book feeling about it) especially given its proximity to Sri Raji, but given there's pretty much zero people in the domain at all, that's of course completely open to interpretation!

 

[Bedrockgames]

The Wildlands always struck me as more subcontinental-inspired than African (there was a bit of a Jungle Book feeling about it) especially given its proximity to Sri Raji, but given there's pretty much zero people in the domain at all, that's of course completely open to interpretation!

I remember it having a real disney movie vibe

 

[Tonguez]

I don' know. I think this actually is more racially insensitive. The original presentation of Valachan (at least as I remember it--not in a position at the moment to review the entry), I don't believe they even got into the skin color of the natives of the domain. Pretty sure it was a dungeon adventure that first introduced the idea that the inhabitants were black (I could be wrong on that as I am purely going on memory), but either way, but DoD the inhabitance were described as "tall and black skinned....with straight hair". It made some kind of sense though that the inhabitants would reflect the appearance of the lord (who began life as a panther, which is the reason he has that skin tone). But it felt like skin color was more incidental: it didn't get at anything essential, and the fact that you could have domain with people who have black skin but with a culture that seemed German spoke against things like ethno-nationalism, racial essentialism. For those of us who were alive at the time Ravenloft was released, the arguments racists made to denigrate other races and recruit were based on blood and soil ideology: on the notion that our differences were essential, not cultural. So the idea that the domain with black people in it, needs to be African, would be something they would have advocated for. The fact that you don't have to have that in Valachan is a good thing. There is nothing wrong with having say an African domain. But I think it would be ashame to take away a domain that became one where culture and skin tone were not seen as tied together at all. That domain is one of the reasons going forward in my own campaign worlds, I realized you didn't need to have these things connected. I often made settings where you had ethnic groups resembling real world ethnic groups but which cultures they ended up in was a result of the accident of history or just pure random determination on my part.

You make a good point here, none of the characters in the Price of Revenge (Dungeon #42) are presented as being black and Valachan is decidedly NOT Africa - the adventure makes a point of stating that its Winter and the road in to the valley has been blocked by snow from a blizzard.

The current discussion reminds me of Ursula Le Guins criticism of the TV adaption of Wizard of Earthsea. She states something like she deliberately made Ged darkskinned because in a fantasy world the protagonist dont need to be pale skinned europeans. Despite that a white actor (Shawn Ashmore) was cast in the role of Ged as were most of the rest of the cast.

Its a strange tension though, can diverse realms from the real world be included without reference to phenotype?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Maybe its because giant cats are exactly common in Europe or NA

If the stories are to be believed pretty much every remote moor in Britain is infested with them!