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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8492558" data-attributes="member: 18">I mean, it's pretty easy isn't it? You just don't assign them a bunch of negative characteristics that line up with racist portrayals of Earth cultures? And try to avoid ripping off Earth cultures which have been oppressed/negatively regarded and assigning their characteristic to the humanoids (which is the old D&D term for "monstrous human" - "humanoid" - the other lot are "demihumans").I mean, a simple example of how to avoid problems even if you do insist on using an Earth culture is Taladas - where the steppe horse nomads (a group subject to tons of racism IRL, particularly re: their appearance and intelligence), roughly equivalent to the Huns, are Elves and Half-Elves - two demihuman races known for being attractive and smart. The immediately means the basic Earth-racist approach doesn't work, and means something more complicated is going on.That's just a crude example, but I think this is pretty easy. Don't lean in to negative stereotypes.(One place I feel like Taladas kind of screwed up here is Armach. Here basically some Silvanaes elves from Anaslon ended up in Taladas, landing in a region populated by tribal humans. The elves assuming tribal = evil (this is text, not subtext, note), attacked the humans, and ended up chopping a kingdom out of the area, and the humans never got organised enough to defeat them. Eventually they started allying with the humans, but the elves run what is basically an apartheid state (right down to miscegenation laws) with the humans (who are dark-skinned, which doesn't help the optics) and other races (centaurs and Marak kender) around them, all in a confederation. The book is very clear that the apartheid state and the laws it runs on are a bad thing, including for the elves, and that the elves messed up when attacking the humans, but at the same time talks about the "superior culture" (verbatim) of the elves allowing them to win and so on, and the whole thing doesn't look great. It's heavily implied that to have any future the elves will have drop their apartheid state, because they're slowly dying out and their state is full of empty villas and untended fields (no non-elf is allowed to enter it), and we're reminded that they screwed up because they also have a problem with the vengeful ghosts of the humans they killed, so the future of this culture is clearly some kind of opening up and healing, if it has one. But it's still not a great look to have a bunch of pale-skinned smarty-pants elves bullying a bunch of dark-skinned humans, and the language used is... er... very much not what I think Zeb Cook would use today. I'd love to ask him what he was thinking exactly there. I suspect the answer is "demonstrating the folly of colonial aggression and blood purity", but I don't think it quite worked.)</blockquote>

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