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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 8499777" data-attributes="member: 7635">I think people are weighing the difference of intent. I hardly suspect any D&D book was designed with malicious intent to spread lies and hate about RW minority groups, but I am old enough to remember a LOT of RPGs cribbed culture notes from non-mainstream-American cultures (using hollywood or similar interpretations of said cultures) as a shorthand to easily describe fantastical beings to others. It's hard to explain the nunances of a unique orc culture to someone not familiar with your setting, it's easy to say, "they're boar-riding Mongols" and let decades of media paint the picture for them. I'm not saying that is right, merely it was easy and for decades it wasn't called out due to the echo chamber of culture D&D primarily existed in. Ergo, a lot of people are willing to cut slack to them for being oblivious rather than malicious. I guess if you're only weighing by result (people got hurt) then that is a distinction without difference: ignorance is not an excuse. Most people do see shades of gray though, and I think it's fair to say Bruce Heard wasn't aiming for slander when authoring his book but opted for the easy path of playing on existing tropes and stereotypes rather than creating whole-cloth material. (Mystara is notorious for this design concept; nearly every land in the Known World and Hollow World, even the Savage Coast, is a thin pastiche of a RW culture or lifted from Tolkien in the case of demihumans. It makes Mystara a very easy world to grasp because you can describe whole kingdoms in one sentence, but that also works to its detriment when every kingdom is full of cliches and stereotypes).</blockquote>

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