Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Levistus's_Leviathan" data-source="post: 8506150" data-attributes="member: 7023887">I've mentioned before that Eberron is one of my favorite official D&D world, and I stand by that claim. It has its problems. Less problems than most other settings (the list of issues with Mystara and the Forgotten Realms could go on for pages), but that isn't any excuse for these links. The problems with House Kundarak (Mark of Warding Dwarves) mostly come from Tolkien explicitly building Jewish stereotypes into his dwarves, which D&D as a whole has taken and incorporated into its different settings. I personally don't see what the problem with their connection to the Daelkyr in 5e has to do with antisemetic stereotypes (but would gladly hear an explanation for the perceived issue), but there are issues, and it's largely the fault of base D&D and Tolkien's Dwarven stereotypes borrowing heavily from Jewish stereotypes. And Eberron is at fault for not changing up Dwarves from the D&D baseline until D&D 5e, which doesn't change them all that much anyway. (See the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OurDwarvesAreAllTheSame" target="_blank">Our Dwarves Are All the Same trope</a> for more information on this.)Drow are an especially big issue, and I always change them in my Eberron games, but they could use some reworking. I do believe that some more recent articles by Keith Baker on his blog-site have added more culturally distinct types of Drow that aren't as connected with the "Exotic Tribal Jungle People of Color" stereotype, but they're still a problem. I don't really see most of the issues with Tairnadal Elves and Talenta Halflings, because while they do borrow some imagery from real-world existing cultures, their most defining features are extremely fantastical and don't really echo any real world cultures all that much, at least, not the ones that they already borrowed imagery from. (Tairnadal Elves use Double-Bladed Scimitars, worship patron ancestral spirits, are mercenaries, and ride on fairy horses, while Talenta Halflings domesticate Dinosaurs and seem to evoke more "primal caveman" vibes to me than First World peoples.)And to address the question at the end of [USER=7635]@Remathilis[/USER]'s post, yes, I do think that most of what people are talking about when they say "I want D&D races to be more like Eberron races" that they do mean the non-Always-Evil Orcs, Goblinoids, Drow, Yuan-Ti, Gnolls, and similar races, and how a Dwarf doesn't have to know Dwarven if it wasn't raised in the Mror Holds. Which I do think is a good idea. If there's a race that is playable, its base mechanics should probably be setting-agnostic, otherwise it will be too restrictive on the possible worlds that can exist. They don't mean the racial stereotypes that are attached to Eberron's various races and monsters (don't get me started on the Carrion Tribes, which are an entirely different problem, because they evoke the cultural stereotypes of the people that the monster came from in the real-world, which is a big issue that basically all D&D worlds have).</blockquote>

Verification