D&D 5E Tasha's Drow Art and the Future of Their Depictions in D&D

[Marc_C]

Mystara Shadow Elves are pale. I prefer that. I welcome the change for drow.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

These aren't different statements.

Medieval Europe was much more diverse than folks imagine, travel was more common than people around here often like to claim, and the Norse peoples traded much more broadly than most people of their time.

So, even if technically a majority of Norse people hadn’t personally seen a dark skinned person, the implication was that Norse people weren’t aware of dark skinned folks, which is a silly claim.

 

[Dire Bare]

You say that you have evidence to the contrary, but don't present it. Do it if you actually have it.

What I think @Rob Kuntz is trying to say . . . forgive me if I'm misunderstanding . . . is that when designing the drow (Fiend Folio?), Gygax was not thinking of the race as based on any real world culture, directly or indirectly, but was only adapting from his interpretation of Norse myth. Therefore, there is no connection to how Europeans have treated people of color during the colonization era and since.

I agree and disagree.

I truly feel that Gygax was not a racist person, not any more or less than the rest of us, and that he was not deliberately trying to create something racist, nor was he trying to use the D&D drow as an allegory on race or racism in the modern era. His intent was exactly as Kuntz describes it, adapting an evil beastie from mythology for D&D.

But I also feel Kuntz is wrong in trying to deny any connection to how we view race in the modern era, and that there is no connection between the drow and how we view people of color today. The racism in D&D's drow isn't explicit, it isn't intentional . . . it's a part of the societal bias most white folk in the US and the Western world have. The ideas and language used to describe the drow and other "bad guy" races is uncomfortably close to how Europeans thought and talked about indigenous peoples all over the world, and the myth of evil beings being cursed with black skin (which is a real world mythic archetype) is hella racist. Gygax unintentionally brought this forward from myth into the game, not because he was a bad person or even an ignorant person, but because he was a human being . . . and this wasn't a conversation society was having about fantasy literature, games, and myth back in the 70s.

We're having these conversations (more) today than yesterday, because our hobby is growing more diverse and many more people of color are interested in playing D&D. And many of them (not all of them), are made uncomfortable and unwelcome with how D&D treats race, with drow and orcs being the two most obvious examples. And many of us of European background, are beginning to see the problematic nature of race in D&D, something we missed for decades because of the early homogeneity of our hobby and our own white privilege.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

You say that you have evidence to the contrary, but don't present it. Do it if you actually have it.

alreadty did in the thread post previous to the one you are quoting.

 

[billd91]

Well, well - criticize the Great Gygax and you apparently get ignored by Rob Kuntz. Guess I can cross that off my bucket list.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Keep in mind that Middle Ages Norse people are not the same as the people who wrote the ancient legends and sagas. International travel didn't always exist.

 

[Rob Kuntz]

What I think @Rob Kuntz is trying to say . . . forgive me if I'm misunderstanding . . . is that when designing the drow (Fiend Folio?), Gygax was not thinking of the race as based on any real world culture, directly or indirectly, but was only adapting from his interpretation of Norse myth. Therefore, there is no connection to how Europeans have treated people of color during the colonization era and since.

I agree and disagree.

I truly feel that Gygax was not a racist person, not any more or less than the rest of us, and that he was not deliberately trying to create something racist, nor was he trying to use the D&D drow as an allegory on race or racism in the modern era. His intent was exactly as Kuntz describes it, adapting an evil beastie from mythology for D&D.

But I also feel Kuntz is wrong in trying to deny any connection to how we view race in the modern era, and that there is no connection between the drow and how we view people of color today. The racism in D&D's drow isn't explicit, it isn't intentional . . . it's a part of the societal bias most white folk in the US and the Western world have. The ideas and language used to describe the drow and other "bad guy" races is uncomfortably close to how Europeans thought and talked about indigenous peoples all over the world, and the myth of evil beings being cursed with black skin (which is a real world mythic archetype) is hella racist. Gygax unintentionally brought this forward from myth into the game, not because he was a bad person or even an ignorant person, but because he was a human being . . . and this wasn't a conversation society was having about fantasy literature, games, and myth back in the 70s.

We're having these conversations (more) today than yesterday, because our hobby is growing more diverse and many more people of color are interested in playing D&D. And many of them (not all of them), are made uncomfortable and unwelcome with how D&D treats race, with drow and orcs being the two most obvious examples. And many of us of European background, are beginning to see the problematic nature of race in D&D, something we missed for decades because of the early homogeneity of our hobby and our own white privilege.

There is no delimited, inferred or stated posits by myself of how anyone should propose or deal with race. I was, as stated, "in this case alone," referring tio the subject of the drow. In fact I stated that DMs should be in charge of that alone and not have it prescribed by WotC's designers AND that the idea of skin tone change was not a factor for me. I don't appreciate obfuscation of my posts and points, Further, with all due respect, I don't believe that my former friend, mentor and near surrogate father, Gary Gygax, needs to be exonerated
by anyone as if this were a mock trial

 

[Dire Bare]

No, that's not the problem. The problem is, in the real world, technology and society are deeply intertwined, the size of the world is defined by the speed of travel and communication, and evolution, not wars between mythic gods in planes beyond, drives the development of everything. There are no sentient tree spirits, no "folk" who appear human, but whose soul and being are drawn from the magic of the river. No god has ever cried black tears that sprung up into a race of malevolent warmongers...or a race of flower-loving hippies...or a race of anything. These things don't exist. They can't exist. There is not a "realistic" version of these things.

There is a huge gulf between simplifying the real and attempting to make the mythic realistic. I can do the former. Granted, if I proposed an RPG entitled, simply, The Thirteenth Century, and the setting and background information had simplified, but reasonably realistic descriptions of various 13th-century peoples on each continent, most people would be horrified by the content. It would certainly not be age-appropriate for any players born after 1600. That world and its people are shockingly alien to our own, which is the way it is because rapid technological developments led to global empires and wars, ultimately leading to the last few decades of US financial & military hegemony driving a high level of economic and cultural homogenization of humanity.

WotC's FR wants to have 21st-century homogenization with a premodern technological landscape. It wants its humanoids to be both evolutionary and mythic in origin. It wants a paleolithic tribe with living side-by-side with a Renaissance city, each somehow having military parity, and the inhabitants of both having moral and religious outlooks that 21st-century Americans can sympathize with. None of this makes any sense at all; it's self-contradictory nonsense. The problem isn't that it's too simple; the problem is that it's brainless.

You can't make 5e FR "realistic" any more than you could make a 7-year-old girl's stuffed animal tea party "realistic." How would a fuzzy frog in a princess dress really behave at a tea party in Cinderella's castle? The answer is, that's an idiotic question...but it's still probably less idiotic than asking what Drow would really be like.

You are hitting on the fantasy aspect of things, that our various fantasy worlds are not terribly realistic . . . which is true. But misses the point. Probably because I didn't make it very well, sorry.

Modern fantasy, like other literary genres, often goes for "suspension of disbelief" . . . portraying the fantastical and the fictional in as realistic a manner as possible, so that our brains are tricked into believing that the entire story is real (in the moment). Modern fantasy also is heavily influenced by sci-fi and sci-fantasy, which deliberately attempt to make "realistic" alien species.

The various "races" in D&D are caught in-between their mythic antecedents and that sci-fi concept of sentient alien species. Which races are spirit-beings tied to a specific element or ethos (fey, demons, celestials)? Which are "mortal" races (sentient alien species), even if touched by the fey or diabolic (elves, orcs, gobbos, tieflings)? Which are okay to portray as always-evil, evil-tendencies, or evil cultures?

Can you make the Realms, or any other D&D fantasy setting, truly realistic? No. But can you add more realism to help with the player's (or reader's) suspension of disbelief? Yes. Should we be looking for instances of racism, sexism, and other -isms in how we portray the fictional and fantastical characters in our fiction and games. And then work to excise or modify them? Yes (IMO).

 

[Oofta]

Now that's just identifiably false. (Source 1 and Source 2) Sure, a lot of Norse people never met anyone with dark skin, but they had terms for those people, and absolutely knew that they existed.

Did I say that they had no concept of different skin tones? No.

I said most ancient norse never seen anyone with dark skin tones. So again with false accusations and twisting of what I actually said.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Did I say that they had no concept of different skin tones? No.

I said most ancient norse never seen anyone with dark skin tones. So again with false accusations and twisting of what I actually said.

That is rather questionable conclusion considering how widely the Vikings travelled and how ethnically diverse they actually were themselves. But more importantly it literally doesn't matter one bit. Nor does it matter what Gygax intended or didn't intent. What matters is how it is perceived by the audience actually playing the game today.