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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8725547" data-attributes="member: 6796468">So... here's a thing I'm not really proud of, but it's a true story.When I was first creating my Aetherstorm setting as a climate change allegory, I included a way to "Deal" with gnomes. As a DM I dislike gnomes 'cause of reasons I'd rather not get into that are largely covered in other threads fairly well. So in the setting, I had the evil deity Tzernobog kill the gnomish pantheon and turn the gnomes into goblins as a result. The dwarves, who shared their lands with the gnomes ('cause the gnomish and halfling pantheons were the result of the dwarven pantheon doinking the elven pantheon and hauflin lived in elven lands) turned against their "Now Corrupted" former allies because the Trow deity had made them into something 'else'.When I was going through the entire "History and Cosmology" of the world with a potential player, she literally hung up the Discord call we were on when I got to this point and I could not figure out why. I thought maybe the call got disconnected, but she explained she was angry 'cause this part of the story was deeply antisemitic.In my ignorance, I had played into an antisemitic trope about jewish people being "Lesser" or "Wrong". I don't remember the specific details of the trope right this moment, but it was -very- unintentional.And that was a wakeup call for me. Unaware of the story or the tropes that went with it, I had absorbed this antisemitic narrative at some point in my life unthinkingly, else recreated it whole-cloth without such influence. Didn't help that I turned the gnomes into goblins which are often how jewish people are presented by antisemites. I was pretty shocked and could've gone immediately into defensiveness, like NuTSR.Instead, I apologized, changed the story, and ran with it. She still didn't want to play, because it put a bad taste in her mouth about the setting, but at least it wouldn't hurt anyone -else- in that way.Homebrew doesn't have to Hate to Hurt.</blockquote>

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