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<blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8336223" data-attributes="member: 7030755">The use of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Burnett-Tylor#ref81986" target="_blank">primitive culture</a> has been used from the nineteenth century to the present day to justify colonial appropriations.&nbsp; It is inherently judgmental and used to assert the intellectual superiority of the West (in which technological advancement was associated with the concept of &quot;Civilization&quot;).&nbsp; It treats contemporary people as if they were in the &quot;stone age,&quot; and thus relics of a different era, minimizing their knowledges and world views. Until the mid 20th century (at best), the &quot;primitivism&quot; of groups was thought to be biologically determined.There are mountains of research dedicated to tracing this history and its relation to European colonialism.&nbsp; Something I said upthread, is that one can be aware of this intellectual history and still engage with creative art that makes use of it, dnd included.&nbsp; But I will say that it is frustrating when you bring it up, either just to note it or deal with it in the game in some productive way, only for it to be immediately dismissed as a non-existent problem.With regards to CM, for an author to try to write an adventure for mass audience that presents these issues in a way that is different than is typical, only for the editor to come back in and a) add language that the author considers problematic (&quot;primitive&quot;) b) remove a faction of good-aligned humanoids and c) make the adventure all about killing the inherently evil-aligned humanoids must be extremely frustrating and feel very disrespectful (and incidentally it's bad design, since it seems to have turned an adventure with multiple paths and multiple factions into a linear combat fest).</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Malmuria, post: 8336223, member: 7030755"] The use of [URL='https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Burnett-Tylor#ref81986']primitive culture[/URL] has been used from the nineteenth century to the present day to justify colonial appropriations. It is inherently judgmental and used to assert the intellectual superiority of the West (in which technological advancement was associated with the concept of "Civilization"). It treats contemporary people as if they were in the "stone age," and thus relics of a different era, minimizing their knowledges and world views. Until the mid 20th century (at best), the "primitivism" of groups was thought to be biologically determined. There are [B]mountains[/B] of research dedicated to tracing this history and its relation to European colonialism. Something I said upthread, is that one can be aware of this intellectual history and still engage with creative art that makes use of it, dnd included. But I will say that it is frustrating when you bring it up, either just to note it or deal with it in the game in some productive way, only for it to be immediately dismissed as a non-existent problem. With regards to CM, for an author to try to write an adventure for mass audience that presents these issues in a way that is different than is typical, only for the editor to come back in and a) add language that the author considers problematic ("primitive") b) remove a faction of good-aligned humanoids and c) make the adventure all about killing the inherently evil-aligned humanoids must be extremely frustrating and feel very disrespectful (and incidentally it's bad design, since it seems to have turned an adventure with multiple paths and multiple factions into a linear combat fest). [/QUOTE]

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