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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 8022214" data-attributes="member: 22779">Good questions, and, I'm sorry but, it's a long thread, and you made some really great points, so this is going to be a rather long post.Actually, I think you largely answered your own question with this:We don't really have to be terribly concerned about other races and whatnot because, well, no one is complaining about them.  If we change orcs and people are happy, then job done.  If we change orcs and then people move on to goblins, well, we can deal with that then.  I don't see why we need to carve out one answer to rule them all forevermore right now.  Let's just deal with what's the problem right now.Let's be fair here.  The non-humans are caricatures.  They aren't meant to be fully fleshed out.  They are simply conceits in a story.  And, really, so much of those conceits are grounded in people's own experiences and biases.  I mean, is it really terribly hard to believe that an upper class English professor at Oxford, writing in the 1930's might hold a few ideas that are less than socially aware by today's standards?  No one is accusing Tolkien of being a raging bigot writing KKK screeds.  Of course not.  What is being said is that because we are holding onto concepts that were written at that point in time, perhaps they aren't quite as socially conscious as they could be.  Which brings me to Gygax: Again, here we've got someone, Gygax, who is writing as fast as his chubby little fingers can type to get a game out the door to meet this massive groundswell of demand.  He's grabbing everything he can as fast as he can and stuffing it between the covers of books.  In the early 1970's.  Again, it's not really too much of a stretch, given the source material, to say that maybe, just maybe, the odd bit that was just a smidgeon culturally insensitive snuck into the game.  I mean, come on, it was the 1970's, inclusiveness, cultural awareness and the like wasn't even on most people's radars at all.  Worrying about colonialist biases in a game wasn't a concern then.  Again, no one is accusing Gygax of being a raging bigot.  He wasn't.  And no one is saying that he was or that his writing was.  But, again, it's not really a stretch to think that a writer, pulling from pulp genre fiction from the previous 50 years, writing in the 1970's maybe wasn't quite as culturally sensitive as he could have been.  Is it?However, now, we have the benefit of forty or fifty years of the Civil rights movement and our views of history have changed.  And they will continue to change.  But, right now, we know that some of these elements are problematic for some people.  So, yeah, cut out the problematic bits and see what's left over.  Present orcs in official books in many different lights - good, bad, and in between.  Look, here is a link to a Greyhawk wiki on orcs:  <a href="https://greyhawk.fandom.com/wiki/Orc" target="_blank">Orc</a>  This is a good example of what NOT to do.  This is pretty bad.  But, here is a different wiki article:  <a href="https://greyhawkonline.com/greyhawkwiki/index.php?title=Orc" target="_blank">Orc - Greyhawk Wiki</a>  Now, there are still some problematic bits, but, that's a HELL of a lot better than the first one.</blockquote>

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