D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[FitzTheRuke]

I don't think every setting needs to hold every option. A curated list can be very empowering to the imagination.

 

[GungHo]

I almost think that the story of the muls is far better done with the warforged (a species unnaturally created for a specific purpose who cannot reproduce without magical assistance) because as a non-organic being they remove a lot of the ickier elements (death of the mother, forced breeding, half-breed status) but keeps the interesting parts (finding new purpose, freedom vs servitude, bigotry for being different). With that in mind, I have no problem allowing the mul to move into a more traditional species setup rather than being sentient livestock.

I can agree with this. It could have been handled better. It wasn't. I'm not saying that Tim Brown and Troy Baker intended to be offensive... though I find it hard to believe that people who were professional authors in 1991 who had been working in the business since the 80s would not understand the very obvious connotations of the words they chose.

Rikus, the guy from the Prism Penthad book, is a Mul and the guy who ends up killing both Kalak, the Sorcerer-King of Tyr, and Borys, the Dragon.

To be clear, I read the books when they were published.

 

[Silam]

Throwing a hot take out there… I find that eliminating the half-races / half-breeds / half-species / whatever you want to call it, from 5e 2024 is pretty racist…

As if people with mixed ancestry didn’t exist.

I have mixed ancestry IRL and I am proud of it.

Has there been abuses related to this? Yes of course. Has there been mixed ancestry offspring who were the result of a white slavemaster raping their black slaves? Yes, of course.

But the United States’ troubled past is not a reason to shove the reality of mixed ancestry under the rug, and in doing so make all of us feel invisible.

This rant is not about Dark Sun, more about 5e 2024 and the unintended consequences of trying to be too politically correct… to the point where it has the opposite effect.

But anyhow… it is what it is. Life goes on.

 

[Necropolitan]

I don't think the depiction of Muls is a problem.

Is it an unjust and horrific situation in-universe? Absolutely, no debating that.

But it's not harmful in the real world and fits Dark Sun.

 

[Remathilis]

Throwing a hot take out there… I find that eliminating the half-races / half-breeds / half-species / whatever you want to call it, from 5e 2024 is pretty racist…

As if people with mixed ancestry didn’t exist.

I have mixed ancestry IRL and I am proud of it.

Has there been abuses related to this? Yes of course. Has there been mixed ancestry offspring who were the result of a white slavemaster raping their black slaves? Yes, of course.

But the United States’ troubled past is not a reason to shove the reality of mixed ancestry under the rug, and in doing so make all of us feel invisible.

This rant is not about Dark Sun, more about 5e 2024 and the unintended consequences of trying to be too politically correct… to the point where it has the opposite effect.

But anyhow… it is what it is. Life goes on.

They should have put every possible combination of the ten PHB species in the PHB. All 45 combinations. 55 different species statblocks isn't too much

 

[Libertad]

Were they?

I'm not saying they weren't, but what's the position here, that they were explicitly and/or obviously based on say, multi-level racist depictions of, for example, Pygmy ethnic groups in Africa (surprisingly Pygmy is still the correct overarching term)? That's a case where local non-Pygmy African ethnic groups (who were often in conflict with the Pygmies) lied racist-ly to the Western colonizers that the Pygmies were cannibals (and also assigned various bad behaviours to them), and the colonizers gleefully and with their own layer of racism, spread that already-racist lie around the world. But is there some specific reason to believe that the halfling cannibals were based on that?

But if the suggestion is merely that if a group is both non-agrarian and cannibal (as some groups indisputably have been, in many different ways), and that that's inherently "racist" (against whom?) to portray in D&D, that would seem like a perhaps untenable position, because historically countless groups have met those criteria (of many ethnicities including "white" ones). Especially if the only connection to Pygmy tribes is "well halflings are short too innit", that might seem to some to be, I dunno, a stretch. Presumably not that though?

AD&D (and to some extent 3E and later) never ceases to amaze me with bizarre racist tropes, so I wouldn't be shocked if they're full-on based on some portrayal of some ethnic group and I just wasn't aware of it.

There was a recent report by the United Nations that touched upon this subject, referred to in the report as "forest peoples of Central Africa." Generally speaking they weren't fond of the term "pygmy," preferring instead to be referred to by their specific ethnicity.

Pygmies are distributed discontinuously across nine different African countries Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Zaire, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Congo and live in innumerable distinct ethnic groups that are separated by geography, language, customs and technology. The one characteristic that is common to them all, regardless of their location or degree of acculturation, is their disdain for the term "pygmy". Without exception, they prefer to be called by their appropriate ethnic name, such as Mbuti, Efe, Aka, Asua, and consider the term "pygmy" as pejorative.

Your linked Wikipedia source also points out that the disdain, using the above as a source:

Dembner (1996) reported a universal "disdain for the term 'pygmy'" among the Pygmy peoples of Central Africa: the term is considered a pejorative, and people prefer to be referred to by the name of their respective ethnic or tribal groups, such as Bayaka, Mbuti and Twa.<a href="African Pygmies - Wikipedia"><span>[</span>2<span>]</span></a> There is no clear replacement for the term "Pygmy" in reference to the umbrella group. A descriptive term that has seen some use since the 2000s is "Central African foragers".

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Your linked Wikipedia source also points out that the disdain, using the above as a source:

Yup but as it says: "There is no clear replacement for the term "Pygmy" in reference to the umbrella group." - hopefully one is generally adopted in the next few years but I doubt it will be "Central African Foragers" as that's just not accurate. Specific ethnicity obviously wouldn't help here as we're discussing broad colonial-derived racial stereotypes which isn't specific to individual ethnicities.

 

[Silam]

They should have put every possible combination of the ten PHB species in the PHB. All 45 combinations. 55 different species statblocks isn't too much

Since 5e 2024 moves most benefits from race/species to backgrounds (which I don’t mind… it’s fine…) it would actually have been somewhat trivial to let any species mix with any other. Pick one ability from one specie and another ability from the other specie, pretty much. Little bit of a balancing act, but nowhere near as difficult as the balancing of multi-classing, so whatever… there’s no need to spell out every single permutation.

 

[Libertad]

Yup but as it says: "There is no clear replacement for the term "Pygmy" in reference to the umbrella group." - hopefully one is generally adopted in the next few years but I doubt it will be "Central African Foragers" as that's just not accurate. Specific ethnicity obviously wouldn't help here as we're discussing broad colonial-derived racial stereotypes which isn't specific to individual ethnicities.

I disagree, in that the term's "correctness" isn't objective if the people it's being used to describe wholesale reject it. In a discussion regarding racist portrayals and terms, I believe that it's important to highlight the viewpoints of those who will be most affected. In this case, the use of "pygmy" to describe fantasy races.

Central African Foragers is definitely wordier, but if anything this ties into how the all-encompassing umbrella of how pygmy's application for "short dark-skinned hunter-gatherer cannibals" or outright monsters (vegepygmy's still used for the monster of the same name by WotC in publications) is a trope that we should do away with, which is often what I see pygmy used for in this context. Which I can understand is what you're highlighting. So apologies if it seems like I'm quibbling; I just wanted to highlight to other readers that the term's "correctness" isn't an accepted one among the people it's used to describe.

 

[Remathilis]

Since 5e 2024 moves most benefits from race/species to backgrounds (which I don’t mind… it’s fine…) it would actually have been somewhat trivial to let any species mix with any other. Pick one ability from one specie and another ability from the other specie, pretty much. Little bit of a balancing act, but nowhere near as difficult as the balancing of multi-classing, so whatever… there’s no need to spell out every single permutation.

My issue would be that any system of mix and match is going to create better choices than others, and much like how multiclassing allows players to chimera powerful options, I wouldn't want everyone to be a hybrid species because it's better/more flexible than regular species (and everyone starts running Dragonborn/gnomes because they get the best resistances, for example).