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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8722717" data-attributes="member: 18">Uhhhhh, you've absolutely been in a game where Drow were &quot;Black-skinned because they were Evil&quot; though, if you've played D&amp;D long enough (unless you got very lucky DM-wise). And functionally turning things dark-skinned because they're Evil is um... pretty bad. Pretty off. So off that even as a child in the '80s I was concerned by that sort of thing. But that was the default Drow lore for a very long time, before it gradually got dialed back (and any attempts to claim it never touched human ideas of &quot;Blackness&quot; are nuked from orbit by the covers of various 1E supplements, which TSR signed off on).What's particularly notable is that D&amp;D did &quot;Dark skin = Evil&quot; at a time when even sources it was drawing from did not. D&amp;D's Dark Elves draw from Elric and other sources, but the Melniboneans (even more directly copied in Warhammer's Dark Elves) have pale-as-hell skin, not black skin.Even Tolkien actually struggled with the evil-ness of his Orcs/Goblins, note. You often hear bollocks about how having hordes of purely-evil sentient beings is a &quot;classic fantasy trope&quot; and immune to criticism (lol) and so on, but Tolkien would definitely have been more open to discussing whether Orcs/Goblins were evil than a lot of posters, frankly. Tolkien, in his letters, tried to decide where Orcs/Goblins came from (he never came close to making up his mind - &quot;warped elves&quot; is Christopher Tolkien deciding for him), and why they were evil, and it was complex, and they weren't always monolithically evil, or even always sentient.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8722717, member: 18"] Uhhhhh, you've absolutely been in a game where Drow were "Black-skinned because they were Evil" though, if you've played D&D long enough (unless you got very lucky DM-wise). And functionally turning things dark-skinned because they're Evil is um... pretty bad. Pretty off. So off that even as a child in the '80s I was concerned by that sort of thing. But that was the default Drow lore for a very long time, before it gradually got dialed back (and any attempts to claim it never touched human ideas of "Blackness" are nuked from orbit by the covers of various 1E supplements, which TSR signed off on). What's particularly notable is that D&D did "Dark skin = Evil" at a time when even sources it was drawing from did not. D&D's Dark Elves draw from Elric and other sources, but the Melniboneans (even more directly copied in Warhammer's Dark Elves) have pale-as-hell skin, not black skin. Even Tolkien actually struggled with the evil-ness of his Orcs/Goblins, note. You often hear bollocks about how having hordes of purely-evil sentient beings is a "classic fantasy trope" and immune to criticism (lol) and so on, but Tolkien would definitely have been more open to discussing whether Orcs/Goblins were evil than a lot of posters, frankly. Tolkien, in his letters, tried to decide where Orcs/Goblins came from (he never came close to making up his mind - "warped elves" is Christopher Tolkien deciding for him), and why they were evil, and it was complex, and they weren't always monolithically evil, or even always sentient. [/QUOTE]

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