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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7619256" data-attributes="member: 4937">Certainly if I also had that background, I think I'd see why that would be your first pass understanding of the structure of D&D, but the fantasy foundations of D&D go back to a time well before Europe was a mighty colonizing power, to a time when on the contrary Europe was one of the world's cultural and technological backwaters and more often than not, it was being colonized by foreign nations (Huns, Turks, Moors, etc.).D&D's fantasy and folk roots don't start in the 18th or 19th century.  Trolls and goblins and elves and dwarves and the like didn't come out of Europe's colonial experience, but out of its dim dark prehistory.   The fantasy roots of goblins and trolls and the like aren't Europeans driving out indigenous groups in the Age of Exploration, but the brutal man versus nature fight of the European Dark Ages.  Tolkien, who popularized this sort of thing as much or more than any other, was a medievalist.  His inspiration was Beowulf and the Viking Eddas and the rest of that Northern European we are just now emerging into literacy a good 5000 years after writing was discovered literature.  The northern Europeans that believed in savage fairy people and driving them into the wild country weren't thinking about non-European peoples of which they had almost no contact.  They were thinking of their own bitter cold, inhospitable, and savage land with its long lightless nights and short growing seasons.When D&D establishes the idea of driving out monsters, and settling the land in a pastoral manner, it's entirely self-contained within European setting.   There are no non-Europeans present in that narrative, and the monsters - fairies, dragons, evil spirits, giants, restless dead - are the inhospitable wilderness and possibly other European iron age tribes.   So, I reject the assumption that D&D in its core gameplay first emerged as some sort of "colonialist narrative" and that we need to find a point in RPGs where some alternative was first introduced.   The original Blackmoor Braunstein was certainly not based on colonialist tropes, and it's slander to claim so.Has this sort of thing on occasion been transformed into a colonialist narrative?  Probably, but it's not that common.  Even writers who held at times in their life deeply racist attitudes, like Robert Howard, when they projected their own race into this fantasy setting, they projected them as the barbarians in the setting and not the civilized peoples.   The white peoples of Howard's setting were the primitive, unsophisticated ones, limited in technology, lore, commerce, and wealth.  Howard's setting isn't about white colonialism per se - it's about a yearning for that mythic primitive bygone time when supposedly Caucasians were more manly, honest, virtuous or whatever than they were now in his eyes, polluted by commerce, decadence, excessive learning, and the sort of things that Howard thought led to social and racial decline.  In other words, it's back to yearning to that just emerging from the dark ages mythic narrative.   Does this not being colonialist necessarily make it better?  No.   But there is a danger I think in seeing things too much within the lens of your own experience.  I think it bizarre to self-identify with orcs.  I don't identify you with orcs.  Why would you identify yourself in that way?  Why consciously adopt a negative stereotype?  The orcs, ogres, trolls, goblins, kobolds, and so forth were never meant to mean you.  So if you appropriate them and self-identify as them, then of course you are going to see all violence against them as some sort attack on yourself whether it is meant that way or not.  But then, you are at that point the one engaged in cultural appropriation - taking dark age fears of a different culture and reskinning them for your own purpose.   You can't blame the author for that baggage. I spent almost my entire youth playing a 1e AD&D Thief.   I probably did it because I was an adolescent and adolescents are almost always attracted to rebellion.</blockquote>

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