D&D 5E WotC's Jeremy Crawford on D&D Races Going Forward

On Twitter, Jeremy Crawford discussed the treatment of orcs, Vistani, drow and others in D&D, and how WotC plans to treat the idea of 'race' in D&D going forward. In recent products (Eberron and Wildemount), the mandatory evil alignment was dropped from orcs, as was the Intelligence penalty.

@ThinkingDM Look at the treatment orcs received in Eberron and Exandria. Dropped the Intelligence debuff and the evil alignment, with a more acceptable narrative. It's a start, but there's a fair argument for gutting the entire race system.

The orcs of Eberron and Wildemount reflect where our hearts are and indicate where we’re heading.

@vorpaldicepress I hate to be "that guy", but what about Drow, Vistani, and the other troublesome races and cultures in Forgotten Realms (like the Gur, another Roma-inspired race)? Things don't change over night, but are these on the radar?

The drow, Vistani, and many other folk in the game are on our radar. The same spirit that motivated our portrayal of orcs in Eberron is animating our work on all these peoples.

@MileyMan1066 Good. These problems need to be addressed. The variant features UA could have a sequel that includes notes that could rectify some of the problems and help move 5e in a better direction.

Addressing these issues is vital to us. Eberron and Wildemount are the first of multiple books that will face these issues head on and will do so from multiple angles.

@mbriddell I'm happy to hear that you are taking a serious look at this. Do you feel that you can achieve this within the context of Forgotten Realms, given how establised that world's lore is, or would you need to establish a new setting to do this?

Thankfully, the core setting of D&D is the multiverse, with its multitude of worlds. We can tell so many different stories, with different perspectives, in each world. And when we return to a world like FR, stories can evolve. In short, even the older worlds can improve.

@SlyFlourish I could see gnolls being treated differently in other worlds, particularly when they’re a playable race. The idea that they’re spawned hyenas who fed on demon-touched rotten meat feels like they’re in a different class than drow, orcs, goblins and the like. Same with minotaurs.

Internally, we feel that the gnolls in the MM are mistyped. Given their story, they should be fiends, not humanoids. In contrast, the gnolls of Eberron are humanoids, a people with moral and cultural expansiveness.

@MikeyMan1066 I agree. Any creature with the Humanoid type should have the full capacity to be any alignmnet, i.e., they should have free will and souls. Gnolls... the way they are described, do not. Having them be minor demons would clear a lot of this up.

You just described our team's perspective exactly.

As a side-note, the term 'race' is starting to fall out of favor in tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder has "ancestry", and other games use terms like "heritage"); while he doesn't comment on that specifically, he doesn't use the word 'race' and instead refers to 'folks' and 'peoples'.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Tolkien struggled with the idea of orcs, their nature and origins, and never came up with an answer that satisfied him.

Tom Shippey discusses it in The Road to Middle-Earth pgs 265-6. In The Silmarillion they are described as intially being corrupted elves. Later generations bred true "'after the manner of the children of Iluvatar', i.e sexually". In Unfinished Tales Tolkien proposes a different origin, that orcs were bred from the Druedain.

Tolkien seems to get no further than this as Shippey describes it. Shippey goes on to propose his own solution: "It would be a good solution to see the orcs as multiplying 'like flies', as if by some manufacturing process in hatcheries... maybe they 'quickened in the earth like maggots'... they would have no being of their own, 'moving when [he thinks] to move them , and if [his] thought is elsewhere, standing idle'"

 

[Doug McCrae]

Tolkien made that connection once. In a personal letter. In other letters he said they weren't based on any specific group or people.

That may be so but their appearance in The Lord of the Rings is clearly based on Asian people. See my post upthread for the relevant quotations in full. "Sallow", "swart", "slant-eyed", "squint-eyed", "bowlegged".

This needs to be considered in the context of the infamous "Mongols" letter plus Tolkien's use of accounts of historical battles such as the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (vs the Huns) as a source of inspiration for the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Siege of Rhodes (vs the Ottoman Empire) as a source for the Battle of Helm's Deep, the Italian city of Ravenna as inspiration for Minas Tirith, the Corsairs of Umbar deriving from Barbary Corsairs, the parallel between Minas Ithil/Minas Morgul and Constantinople/Istanbul, etc.

 

[TheSword]

Oh that hogwash yet again. Sorry those rumors are false. He does state that he doesn't approve of the beaked or feathered versions of the orcs but finds that the humanoid form fits much better and that perhaps some degenerate form of Elf or human should be used.

He eventually used the Elves and had them become degenerate and foul. Born fully grown from the pits where they were created

Page #19 has most of this but some doesn't appear until later. At no time does he refer to mongol or any other real world cultures.



Frankly it seems only modern readers wanting to find links to minorities find such links and one has to wonder if THAT isn't Racist.

This made up fictional race is foul.....they must be talking about this real word people! How racist!

I thought the same way at first. I felt like someone was putting words into my mouth and making me feel like a racist which I found very disturbing. Then I actually did some research.

The guy who wrote the articles explaining in detail why depictions of orcs use racist stereotypes is asian.

So by claiming as you do that people who see a link are racist themselves you are saying that an asian man criticising the way white men write stories based on racist tropes is a racist?

...He’s a racist?

You do realize how stupid it sounds? I was ashamed I ever wrote it in the first place and now wholeheartedly redact that.

 

[Mercurius]

That may be so but their appearance in The Lord of the Rings is clearly based on Asian people. See my post upthread for the relevant quotations in full. "Sallow", "swart", "slant-eyed", "squint-eyed", "bowlegged".

Tolkien was a person of his times, and almost certainly had biases that we can look back upon and unfairly judge from a contemporary vantage point. But at the very least, we should look at the broad context of his work--not just single quotes from personal letters, but multiple quotes and his entire corpus of writings. I have no doubt that there were--from modern standards--degrees of subtle racism and Eurocentric bias, but even in that regard, Tolkien himself evolved his perspective and was overall very humanistic.

Perhaps most importantly, Tolkien detested allegory. So even though there were almost definitely subtle unconscious biases in his world-building, his focus was creating within the world itself, not intentionally transposing real world ideas into fantasy. He repeatedly stated that nothing in his secondary world was meant to represent anything from the primary world. He wanted orcs to organically emerge from Middle-earth, to make sense within Middle-earth.

But I think we should really separate Tolkien from D&D, just as we should differentiate Gygax from the current milieu. Of course Tolkien was a major influence, but not only was Gygax intentionally subversive of Tolkienisms, but the game has undergone almost fifty years of development and change since then. The orcs of at least recent editions have no real connection to Asian/Mongolian people, afaict.

 

[TheSword]

Thanks for the response. In my mind, what you describe isn't a clear or meaningful connection to an ethnic group. What you describe are shared traits to various stereotypes that have been used to character different racial groups (not only Africans), but not shared traits to the actual group(s).

Meaing, the tie to the actual ethnic group is only there if we, ourselves, fuse the stereotypes to the group, and then add the extra level of saying, "because orcs share traits of a stereotype, the depiction of orcs is connected to the group that has been stereotyped in that way." What this ends up doing is subtly re-inforcing the stereotypes.

We can parse this out in a simpler way. Let's say a hypothetical real world group of some kind has been stereotyped as being really lascivious and self-indulgent. Now let's say an author has a character who is lascivious and self-indulgent. Is there any real connection of that character to the real world group? We don't know the author's intention, but based upon what we actually ca observe, no, because that person only shares traits of the stereotype, not the actual group of people (who, by the way, are comprised of individuals for whom stereotypes don't apply).

So by saying that this person depicts the real world group, we are actually (unintentionally) reinforcing the stereotype when all that is actually happening is that the characters shares traits of a stereotype, but not of the actual group.

Now there would be a tie if orcs were actually depicted in a caricaturish way of black people--such as exaggerated physical traits, cultural forms, etc--but they aren't. As far as I can tell, there are no substantial or consistent links between the depiction of orcs in D&D and any traits of black people in our world. Orcs aren't Aunt Jemima in any discernible or consistent way. So yes, there has to be some kind of "smoking gun." Otherwise we're making a big leap that creates more problems than it solves.

Of course that doesn't mean that WotC shouldn't make efforts to be mindful in how it depicts different races and creatures. I'm not opposed to the idea of a cultural consultant in the cases where a fantasy trope is clearly based upon something from the real world (e.g. Vistani/Romani).

There are real and significant problems of systemic racism and racial stereotyping in our world, that probably trickle into RPGs into various ways. And certainly WotC should do everything possible to advocate for diversity and inclusivity. But I don't think orcs are the (or a) problem.

Google led me to this article by a psychology professor, which is worth considering: No, Orcs Aren't Racist.

I read the article too. Then I realized it was written by a privelaged white man who probably isn’t the best authority on what constitutes racism or not.

Also no one is claiming that people who use orcs in the games are racist. Even in the case of people who draw inspiration for monstrous humanoids from other cultures (Japanese hobgoblins for instance).

However you take a creature originally based on a appearance which today we definitely would say is racist (least loved Mongol types).

Then add the fact that they are described as behaving in the same way that non-white cultures were stereotypically claimed to behave as a justification for killing them and taking their stuff.

Then you write adventures that involve going to those creatures lair (home), killing them and taking their stuff.

Or you try and justify it by perpetuating the myth that there are warrior races of noble savages. To try and add a positive spin on the stereotypes, which are also Victorian and earlier racist tropes.

Either way it’s not a petty picture.

 

[Doug McCrae]

we should look at the broad context of his work--not just single quotes from personal letters, but multiple quotes and his entire corpus of writings.

Yes, that's exactly what I have done, and it's clear from doing so that The Lord of the Rings is a racist work because it repeatedly makes a connection between Asian people and absolute evil. This isn't about whether Tolkien himself was racist, I can't make a judgement about that.

Perhaps most importantly, Tolkien detested allegory.

The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory, ie a long text intended to have a single meaning by the author. Whether it is or isn't an allegory is irrelevant to whether it's a racist work, because this isn't about conscious intent.

 

[TheSword]

Tolkien was a person of his times, and almost certainly had biases that we can look back upon and unfairly judge from a contemporary vantage point. But at the very least, we should look at the broad context of his work--not just single quotes from personal letters, but multiple quotes and his entire corpus of writings. I have no doubt that there were--from modern standards--degrees of subtle racism and Eurocentric bias, but even in that regard, Tolkien himself evolved his perspective and was overall very humanistic.

Perhaps most importantly, Tolkien detested allegory. So even though there were almost definitely subtle unconscious biases in his world-building, his focus was creating within the world itself, not intentionally transposing real world ideas into fantasy. He repeatedly stated that nothing in his secondary world was meant to represent anything from the primary world. He wanted orcs to organically emerge from Middle-earth, to make sense within Middle-earth.

But I think we should really separate Tolkien from D&D, just as we should differentiate Gygax from the current milieu. Of course Tolkien was a major influence, but not only was Gygax intentionally subversive of Tolkienisms, but the game has undergone almost fifty years of development and change since then. The orcs of at least recent editions have no real connection to Asian/Mongolian people, afaict.

Except the underlying assumptions are there. D&D orcs are Tolkien orcs to all intents and purposes - monolithically evil, savage, tribal, dumb but cunning, fecund, and generally dark skinned

Also yes D&D has changed, there is far better representation among the good guys. Which is awesome.

How ever the monstrous humanoids have changed little. Google hobgoblin 5e and ask yourself what stereotypes this warlike, savage, conquering, ruthless humanoid is based on.

 

[Mercurius]

I read the article too. Then I realized it was written by a privelaged white man who probably isn’t the best authority on what constitutes racism or not.

Do you apply the same criteria to the privileged white men who are saying that depictions of orcs is racist, like the twitter guy who started the kerfuffle, or Christian Hoffer, who wrote the follow-up article on comicbook.com? Or the numerous white people who say that depictions of orcs are racist? The point should be obvious: if you negate one person's view on racism because they are white, you should negate any and all white peoples' views (I'm not suggesting this is what we should do, just that your logic should be applied consistently).

 

[TheSword]

Yes, that's exactly what I have done, and it's clear from doing so that The Lord of the Rings is a racist work because it repeatedly makes a connection between Asian people and absolute evil. This isn't about whether Tolkien himself was racist, I can't make a judgement about that.
The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory, ie a long text intended to have a single meaning by the author. Whether it is or isn't an allegory is irrelevant to whether it's a racist work, because this isn't about conscious intent.

There is also the general case that nations to the east and south are evil and serve the dark lord, while those to the west are generally good. The further west the better.

[I’m waiting for someone to say no zealot like a convert]

 

[Mercurius]

Yes, that's exactly what I have done, and it's clear from doing so that The Lord of the Rings is a racist work because it repeatedly makes a connection between Asian people and absolute evil. This isn't about whether Tolkien himself was racist, I can't make a judgement about that.
The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory, ie a long text intended to have a single meaning by the author. Whether it is or isn't an allegory is irrelevant to whether it's a racist work, because this isn't about conscious intent.

Racism has levels and degrees, no? Part of the problem I see with this issue is that we're mashing everything together. Calling the LotR "a racist work" is a sloppy characterization that avoids any nuance. By that criteria, we could say that 99% of literature and art is racist. So what then?

I also wouldn't characterize orcs as "absolute evil." The question of evil in Tolkien is complex.

I also don't agree that LotR was "intended to have a single meaning" - although I may not understand what you mean by that. I do think the allegory thing is important, because it informs us on Tolkien's intention and method. At worst he was guilty of sub- or unconsciously infusing his work with his own (Eurocentric) biases, which we're all guilty of doing.