These player races get the bulk of the negative aspects of the Half Human Hybrid, Half Breed Discrimination, Maligned Mixed Race Marriage, and parts of That’s Not My Child.
#BIRTHRIGHT CAMPAIGN SETTING RACES TV#
For ease of examination, I will draw on TV Tropes for this. With the Half and Lineage player races typified by the Half Elf, Half Orc, Aasimar, and Tiefling, we see a lot of things come into play. This was characterized best in the debacle that was Maztica in 2nd Edition AD&D. All of this bled into D&D’s tradition of exoticism, racism, and problematic practices. The fantasy media of the era wasn’t particularly forward thinking or diverse in positive ways either. Gygax himself was a biological determinist and essentialist. There were a lot of bad ideas around how races (being IRL people from different ethnic groups) “should” or “could” coexist. The USA in the 1970s was still in turmoil from the Civil Rights Movement. This point of view is not surprising given the background that D&D emerged from. I can sum a lot of the narrative design and world build up as “If they don’t look like us, we either want to have sex with them or kill them.” Where it flashes up in its most obvious forms are in how the game instructs players and DM’s to treat the “half” races (specifically Half Elves and Half Orcs), how POC are depicted and treated, and in how “monstrous” races are all but dismissed as “people” or being part of the world. Unfortunately, it was a template of unchecked, and unquestioned colonialism and the repetition of racism based narratives.
And yes, I’m picking on D&D in this, because it set the pattern.ĭ&D set a template that has been relentlessly reproduced by fantasy RPGs right into the modern era. So, mid-mutter, Sammy Davis Jr came into the set, and I heard his iconic line of “Integration! Integration!” So let’s talk decolonization and integration.
#BIRTHRIGHT CAMPAIGN SETTING RACES PDF#
This had been set off by reading through my shiny new pdf copy of Tiny Dungeon 2e, where I was simultaneously elated at the variety of player races and depressed by the stereotypes applied. I was muttering to myself about Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy games and how they treat both POC and non-humans as being less dimensional and nuanced. So, I was driving home and tossed in The Rat Pack Live at the Sands for the ride.
0 kommentar(er)
