So, I was driving home and tossed in The Rat Pack Live at the Sands for the ride. 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. 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. 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. And yes, I’m picking on D&D in this, because it set the pattern.
The Issues
D&D set a template that has been relentlessly reproduced by fantasy RPGs right into the modern era. Unfortunately, it was a template of unchecked, and unquestioned colonialism and the repetition of racism based narratives. 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. 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.”
This point of view is not surprising given the background that D&D emerged from. The USA in the 1970s was still in turmoil from the Civil Rights Movement. There were a lot of bad ideas around how races (being IRL people from different ethnic groups) “should” or “could” coexist. Gygax himself was a biological determinist and essentialist. The fantasy media of the era wasn’t particularly forward thinking or diverse in positive ways either. All of this bled into D&D’s tradition of exoticism, racism, and problematic practices. This was characterized best in the debacle that was Maztica in 2nd Edition AD&D. [1]
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. For ease of examination, I will draw on TV Tropes for this. 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. Aasimars are the exception, because they’re traditionally planar touched from the outer (read: heavenly) planes, and therefore inherently acceptable/desirable. They’re not untouched by racism though, since being a “model minority” carries a host of its own issues.
The Half Orc, Half Elf, and Tiefling however, are a lot of One Drop Rule and discrimination at work, reflective of a simplistic and inaccurate view of mixed relations. It’s based on the ideology of American racism and the rationalization of segregation. That being that groups shouldn’t mix because the children of such mixing will (not might be, but will) be rejected by both groups and forced into lives on the fringes of everything. They ascribe half Orcs the negative stereotyped features of POC; they’re brutish, incapable of having or enjoying high culture, and violent by nature. Half Elves are the exotic, sexualized Mulattos of the game, there to be sexually desired and act as diplomats because of their inherent charisma. Both are denied “normal” lives, both are rejected by both sides of their families. Neither reflects what would, in a world with many such hybrids and a long history of it, be a normalized and routine part of any culture where people from different groups mix and mingle. Why? Because D&D worlds are segregated ones.
Tieflings offer a different issue. They’re not a hybrid, but rather a bloodline that traces their lineage to an Abyssal or Infernal pact made by a distant ancestor. They’re under a “Sins of the Father” sort of problem, and again, don’t reflect a world where their presence and background would have been normalized long ago. Yes, demons and devils are generally considered to be bad, and are, inarguably, evil. Tieflings however, are not. Neither are Warlocks (probably the most common source of Tiefling bloodlines) vilified. It’s discrimination for the sake of discrimination, arguably the weakest tool for creating conflict.
Monster races are thoroughly othered and denied all but the least rudimentary integration with the bulk of worlds in D&D, and definitely in its core lore. Even when they’re described as social, intelligent, and prone to creating large settlements, they are treated as unwanted animals to be cleared from the land to expand
(normally) human lands. Even where they aren’t coded as POC, the colonialist aspects of this are writ large, and hark back to the clearances of indigenous peoples from their lands by force that are still largely celebrated in the west. Notable examples of this are Orcs, Hobgoblins, Goblins, and Lizardfolk. In the essentialist framing of D&D, these races are not “people”, but “monsters”, and are inherently dangerous/evil, and can be killed without thought or hesitation to claim their treasures, lands, and resources.
POC in D&D suffer several issues. Stereotypical portrayals based in problematic pulp literature roots not being the least of them. Another is that their regions and areas are seldom developed any of the interest, vigour, or effort seen in the areas that are European coded. Continued use of outdated and offensive terminology, in particular with Asian coded source books being released as part of the “Oriental Adventures” line being the best example. In broad terms, POC in D&D, and games patterned on it, are either there as background figures waiting for rescue led by the European coded peoples, palette swapped European coded peoples, or presented in a stereotypical manner that was problematic in the 1990s.
Potential Solution
A solid solution to this state of affairs is decolonization and integration.
Decolonization is a difficult process in the real world, but less so in fictional worlds. The first step is to acknowledge, like anime, manga, and some forward thinking RPGs did ages ago, that fantasy worlds are not just the real world European middle ages, but with magic and monsters. That is a subgenre of fantasy RPGs, but that’s not what’s being discussed here. This small step is in reality leap forwards for games built on the D&D pattern. Fantasy worlds are not tied to the “real world” in terms of history, technology, or culture. Yes, I realize that nothing comes from a vacuum, and that coding is inevitable in most cases, but that doesn’t mean that things need to be slavishly reproduced to maintain a facade of authenticity.
The first big step is to stop presenting POC in the context of being background characters in their own lands. I’ve talked about this before, and most extensively in my review of Tomb of Annihilation. [2] POC need to be shown as active and dynamic, and the lands they’re in, and their cultures, need to be developed more and with better effort. Why? Because non-POC often lack the anchoring to the concepts and aspects of POC coded cultures; and defaulting to “hilarious” but racist accents and depictions is not the way forwards. To its credit, D&D has come forward a long way in the art department, but continues to lag in the areas of world building to support said art. Tethyr, Turmish, and Chult being recent examples. A further step here is to move away from the need to make POC in the game “historically accurate” and let them be as fantasy-powerful and active as the European coded people.
The next step in decolonization is to cease othering “monster” races, better described perhaps as monsterfolk. If players and dungeon masters can tell the difference between the standard player races when they appear in the monster manual and players handbook, or discern that there’s a difference between evil human bandits and pirates and not-evil humans who are not bandits and pirates, there’s no reason they can’t extend that monsterfolk. Except that the books train them to not to. Evil human cultists living in squalor and being obscene? Clearly an aberration from normal society. Goblins or Orcs living in squalor and being obscene? Normal and how they are because they’re Goblins and Orcs. That last example has some roots in racist depictions and narratives of POC that were used as rationalizations for colonialism.
A further step in decolonization is the abandonment of racist narratives and segregationist ideology around how different populations interact. In most cases in D&D fantasy worlds, we’re not talking about populations that were thrown together under horrible circumstances or just recently. In the majority, we’re talking about populations that have been living around each other for millennia. Now, I’m not saying it should all a peaceful, hug a rainbow love fest. What I am saying is that population mixing is a normal event, doesn’t have to be a violent one (and often isn’t), and that the cultures involved would develop practices around it. And those practices aren’t, by default, “reject the child”.
On into integration, there’s a lot of map work to be done. D&D and worlds that pattern themselves on it are human-centric in the extreme when it comes to maps. The political and territory maps are often the worst for it, with non-human lands of all stripes being ignored. Areas they occupy are usually just labeled like empty wilderness. These lands need to be delineated and described in the same detail as the lands they exist near. This moves to normalize them and is probably the easiest step in integration. A harder step is establishing relationships with the peoples around these spaces that don’t default to “they hate each other and attack each other on site”. That’s lazy and boring. Remember that if players and DMs can tell the difference between villainous humans and non-villainous humans, they can do the same with Orcs and Goblins.
Combining decolonization and integration is making monsterfolk cultures into functional ones. The bulk of them follow a simple pattern: they’re evil, rely on slaves, live in horrid squalor or corrupting opulence, follow an unbalanced and evil deity, and have cultural practices that are so self destructive that they would be unsustainable. A lot of this has some deep roots in how real world POC cultures were depicted in as a way to dehumanize them and rationalize cruel treatment, dishonest trade, forced migration, and extermination. So developing this away from that model is vital.
With the Half and Lineage races, the first step to decolonization and integration is to STOP CALLING THEM HALF-WHATEVER. The Tiefling, Aasimar, Genasi, Ogrillion, Orogs, Genasi and even Mul got names. A further step would be to move to a broader model of hybridization possibilities instead of remaining stuck in the Gygaxian blandness of Human/Elf and Human/Orc pairings. This is something I’ve touched on before, and you can get into those Punnett Squares there. [3] But the point is that “half-x” is doing no one any favours at this late date. With these groups, as mentioned in the issues part of the post, the integration point is that they aren’t new or unusual to the populations they’re in for the overwhelming majority of circumstances. Elves living near humans would have practices for raising mixed children, and vice versa. Remember mixed people aren’t “torn” between their ancestral lines by default; that’s just not how it works. Nor are they “natural diplomats” between them. That’s all old and racist narrative baggage. Figure out how the relevant populations handle mixed relationships and the children that can result from them.
Final Thoughts
This isn’t an exhaustive work by a longshot. This post is just a framework on how to remove some of the oldest, most resilient, issues from D&D and worlds and games based on their model. It doesn’t go deep into how the fluff and baked in lore does a lot of the heavy lifting for framing how different races are or what classes they’re best matched up with. It doesn’t go into the conflation of biological traits (seeing at night, poison resistance etc…) and cultural practices (weapons training, knowledge of stonework, a tendency to hold grudges) or how that reinforces the idea that biological determinism is a thing. Nor does it touch on the problematic copy-pasting of live, real world religions into the game where they’re treated like made up fantasy ones.
What this post is, and does, is call for better world building. To start the process at the point of entry that most have to the game, with characters, maps, and the descriptions of the cultures of these worlds. We live in an era where fantasy is tearing away from Tolkien, Leiber, and Gygax’s concepts and their limitations. So it’s not unreasonable to, canonically, move past them in the world’s largest and most famous tabletop RPG. Not just that, but it’s vital that we do, because D&D is very much an influence in fantasy, and the longer it drags its feet on change, the harder things will be when it comes. For more thoughts on decolonization, check out my post on Decolonizing Magic. [4]
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