I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can’t have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered “good” in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of “oh shit wait wtf am I saying”. I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of “sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered” is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it’s high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That’s it I guess. That’s the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren’t built from around breaking into others’ homes to kill them and take their stuff.
TTRPG writers need to learn the lesson that video games learned in the 90s: the universally-acknowledged acceptable target of unlimited violence is the nazis. The D&D shorthand for this are the mortal worshippers of demons and evil gods (there’s usually at least one obvious fascist god of tyranny or something), characters that are consciously choosing to side with unfathomable cosmic evil because they’ll personally get some small benefit.
Tolkien honestly fucked up and ruined fantasy with orcs, I wish Le Guin was the defining influence
In that scenario, D&D probably still exists but is even worse because they hew closer to stuff like Conan and have all the not-even-metaphorical racism present in that. I suppose there could just as easily have been a reckoning against that racism earlier in time.
This and also the way “Bandits” are used as generically evil People You Can Always Kill
It’s incredibly disturbing. Beyond the moral aspect: it’s fucking lazy. It’s like running a modern setting and everywhere you go there’s ninjas to fight, and none of them have names or faces. Rather than making a world where different factions have different motivations, or this culture is superstitious about X because this thing happened a long time ago, it’s just “the enemy race is here, eradicate them.” Bland, repetitive campaign.
I say this loving Baldur’s Gate 3, but it was super disturbing to me that all the goblins are treated as straight up evil to the point where you’re allowed to kill goblin children without consequence.
It’s a deeply problematic thing in D&D that they’ve never really bothered too hard to deal with
Even as every other competitor completely blows past them in terms of complexity and nuance
Hell, fuckin’ Pathfinder elevated goblins to one of the playable ancestries, with the alchemist class being represented by a goblin!
Pathfinder started by giving goblins on the whole a base personality beyond “small evil thing”. It might just be “luv fire, luv pickles, 'ate dogs, 'ate 'orses, simple as”, but it’s more culture than FR has ever given them.
Well if inherently evil races aren’t real, how do you explain white people?
I’m gonna make a hotep tabletop game where the orc equivalent are yakubians.
The race trope in D&D was inherited from Tolkein’s racializations in his LOTR. To preface, I don’t care for the work nor for the author. LOTR was way before my time and I never vibed with the weird insistence from the r/fantasy crowd that I need to “like” it to get their “fantasy fan starter pack.”
Tolkien was a massive racist POS for the racializing and racial coding in his works. Orcs are, by his own admission, inspired by 19th and 20th European racial caricatures of Asian and African peoples. He sees no problem with characterizing them all as canonically irredeemable and the definition of “evil,” this coming from a clown who apparently professed to be a “Roman Catholic,” who should then know then the importance of the Christian redemption doctrine. He himself later admitted it was problematic that he antithetically made the orcs irredeemably evil when the LOTR is supposed to be a Christianity referenced work… but then did nothing about it.
Fantasy today portrays goblins and orcs and trolls and whatever races as inherently vile, down to even their physical appearance. This is a racial characterization that has absolutely no material basis in reality other than in the racist caricatures of every non Anglo-American race during Tolkein’s time which he directly lifted from in his work. Seeing a non-white person back then produced the same conditioned revulsion that fantasy today makes people feel about those “monster” races.
It’s very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkein in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving “other” peoples, simply continued it within the confines of “fictionalized” races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkein admitted).
All this would have just been a simple rant on a problematic media tradition if it isn’t now being reverse applied onto real world designated enemy groups, like how Russians are now being called “orcs.” Fantasy through this trope has basically preserved through fictionalized cryo-statis, the conviction that an entire race can be genocided so long as they look “monstrous” and act “pure evil” used at the height of 19th and 20th century settler-colonial imperialism.
Without exaggeration, I’d argue it has contributed to how easy it has been for regimes like Israel and their Western apologists to resurrect the “shut your brain off, the entire population is inherently monstrous and worth exterminating” mentality, embedded particularly in the younger generations through media consumption of the fantasy genre, by invoking atrocity propaganda (similar to how “evil” races always have the inciting incident in the first chapter/episode where they do “the bad thing” to justify their subsequent extermination by the “hero” protagonists) to justify the Palestinian genocide.
I can’t begin to describe how much it makes me want to strangle someone when I say the racial elements in DnD (etc.) are off putting and reminiscent of real life discriminatory ideas, and they respond
"What about Orcs/Goblins/Kobolds/etc. make them like black people /Jews/indigenous peoples/etc?? Sounds like you’re the real racist
"
We already have a group of semi-intelligent four-limbed upright-walking baddies you can mindlessly slaughter, they’re called undead. Works great too because the undead masses generally don’t have free will. Replace undead with robots for a sci-fi setting.
If you’re killing and plundering sapient (is that the right word?) creatures for no good reason, you’re the baddies.
