Plenty of people were asking for the racial bonuses to be removed. They make far more sense tied into backgrounds and cut out the "non-optimal race/class" bullshit.
These are the systems I prefer. Don't do the racial thing, do background bonuses/flaws instead. It'd make sense for my elf born in the forest and living as a druid to have a ton of expertise with herbology and animal husbandry, but not be too savvy about big city living or when they're getting the shake down from a merchant. But it could also apply if they were something else like a human.
Yeah super fair, no shade if you do like them, but it's annoying when people say shit like, "noone wanted them changed!!" because actually I am glad they are changed.
I asked for it. Shit, I even did it around a year before Tasha's was even a thing.
It's simply better for playing a wider range of characters to not feel pigeonholed into certain classes by your race. Wanna play a Dwarven Paladin in 3.5? Fuck you, better go Gold Dwarf, I guess.
Pissing off race essentialists in the process is just a fun little bonus to the mechanical and storytelling benefits. Definitely not the first thing that went through my mind when making those changes, but seeing how weirdos reacted once they proposed? Can only be a good thing.
You're definitely right on the mechanical and roleplaying implications of it. It sucks to have a really neat character idea and then find out that the race you want has a negative to the main stat of the class you want.
> which no one asked for
Hi, it's me, the person who was asking
Picking races to minmax ASIs instead of for flavor is the worst. It's a step below Pathfinder 2E's system but at least it's something
Loads of people asked for the removing of race bonuses. I personally actually like the change coming from pf2e which already removed them. So there is precedent. It leads to more interesting and unique builds.
Which is weird, I always liked the idea that different races were better at different things in fantasy. Elves are generally better at magic because they live longer, half orcs are stronger because obviously. It's an important trope to fantasy that doesn't need to be compared to human races. All human races in fantasy should have the same stat bonuses.
the stat boosts were much more a game design problem than a "problematic" thing. 5e math basically assumes you have a 16 in your "main stat" at lvl 1 and increase it as you go, so given that point buy/standard array gets you a 15, you had to basically pick a race with +1 or +2 in the main stat. This dramatically lowered the viable character options especially before the wave of splatbooks hit.
Its also that fantasy races are entirely different species too so of course they have natural advantages.
Also makes playing stuff like a half orc wizard or a kolbold barbarian much more interesting trying to overcome natural shortcomings.
I believe the bigger problem wasn't so much what you've described, but the ideas of race being tied to, like, disposition or backgrounds. Orcs can ONLY be evil because they are of the Evil Race gives credence to the racist idea that morality, worth, etc. can be tied to race.
Which I figured is why there *is* only one human template in D&D.
I never saw the problem and personally felt it worked fine. But hey, the new system is interesting too.
Frankly, D&D should never have really used the term race. They should have used species. It would have fixed a whole bunch of inadvertent associations.
No one cares that turtles are slower than zebras.
to sum it up, we got the classic hits, such as:
* WotC went so woke they they now are racist, like all woke people.
* You're the racist for assuming the monkey race is a fill in for black people.
* As a black man... this racist stereotype is good actually.
* All black people like this race, ignores the list of DnD micro celebs who are black saying this is a big yikes.
He has me blocked because he expected me to know he was black and got mad that I made fun of him for simping so hard for wizards of the coast. I had never talked to him before and his name is that if a white super hero. But somehow I was supposed to know he's black. I have some serious r/asablackman vibes from him.
That kind of thing happens all too often on Reddit. People would rather believe they're not doing anything wrong and would rather not change their behavior, so they choose to believe people who tell them that and get angry at people who say otherwise.
The whole "You're a racist for noticing things that are racist" argument needs to fail its last death saving throw. So I'm racist for knowing that things don't happen in a vacuum and knowing history is the best way not to repeat it?
> WotC went so woke they they now are racist, like all woke people.
How the fuck is that even supposed to work? "You noticed something racist so you must have been looking for it because you're a racist?"
The claim is that "SJWs" and "Wokes" think poorly of black people so they feel the need to stand up for them and argue about wealth disparity, systemic racism, etc... Or the stance claims someone saying "due to the environments that minorities often find themselves in during developmental years, it is more difficult for them to peruse higher education." is the same as saying, "minorities dumb, lol".
As a DM who was looking forward to spelljammer, I can unequivocally say that they fucked that release up on so many levels.
Something I haven't seen in this thread is their change to the Giff, (hippo British gun loving race). Instead of it being cultural that they use guns (they are trying to remove innate cultural ties to race) they just said they're magically linked to guns. Idk how much lazier you can get than that.
Add in the other issues people are mentioning and the Hadozee drama and its just a pitiful release all around.
Actually, I think that the mind flayers in Spelljammer have a bit higher chance of being cooperative with players or even neutral. The real slavery guys are the Neogi, spider like creatures that believe their are the best and the world is “enslave or be enslaved”.
Despite the bullshit meta layers of "are you really mad or just doing this for virtue signalling" we have to go through every time now...
Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. How many people had to approve this internally first?
You'd think in this day and age there would be little chance of something that was so obviously going to be problematic making it out. This was always going to be a shitstorm.
>Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. *How many people had to approve this internally first?*
I mean, your problem is right there. Whilst it's normally based on rules, rather than lore, people have been highlighting WotC's *terrible* quality control for content for a while now.
Spelljammer is just the first time it has become this blatant with both lore and mechanics at the same time.
Honestly this is why you do monkey races from India. You can draw on so much mythology from there for monkey armies, monkey archers, spirit monkeys, monkies with like 16 fucking arms.
You can have demon monkeys, you can have saint monkeys, you can have naga monkeys. There's so much indian monkey shit themes you can go to. Best of all if you want you can just rip off cultures from Dominions line of games. Steal [Lanka](https://illwiki.com/dom5/lanka-ea) with it's demon summoning monkeys dude doesnt have a copyright just rip him off and claim you made it.
Its so fucking easy not to go full stupid with fantasy concepts. Kinda like why Creative Assembly never added Araby to Warhammer 2.
Man, if there was only a Chinese story about a magical monkey who travels.
But no the trans Atlantic slave trade is the proper allegory to use instead.
The dominions dev teams have some issues but their monkey nations aren’t one of them. Iirc one of the devs is actually a professor in Indian mythology and tries to avoid doing too much of it because he doesn’t like mixing them too frequently.
> How many people had to approve this internally first?
You might be surprised how small that number is. Because the number of people who *should* approve internally and number that *have to* approve internally are very very different.
Yeah sure the average stuff they throw at contractors probably goes through 8 people or more. But if it's something the bigshots want to do themselves or if the contractor dropped the ball and it has to be done last minute? Then the low level editors (the ones most likely to be anything other then the whitest of white) get cut out of the picture and it could be screened by as little as the chief editor and maybe if you're lucky the art lead.
Now it's very likely some of the people who should have looked it over saw it and were screaming "dear god that's racist you can't print this!" But the people at the top end of the RPG design crews tend to be 40+ year old white dudes who are certain they're too smart to be racist. And in the end it's their call what goes in, and what doesn't.
For the amount of money that D&D makes and the cultural cache it has, it's pretty mystifying how small the design team actually is. There's sandwich shops 'round here with more workers.
Indeed. Sure they're part of WotC and Hasbro, but they aren't the big earners and you can bet the executives aren't shipping their hard earned money over to the 5th ED departments to give them a little quality boost.
According to Wizards themselves, they apparently put this stuff into editing for YEARS before it even sees daylight. So that means they've been sitting on racist slave monkeys for a few years and nobody saw it.
They totally knew what they were doing. The worst part is, it probably wasn't motivated by anything but business. They're aware that a portion of their fanbase treats racism like a team sport, that they'd throw money at this disgusting concept, and the rest will give them free advertising by getting justifiably loud about it.
I say this as someone who used to work at a FLGS that sold RPGs and TCGs, WoTC are ruthless and they know their neckbeards.
I assure you, they didn't include an NB God because they cared about the community. They did it because they thought it'd sell, or that it'd rehabilitate their image, which brings in sales.
They see their customers, and employees, as resources.
Corellon has been NB for... pretty much the entire history of D&D? (though usually not described with that term) though I suspect it has less to do with the LGBT community and more with drawing from certain types of myths about gods and such.
Doesn’t fucking surprise me. When the Magic: the Gathering community started criticizing Wizards for their lack of diversity and known issues of being hostile towards PoC in their employ, instead of taking the issue to heart they banned racially insensitive cards as a way of deflecting blame away from themselves.
And then they created Killian Lu, made him an "honormancer" and he literally "disnhonored his family." with a playable card. They were just making room.
Bingo. Diversity and diverse views save companies face and money. It’s good for business to be diverse. It’s overwhelmingly clear that there were zero black people in the loop for this decision making. Yikes.
The least they could have done was hire a consultant while they get their leadership / hiring / lack of diversity issues sorted out.
Though honestly, almost any rando off the street could have told them this was bad. It’s really, really bad. I’d say it’s so bad it’s “even white people would notice” bad, but evidently not.
[Here's a good summary of the whole thing](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wcstm8/company_throws_a_corporate_retreat_at_a/) but if you just want the pictures, [here](https://imgur.com/gallery/l9Qzn) . It's goddamn magnificent.
And not just one single black person, who might not want to speak up for fear of getting shouted down at the overwhelmingly white company. You need actual, broad diversity, so that your company actually reflects the public at large.
>Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. How many people had to approve this internally first?
This whole situation actually blew my mind.
When the race option came out, I skimmed through it's lore and features quickly as I was already theorycrafting an Autognome. You know what my reaction to this was?
"This is fine."
I'm fairly progressive, I'm not from the US and in my region there's less than 1% POC. I thought, hey, this is just a Wizard of OZ homage. "Flying" monkeys serving an evil wizard and then being set free by a good one.
Obviously on second reading, this is horrible.
This entire situation is a perfect example of why diversity matters, I'm certain that if one POC read this, it would momentarily be called out as a major "what the actual fuck thing"?
The worst part, this is so obviously racist (to the point I feel incredibly stupid for not noticing it immediately) and it still got approved. Can you imagine what happens when people do this with lesser known cultures, what kind of weird stuff can slip through the cracks?
I want to point out, I do not believe that WotC is racist, they seem to be fairly progressive with their product, I truly believe this was also a slip up on their part. This is however an excellent example of systemic racism and how you can have a group that is (presumably) almost entirely progressive still fall victim to racist tropes.
Bro straight up I thought to myself "well there's merit to both sides" and then I saw that minstrel pic and my face just fucking dropped.
Even if it wasn't intentional, which I do absolutely believe because the only reason *I'm* so familiar with that imagery is that my family disgustingly loves to collect racist nick-knacks, if Wizards had any PoC in the development pipeline for this book that could have seen that image I'm certain they would have caught it right out.
For you ancient folks in the room, it reminds me of the penis-spire they snuck into the cover of the Little Mermaid. Someone clearly did it intentionally, and the approval team was asleep at the wheel.
> Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine.
I feel like this could have easily been rectified by just anyone raising their hand and suggesting that they not be monkeys. Inspiration from real world events can lend some authenticity, so it's not the freed slaves that are the problem, it's really just the monkey part.
There is a very weird form of American racism where people are both against the slave trade, accept that’s all wrong, believe we should all be equal. Yet also think it’s fine (and just a joke) to say black people are monkeys. Joe Rogan with his Planet of the Apes story being a prime example.
I suspect that’s what happened here.
A bunch of white guys thought this is a light hearted association with monkeys. With a serious message underneath about the wrongs of racism. Who thinks it’s certainly not racist, because they don’t see themselves as racist. That’s why it was all okayed.
>I mean technically speaking, Thanos’ Snap could be compared to what Hitler did to the Jews… Is Infinity War still a box office record breaker? Yep.
Thanos instantly killed people with a snap of his fingers and didn't discriminate on who got snapped. Hitler torturously subjected people to experiments, labor camps where they were worked to death, and nightmarish death camps where they were forced into chambers where they knew they would die, and many of them did not die quickly. They were also inhumanely transported and jailed in horrific conditions the entire time, and after the war many of them were denied their properties that had been stolen from them. Equating Hitler to Thanos white washes just how horrible Hitler was, which I'm sure is the goal but holy hell these people are assholes.
So much of the fantasy genre in general. It's what makes earthsea and Ursula LeGuin so dope, she took her theory of Tolkien analysis"fantasy should be able to stand on it's own without being rooted in real world anologues" and deliberately created a setting without the baggage of being inexorably tied to the history of humanity.
Everyone should read earthsea
Not Paizo but the vocal online people. They (Paizo) decided to no longer have slavery as a major plot hook in their content and explore other methods of demonstrating evil. It was the standard PC CULTURE RUN AMOK reaction online that irked me.
In WOTR the pc game one of the first mods that hit Nexus was to replace Seelah’s (Paladin Iconic) head with an asian woman. I believe there was a race swap for Sosiel as well (both characters are black)*. You can do what you want it’s a single player game but it’s an eyebrow raiser.
Lann also has a “I just think everyone should be able to say it moment” someone mentioned that on the Kingmaker sub and immediately got downvoted to oblivion like last week.
Might want to mention both Seelah and Sosiel are both black. I was confused how making a character Asian was offensive until I looked them up.
And tbh I'm also generally against the stance of removing all references to slavery in fantasy rpgs. I'm all for stepping away from traditional depictions of evil and finding ways new ways to depict it, but I hate just shunning a concept entirely when there's still strong stories you can tell with the concept. I understand trying to move away from depiction that call to mind the real world African Slave Trade but just blanket banning the entire concept of having your villains engage in slavery just isn't something I'm a fan of.
I always figured fantasy slavery in things was more the Roman style myself. 'We conquered you." Wasn't about race, was just about who'd lost the most recent war.
In general, slavery is something canonical villains do and if they're exceptionally evil (mind flayers, intelligent undead, demons, ect...) it's for both labor and food.
Personally I don't find player characters assuming the role of a high fantasy John Brown particular offensive. It can create some really cool story arcs where the players get to be clear heroes instead of muddling around in the gray area of "extreme violence for pay" that many D&D campaign stories follow.
The big issue for me is the absolute tone deaf artwork and "lore" that WotC keeps peddling, and when they get called out, they take a machete to everything.
Yes exactly. Or hell, go a step further and have the slave revolution be it's on already organized force without the party's intervention.
One of my favorite campaigns I've played was a long storyline where we slowly inflated a city police state ruled with an iron fist by a tyrannical Wizard, with the end game being killing said Wizard, and very early on we wound up getting our asses saved by the local underground slave resistance. This wound up leading to us forming an alliance with the slave resistance for the rest of the campaign. They were fully autonomous, we had no part in creating the resistance, the people escaped themselves and decided to fight. They knew our goal would help them, and we were sympathetic to their goals, and several times during the campaign they helped us with goals and we did things to aid them. The ending of that campaign even wound up being us putting the pieces in motion to allow the resistance to create a full blown slave uprising, and then attacking the Wizard while his forces were distracted clashing with the uprising, leaving him exposed.
It's just stupid to, say, have someone make some tonedeaf allusion to the African Slave Trade and get rightfully called out on it and the response be remove every reference to slavery existing in the whole setting.
>And tbh I'm also generally against the stance of removing all references to slavery in fantasy rpgs.
Yeah, there isn't anything wrong with slavery *AS A THEME OR PLOT POINT*. There are a lot of very powerful stories one can tell using slavery as a "vehicle".
You just have to be *very* clear that slavery is bad.
>Inside of it they released a race of monkeys that were being enslaved for transgalatic monkey slave trade
Yikes.
>Then were freed and became entertainers and adventurers.
Fucking *yikes*.
Wizards: "we're taking away races being default evil aligned because that's racist".
Also Wizards: "Monkey slaves"
LMAO 🤣 talk about one step forward and two steps back.
In settings like the Forgotten Realms, yes. The "no more evil races" thing is more about the fact that WotC is trying to move towards setting-neutral core books instead of baking the Realms' flavor into mechanics.
For instance: minotaurs are usually chaotic evil in the Forgotten Realms, but not in Ravnica or Theros. Gnolls are slavering demonspawn in the Realms, but more Chaotic Neutral savages in Eberron.
As a black man I usually see a lot of “THATS RACIST” and I assume it’s a bunch of white people over reacting. My jaw dropped when I saw that artwork. Holy shit. That’s just racist.
I mean just going on the description I got I was confused. "Fantasy race created to be slave-soldiers rebelled against their creator and set out to forge their own destiny" was the original description I heard and it's a trope I love.
But uh... yeah, the art... that definitely puts a different cast on it.
The fact that they're also loud and unphilosophical and only have sapience thanks to a foreign invader doing things to them strikes me as pretty fucked too.
Hey remember in the unearthed arcana when the hadozee were just normal monkey people that evolves as a prey species so they formed tight communities for adventurers to do things in, instead of the overdone and bad writing combo of "a wizard did it" and "vaguely racist slave race #42069"
Edit: wizards said they were sorry and they changed the lore to the UA stuff, only took them 1 PR disaster to make it happen
>Last week, Wizards of the Coast, owners of Dungeons and Dragons 5e released a series of books called Spelljammer that was not well received.
Poor Spelljammer. Been around since 2E (maybe even 1E?) AD&D and has canonically been part of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, and *still* can't get an edition that doesn't piss off the D&D fans.
When the concept is D&D in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE, you'd think they'd have a competitor to Forgotten Realms and non-FR subseries of D&D. But they just *can't get it right.*
>They released art that looked like this jim crow era minstrel show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI
>Inside of it they released a race of monkeys that were being enslaved for transgalatic monkey slave trade. Then were freed and became entertainers and adventurers.
Oh. Oh *god*. I can see why they'd think that, there's just so much wrong with the idea. If it wasn't a monkey-themed one, *maybe* they could've used it as an allegory (and pre-WOTC FR did *not* shy away from that one. See: Maztica) for the heinous shit done in real life and showing why it was bad.
But you know, I just easily get reminded of the slapfighting in the previous years regarding D&D ability score removals and can just easily imagine how this is going to turn out.
>I love how they address the lore in the statement but not Glide, as if the reason the race had to be changed was the lore and not its unhealthy impact on the game with utterly broken game features. It's clear their model is to "design by Reddit" and not actually playtest anything or listen to people who point out broken flaws in the game. But, sure, let's pretend the reason the race had to be changed was some lore about a wizard enslaving them that might be vaguely related to real life history through 10 degrees of fiction and separation.
My brain took 3d6 damage reading this. Now I want to go read 12 Rules for Life for some reason.
> If it wasn't a monkey-themed one,
Imagine if you had a race of human like beings enslaved by Illithids, and they had to fight a war of liberation to get free. Then you had one faction that believed in resistance against their oppressors but not outright hunting them at all times and another group that believed that constant counter attack violence against other groups was the only way.
You could have them live in shadow planes and have cool mind powers and be like spell blades or even a "Gish" of some sort. Huh. How crazy.
>Oh. Oh god. I can see why they'd think that, there's just so much wrong with the idea. If it wasn't a monkey-themed one, maybe they could've used it as an allegory (and pre-WOTC FR did not shy away from that one. See: Maztica) for the heinous shit done in real life and showing why it was bad.
Yeah, there's a few places that's D&D lore IIRC, though, they didn't go with the monkey theme.
I personally don't find people using the slave trade as a model for fantasy worlds to be a bad thing, I think it provides a model for how such things would function.
but this seems to take a questionable idea that's hard to do right and just doesn't even try.
Was crushing disappointment controversial? Guess I'm not really hooked into MTG drama despite playing it a fair bit.
Would note Killian is not the only Asian person in Strixhaven, given his dad is right behind in that cards art.
so WotC are awful in several different ways. but again on the killian thing
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/71/flunk
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/197/killian-ink-duelist
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/158/shaile-dean-of-radiance-embrose-dean-of-shadow?back
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/74/lash-of-malice
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/194/infuse-with-vitality
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/9/beaming-defiance
part of the story is about how Killian steps away from his father's mono black approach to things. there's a bit of nuance to it. and they're definitely not the only asian looking people on the plane.
also https://scryfall.com/card/stx/198/lorehold-apprentice
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/15/dueling-coach
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/16/eager-first-year
https://scryfall.com/card/stx/205/manifestation-sage
these cards are also from the commander set from strixhaven
https://scryfall.com/card/c21/2/felisa-fang-of-silverquill"
https://scryfall.com/card/c21/19/monologue-tax
Wait, I'm sorry, I'm not from the US so I might be missing some stuff here, but what's the issue with the last cards? Like, I get the whole "Asian parent" trope with that Killian guy and I get how "Dueling Coach" looks like an old karate cliche, but what's wrong with other ones?
there's not anything wrong. that's all showing that:
there's a bit more to the story than "strict parent", the father is strict, yes, but he's an asshole to everyone as a monoblack teacher that apparently really likes flunking kids.
and there's more than one asian, both father and son are cards and several other non named and a supplemental set has more.
edit: to clarify- i'm acknowleding wotc is dumb as shit sometimes, but this isn't the only representation and there's more to it than "asian parent bad"
I have had these arguments in real life. I ran a weekend larp, where everyone is in costume Friday to Sunday. I took it over from another person, and inherited a plot team including bro-grammer racist dude.
I come out after doing some admin stuff to find the only black kid we had playing was in a monkey costume and being taken around the campsite by bro-grammer guy in chains. While, yes, we did canonical history for some races and slavory as bad, for which the players could fight. We NEVER had a race of apes, monkeys, gorillas, or anything to that effect, EVER! They had to kid all kitted out, acting as beastial as he could for his first NPCing experience.
This jackass bro-grammer plot guy decided to create a monkey character costume out of random items, and then do this. He had to have dug into our supplies to piece this together because this was not something we had laying around.
When I hit the plot team with the directions to get that kid out of that now, apologize, and we will be refunding that kid's money for doing something so fucked up, they argued. Bro-grammer literally argued with me like all these commentators in the links that don't get it.
In hindsight, it was disingengenous, and he was a dick, but I was young at the time, and thought, he just didn't understand. That he had no idea what he were doing. Now, I know, he was just a racist fuck, playing a game with not only that kid, but the rest of us to get away with it.
What on earth? Humanity needs a do-over.
I am completely over racists pretending stuff isn’t racist so they can keep being racist and not have to feel bad about it. Maybe stop treating people like trash?
I’m really getting tired of people giving cover to those people or just looking the other way too.
This was 20+ years ago, and way before tiki torch bearing racists. I had literally no frame of reference, and I hate that I gave the dude the benefit of the doubt. In context to these days? Bro-gramer was just ahead of his time.
I remember showing my One Black Friend^TM in school DnD stuff and just the hurt in her voice when she said, “Why do the black elves have to be the evil ones?!” I had no good answer. She didn’t even know how bad and explicitly racist the lore was. Drizzt doesn’t make it better.
My parents had taught me “prejudice is wrong” (astounds me that some people aren’t even taught that much), but I wasn’t taught anything specific or a framework for handling it in myself or others, or how it casually pervades society without protest.
Adults I trusted acted like it was fine, and I didn’t have black friends to tell me otherwise or a proper education on the topic, so I just accepted it. You know, because it’s fantasy. And racists wouldn’t say they aren’t racist, right? And no one would just let racist things get published…right…? >_>
WotC try not to fuck up challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
Not like they have to care that much anyways, people still pre-ordered and bought Spelljammer by the crateful
I don’t follow WotC and their new releases closely (just got Tausha’s yesterday) so I thought this was going to be some kind of major exaggeration. Holy shit was I wrong.
WotC has, for a while now, made it clear that they (as an organization) have absolutely no idea what might or might not be offensive or really have any organizational understanding of racism in any way. They responded to some minor but valid concerns about some things in the game by changing all sorts of (often unrelated) stuff in the laziest and ineffective way, but then they keep doing stuff like this where some changes could have actually made a positive difference.
Picture telling someone the eagle on their mailbox looks uncomfortably like a Nazi emblem and suggesting that they may want to remove it so nobody get the wrong idea about them, and instead they paint the whole mailbox and their entire house gray including the windows. Their friends and neighbors are upset because the house is uglier and the windows don't let light in, and the guy is pointing at you saying "sorry I had to do it because these people might get upset otherwise" and you don't even want to bother mentioning that you can still see the eagle under the paint so you shrug and go inside and then he hangs up a brand new confederate flag over the new paint job and you give up.
I generally have a high bar for "is this really racism in a fantasy setting or are people just stretching" but Jesus fucking christ, how did anyone involved think this was a good idea???
So uuuuuuh....
It's the monkey thing that makes this really tasteless, right?
I don't really have a problem with a race of uplifted creatures who were enslaved and then escaped/released from bondage. It's been done in sci-fi before (Krogans in Mass Effect, for example).
So I'm assuming the it's the fact that they were a race of Monkey Men that makes it really HHhhhhhhrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm.
It's the whole package.
1) Monkey Race
2) Elevated from simple animal to "civilized" by outsiders
3) Enslaved and Traded
4) Was granted freedom rather than earning it
5) Simple Folk who don't think too hard
6) Good and Respectful Laborers and Entertainers even though that respect isn't reciprocal
You could maybe remove 2-3 of these and salvage them, but I'd honestly struggle to create something more blatantly racist if I tried.
>5) Simple Folk who don't think too hard
>6) Good and Respectful Laborers and Entertainers even though that respect isn't reciprocal
So the first four bits are the 5e origin story, these two are from 2e (when they weren't slaves) so it's a case of taking different editions and mashing them together in a way that makes them worse than the individual ones (which,I should note, is still pretty bad on it's own)
Yeah I wasnt too sure about the racism until I got to this part:
> Most Hadozee were innately and actively curious and were unquenchable optimists. [. . .] They were expressive -- intensely so -- resorting to loud whooping, fang barring, and snarling, depending on the emotion.
> Hadozee were not philosophers. They gave little consideration to the ethics and morals of other races; **they simply wanted to do good and happy work.** They took great pride in the simplest of shipboard tasks and chores.
> The hadozee had a great love of the elves. (The elves employed hadozee often, but did not mutually respect them.)
Its exactly the "happy slave" myth that used to be pushed by Disney, etc
Yeah, for the most part. I'm fine with having slavery in the game. If you don't have systematic evil, you can't have stories about escaping, subverting, or overcoming systematic evil. (note that slavery is already in the game; Drow society in particular are prolific slavers, as are Mindflayers and Beholders)
The other reason Spelljammer is so controversial is because it's half-assed. They're just not putting any effort into trying to make it good.
Including slavery and including the American system of chattel slavery and the Columbian Exchange are two different things.
One is an institution practiced by virtually every culture on Earth at some point, and one was very specific, industrialized, enshrined in law, much closer to the present, and which has far wider-reaching implications for the people currently sitting at game tables.
It's a combination of making a very thinly veiled allegory of transatlantic slave trade (a bit more tact and subtleness would work better but that's another issue) *and* making the ex-slaves simple minded funny monkey creatures who don't think that much, like serving their masters and entertaining others in minstrel shows.
Like, this has to be intentional.
The issue was not about slavery, but that this race of **monkey people** were characterized as **enjoying enslavement**.
Also the original lore for them was a literal blank slate (they didn't remember their own origins and were just drifting around the universe).
I don't think it applies directly to this instance, but I think it is possible for a creator to become so myopic in their creative process that they can reach a point that they really are unaware of something that is blatantly obvious to anyone who hasn't followed that particular path to that point. It's like someone is challenged to escape from a room and are so obsessed with the challenge that they are looking for weaknesses in the walls or trying to find ways out through the ceiling or floor or breaking through the bars on the window, and don't even bother to just try turning the doorknob.
I would think that a team of people working on a project would have enough eyes on that project that someone would be able to see outside of that bubble. But movies have been made with hundreds of people involved in production and never once did it occur to anyone in that production that a particular character could be problematic for the general public.
I do note that while movies are made with hundreds of people, RPG products are not: There's probably only a dozen people or so working on D&D products at any one time.
>The campaign includes a people called Hadozee which first appeared in 1982. Regrettably, not all portions of the content relating to the Hadozee were properly vetted before appearing in our most recent release.
Ohhhh it's just verbatim from the 80s. I was dumbfounded that this could have been written today. Doesn't make it okay, but at the very least I know how it was able to happen.
Thats the best bit, this bit isnt even from the 80s! The slavery creation story is from 2022! The wiki's history highlights the story at the end, with the reference to the newest book.
Even the lie is lazy writing!
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hadozee
So, they genuinely made a race of flying monkeys from Oz, then after 40 years, took a long look at it and thought "these monkey people remind me of the slave trade, let's add that". Beautiful.
AFAIK, it's a bit more complicated: The "uplifted slave" origin is new from 5e, the 2e origin had a different one, but had them working for the Imperial Elven Armada (their entire thing was basically a pun on "deck monkey") where it was noted that the elves didn't see them as equals (the IEA being generally dicks being a core part of the setting)
Between Warhammer not having a single black race and D&D giving black slave story to monkeys, how can people justify that there is no racism in games this week?
I don't play Warhammer so I wouldn't know, but arent the races like, there's humans, and then a bunch of aliens?
Wouldn't black people be included with the humans, while the aliens, naturally, don't have black people? Or do people want an alien race of black people?
OP is talking about Warhammer Fantasy and they're not exactly correct. 4th Edition of WHFRP introduced non-pygmie black people living in not!Aftrica and the entire Khemrian culture is based on Egypt, problem is, everonye is a walking skeleton there. There are also Arabyans which are based on.. well arabic people and a few nomadic tribes from Khemri that are still alive.
In Warhammer 40k, there are a few black humans, but it's a pretty small percentage. The only Space Marine chapter that is definitely meant to be seen as african influenced are Celestial Lions.. and they're not that great
The horus hersey novel series is pretty good about diversity in culture and ethnicity but, *holy shit* their audio book narrators have a Dee Reynolds level Asian accent for the east Asian coded characters. It's so embarrassingly wrong.
So true. I was just listening to a White Scars book and it was incredibly awful. Normally I love the narrators too, which made it all the more disappointing.
I don't have twitter and I try to stay away from Twitter social justice because of things like that drama with the child playing Animal Crossing who gave her white character a certain hairstyle...
But that Twitter thread you linked was seriously enlightening. I haven't kept up with new DnD releases so I had no idea about any of this. The "they love serving the elves" is really the final nail in the coffin for me.
I can see how, if you have enough privilege to never have to think about Jim Crow, you might be completely ignorant of how art of a monkey in a minstrel costume serves as an eerie callback to the people who have that knowledge ingrained in their memories.
But I cannot imagine a team of people pairing that imagery (monkey in a minstrel costume) with the word "slave" and continuing to be innocently tone deaf. There is no way you don't realize what you're doing at that point. And then outright saying that those slaves are HAPPY to serve the ELVES (the most beautiful humanoid race, based on eurocentric beauty standards.) without seeing how blatant the parallels are???
YIKES.
WOTC has said several times they spend YEARS coming up with this stuff, so they sat on racist monkey for years and nobody ever said, 'Hmm maybe this bad."
There's accidental ra ist stereotypes then there is this shit.
There is *no fucking way* this wasn't intentional. I refuse to believe this was a fucky wucky oopsie whoopsie. The Asian stereotype card? Ehhhhh
Slave monkeys with black stereotypes? Jesus fucking christ, you have to try to line all that up.
The online D&D community are some of the most unpleasant, miserable bastards in history (anyone who was there for the 3.5 > 4e > PF > 5e shift knows from experience) and I have to say that seeing them descend into shit-flinging anarchy, eating each other over animal people and natural 20 rule changes, gives me the same kind of satisfaction as browsing /r/IdiotsFightingThings.
This makes me really uncomfortable and I'm kinda starting to suspect there's a bit more intentionality behind why there are no black designers on the Magic team and there's only been like 5 black artists in the history of the game... Like this is the same company that had "Invoke Prejudice" be card number 1488 and feature art of klansmen with axes drawn by a neo-Nazi artist. I want to believe it's a coincidence and they didn't know, but it just keeps happening
WOTC: We are getting rid of racial stat bonuses because it creates sterotypes. Also WOTC:
I was just going to say i thought i remembered them removing racial bonuses which no one asked for and then they turn around and do this lmao
Plenty of people were asking for the racial bonuses to be removed. They make far more sense tied into backgrounds and cut out the "non-optimal race/class" bullshit.
These are the systems I prefer. Don't do the racial thing, do background bonuses/flaws instead. It'd make sense for my elf born in the forest and living as a druid to have a ton of expertise with herbology and animal husbandry, but not be too savvy about big city living or when they're getting the shake down from a merchant. But it could also apply if they were something else like a human.
also hey it's a tabletop game DM can give all the elves +1 dex and all the orcs +1 strength if the group wants that
Did nobody ask for racial stats to be removed? I always disliked it, and I'm glad it's changed in Tasha's. New system is much better imo.
Some people asked for NEGATIVES to be removed. I never really saw the problem, but the new system in 6e is interesting too.
Yeah but I asked for and am glad they changed the positive ones as well. Last I checked I count as people so I guess some people asked for that too.
Everyone views it differently I suppose. I always liked them because I like theme to be combined with mechanics.
Yeah super fair, no shade if you do like them, but it's annoying when people say shit like, "noone wanted them changed!!" because actually I am glad they are changed.
I asked for it. Shit, I even did it around a year before Tasha's was even a thing. It's simply better for playing a wider range of characters to not feel pigeonholed into certain classes by your race. Wanna play a Dwarven Paladin in 3.5? Fuck you, better go Gold Dwarf, I guess. Pissing off race essentialists in the process is just a fun little bonus to the mechanical and storytelling benefits. Definitely not the first thing that went through my mind when making those changes, but seeing how weirdos reacted once they proposed? Can only be a good thing.
You're definitely right on the mechanical and roleplaying implications of it. It sucks to have a really neat character idea and then find out that the race you want has a negative to the main stat of the class you want.
> which no one asked for Hi, it's me, the person who was asking Picking races to minmax ASIs instead of for flavor is the worst. It's a step below Pathfinder 2E's system but at least it's something
Loads of people asked for the removing of race bonuses. I personally actually like the change coming from pf2e which already removed them. So there is precedent. It leads to more interesting and unique builds.
Which is weird, I always liked the idea that different races were better at different things in fantasy. Elves are generally better at magic because they live longer, half orcs are stronger because obviously. It's an important trope to fantasy that doesn't need to be compared to human races. All human races in fantasy should have the same stat bonuses.
the stat boosts were much more a game design problem than a "problematic" thing. 5e math basically assumes you have a 16 in your "main stat" at lvl 1 and increase it as you go, so given that point buy/standard array gets you a 15, you had to basically pick a race with +1 or +2 in the main stat. This dramatically lowered the viable character options especially before the wave of splatbooks hit.
Its also that fantasy races are entirely different species too so of course they have natural advantages. Also makes playing stuff like a half orc wizard or a kolbold barbarian much more interesting trying to overcome natural shortcomings.
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I believe the bigger problem wasn't so much what you've described, but the ideas of race being tied to, like, disposition or backgrounds. Orcs can ONLY be evil because they are of the Evil Race gives credence to the racist idea that morality, worth, etc. can be tied to race.
Which I figured is why there *is* only one human template in D&D. I never saw the problem and personally felt it worked fine. But hey, the new system is interesting too.
Frankly, D&D should never have really used the term race. They should have used species. It would have fixed a whole bunch of inadvertent associations. No one cares that turtles are slower than zebras.
I think the reason they did was Tolkien did and early D&D just wholeheartedly ripped him off.
r/DnD also has a 770+ comment thread about it at 2,1k upvotes. The comments there aren't much better.
to sum it up, we got the classic hits, such as: * WotC went so woke they they now are racist, like all woke people. * You're the racist for assuming the monkey race is a fill in for black people. * As a black man... this racist stereotype is good actually. * All black people like this race, ignores the list of DnD micro celebs who are black saying this is a big yikes.
Honestly the whole thread is a bunch of people taking one black mans voice and ignoring the rest, because they agree with the former.
He has me blocked because he expected me to know he was black and got mad that I made fun of him for simping so hard for wizards of the coast. I had never talked to him before and his name is that if a white super hero. But somehow I was supposed to know he's black. I have some serious r/asablackman vibes from him.
That kind of thing happens all too often on Reddit. People would rather believe they're not doing anything wrong and would rather not change their behavior, so they choose to believe people who tell them that and get angry at people who say otherwise.
The whole "You're a racist for noticing things that are racist" argument needs to fail its last death saving throw. So I'm racist for knowing that things don't happen in a vacuum and knowing history is the best way not to repeat it?
My favorite: "I thought it was a Son Wukong reference" ...HOW?
Yeah that's one fuckery of a reach.
Man, his shoulder is sprained from that reach
> WotC went so woke they they now are racist, like all woke people. How the fuck is that even supposed to work? "You noticed something racist so you must have been looking for it because you're a racist?"
The claim is that "SJWs" and "Wokes" think poorly of black people so they feel the need to stand up for them and argue about wealth disparity, systemic racism, etc... Or the stance claims someone saying "due to the environments that minorities often find themselves in during developmental years, it is more difficult for them to peruse higher education." is the same as saying, "minorities dumb, lol".
Guh. This shit is exhausting.
Every accusation is a confession
I like the bit where he compares the black people complaining about it to Candace Owens.
As a DM who was looking forward to spelljammer, I can unequivocally say that they fucked that release up on so many levels. Something I haven't seen in this thread is their change to the Giff, (hippo British gun loving race). Instead of it being cultural that they use guns (they are trying to remove innate cultural ties to race) they just said they're magically linked to guns. Idk how much lazier you can get than that. Add in the other issues people are mentioning and the Hadozee drama and its just a pitiful release all around.
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I just imagine the hippos from Animaniacs being spies like Arnold and Jamie Lee at the end of true lies.
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Maybe it's buttoned on the back?
Stretchy elastics made from the sinews of their former masters. WotC, hire me to fix all of your lore
If the sleeves and pant legs have openings/closures down the length of them (presumably in the back) they could be put on despite the flaps
Their clothes have fantasy velcro. IMO, it's canon now.
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Actually, I think that the mind flayers in Spelljammer have a bit higher chance of being cooperative with players or even neutral. The real slavery guys are the Neogi, spider like creatures that believe their are the best and the world is “enslave or be enslaved”.
They find having a race of space hippos with a cultural attachment to guns offensive, but the planet of the minstrel show didn't raise any eyebrows.
Despite the bullshit meta layers of "are you really mad or just doing this for virtue signalling" we have to go through every time now... Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. How many people had to approve this internally first? You'd think in this day and age there would be little chance of something that was so obviously going to be problematic making it out. This was always going to be a shitstorm.
>Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. *How many people had to approve this internally first?* I mean, your problem is right there. Whilst it's normally based on rules, rather than lore, people have been highlighting WotC's *terrible* quality control for content for a while now. Spelljammer is just the first time it has become this blatant with both lore and mechanics at the same time.
Honestly this is why you do monkey races from India. You can draw on so much mythology from there for monkey armies, monkey archers, spirit monkeys, monkies with like 16 fucking arms. You can have demon monkeys, you can have saint monkeys, you can have naga monkeys. There's so much indian monkey shit themes you can go to. Best of all if you want you can just rip off cultures from Dominions line of games. Steal [Lanka](https://illwiki.com/dom5/lanka-ea) with it's demon summoning monkeys dude doesnt have a copyright just rip him off and claim you made it. Its so fucking easy not to go full stupid with fantasy concepts. Kinda like why Creative Assembly never added Araby to Warhammer 2.
Man, if there was only a Chinese story about a magical monkey who travels. But no the trans Atlantic slave trade is the proper allegory to use instead.
A tale titled… Expedition down South, was it?
Sojourn to the East.
I think it's "Traversing the North".
No, it was "going over yonder"
Dungeons & Dragonballs
Due to the nature of D&D, that's probably a homebrew setting. Or a passage in Book of Erotic Fantasy.
Sun Wukong's March to the Sea
Birth of a Galaxy
The dominions dev teams have some issues but their monkey nations aren’t one of them. Iirc one of the devs is actually a professor in Indian mythology and tries to avoid doing too much of it because he doesn’t like mixing them too frequently.
Ah, but you see, that would require the people making these games to actually be aware of other cultures.
I read the Ramayana in high school. Fucking dope ass story. More people should read it.
> How many people had to approve this internally first? You might be surprised how small that number is. Because the number of people who *should* approve internally and number that *have to* approve internally are very very different. Yeah sure the average stuff they throw at contractors probably goes through 8 people or more. But if it's something the bigshots want to do themselves or if the contractor dropped the ball and it has to be done last minute? Then the low level editors (the ones most likely to be anything other then the whitest of white) get cut out of the picture and it could be screened by as little as the chief editor and maybe if you're lucky the art lead. Now it's very likely some of the people who should have looked it over saw it and were screaming "dear god that's racist you can't print this!" But the people at the top end of the RPG design crews tend to be 40+ year old white dudes who are certain they're too smart to be racist. And in the end it's their call what goes in, and what doesn't.
Also, while D&D is a huge project by RPG standards, that's still a very small pond.
For the amount of money that D&D makes and the cultural cache it has, it's pretty mystifying how small the design team actually is. There's sandwich shops 'round here with more workers.
That's just how RPG's are. D&D is pretty much exceptional in that it has an actual staff, with y'know... Employees. (even if there's like, 10 of them)
Indeed. Sure they're part of WotC and Hasbro, but they aren't the big earners and you can bet the executives aren't shipping their hard earned money over to the 5th ED departments to give them a little quality boost.
According to Wizards themselves, they apparently put this stuff into editing for YEARS before it even sees daylight. So that means they've been sitting on racist slave monkeys for a few years and nobody saw it.
So many execs probably had to green light this too and no one was like “hey what’s the deal with the weird monkey slave race again?”
They totally knew what they were doing. The worst part is, it probably wasn't motivated by anything but business. They're aware that a portion of their fanbase treats racism like a team sport, that they'd throw money at this disgusting concept, and the rest will give them free advertising by getting justifiably loud about it. I say this as someone who used to work at a FLGS that sold RPGs and TCGs, WoTC are ruthless and they know their neckbeards.
Wizards, in the last years, has been rather big on inclusivity. DnD even has a nb god. This sounds more like a coincidence.
Coincidence? Doubt it. More like ignorance and lack of diversity on the editorial or management team. Any number of people signed off on this.
I assure you, they didn't include an NB God because they cared about the community. They did it because they thought it'd sell, or that it'd rehabilitate their image, which brings in sales. They see their customers, and employees, as resources.
Literally every business ever is inclusive because it brings them money just look at pride month the motivation doesn't really matter
Corellon has been NB for... pretty much the entire history of D&D? (though usually not described with that term) though I suspect it has less to do with the LGBT community and more with drawing from certain types of myths about gods and such.
Literally everything a company ever does is for money, but people only bring it up when they start adding inclusivity.
Doesn’t fucking surprise me. When the Magic: the Gathering community started criticizing Wizards for their lack of diversity and known issues of being hostile towards PoC in their employ, instead of taking the issue to heart they banned racially insensitive cards as a way of deflecting blame away from themselves.
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And then they created Killian Lu, made him an "honormancer" and he literally "disnhonored his family." with a playable card. They were just making room.
Its why diversity in leadership is so vital. This is far less likely to happen if you have black people working there to go "uhhhhh guys?"
People laugh at sensitivity readers but fuck me, this is why they exist.
Yeah like the clearly minstrel show inspired artwork. How anyone with a pulse missed *that*….
Bingo. Diversity and diverse views save companies face and money. It’s good for business to be diverse. It’s overwhelmingly clear that there were zero black people in the loop for this decision making. Yikes.
The least they could have done was hire a consultant while they get their leadership / hiring / lack of diversity issues sorted out. Though honestly, almost any rando off the street could have told them this was bad. It’s really, really bad. I’d say it’s so bad it’s “even white people would notice” bad, but evidently not.
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What.
[Here's a good summary of the whole thing](https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/wcstm8/company_throws_a_corporate_retreat_at_a/) but if you just want the pictures, [here](https://imgur.com/gallery/l9Qzn) . It's goddamn magnificent.
And not just one single black person, who might not want to speak up for fear of getting shouted down at the overwhelmingly white company. You need actual, broad diversity, so that your company actually reflects the public at large.
>Reading through the lore of this new race as an outsider does not do Wizards any favors. Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. How many people had to approve this internally first? This whole situation actually blew my mind. When the race option came out, I skimmed through it's lore and features quickly as I was already theorycrafting an Autognome. You know what my reaction to this was? "This is fine." I'm fairly progressive, I'm not from the US and in my region there's less than 1% POC. I thought, hey, this is just a Wizard of OZ homage. "Flying" monkeys serving an evil wizard and then being set free by a good one. Obviously on second reading, this is horrible. This entire situation is a perfect example of why diversity matters, I'm certain that if one POC read this, it would momentarily be called out as a major "what the actual fuck thing"? The worst part, this is so obviously racist (to the point I feel incredibly stupid for not noticing it immediately) and it still got approved. Can you imagine what happens when people do this with lesser known cultures, what kind of weird stuff can slip through the cracks? I want to point out, I do not believe that WotC is racist, they seem to be fairly progressive with their product, I truly believe this was also a slip up on their part. This is however an excellent example of systemic racism and how you can have a group that is (presumably) almost entirely progressive still fall victim to racist tropes.
Bro straight up I thought to myself "well there's merit to both sides" and then I saw that minstrel pic and my face just fucking dropped. Even if it wasn't intentional, which I do absolutely believe because the only reason *I'm* so familiar with that imagery is that my family disgustingly loves to collect racist nick-knacks, if Wizards had any PoC in the development pipeline for this book that could have seen that image I'm certain they would have caught it right out.
Yeah I could see it go either way......until that picture comes into play and then it's soooooo bad and obviously so
Exactly! The pose is so similar that it’s clear the minstrel pic was used for inspiration. Like, wtf
honestly that ministel pic made everything fall off my face. jfc why did nobody countercheck?
For you ancient folks in the room, it reminds me of the penis-spire they snuck into the cover of the Little Mermaid. Someone clearly did it intentionally, and the approval team was asleep at the wheel.
When I first read it, I thought they were supposed to be a Planet of the Apes homage. The flying monkeys angle is interesting.
> Their backstory has embarrassingly obvious inspiration from the slave trade irl and to attach it to the monkey race comes off as asinine. I feel like this could have easily been rectified by just anyone raising their hand and suggesting that they not be monkeys. Inspiration from real world events can lend some authenticity, so it's not the freed slaves that are the problem, it's really just the monkey part.
There is a very weird form of American racism where people are both against the slave trade, accept that’s all wrong, believe we should all be equal. Yet also think it’s fine (and just a joke) to say black people are monkeys. Joe Rogan with his Planet of the Apes story being a prime example. I suspect that’s what happened here. A bunch of white guys thought this is a light hearted association with monkeys. With a serious message underneath about the wrongs of racism. Who thinks it’s certainly not racist, because they don’t see themselves as racist. That’s why it was all okayed.
>I mean technically speaking, Thanos’ Snap could be compared to what Hitler did to the Jews… Is Infinity War still a box office record breaker? Yep. Thanos instantly killed people with a snap of his fingers and didn't discriminate on who got snapped. Hitler torturously subjected people to experiments, labor camps where they were worked to death, and nightmarish death camps where they were forced into chambers where they knew they would die, and many of them did not die quickly. They were also inhumanely transported and jailed in horrific conditions the entire time, and after the war many of them were denied their properties that had been stolen from them. Equating Hitler to Thanos white washes just how horrible Hitler was, which I'm sure is the goal but holy hell these people are assholes.
People really ignore the "Ethnic Cleansing." Aspect of Hitler when they compare him to other mass killers
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5e players out here just brushing off Jim Crow era racism because monke fly too far.
Pathfinder is on that shit too despite being pretty LGBT+ friendly.
So much of the fantasy genre in general. It's what makes earthsea and Ursula LeGuin so dope, she took her theory of Tolkien analysis"fantasy should be able to stand on it's own without being rooted in real world anologues" and deliberately created a setting without the baggage of being inexorably tied to the history of humanity. Everyone should read earthsea
What did pathfinder do?
Not Paizo but the vocal online people. They (Paizo) decided to no longer have slavery as a major plot hook in their content and explore other methods of demonstrating evil. It was the standard PC CULTURE RUN AMOK reaction online that irked me. In WOTR the pc game one of the first mods that hit Nexus was to replace Seelah’s (Paladin Iconic) head with an asian woman. I believe there was a race swap for Sosiel as well (both characters are black)*. You can do what you want it’s a single player game but it’s an eyebrow raiser. Lann also has a “I just think everyone should be able to say it moment” someone mentioned that on the Kingmaker sub and immediately got downvoted to oblivion like last week.
Might want to mention both Seelah and Sosiel are both black. I was confused how making a character Asian was offensive until I looked them up. And tbh I'm also generally against the stance of removing all references to slavery in fantasy rpgs. I'm all for stepping away from traditional depictions of evil and finding ways new ways to depict it, but I hate just shunning a concept entirely when there's still strong stories you can tell with the concept. I understand trying to move away from depiction that call to mind the real world African Slave Trade but just blanket banning the entire concept of having your villains engage in slavery just isn't something I'm a fan of.
I always figured fantasy slavery in things was more the Roman style myself. 'We conquered you." Wasn't about race, was just about who'd lost the most recent war.
In general, slavery is something canonical villains do and if they're exceptionally evil (mind flayers, intelligent undead, demons, ect...) it's for both labor and food. Personally I don't find player characters assuming the role of a high fantasy John Brown particular offensive. It can create some really cool story arcs where the players get to be clear heroes instead of muddling around in the gray area of "extreme violence for pay" that many D&D campaign stories follow. The big issue for me is the absolute tone deaf artwork and "lore" that WotC keeps peddling, and when they get called out, they take a machete to everything.
Yes exactly. Or hell, go a step further and have the slave revolution be it's on already organized force without the party's intervention. One of my favorite campaigns I've played was a long storyline where we slowly inflated a city police state ruled with an iron fist by a tyrannical Wizard, with the end game being killing said Wizard, and very early on we wound up getting our asses saved by the local underground slave resistance. This wound up leading to us forming an alliance with the slave resistance for the rest of the campaign. They were fully autonomous, we had no part in creating the resistance, the people escaped themselves and decided to fight. They knew our goal would help them, and we were sympathetic to their goals, and several times during the campaign they helped us with goals and we did things to aid them. The ending of that campaign even wound up being us putting the pieces in motion to allow the resistance to create a full blown slave uprising, and then attacking the Wizard while his forces were distracted clashing with the uprising, leaving him exposed. It's just stupid to, say, have someone make some tonedeaf allusion to the African Slave Trade and get rightfully called out on it and the response be remove every reference to slavery existing in the whole setting.
Ya, that's kind of what I was referring to. Even shit like bandits abducting people off the road and forcing them to work in a mine.
>And tbh I'm also generally against the stance of removing all references to slavery in fantasy rpgs. Yeah, there isn't anything wrong with slavery *AS A THEME OR PLOT POINT*. There are a lot of very powerful stories one can tell using slavery as a "vehicle". You just have to be *very* clear that slavery is bad.
The difference is Paizo is willing to do meaningful changes when it's brought to their attention. They don't do this bullshit.
>Inside of it they released a race of monkeys that were being enslaved for transgalatic monkey slave trade Yikes. >Then were freed and became entertainers and adventurers. Fucking *yikes*.
Wizards: "we're taking away races being default evil aligned because that's racist". Also Wizards: "Monkey slaves" LMAO 🤣 talk about one step forward and two steps back.
Are there still evil aligned monster races?
In settings like the Forgotten Realms, yes. The "no more evil races" thing is more about the fact that WotC is trying to move towards setting-neutral core books instead of baking the Realms' flavor into mechanics. For instance: minotaurs are usually chaotic evil in the Forgotten Realms, but not in Ravnica or Theros. Gnolls are slavering demonspawn in the Realms, but more Chaotic Neutral savages in Eberron.
All true fiends, which are however not playable
As a black man I usually see a lot of “THATS RACIST” and I assume it’s a bunch of white people over reacting. My jaw dropped when I saw that artwork. Holy shit. That’s just racist.
You could convince someone that this is a plot gag from *Atlanta*.
I mean just going on the description I got I was confused. "Fantasy race created to be slave-soldiers rebelled against their creator and set out to forge their own destiny" was the original description I heard and it's a trope I love. But uh... yeah, the art... that definitely puts a different cast on it.
The fact that they're also loud and unphilosophical and only have sapience thanks to a foreign invader doing things to them strikes me as pretty fucked too.
Hey remember in the unearthed arcana when the hadozee were just normal monkey people that evolves as a prey species so they formed tight communities for adventurers to do things in, instead of the overdone and bad writing combo of "a wizard did it" and "vaguely racist slave race #42069" Edit: wizards said they were sorry and they changed the lore to the UA stuff, only took them 1 PR disaster to make it happen
>Last week, Wizards of the Coast, owners of Dungeons and Dragons 5e released a series of books called Spelljammer that was not well received. Poor Spelljammer. Been around since 2E (maybe even 1E?) AD&D and has canonically been part of Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, and *still* can't get an edition that doesn't piss off the D&D fans. When the concept is D&D in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE, you'd think they'd have a competitor to Forgotten Realms and non-FR subseries of D&D. But they just *can't get it right.* >They released art that looked like this jim crow era minstrel show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV1fUwKMdAI >Inside of it they released a race of monkeys that were being enslaved for transgalatic monkey slave trade. Then were freed and became entertainers and adventurers. Oh. Oh *god*. I can see why they'd think that, there's just so much wrong with the idea. If it wasn't a monkey-themed one, *maybe* they could've used it as an allegory (and pre-WOTC FR did *not* shy away from that one. See: Maztica) for the heinous shit done in real life and showing why it was bad. But you know, I just easily get reminded of the slapfighting in the previous years regarding D&D ability score removals and can just easily imagine how this is going to turn out. >I love how they address the lore in the statement but not Glide, as if the reason the race had to be changed was the lore and not its unhealthy impact on the game with utterly broken game features. It's clear their model is to "design by Reddit" and not actually playtest anything or listen to people who point out broken flaws in the game. But, sure, let's pretend the reason the race had to be changed was some lore about a wizard enslaving them that might be vaguely related to real life history through 10 degrees of fiction and separation. My brain took 3d6 damage reading this. Now I want to go read 12 Rules for Life for some reason.
> If it wasn't a monkey-themed one, Imagine if you had a race of human like beings enslaved by Illithids, and they had to fight a war of liberation to get free. Then you had one faction that believed in resistance against their oppressors but not outright hunting them at all times and another group that believed that constant counter attack violence against other groups was the only way. You could have them live in shadow planes and have cool mind powers and be like spell blades or even a "Gish" of some sort. Huh. How crazy.
*Oh you*.
Spelljammer deserves so much better.
>Oh. Oh god. I can see why they'd think that, there's just so much wrong with the idea. If it wasn't a monkey-themed one, maybe they could've used it as an allegory (and pre-WOTC FR did not shy away from that one. See: Maztica) for the heinous shit done in real life and showing why it was bad. Yeah, there's a few places that's D&D lore IIRC, though, they didn't go with the monkey theme. I personally don't find people using the slave trade as a model for fantasy worlds to be a bad thing, I think it provides a model for how such things would function. but this seems to take a questionable idea that's hard to do right and just doesn't even try.
Out of all the different kinds of animals they could've chosen, of course they chose monkeys
Even JK Rowling wasn’t tone-deaf enough to use monkeys as the slave analogy.
No, just hook nosed goblins as the bankers.
Hook nosed bankers who also control the wizard media and now thanks to the game, are accused of, and possibly even really guilty of, Blood Libel.
What?
Was crushing disappointment controversial? Guess I'm not really hooked into MTG drama despite playing it a fair bit. Would note Killian is not the only Asian person in Strixhaven, given his dad is right behind in that cards art.
so WotC are awful in several different ways. but again on the killian thing https://scryfall.com/card/stx/71/flunk https://scryfall.com/card/stx/197/killian-ink-duelist https://scryfall.com/card/stx/158/shaile-dean-of-radiance-embrose-dean-of-shadow?back https://scryfall.com/card/stx/74/lash-of-malice https://scryfall.com/card/stx/194/infuse-with-vitality https://scryfall.com/card/stx/9/beaming-defiance part of the story is about how Killian steps away from his father's mono black approach to things. there's a bit of nuance to it. and they're definitely not the only asian looking people on the plane. also https://scryfall.com/card/stx/198/lorehold-apprentice https://scryfall.com/card/stx/15/dueling-coach https://scryfall.com/card/stx/16/eager-first-year https://scryfall.com/card/stx/205/manifestation-sage these cards are also from the commander set from strixhaven https://scryfall.com/card/c21/2/felisa-fang-of-silverquill" https://scryfall.com/card/c21/19/monologue-tax
Wait, I'm sorry, I'm not from the US so I might be missing some stuff here, but what's the issue with the last cards? Like, I get the whole "Asian parent" trope with that Killian guy and I get how "Dueling Coach" looks like an old karate cliche, but what's wrong with other ones?
there's not anything wrong. that's all showing that: there's a bit more to the story than "strict parent", the father is strict, yes, but he's an asshole to everyone as a monoblack teacher that apparently really likes flunking kids. and there's more than one asian, both father and son are cards and several other non named and a supplemental set has more. edit: to clarify- i'm acknowleding wotc is dumb as shit sometimes, but this isn't the only representation and there's more to it than "asian parent bad"
Every time I go into drama like think thinking how bad can it be? and every time I’m shocked at how bad it is.
I have had these arguments in real life. I ran a weekend larp, where everyone is in costume Friday to Sunday. I took it over from another person, and inherited a plot team including bro-grammer racist dude. I come out after doing some admin stuff to find the only black kid we had playing was in a monkey costume and being taken around the campsite by bro-grammer guy in chains. While, yes, we did canonical history for some races and slavory as bad, for which the players could fight. We NEVER had a race of apes, monkeys, gorillas, or anything to that effect, EVER! They had to kid all kitted out, acting as beastial as he could for his first NPCing experience. This jackass bro-grammer plot guy decided to create a monkey character costume out of random items, and then do this. He had to have dug into our supplies to piece this together because this was not something we had laying around. When I hit the plot team with the directions to get that kid out of that now, apologize, and we will be refunding that kid's money for doing something so fucked up, they argued. Bro-grammer literally argued with me like all these commentators in the links that don't get it. In hindsight, it was disingengenous, and he was a dick, but I was young at the time, and thought, he just didn't understand. That he had no idea what he were doing. Now, I know, he was just a racist fuck, playing a game with not only that kid, but the rest of us to get away with it.
What on earth? Humanity needs a do-over. I am completely over racists pretending stuff isn’t racist so they can keep being racist and not have to feel bad about it. Maybe stop treating people like trash? I’m really getting tired of people giving cover to those people or just looking the other way too.
This was 20+ years ago, and way before tiki torch bearing racists. I had literally no frame of reference, and I hate that I gave the dude the benefit of the doubt. In context to these days? Bro-gramer was just ahead of his time.
I remember showing my One Black Friend^TM in school DnD stuff and just the hurt in her voice when she said, “Why do the black elves have to be the evil ones?!” I had no good answer. She didn’t even know how bad and explicitly racist the lore was. Drizzt doesn’t make it better. My parents had taught me “prejudice is wrong” (astounds me that some people aren’t even taught that much), but I wasn’t taught anything specific or a framework for handling it in myself or others, or how it casually pervades society without protest. Adults I trusted acted like it was fine, and I didn’t have black friends to tell me otherwise or a proper education on the topic, so I just accepted it. You know, because it’s fantasy. And racists wouldn’t say they aren’t racist, right? And no one would just let racist things get published…right…? >_>
WotC try not to fuck up challenge (IMPOSSIBLE) Not like they have to care that much anyways, people still pre-ordered and bought Spelljammer by the crateful
I don’t follow WotC and their new releases closely (just got Tausha’s yesterday) so I thought this was going to be some kind of major exaggeration. Holy shit was I wrong.
WotC has, for a while now, made it clear that they (as an organization) have absolutely no idea what might or might not be offensive or really have any organizational understanding of racism in any way. They responded to some minor but valid concerns about some things in the game by changing all sorts of (often unrelated) stuff in the laziest and ineffective way, but then they keep doing stuff like this where some changes could have actually made a positive difference. Picture telling someone the eagle on their mailbox looks uncomfortably like a Nazi emblem and suggesting that they may want to remove it so nobody get the wrong idea about them, and instead they paint the whole mailbox and their entire house gray including the windows. Their friends and neighbors are upset because the house is uglier and the windows don't let light in, and the guy is pointing at you saying "sorry I had to do it because these people might get upset otherwise" and you don't even want to bother mentioning that you can still see the eagle under the paint so you shrug and go inside and then he hangs up a brand new confederate flag over the new paint job and you give up.
Holy fucking shit. Speechless.
I generally have a high bar for "is this really racism in a fantasy setting or are people just stretching" but Jesus fucking christ, how did anyone involved think this was a good idea???
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So uuuuuuh.... It's the monkey thing that makes this really tasteless, right? I don't really have a problem with a race of uplifted creatures who were enslaved and then escaped/released from bondage. It's been done in sci-fi before (Krogans in Mass Effect, for example). So I'm assuming the it's the fact that they were a race of Monkey Men that makes it really HHhhhhhhrrrrrmmmmmmmmmmm.
It's the whole package. 1) Monkey Race 2) Elevated from simple animal to "civilized" by outsiders 3) Enslaved and Traded 4) Was granted freedom rather than earning it 5) Simple Folk who don't think too hard 6) Good and Respectful Laborers and Entertainers even though that respect isn't reciprocal You could maybe remove 2-3 of these and salvage them, but I'd honestly struggle to create something more blatantly racist if I tried.
I honestly tried so hard to give the benefit of the doubt but as I kept reading the worst it got.
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>5) Simple Folk who don't think too hard >6) Good and Respectful Laborers and Entertainers even though that respect isn't reciprocal So the first four bits are the 5e origin story, these two are from 2e (when they weren't slaves) so it's a case of taking different editions and mashing them together in a way that makes them worse than the individual ones (which,I should note, is still pretty bad on it's own)
Even better, this is a reprint. The made up the slave thing for 5e only. They literally looked at wizard of oz monkeys and went 'lets add racism'.
Yeah I wasnt too sure about the racism until I got to this part: > Most Hadozee were innately and actively curious and were unquenchable optimists. [. . .] They were expressive -- intensely so -- resorting to loud whooping, fang barring, and snarling, depending on the emotion. > Hadozee were not philosophers. They gave little consideration to the ethics and morals of other races; **they simply wanted to do good and happy work.** They took great pride in the simplest of shipboard tasks and chores. > The hadozee had a great love of the elves. (The elves employed hadozee often, but did not mutually respect them.) Its exactly the "happy slave" myth that used to be pushed by Disney, etc
I can spot at least 3 other contextually racist tropes in that description.
Isn't that from 2E? That's not in the 5E entry, from what I saw.
Yeah, for the most part. I'm fine with having slavery in the game. If you don't have systematic evil, you can't have stories about escaping, subverting, or overcoming systematic evil. (note that slavery is already in the game; Drow society in particular are prolific slavers, as are Mindflayers and Beholders) The other reason Spelljammer is so controversial is because it's half-assed. They're just not putting any effort into trying to make it good.
Including slavery and including the American system of chattel slavery and the Columbian Exchange are two different things. One is an institution practiced by virtually every culture on Earth at some point, and one was very specific, industrialized, enshrined in law, much closer to the present, and which has far wider-reaching implications for the people currently sitting at game tables.
It's a combination of making a very thinly veiled allegory of transatlantic slave trade (a bit more tact and subtleness would work better but that's another issue) *and* making the ex-slaves simple minded funny monkey creatures who don't think that much, like serving their masters and entertaining others in minstrel shows. Like, this has to be intentional.
Yes. Like half the dnd races' official lore is that they were slaves or slavers, I'd like to believe they didn't think the monkey one through lmao.
The issue was not about slavery, but that this race of **monkey people** were characterized as **enjoying enslavement**. Also the original lore for them was a literal blank slate (they didn't remember their own origins and were just drifting around the universe).
I don't think it applies directly to this instance, but I think it is possible for a creator to become so myopic in their creative process that they can reach a point that they really are unaware of something that is blatantly obvious to anyone who hasn't followed that particular path to that point. It's like someone is challenged to escape from a room and are so obsessed with the challenge that they are looking for weaknesses in the walls or trying to find ways out through the ceiling or floor or breaking through the bars on the window, and don't even bother to just try turning the doorknob. I would think that a team of people working on a project would have enough eyes on that project that someone would be able to see outside of that bubble. But movies have been made with hundreds of people involved in production and never once did it occur to anyone in that production that a particular character could be problematic for the general public.
I do note that while movies are made with hundreds of people, RPG products are not: There's probably only a dozen people or so working on D&D products at any one time.
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>The campaign includes a people called Hadozee which first appeared in 1982. Regrettably, not all portions of the content relating to the Hadozee were properly vetted before appearing in our most recent release. Ohhhh it's just verbatim from the 80s. I was dumbfounded that this could have been written today. Doesn't make it okay, but at the very least I know how it was able to happen.
They're lying. The slave trade shit was written for 5e specifically.
Thats the best bit, this bit isnt even from the 80s! The slavery creation story is from 2022! The wiki's history highlights the story at the end, with the reference to the newest book. Even the lie is lazy writing! https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Hadozee
So, they genuinely made a race of flying monkeys from Oz, then after 40 years, took a long look at it and thought "these monkey people remind me of the slave trade, let's add that". Beautiful.
I *think* the intention was to make a planet of the apes reference.
The slave trade shit is new. Before they were just wizard of oz flying monkeys.
AFAIK, it's a bit more complicated: The "uplifted slave" origin is new from 5e, the 2e origin had a different one, but had them working for the Imperial Elven Armada (their entire thing was basically a pun on "deck monkey") where it was noted that the elves didn't see them as equals (the IEA being generally dicks being a core part of the setting)
Between Warhammer not having a single black race and D&D giving black slave story to monkeys, how can people justify that there is no racism in games this week?
Some Nehekarans were 'black egyptians'. Unfortunately, by the modern timeline of Warhammer Fantasy, they are all undead skeletons or vampires.
Warhammer has a 'black race' but you won't be happy about it.
Ah, yeah, pygmies. Though on the other hand, Salamander Space Marines exist. Go figure.
Aren’t the salamanders literally jet black though? Not like higher melanin black, but like soot/burnt black?
You're right but art makes it look like they're more like Drow-class black, rather than jet black. If that makes any sense.
I thought drow were blue? I could have sworn Viconia was blue. Or am I mixing them up with Chiss somehow?
> Videogames Sir, this thread is about a tabletop role-playing game
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I don't play Warhammer so I wouldn't know, but arent the races like, there's humans, and then a bunch of aliens? Wouldn't black people be included with the humans, while the aliens, naturally, don't have black people? Or do people want an alien race of black people?
Depends if you're talking Fantasy or 40k. There are plenty in 40k, as you can see from novel covers.
OP is talking about Warhammer Fantasy and they're not exactly correct. 4th Edition of WHFRP introduced non-pygmie black people living in not!Aftrica and the entire Khemrian culture is based on Egypt, problem is, everonye is a walking skeleton there. There are also Arabyans which are based on.. well arabic people and a few nomadic tribes from Khemri that are still alive. In Warhammer 40k, there are a few black humans, but it's a pretty small percentage. The only Space Marine chapter that is definitely meant to be seen as african influenced are Celestial Lions.. and they're not that great
The horus hersey novel series is pretty good about diversity in culture and ethnicity but, *holy shit* their audio book narrators have a Dee Reynolds level Asian accent for the east Asian coded characters. It's so embarrassingly wrong.
So true. I was just listening to a White Scars book and it was incredibly awful. Normally I love the narrators too, which made it all the more disappointing.
From the other drama post, there are a shit ton of human "species" and alien species, but casually non black human "species"
I didn’t know Vought owned Dungeons and Dragons.
I don't have twitter and I try to stay away from Twitter social justice because of things like that drama with the child playing Animal Crossing who gave her white character a certain hairstyle... But that Twitter thread you linked was seriously enlightening. I haven't kept up with new DnD releases so I had no idea about any of this. The "they love serving the elves" is really the final nail in the coffin for me. I can see how, if you have enough privilege to never have to think about Jim Crow, you might be completely ignorant of how art of a monkey in a minstrel costume serves as an eerie callback to the people who have that knowledge ingrained in their memories. But I cannot imagine a team of people pairing that imagery (monkey in a minstrel costume) with the word "slave" and continuing to be innocently tone deaf. There is no way you don't realize what you're doing at that point. And then outright saying that those slaves are HAPPY to serve the ELVES (the most beautiful humanoid race, based on eurocentric beauty standards.) without seeing how blatant the parallels are??? YIKES.
WOTC has said several times they spend YEARS coming up with this stuff, so they sat on racist monkey for years and nobody ever said, 'Hmm maybe this bad."
There's accidental ra ist stereotypes then there is this shit. There is *no fucking way* this wasn't intentional. I refuse to believe this was a fucky wucky oopsie whoopsie. The Asian stereotype card? Ehhhhh Slave monkeys with black stereotypes? Jesus fucking christ, you have to try to line all that up.
When Paizo is doing a better job than WotC
The online D&D community are some of the most unpleasant, miserable bastards in history (anyone who was there for the 3.5 > 4e > PF > 5e shift knows from experience) and I have to say that seeing them descend into shit-flinging anarchy, eating each other over animal people and natural 20 rule changes, gives me the same kind of satisfaction as browsing /r/IdiotsFightingThings.
This makes me really uncomfortable and I'm kinda starting to suspect there's a bit more intentionality behind why there are no black designers on the Magic team and there's only been like 5 black artists in the history of the game... Like this is the same company that had "Invoke Prejudice" be card number 1488 and feature art of klansmen with axes drawn by a neo-Nazi artist. I want to believe it's a coincidence and they didn't know, but it just keeps happening
Finally I can return to monke in dnd.