A lot has been said about this subject, and I’m not ambitious enough to even give a proper tour of the topic at the moment. Of course some shit has been said or done that is various degrees of messed up, and some shit has been done that is very cool. I bring it up because I have ambitions to make a high fantasy ttrpg, so I need to give it at least some thought.
Race & Racism in High Fantasy
Realism. Physically diverging appearances within a species are a result of genetic isolation, drift, etc. Shared ancestry with a lil fork in it. This suggests that any types of elves and dwarves and orcs should have the same apply to them, in a world where humans have those qualities. But for long-lived species with half or less the length of a human generation, wouldn’t that process move slower than it does for us? Also, wouldn’t the existence of black elves suggest strong convergence with humans in a given area? Melanin has obvious enough geographic selection going on, what about eye shape?
Much like the race-blind casting going on in some stage productions these days, major video games striving to sell the public what it wants have found the path of least resistance is to offer human-like racial variety in all the fantasy creatures with no explanation given. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age 4 had a lady dwarf and elf respectively, with racial features of real life East Asian people.
Nice to just say fuck it and play nice with a broader pool of customers, but it does sit a little odd for me with no explanation given. I can see why they wouldn’t bother. Racial discourse is so fraught and complicated almost any reason could bring controversy. Better value to just roll with it. But I’m not an international business conglomerate growing IP and maximizing profits. If I’m canceled, it’s lower stakes. I can just get off the internet and enjoy more personal time. So I think about it…
Sun in the south makes people get darker skinned, some less obvious factor out east makes people to the east get interesting lookin’ eyes, and something out west makes people lose pigment and go ruddy pink with weird noses. People in between grade into each other, appearance-wise. Explained more than the video games did, good enough for me.
What about immortals like elves who might have hundred+ year generations? What about nymphs who can be born by spontaneous generation? Ehh, maybe the elves mutate faster between generations? Maybe the nymphs just look like the local humans for reasons? I dunno. Would it be better to have the fantasy races have fantasy racial variations like they did with the moon/sun elf biz in older Forgotten Realms products? I don’t think so, because the point is for a black person to not be made to feel weird for wanting their elf to look like a black person.
The difference between this and the non-explained approach of BG3 and DA4 is your character’s looks do say something about where their ancestors are from, instead of being totally random. Feels more realistic to me. If you have opinions on how those video games handled it or what I’m writing on this part of the article, I’m probably only interested if you’re noticeably non-white IRL. I’ll take your word for it, not asking for a picture, just saying it’s trivially easy to get honky opinions – why, this article for example. 🤡 honk honk.
Monster Races. Ah, the dark skinned powers of darkness, brutish and muscular, out to pillage the fair-skinned noble people of inherent goodness. The sheisty secretive cabal of big-nosed swarthy wizards with strange beliefs who are the power behind the throne. The nomads who look human enough to walk among you and steal your children. Fantasy is coming from a white place innit.
There are many who say the tainted origins of this stuff mean there is no good way to use them – the kind of SJWs who would boycott Wicked and Spirit Halloween stores. Innocent child of folly that I am, I love wacky out of control monster people who are up to no good, and don’t think those images influenced me the way they were intended by the anti-semites who originated them, scaring their children racist for centuries. At the same time, saying “everybody who looks like this acts like that” is bad business, and I don’t truck with it. I’ll navigate my own honkey path here, hope it’s not too problematic.
So, like, goblins as silly faerie creatures, no rossetti->rowling scheming bankers. Orcs as big buff barbarians but no more evil than humans who are big buff barbarians. The barbarian thing raises the issue of cultural stereotypes that don’t hinge on race. I give that a nod here to say, yeah, like races, avoid saying all the people over here act like that / do that.
Unlike D&D, I’m not hobbled by needing an alignment system. It’s so baked into that game it wouldn’t be easy to extricate, and that ties it back to its history when orcs were an entry in the Monster Manual that said “Alignment: Chaotic Evil.” In trying to excise the racism from that in new products, they came up with a vision of orcs that was just bizarre. No Warhammer waaargh in them at all.
Now were Warhammer‘s orks also a racistic stereotype of barbarian marauder? Yes, but humans in those games also spent all their time choppin’ heads, so it felt a bit more even-handed. They were really popular to play. Outsider view on the UK, I feel like wargamers from lower class backgrounds, in a place with a much more blatant class system than we have in the US, may have identified with the violent punk-rock / metal take on the green guys. Orks winning the board against humans or elves is like sticking it to the aristocrats, right?
So ungluing the cultural archetype from the race, showing more variety, but keeping a place in the world for players who want to waaargh, that’s how I’d like to do.
Colorism. The very concept of black magic as evil? Not great. On the other hand, what’s a fantasy game without hexing diablos riding thru the night like the demons in Fantasia? Just gotta try to shake off the stank of this stuff. Again, I’m far from the scholar the subject of colorism deserves, google that shit if you are unfamiliar. It’s an aspect of racism that isn’t always strictly drawn on racial lines. People with darker skin are treated more poorly, to the point they are victimized by a skin-lightening cosmetic industry in some places. Ill.
Anyway, here’s how I handled dökkálfar/ljósálfar in this other post:
Light Elves. In an unknown eon, the law of Heaven and chaos of Hell infected the shining host, sowing division. While high elf rulers remained more or less the same, their subjects divided between light and dark elves. Light elves can be dark skinned in the south, even very dark skinned, but have some particulars in common. They tend to live exclusively in settlements, sometimes full cities, and have a society with some sense of law and obedience to hierarchy. They have skin tones in the local human range, and hair that ranges to lighter, less natural colors. Light colored eyes?
Dark Elves. Dark elves have something of the chaos of hell, most notably on their skin, where they have a great variety of hues – all of them unnatural for humankind, whether light or dark. Their faces are much more expressive than light elves, sometimes lined from big smiles or wacky eyebrow moves, despite their eternal youth. Some live in settlements but many are nomadic, and they mostly prefer the most rustic places, far from big cities. Despite the influence of Hell, few would enter into pacts with or worship beings from there. Mostly their hexing magic takes agnostic forms.
So you can have a light elf much darker than a light-colored dark elf, etc. Most of these fantasy races don’t have that kind of color-based division built in, like orks is green, any shade. As far as depictions in the game’s art, just making a point of having the prettiest gentlest people sometimes be the darkest. If 99% of media 5ever must have dark-skinned people be brutes or bad attitudes whenever they are allowed depiction, people like me gotta counter that when we can.
I’m not drawing any grand conclusions or advancing a big thesis, just considering, at least briefly, how I’ll handle these issues in a game. Have at thee.
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You seem to be assuming that humans and elves and dwarves are related through evolution and common descent. In most fantasy worlds, there are gods running around creating stuff at will. Of course, the world’s most common civilized races all being basically minor variations on being humanoids is, well, let’s just say it’s got it’s own issues. Make PZ happy and include a sentient spider civilization in your world! But back to what I was saying, gods certainly excuse all manner of weirdness in a setting. Need a pegasus that violates the twin nested hierarchy, a god did it!
But, since you didn’t mention gods at all in your post, I’ll assume that was deliberate and this is a naturally evolved fantasy world.
It’s kinda weird you suggesting that alignment is baked into D&D and hard to excise, given it basically has been. Sure, 5e still has alignments, you give your character one when you create them, and monsters have one listed, but there are no rules covering alignments whatsoever. It’s meaningless now. Paladins don’t even mention alignment in their class description. Smite Evil has been replaced by Divine Smite, which has no requirements that it be used on any type of whatever. The “detect {alignment}” spells are gone. “Protection from {Alignment}” has been replaced with “Protection from Good and Evil”, but the spell description doesn’t mention alignments at all, and it protects you from angels and elementals as much as it does devils.
The only reason that alignment hasn’t been removed entirely from the game is that I assume the marketing department would scream bloody murder. As long as it has cultural cache through things like internet memes, getting rid of it would be getting rid of free advertising. But it means nothing. The only thing that the Monster Manual tells you about alignment now is that you can change it as you see fit!
I always wanted to make a fantasy culture that reversed the usual good/evil light/dark pairing. An underground race that considered darkness the exemplary of goodness, while Light was that bright evil thing that burned your skin if you stepped too far away from the safety of the caves. I was a little disappointed that the World Below RPG didn’t do anything like this. : – )
i didn’t know that alignment got smashed in 5e! shows how flimsy my imagination is. like their take on de-eviled orcs, i hafta wonder if this is throwing out dnd baby with the bathwater. i’m coming up with my own shit out of badly inflamed GMitis, not because i hate dnd – and if i’m building something new i don’t need to import sketchy concepts of the old. but if i’m playing dnd, i kinda want alignment? dnd sans alignment feels like vampire: the masquerade without clans. weird. they coulda nixed evil in orcs without going *that* far.
i realize i was focused enuf on cutting against racism and colorism i didn’t suggest counters to antisemitism. if a halloween witch is, as some have proposed, a stereotype of jewish people, do the humanization in wicked, or various nice witches of fiction, counter it? a generous goblin? a swarthy vizier who is good guy? thinly veiled john stewarts or beastie boys? idk, kinda fun to ponder. certainly not treating any religion as unduly sinister may have some utility… but as a big hater of jesus that feels yech.
like i should be able to have thinly veiled christianity suck balls and get fought by heroes right, that being my culture
>Colorism. The very concept of black magic as evil? Not great.
NO! ‘black magic’ is ‘bad magic’ or ‘evil magic’, not magic done by black-skinned people.
cf. http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/539/nigromancy-in-the-later-middle-ages
or more directly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_magic
(Dark vs. Light)
i heard black magic is when christopher lee comes over for a party and finds the white hen and black cockerel in your closet and gives you a roundhouse punch in the kisser
Can’t but help think of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalNegro now.
(s ubset of https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MagicalMinorityPerson )
You’re right that Warhammer’s Orcs (and the sci-fi offshoot, the Orks of Warhammer 40,000) are indeed based most heavily on British regional stereotypes, though so are its Elves and Dwarfs. The Orcs are inspired by cockneys, and most especially by football hooligans from the 70s and 80s, hence their way of talking and love of violence.. The Dwarfs are gruff northern mining folk – Yorkshiremen, Lancastrians and so forth, and the Elves are the kind of effete soft southerners from the home counties who ponce around like I do. At least, that was the original idea – all these cultures have been developed much beyond that since the early 80s. Many of the designers are on record (Graeme Davis and Jes Goodwin I recall, from the former’s blog) as feeling they needed a lot more depth than this. So the Dwarfs acquired a lot of viking and Anglo-Saxon traits in their aesthetic and culture, while the three kindreds of the Elves were detailed along different lines. The Wood Elves took on primarily Celtic cultural markers, with a little bit of Native American earlier on, while the High Elves were a much more diverse combination of sophisticated and ancient world cultures – Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese, Persian, Greek and Roman – to emphasise their long lives and aspirations. The Dark Elves were characterised as the dark reflection of these high cultures – all the cruelty and madness and oppression that one sees in ancient societies the world over. Unlike the Drow of D&D, Warhammer’s Dark Elves are just as pale-skinned as their High and Wood Elf counterparts, possibly slightly paler as they live in the frozen north of Naggaroth. Both High and Dark Elves in Warhammer are great maritime civilisations, reflecting something of European colonialism in the early modern period – the High Elves found colonies and grow rich from sea trade, controlling other people’s access to the sea lanes, while the Dark Elves are vicious slavers and conquerors who go around taking whatever they want because they see other people as beneath them. Warhammer’s Elves are possessed of a sense of their own superiority over others as their key racial flaw (the effects of the wild magic of Chaos on their development since the collapse of the polar warp gates, which made the world as it is today), which manifests differently in the different kindreds (High Elves are patronisingly paternalistic, seeing everyone else as ignorant children in need of Elven assistance, Dark Elves are murderously oppressive, seeing everyone else as beneath them, and Wood Elves are aloof and unconcerned with people they see as lesser, preferring to keep to themselves and ignore the wider world entirely. Given all this, it seems rather appropriate that Warhammer’s Elves don’t show much by way of real world human variation, and are all very pale indeed (though it must also be said that the very word itself – elf – is cognate with the Latin albus, white, because in the original folklore they were the bright, shining folk, suffused with supernatural radiance).
For the Dwarfs it’s greed for gold and stubbornness that afflict their kind. There are actually evil Chaos Dwarfs too, who are styled as techno-Satanic ancient near eastern cultures – Assyrian, Babylonian, Hittite and the like. Warhammer’s humans follow this pattern too, and are based on real-world human cultures for the most part, though non-British ones. The most prominent being the Empire (Holy Roman Empire), Bretonnia (Feudal French, with lots of Arthurian stylings) and recently Grand Cathay (ancient China, particularly the Tang period, though ruled by immortal dragons). Less explored cultures include Kislev (Slavic, particularly Kievan Rus), Tilea (Mediaeval Italy, with a mercenary condottiere vibe) and Araby (hardly explored thus far, but somewhat stereotypical Arabian Nights type stuff when mentioned in the early 80s). There are also ancient Mesoamerican Lizardmen, the Ogre Kingdoms have something of central Asian steppe peoples, and there are the Tomb Kings of Khemri – an undead kingdom mostly styled after Egyptian funerary culture but more generally the death-obsessed aspects of other ancient European and West Asian cultures. Oh, and there is the tiny, soggy, mostly irrelevant island of Albion in the Sea of Claws, populated by mad druids, idiotic cave people and bumbling giants, because self-deprecation has always been at the heart of British humour.
So, Warhammer tends to work more on cultural and historical archetypes than on race as we would think of it. Which tends to be how British people work more generally (not that we don’t have racism, but we have far more by way of cultural xenophobia). That said, I think it matters hugely not just what influences and inspirations one uses, but how and why one uses them. Warhammer, fundamentally, isnt an attempt to say something meaningful about real world races and cultures. It’s not allegory – it’s about using historical cultures to create interesting fantasy peoples and conflicts as a background to stories and games.
AFAIK, most human variation isn’t adaptive, it’s just neutral drift. Skin tone is the only obvious exception, and even that’s only partial – yes, the people of northern Europe specifically seem to have ended up with pale skin to improve our vitamin D synthesis (note that this goes the other way to what you’ve suggested – darker skinned appears to be the default, and whiteness is the regional adaptation), but there’s a heck of a lot of other variations in skin tone around the world with no obvious adaptive explanation. Separated populations just end up looking different because change happens and there’s usually nothing forcing it in any particular direction.
By far the best treatment I’ve seen of the cultural and class tropes embodied by Warhammer Orks is this, from the always-reliable Arbitor Ian: Why do ORKS in 40k have NOBZ? | Ork Accents in Warhammer 40k.
Mind you, it’s not like Warhammer hasn’t had some quite egregious problems depicting race (in humans) in its past. None of them core to what it is, and most swiftly abandoned, but the grungy, experimental days of 1st-3rd edition saw things like the pygmies (step 1: take every racist stereotype of black African people you can think of, step 2: end of steps) and very demeaning descriptions of the Cathayans, Nipponese and Arabyans along exactly the lines you would expect. The 70s and 80s in England were very much like that, sad to say, so it is probably a blessing that they decided to stick almost entirely to European-inspired cultures for the first ten or so years.
Thinking on it, Warhammer is perhaps a bit different in terms of how it relates to the psychology of this issue from purely RPG franchises. In a traditional tabletop RPG one plays a single character, and identifies very closely with that character. Some people will clearly want to identify along racial or appearance-based or gender or any number of other lines, if those lines are important to them. Warhammer, as a tabletop wargame, isn’t quite the same. You have a whole army to identify with, not one person, so there is some additional level of remove and I don’t think most people have the same kind of personal identification that they would when playing a single character in an RPG. Having done both, this certainly seems to be my experience – there can be a kind of general cultural identification with your army and the people it comes from, but it’s not at all a one-to-one with your personal identity. Perhaps that’s just my experience. I can imagine someone of Chinese origin finding a more personal affiliation to Grand Cathay, or a Frenchman to Bretonnia, or someone from Essex to the Orcs. But it’s not something I’ve really seen, in the way it is with RPG characters.