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El Estrago Bonito posted:It should be noted that the reason Gnomes are the communications people in Ebberon is literally due to the old joke about tiny people living inside your TV set. I get that the guy writing it isn't trying to say 'JEWS CONTROL THE BANKS' with his RPG setting but it's still possible to create a work that is kinda racist even if you're not a racist yourself -- we are talking about the setting, not the author here.
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Mar 11, 2015 09:06
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Any faction that uses banks and likes money a lot is a Jewish stereotype, got it.
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Mar 11, 2015 10:21
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Dwarves generally get the short shrift in Eberron. I've read the original campaign setting for it more than once and I couldn't tell you anything more about them than: - Their home nation is the Mror Holds, but they originally came from the Frostfell (northern arctic region) - They have a Dragonmarked house, probably the one of Warding? - The Aurum conspiracy has their headquarters in their homeland - They have a sweet giant head carved into a mountain, and there's an illustration of it Couldn't tell you a thing about dwarf society.
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Mar 12, 2015 05:17
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Any faction that uses banks and likes money a lot is a Jewish stereotype, got it. yeah I sorta understand the complaint but... there's nothing that makes gnomes automatically jewish. They're portrayed as a very savvy and intelligent race in Eberron, that has been around for long enough to make themselves basically irreplaceable. They're also portrayed as extremely good people, they gave the money to the dwarves to start their banks because they wanted to see the race succeed and make a place for itself. Do they hold a lot of power in the world? Well, yeah, they do! That doesn't make them a 'jewish sterotype' unless you want to say any race that ever holds power and has lots of money are a jewish sterotype.
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Mar 12, 2015 05:30
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Any faction that uses banks and likes money a lot is a Jewish stereotype, got it. in mystara the shadow elves are reclusive monotheists who wandered a desert for 40x years and reached a promised land where their god gave them 14 commandments on stone tablets. they are also ethnic outsiders who hide their ethnicity in order to secretly gain control of many world governments and control the "Subhuman" races, using them as a tool to weaken human / dwarf / elf aka white culture. don't worry though, not all the underground elves in D&D are as bad as drow and shadow elves. Gruugrach elves also lived underground, sharing a society with gnolls. It's just an unfortunate reality that they know for a fact that miscegenation will destroy the world and therefore have to police race-mixing
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Mar 12, 2015 05:52
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Mormon Star Wars posted:in mystara the shadow elves are reclusive monotheists who wandered a desert for 40x years and reached a promised land where their god gave them 14 commandments on stone tablets. they are also ethnic outsiders who hide their ethnicity in order to secretly gain control of many world governments and control the "Subhuman" races, using them as a tool to weaken human / dwarf / elf aka white culture. See, now we're going places.
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Mar 12, 2015 06:53
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At first I thought the title was a reference to Werewolf: The Apocalypse, 'cause man that game was full of tying real-world people to its splats. Boadicea was a werewolf. The Russian royal families were alternately Get of Fenris and Silver Fang kinfolk. The Bone Gnawers were involved in the Russian revolution, but the Bolsheviks were actually secretly controlled by clan Brujah vampires. I mean, I know oWoD is replete with this poo poo, but the mixing of real-world history and politics with the splats seems most prominent in Werewolf.
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Mar 12, 2015 11:27
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signalnoise posted:Yeah, they've definitely got some kind of spirit animal magic going on. I don't really get what the conquistadors are even doing in that time period, either other than supposedly looking for the fountain of youth, but I think Ponce de Leon had been dead for like 200 years at the time of the civil war. Necropost from the start of this thread, but fun historical fact: Some of his expedition's gear was floating around even at that time. Chief Iron Jacket of the Comanches wore a breast plate almost certainly scavenged from the Spanish centuries ago and handed down as a family artifact.  On topic: Has anyone mentioned the Shadowrun Orcs=Black People thing? Because jesus christ.  (Complete with mechanical enforcement of inferior intelligence, lifespan, and charisma)
Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 12:13
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Ratpick posted:At first I thought the title was a reference to Werewolf: The Apocalypse, 'cause man that game was full of tying real-world people to its splats. The various Clanbooks are also similar, but "whoah, this is told to you by an in-character narrator, so you never know!". I remember the Setites claiming most powerful people involved in the Middle East from ancient Egypt to today as some kind of kinfolk or full on vampires.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:26
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OneThousandMonkeys posted:Any faction that uses banks and likes money a lot is a Jewish stereotype, got it.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:44
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Don't Mystara shadow elves get their magic from the radiation of a crash-landed spaceship or something similar? What I'm saying is that Mystara owns.
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Mar 12, 2015 15:49
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Isn't it implied by VtR fluff that Jesus (or maybe just Longinus) is a vampire?
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Mar 12, 2015 16:11
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whydirt posted:Don't Mystara shadow elves get their magic from the radiation of a crash-landed spaceship or something similar? What I'm saying is that Mystara owns. It's been a while since I read Mystara materials, but I think you're mixing the shadow elves up with Glantri, which is covered with a purple "Radiance" that empowers magic and that is actually leaked radiation from a buried spaceship (called the Beagle, for Pete's sake).
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Mar 12, 2015 16:19
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Ronwayne posted:On topic: Has anyone mentioned the Shadowrun Orcs=Black People thing? Because jesus christ. I know that lifespan, and I think intelligence and charisma, are justified in-universe as Orcs and Trolls being second class citizens and so not having access to the same education, healthcare and career opportunities that the 'pretty' races do. So it's not that your orc is genetically stupid, but that he was auto-rejected from Harvard when they saw the tusks on his application and he dies younger because he can't afford dialysis. So it's intended to be more like commentary on real-world racial politics than reinforcing stereotypes. But it could be handling it poorly.
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Mar 12, 2015 16:27
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Ryoshi posted:Isn't it implied by VtR fluff that Jesus (or maybe just Longinus) is a vampire? Longinus is definitely a vampire, at least according to the theology of the Lancea Sanctum: according to them, Longinus was punished by God for being pretty much an rear end in a top hat, the last straw being him poking Jesus with a spear while he was on the cross. The Lancea Sanctum believe that the purpose of vampirism is a curse from God and that vampires are, in a weird way, chosen by God to keep the fear of God in people. Having said that, VtR is actually pretty good about avoiding any definitive origins for vampirism: the various factions all have their own theories about the origins of vampirism, and because vampires forget things as they get older as succumb to torpor there are no vampires with living memory of the origins of their curse around. This is much better, IMO, than oWoD's vampires being all descended from Caine, because it basically stated that the Abrahamic religions were right about God, which got confusing when you added the other supernatural splats whose metaphysics were just as true but in conflict with Vampire's.
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Mar 12, 2015 16:37
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It's worse. They're stat caps.
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Mar 12, 2015 16:50
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Der Waffle Mous posted:It's worse. Yeah orcs and trolls in Shadowrun are explicitly incapable of ever being as smart as other races. Fifth edition they realized this and... made note in the race entries that they're smarter, just in different ways, with Trolls and Orks having better spatial reasoning. But didn't actually change the stat caps. Edit: Seriously this is like my favorite shadowrun fact. They explicitly made orcs and trolls stand in for blacks and mexicans in terms of treatment. And made them legitimately dumber than other races. And then when they finally, after five editions, realized the problem, they still didn't fix it, they just slapped on a 'no they're not actually genetically dumber' to look less terrible. KittyEmpress fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 17:03
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Yyeah, I'm gonna go with "handling poorly." Are official novels set in canon universes allowed or is that too fish-in-a-barrel? Ed: does anyone want to tackle Exalted? I am too burned out at this point. Bury my heart at Ghost Rape hill. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 17:32
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I recall that some Shadowrun material, 1st/2nd edition came out and stated that natural-born orks and trolls (as opposed to ones who were Goblinized humans) developed and dropped off at a markedly accelerated rate. One character's daughter was forty and in the most wretched state of dementia, and another splat pointed out that this can lead to twelve year olds who are indistinguishable from toughs six or seven years older, save for the tusks and even worse impulse control. Not sure if they elided it from later editions, but they were originally characterized as being congenitally stupider than the pretty races, with a lot of people who experienced Goblinization suffering irreversible brain damage in the process. And then they greenlit a novel about a med student who went all Flowers for Algernon after turning into a troll.
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Mar 12, 2015 17:39
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Well, we can just take a look at one of the most recent books, Run Faster, and see!On Dwarves posted:One of the most significant disadvantages to their insular and well-connected nature is it feeds into the conspiracy-esque view of dwarfs as hoarders of wealth. Dwarf-owned shops, especially those in less well-to-do neighborhoods, are frequently targeted by the dim masses in search of dwarven gold. The urban legend of well-connected dwarfs who operate as go-betweens for illicit corporate operations and keep certain valuables, such as credsticks and electronic stock certificates, has only helped fuel these rumors. Especially when these hidden wealth caches are discovered. So they're literally Jews, got it. On Orks posted:As the second-most populous metatype on the planet (behind humans) with a growing youth population working alongside the recent discovery of Or’zet and rise in popularity of orxploitation music and films, an emerging culture for orks has strengthened and penetrated the mainstream. But it is not a culture that will make much of the world happy. The popular lyrics of orxploitation goddess Orxanne—”live fast, die young, best behind a smoking gun”—are not the counterculture rap one would expect, but instead the growing cultural norm for a metatype that is starting to find its stride and possibly turning some of its simmering discontent outward. It is most interesting to me when looking at this blossoming culture that its greatest proponents, the megacorporations behind orxploitation, are fueling the fires of revolution. While the great powers of the world will not be brought down by an uprising of enraged orks, they could risk losing a portion of their heavy labor force if said workers were to decide they wanted a nation. Literally Blacks and Latinos, but also literally animals, got it. On Ork Intelligence posted:Mental Characteristics: Hobgoblins demonstrate base mental limitations similar to the standard robustus. They possess a quicker temper, which was once considered a cultural phenomenon but has been shown to be a variation in hormone levels. The hormonal variation can also explain their enhanced scoring on EQ tests, which leaves the, with an odd combination of empathy and simmering anger. On Ork Intelligence, Part 2 posted:Mental Characteristics: Oni seem to possess the same intellectual limitations as their primary species. This diminished intellect has been tested across both indigenous Japanese oni and those born outside Japan. While similar in intellectual level to the base metatype, oni possess, on average, a greater EQ and force of personality. On Ork Intelligence, Part 3 posted:Mental Characteristics: Satyrs lack the mental limitations of their primary subspecies. They also score exceptionally well in adaptive thinking tests and have an above average EQ. These qualities have led satyrs to become one of the more well-adjusted robustus metavariants. In most cases, they also tend to adapt better to society at large than their primary subspecies. The Bell Curve is your favorite book, got it. On Jesus Christ, Really? posted:If you’ve never been pulled aside and questioned for walking while tusked, you won’t understand why this jacket comes with taser-resistant lining. gently caress off. So yeah, I'd call it meaner poo poo than 'handled poorly', personally, but it's definitely handled poorly.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:04
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In an attempt to properly grimdarkify their universe they inadvertently(?) created a world where Ferguson PD and Zimmerman did nothing wrong.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:08
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And here I was concerned that a steampunk alternate history setting might be considered offensively revisionist. Holy crap Shadowrun
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Mar 12, 2015 18:13
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In one of the State of the Art books, I think a 3rd Ed one, they talk about Orksploitation movies. This is also the same setting that still has a version of Japan as seen through the eyes of a GM executive in 1983. Impossible scenarios also happen like the successful reunification of the Koreas and a peaceful no problems two state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict but China falls apart the second a magical wall goes up around Tibet. Shadowrun was pretty much written through the viewpoint of someone who listened to Coast to Coast AM in the 90's and believed it. Shadowrun is so loving ridiculous that you lose sight of the regressive poo poo because you're too busy getting caught up in how much of a crazy and hosed up world it is.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:51
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You know, I get the feeling they're trying to make the point that racism is wrong but failing at it unintentionally so I'm not gonna rage at them, but at the same time I think that the fact that the stand-ins for the black and Latino races have literally inferior mental faculties compared to the rest is one hell of a blunder and that not correcting it despite recognizing the issue is one hell of a gently caress-up. I get the feeling they're reluctant to change it simply because they don't want to mess with something that's been around since the first edition of the game, and that's really loving pointless. I mean, if they wanted to keep the overall game balance (orks and trolls are good at fighting, elves are wizard, etc.) they could just change it so that orks and trolls have a harder time casting or whatever, but remove the stat limitations on their cognitive abilities.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:54
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What is the context on those Shadowrun ones? Because to me, it comes off like it's written in-universe by a racial apologist. Like, it's supposed to seem super racist and show you how people see orcs, rather than how they actually are. Like Ronwayne said about 'Zimmerman did nothing wrong'. It's the right analogy - You can shoot an orc and get away with it, because 'the streets were his weapon'.
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Mar 12, 2015 19:13
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On one hand: yeah the orcs are literally scientifically proven dumb aggressive savages. On the other hand: the view of the book is that it's still wrong to detain, question, and tase them for no reason. But that's really stupid. Like you guys said it just comes off as idiotic. If they're going to be a minority stand-in then they can't actually, provably do all the negative poo poo that racists fantasies say that minorities do like being measurably violent dumb brutes who have actual litters of unsupported children and roam around in gangs. This would be like if that Star Trek episode where both dudes are half-white/half-black on different sides of their body actually had one of them be an innately violent destructive idiot due to his skin color. No, the whole point was that other than their skin differences they were exactly the same
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Mar 12, 2015 19:26
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Elfface posted:What is the context on those Shadowrun ones? Because to me, it comes off like it's written in-universe by a racial apologist. Like, it's supposed to seem super racist and show you how people see orcs, rather than how they actually are. Like Ronwayne said about 'Zimmerman did nothing wrong'. It's the right analogy - You can shoot an orc and get away with it, because 'the streets were his weapon'. So, in most Shadowrun books, including this one, you'll have the bulk of the text on a single subject written by a singular figure in-setting, giving a more-or-less objective viewpoint. In this case, it's the only viewpoint given in the entirety of the 20~ page chapter about metatypes. If the main text is meant to be seen as biased or uncertain, you'd then see text below each section, emulating a forum conversation, with other people offering their own opinions, calling out the author for being a racist, etc. There are none of those in this chapter, which is indicative of the fact that it's meant to be taken seriously and as an objective account. Nothing else in the book is meant to feel like it's feeding you inaccuracies. It's just a player's guide, expanding on rules and setting information. It absolutely does come across as written by an in-setting racist, but nothing says that's the case. There are objective, out-of-setting boxes in each section that offers how to use these ideas and concepts in the game, with nothing suggesting, "Maybe these aren't true.", just things telling you how to handle being an ork, which is more wolf than man.
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Mar 12, 2015 19:28
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Part of the problem is that orcs and trolls are fantasy bad guys so everything becomes an extension of the D&D race war setting even when it's mixed in with a riff on real-world politics and scifi.
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Mar 12, 2015 19:37
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The whole setting of Shadowrun is saturated with that sort of late-80s pseudo diversity where they try to pay lip service to minorities by including them practically as caricatures of themselves. This kind of thing is always uncomfortable in hindsight. Instead of "the black guy" or "the disabled guy" it's just people with tusks instead. See also: the great ghost dance.
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Mar 12, 2015 19:53
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Except Shadowrun is very clear that it's taking those tropes and applying them to real-world racial politics. It's the precise moment that fantasy-racism meets real world racism. To be fair, when the material originated, "even if there are real genetic differences, we should hold to equality as a principle despite this" was probably a defensible position. Just not so much six editions later. e: Native Americans taking back most of North America is probably the most awesome part of Shadowrun, but to quote First Nations goon Crosswell, "that really isn't what a Ghost Dance is about."
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Mar 12, 2015 19:53
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It would be cool if they made a fantasy Jew race based on the lesser used Jewish traits like neurosis, self-depreciative humor, controlling mothers and propensity to lawyering instead of banking. Basically a race of Larry David and Woody Allen characters
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Mar 12, 2015 19:55
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I don't want to cause a huge derailing clusterfuck with this question but I was just thinking a bit about this subject earlier and wanted to get some opinions. The whole thing with viewing/substituting fantasy species as stand ins for actual real world human races seems a bit of a stretch. It's pretty easy to see how you can connect racial stereotypes with a traditional 'bad guy' species in fantasy since those stereotypes contain nothing but extremely negative traits, but since those stereotypes themselves have no basis in reality then it becomes this weird double abstract thing that I'm not even sure how to properly describe. I mean, if someone were to describe orcs to a person who had never heard of the standard fantasy setting and that person said "They sound just like blacks/latinos/etc." then that persons probably already an irredeemable piece of poo poo anyway, but most people would probably just think "They sound like the monsters you get in fairytales" and would never make the racial stereotype connection unless it was pointed out to them because they don't already think of other human beings in terms of broad negative untrue groups of traits. Does this make any sense?
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Mar 12, 2015 20:19
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Bob Quixote posted:I mean, if someone were to describe orcs to a person who had never heard of the standard fantasy setting and that person said "They sound just like blacks/latinos/etc." then that persons probably already an irredeemable piece of poo poo anyway, but most people would probably just think "They sound like the monsters you get in fairytales" and would never make the racial stereotype connection unless it was pointed out to them because they don't already think of other human beings in terms of broad negative untrue groups of traits. It's not "They sound just like blacks/latinos/etc.", more like "They sound just like the bigoted poo poo racists say about blacks/latinos/etc, which really makes me wonder about the writer's motivation for having it be objectively true."
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Mar 12, 2015 20:46
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Bob Quixote posted:and would never make the racial stereotype connection unless it was pointed out to them because they don't already think of other human beings in terms of broad negative untrue groups of traits. This is the problem though. In D&D it's objectively true that orcs are dumber and more evil than humans or elves or gnomes. It's not that orcs are literally black people, it's that you have multiple racial groups with differing traits in a way that reflects negatively on some of the groups. It's probably not intentional, but the whole thing directly reflects real world stereotypes, and combined with the general fantasy trope of it being totally okay to slaughter the evil races en masse, it's pretty problematic. Although in the specific case of Shadowrun, the orcs=literal black people is totally intentional and racist as hell.
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Mar 12, 2015 20:46
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Bob Quixote posted:Does this make any sense? No, it doesn't make sense, pointing out that races in fantasy map uncomfortably closely to races in real life isn't weird, especially given how loving weird and lovely fantasy has been about race over the years (and gender, and politics, and...). These things are written by people, people with opinions, beliefs, and unchecked assumptions, and there's no reason to believe that they weren't putting them in their writing and every reason to believe they were. Sure, not every example might hold water under scrutiny, but there's no reason not to go, "Hang on, is this doing what I think it's doing?" when you come upon a possible example of it.
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Mar 12, 2015 20:57
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The thing is, D&D and the settings it has inspired, like Shadowrun, have a lot more in common with the pulp fantasy of the early 20th Century than with the Tolkien stuff the resemble superficially. From what I can tell, the orcs in Tolkien are entirely supernatural, they aren't stand-ins for other races and the colonialism is there, but not like in Howard or Lovecraft. When you look at pulps, like Howard (who I guiltily really like), the different races are, well, races. The Shemites and Picts and not-Africans aren't different species, they're literally racist caricatures. D&D used those kind of characterizations but overlaid them with the Tolkien "races" and pow, now we have weird uncomfortable racist orcs. (I know Tolkiens dwarfs are based explicitly on Jews, but I don't think any of the others share the same kind of racial/religious stand-in status. Correct me if I'm wrong.)
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Mar 12, 2015 21:10
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FishFood posted:(I know Tolkiens dwarfs are based explicitly on Jews, but I don't think any of the others share the same kind of racial/religious stand-in status. Correct me if I'm wrong.) Tolkiens dwarves represented a isolationist policy America (as it was back when he was young). The shire was beautiful Ireland, and orcs were the horror of mechanised warfare.
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Mar 12, 2015 21:24
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FishFood posted:(I know Tolkiens dwarfs are based explicitly on Jews, but I don't think any of the others share the same kind of racial/religious stand-in status. Correct me if I'm wrong.) The language of Tolkien's dwarves (spelled with a 'v' to differentiate them from real people with dwarfism according to Tolkien himself) was based on the Semitic language family, of which Hebrew is a branch. Tolkien never fully developed it the way he did the elf languages, but his notes on the bits of grammar and vocabulary he did work out are pretty unambiguous as to their inspirations. Apparently somebody was paid to 'finish' the dwarven language in preparation for the Hobbit movies. The concept of dwarves as short, burly, bearded craftsmen who toil in the earth and lust after gold comes straight from the Germanic mythology he studied as a scholar of Old English literature though, many of the names used for dwarves in his stories were borrowed straight from the Norse Eddas. 1994 Toyota Celica fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 12, 2015 |
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Mar 12, 2015 21:33
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Bob Quixote posted:Does this make any sense? To add to what folks say above, some of this stuff comes out whether you mean it to or not. Take the Drow, for example. In traditional mythology, the "Trow" are fairies or trolls that sneak into your house and do poo poo to you while you're asleep, like a ton of other creatures. In D&D, they are a dark-skinned matriarchal society that live underground, created basically whole cloth by Gygax and expanded on by Salvatore. They are innately evil, worship an evil spider goddess who was cast out by the light-skinned good elf god, consider men to be utterly and innately inferior to women, are paranoid and backstabbing as a matter of both course and religious devotion, and believe that they should be in charge of everything. Now, were you to ask Salvatore or Gygax, "Hey, do you have a problem with powerful black women?" they'd almost certainly answer "No, of course not. I'm not racist." They almost certainly didn't sit down to say "Now how can I settle my grudge with all those races I hate today? I know! A D&D manual/novel!" But what they wrote is nevertheless quite easily readable as very racist and sexist. There is no ambiguity to the drow's portrayal. They are literally a race of evil black women who want to dominate and enslave you for their weird god. No amount of jockeying is going to make "And as punishment, the good god turned all the evil people's skin black to show how evil they were" into something that isn't troublesome. That's a pernicious racist trope that has a long history, dating back to the mark of Cain. Tolkien had a similar problem with Lord of the Rings. In one very uncomfortable reading, it is a book about how we shouldn't allow the evil brown skinned folks (The Haradrim) from the middle east and their black skinned orc friends to take over White Europe. When this was pointed out to Tolkien, he was appalled. He hadn't realized that he had written something that could be taken as racist, as it was certainly not his intention. He was a devout Christian who believed all men were brothers, and he hated racists utterly and completely. He was very troubled by his portrayal of the orcs, and his letters spend a great deal of time discussing back and forth how to resolve the problem. But a lot of RPG people don't do that. They bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the Drow, for example, aren't even slightly awkward or in need of fixing. Doesn't mean people are racist for having made a mistake, or for playing a game. But pretending that these things haven't happened, or that we shouldn't correct them?
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Mar 12, 2015 21:39
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Well it started as "orcs and related creatures are elementally evil monsters made with evil magic/that spring in adult form out of primordial evil muck to plague the world." Then this was injected with "Well why don't we give them some kind of ecology as a thought exercise/way for players and GMs to get more mileage out of this super-common trope." Then this morphed into "Well now that these are developed in some way, what if I want to play as one and likely play it as nuanced?" Ranging from dark elf with a heart of gold to "this is evil because" to "this is evil but goes far enough off the scatterplot that it starts to come back in at adorable." This is then spliced in with "What if we ported fantasy tropes into a modernized dystopia and vice versa?" So you get a race whose dual origins are "creature that you should kill on sight to make the world a better place" mixed in with racial politics as understood by nerds, whose comprehension of racial politics is not their first skill. "Orcs are downtrodden, so that's an analogy for [minority], right?" So you get a creature that's genetically/magically strong, evil, stupid, and obsessed with violence standing in for minorities. Meanwhile Shadowrun the Actual Game as Played tends to be Tolkien: Impossible and a lot of the splats are fictionalized black market catalogs. The impression I have always gotten is that it's cyberpunk with trolls. D&D eventually tends to be about how your character is going to directly or indirectly take control of the setting, so the politics become a lot more explicit in play.
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Mar 12, 2015 21:48
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