The problem with Evil races is not what you think

[Cadence]

Well, lets imagine it as an orc. What would an orc race have to be in order to avoid being deeply problematic? I would say that first we should dump the word 'race', lets call it a 'species', it is not a human, it is another species.

Tolkien's and similar use of 'race of men' vs. 'race of elves' or whatnot, seems to certainly be outweighed by the negative uses of the word's other definitions before and since. I'm tempted to suggest 'peoples' instead of 'races' for the humanoids, but then does that box out the centaurs and treants, for example. Sure, 'species'.

I would probably totally avoid the whole 'breeding with humans' thing entirely. If the issue ever comes up, then OK, maybe orcs and humans are in the same genus. Maybe they can create sterile offspring, or whatever. But why even go there?

Orcs are not inherently evil. There may well be an orc civilization which has standards and culture which the PCs will not approve of. OK, fine, so do cultures on the real Earth (and yes we label them as inferior to us, our bad). I mean, we have plenty of fictional models already out there, like Klingons, which are certainly not an 'evil race' or particularly 'primitive' etc. In fact, I think Star Trek did a fairly decent job, right? (I'm sure there are points where it might be criticized, I really haven't studied the topic). I mean, there are other non-D&D versions of orcs too, some of which are probably more acceptable.

I guess my question about Orcs and Elves and Klingons and Vulcans is, what's their purpose?

I don't know if I have words I want to put down for any of them but I think I can see a storytelling purpose for the humanoid animals (some flavors of lizardmen, kenku), the things from Faerie (some flavors of elves, some flavors of goblins), the things from the far realms and abberations (ilithid) and the undead (vampires and zombies), and the outsiders (angels and devils) that don't have to drift into problems.

But is the purpose of dwarves, halflings, and orcs (or Klingons and Vulcans) mostly to allow for a certain type of person to not be a human - often with a solid slop of some extreme stereotype thrown on? That is, to essentially be another race of humans? Does that work if the other race is "better" or doesn't overlap in too many ways at all - but fall flat if they are "lesser" or are portrayed as the other? If they're the same, do they just allow for stories about interactions between human groups, without needing one of them to be human (is that why they're used in Star Trek so much)? How important is that in a fantasy world?

Anyway, obviously they can't be INHERENTLY primitive, evil, stupid, aggressive, etc. That's really it. While this might create some problems for existing D&D settings and lore, it doesn't seem all that onerous to me. Now, creatures which are much less obviously humanoid, we can be less worried about. The example of 'parrots' is good, a bird people are much less evocative of humans, and as long as you avoid trying to carbon copy a human culture onto them, I am sure it should be fine. That leaves a LOT of design space open! Cat people, dog people, bird people, lizard people, snake people, insect people, etc. etc. etc. Just don't make the more anthro ones inherently negative AND associated with cultural traits we link to racist ideas.

It is all rather unfortunate. This would be a lot easier, except we're burdened with a nasty history. That's life.

Oh for a time machine and the hope that we would actually be better than our ancestors were in those same situations.

 

[Malmuria]

I should add that my argument in the post upthread isn't that all animal people are racist. It's that the use of animal features applied to real world people by racists demonstrates that animal people in fiction can be racist. (I'll add this to my OP as an edit.)

Elsewhere in this thread I've made stronger arguments about what I think is racist in D&D, to do with correspondences with racist claims, and in some cases derivation from Tolkien, Howard, Lovecraft, and other cultural sources. Ultimately all of it comes from the (often unconscious and unexamined) absorption and reproduction of ideas in the wider culture.

Yes. And that social relationships within the implied or default dnd setting mimic colonialism, and I would say specifically nineteenth century settler colonialism. That is, these racial descriptions in dnd, as a set of cultural documents, don't make sense without the context of Euro-American imperialism.

The question of what gets inadvertently reproduced even among people mindful of those tropes is an interesting one. I'm assuming most of us run games in English, and many of us playing where we reside, which is to say, on stolen land. Which is to say, the development of this particular language of talking about otherness is fairly recent, and permeates our contemporary existence.

 

[Doug McCrae]

CONTENT WARNING: VERY RACIST CLAIMS, IN QUOTATION

This post is about several different sorts of correspondences between "savage" humanoids in D&D 5e and racist ideas.

Savage and Civilised Races

Note the virtually identical terminology — D&D 5e's "civilized and savage" and "savage... races" compared with Gobineau's "savage races" and Darwin's "savage and civilised races."

D&D 5e Monster Manual (2014):
"Humanoids are the main peoples of the D&D world, both civilized and savage… far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds."

Arthur de Gobineau, The Inequality of Races (1853):
"The savage races of to-day have always been savage, and we are right in concluding, by analogy, that they will continue to be so, until the day when they disappear."

Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871):
"The belief that there exists in man some close relation between the size of the brain and the development of the intellectual faculties is supported by the comparison of the skulls of savage and civilised races."

Devil Worship

The worship of evil gods, such as the orcish god Gruumsh, is very similar to devil worship.

Monster Manual:
"[Gnolls worship] the demon lord Yeenoghu."

Cotton Mather, The Glorious Works of Christ in America (1702):
"These parts were then covered with nations of barbarous Indians and infidels… whose whole religion was the most explicit sort of devil-worship."

Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain (1868):
"All Indian religion has the air of devil-worship, or worship of the destructive principle in some shape: the gods are drawn as grinning fiends, they are propitiated by infernal music, they are often worshipped with obscene and hideous rites."

William Benjamin Smith, The Color Line (1905):
"These "avenues" of the far-sighted African are nothing but the blind alleys of Voodooism and devil worship."

A Creed of Fear and Horror

Monster Manual:
"Maglubiyet… is the greater god of goblinoids… he is worshiped not out of adoration but fear."

Greater Britain:
"We must not forget that Hindooism is a creed of fear and horror, not of love."

Human Sacrifice

Monster Manual:

Gnolls celebrate their victories by performing demonic rituals and making blood offerings to Yeenoghu.​

​

Prisoners… are sacrificed to Semuanya, the lizardfolk god.​

​

When an orc slays an elf in Gruumsh's name and offers the corpse of its foe as a sacrifice to the god of slaughter, an aspect of the god might appear.​

John Lubbock, The Origin of Civilisation (1870):

The lowest races have no religion; when what may perhaps be in a sense called religion first appears, it differs essentially from ours; nay, it is not only different, but in some respects even opposite... The deities are evil, not good... they generally require bloody, and often rejoice in human, sacrifices.​

Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color (1920):
"The native religions were usually sanguinary, demanding a prodigality of human sacrifices. The killings ordained by negro wizards and witch-doctors sometimes attained unbelievable proportions."

HP Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1928):

From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a centre hung, head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshippers jumped and roared... there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng.​

Robert E Howard, The Slithering Shadow (1933):

'A god must have his sacrifices. When I was a child in Stygia the people lived under the shadow of the priests. None ever knew when he or she would be seized and dragged to the altar…'​

'Such is not the custom of my people,' Conan growled.​

Cannibalism

Monster Manual:

Gnolls are feral humanoids that attack settlements along the frontiers and borderlands of civilization without warning, slaughtering their victims and devouring their flesh.​

​

Lizard folk are omnivorous, but they have a taste for humanoid flesh. Prisoners are often taken back to their camps to become the centerpieces of great feasts… Victims are... cooked and eaten by the tribe.​

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes (1912):
"And then began for the French officer the most terrifying experience which man can encounter upon earth—the reception of a white prisoner into a village of African cannibals."

Robert E Howard, Shadows in Zamboula (1935):
"Cannibalism was more than a perverted appetite with the black men of Darfar; it was an integral element of their ghastly cult."

Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals (2011):

The motif of the missionary as cannibal fare has been a staple of Western popular culture for centuries.​

​

Imaginary cannibals have been all too influential as a negative stereotype of non-Western Others and as an excuse for the extermination of those Others.​

Non-morality

Monster Manual:
"Lizardfolk have no notion of traditional morality, and they find the concepts of good and evil utterly alien."

The Color Line:
"It is more correct to say of the Negro that he is non-moral than immoral."

 

[willrali]

Yeah, as the years have gone by, I've come more and more to the view that there's simply no room for 'humanoids'. The problems just run too deep. The next game I run will be all humans, all the time. The enemies will either be humans or literal monsters of alien or demonic motivation that are impossible to play as characters.

I'm just tired of navigating the minefield of humanoid 'races' and all the baggage they bring.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Tolkien and similar use of 'race of men' vs. 'race of elves' or whatnot, seems to certainly be outweighed by the negative uses of the words other definitions before and since. I'm tempted to suggest 'peoples' instead of 'races' for the humanoids, but then does that box out the centaurs and treants, for example. Sure, 'species'.

Yeah, there was a whole thread on what name to use a few months back. Various suggestions were made, but IMHO species is the clearest, other ones seem like they don't really get you far enough from the baggage of 'race'. People, folk, kind, kin, nation, etc. are all mostly tolerably clear, though some of them have other connotations that might not always fit, like implying a level of unification of culture or politics that is not justified in every setting. Species does sound a bit 'sciency' I guess, but there's some virtue in that, you have clearly made a statement as to the biological distinctness of each group. I guess you may be opening up the possibility of the can of worms which would be some people's sense of where on the cladogram to put each one, and if some of those locations imply some superiority or something, but at least you make people take a few more dubious leaps before they get to "I'm better than him."

I guess my question about Orcs and Elves and Klingons and Vulcans is, what's there purpose?

I don't know if I have words I want to put down for any of them but I think I can see a storytelling purpose for the humanoid animals (some flavors of lizardmen, kenku), the things from Faerie (some flavors of elves, some flavors of goblins), the things from the far realms and abberations (ilithid) and the undead (vampires and zombies), and the outsiders (angels and devils) that don't have to drift into problems.

I'm with you there.

But is the purpose of dwarves, halflings, and orcs (or Klingons and Vulcans) mostly to allow for a certain type of person to not be a human - often with a solid slop of some extreme stereotype thrown on? That is, to essentially be another race of humans? Does that work if the other race is "better" or doesn't overlap in too many ways at all - but fall flat if they are "lesser" or are portrayed as the other? If they're the same, do they just allow for stories about interactions between human groups, without needing one of them to be human (is that why they're used in Star Trek so much)? How important is that in a fantasy world?

Yeah, I mean, this is a good question, do we need orcs at all? Obviously the simple answer is 'no'. I mean, we can get by without them. If orcs have to be depicted in as much of a 3-dimensional nuanced way as humans, at some point is it really necessary to have them as a different species? I do think Star Trek wrestled with that a bit, Vulcans seemed a lot like supermen at first, but Spock was always depicted as being both superhuman, and at the same time in some ways unable to do things that were pretty easy for humans. So that leaves us with the IDEA of aliens, which is a thing in Sci Fi. I mean, the very idea of a cosmopolitan galaxy filled with different species says something IN AND OF ITSELF. Likewise, in a world-building sense, humanoids/demi-humans does say something. Plus it has folkloric/mythological significance. So, I think there is a reason to have 'orcs', at least as a general concept. Now, maybe the game could do with just 'elves' and 'dwarves', so to speak, and not hostile humanoid races, but I think basically by saying every species must be depicted in a nuanced way, that is what you would get, nobody is really an 'orc', they are just a species, like us, but different. So I could see building a world where you have demi-humans, but no humanoid monsters. Or the only ones are things like giants or something, which could have their own special creation story and be really very different from 'people'.

Oh for a time machine and the hope that we would actually be better than our ancestors were in those same situations.

Yeah, we'd like to think we would, but my money is against it, even for myself.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Hey, make orcs into the mortal descendants of literal and you have a fine rationale for an always evil non-nuanced species.

(IOW, what tieflings could have been.)

Of course, eventually, someone will want to play a Hellboy-inspired character and…

 

[pemerton]

When is something tripe and when is it a natural feeling story element?

I think the notion of a "natural feeling story element" is challenging in this context. Because when we're talking about received tropes, naturalness can be a manifestation of that received character.

Does the creature from the black lagoon need to have language and literature and science and live in a house to avoid tropes?

Speaking just for my part, I get a bit tired of framings/settings that treat agrarian and urban social and economic forms as the norm for humans, so that other forms of human life get framed as "primitive" and threats.

There is a complexity or a compounding, here, that results from the fact that RPGing, as an activity, is undertaken by people living in urban, literate societies. Which means it's easy to project that as a norm - so part of the "strangeness" of a creature is its distance from, or contrast with, those social forms.

A further compounding factor is the heritage of JRRT - The Shire is presented as, at one and the same time, an agrarian pre-industrial paradise and as having material plenty comparable to nineteenth or even twentieth century Britain. So familiar cultural elements - romanticised British villagers - are merged with a familiar material culture not in any sort of realistic fashion, but by authorial whim that reinforces the normative projection described in the previous paragraph.

One way to try and break down that normative projection can be to engage with a wide range of history and social science. Another, based on human experience rather than intellectual techniques, is to talk with someone who is an accomplished professional in a scientific field about her childhood eating with banana leaves and gourds (ie when her society had not undergone extensive processes of industrialisation and state formation, and hence - among other things - did not have a material culture that rested so heavily on factory production of crockery and cutlery). Breaking down that normative projection means breaking down the association between humanity - in its full meaning - and a certain sort of material and intellectual culture and social and economic organisation.

In D&D, given its standard processes of play and associated mechanical systems, I think this is not just about Orcs vs humans. It's also, for instance, about rules for AC.

To somewhat echo @AbdulAlhazred, there's no reason to think this should be easy.

Is it ok to just have the things the races do semi-logically follow from what the base species does?

If we're talking about animalian people, we get proud lionfolk and group-centred dogfolk and sneaky, slithery ratfolk. Maybe also tail-chasing catfolk, though they mightn't be a good fit for typical D&D.

If we get to non-mammalian animals, or even more obscure mammals like echidnas or pangolins, it's more obscure how we would project their apparent emotional lives (do frogs even have emotional lives?) onto animal people. But I think this is pretty different from what @Doug McCrae is discussing. D&D lizardfolk aren't created by trying to imagine, in some sci-fi-ish way, what an intelligent lizard might be like - for a start, there's no particular reason to think that an intelligent, humanoid, egg-laying reptile would be a gregarious animal. They're a version of a pulp trope - you could take the entries for lizardfolk and "tribesmen", swap the names, and not have anything that is being said about either group of people change.

I guess my question about Orcs and Elves and Klingons and Vulcans is, what's their purpose?

<snip>

But is the purpose of dwarves, halflings, and orcs (or Klingons and Vulcans) mostly to allow for a certain type of person to not be a human - often with a solid slop of some extreme stereotype thrown on? That is, to essentially be another race of humans?

My knowledge of Star Trek isn't that great - bits and pieces of the original TV series and original movies. On that basis, it seems to me that the purpose of Vulcans is to serve a storytelling function, about the relationship between human intelligence and human morality. This is done by having Vulcans be hyper-intelligent but lacking in the sorts of emotions that underpin particularity and permissible self-regard (as opposed to strict impersonality) in human morality.

I created a Burning Wheel character a few weeks ago, for a new campaign. The character is a Dark Elf in JRRT's sense - mechanically, in BW, this is expressed by having the standard Elvish Grief trait turn into Spite. Like all BW Elves, Dark Elves can sing magical songs - one of these can allow other Elves to turn their Grief to Spite as they realise the futility of hope. In certain circumstances, a Dark Elf can turn Spite back to Grief - this requires (inter alia) being forgiven by a (non-Dark) Elf whom the Dark Elf has hurt in the course of play. A Dark Elf may also, in the right circumstances, turn his/her Spite into Hatred - a trait normally possessed only by Orcs.

So besides some cool images, the function of Elves and Orcs is to give a certain sort of mechanical expression to these emotional aspects of the human experience - Grief at the suffering of human due to their "fallen" nature; Spite (or, less evocatively, extreme realism/pessimism) at the futility of continuing to struggle for genuine achievement or redemption; Hatred as a response to all the horrible experiences the world throws at us. (Dwarves, in BW, have Greed as their Emotional Attribute.)

There are also material cultures associated with these different "stock" (the BW term for D&D's "race") - Dwarven armour, Elven cloaks, Dark Elves dark metal weapons that long to draw blood, jagged Orcish blades and Orcish wolf-riders - but at least in my view, these are not foregrounded in the same way in BW as in D&D, and hence the pulp-y and racialised tropes do not predominate.

Of course that's my view and experience. Others might differ.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think the notion of a "natural feeling story element" is challenging in this context. Because when we're talking about received tropes, naturalness can be a manifestation of that received character.

Speaking just for my part, I get a bit tired of framings/settings that treat agrarian and urban social and economic forms as the norm for humans, so that other forms of human life get framed as "primitive" and threats.

There is a complexity or a compounding, here, that results from the fact that RPGing, as an activity, is undertaken by people living in urban, literate societies. Which means it's easy to project that as a norm - so part of the "strangeness" of a creature is its distance from, or contrast with, those social forms.

Right, and here I think we all have to politely ask people with different cultural/social backgrounds to all give each other the same 'breathing room'. I think that sometimes is the gist of frustration with 'PC' ideas about gaming and race/culture. Not to absolve anyone of responsibility for how they depict things, but to be able to give and take. However, I do appreciate that our Western cultures have done a lot of 'giving' and not so much 'taking' in a sense, historically (or maybe we should call it taking instead of giving, either way).

In D&D, given its standard processes of play and associated mechanical systems, I think this is not just about Orcs vs humans. It's also, for instance, about rules for AC.

That is an interesting point which hadn't come up so far in any of this discussion. AC is an easy one to look at, you are 'better armored' the more metal you can drape on your body in D&D. I think many games follow a similar pattern. I don't think this is unrealistic necessarily, but clearly there are trade-offs, and different societies needn't be 'backwards' simply because they don't wear armor. Yet those characters would be harshly punished mechanically in a D&D game (certainly a classic D&D game, less so in 4e or 5e).

D&D lizardfolk aren't created by trying to imagine, in some sci-fi-ish way, what an intelligent lizard might be like - for a start, there's no particular reason to think that an intelligent, humanoid, egg-laying reptile would be a gregarious animal. They're a version of a pulp trope - you could take the entries for lizardfolk and "tribesmen", swap the names, and not have anything that is being said about either group of people change.

Right, Lizardmen (or nowadays folk) aren't about what an intelligent lizard race would be like. They are simply a recapitulation of old western tropes about 'primitive tribes', with the lizard part not carrying any significance at all except as an atmospheric detail.

My knowledge of Star Trek isn't that great - bits and pieces of the original TV series and original movies. On that basis, it seems to me that the purpose of Vulcans is to serve a storytelling function, about the relationship between human intelligence and human morality. This is done by having Vulcans be hyper-intelligent but lacking in the sorts of emotions that underpin particularity and permissible self-regard (as opposed to strict impersonality) in human morality.

I watched all the original series episodes a few months back. Spock is a pretty sophisticated character. For example when the 'space hippies' show up, he identifies closely with their philosophical stance and they respect him. He's controlled, and cool, in his outward appearance, but Vulcans are not depicted as emotionally challenged, more the opposite. Their instinctive nature is so strong that they were FORCED to become controlled, or else perish. The message as it relates to modern humanity is pretty transparent of course! The theme is extended to humans as well, with hints of a history in which civilization reached the very brink of annihilation before adopting more mature attitudes (and presumably the Vulcans helped, as they are said to have appeared at that time).

I mean, Star Trek has plenty of ludicrously stock trope aliens as well, though interestingly I think the original show was in some sense more enlightened in that regard than later series. The Klingons are bad guys, maybe even a bit evil by our standards (they threaten to torture Kirk and Spock once for example, and they systematically execute Organians who don't obey them). OTOH they keep to their agreements and seem to have their own cultural standards. The Romulans are the other race that shows up a few times. They are depicted as a militaristic society, but the individual characters are respectable and certainly don't seem to be depicted as 'inferior' or lacking in positive traits.

 

[Emerikol]

So the gist of it is....
Because in the past some humans were falsely accused of being savage and evil, we cannot now have savage and evil make believe races in a roleplaying game.

First I will say that the past should never dictate what you can or cannot do today. It's either inherently right or wrong.

I'm not surprised that WoTC has gone the route they've gone. If I still played D&D, I don't and never played 5e, I would just tell my players to ignore all that stupid stuff and pretty much go with the implied world setting of prior years.

It's too bad. I think WoTC is listening to their employees, west coast leftists, and think they represent most of America. This is honestly a non-problem. If in fact this is the next thing we need to do on the road to racial equality then no problem exists in America as it relates to racism. Personally I don't think that is true and we should focus on real issues and not get sidetracked into stuff like this.

 

[Cadence]

If we're talking about animalian people, we get proud lionfolk and group-centred dogfolk and sneaky, slithery ratfolk. Maybe also tail-chasing catfolk, though they mightn't be a good fit for typical D&D.

If we get to non-mammalian animals, or even more obscure mammals like echidnas or pangolins, it's more obscure how we would project their apparent emotional lives (do frogs even have emotional lives?) onto animal people. But I think this is pretty different from what @Doug McCrae is discussing. D&D lizardfolk aren't created by trying to imagine, in some sci-fi-ish way, what an intelligent lizard might be like - for a start, there's no particular reason to think that an intelligent, humanoid, egg-laying reptile would be a gregarious animal. They're a version of a pulp trope - you could take the entries for lizardfolk and "tribesmen", swap the names, and not have anything that is being said about either group of people change.

Exactly. That was what I was trying to allude to with my "some flavors of lizardmen". I would be all in on a source book that took real life animals and humanoidized them with traits reflecting where they might end up. Even the house cat