Race in Dungeons and Dragons

The impact of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and its many transmedia products, while fairly infrequently discussed by historians of fiction in Fantasy, ought not to go unremarked. Even if the trickle-down influence of the game is not considered, its most popular realms were shared worlds in which large numbers of novels, written by multiple authors, were set. Hundreds of novels have been written for each of the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance settings, for example.15 In the early editions of D&D “humans are the normative race, and given the Anglo-centric depiction of human culture in the game, humans can be interpreted as representing ‘white people.’”16 The manuals for the first two editions of the game contained only illustrations of White characters in their hundreds of pages, and the third edition (2000), had very few.17 This structure was maintained in D&D – despite the myriad other playable races – until the fourth edition, released in 2008, which Tresca argues: “set out to remove the humanocentric bias of the racial descriptions.”18 As Matthew Sernett writes in the Races and Classes guide to that edition:

Dwarves are described as suspicious, greedy, and vengeful. Elves are known to be aloof, disdainful, and slow to make friends. Gnomes are reckless pranksters. Half-orcs have short tempers. Each race in the 3rd Edition Players Handbook brings with it classic flaws – except humans … maybe humans were described in such glowing terms as a means of explain why we presented them as the dominant race in all of D&D’s published settings.19

The fourth edition added corruptibility as an inherent weakness of humans. This passage highlights the racial logic of the game world – non-physical traits are linked to biology – and adding a flaw to humanity does not undercut this. Game rules that favour specifically White humanity and privilege human player-characters over non-human characters which are often marked as non-White, combined with the dominance of humans in “all of D&D’s published settings” as Sernett puts it,20 established Whiteness as both normative and desirable.