How Dungeon Masters Handle Race

A thread asking dungeon-masters how “fantasy racism” – the antipathy of dwarves and orcs for example – affects the design and play of campaigns received a range of answers. One poster said “I have a pretty accepting world. I’m a bit more flexible with alignments than the books suggest … there aren’t really any major conflicts on a purely racial basis.”109 Players can change the alignment of individual characters or entire races so that some of the in-world justifications for...

 Medieval Thought and "Monstrous Races"

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that: “any kind of alterity can be inscribed across (constructed through) the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual.”3 Fear of racial difference has been embodied through monsters for centuries, and the idea of “monstrous races” stretches back to the Classical Era. Medieval thought “created strong links between physical and non-physical characteristics among different human gro...

 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...

 Racial Theory, Science, and Fantasy

Modern concepts of race were formulated as a “widely shared theory of biologically determined, physical, intellectual and moral differences between human groups.”35 Hannah Augstein identifies three key elements in nineteenth century race-thinking: that humanity can be divided into races “whose characteristics are fixed and defy the modifying influences of external circumstances;” that these racial groupings have different “intellectual and moral capacities;” and “that mental end...

 Fantasy's "Unreality" Makes It Safer for Exploring Cultur...

Fantasy is a useful sub-set through which to explore popular culture not only because of its prominent position at the present historical moment,but because its inherently non-mimetic nature creates a space which is at least nominally not “the real world” and is therefore safer for cultural work around fraught issues such as – although by no means limited to – race. This is not to suggest that the imagined worlds of Fantasy are separate from reality, but rather that the inclusion of a...

 The Invisibility of Whiteness Makes it the Default

In the theoretical and critical literature of whiteness studies, one of the more often discussed ways in which the social efficacy of the category of whiteness has been maintained in the face of its various “leaks” is, ironically, through its erasure as a definable racial category, as was briefly mentioned in the discussion of Tarzan of the Apes. As Jolanta A. Drzewiecka and Kathleen Wong (Lau) point out, the invisibility of whiteness has resulted in its supposed universality. By erasing ...

 SF Fantasies are in a Mutually Complicating Relationship ...

This general paradigm is offered as a theoretical ground for the specific focus and readings of the rest of this book, which analyses in detail the issues of gender, race, and their representation in American SF. For, while the “cognitive” element of SF may not hold in all or even most cases, still SF, as a specular mode, reminds us that its fantasies are in a mutually complicating relationship with material reality. The categories of gender and race, their mutable histories, and the meta...

 Racial Alignments in DnD

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, th...

 Tolkien's World Makes Race Scientific Rather Than Legalistic

The core of the problem is that Tolkien conflates race, culture, and ability. Hobbits, he says, are a race, and based upon a combination their hereditary traits and cultural practices, are better at being stealthy than other races. Tolkien does this throughout his novels, outlining the “racial” characteristics of men, of dwarves, of elves, of orcs, and those few of mixed ancestry (like Aragorn or the Uruk-Hai). As Helen Young, author of Race and Popular Fantasy Literature put it in a re...

 "Race" in D&D

As a social scientist who studies male-dominated subcultures, I have done research that put me in spaces where I delved into reactions to issues of race in gaming. A key question is this: Given how charged the term race has been, why would games use it to discuss differences that have nothing to do with the way we traditionally use the word? Dungeons & Dragons is not the only game to use the term in this way; so have many other digital and analog fantasy offerings. But the celebrated game...