Tolkien had an explicit theme of racial unity – at the end of both The Hobbit and TLOTR, various races band together to win the decisive battle. Many works that wish to be inclusive fail in the very act of attempting to include: non-white Barbies tend to involve dying a white doll brown or else introducing them as exotic others (Jamaican Barbie in a head-scarf, Hula Honey Barbie, Kwanzaa Barbie, etc.) There is a (not to) fine line between tokenizing and diversity. I don’t think that explicitly expressing racial tolerance excludes implicitly encoding racism. Now I am fully admitting to not having read it in over fifteen years, and I am planning on tracking it down to say more about it. Second, a few people who have read AQ more recently than I have reminded me that the setting goes out of its way to have various races get along. Perhaps a later post can get around to that.) Some people tell me it has changed things, but I’m looking at 30 years of D&D vs. (here let me fully admit to barely looking at 4 th edition.
Pushing racial diversity to supplements merely reinforces its absence in the core texts, especially because their very existence undermines the “European” setting argument – with all the various known worlds (if you will) to draw from, why do the core texts show no illustrations of Arabic elves, Persians, Moorish dwarves, Egyptians, Aztec priests, or Asian adventurers? Each exists as an official canonical part of the D&D universe, yet they unrepresented in the handbooks. I did allow myself to be distracted from my focus on the DMG and PH twice – once to diss AQ and OA, and once to briefly discuss the Drow. So let’s start with a topic that has come up a lot, both on this page and others: Al-Qadim and Oriental Adventures.įirst, none of the supplemental settings contradict my point, as I was specifically looking at race as presented in the core handbooks.
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