A horrible step in the wrong direction

***CONTENT WARNING***

This post contains colonial language and description of colonialism and racism.

***CONTENT WARNING***

Recently, Wizards of the Coast released a brand new book called The Candlekeep Mysteries. The conceit of the book is that it contains a collection of short adventures based around books found in the Candlekeep Library, somewhere, predictably, on the Sword Coast. The broader conceit of the project was to use a wider diversity of writers than is usually the case for an official DnD book. 19 different writers were used for the various mysteries, most of whom have either published third party content for DnD or written for other TTRPGs.

The aim here was to reach out beyond the usual DnD writers and celebrate the range of talent in the TTRPG space. Sounds great right?

That’s why the experience of one of the writers on the project, Graeme Barber (@POCGamer on Twitter), is so depressing. You can read what happened in his own words here and here, but in summary, Barber’s adventure was heavily edited after he submitted it with no consultation, to the point where he did not even see the final copy of the adventure until after the book was actually released. Most disturbingly, especially given that Barber is a writer of colour who is active in the TTRPG community in speaking out against racism in TTRPGs, explicitly colonial language was added to his adventure.

I have literally zero experience in the TTRPG publishing world, but the idea that Barber was not consulted at all in the editing process is baffling to me. Even if the decision was made not to discuss changes with Barber for timing issues or something mundane such as that, the fact that Barber didn’t even get to see the final version of his own adventure before it was released just seems to be disrespectful.

However, the part of this story that I want to focus on is the use of colonial language. For contect, Barber had included in his adventure descriptions of the Grippi, a race of frog-people. In the final cut, the word ‘primitive’ was added to this description. This may not seem like much, but it’s important to understand the context of the word primitive, and it’s colonial connotations, to understand quite why this addition is so problematic.

The word ‘primitive’, along with others such as ‘barbaric’, ‘uncivilised’ and ‘savage’ were used in the colonial era to describe native people of pretty much every continent other than Europe. It was considered by Europeans in the colonial period (basically any time between the sixteenth century and the 1950s), that every culture they encountered that was different from their own was in some way inferior. They used words like primitive and barbaric to belittle and erase cultural practices which had existed for generations. More horrifically, they used this kind of language to justify the idea that it was the duty of white Europeans to bring ‘light’ to the ‘dark’ places they encountered. This bringing of ‘light’ usually meant destroying cultural iconography, erasing oral history and language, and forcing European ideas of what is civilised and moral on non-European people. At its worst (and this was quite often), this meant murdering, enslaving and exploiting non-Europeans for the enrichment of the European colonists.

This happened in every continent on the planet. From the annihilation of the Native American populations and cultures, to the Atlantic slave trade, from opium wars in China to the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in Australia, colonialism, and the mindset of western (white) supremacy has wrecked havoc across the entire globe.

While it is possible, especially for white Europeans, to think of this as a purely historical phenomenon, the impact of colonialism, and the actions of European nations in the colonial period is still very much felt today. The rate of vaccination for Covid 19 in Europe and America compared with in Africa and Asia is just one example of how colonialism still shapes geopolitics. For people of colour, the realities of colonialism, and the racist attitudes that underpinned colonialism, are part of the lived experience. One only has to look at the recent shooting of Asian Americans in Colorado, and the appalling apologism of those in power to see how colonialism is not a thing of the past.

This is heavy stuff for a DnD blog, but it’s important context. DnD, and the fantasy genre as a whole, exists in this context. Tolkien, CS Lewis and any other father of modern fantasy you could name, wrote with this context.The language of colonialism and racism has been part of DnD since the very start. As I have discussed before, the portrayal of Orc and Goblins in DnD is still explicitly racist. A quick perusal of the half-orc race in The Player’s Handbook gives us plenty of this colonial language. Orc tribes are ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’. Half-orcs are described as having ‘evil lurk[ing] within them’. Their attempts to mix with more ‘civilised races’ is underlined by their ‘orcish heritage’. This kind of language would not be out of place in colonial descriptions of the native cultures of Africa.

Another perhaps less well-documented area of The PHB with some worryingly colonial language is the Barbarian class. The very word ‘Barbarian’ comes from an earlier form of colonialism; it is an ancient greek term used to describe non-greek peoples. The word is derived from a mocking imitation of how non-greek languages sounded - “bar-bar-bar”. It’s not hard to think of modern (and incredibly racist) parallels to this. While Greek in origin, the word ‘barbarian’ is, of course, part of the modern colonial lexicon as well. ‘Barbaric’ peoples were contrasted to the more ‘civilised’ colonisers. Bringing ‘civilisation’ (for which read ‘western culture’) to these barbaric savages was part of the raison d'etre of colonialism.

Again, a perusal of the flavour-text of the barbarian in the PHB gives you plenty of colonial language. Barbarians are described as eschewing ‘civilisation’ for more a ‘primal’, ‘animalistic’ world. The barbarian class is based around ‘raging’, using the power of emotions, often tied to a connection to the natural world. The implication here is that these barbarians, who often come from remote tribes, are more driven by emotions and particularly anger, than the more rational, civilised people who come from more sophisticated lands. Again, this kind of description perfectly fits with colonial perceptions of groups such as the Maori and Gurkhas.

If you decided to make a barbarian character and decided to make them a PoC, I think there is a very good chance you would slip into some problematic tropes that many PoCs would find incredibly offensive.

Harmful colonial language is written into DnD. It has been from the very start and this has not gone away with more recent editions. With the release of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything last year, and other moves by WotC to address the well-documented issues of racism in DnD, I thought that the pendulum was starting to swing in the direction of a more progressive and less problematic game. What happened to Barber is a massive step in the wrong direction, and it shows that there is still a very long way to go.