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One of the giant elephants in the room with regards to fantasy has always been race. This is almost certainly because the majority of fantasy settings are modeled after medieval Europe. Of course with the increasing egalitarianism of modern society and the ever growing number of gamers from all sorts of backgrounds we've seen a lot more representation of colored people in game materials.
How do you deal with race in your games if at all?
I for one remember having a black friend who joined my gaming group. He made a human rogue who he described as being "dark skinned", to which I as the dungeon master found myself a little caught off guard. I found myself wondering "WHERE DO THE BLACK PEOPLE COME FROM IN MY WORLD? I HAD NOT PLANNED FOR THIS!" It may sound like a petty concern, but I had one human kingdom based off of England and one based off a mix of European influences with pale, sickly skin from living in a land awash in necromantic enchantment. Suddenly this one characters' very existence threw a wrench in my world/story. Did I invent a new continent where his people come from, with their own royal families, empires, etc.?
The funny thing was that at the time I felt like the issue was a hot potato and just kind of ignored it, much to the detriment of the story/world.
One of the giant elephants in the room with regards to fantasy has always been race. This is almost certainly because the majority of fantasy settings are modeled after medieval Europe. Of course with the increasing egalitarianism of modern society and the ever growing number of gamers from all sorts of backgrounds we've seen a lot more representation of colored people in game materials.
How do you deal with race in your games if at all?
I for one remember having a black friend who joined my gaming group. He made a human rogue who he described as being "dark skinned", to which I as the dungeon master found myself a little caught off guard. I found myself wondering "WHERE DO THE BLACK PEOPLE COME FROM IN MY WORLD? I HAD NOT PLANNED FOR THIS!" It may sound like a petty concern, but I had one human kingdom based off of England and one based off a mix of European influences with pale, sickly skin from living in a land awash in necromantic enchantment. Suddenly this one characters' very existence threw a wrench in my world/story. Did I invent a new continent where his people come from, with their own royal families, empires, etc.?
The funny thing was that at the time I felt like the issue was a hot potato and just kind of ignored it, much to the detriment of the story/world.
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In the inner sea world guide, you can find a lot of environments so that shouldn't come as that big a suprise.
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Black people have lived in England since at least Shakespeare's time. (See: Othello) Probably a lot longer. Multiculturalism is not a recent invention no matter what some history books say.
It doesn't have to "throw a wrench" in your world. If you don't want to explore the character's place of origin, something vague like "the other side of the world" or "the southern continent" works fine. Continue with your planned adventure, and maybe work on that aspect as you desire so you can use it later.
You could even put a lot of this on the player. Ask him to come up with the culture he is from, and how he got to the area where the adventure is taking place. So long as its reasonable, use it. Even if you want a different culture in this "far off land," there are probably multiple cultures present there.
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Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. Northern Africans were more common in the Empire than the pale skinned Celts.
In the Middle Ages, the Arabic Empire was one of the dominant forces in the world, controlling the trade routes between Europe and China, and operated as traders and merchants.
Multiculturalism was just as common in the past and, arguably, racism was less common. In Othello, the protagonist's father-in-law cared more about the Moor of Venice's age than his skin tone when protesting the marriage.
Personally, in my homebrew worlds, all humans are brown. Ethnicity plays less of a role than nationality. And I like the visual contrast it adds between humans (dark), elves (pale), and half-elves (mocha).
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I stopped homebrewing a long time ago. When I did I had made up a place like the Egypt and the middle east for my world. Now I use Golarion when I game fantasy and they have many places with dark skinned folks. Works out fine and no surprises.
Players dont really focus on it we just play through nromally. Now race tends to be a bit of a different story. Different places have different norms and values. Even then we usually only mention a few things for flavor and dont dwell on it at the table. Same thing for sexuality.
When the campaign is about adventure these things are pushed over to the side and not even a thing really. They become bigger elements when we focus on political intrigue so campaign has a huge impact on whether or not we worry about skin, sex, etc.
Huh. I don't mean to sound like "I am particularly enlightened" or anything, but skin color is just one of those things that doesn't come up in my games, either in my mind or past my lips.
That is to say, I don't tend to describe skin tones of NPCs, and neither do my players.
If someone wanted to play a native of Irrisen with dark skin, that's what they'd get, and nobody would ever think about it again. Ever.
What the game art portrays and what matters are two different things.
In my opinion there's lots of racism going on in a fantasy world, it's just that rather than between humans of different skin colour it's between humans and elves, elves and dwarves, etc.
Richard
I agree. Seems to me that fantasy games, books, and movies can depict, explore, and deconstruct (or perpetuate) racism in a non-threatening way by using fantasy races instead of real-world races. If you look at fantasy worlds and sci-fi universes long enough you'll see that most of them do this to some extent with a wide variety of real-world issues.
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In my opinion there's lots of racism going on in a fantasy world, it's just that rather than between humans of different skin colour it's between humans and elves, elves and dwarves, etc.
Richard
What was that quote again? The one about White, Yellow and Black putting their differences aside to gang up on Green? I always thought it was a rather clever way to describe fantasy-racism.
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Why worry about the darker skinned guy next to you when that thing with tusks and glowing eyes is looking your wayBecause my wife is looking his way.
That sounds like more of an issue with your wife (and maybe you) than him.
I'm from Texas, usually when people say that sort of thing where I'm from they're at some level of seriousness about it.
In our setting there are seven distinct custom races, of which is one more or less the human equivalent. They are not black in skin color, because there is no reason for them to be, just as there are no black halflings in Golarion (at least I've never seen or heard of one). The other races have their own skin colors, from very light to rather dark.
It's fantasy, and the more you try to model it after the real world, the less fantastic it gets.
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racism or species-ism?
Separate themes...
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Because humans are generally described as being more prolific and diverse than the other races I generally have 3-5 ethnicities of humans in a given setting. I won't cover everything because there's only so much stuff I want to deal with at once but I do make note of what's available on session zero. If the setting is as expansive or detailed as say, the inner sea, then most anything goes as far as humans are involved.
I am black and often play avatars of myself (or just power fantasies of myself), including skin tone, but for me the priority is to play the setting so if there are no black people then its no big deal to me. That said I do like having the opportunity to be a black human even if I don't play a human or someone with dark skin (fetchlings?) simply because I feel like black people are somewhat underrepresented in high fantasy fiction.
[edit] One thing I have to admit, that I didn't know much about Pathfinder other than my workmates played it a few years ago. I would not have initially got the beginner box if it weren't for Seelah. A black female paladin without skimpy armor made me take a closer look and I eventually got the Beginner Box. So race in fantasy rpgs may be a bigger deal than I will admit.
I never worried about skin color in D&D. It was just never an issue. If you wanted dark skinned character you just made your character dark skinned, no need to explain anything, after all you were human among party of Elvers and Dwarfs. The color of your skin doesn't mean much compared to long lived race like dwarfs and Elves who can see in the dark.
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As a straight, white male, I never really saw a problem with race in fantasy until I spoke with a half-asian woman. What she told me is that because she only ever saw white protagonists, she only ever imagined, played, and wrote white protagonists. Representation is important when you have none. Imagine how it would be if you saw a fantasy story with no one who looked like you? I can't because I've never seen it.
Seeing as Elves, Dwarves, Demons, Angels, halfings, and most other races are just humans with a little bit different about them, Why can't they also have different skin tones?
Separate note: Human hatred towards elves, dwarves, etc. would be speciesism, not racism.
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For me this has never really been a problem. I have often modeled my home worlds loosely on earth. I usually have some sort of analog to Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Back in 2000, when 3rd edition came out, I ran a game from 2,000 to 2,003. At the time I was living in New York City. The players started out at 1st level, and worked their way up to 20 level. We used the Forgotten Realms. One of my players, a Puerto Rican with coffee with milk colored skin played the fighter of the group. I had always assumed and my friend confirmed that his character looked much like him. One of our other friends who played with us was Korean American. His character was a rogue. Again I assumed that the rogue looked Korean. Apart from the player's descriptions of their character, the subject of race never really came up as a topic of conversation. We had fun playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I appreciate Paizo's decision to make Golarion a diverse place, and to show this with the artwork they use to show off Gollarion.
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I would argue that people of color have always been in fantasy. For instance, the Conan stories were full of people of all sorts of shades from analogs from all places around the world. Though they could be quite brutish and roguish at times, many were rather smart and clever. R. E. Howard was an interesting fellow for his time. Some authors writing around the same time period did not always treat darker skinned people well, or intelligently.
In the world of gaming, people of all races have been represented in D&D and its variants since 1st Edition. Deities & Demigods is chock full of mythology from all around the world, and the adventure modules being published at the time featured jungles, islands, pyramids, savannahs, and everything from Aztec temples to the Far East.
So... dark skinned people have always been available to you for gaming.
That said, I have a long-time player who, though he is very open-minded now, did once balk at any intrusion into his Medieval European fantasy world by anybody with a tan. Even though the rest of us could point to historical precedent for at least some visitors from other lands, he just was a very hard nut to crack. One of those guys who was not good with change. He's more than okay now. I think my wife helped with that. She joined the game in 2000, with a Japanese-style character. After awhile, he just sort of stopped complaining, and in time, characters and settings of all types became okay with him.
They say that a person well-traveled around the world tends to lose his prejudices as he sees firsthand that people of other races mean him no harm and are people, like him. I think he sort of learned the same thing gamewise, by traveling in-game.
short answer:
I have race issues in my games and I try not to shy away from them. I do not focus on them, but I use them as added flavour and texture to my plots.
long answer:
in my current campaign I have deliberatly focused on predjudice and xenophobia. taking more pointers from the old forgotten realms and the witcher series in particular.
examples: my kingdom has a dominance of human first and hobgoblin second. these two races live together and their cultures are intermixed, but the hobgoblins are second-class citizens. (something they have been fine with so far)
neigbouring nations are tengu and dwarfes, the tengu are secluded but very diplomatic, the dwarfes are mercantile and practical, but their culture is very xenophobic. they have an innate fear of change.
there are also half-elves, in my campaign they fulfill the role of the tieflings in other (more standard) settings.
(which should give you a pointer to whats up with the mythic, near-forgotten elves)
my players are portaying two humans (one noble, one slumborn), a hobgoblin and a half-elf. and I have npcs react differently to all of them.
I told the hobgoblin and half-elf player that there would be predjudice against them because of their race, and they were fine with it. I also stressed that this was part of the setting, and not me having a go at them.
I also try to give the different players some perks for being different, the hobgoblin has a foot already in the door on the black market, the half-elf has a deeper connection to some forms of magic, the noble can get into high-society gatherings and so on.
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Historically, there are people of color in Authurian myths, the myths of Roland and Charlemange, and not as villians, but as protagonists. The vikings certainly met the people of east Africa and the middle east. The Huns and Avars were asiatic, and traders from India visited the Roman empire.
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Personally, in a world full of elves, dwarfs and tieflings, I don't see something as trivial as skin color posing any social issues.
Yes, this.
I just have humans having different races and skin colors based on climate just lie int he real world. If I have time to plan out the full history of a homebrew setting I try to take historical migrations into account. Even so if someone wants to play a particular race I don't straight jacket them into being from a single region as "descendant of an immigrant" is super easy to work in. I also generally shy away from having people being racist in game world both because it seems silly when there are far more different groups like orcs and goblins for society to develop against, and because I as the GM don't have anything meaningful to say about racism. So any inclusion would be pointless at best and offensive at worst.
Also I sometimes try to figure out how different player "races"/species (pathfinder terminology doesn't help this discussion) would develop their own ethnicities. For instance orc skin colors are a range of greens in one of my campaigns. Those in warm climates have very dark green skin, nearly black, and those in colder areas have lighter more Warcraft lookig skin.
Personally, in a world full of elves, dwarfs and tieflings, I don't see something as trivial as skin color posing any social issues.Yes, this.
Agreed as well. I also don't see much of a need to worry too much about where "real world minority x" comes from, because I just assume there is an Asian/African/Americas/etc analog, or at least a place that is going to have people from regions with comparable ethnicities.
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I take a line from Shadowrun: Why worry about the dark skinned guy next to you, when the guy on the other side of the bar can palm your face.
"Where you all keep your white elf women at?"
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I think that, even if you base your world on middle aged Europe, it is not a problem if you look beyond some small corner of the world (and usually the PC go well beyond that).
Let's look at what ethnicities were present in the middle ages Europe and neighboring territories:
1) White skinned people in the northwest of Europe;
2) not so white skinned people in south Europe (Italy, Greece, Easter Roman empire);
3) Arabs in Spain;
4) Mongols in the Middle East, in some period in Russia end even further west;
5) Egyptians, Arabs and several shades of black along the southern shore of the Mediterranean sea;
6) there was trade between Europe, the Muslin nations, India and China. There were Indian and maybe Chinese traders in the Muslim nations.
7) slave trade distributed black people, Egyptians, Celts and members of every defeated army in all corners of the Roman empire and the trade continued even after the fall of the western roman empire. It wasn't limited to black people, the Teutonic Knights did raid in the neighboring pagan states capturing people to convert and sell as slaves. Arabs did sell Christian slaves, Christians did sell Arab slaves and so on;
8) Hannibal and his Carthaginian troops, included his Nubian mercenaries, did stay in Italy for 16 years and, to cite a song, "What did you think they did during 20 years of military occupation?" ;-)
So, usually, unless you are playing in a very small and insular area, there are all the reasons to have people of different ethnicity.
Add that with magic it is way easier to travel for long distances that with conventional means.
BTW, the Inner Sea area of Golarion is larger than the whole of Europe, the southern side of the Mediterranean basin and the Near Est together.
I checked the maps some time ago.
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Not that much in my home game. The primary campaign setting is founded by exiles from all over the world so an integrated nation is much easier to pull off.
Now I will say that when I think about race I have a tendency to craft the various non human races and their culture around human ethnicities such as halflings being Jewish, half-orcs being African-Americans, and elves being Japanese. I also find this helps a lot when I have to flesh out races that aren't really as defined culturally in a lot of the classic literature they come from and are more used as cultures of living villains as a way to make them feel more realistic and relateable. Like in my home game Hobgoblins are like a mix of Spartans and the Huns, they are ruthless and killers but also very egalitarian with their own people, able to accomplish tasks no one else thought they could, and can be reasoned with bargained with. Ohh also they follow an evil bent philosophy akin to Buddhism where they just reincarnate and the highest state of being is the hobgoblin.
As a white person that games mostly with other whites, I wouldn't know how to make race issues a theme of my game. I could consult my PoC friends, but I think there'd very hard for me to do a game in which racial issues are handled in a constructive way and represented even somewhat correctly.
Due to this, I go for the star trek method (or well, how star trek should have handled it - watching star trek from a modern point of view it's crap full of racism, though it was good for it's time) of just letting race be a "oh, whatever", except for the case of monstrous species. I also tend to prefer to refer to the various species as species rather than races.
If my gaming group had more people with experience of racial issues, I'd likely talk about them how they'd want race handled, but as a GM I don't think I'm up for the challenge of making a racially-focused campaign; unlike say, class, where I certainly have experience to make it the focus of a campaign (though of course class in a feudalistic society works a little bit different from how it works in a capitalist society - though our current system moves more and more towards feudalism).
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Personally, in a world full of elves, dwarfs and tieflings, I don't see something as trivial as skin color posing any social issues.
Lol but that's completely untrue. In golarion alone we have halflings subjugated because they are short (and therefore take up less room), skinwalkers prized for their unique allure as slaves, racial tensions over gentrification and racial oppression in sargava, a fetish amongst taldans for half goat men, and major deity devoted to the idea of slavery. Now into that creatures that are THE LITERAL EMBODIMENT OF VARIOUS SINS AND VICES WHO'S CORE REASON FOR EXISTING IS TO SOW SAID SINS and it's not hard to see race becoming something of an issue. To say that race is trivial in this setting kind of does an injustice to a lot of the narrative tension going on there and a whole lot of stories that make for great games (and are also kind of important to address in general).
The other big issue with not thinking about it is it runs the dangerous route of excluding those other players and groups.
BTW, about PoC in medieval europe, this is a good link.
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As a white person that games mostly with other whites, I wouldn't know how to make race issues a theme of my game. I could consult my PoC friends, but I think there'd very hard for me to do a game in which racial issues are handled in a constructive way and represented even somewhat correctly.
Due to this, I go for the star trek method (or well, how star trek should have handled it - watching star trek from a modern point of view it's crap full of racism, though it was good for it's time) of just letting race be a "oh, whatever", except for the case of monstrous species. I also tend to prefer to refer to the various species as species rather than races.
If my gaming group had more people with experience of racial issues, I'd likely talk about them how they'd want race handled, but as a GM I don't think I'm up for the challenge of making a racially-focused campaign; unlike say, class, where I certainly have experience to make it the focus of a campaign (though of course class in a feudalistic society works a little bit different from how it works in a capitalist society - though our current system moves more and more towards feudalism).
Honestly the star trek approach is probably the best way to start if you don't have any ideas off hand as to how to use human ethnicity as it makes sure to put forward the opportunity for multiracial world but also gives you some breathing room to work out those tensions organically through play. Like in my home games skinwalkers feel a lot like native americans struggling with their identity culturally as many have moved into cities and urbanized creating a new ethnic subset that have never lived in the wild forests or plains of their forebears and instead adopted some of the living habits of other humanoids. That came about as I started to try and figure out how that race (which I had already kind of viewed as native american stylistically) would work in a lot of the urban settings I like to GM in.
For my next home brewed campaign I'm going to try something different...
None of the races (human or not) will have skin pigments falling within the rather narrow band found on Earth. There still might be prejudice -- but it will probably be more humanoid sub-type vs. other humanoid sub-type or culture/society vs. culture/society.
None of the cultures and societies presented will have gender bias -- unless that be generally leaning toward matriarchy or gynarchy (but most will be egalitarian). I think leaving out patriarchies still leaves plenty of other "-archies" and "-isms" to play with.
None of the cultures or societies will have "hang-ups" about gender preference. There will probably still be sexual hang-ups and such -- but they won't have anything to do with which gender someone finds attractive.
None of the "races" will be inherently or automatically evil or good. Societies and cultures will certainly view other different and/or competing societies and cultures as "evil", but a detect evil won't register a newborn orc (equivalent) as evil. Frankly if I can think of a way to eliminate alignments, I will do so.
I'm curious to see how this goes.
CJ
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I've never had the issue of skin color come into games, and have often left it more as a visual descriptor. Cultural backgrounds of or influences on a character may influence their morality, but even that is a player choice rather than a mandate based on whether they are Chelaxian, Andoran, or Kelish. I'll agree that race, or at least race based on skin color, was always something of a afterthought in fantasy games, though.
Honestly, most "races" in D&D and Pathfinder have always come off as different species of humanoids more than they did as races. Species that can mate with each other like Lions and Tigers, but species nonetheless.
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Also, I'd be very very careful with using human cultures and subcultures for nonhuman species, not to reproduce various harmful stereotypes. For example, I think it's a very very risky thing to portray half-orcs (famous as barbarians, uncivilized etc, with a heritage of stupidity and brutishness) as african americans (which have a history of being portrayed in about the same way as orcs, and where that has been used to justify extreme oppression).
Not saying it's impossible to do well or that anyone trying is racist or anything, but I can see that going very bad very fast.
I've never had the issue of skin color come into games, and have often left it more as a visual descriptor. Cultural backgrounds of or influences on a character may influence their morality, but even that is a player choice rather than a mandate based on whether they are Chelaxian, Andoran, or Kelish. I'll agree that race, or at least race based on skin color, was always something of a afterthought in fantasy games, though.
Honestly, most "races" in D&D and Pathfinder have always come off as different species of humanoids more than they did as races. Species that can mate with each other like Lions and Tigers, but species nonetheless.
It's also possible that being an elf is a retroviral condition.