![]() He laughs as he charges toward the frost giant who dared poach his people’s elk herd.Ī half-orc snarls at the latest challenger to her authority over their savage tribe, ready to break his neck with her bare hands as she did to the last six rivals.įrothing at the mouth, a dwarf slams his helmet into the face of his Drow foe, then turns to drive his armored elbow into the gut of another. While “fighters” come from all cultures, The Player’s Handbook (one of the three core rulebooks for D&D) specifies that barbarians only come from “savage” “tribes” that lie outside of “civilization”.Ī tall human tribesman strides through a blizzard, draped in fur and hefting his axe. But that is not all that sets them apart. The key thing that sets the “barbarian” class (i.e., the archetype a player can choose for their character) apart from the “fighter” class in D&D is that barbarians can activate an intense “rage” that gives them special powers. The first is early medieval Old Norse accounts of “berserkers.” The second is racist depictions of Indigenous peoples. But while Arnold’s tanned, hairless and be-loinclothed Cimmerian is the key cultural touchstone for most American ideas of “barbarian”, the current version of D&D seems to draw from two entirely different sources. ![]() Or, if you’re into deep nerdy cuts, maybe you think of the Marvel Comics run from 1970–1993. It’s more likely the Conan of the popular Arnold Schwarzenegger films from 19 (which had the good sense to ditch the racism). ![]() Howard (who was, himself, disgustingly racist). Cover of Conan the Barbarian story “The Treasue of Tranicos” by Earl Norem, 1979įor those of you who don’t play D&D, when you hear the word “barbarian”, the first thing that likely comes to mind is “Conan.” And the Conan who is lodged there is probably not from the original stories by Robert E. Note: If you play D&D and know all about how barbarians work in it, feel free to skip this section. There’s a lot more racism baked into the core of D&D-and by extension, the whole fantasy genre-that needs to be addressed. They recently published a new supplement book, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, which gives players the option to further decouple their character’s abilities from their race. In June 2020, they published an article on their website that outlined those changes: discontinuing links between race and morality (i.e., orcs aren’t an “evil race”), allowing players to decouple race and ability scores (so orcs are not, by definition, stronger than others), and making other changes to remove some of the obvious racism from their published adventures in consultation with sensitivity readers and consultants. Roleplaying game designers, players, and communities took to social media to discuss these issues and press Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes Dungeons and Dragons, to make changes. Graeme Barber wrote an excellent piece in February of 2019 on how D&D deals with “half-“ races (i.e., half-elves, half-orcs, etc.), replicates deeply racist ideas around miscegenation. James Mendez Hodes wrote a pair of must-read articles exposing the racist and colonialist underpinnings of Orcs. Several other members of the D&D gaming community-particularly people of color-have been doing the hard work of calling this out amidst a fan culture that can be deeply hostile to criticisms. I am far from alone in pointing this out. As I wrote in 2017 here on The Public Medievalist, the game has racism built into some of its core aspects. During the pandemic, D&D’s popularity has only grown as friends and family look for new ways to keep connected.īut D&D is also going through a long overdue reckoning. And professional D&D players-like the casts of popular Twitch show Critical Role or the podcast The Adventure Zone-have become celebrities. Whereas prior editions of the game had long been a mainstay in hardcore “nerd” cultures, the current 5 th edition of D&D (published in 2014) has found a much broader audience. Find the rest of the series here.ĭungeons and Dragons is massively popular-probably the most popular fantasy rehash of the Middle Ages in the world today. This article is part 47 of The Public Medievalist’s series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Paul B.
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