My girlfriend is a big Hack fan. I have been trying to find a version that will run on a current PC.
Folk, Kin, and People all appeal to me because of their aesthetic. I just looked up the etymology of the word “species” (and realized my search was a Darwin title) and find it dates from the 1600s to describe biological categories. It doesn’t really match my D&D vibe as well as the other suggested words.
That said, it’s way better than race.
Species doesn’t fit a fantasy vibe but I think it’s fine as a mechanics/rule term like hit points, armor class, experience levels or spell slots. Just like in-game people have their own more poetic way of describing those mechanics, so too with using different terms for species.
I forgot to link in my post:
Follow through to downloads.
Here ya go:
This is basically NetHack turned vertical:
Have you tried Crawl?
Thanks for the suggestions everybody. But she doesn’t want a new game. She doesn’t even want NET Hack. She just wants the original Hack.
Have you tried virtualization in DOSBox?
From the downloads page linked to before. 
Spoilered because it’s an FTP site that I can’t vouch for, but it claims to have “Old to ancient versions of Hack and NetHack for MS-DOS”. Now whether or not they can run on modern PC, I have no idea. But it’s a starting point.
Dosbox Hack at the Internet Archive (play online or download):
To be clear, no one ever suggested that NetHack was “woke”. They just adapt material from wherever (D&D, Tolkien, Discworld, you name it) and have their own little jokes; if you ask for info on a monster or item it generally credits the source material.
Thank you ! DPRK I am in your debt!
But but “Circle of life…”
Has anyone tried out One D&D yet? What are the highlights?
There’s not much to try, yet. Just a bunch of options that you could integrate into your existing games. You can’t run a full game of the new edition yet.
I’m probably going to be starting a new one in the next month or so and might integrate the character creation stuff. I like the way they’re doing feats now. I’ll report back.
So any rundown/opinion on the options thus far?
I fear that eurocentrism is hard baked into trad fantasy and having lilac orcs, some nice, aint enough.
One way out is the “inverse colonialism” of “Fallen Empire” setting you can find at Dungeon Of Signs.
The centre of the map is a decaying decadent senile Empire. Surrounding it are “normal” human societies.
Adventurers are explorer-freebootes picking over the corpse of the empire for loot and lore. There are no natural humanoids or demihumans… but the empires mages used magic to make enhanced soldiers and servants
I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with the standard D&D setting tropes or even with more explicitly colonial ones, like in Eberron, so long as you’re taking a nuanced look at these ideas rather than simply making the ‘colonizers’ unquestioned good guys by default.
A story from PBS Newshour with some interesting perspectives:
I think the Eurocentric nature of traditional fantasy is probably one of the main selling points of D&D as it makes it so easy for people to just jump right into the setting. Over the years D&D certainly had some good settings based on other parts of the world. There was Oriental Adventures back in 1985, Al-Qadim was released in 1992 and had an Arabian Nights vibe, and then Dark Sun in 1991 which had a Sumerian type setting with cannibal halflings. All three of them were critical successes at the time, but at least Dark Sun and Al-Qadim didn’t sell as well as one might have thought.
But there were non-Eurocentric settings in third edition. The new edition of Oriental Adventures had a different setting based off the Legend of the Five Rings card game, and third party publishers released games set in the Middle East during biblical times, there were a few fantasy Africa settings, some Egypt sourcebooks, etc., etc., but I don’t know how good many of them were or how well they did. There was such a glut of d20 books during that period of time.
I think the interest for non-Eurocentric fantasy settings is pretty low. It exists, but I don’t know if it’s worth it for WotC to pursue to a large degree. Hell, they barely do anything with settings these days. I don’t know if I’d want to release a setting based on somewhere outside of Europe for fear of a public relations disaster. Even if I hire the best sensitivity readers and experts, I’m not sure its worth the expense or the possibility of trouble.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve rarely expected a lot of nuance in any of my D&D games. They’ve always been rather simplistic good versus evil type adventures. In other games? Certainly. But I don’t think that’s what WotC is going for with D&D.
IIRC from my reading of the DS boxed set, it wasn’t so much Sumerian as Dune. Everything is more hostile and lethal and magic is shunned in favor of psionics.