With a big dollop of Mad Max.
Let face it, at the time, it’s not like most of us got much in the way of education about the fertile crescent region. I’m not arguing that Dark Sun was just a fantasy version of Sumer, just that the influence is there.
You can always throw the DM off by the paladin quitting their life of adventuring to raise these now orphaned goblins.
“I am just playing how my character would!”, well duh, you are playing like a jerk as you make your character a jerk. Dont do that.
Oh, hi, @DrDeth. You got that cite for the squirrel thing, yet?
An update on the “Anti-Woke” NuTSR led by Gygax’s son:
So much for “Go woke, go broke”
NuTSR has been a dumpster fire from beginning to end.
FWIW there is this. I haven’t played these games for years but do not generally think that D&D or Tolkien had very much to do with human racism at all. No doubt the mythologies that they used as inspiration were imperfect. This sort of thing provides fodder for Atlantic articles, though. You can see flaws everywhere if you want to see them badly enough.
It may be an unfortunate fact that a lot of racists hitch their horses to Tolkien, but that can’t be blamed on Tolkien himself. Tolkien’s own ideas about racism come through pretty clearly in both his fiction and in his letters, and he was not just neutral but strongly anti-racist. Not only is there his letter to his German publisher (which that article really should have quoted more from, because they left out the best parts), but there are instances in his books of people being racist, and wiser people showing them just how thoroughly wrong they are.
So much stretching that Plastic Man would be amazed-
Many longtime Dungeons & Dragons fans had recognized themselves in the game’s crude cannon fodder, yet still found a way to make the game their own. Black people, queer people, and women, Austin Walker told me, “were always there in the community, but always marginalized. That has shifted. We have found each other.”
Minorities were not “races”. Orc had pig snouts and were green.
And saying that “Why Elon Musk Needs Dungeons & Dragons to Be Racist” based upon this-
Last November, on X, the billionaire tycoon Elon Musk told the toy company Hasbro to “burn in hell.” Hasbro owns the company Wizards of the Coast, which produces the game Dungeons & Dragons. Wizards had just released a book on the making of the game that was critical of some of its creators’ old material. “Nobody, and I mean nobody, gets to trash” the “geniuses who created Dungeons & Dragons,” Musk wrote. Okay, that doesnt say at all what the Atlantic claims.
Most racists are not literate enough to read Tolkien.
The number of asshole tech bros who have appropriated names from Tolkien really highlights this. There’s some room for debate over how racist LotR is (I vote “not very,” but I can understand where the other side is coming from), but it’s absolutely unambiguous that Tolkien would have hated everything about Pete Thiel’s Palantir.
If that methed-up sex criminal can so completely miss (or at least, disregard) the extremely explicit anti-tech themes of LotR, you’re never going to escape the chuds who read about Haradim and think Tolkien hated brown people as much as they do.
While people are entitled to their own interpretations, having read the whole Tolkien oeuvre several times, I think the argument it involves much human racism is exceedingly weak. The examples given from an huge body of work seem very vague. D&D is kind of what you make it, and has many variations, but again I find the argument pretty weak based on my recollection of the source materials.
The article claims people felt excluded without given any real details, which is not quite the same thing. Of course the fact I don’t see something does not mean it is not there. But the article title is hard to justify from the writing.
Piggish snouts, sure, that’s always been there. Not that them having pig snouts precludes them being racist caricatures sometimes.
But green? Not generally, as a rule (grey seems to have been the most common descriptor in RAW).The artwork can be seen to be heavily influenced by Warcraft over time, so green skintints creep in there, but canonically, DnD orcs are more grey than not.
Not that them being green would preclude them being racist caricatures sometimes, either.
And the less said about early LOTR media, the better - Bakshi’s orcs were literally painted over Zulu warriors in many shots… sure, nothing to see here, POC fantasy fans 
I am curious what you thought of the Atlantic article.
I thought it was good. It didn’t say anything I didn’t already know, though.
I went to a gaming con last month for the first time since 2005 and things have changed quite a bit. Disclaimer: I didn’t actually play any D&D games. There were a lot more women at the con than I remember being at cons in 2005 or earlier. Of the eight games I played, there were only two tables I sat at with no women and three of those games were run by women. Prior to 2005, it would have been unusual to just sit at any table with a woman (not counting Vampire games in the 1990s).
There were a lot more openly LGBTQ players and allies than I remember from previous years. There was even a “Gaymers” organization with their own booth, a decent number of people wearing “Protect Trans Kids” buttons, and others who had little rainbows on their badges. One of the women running a game I played in was trans (and she was a great GM).
Hygiene was not an issue. In the 90s and early 2000s, a lot of gaming spaces would have at least one dude who stank to high heaven. Sometimes he was an overweight guy everyone called Ogre but to me he was always Cat Piss Man. Over the course of three days, I did not run into a single Cat Piss Man (or Woman). I did not see a single ass crack as everyone’s clothes fit. Except for one guy whose shirt didn’t come down far enough to cover the belly hanging over his belt.
The only thing that stayed the same was that it was overwhelmingly white. Though I did see a few Black people, which wasn’t the case in most gaming spaces more than twenty years ago. The face of gamers have changed quite a lot over the decades that the changes are overwhelmingly positive.
I honestly don’t know how important it is that WotC changed the name of race to species or some of their other changes. It wasn’t a complaint I typically heard outside of online spaces nor are the changes something I hear people complaining about outside of online spaces. I don’t know if it was really a problem for a significant number of D&D players but at the same time I don’t think the changes upset a significant number of players either. I’ve got some complaints about 5th edition, but none of them revolve around being “woke.”
Orcs in Warhammer (fantasy) have been expressly green since the 1980s; I suspect there’s been a lot of leakage between the gaming systems over the years.
Yes, sorry, I meant Warhammer, not WC/WoW (which itself takes from Warhammer) there.
I’ve been attending (and GM-ing at) gaming cons for years now, and can confirm this. The Gaymers have been a presence for some time now, and it’s not at all unusual to see women there. Almost all of the cons, including a small grass-roots one that I was at just last weekend, will either print your pronouns on your badge and/or offer a ribbon listing pronouns that you can attach to your badge. Cons are also now publishing anti-harassment policies, and will include the phrase “Cosplay is not consent” in their publicity materials. You’re right about the relatively small number of gamers of color, but that does seem to be changing as well, even if not as quickly as it might.
I had been blissfully unaware of the number of far right wingers who have glommed onto Tolkien, until about a month ago when a thread about it somehow popped into my Facebook feed. A bunch of dudebros assuring each other how stupid it is to think that Tolkien could have been anything other than a supporter of Donald Trump and his many good works, and who would have been disgusted by all the current woke nonsense from the libtards. After all, they were saying, Tolkien hated democracy. His perfect society was one ruled by king who had absolute power and was descended from ancestors of the proper, unpolluted bloodline. Someone just like Trump, not some woke degenerate like Biden or Clinton, and especially not Obama.
And that famous reply from Tolkien to the German publisher, which “libtards like to throw around to convince themselves he was one of them”? Totally taken out of context, my friends.
One of the more unpleasant things I’ve come across on Facebook, which is saying quite a lot.
IIRC StarCraft was going to be a Warhammer 40k IP game but they had the license pulled and scrambled to make it “generic”; then they made a medieval version of that IP for the Warcraft RTS games, an MMO from that, and then got massive (I mean, StarCraft was massive in its own way, too).
Where exactly is the line? I think plenty of media makes their orcs “Norseish”, with their armor and equipment drawing from Viking-y themes. Or you have Warhammer’s lizardmen, who are aesthetically Aztec rip-offs; is that “racist”? (Warhammer Fantasy has plenty of races that unquestionably are pretty bad, most of which Games Workshop likes to pretend have never existed; and that’s for the best. But the lizardmen specifically aren’t as obviously offensively stupid and lazy as “Araby” or “Nippon”, but aesthetically they are just pop culture Aztec clothes on lizards).
I think the way that almost every fantasy culture tends to just be medieval England, France, or Vikings is kind of incredibly boring. It would be nice to have more variety, including both entirely imagined stuff as well as drawing inspiration from a wider array of historical cultures.
That certainly doesn’t mean that “Zulu Orc culture whose only value is loving waaaaaaar” is good or creative whatsoever, but a setting that’s more “Fantasy Ghana Empire” rather than “Fantasy France” would be cool.