We tell ourselves stories in order to live…
— Joan Didion, The White Album
We are living through a moment of revolutionary change. The life of black Americans—and colonized people worldwide—are being recognized as actually human. The sudden changes of this moment have had a long buildup. The reaction to George Floyd’s death and attempted official impunity links us to history: Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Rodney King, Emmett Till, Isaac Woodard. It also links us to the long struggle for justice, equal rights, and the unraveling of the myths, language, and assumptions that have enabled us to perpetuate social violence and think of it is normal, natural, and inevitable.
To unravel this poisonous thicket we need to re-examine our stories and myths; but we also need to learn how to tell new stories, or recover old themes in radically new ways. In the late 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons gained a reputation for being potentially Satanic because it included brutal violence, demons, and buxom maidens in distress. In fact it was a clear reflection of the American id. The Paladin was essentially a Crusader: a lawful good character, slaughtering evil monsters with no moral reservations, no awareness that his victory might actually mean murder. Looting treasure was a core element of the game, and saving tied-up buxom damsels was fine, so long as parents weren’t eavesdropping.
Dungeons and Dragons reflected the dominant culture of the late 1970s: we wanted to be the good guys in Star Wars, not the conflicted and corrupted characters in Apocalypse Now. Killing faceless stormtroopers in cold blood was not a problem, because they were the designated bad guys. We saw the world through the lens of Hero/Victim/Villain, and we wanted to be the heroes. It is not a coincidence that D&D was initially popular among white suburban boys. We were living through the Second Segregation, after our parents whisked us away from public cities where Other People were threatening to get actual rights. Electing Reagan shut down that social progress for a whole generation.
The hard stone of denial has been slowly rolled back, through decades of heart-breaking work. Formal changes in law & policy are outcomes; symptoms of deeper changes in our culture, in how we collectively see the world. Our worldview is formed through the stories we tell ourselves, including the high-story of official history. In 2000, Pope John Paul II asked for forgiveness for the brutality of Crusades and the Inquisition (But wait…then paladins are not the good guys?). In 2008, Australia’s Prime Minister formally apologized for dispossession, forced relocation, and family separation of Indigenous Peoples. Canada’s First Peoples policy includes massive changes to territorial control and rights. However, most of the work is at the interpersonal level: learning to treat others with respect, and recognizing everyday problems with micro-aggressions, tokenism, and harm that comes from very skewed understandings of history.
Dungeons & Dragons plays a pivotal role in this moment, as a forum for collective story-building. On the one hand, it has become popular with an increasingly broad spectrum of people of color and those who identify as LGBTQI. There is some crossover with cosplay, and even with the BDSM community. We are moving away from the term “dungeon master” for D&D partly out of respect for the fact that the term has a significantly different meaning among the dom/dominatrix community. On the other hand, even Homeland Security agencies discuss ‘tabletop roleplaying scenarios’ that sound a lot like D&D, minus the polyhedral dice. Back in the middle, the Critical Role campaigns have brought D&D itself into the American mainstream since 2018.
However, the way we play role-playing games (RPGs) like Dungeons & Dragons is changing significantly, as our 21st-century culture departs further from the worldview of the 1970s. In a recent interview, Matthew Mercer (Game Master of Critical Role) argued that the Good/Evil alignment system of D&D is being progressively abandoned. This is a fundamental shift that requires re-working some of the core rules of the original game. But even more fundamentally, we now include supposed ‘monsters’ as player characters. You can play a goblin, or an orc, or an infernally-touched Tiefling. “Good” and “evil” play out through the motivations and actions of the characters, their allies, and their foes.
To explain this shift, consider a critical re-think of The Lord of the Rings. Jackson, Boyens, & Walsh did a brilliant film adaptation, but Sauron remained uninteresting because it (he?) was ‘just evil.’ The struggles of Frodo and Gollum were fascinating complements of each other, and at least we could understand Saruman and Denethor as overthrown by despair. But what stuck with me, from the DVD extras, was the M?ori actors who played Uruk-Hai in the Two Towers. They identified with the Uruk-Hai and orcs—not as the bad guys or monsters, but as misunderstood ‘Others.’ Tolkein’s portrayal of these ‘monsters’ echoes the way that Europeans had portrayed the M?ori: as savages fit only to be conquered, colonized, and civilized. It is a worldview that was faithfully incorporated into the original design of Dungeons and Dragons, and every tabletop RPG and video game descended from it.
The 1619 Project reveals the relationship between colonialism, slavery, and racism. It is not the first set of essays to do so. But Nicole Hannah-Jones makes the striking argument that she, like many African-Americans over the last 160 years, refuses to give up on the American project. Many African-Americans seek to build ‘a more perfect union’ despite how they have been treated, which is perhaps the most powerful lesson any of us can learn. The ostensibly simple step of recognizing others as human beings requires acknowledging slavery, Jim Crow, and persistent racism in the 21st century. To move forward, we need to see the past clearly: to recognize the colonial framework that underpins this history of violence. This project was first articulated clearly in the 1950s and 1960s: to decolonize our assumptions, our language, our identities. We face a major task of exorcism: not just to challenge and uproot these poisonous assumptions from the games we play and the stories we create, but also to build a new framework in which to tell new stories and imagine new possibilities beyond the shackles of this grim history.
How to decolonize D&D? Now that I have argued the need for it, I am really interested in what you come up with. I am playing with a group who have developed intriguing ideas. The very nature of this project is that it is a massive work-in-progress, a collective effort to change how we tell stories and see the world. While not conclusive, we have some recommendations that might be useful as a starting point.
- Form a campaign of total strangers. Now that we are using internet video, voice, and chat for gaming, you can use message boards to recruit people you have never met. Yes, it is a self-selecting, biased sample of people who are willing and able to use this mode of interaction. Nonetheless you may get players and a GM with wildly different worldviews and life-experiences. That in itself is an adventure!
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Consider using the Eberron campaign setting. Keith Baker began developing this setting in the 21st century with Wizards of the Coast. Baker characterizes Eberron as ‘pulp fiction meets film noir meets an alternate reality in which magic is the basis for industrial civilization’. It is not a steampunk version of Victorian London, but rather like Gotham City or Berlin circa 1921. In this setting, orcs, goblins, and other beings are people. No one is inherently evil nor good; choices matter, and the ethics of many confrontations are unclear.
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Omit humans from the game-setting. Even in a fantasy world with elves and goblins, the presence of humans implies a ‘normal.’ Yes, the humans could be African, Asian, or some group other than European. But the fact that I even have to state this reveals the implied norm: white, het, male. Attempts by Wizards of the Coast to incorporate people of color into their books is OK, but it feels like tokenism. If you remove humans as potential characters from the setting, you remove an implicit normal. This pushes players to role-play characters that are fundamentally different from themselves, and to think about the relations and tensions between various groups.
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Assume that most, if not all of the player-characters will start off in debt. This provides at least one strong shared motivation for the players, who might be unsure about why an orc, a dwarf, and an elf would form an adventuring party. Non-players might ask: “But wait…isn’t D&D about escapism? Why bring such real-world issues into it?” The answer is believable character motivation. Remember why Sauron is so uninteresting in Lord of the Rings. His motivations are evil because he is…evil. Explanations of this antagonist become circular and pointless almost immediately, which is not compelling. In contrast, a noble who holds a band of orcs in grinding poverty to enrich himself and promote his political aspirations? That is a believable, understandable villain. The result is more compelling game-play, and story-building that is more nuanced.
To make this more tangible, I propose that characters begin by wearing a choker or torque of debt. In a disrupted fantasy setting, individuals could get out of debt by fleeing to a very different realm. To ensure repayment, moneylenders have devised this unbreakable necklace that can only be removed when the lender consents. To get more of a sense of this social dynamic, perhaps players would want to research the history of indentured servitude and practices of serfdom.
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Focus on calling-in, not calling-out. Unfortunately, public shaming and condemnation have been part of American culture since the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s. Shaming is not an effective tool for positive cultural change. We all have a lot to learn, and we cannot learn if we feel that any mis-statement will be publicly condemned. In my D&D game, I am a bit pronoun-challenged. It is a problem I share with many Gen-Xers, and my Millennial players kindly and patiently correct me. It is never too late to learn, never too late to take responsibility when harmful assumptions get revealed. This is a hypothetical setting in which we can explore the full range of relationships, emotions, and situations. Here we can play, learn, grow, and imagine entirely new worlds of possibility. It can be violent, raunchy, and hilarious; and it can be a way to reveal and abandon old assumptions and language, to create new stories and understandings that can re-shape our own 21st century reality.