I've thought about this before, so I find it a strange I haven't blogged about it, but I can't seem to find the post if I did. Anyway, tt seems like one way to ameliorate problematic nature of of D&D and related fantasy game characters killing hapless humanoids to clear them from their land and take their stuff is to have the PCs being the ones fighting off the invaders. This is not guaranteed to free a setting of racist stereotypes (just take a look at Nowlan's Armageddon: 2419 AD), but it's perhaps a start. It at least makes the PCs freedom fighters rather than conquistadors.
Inspirations abound (I'll list some below) but something like the set-up of the 70s science fantasy comic from DC Starfire would work well. Two warring factions invite armies from other worlds to fight for them and wind up getting conquered by them. The mercenaries-turned-conquers might be orcs and drow, or something more exotic. Ideally, there should be a difference between them, but not a difference that makes one side particularly preferable as allies to the other. You could also have the remnants of the two native blocs (elves and humans. maybe) that called in the outsiders still be mistrustful of each other.
I think it works best if the invading forces lost cohesion due to infighting or to fighting with the other invaders, and are now only slightly more powerful that the indigenous folk, but not enough so that they can really mount a concerted effort to destroy them. Perhaps in many places the native people are allowed to live out their lives relatively peacefully as second class citizens in the alien-order (like the humans in the Planet of the Apes tv show--or any number of real world examples). There could also be some weird artificial cultures like the various *-men groups in Vance's Planet of Adventure.
Anyway, other genre works that could be inspiring:
De Camp. "Divide and Rule." Aliens conquer Earth and enforce a neo-feudal culture on mankind.
Burroughs. The Moon Men. Men from the Moon have long ago conquered Earth and reduced North American civilization to a more "primitive" state. Not dissimilar from the Star Trek episode "Omega Glory" if you replace the Communists with Moon Men--and Burroughs' original draft had Communists!
Killraven from Marvel Comics.
10 comments:
I agree that a "freedom fighter" setting can make for a good game, but:
"...fantasy game characters killing hapless humanoids to clear them from their land and take their stuff..."
Does that actually happen regularly for most folks? I know some of the TSR modules kind of work that way, but even Keep on the Borderlands is more an extended bout of serial home invasion than fantasy imperialism IME. No party I ever saw wanted to actually move to the caves, they wanted the monsters dead for their loot. Still awful, but a different kind of awful.
Nothing homebrew I've run or played in had the "bad guy" intelligent species as hapless natives waiting for conquest by the human/demi-human imperialists. They were always either aggressive military rivals (often leading to invasions as you suggest), incompatible with the "good guy" races on biological grounds (eg mind flayers eat brains and reproduce through parasitism, we are cattle to them), servants/creations of Sauron-style Big Bads with minimal free will, or mercenaries used by lesser Big Bads to provide numbers and do lackey work.
Closest I can think of to a colonialist land-clearance situation was a game where the party was tasked by an up-and-coming noble with clearing the goblinoids from his border holding. Even there the problem wasn't so much that they were there but they were raiding to take slaves regularly rather than doing their damn farming themselves. We actually did wind up convincing a few extended families of goblins to play nice in the end, largely because the hobgobs and bugbears who'd been in charge had treated them almost as badly as their human slaves.
You could argue the human kingdom that had granted the holding to our employer was being expansionist and imperialist, but the way it was presented to us was that the goblinoids had migrated up to (and over, in some cases) a long-established border rather than having been pushed out of the region originally.
I feel like "Imperialism" is the macro-view and result of "fantasy home invasion." The individual conquistadors and their men were mostly after loot, I assume.
While I won't say that context is meaningless (that have limited free will, their are creations of the big bad), the colonial powers had a context that they believed fervently in to justify their behaviors too: these people are heathen savages, they're obviously not as intelligent as use, this land is mostly empty or not being put to good use, etc. I don't get particularly animated about the reasons things are done to fictional beings in fiction, but I think it's important to acknowledge the parallels.
Fantasy Home Invasion is 100% imperialism. The name level manifest destiny of “clear hexes and establish a castle/tower/church” is 100% colonialism. D&D, like humanity, is riddled with colonialism. It’s in its DNA. It doesn’t stop it from being a fun game, it just needs to be acknowledged.
Most of the time when you see someone suggest that something is 100% anything at all, your hyperbole detectors should go off.
Fantasy home invasion is a very broad term, and while it's generally a shitty play style associated with murder hoboing, it can also be applied to clearing the undead out of a tomb complex or smashing the constructs and traps guarding an ancient treasure vault. Are those serving the cause of imperialism somehow? If so let's hear your reasoning.
Name level stronghold building is more likely imperialism than colonialism, but it really depends on the long term goal. If you mean to integrate the "cleared" territory into the home nation's governmental structure, that's imperialism. If the focus is more on resource extraction, installing a foreign population over time, and forced imposition of a foreign culture on surviving locals, that's colonialism. Both are generally awful, but they're different kinds of awful.
And you don't have to do either. Your GM can just as easily set up for your name level character to work toward securing a region that's undergone a natural disaster, suffering rampant banditry, at risk of loss to another nation during war, or that's just been reconquered after being lost on a previous conflict. Or maybe the region's former noble has died and the PC has been rewarded with the opportunity to claim the holding - most fantasy worlds are vaguely feudal, for better or worse.
Not seeing how any of those fall neatly into the "isms" you're objecting to, although the "reconquest" scenario might be a bit imperialist. Were France and Germany being imperialistic about Alsace all those years it went back and forth, or were they being nationalist assholes who didn't care what the locals wanted? Bit of both, I think.
Dennis might have a response, but if you are asking if there is some circumstance where "fantasy home invasion" doesn't carry the taint of imperialism or colonialism, I would say: Sure. But I don't think the argument "this is not always colonialist/imperialist tinged, therefore it is never colonialist/imperialist tinged" is compelling.
I didn't say anything about imperialism but projecting a nation's control and influence through hard or soft power does apply in many D&D cases.
The Keep on the Borderlands and other "hex-clearing" paradigms involve agents (be they indirect or directly in the employ of the state) of "civilization" entering a "wilderness" and removing parties that interfere with the agents or their state's ability to control real estate. That's imperialism. If you are bringing in settlers, that's colonialism.
I agree that D&D doesn't have to be played that way but that was very much its genesis. And that doesn't make old-school style play bad or wrong or problematic, it's just its history.
And regarding your Alsace-Lorraine comparison, it is entirely possible to be both nationalistic and imperialistic.
I want to know how the orcs got that stuff! Did they earn it? Make it? Work for it? Treasure Type C is pretty good and then they often carry potions (S) as well as a lot of bling objects (Qx10) and trash (O).
Some people have hypothesized that C is "carrion," what accumulates if you randomly build up a body count. But I don't know. Ditto other humanoids.
"I feel like "Imperialism" is the macro-view and result of "fantasy home invasion." The individual conquistadors and their men were mostly after loot, I assume."
Their motivations changed greatly over time. Initially the glory of exploration and being the "first" to find new lands was a big driver, and they obtained funding in part through their rulers' hopes that they'd be able to claim land overseas for the crown (a national prestige thing) or at least bring back something that would turn them a profit. When they got there and realized how much wealth was within the grasp of a bold and ruthless leader the loot started to take priority. Later waves of explorers knew there were riches to be had, and also had higher demands placed on them by the crown, which had grand designs for an overseas empire. There was also a significant religious influence since the Catholic church insists on proselytizing at every opportunity, although it's hard to say how much that matter to the "average" conquistador.
"While I won't say that context is meaningless (that have limited free will, their are creations of the big bad), the colonial powers had a context that they believed fervently in to justify their behaviors too: these people are heathen savages, they're obviously not as intelligent as use, this land is mostly empty or not being put to good use, etc. I don't get particularly animated about the reasons things are done to fictional beings in fiction, but I think it's important to acknowledge the parallels."
It's equally important not to draw them where they don't exist. That "limited free will, creations of the Big Bad" thing was an army of mixed humanoids who were possessed by the spirits that had been dragged to the Prime Material from the Nine Hells by a pit fiend. That wasn't some biased viewpoint drawn up as justification by European colonialists, it was the mechanics of the game itself. We could (and did, in a few cases) expel the spirit and free its host but it wasn't something that could be done easily, safely, or en masse, and most of the time the free-willed goblin or orc was so confused by its situation it was as hostile to the PCs as it had been while possessed - just less dangerous. I don't know what the GM planned to do with the suddenly-de-possessed horde if we'd beaten the fiend and closed its infernal gate - maybe there was an ugly mass slaughter planned but I'd like to think not. We'd gone to some trouble to free a couple of orc kings and keep them safe and relatively happy with us in the hopes they could help with the aftermath if we closed the gate. Never going to know since we had a TPK before with the fiend's second in command and the whole thing derailed.
Anyway, before I check out on this, the TL;DR version of all this is that I agree that being mindful of what creeps into our gaming is important, but I just haven't run into the level of casually used negative "isms" you seem to have and it's kind of foreign to me. Our homebrew humanoid monsters have always been either at least a fair match for the "good guy" nations, or incompatibly alien despite their shapes, or hapless pawns of something objectively terrible. Proxying them as victims of colonialisms feels weird - although I suppose you could argue the "pawns" trope reflects on the denial of self-determination so many colonized nations suffered from. Still suffer from, in some cases.
I dig on this "conquered people" idea, and might just adapt it to my home setting which is currently using an inverse idea (the humans are the transplants to the new world and are trying to carve out a place among the various hostile beings...more "refugee" than "colonial," but the end result is much the same). One neat thing about the concept is it helps justify those "racial preferences" in the PHB: you can figure out which peoples were fighting whom, which were allies, which were the alien mercenaries, etc.
Good stuff. Though rather than "freedom fighters" I'd prefer to see the PCs as a form of "reconquista," taking back lost territory, a la the history of Spain.
RE real world analogies, this kind of thing is what brought down the Aztec Empire as the Spanish "conquerors" would never have taken down Mexico without the help of local enemies of the Aztecs (who wanted foreign allies to fight back against their bullies/subjugators). In the end, it didn't work out great for anyone, and the result is a completely new culture as different and fractured as any country on Earth (including the U.S.).
Dig it.
Sure, conquistadors might have had complicated motivations. I'm not sure it matters overall, If they did have a motivation of "just loot" they are the equivalent of the adventurers you mention. If they were "better," that's not really a defense of adventurers.
The canonically orc seems to have to the sort of societies all humans do as described in the Monster Manual. If your orcs were different, you are at least familiar with the Monster Manual description. Saying "the world itself codifies this interpretation of orcs" doesn't do a whole lot of work in distancing the game from colonialist beliefs, because they thought that too.
I think the disconnect is that you are looking for overt, surface descriptions of things that are in all ways identical to historical examples. What we're saying is that those historical belief systems clearly seemed to have informed the underlying assumptions of D&D. Given that this is a much discussed topic, and pretty obvious from examinations of Keep on the Borderlands and the like (there are a bunch of blogposts about it), it seems odd that it seems a new concept to you, but I guess any news you haven't heard is news!
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