Diversity and inclusiveness been hot topics everywhere recently, and rightly so. In response, many companies that develop tabletop roleplaying games have attempted to increase the inclusiveness of their game settings by including artwork in their source materials that shows classic roleplaying characters as women and people of color. In Pathfinder, the iconic paladin is a black woman. One of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths my gaming group has been playing through recently, Wrath of the Righteous, features not one but two same-sex couples, one of them a mixed race couple (a human and a half-orc). The new 5th edition version of Dungeons & Dragons features even more black character exemplars in the Players Handbook.
But there are some disappointing misses in all this. D&D's traditional settings, like the current default setting of the Forgotten Realms, have always been fantasy equivalents of Earth, with analogues of Europe, Asia, and Africa. But the Asia and Africa analogues were very homogeneous, treating the variety of cultures found in those continents as if they were all one giant monoculture. Asian cultures represented by Kara-Tur were a mix of China and Japan with a few tidbits of Mongol and similar northern Asian cultures thrown in. There was no room for flavors like Korea, Indonesia, India. Arabian cultures did the same, failing to recognize that not every Middle Eastern country is a desert inhabited by Bedouins. The Africa analogue, Chult, is a deadly jungle, its designers forgetting or ignoring that Africa is huge and comprises many different environments and thousands of different cultures.
Pathfinder's default setting, Golarion, is very similar, but in some ways worse; Golarion has a region called the Mwangi Expanse that represents its Africa analogue. Thus far Paizo hasn't released a supplemental book detailing anything about Mwangi. On world maps the Mwangi Expanse seems small, and what materials do mention it treat it much the same as D&D treats Chult, as a steamy jungle full of "primitive" tribes. The rest of the Africa-analogue geographical location is divided into Pharaonic Egypt, which somehow still exists in a medieval world; and another generic 'Arabia' with Turkish, Bedouin and Persian influences all jumbled together. Their representation of Golarion's Asia-equivalent has done a little better, with countries resembling many parts of Asia besides China and Japan, and they've even included a Russia-equivalent to flesh out their world. But the lack of supporting material for the Mwangi Expanse is disappointing.
I was excited when I first learned that Wizards of the Coast would be releasing a supplement for the Eberron setting for 5th edition D&D. Eberron is a newer setting than the Forgotten Realms, designed originally for 3rd edition rules and carried on into 4th edition as well. It became the setting for the online multiplayer Dungeons & Dragons Online game. I liked this setting quite a lot and spent many hours playing in a very entertaining long-term campaign in that setting. Magic-fueled railways and airships, floating cities, artificial constructs that have been recognized as a separate race, elves that raise their most respected citizens as positive undead, a mysterious continent where geography is malleable, and an entire country that disappeared in a single day are pretty appealing details for me.
But as I was reviewing the Eberron materials to refresh my memory, I began to feel a bit disappointed. Eberron is not full of those analogues of Earth's geographical regions or countries that other settings have, which is refreshing. But because there's no Africa or Asia analogue, Eberron lost any reference to non-white people. All the art shows elves who look white, halflings who look white, all the other Eberron-specific new races who look white (except for the Warforged, the construct race, which don't look like white people because they're made of metal and wood). At least those Earth-analogue countries gave the designers of Forgotten Realms and Golarion an excuse to bring in Asian and black African people. Without that inspiration, Eberron became Planet Whitebread.
I haven't seen the new 5th edition Eberron book, but I hope that the revised version will be more racially inclusive. Why can't all or most dwarves be black? How about making the nomadic halflings of the Talenta Plains look like people from the Middle East or southwest Asia? The Valenar elves already have a slight Arabic/Persian feel; why not strengthen that? Sarlona, home of the Kalashtar race, already sounds very Asian, with a strong elements of Indian and Tibetan culture; why not make that more obvious by making the people look Asian? The humans of Eberron could all look less white European, too. I realize that players can do these things on their own, but for the sake of inclusiveness I hope the game designers will do some of the work for them.
To be honest, I'd like it if fantasy games stopped trying to make their fantasy races look like real-world people or imitate real-world cultures. I think there's an idea that players won't want to play characters that aren't at least a little like themselves, and the majority of D&D and Pathfinder players are still white men. But perhaps if game designers show them purple elves and green halfings and blue humans, they'll get used to the idea. Fantasy characters don't live on Earth; why should they look like people who do? And people who live in worlds full of magic and demons and dragons wouldn't have the same kinds of cultures and societies as people on Earth. There's nothing wrong with using those as inspiration, but perhaps designers should work harder to make sure their fantasy societies feel more fantastical. If they are going to use Earth peoples and cultures as the basis for fantasy worlds, they need to make sure that all the peoples are represented, not just some of them.
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