D&D and Races

So there’s something that’s been bothering me for a while now. About a month or two ago, it started trending online where people were saying that orcs in D&D were racist because they were biologically required to be evil. Now Wizards of the Coast have published an article pretty much conceding that the orcs and drow do rely on essentialist ideas about race.

The problem with all this is the fact that they’re actually not required to be evil as a rule. It’s more of a trope or cliché. In fact, as of my writing this, TV Tropes had this to say about the matter:

“In-universe, the ‘usually evil’ nature of some races is justified by their racial deities, such as Lloth for the Drow and Gruumsh for the Orcs, being evil. These gods also work very hard to make sure that their worshippers are just as bad as they are, and any that aren’t tend to end up on the gods’ hit list. Good deities tend to respect free will more than the evil ones, so their races have evil, good, and neutral people. Human alignment is all over the place since they don’t have a racial deity to call their own. In some cases, an evil race will also have been created by an evil god.”

TV Tropes does mention that in old versions of the game, rule books listed alignments for creatures without acknowledging that they could differ from that default listing. But should they really have to? Everything can be altered by the DM on the fly as the story calls for it. Even hit points. If you want to split hairs, you could even create your own separate stat blocks for the Chaotic versions of things that are normally Lawful or vice versa. It’s a matter of writing and world-building, not mechanics.

Drow are actually a really great example of why being evil is more of a convention than a rule. In Forgotten Realms lore, the drow originally were good, or at least neutral, before they turned to Lolth for help during the Crown Wars. The Crown Wars were sort of an elven civil war that ended with them dropping magic nukes on each other before many of them retreated back into another dimension called the Feywild. As punishment for siding with Lolth, Corellon — the main elven deity — banished the drow to live under Lolth’s control underground. However, since 2nd edition, there has also been a good-aligned deity named Eilistraee that some drow worship in secret. You probably don’t see her mentioned much anymore because in old rulebooks they outright say her priestesses would do rituals where they danced naked with swords — total fanservice that likely wouldn’t go well with the family-friendly look Wizards is looking to project now.

But if drow can be good outside of Lolth’s control, then it stands to reason the same could be said for orcs. It even says as much in Volo’s Guide to Monsters, though it does also say that orcs have an innate tendency toward violence. Specifically, it says:

“Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very nature are evil, such as gnolls, it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion.
No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task.“

When you break it down, this passage from Volo’s Guide really can’t be taken at face value. If an orc grew up spending its whole life in the confines of civilization, how can you call it “domesticated?” That’s just not a word you use for people. If violence is in their very nature, why then would they have to be indoctrinated into it? Then you have to consider the impact of the Pygmalion Effect, where its whole life everyone has expected the orc to be violent. It’s almost as if this passage is written in-universe from the point of view of a character who is racist against orcs. (Some D&D books are explicitly written in-character, such as the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide, which changes perspectives many times throughout the book. Older books even had back-and-forths between the characters Volo and Elminster in the book’s footnotes.)

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that if you want more positive — or at least more nuanced — takes on orcs and drow, you can do that. You don’t need to buy another book rewording the rules. You just need to get creative and write. The published settings of Eberron and Wildemount already have more positive depictions of certain “monstrous” races — and Wizards tried to claim credit for that. However, the authors of those settings — Keith Baker and Matt Mercer — don’t actually work for Wizards. Keith Baker won a contest and Matt Mercer was already a well known voice actor before he got famous with the show Critical Role. Those settings came from the outside and were absorbed into the D&D brand.

I’m not really sure how to feel about Wizards of the Coast right now, because it seems like they may be doing that “absorbing” thing without credit this time. About two weeks ago, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Arcanist Press released their own supplement on DMs Guild that swaps out race for ancestry and culture. It’s been pretty popular on Twitter and it’s already a “Gold Best Seller.” The idea that they might take a product for sale in their own walled garden and then quash it with their own product just seems… really not great.