Your Dungeon is Problematic.

[amigocabal]

I came across this web site with several entries regarding entiries into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (2nd ed.) Monstruos Manual. Here is one of the entries, a post about the Ad&D description of minotaurs:


http://your-dungeon-is-problematic.tumb ... notaur-add

Basically, in this setting, the first minotaur was a cursed human, and sometimes humans are afflicted with the minotaur curse if they commit crimes against the natural order. They are often kept as slaves by evil wizards and tyrants, and, as expected, are quartered in labyrinths.

He explicitly wrote about, "the fucked-up thing that I’ve hinted at several times" I remember reading that part over ten years ago, and I did wonder what the author was thinking. You should click the link and read it.

The home page for the site is here.

[biostem]

They are magically cursed... 'nuff said.

[madd0ct0r]

old school D&D

1) orks are inherently evil
2) you find a pack of Ork Children. Do you kill them?

This blog is not old-school D&D and is probably making a more interesting but less relaxing fun type of world.

[Purple]

I get that it's supposed to be humor but frankly I don't find it funny. Every time I see someone using modern day liberal terminology like "hate crime" to analyze a fantasy setting, game or anything like that I just roll my eyes.

[madd0ct0r]

Well why not?

Works for Tolkien when Gollum is not just an inherently evil character but one capable of nuance. I find quite a lot of fun in addressing the implications of world building with shades of grey building up.

[Grumman]

On one hand, it's worth considering such things when worldbuilding, if only for the opportunities it might present to flesh out your world in interesting ways. On the other hand, there's no guarantee that orc children are innocent babes who could grow up to be decent people with the right role model. People sometimes think that way about chimpanzees in real life, and it falls flat around the point where it decides to eat their face.

[Simon_Jester]

Virtually all these I've seen are based around the standard "we like to argue about the definition of alignment" schtick people have been bludgeoning D&D for at least as long as the Internet has been a major thing.

The original D&D basically stole its alignment system from the works of Moorcock, where Law and Chaos were objective spiritual forces that had a distinct physical reality, and where Law was far more compatible with the existence and survival of civilizations and the continued existence of ANY kind of moral order.

Thus, from the point of view of human or near-human beings who like to have some degree of insurance against being randomly robbed or killed by fellow mortals... or against having their world randomly turned into a sea of firedeath by chaotic gods... Law was objectively 'right' and Chaos 'wrong' in a meaningful sense. The difference wasn't something you could cover under freedom of religion or freedom of thought.

This "right/wrong" divide was later reassigned to the "good/evil" axis, but it was still there. It was built into the original setting precisely because at that time, many of the alternative takes on good/evil (competing brands like Coke and Pepsi, orcs as noble savages a la Warcraft III, etc.) simply hadn't been developed yet.

And it informs a great deal of both D&D source material and other fantasy because it confers a sense of cosmic meaning on people's actions. What we do doesn't just matter because we stopped the gnomes from being driven out of the Sunshine Valley, and stopped the kobolds from taking ownership of the Sunshine Valley, in other words. It matters because we just participated in a literal battle against objective, clearly existant evil.

[amigocabal]

They are magically cursed... 'nuff said.

Which would explain why they are still sexually attracted to humans.

That the curse is believed to arise from crimes against the natural order would also explain why the general public would have little objection to evil tyrants keeping them as slaves. As for breeding, I would imagine them minotaurs' masters would go to slave markets to buy or rent slaves for that purpose.

[Simon_Jester]

Another couple of issues, now that I've read more of the ones on this blog in particular:

I've repeatedly seen the writer comment that the portrayals of orcs, ogres, et cetera in the AD&D Monster Manual are tired and old.

...Really? The Monster Manual was published in 1977, for crying out loud! That was barely twenty years after The Lord of the Rings came out! On a timeline, the publication of the AD&D sourcebooks is as close to World War Two than it is to the present. You can't quote a book from the 1970s, and call the genre conventions it plays off of "tired" and "old" and "unimaginative" like that. Not when in many cases it invented those conventions, or used them in an era when people were reading them for the first time.

You want to criticize AD&D's depiction of ogres as thugs with no culture or crafts of their own, as slavers and cannibals? Fine- but if you compare that to the material that served as AD&D's own reference material, they were very much in line with that when they did so. TSR didn't invent this shit. And indeed, by popularizing and encouraging a generation of people (particularly the Generation Xers) to create numerous diverse depictions of ogres in their fiction, TSR probably did a lot (directly and indirectly) to get people thinking seriously about what ogres might be aside from just being the terrifying cannibal thug-monsters parents would tell scary stories about to frighten their children.

Because that is the default depiction of 'ogre.' Terrifying cannibal thug-monster to frighten children with. The default depiction of 'elf' is aloof, vaguely sinister fairylander who will torture or kidnap you if you displease them. The default depiction of 'orc' is a twisted debased parody of humanity, engineered to cause pure chaos and death and mayhem by a sadistic and evil supernatural demigod, and whose only redeeming virtue is that the Catholic dogma of the author prohibits him from saying they are truly irredeemable. Hell, the default depiction of 'mermaid' is seductive ocean-spirits who lure sailors underwater and freaking drown them!

Compared to this original reference pool, TSR's version of ogres, elves, orcs, and merfolk don't seem so out of line, now do they?

The author of this blog seems to have almost no concept of what fiction or culture looked like before their own birth... and if I had to guess, I'd say probably that birth was some time after 1985, so that is a LOT of perspective they're missing.

...

Of course, you can certainly still make a case that the Monster Manual and other AD&D sources from that era do show worrying amounts of 'fantastic racism,' intolerance of 'savages,' and a refusal to acknowledge that strange or alien peoples can have any art, culture, or other things of real value. That part of the argument stands, especially since in the intervening forty years we haven't gone as far toward a balanced and realistic depiction of such interspecies relations (which in a non-fantasy setting would be interracial or intercultural) as we might like.

But we should at least do it while being aware of how these fantastical creatures, which are purely constructs of our own culture, have evolved over time.

[Imperial Overlord]

The original D&D basically stole its alignment system from the works of Moorcock, where Law and Chaos were objective spiritual forces that had a distinct physical reality, and where Law was far more compatible with the existence and survival of civilizations and the continued existence of ANY kind of moral order.

You're not going back far enough. Law versus Chaos is a thing at least as far back as Ancient Egyptian and Sumerian myth. Moorcock was one of the first modern writers to popularize it and deserves credit for that, but we're talking about the foundation myths of the beginnings of western civilization.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair enough, especially since it was those ancient myths in which the forces of Law were kind of jerks too, just jerks more consistent with mortals actually being able to live in the world without being terrorized and destroyed by monsters and supernatural events.

[Grumman]

Personally, the first thing that comes to mind is the spell Holy Word as an exact mirror of Blasphemy. It would be easy to fix - just make it affect evil subjects instead of nongood subjects - but it's absurd in a way that Blade Barrier is not for Good clerics to have a spell that does not hurt Good-aligned people that fails to account for Neutral alignment. There could still be collateral damage - an Evil person who obeys the law out of enlightened self-interest doesn't deserve a smiting - but it's better than "all kittens and babies within 40 feet instantly die."

[Starglider]

That blog is a pathetic pileup of cliched tumblrisms. Much as I would like to believe it is a deliberate parody, it seems more likely the author is desperately seeking approval from fellow SJWs but doesn't want the controversy of commenting on real world issues, so delivers the standard payload of spite and scorn onto old fantasy writing instead. Their conceit of major biological differences being meaningless, impossible or irrelevant to behaviour is nonsensical.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally, the first thing that comes to mind is the spell Holy Word as an exact mirror of Blasphemy. It would be easy to fix - just make it affect evil subjects instead of nongood subjects - but it's absurd in a way that Blade Barrier is not for Good clerics to have a spell that does not hurt Good-aligned people that fails to account for Neutral alignment. There could still be collateral damage - an Evil person who obeys the law out of enlightened self-interest doesn't deserve a smiting - but it's better than "all kittens and babies within 40 feet instantly die."

Eh. I always thought of it as a spell which releases energies that are intrinsically destructive to mortal beings,* with the caveat that there is a way to be immune, which is to actively and avowedly have a spark of inner saintliness (that is, good alignment).

It's no worse than having a Fireball spell with a highly specific way of being immune to fire. Sure, you can't cast it carelessly if you don't want to blow up kittens and babies who are incapable of rendering themselves immune... but the same restriction applies to Fireball or any other area effect spell.

That blog is a pathetic pileup of cliched tumblrisms. Much as I would like to believe it is a deliberate parody, it seems more likely the author is desperately seeking approval from fellow SJWs but doesn't want the controversy of commenting on real world issues, so delivers the standard payload of spite and scorn onto old fantasy writing instead. Their conceit of major biological differences being meaningless, impossible or irrelevant to behaviour is nonsensical.

I honestly wouldn't take it that far. Most of the "biological differences" they dismiss are things that are rather ridiculous on their face (entire species of sapient large predators who 'make their living' by raiding human travellers, dwarves who appear to practice no agriculture).

The main 'pathetic' thing present is the combination of repetitiveness and utter, utter blindness to the fact that literature evolves over time.

[Zixinus]

Has anyone done a serious comparison of the first and last edition of D&D manuals? I wouldn't be surprised that many of the common criticisms have been addressed or changed accordingly.

[Starglider]

The main 'pathetic' thing present is the combination of repetitiveness and utter, utter blindness to the fact that literature evolves over time.

Did you see the entry on elves? After running through every available synonym for racist, they had to break out the ultimate insult... 'libertarians'! Truly, elves are the real villains here.

[Simon_Jester]

I... really did not get that sense from the text. They mention "libertarian" because it comes up directly in line-by-line commentary (the original passage reads something like "elves prefer to have few laws and allow all citizens of their communities to do as they please"). I didn't get the sense it was being flung as an epithet the way "xenophobic" or the like would be.