OSSR: Races of Eberron
Chapter 5: Other Races
D&D has a metric shit tonne of races in it.
AncientH:
The thing about Eberron is that its stated goal was for all D&D PC races and classes to have a place within it. That was probably fine when it was just the Player's Handbook, but the list of what constitutes a "playable" race and class expanded tremendously throughout the lifecycle of the edition, and none of them were ever really designed relative to one another - that is to say, Dragon Shamans and Raptorians and Goliaths and Illumians and shit never got equal pagespace with Elves and Half-Orcs and Humans. It wasn't a matter of not having the conceptual space for all the different races and whatnot, it was just a matter that none of these *new* races had ever been worked into any of the established settings. Because they were *new*. And this was not unfamiliar territory for D&D - as an RPG that regularly shat out Monster Manuals, it was used to "new" monsters and critters and peoples being dreamed up almost out of thin air, and the vast majority never made it off the page. It's why settings like Planescape were so relatively successful, in that you at least had a plausible reason why you had never heard of Yakmen or Giant Space Hamsters before. But, this is Eberron, so different rules apply.
The first rule - and these are unwritten rules, I guess I should add - is First Come, First Serve. The races that have been around longest
in the edition, which in this case basically means the Player Handbook Races, are presumed to be the most numerous and important, because those are the ones the players are going to be most familiar with and are going to play the most.
The second rule is Rule of Cool. The races that interest the writers the most get the most development. This is why Drow get a lot of love in the Forgotten Realms, but Aquatic Elves
don't. In Eberron, this mainly means that the four new heavily-pushed races got the bulk of the book.
The last rule is Everything Old Is New Again. This basically means that in an effort to make races exciting and interesting, they're going to be recognizably the same as previously, but slightly refluffed along more "intetesting" lines. So, Dwarfs are merchant bankers, and Drow have a thing with scorpions instead of spiders. Stuff like that.
What all that means in this chapter is that you're looking at the "rest" (i.e. not at all all of the other playable character race options, but a bunch of them), and how they have been refluffed to fit in the Eberron setting.
FrankT:
As AncientHistory said, the fact that we're talking about “races” at all is
very weird, and more than a little bit problematic. In our world, we only have the one species of human, and there isn't a lot of difference from one flavor to another. There are cultural and skin color differences to be sure, and those are very important socially, politically, and historically. But none of them are terribly biologically meaningful. You can find differences if you look hard enough, but the fact that people of West African descent are less likely to benefit from angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors than people of South Asian descent is not the kind of grand bell curve that people with high hopes for racialist theories have been looking for.
Racial theories that
do posit gross differences and broadly applicable stereotypes between arbitrarily defined “races” are, in our world, universally scientifically disproven. And beyond that, many of them were driving forces behind what are generally agreed to have been the worst crimes in human history. That's not even an exaggeration. People who talk about “races” as if they said something measurable and meaningful about the people categorized within them are generally
wrong and probably the closest thing our world has to genuine capitalized and italicized
Evil.
I don't even know what the columns are supposed to mean. As a doctor and a biologist, none of that shit makes any sense.
Now D&D is a fantasy world. It works differently from our world, and there are things that are true there that aren't true in our world. And that's
fine. But when you're talking about
race, you have to tread carefully. Because of all the Neo-Nazis and slavery and apartheid and shit in our world and how there are a lot of people who are justifiably still a little bit upset about it all. After all, while your fantasy can be whatever you want it to be, if you decide that your fantasy is “what if all the racist gibberings of KKK terrorist cells were actually true?” you have a bit of explaining to do to all the people whose fantasies involve more socially acceptable things like being super strong and getting laid.
Discussing “race” in a respectful and interesting way would be kind of a lot of work, and D&D has historically just not done it. We're basically repeating genre tropes from the 1940s in a completely naive fashion. You could make “races” mean something biologically and socially in the world that would be an interesting piece of world building – but D&D never bothered to do that.
Science Fiction and Fantasy from the 1940s is actually super embarrassing and should not be embraced without contextualization and analysis.
That being said, references to real world peoples can be immensely useful in terms of world building and getting ideas across to readers. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a
reference is worth a thousand pictures. A simple “These guys are like Persians” or “These guys are like Aztecs” would convey an
enormous amount of information about food, clothing, naming conventions, and architectural styles to the reader. And that would be incredibly useful. But while it's entirely possible that that kind of thing was done
internally between the authors, that sort of helpful tie-in is never pitched explicitly in a place where the reader can read it.
So we kind of end up with the worst of all worlds: people saying shit about the races in the fantasy world that would be extremely offensive if said about real people, while not actually providing any payoff in terms of story space or even accessibility. Here's the Dwarves in this book find and replaced with Japanese:
Almost Races of Eberron wrote:Japanese characters have much to be proud of. Their race has grown from a collection of feuding barbaric clans to a mighty economic force in Khorvaire in just a thousand year's time – a handful of generations to the long lived Japanese. Even so, the bloody past of the barbaric clans has left the Japanese with a brutal and direct sense of honor and the physical skills to back their views.
AncientH:
Perhaps ironically, the best comparison you can make is
Star Trek.
Hey baby, wanna make a quarter-black?
...but at least Star Trek had the general excuse that Rubber Forehead Aliens evolved separately on different planets, and usually posits one-world governments and cultures. In D&D, you're supposed to accept that Goliaths, Half-Giants, Elves, Orcs, Dracotaurs, Aaroackoa, Dwarfs, Halflings, Scorpionfolk, Troglodytes, Bullywugs, etc. evolved and/or were divinely created and/or a wizard did it all on the same world. Which can stretch belief a smidgen. And then they're all (or mostly all) in the same culture grouping, which is just frankly bizarre.
Dwarfs in Eberron fall into the latter territory; as opposed to the fantasy stereotype of normally being the one race with a tendency to get its shit together, here the Dwarfs struggled with no serious national identity and even today are working against local interests to forge a true Dwarven identity.
...I'm not sure whether to applaud that or not. I do like that it at least backassedly acknowledges a Shadowrun-esque concept that "racial" identities are as limited and unrealistic as "All
Mexicans Halflings are lazy," but on the other hand most of the rest of the section (and, indeed, the book) tries hard to stick to those very same stereotypes. So while they tell us in one paragraph that not all Dwarfs act dwarfish, in the next paragraph they assure us that they can halk their grakha correctly. So culturally, Eberron dwarfs and Forgotten Realms dwarfs are 99% indistinguishable from Warhammer Dwarfs and whatnot.
Along with the bare-minimum "____ in Eberron" for these writeups, they give us a sample character, a sidebar on playing an Eberronian ____, and adventure seeds. I'll let you know if any of them are worthwhile. Right now, I'm wondering why the fuck the sample 3rd-level Dwarf has 25pp in cash on his person.
FrankT:
D&D has a lot of different flavors of Elf. It all has something to do with Tolkien fanwank to begin with, and then people just got so used to having different flavors of Elf that it didn't seem like a terrible idea to make up some of their own. And that is why Dragonlance had two different kinds of Sea Elves called the Dargonesti and the Dimernesti and I refuse to even
try to remember which was which.
Like other Elves, but like Blue or some shit.
Anyway, Eberron is a D&D setting and therefore decides to have a bunch of Elf variants that you don't care about. The Elves in Eberron are called the Aerenal, the Drow, the Khorvaire, and the Valenar. This is already more information about Eberronian Elves than you wanted to know. You would be a happier and better person if you didn't know about the flavors of Eberronian Elves, and the world would be a better and more productive place if less people knew about the Eberronian Elf flavors.
I know, and that guy knows. That's already too many people.
Players with a certain min/max glint in their eyes like the proliferation of Elf subtypes, because the more variants there are to choose from the more chances are that you can find one that happens to have benefits that you can capitalize on and penalties you can ignore. I myself have been known to play a Grey Elf when playing a Rogue or Wizard because that happens to be highly synergistic. Also because I am a cheesy bastard and an unrepentant power gamer. This book doesn't actually tell you what the different stat modifiers and crap for different Eberron Elf flavors are, possibly because even the authors cannot muster the give-a-fuck to look that shit up. I certainly am not going to open up other Eberron books just to figure out how an Aerenal Elf is different from all other Elves.
AncientH:
A large part of this is "back to Tolkien," which sounds kind of harsh but is true.
Tolkien is basically the guy that divvied elves up into different groups, and in doing so set the stage for elf-proliferation in D&D. (Okay, the Nordics and/or Proto-Germans had the Dökkálfar and Ljósálfar, but fuck off.) The thing about Tolkien though is that most of his elf-kindreds were separated
culturally, like Germans and French, who could both reach back to Charles the Great as a common cultural and historical touchstone. It's a distinction worth mentioning because (and I am now trolling for any of the Tolkien fanboys in our audience), by and large the different elf kindreds were not tremendously
biologically different, and could all pretty much interbreed and make more elves.
Creepiest elf-baby pic I could find in two seconds.
Now, it is also worth mentioning that Tolkien didn't invent fantasy racism all by himself. Tolkien's fantasy racism may be the spark for a lot of D&D's later fantasy racism, but as I mentioned earlier it was really just following in the footsteps of some earlier writers, like Arthur Machen or Edgar Rice Burroughs (seriously, why are there not more races of men with monkey tails? Too harsh?), and without much of a stretch back to actual mythology and legendry like the histories of Herodotus.
Dog-headed men suvived for a very long time in European lore as "fact," located somewhere in Africa or Asia.
So when I say Eberron is taking it back to Tolkien, I'm largely saying that the distinctions we're seeing are a) predominantly cultural, and b) a lot of the naming conventions trend back towards something resembling Tolkien's Sindarin. Remember, in Eberron it's okay to be
just different enough to be interesting, but not so different as to actually constitute a significant change. So, instead of primeval Black Forest type woodland, we're looking at wood elves that like to mess about in rainforests, that kind of thing.
FrankT:
The Aerenal Elves are the ones that are most differentish to Elves of other games. They are kinda like necromancers in that they have the “undying.” These are animated corpses that look and walk and squawk like
ducks undead but are totally different because they are full of
positive energy instead of
negative energy. Because apparently we live in a 1980s cartoon where if you shoot blue lasers instead of red lasers, you are good instead of bad. This is so fucking juvenile that it's hard for me to even engage with it.
The truth of the matter is that there is a lot of impetus to have Elves who are also Necromancers. Because that's awesome. Elves are awesome. Necromancers are awesome. They go together like slinky goth chicks and speaking with the dead. But whenever WotC visits this concept they have to make it all dumb. Like with the Yathrinshee which K famously dubbed “The Dark Beauties of Bad Class Features.” The thing with trying to come up with things that were just like Undead but didn't have to be evil in games where undead had to be evil all the time goes way fucking far back. Like with the Baelnorn and shit, which were already an Elf thing.
I could explain the Baelnorn, but you'll be a happier and more productive person if I don't.
The thing is: all of this is pointless. You could just say that some Undead aren't bad, and that could be the end of it. No one thinks it's terribly implausible if some vampires and ghosts and shit are heroes rather than villains, and that's all you need to say. You don't need new creature types and funking bullshit with laser colors or anything. You could just have some of the Undead be light side instead of dark side. The. Fucking. End.
AncientH:
It also draws really uncomfortable comparisons with some of the more
extreme ascetic practices of certain Buddhist sects.
Although the Eberron folks are so clueless about other cultures it's hard to say whether they ever made that kind of connection. I mean fuck, Eberron is supposed to have room for Dragon Samurai and shit, and I seriously can't remember if they have an Asia parallel or if those dudes are supposed to be running around with katanas elbow-to-elbow with Thri-Kreen Hexblades ("Here is the claw!") and Jerren Ronin ("All my life, I always wanted to be a gangster.")
FrankT:
Eberron Drow worship a scorpion god instead of a spider goddess. That shouldn't be a deal killer or even really matter at all. But there's something about the Eberron Drow that makes me passionately refuse to give a single shit about them. I can't quite put my finger on it...
Races of Eberron wrote:Drow have few of the political struggles and rivalries that other races have.
Oh right. That. It's because they are completely fucking boring and don't have any conflict or storytelling potential.
Yawn.
AncientH:
The Drow were also inexplicably sorta-kinda modeled artistically after the Australian aborigines.
No, seriously, they have three-pronged drow boomerangs and shit.
I'd call them out for cultural appropriation, but I'm still blanking as to
why. I mean, they didn't actually borrow anything beyond a lot of the most superficial and cosmetic aspects of aboriginal culture, and then for no real fucking purpose. At least when Games Workshop gave a Mayan/Aztec feel to the Lizardmen, it gave you something for both writers and players to explicitly draw on when working the fluff and creating characters. This whole thing is...uh...yeah, I don't fucking get it. I mean, it would make more sense if you had more cultural diversity in Eberron as a whole, but it's not like you've got halflings with reindeer herds that are basically Sami with the serial numbers filed off, or elves that follow a Polynesian concept of
mana, or Dwarfs have public baths and state-owned prostitution or something. Something like 90% of all of these assholes live in "Settlements" that are basically hamlets, villages, towns, and cities with approximately the same technology level and cultural conventions.
FrankT:
The “
Gnomes Are Jews” thing is a thing which D&D has thrown around before. They are a race who specialize in gem cutting and have big noses. They are based on the parts of Dwarfiness that Tolkien
explicitly based on Jewishness. And that's... fine. It's obviously a mine field, but it's fine. Jewish culture is a culture, and by making Gnomes be Jews, you could create a lot of shared head space and player expectations and stuff. You could know that Gnomish gefilte fish was disgusting while Gnomish lox was delicious. That Gnomes sat around and argued math and theology late into the night while getting hammered on wine. And so on. By telling people that Gnomes are Jews you have default cultural expectations to fill in blanks with whenever something is undefined in the game but suddenly becomes important.
Why don't they eat the rest of the matzah?
So I'm definitely not saying that it's unacceptable on first principles for Gnomes to be based on a specific group of real world humans. I'm definitely not even saying that choosing specifically Jews as that group is an untenable design choice. But it's important that when you do this sort of thing that you fictionalize aspects and stories of the people that aren't extremely offensive. And Races of Eberron did not live up to that challenge.
Not Quite Races of Eberron wrote:The Jew's natural gift for illusion is a manifestation of their racial bent towards deception; a Jew will rarely engage in direct conflict when he can strike from the shadows or trick others into working on his behalf. Most Jews take great pleasure from these subtle games
This is, bluntly speaking, really offensive. If you're going to do “Gnomes are Jews” in a game, you do it so you can reference but don't have to describe their flat bread or their skull caps. You do not do it so that you can have the Trust of Zilagro be an expy for the fucking Elders of Zion. Fuck.
I shouldn't have to talk about this, and I'm not going to in any great detail. Just: holy fucking shit.
AncientH:
Where I think Eberron dropped the ball on Gnomes was not emphasizing Gnomish cultural importance on the rest of Eberron. In real life, Jewish culture has had a disproportionate impact on non-Jewish cultures in the West (and, generally to a lesser degree, in Asia and Africa - the exception being Ethiopia, which went Jewish in a big way). People like "Common" as a cheap and easy way of cutting through the difficulties of conversation between different cultures, but they tend not to take any step beyond that as to what amounts to a shared cultural history and legacy. Beyond the Christian religion which arose out of Jewish religious practices, many Western occult systems have Jewish occult practices and demonology as a common root, and even the legacy of Jewish segregation and discrimination is a common cultural touchstone - maybe you don't want to create a Gnomish Holocaust in your game world, but it would be much more
interesting if they sat down and thought out, for once, how the different cultures and peoples of their fantasy world interacted. That's really what made Tolkien's material so novel and breathtaking, is the degree to which he developed the history and background of his setting. It's worldbuilding, plain and simple, and the Eberron writers fucked it up.
FrankT:
Goblins are, when you think about it, rather a strange situation. From 3rd edition on, we have talked about “Goblinoids” with the general understanding that the Goblins, Bugbears, Hobgoblins, Vril, Norkers, Blues, Forest Kith, Dekanters, Amitok, Varag, Bhukas, Koalinths, Bakemono and Vodnik are all
related and
relatable within a single grouping. They are collectively “Goblinoids” and apparently people in the world see them as being a continuum of peoples. Which is
fascinating, because Humans, Orcs, Elves, and Ogres are all
demonstrably related in the sense that Humans and Ogres can definitely interbreed with the other two and each other (there may be some kind of ring species deal going on with Elves and Orcs being unable to interbreed yet both being able to breed with the same other creatures). But no one talks about “Ogrinoids” to mean the entire spectrum of Humans, Orcs, and Elves. In fact, Elves got
four different writeups in
this very chapter. But Goblinoids, all of them collectively, only get one.
D&D can't even agree what color these assholes are supposed to be.
You could say something reasonably profound about the fluid definition of “race” and how political and historical realities define whether two people are considered one race or two and biological realities don't count for shit. Like how in our world there's more genetic variation in Africa than outside of it, but people still talk about “Black” as if that was a thing that made sense. Or how of the seven tribes of Russians, five of them are referred to interchangeably as “Russians” while the Belorussians and Ukrainians are not. The fact that Goblinoids are considered a single nation but other Elves could be the start of a whole piece of introspection on what “race” means to the people of the game world. Are Goblinoids one race because they are “the other?” Are they one race because they have done better at nation building than the other races? Are they one race because they are early adopters of movable type? Are they considered the same race by themselves, or just by other people? Or just themselves and not by other people? Does it say anything about your political affiliations and prejudices that you call someone a Goblinoid rather than specify that they are an Amitok? All of these could be really interesting to talk about.
But of course this book doesn't do dick with this. Goblinoids have a common language that most of them speak (“Goblin”) and um... that's it really.
Then there's the issue of slavery. Slavery is a pretty fucking big issue. It's kind of the
biggest issue, especially when you're talking about race. Apparently the Goblin nation simply
has slaves. This despite the fact that they are signatories to the truce that freed the Warforged slaves for no better reason than that they were thinking creatures. And the other nations seem to have serfs, which are just slaves by another name. So... what the hell is supposed to be going on here? If slavery is allowed by the standards of the treaty of Thronehold, why the fuckity fuck fuck are the Warforged not still slaves? And if it isn't, why are there still human serfs and slaves in the different countries? What the hell?
AncientH:
It's worse than it looks because one of the defining points of Eberron was to try and bring Hobgoblins et al. out of the "Sauron commands!" ghetto of simple villains and make them both a political presence and PC-acceptable characters to play. I mean fuck, this is the entry for this section:
“We goblinoids are just like you humans, except our empire lasted eleven thousand years.”
What it boils down to is the writers were even fucking lazier than normal in this section, and didn't want to write out separate sections for Goblins, Hobgoblins, and Bugbears, much less touch on an ancient civilization that probably underlies a lot of common Eberron culture and history.
Stereotypes are hurtful.
FrankT:
Let me just say that it is embarrassing and creepy that we even
have Half-Elves and Half-Orcs with their own writeups. It was embarrassing and creepy in 2005, hell it was embarrassing and creepy in 1985. People thought it was high time for that mulatto shit to hit the cutting room floor when 2nd edition AD&D was a thing, and it's just revanchist and kind of disgusting that we still have this shit in our games.
Seriously? Is this a thing we're still doing?
AncientH:
Half-whatevers are
very weird. The only reason you see them is because Tolkien included a couple elf-human marriages in
The Lord of the Rings, and even then he was pretty fucking clear that the pointy-eared progeny either chose to be elves and lived forever (like Elrond Half-Elven) or to take the Doom of Men and die (like his brother, who nobody remembers because seriously, that dude has been dead for three thousand or so years by the start of book one). Which isn't to say that you can't have interesting stories based around mixed-race characters - you totally can - or that the cultural response to mixed-race characters isn't worth getting into - again, that is totally and completely a historical social development and worth exploring.
But in fantasy, it gets weird, because rubber forehead aliens and magic and
SCP-889, so you get...lots of things. Many of which should not be possible. Like half-dragons. Half-dragons are pretty much reason #1 that there are templates in D&D. But it would take a book this size just to talk about what the elf equivalent of an octoroon is and why or how that is significant in your game, and
nobody actually wants to get into that because it is disturbing as fuck.
So Eberron, like many D&D settings before it, has defaulted to it just being a thing where occasionally elves/orcs/humans fuck (either willingly or unwillingly), and half-whatevers crop up. Unlike Forgotten Realms or whatever, they try to play it up that half-orcs and half-elves are more or less accepted. I can understand this, and arguably it makes Eberron more progressive than "Mommy was an undiscerning prostitute when the orc horde passed through." or "Daddy died by snu-snu."
FrankT:
Halflings get two writeups. One is for the Khorvairan Halflings who wear bowler hats, and the other is for the Talentan Halflings who ride dinosaurs. Yes. Really.
Not even making that part up.
This dichotomy is a weird sounding but fairly straight take on Tolkienian Hobbits. From the beginning, Hobbits were supposed to be
British but also supposed to be
Rural. Because Tolkien was British and also constantly fapped to pastoral fantasies about how wicked sweet it was when peasants could i.e. of dysentery and shit. Now, British people are not in fact a particularly rural people. Less than one in five people in the UK lives in a rural area, putting them at about the level of the United States. There are certainly
less rural countries, but they are mostly joke nations and city states like Hong Kong or Belgium. So when Tolkien ranted about the virtues of Englishness and also the virtues of rural people he was essentially talking about two largely irreconcilable concepts.
So if you're going to talk about Halflings in a D&D context, you have to address the contradiction inherent in the source material – the dichotomy of urban and rural. Eberron chooses to address this issue by having two sets of Halflings: one who wears bowler hats and represents urbanity, and the other of which dresses like Cubone and rides around on dinosaurs. That's... minimally acceptable. It's pretty much the easy way out when attempting to reconcile contradictory source material, but at least it's something.
Now, Eberron has to make it all
weird by having the Talenta Halflings be not only
rural, but
primitive. And to express that lack of civilization by... refusing to learn the names of nouns and pointing and grunting a lot. That's so fucking dumb that they lose almost all the points they gained from successfully noticing the dissonance in the source marterial in the first place.
AncientH:
I'm going to split with Frank here; I think the whole dinosaur-riding bit comes straight from Dark Sun.
I don't recall if Athasian halflings actually rode dinosaurs, but if you look up "tribal halfings," it comes back to these little knee-biting cannibal bastards.
FrankT:
I think we said enough about the Kalashtar in chapter 4. The Inspired are evil Kalashtar. That's pretty much as far as it goes. The Inspired “aren't intended” to be playable, they are just douches. There's pretty much no reason for them to get their own writeup. There could have just been a rant about how some of the Kalashtar were jerks back in the Kalashtar writeup. In fact, there totally was.
These fuckers don't even dress differently from Kalashtar.
Even by the extremely low standards of what constitutes wasted wordcount in this book, this section is a waste of time and ink.
AncientH:
I don't know why they had the Inspired when they could have just re-fluffed the Elan. I know I've said something like that before, but I'm sticking with it.
FrankT:
Races of Eberron wrote:Wise and wild, the orcs stand out as a race always on the edge of savagery. With a proud history and a sacred duty, orcs are guardians of some of the world's most ancient secrets.
Yeeeah. Look, I know that we're still dealing with the fact that a lot of Orc descriptions are repeated verbatim by neonazis as evidence that Orcs represent African Americans or some shit, so getting a racial description of Orcs that isn't purely negative and actively encouraging genocide is probably a step in the right direction. But we're talking baby steps here. Noble Savage characters are still offensive, still part of the scientific racism spectrum.
I mean, it's better to use mixed or positive stereotypes than... these things... but it's still bad.
And really... savages? Do we honestly have to explain in 2005 how describing people as
savages is probably not cool?
Anyway, the rest of this book is crunch. It'll take us a post or two to chew through. Probably two, there's really a fuck load of it even if the information density is god awfully low.
AncientH:
There's two things I want to say about Orcs. The first is, we've already established in an earlier section that Half-Orcs tend to live with Orcs and share Orc culture. That tells us that there
is an Orc culture, so all this "savage" nonsense is crap.
Second, there's a piece of equipment here explicitly for Orcs - "Shaders." They're sunglasses. Primitive, medieival sunglasses. 1 sp.
David Caruso says this section is distasteful.
