Ancestral Knowledge

So, like I said in the last post, I've been reading, and loving, Outcast Silver Raiders. One of the choices it makes that I'm enjoying is presenting the players with no racial (ancestry, species) options up front—everybody's a human by default. The game gives the GM a bunch of the trad demihuman options in the back of the book…but then actively discourages them from actually using those options. An all-human party makes a lot of sense for the Mythic North setting in particular (weird, grimdark 13th-century Scotland, more or less), but it also helps punch up any fantasy setting by making whatever non-humans the players encounter truly unusual and strange.

Besides, the menagerie of D&D demihumans, those intended for players and those intended as NPC foes alike, just isn’t very interesting. I'm not going to belabor this point too much (other and wiser folks have written at great length about it before), but they’re almost all just crude racialized exaggerations of real groups of people.

Most “monstrous” demihumans represent the Western archetype of the “savage.” They're primitive people hanging around on marginal land (swamps, jungles, mountains, caves, deserts) basically just waiting to be colonized or slaughtered. They might do a little raiding, a human sacrifice or two, or some quasi-cannibalism to remind us that they're evil (in case we don't have an alignment system to assure us that they're Evil), but mostly they're passive objects of imperial violence. They've often been given recognizable trappings of indigenous American cultures, or at least stereotypes thereof—feathers, tomahawks, blow guns, spear throwers, and so forth. Goblins, kobolds, and lizardmen fit into this category, among others. It's super racist!

Other monstrous demihumans, rather than being uncivilized savages, represent the anti-civilization of The Horde, threatening to turn the world upside-down and displace the point-of-view culture from its “rightful” place on top. Orcs, hogoblins, and their ilk get a bunch of cultural markers that suggest nomadic steppe people, particularly the Mongols (the centaurs of the Warcraft franchise are an especially ugly, heavy-handed example of this).

Several categories of “civilized” humanoids are just real human beings dressed up in fantasy trappings. Halflings and gnomes are basically “what if little people were magic?” with an extra coat of racist paint on the halflings in WoTC's “they're also Romani” characterization). Dwarves are a bit of the same, although at least they have solid roots in folklore…although of course in contemporary fantasy fiction, their culture tends go heavy on a lazy mashup of Scottish and Jewish stereotypes.

In all these cases, one of the major problems is that there's little or no attempt to imagine demihumans as anything other than simplistic analogues for real groups of people. There tend to be few, if any, internal distinctions within the racial categories. Each group gets one pantheon, one language, maybe two cultures if they're lucky. (Sometimes, what should be a distinct culture gets spun off as an entirely different species.) Maybe a few different tribes, all of which behave more or less identically to each other. Some of the latter-day D&D ancestries have had sense enough to step away from “These guys are Mongols” or “These guys are Aztecs” analogies, but they still paint with a too-broad brush. Dragonborn? They're just some dudes, but with scales. Tabaxi? Well, they're naturally curious, of course. Meow.

* * *

Okay, but what about the two most popular non-human 5E species? Elves and tieflings have been conspicuously absent from my diatribe. And why? Because they're actually pretty interesting, they're probably popular in part because they're interesting, and they show two good ways forward for character ancestry.

Elves have the important distinction of being older, wiser, haughtier, and generally better than humans. At least elves think so, and that makes them novel. Most D&D demihumans exist, both in the game and outside of it, for humans to dump on (and by extension for people in dominant real-world groups to dump on minorities). They're barbarians, savages, animals, misshapen creatures. Elves, on the other hand, look down on humans. Elves are smarter, more beautiful, better at magic. More cultured. More civilized. You can kind of map an envious awe of an older “race” by some young upstarts only recently emerged from barbarism onto, say, the 19th-/20th-century German (and Western European, more broadly) obsession with Greece and Rome, but it just doesn't work that neatly. Elves aren't Greeks or Romans. They're more complicated.

Much more complicated, in fact! They get real internal cultural differences. They get multiple languages. They get varied religious practices. It tends to be a bit thin, still, and it's mostly derived from Tolkien (so no need to give TSR or WotC any credit), but a few different elven nations and some kind of conflict among them is a lot better than halflings or orcs get. Elves are also distinct, surprisingly, for having real physiological differences from humans that actually matter in the game, like resting via trance rather than sleeping. They could certainly be weirder—if we stuck closer to their folkloric roots, they'd be stealing babies and drinking blood—but they're at least a little bit alien.

Tieflings represent the opposite end of the spectrum: not alien and strange like the elves of folklore, not merely foreign like the myriad demihumans who ought to just be replaced by distinct human cultures, but uncanny. Almost normal, almost like “us,” but off somehow. Tainted. Marked. Problematically literal infernal ancestry aside, tieflings are a richer and truer analogy for being a despised minority than the essentially antisemitic dwarven trope of “They’re hardworking and smart and by golly, they just love gold” or anything like it could ever be. To their neighbors, they almost seem like normal people, but something in their deep ancestry is different, wrong, corrupt. They can't be trusted. They're probably up to no good. And there are signs. Blood will out. (Aasimar, on the other hand, aren’t the least bit interesting, because they don't represent anything authentic or recognizable; nobody in real life ever believed that some particular racial other in their society was actually inherently better than them, and descended from angels no less.)