DECOLONISING D&D

In 2019, after seeing yet another round of alarmist discourse in Xwitter about how Dungeons & Dragons is FULL of COLONIALIST tropes and patterns, and needs to be revised, SCRUBBED of its PROBLEMATIC FILTH---I rage-tweeted this brainfart:

"Decolonising D&D"

I've seen this thread round the community, since. Humza K quotes it in Productive Scab-picking: On Oppressive Themes in Gaming. Prismatic Wasteland quotes it in Apolitical RPGs Don't Exist. Most recently, it was referenced in a 1999AD post about Western TTRPGs (an interesting discussion on its own merit; one that already has a counterpoint from Sandro / Fail Forward.)

If folks are still referring to it five years later, maybe I should give the thread a little more credit? Perhaps the fart miasma has crystalised into something concrete.

In the interest of record / saving this thought from the ephemerality of Xwitter, here is the text in full, properly paragraphed, and somewhat more cleanly expressed:

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"DECOLONISING D&D"

Firstly: saying "D&D is colonialist" is similar to saying: "the English language is colonialist".

If your method of decolonising RPGs is to abandon D&D---well, some folks abandon English; they don't want to work in the language of the coloniser. More power to them!

For those who want to continue using the "language" of D&D---

Going forth into the "wild hinterland" (as if this weren't somebody's homeland);

to "seek treasure" (as if this didn't belong to anybody);

and "slay monsters" (monsters to whom?)

Yeah. There's some problematic stuff here, and definitely these aspects should make more people uncomfortable.

But! I think it is an error to "decolonise D&D" by scrubbing such content from the game.

That feels like erasure; like an unwillingness to face history / context; like a way to appease one's own settler guilt.

Do you live in the West? Do you live in any Asian urban metropole? White or Person of Colour(tm)---you are already complicit in colonialist / capitalist (yes, of course they are inextricably linked) behaviour. (I can't speak for urban metropoles elsewhere, but I bet they are similar centres of extraction.)

Removing such patterns from the TTRPGs you play might let you feel better, at your game table. But won't change what you are.

I think it is more truthful and more useful NOT to avert one's eyes from D&D's colonialism.

The fact that going forth into the hinterland to seek treasure and slay monsters is a thing, and fucking fun, tells us valuable things about the shape and psychology of colonialism. Why conquistadors in the past did it; why liberal foreign policy, corporations, and post-colonial societies do it today.

Speaking personally:

I write stuff that evokes / deals with the context I'm in---Southeast Asia. An intrinsic part of that is looking at the ways colonial violence has happened to us---as well as the ways / reasons we now, supposedly free, perpetrate it on others.

A long chain of suffering. Heavy stuff.

I also write for people who want to have fun / kill monsters / pretend to be elves, of course. But for those people who want to consider serious stuff like colonialism: I offer no FIGHT THE POWER righteousness, no good feeling, no answers.

Only discomfort. Because the truth is uncomfortable.

Here's a screenshot of the Author's Note for Lorn Song of the Bachelor:

"Any text inspired by Southeast Asia has to reckon with colonialism ... This text presents a difficult situation; there are no easy solutions. "... If I offered a mechanical incentive for you to fight colonial invaders, you wouldn’t be making a moral decision, but a mercenary one. "The choice you face should echo ... the kind of calculus my grandparents faced."

I stand by that.

Also: might we be more precise and more careful about using the term "decolonising", please?

Here I quote Tuck and Yang's landmark and (sadly) still trenchant "Decolonization is not a metaphor":

"Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies ..."

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Further Reading

So this post isn't just me reheating a hot take, here are some touchstone writings from around the TTRPG community about colonialism as a subject and mode of play in games:

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"Jim Corbett was called upon to hunt down another fifty maneaters over the course of the next 35 years. Together, those tigers had killed over 2000 people, for much the same reasons as the Champawat Tiger - injury, desperation, starvation, and habitat loss. Would you look at that. The root cause was British colonialism."

D&D Doesn't Understand What Monsters Are from Throne of Salt

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"Another effect of having colonizers in my setting would be giving players the opportunity to drive them away from the islands, their home. This maybe just be for the catharsis. After all, isn’t catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?"

I’m Adding Colonizers To My Setting from Goobernut's Blog

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"When you have a slime boy and the other characters are a really fat lizard and one's playing Humpty Dumpty, it completely shatters the straight-faced serious authoritarian illusion of race, and replaces it with complete fucking nonsense. I love the idea of proliferating the number and types of "races" into absurdity, to the point where the entire logical structure of it collapses in on itself and race as a category ceases to become coherent or meaningful in any sense."

Interview with Ava Islam - Designer of the RPG Errant from Ava Islam / The Lost Bay

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"Perhaps most critically, the fundamental basis of power is not land or even money but manpower. That’s what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. It’s what the European colonists really need (even if it’s not what they most desire). There is rich loot to be grabbed in the form of spices, Spanish silver, Indian gold, sea cucumbers (the Chinese love ’em), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so there’s ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success – the key to independent survival – is nakedly and unquestionably uniting people."

Counter-colonial Heistcrawl: previous high scores from Richard's Dystopian Pokeverse

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"They worked their own land—which they dispossessed from American Indians—or became small shop owners or opportunistic gold diggers or bounty hunters or itinerant ranchers. To me, substituting these situations for one ruled by industrial monopoly ignores that the Wild West is a perfect example of how capitalism operates outside of (or prior to) mass industry, instead being composed of self-employers and self-sustainers."

Fantastic Detours - Frontier Scum from Traverse Fantasy / Bones of Contention

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"... using the Western framing and D&D's baked-in imperialist and capitalist structure to get people earnestly participating in the experience of forming imperial power structures and the early roots of regional capitalism ... The PCs aren't the drifters on the train or the townsfolk watching with apprehension - they're the railroad itself."

An Arrow for the General: Confronting D&D-as-Western in the Kalahari from A Most Majestic Fly Whisk

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Hopefully going to start using my Druid's Wildfire Spirit summon more going forward. Needed to figure out what the heck it looked like first.

Oh yeah, tip for finishing your Neocities site (or any project, really):

Don’t fuckin’ announce that you’re gonna do it! All my most furiously productive nights are spent toiling on things that I’m excited to unveil so I can see the pure shock and horror on everyone’s faces. You never want to give people enough advance warning to call the police.

On November 25, at the urging of a far-right troll, Elon Musk banned the @crimethinc Twitter account.

Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with “free speech”—it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence.

Please help us circulate our full statement:

https://crimethinc.com/TwitterBan

Please follow us on Telegram and Mastodon.

So, my D&D group was about to start a new campaign, but instead we're doing season 2 of a previous campaign, and I don't have an excuse to move forward with my Kobold Paladin or Kenku miner Warlock... yet.

Once I established that the darker spots in my coffee were not bugs floating in it, there was only one other possible explanation... #cryptid #doodle #cartoon #drawing #art https://www.instagram.com/p/CSa8KXeM5FGXqEx8i75oB1PRVDwZbdI9mbci5A0/?utm_medium=tumblr

Amazing score at @halfpricebooks today. My collection of Star Wars artbooks inches ever closer to complete (still missing a lot though). #starwars #conceptart #artbooks https://www.instagram.com/p/CSSkCrTrS-qgXSercyakTD4IqTp6k_64kn5T7I0/?utm_medium=tumblr

i know your alien designs aren't very human, but do you have any advice on how design an upright and bipedal insect? or creatures with exoskeletons in general? so far i know that a hunched over posture will be needed to make room for all those arms and vestigial wings. the bipedalism is what is currently throwing me for a loop- both in how it evolved and the leg structure/gait. maybe creating something with a mix of internal and external skeletons would be better for this kind of creature?

Long post, but I couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk about LEGS: how and why?

One reason animals evolve bipedalism is because it’s very energetically efficient. Humans are champs at endurance walking partly because we’re letting gravity do half the work, falling forward with every step. In comparison, an animal like a beetle or a newt with splayed legs has a very stable standing position, but in all parts of their walk cycle, they’re actively pushing their body up against gravity. This is no biggie when you weigh a fraction of an ounce, but once you’re pushing 50 pounds it becomes a chronic problem. In the evolution of land vertebrates, you can see limb attachments starting at the sides of the body (i.e. ancient amphibians) where the fins used to be, but in later animals, the limbs moved underneath the body and became struts to passively support their body weight against gravity. (i.e. a horse)

But why move onto only two legs? Well, feet are also heavy, and in order to walk you have to lift them up. This is the motivation for many animals evolving digitigrade or even unguligrade legs: if there’s less heavy bones and complex joints at the end of your leg, that’s less weight to pull up against gravity, which means you can run slightly faster and walk slightly more efficiently.

And for animals with only two walking legs, that’s even LESS weight that they have to lift around in order to get up and go places... at the price of having fewer backups in case of injury.

So, that’s great. What about arthropods though? Well, I think the main reason we don’t see any bipedal arthropods on our planet right now is because they don’t have any of the evolutionary pressures that cause it. First of all, they aren’t big and heavy-- arthropods are limited by their passive diffusion respiratory systems, and their need to wriggle out of their entire skeleton and be mushy for a while after in order to grow. Second, they’re not being pushed into the long distance walking lifestyle of humans or horses-- arthropods with distance to cover just fly over it, because they weigh nothing, so flying is super easy. But if you muck around and change some of those evolutionary factors, how would the leg structure of (for example) a beetle change to accommodate them?

I’d imagine it would look strangely familiar. Legs straightening out, moving underneath the body, simplifying and strengthening the hinges, we’ve been here before. What’s new is that there’s more leg to work with. For walking efficiency at a larger size, I’d expect one of the pairs may reduce their role in locomotion, somewhat like the forelimbs in mantids or butterflies. If you’re aiming to make a bipedal bug, forelimb specialization is a good excuse to remove four of them from the ground. As for the legs on the ground, another familiar phenomenon may happen over time...

With similar motivation, mass would move away from the foot and towards the body in cursorial species just like for vertebrates. As for structure itself in the exoskeleton, I recommend looking at the larger arthropods of real life... terrestrial crustaceans like coconut crabs come to mind. For a truly huge arthropod, a mix of endoskeleton and exoskeleton and/or a water-dependent molt might be necessary to get away with the high body weight. As for posture, the world is your oyster! Humanoid or not, just make sure your handsome lad has a good center of balance!

That’s all folks!

PATREON | STORE  

Things they don’t tell you about art school

Well some kinda #artschool discourse is going around Twitter again. On the off-chance I can reach anyone before they make their mistake: Art schools aren't necessary for a career in the arts. If you go to one, you'll probably start hearing this right around senior year (that's when I first heard it). I'm not saying there aren't good schools out there. By most accounts, mine was a very good one (even if they are at the center of the current kerfuffle), and I think I'm one of the only people from my class and major that hasn't spent at least a little time working in the industry yet, so that's something of an endorsement. I'm saying you don't NEED to go to one. Where your degree comes from, or even having a degree at all, will have far less impact on your career than being able to demonstrate skills and having a network of people who can convince people to take a chance on you. No one tells you this until you're already there and committed to the massive debt. A cynical part of me blames it on greed and business and such. Student loan servicers need you to be in debt; art schools need your tuition money; your high school needs you to go on to college to make them look good. But I think more of it is probably that it's just not something your teachers, guidance counselors, college admission staff etc. are thinking about. By default, it's just not something they consider. But it's something you should be thinking about and aggressively looking for answers to. College is expensive, and art school is especially expensive. It may end up being worth that cost; or it may be a ball and chain that follows you around for the rest of your life. When I look back at my decision to go to art school, it always strikes me just how naive I was, how little research I did, how screwed up my priorities were, but also how little help the people around me were (not that naive past-me would have known he needed the help). Past-me genuinely believed that you just went to college for a thing that you wanted to be your job, and somehow, you learned everything you needed to get that job: How to apply, all the skills you needed etc. and no one knew I thought this, so no one could set me straight. It's obvious to me now, but it never occurred to past-me that there's nothing stopping you from looking up your dream job, seeing what companies are hiring people to do that thing, and what qualifications they're looking for. (Actually, I tried this ONCE in, like, junior high, in like, the worst possible way, and when it failed, I just decided that meant I would learn all of that in college. Again, don't be like past-me. He was an idiot.) There's nothing stopping you from finding people with that job and asking them how they got the job and what advice they have for someone who wants to do that job when they grow up. (Pros scoff at that, but I think that's mainly because it's a common piece of art school homework that has a reputation as something the school is making the kids do in lieu of teaching it to them themselves. I suspect they'd be happy for an independent learner to ask.) Also, take your time. Past-me hated high school and just wanted to be done and never have to go to school ever again. This isn't a great way to learn anything in a scholarly environment, and it's not a great attitude to bring into a very very expensive school. Many of the people I went to art school with who seemed to enjoy the most success right off the bat were people who were older when they went to art school. These people had had jobs or studied other things before jumping into our program, and I believe those experiences helped them to work and study in ways that those of us just out of high school, living on our own for the first time in our lives, just weren't familiar with. I can't give this advice to past-me, but maybe somehow it can find its way to someone similar enough to past-me that they can avoid a whole lot of hurt and a whole lot of debt. I know from experience, no one else is liable to give that person this advice, so if you know someone like past-me, please, give them my advice, or if past-me sounds an awful lot like present-you, maybe consider this advice for yourself: 1. If you have a dream job, research the hell out of it. Find out the qualifications you need, the skills you need. Learn about other people doing that job because they're your best information about that job, and also your competition for similar jobs.

2. Don't rush into expensive decisions. Art school can wait, and if you make it wait a bit, you might just be much better suited to make it work for you. Or you might learn enough on your own that you don't need it.

3. Don't make your first taste of freedom an expensive one. There's a lot to learn about living on your own. It may be far better to get a job and your first apartment and learn all about eating cereal for every meal and figuring out how to do laundry and going to parties in a setting where it won't cost you tens of thousands of dollars per semester to do so.

4. An apartment, a decent computer, a bunch of tutorials, and tickets to industry networking events are way cheaper than art school. It's not the route for everyone, but even if they don't work for you on their own, they're all things that will help you succeed at art school.

5. Student loans are a goddamn nightmare, and they're not getting fixed anytime soon. They're a big part of why I might seem to be cautioning you away from college period. They're not as bad as you've heard: they're worse. Fight for every non-loan dollar that you can get. And if you can't get scholarships and grants, consider cutting your losses and resuming school at a later date when you can get those non-loan dollars.

Tumblr app didn't want to load the other day, so here's an Inktober twofer: paper minis for a Kraken and a Dryad.

Last night's Kraken mini wouldn't be complete without some free-standing tentacles to herald its appearance. Just a quick Inktober batch before work tonight.

Did an Ancient Black Dragon paper mini for today's early Inktober entry. I'm a firm believer that two-legged dragons, in the style of Game of Thrones or Skyrim are way cooler than four-legged ones, and I've wanted to redesign D&D's dragons as two-legged dragons.

Decided to get an early start on my Inktober paper mini extravaganza with some orcs.

I like monster portraits for minis of humanoid monsters like orcs and goblins. Monster portraits are a lot of fun, and that provides the flexibility as a DM to dictate their weapons and armor.

Drew myself a paper mini and bought myself some metal dice for our upcoming Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign.

One of these days, I'm going to stop waiting until 20 minutes before I lose my daylight before I start trying to draw. That, or I'm going to pick less ambitious subject matter when I have so little light left. #pocketsketchbook #drawing #Pencildrawing #lakemichigan #milwaukee https://www.instagram.com/p/BnpdZZcH44R/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=fau726727gjq