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 wouldnāt 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 wasĀ 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, isnāt catharsis a big part of why we play roleplaying games?"
Iām 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. Thatās what local rulers fight over, and what Chinese commercial networks export, in return for unique island products. Itās what the European colonists really need (even if itās 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 āem), perfumes, dyes, cloth etc. so thereās ample opportunity for piracy, trade and smuggling, but the key to long-term success ā the key to independent survival ā 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 landāwhich they dispossessed from American Indiansāor 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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Yooo I'm on this?
