Silk & Dagger & Disability
So, obviously, the main thing Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG is about is capitalism and slavery through indirect means, but people really resonate with the disability readings of my work, so here’s this.
So, unlike Eureka, Silk & Dagger is technically a class-based RPG, but it only has two classes, Mistress and Servant, which is the joke. (It’s literally their socio-economic classes.)
It also has two races, elf and man, A.K.A. humans.
“Race” is not normally something I default to when writing RPGs, but in this case it’s a matter of the inspiration and source material that Silk & Dagger is parodying. The thing is, though, that still isn’t really what Silk & Dagger is about. It’s about class and forced labor, and the way that these two “races” map onto that is not really applicable to how that works in the real world. That’s one of the reasons that Silk & Dagger doesn’t have a whole roster of “races,” it would make people even more likely to try and read it as a racism allegory when it’s not.
So, there’s the dark elves that live in the underground caves. Dark elves can see in the dark, have sensitive ears that move and that ear movement is part of their language, and they don’t sleep, among other things.
You, reading this, are probably a human so you know that humans can’t see in the dark, can’t really move their ears, and do need to sleep regularly.
While dark elves are actually still not particularly well-suited for life in these caves, nor the society they live in, their innate abilities make them much more suited to it than humans.
The people in charge of division of labor in this society pretty much all happen to be dark elves, who have obviously never been humans and never will be, and have an interest in their underlings working as much and as hard as possible. So when they get servants who can’t see, can’t hear, and can’t communicate as well as a normal person, and these servants try to say they also need to take more time off than a normal person, you can probably see where I’m going here. The response is that humans are dumb, lazy, ungrateful, parasitic, worthless, etc.. Many Drow don’t even think “sleep” is real, they think it’s something humans are making up to get out of work.
These humans are people who would be able to thrive somewhere else, in some other situation, but they’re not in that situation, they’re in another situation that the Drow forced them to be in. They have no choice but to do a job their body is not good at, do it worse than everybody else because of this, and be considered dumb, lazy, and a liar the whole time.
I’m sure many of you reading this will find this situation familiar.
Oh and also the little candles that humans need to see in pitch black caves are constantly blamed for the buildup of carbon dioxide in the enclosed cave systems by Drow who burn coal to heat their bathtubs.
janainaart
yousharknotpass
theartofmadeline
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