anita brown (crayon)

it takes work, yes!

it’s worth it. for both you and your players, but especially for new players who can see the game in different ways than you

examples I’ve written that you should feel free to use:

-orcs: rather than give in to the weird “tribal savages who fight all the time,” consider connecting orcs and their inate strength/constitution to the earth. in my most recent campaign setting, orcs are descended from a human champion who bested an earth primordial; the primordial, impressed with their strength, blessed them and their descendents with powerful tusks and a greater constitution.

-drow: instead of the entire drow narrative being “they’re dark skinned and bad because they betrayed the fair skinned elves and their gods,” consider playing up their connection to spiders. perhaps they worshiped a spider God who gave them the ability to blend into their darkened surroundings. if you’re married to their current aesthetic appearance, take care to present multiple drow societies that have different outlooks; not a homogenous race of black skinned slavers. consider pigmentless drow, who’ve lost all skin color because they never see the light of day. drow who use echolocation? distancing your drow from the bad connotations carried by the current zeitgeist is a useful endeavor

-include elves of color in your game

-drop the ‘tribal’ aesthetic and the connotations that goblins and other monstrous races have. it’s lazy (note, tribes and other similar social structures are still perfectly valid social structures; but if the only example of them in your game world is the violent, monstrous people who seek to destory “civilized communities” that sends a bad message about real life tribes and their validity

-focus less on race and more on societies; a society can be evil or good, but a race cannot

-consider that fantasy races have no reason to conform to any gendered structures (especially our current human binary). dwarvish societies who express their varied and fluid genders through beard braiding. elvish societies who reproduce asexually. don’t limit yourself to what you can relate to from a 21st century human perspective