This is straight up shit I'd expect from a fantasy world made by the Third Reich lmao
"nits make lice" is an exact quote from a commander of the 3rd Cavalry of Colorado on why he ordered the murder and mutilation of hundreds of native children at the Sand Creek massacre.
Gygax said of Chivington's 'observation' that it was an observable fact. I honestly didn't realise Gygax was this demented.
Shoutout to @ssjmarx for running a campaign of this era and making it verifiably not cringe
Thanks for the shoutout. The Desert of Desolation campaign has some cringe orientalism that I straight up rewrote, and I kinda assumed that the party would go full John Brown on the slave traders as soon as they found them.
That'd be because Gygax's early stuff was fully eating the Tolkien archetypal stuff where one's nature was divinely determined long before birth and long after death. A child of an evil race such as orcs would be evil from birth, and so killing it would be morally justified.
And of course that kind of dipshit thought has infected all fantasy since with precious few exceptions. It's not even a particular victory that WoTC has moved away from that in recent years because each new edition of D&D does less with alignment than the previous so they can't fall back on precedent to keep up the "Evil races are always evil". That and the new crop of writers coming in that are able to actively correct this stuff in the new books.
the Tolkien archetypal stuff where one’s nature was divinely determined long before birth and long after death
that's not only Tolkien, that particular idea is also a core concept in the "theory" of Julius Evola.
Yeah Gygax was a libertarian tech bro type guy who got really into genetic determinism and that shit reflects in his game. Shit sucks.
I think this is something to keep in mind when formulating ur campaigns. The raciality of d&d and indeed “races” in real life are based on white supremacy. If you don’t outright get rid of “races,” you should be treating them the same as if they were all just different kinds of humans, instead of playing into the fantasy where the hero is made to look “white” in comparison to say, a goblin. The goblin exists in its form to supplement the “white” hero.
More and more, especially with Barker, another prominent trailblazing ttrpg scholar and writer being outed as a neo nazi, it is hard to separate the origin of amerikkkan ttrpg from reactionary, white supremacist, chuddy facistery.
However, d&d is very much a thing that can be reclaimed. Being a nerd isn’t just for mayos!! There are plenty of IBPOC in the nerd traditions. As well as, marginalized mayos and others like myself.
I always broke the rules and treated the “evil races” like ppl. One time I did a random d&d game with a professor guy who turned out to be a leftist. He was shocked by my actions, and some other dude left the table lol. Me n the prof are still friends :p
In games where I have "non-humans" of any type, I go in the complete opposite direction and focus on making them actual species in their own right, instead of just humans with cosmetic alterations and ethical essentialisms. They're harder to play or depict, in some ways, but building a species from its evolutionary or magical origins through to how its social and political-economic structures develop and how its biology (or conceptual or arcane makeup) and environment shape its interactions with the material world tends to prevent the kind of crass racism that underpins most ttrpg 'races'. These are actual, alien species, not just "humans, but small, green, and stupid". Who needs goblins when you have amphibious cephalopods that historically were forced to remain in tidal zones for most of their lives prior to their development of arcanotechnology capable of maintaining their homeostasis and allowing them to travel effectively on land (and who are horrified by the "antisocial" behavior of humans because of the ways in which their societies developed due to the small amount of space in which they could live)?
Fantasy have always been a highly problematic genre rooted in westerners using it as an escapist tool to indulge in reactionary fantasies. Tolkien might have dunked on Nazis that one time, but his works are ultimately based on the core concept of the supremacy of ancient tradition over the corruption of industry.
I googled 'nits make lice gygax' and found some posts of his; let's just say I'm glad he kicked the bucket because dear God that's some insane thinking.
Aside from his paladins sounding like they're based on Judge Dredd (a tyrannical one too, as early Judge Dredd didn't kill villains but did everything to capture them alive for trial) he really does actually see killing the children of your enemies as justifiable:
Chivington might have been quoted as saying "nits make lice," but he is certainly not the first one to make such an observation as it is an observable fact. If you have read the account of wooden Leg, a warrior of the Cheyenne tribe that fought against Custer et al., he dispassionately noted killing an enemy squaw for the reason in question.
I don't care if you can point to a native American (or any member of a minority) and be like 'look, they did it too!', it's still insane and vile, the heck is wrong with these people?
But then of course, the real problem is they've envisioned world with actual evil races to justify what are war crimes in the real world (the real world being where they refer to women and children of the opposing side as 'nits make lice' and that it's an observable fact).
People also run to the cliched argument of 'lawful good doesn't mean lawful nice or lawful stupid'; right, but apparently 'lawful good' does seem to mean lawful tyranny. Not being a war criminal doesn't mean you're being lawful nice or lawful stupid. There's a guy on that page who, while discussing with Gygax on the forums, mentions he comes up with contrived reasons for why everything works out okay anyway because he's clearly trying to avoid intellectually confronting the crazy he's talking to. He says when the party captures villains, they pull out secret weapons to justify just flat out killing them rather than taking prisoners, and that evil tribes don't have any children there.
Damn libs. Probably the sort who think Kissinger 'made difficult choices'.
Thermian arguments act like fictional worlds are real parallel universes instead of places designed with intent
Wait, posts? Like forum posts? I had thought Gygax was maybe saying this stuff in the late 1970s when he had more cocaine than braincells. Was he still being a racist buffoon 20 to 30 years later? Right up to his death in 2008?
I don’t care if you can point to a native American (or any member of a minority) and be like ‘look, they did it too!’, it’s still insane and vile, the heck is wrong with these people?
Reactionaries completely fail to understand leftist arguments grounded in historical context or nuance so they think the left position is "everything bad is exclusively done by white people and nothing non-white people do is bad"
Seems like he may have spread the brain worms to his son, as looking up 'gygax racist' brings up a story about his son saying something offensive in regards to (yet again) native Americans. Seems like the gygax household have probably been brought up on tales of frontiersmen and cowboys fighting off the indigenous population (probably also grew up on an unhealthy diet of John Wayne).
The man lived at a time when the horrors of Auschwitz were still fresh in the popular consciousness. He had no excuse.
Shout-out to the podcast Three Black Halflings for going over a ton of shit like this. D&D's roots are problematic at best and there are a ton of issues that stem from it going into the present day. Imo the good and evil stuff should only be kept for literal angels and demons. I'm comfortable saying a devil is evil, I'm not comfortable saying an elf coded as black (drow) are inherently evil.
Eh, while drow skin is black nothing about them otherwise is even close to resembling real world cultures or societies. Orcs, on the other hand, are really the biggest offenders in this category. And don't get me started on Yuan-Ti.
Yeah the whole drow idea seems kind of sus to me. Like an evil faction that worships spiders and lives underground? Okay. Having them be all literally black because of them being evil? Not cool, even if there was no basis in actual racism. Also shouldn't people underground be albino?
That's how we play it. The only intrinsically Good and Evil beings are Angels and Fiends, and Angels never get involved in anything anyway.
D&D is so old and busted as a roleplaying system. I've no idea why people still play it in this day and age, other than inertia. There are so many better systems out there. Even back in the day there were better systems, like RuneQuest.
5e is really smooth, but I actually prefer RuneQuest too so yeah the main reason people play it is because everybody else plays it.
DnD started out as a wargame project. Gugsx being neck deep in wargaming is a sufficient inditement of him as a person.
Yeah, but then you know thr kinda people you can meet in tbe hobby
Gygax was a libertarian (i.e., a fascist) and D&D is an irredeemable colonial fantasy. The core system of the game is killing people designated as subhuman and taking their stuff. The primary environment of D&D, the dungeon, is literally a place where you invade, murder basically everyone you run into, and steal everything not nailed down.
You can of course try to play D&D in a way that avoids using this core loop, but then why are you playing D&D instead of something designed for at least non-colonial (if not de-colonial) gameplay?
Yeah as much as I enjoy D&D Gygax seemed to be kind of a chud, I've heard he originally wanted certain classes to be gender specific (the Fighter was originally going to be Fighting Man, for example).
Fighting Man is definitely what it was called originally, with the change to Fighter coming with the upgrade to AD&D. There was also a maximum strength stat that was different based on sex (I think it was 18 for women, 18.50 for men? stats were weird back then). All of this was abandoned by 2e, though to this day you get a certain segment of gaming chuds demanding that female characters get docked from their strength stat in the game about fighting magical dragons.
I say it all the time but why tf do we call different species "races" (hint: to justify racism)
