Hooray! I’m so excited to finally get to share two of the cards I made for the new #MTGLorwynEclipsed set!
It was such a joy to work on these and I’m still pinching myself to see my name on a magic card, how crazy! Many thanks to my amazing AD Jameela Wahlgren who was an absolute joy to work with!
If you currently are subscribed to D&D Beyond, consider unsubscribing, you won’t lose any perks until the subscription period is over and if enough people unsubscribe and mention the OGL 1.1 as the reason, Hasbro might roll back the changes, sub numbers are an easy way to project loss of revenue. Third party products, streamers, online content creators and the fan community are what made D&D what it is, not Hasbro and I think they could do with a reminder.
And then they handwave the whole thing with “50 years ago everything was racist”. And while that is absolutely true, that does not excuse literally creating the most horrendously ignorant and maliciously racist content for the poor hadozee in all those 50 years. There isn’t an award for “Overtaking Racist Lore from 50 Years Ago”; that is a stain that no hand-wavey errata document can paint over. Heck, the errata is more concerned with adjusting the freaking Glide mechanic and adjustments to Challenge Rating rather than admitting “we f*cked up and there’s no excuse”.
That content is still out there. Someone paid for the privilege of having the trauma of their culture and history thrown through the stained glass of their heart when all they wanted was to read about ttrpg options. Someone read this and saw the happy slave stereotype was reborn in 2022, and that faith in d&d is never coming back once its gone. And some all-lives-matter bootlickers out there are already calling the whole thing kowtowing to faceless internet snowflakes because they can’t accept their favorite game is racist and they should empathize with those hurt by it.
Future versions of the print Astral Adventurer’s Guide are going to be revised apparently, and the current digital version is revised as well. Doesn’t change the fact that there are people who paid for and now hold those original digital copies, racist lore and all. Doesn’t change that the Guide coming to local game store shelves near you are going to contain that horrendous racist lore. And in the next ten years, what with D&DOne coming in the near future, all the 5e players are going to share digital copies with all the internet, racist lore included like a timecapsule bomb. (All d&d content does that, there are scans from every magazine and book out there from 1st to 3.5/4th)
Good job on pulling the copies to stop the flow of your content’s corrosive vitriol, Wizards. I’m sure it gave your company’s near-monopolized flow of ttrpg fan money a heartstopping five minute pause as you edited out the offensive content and put it back up for full price. I’m sure glad you are “eternally grateful for the ongoing dialog with the D&D community”; this was just a friendly dialog and not a horrendous oversight by entire departments of people, starting from the writers room and going all the way through to print… You tainted one of your game’s most beloved campaign settings through your negligence and ignorance and very likely malevolence as well. Way to make it all about your company “making a mistake” and to “[committing] to making D&D as welcome and inclusive as possible” because “this part of [your] work will never end”.
Your apology and response are as vacuous and breathless as Wildspace, Wizards of the Coast. So glad you’re covering your ass because no one thought to give Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford (the writers with their freaking names on the product) a smack upside the head for mistakenly or maliciously leading your company team to recreate the most denigrating stereotypes of American slavery in Dungeons & freaking Dragons. Your zip-zappy scifi-fantasy campaign setting–one so beloved by the community that entire fan forums and websites were made when 3.5 never got their official version–has exploded before leaving the atmosphere. All because none of you looked over its content for the racist nuke in your cargo. You just banked on “it’s d&d, it’s practically printing money because geeks have cash to burn” to just skirt on by with simple patch-errata pdfs in case of bumpy flight…
That is all I have to say at this time.
With love and support and hope to those affected by this fiasco of incredible ignorance,
Hadozee in 5e Spelljammer: Or, How the Hell Does the Biggest TTRPG Company in the World Make Something So Racist in 2022?!
I wholeheartedly applaud the person who first posted about this egregious material, @KendoMakesFilms on Twitter, for sharing screenshots of the new 5e book’s lore for the Hadozee and alerting the community on how incredibly racist it is. But before I did my due research, my emotions were in absolute furious frenzy and I started a whole twitter thread pointing out stuff the old lore and getting even more horrified that somehow this is the most racist lore in all the poor hadozee’s history. And now I’m sharing it with you all, because this is absolutely not being talked out on the major d&d content creators and sites…
My day kinda got ruined after finding out the new lore for 5e Hadozee is incredibly racist. Ruined not because of anything that personally affects me (as a non-poc eldritch horror being on social media), but because one of the biggest tabletop roleplaying companies in the world just allowed something so racist to be put out on the consumer market… A market full of people (including a huge proportion of color) who are going to buy this book and either ignore the horrible racist “worldbuilding”, make excuses for a major corporation with bootlicking, or be hit in the face by “you paid for us to inflict racist horror on you”.
How does Wizards of the Coast, in 2022!, let this happen?! How does the world’s dominant tabletop roleplaying game’s production empire allow this horrible, insulting and degrading content to reach digital and print copy?!
Here’s the basics:
The hadozee are a race of simian-looking humanoids who have flaps of skin like flying squirrels. They have been in D&D since Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd Edition), detailed in the Compendium Spelljammer Appendix I book. That was back in 1990, when monster and non-humanoid creatures were just monsters, before monster/non-humanoid races were a thing. And even then they had a bad connotation (not to mention were apparently a ripoff of a Star Wars expanded universe race). They were called “deck apes”; because they were great at working on ship/spelljammer crew sails. The elves of the setting “discovered” that the hadozee were intelligent and “granted” them respect and positions on their ships–all to face the orcs, who back then were the dominant nemesis race against the “oh so tolkienesquely perfect elves” in the lore.
Yeah, even back then they were quite already dipped in racist stereotype; only given respect when a more “perfect” race deemed them worthy to work “for/with” them. They were also much more monstrous, and more an amalgamation of simian traits rather than how they are depicted today.
Spelljammer is very much a product of science fiction/western tropes, and around that time it was steeped in Star Wars IV through VI, as well as its “gritty space adventure” clones. So a lot of stereotypes were just used to make monsters. Literally on the opposite page of the hadozee in this book are gorilla men, and holy heck it’s bad. I’m just glad we left that archetype to the dust, it is not worth knowing at all…
Moving on, Dungeons & Dragons had evolved to 3rd edition by 2000, now owned by early Wizards of the Coast. Then three years later there was a great big “patch” called 3.5 edition, and that became the definitive edition for many, many years. Monsters were more complex and customizable; and each supplemental book added new races to try out against new challenges and even settings. One such book was Stormwrack, a book about high seas adventure and pretty much nothing else! And that was the reintroduction of the Hadozee as a playable race for the first time!
In Stormwrack the hadozee (or “winged deck apes”) became developed enough to seek out adventure for themselves, aboard ships and among crews they chose. The lore really leaned into the curious monkey aspect and shed off the most obvious of racist tropes, but they do retain the adoration/fawning over elves–which is quite icky still. The elves were more wild folk and chaotic rather than a paragon race, though still very much tolkien levels of pale. But there’s no specific lore about their history that makes them only seen as good because the elves “chose them”, and the hadozee appear to have connections with other races and their crews.
And that’s the last we’ve seen of the hadozee until now. Stormwrack wasn’t a necessary book by any means, but the hadozee were worked more into just literally being fantasy orangutan people.
Also of note, Spelljammer never had an official 3.5 setting release. Certain elements were utilized, and books like Stormwrack started the trend of giving big vessels statblocks with the updated d20 system.
Now this is where things come to a head, and why this discussion is happening now. It’s 2022 and 5th edition D&D has been out officially since 2014. (We don’t talk about 4th edition, no no no…) And in 2021 an Unearthed Arcana article was released called Travelers of the Multiverse., written by Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford at Wizards of the Coast. That article had all the playtested races for an obvious Spelljammer setting that was in development; and the Hadozee were in it among other spelljammer races like astral elves and thri-keen. 5th edition players could now play these races in their own settings, as the article had no lore or artwork for what was to be in Spelljammer 2022. But 5e had been such a success across the board that no one expected what was to come out. And Spelljammer was a setting that inspired so many d&d players, entire forums and sites were made to try and update the setting from AD&D to 3.0/3.5 editions…
But we finally get three books for 5th edition Spelljammer. On August 16th 2022, the Astral Adventurer’s Guide was included in the book drop, which would include all the wonderful lore and options for d&d players to make setting-inspired characters…
And holy heck did the most racist lore for the hadozee drop ever! After doing all this research into the hadozee’s history in d&d, I am honestly shocked that in 2022 that is the case…
According to the Astral Adventurer’s Guide, and I paraphrase here: the first hadozee were originally tiny treetop creatures the size of housecats, flitting from branch to branch. That is, until several hundred years ago when a wizard named Yazir showed up with a bunch of apprentices on some spelljammer ships; and they captured the animalistic hadozee and perform experiments on them. The hadozee are given a “magic elixir” that makes them grow, become bipedal and intelligent. As well as “intensifying [their] panic response, making them more resilient when harmed”. All to make a slave army the wizard could “sell to the highest bidder”.
But luckily the white savior apprentices under Yazir “liberated” the hadozee and they all killed the big bad racist wizard. They all then took the experimental elixir, went back to the hadozee homeworld and used it to happily make more. Eventually the “enhanced” hadozee had children, and those newborns had their mutated parents’ traits–so they took to the stars.
How does someone not get whacked in the head for glamorizing the horrors and longlasting trauma of freaking slavery and all the inhumane atrocities committed by slavers?! Oh but wait, they’re so “enhanced” that rather than live with the horror of being twisted beyond your entire species they decide to be happy little deckhands and “give”/force the mutative unknown substance to more of their animalistic kind…
We’re not done yet… Apparently the current “enhanced” hadozee are curious to a fault, “unquenchable optimists” and expressive with “loud whooping, fang-bearing, and snarling”. They are specifically stated as not philosophers; simply wanting to “do good and happy work”. And apparently taking “great joy in the simplest of shipboard tasks and chores”. Lastly, the writers brought back the “great love of the elves”. Probably because astral elves are effectively the most “elf” they’ve ever been, way past original tolkienesque to the point of freaking Silmarillion immortal perfection. But the elves are written to “not mutually respect them”. Because of course they don’t have to see another sentient race as even close to equal and deserving of rights.
I bet they thought they were so smart to make “Abu from Aladdin” and “Jack the Monkey from Pirates of the Caribbean” as a playable race in the zip-zappy magic space setting…
“Thanks for buying our overpriced 49.99 digital book bundle, spelljammer fam”, says the coastal Wizards lying on their 5th edition money, “There’s a super special surprise on page whatever just for black people! Vindictive hatred and glamourizing the slavery of this cute little monkeyman, see how they sweep and hoot and grin cheerily because they’re just so gosh darn lucky their ancestors were captured and forcibly experimented on to be war chattel/smiley labor for money.”
Somehow 5th edition’s writing team, especially Perkins and Crawford, decided to rewrite slavery for the ideal “happy little ship monkey” as a playable race. They took everything cheesegrated off of 3.5′s Stormwrack hadozee and just molded it together into the perfect little ship monkey. And they sprinkled on some “spicy” tropes to make it theirs and give it some “juicy” trauma… Stupidly (and most definitely with racial blindness to the point of willed ignorance) they remade slavery and the “happy slave’ stereotype in OUR scifi d&d setting.
Eternal DM, Eldritch God of the Alphabet Mafia, Tabletop Storyteller!! ------
I tag everything!! ----------
Icon Artwork by @LadyZolstice // @AbolethEye on Twitter!
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