OSSR MERP
8.0 Appendix 1 - Race Descriptions
Fantasy Racism
Only with more Apartheid.
AncientH:
We've touched on this before in a lot of OSSRs, but a recap for anyone that doesn't feel like going back: racialism is highly prevalent in roleplaying games. It was present in Dungeons & Dragons, where you had to pick your race at character creation, and the races you picked at character creation were based on Tolkien. This kind of racialism normally gets a pass because it's
fantasy: you're not getting a racial cock size modifier for being black or an income modifier for being Jewish, you're getting an extra bow proficiency because you're an elf. That doesn't make it much
better, but the veneer of "this isn't like
real life racism" means a lot of folks give it a pass - people are used at this point to picking a "race" being a
mechanical choice as much or more than as a
cosmetic choice.
Tolkien didn't start it. You get this kind of thing going back a long ways in fantasy, and before fantasy in mythology: the idea of different "peoples." The difference is, folks back in the day didn't have the biology to back up their ideas of race - they talked about breeding and the closest they could come up with was dogs and horses and whatnot. People would talk about fractions of "blood" and all that. The principle of
heredity had been discovered a long time before the means and mechanics of biological inheritance had been worked out.
Which is a long way to say, the buck does not either start or stop at Tolkien. But he did encapsulate a lot of ideas about fantasy racialism and racism that would go on to become tropes. It's why elves are usually considered good and orcs and goblins are usually bad.
And also why you have "interracial" elf/orc porn.
FrankT:
Racism in Tolkien is a touchy subject. It's importantly true that while Tolkien had no problem seeing
that the Hitler chap was a bad guy, but he had an awful lot of difficulty explaining
why. Remember that it was the
Nazis who embraced romanticism and ideas of noble races and shit, the
Allies won with industrialism and the systematic destruction of the old pastoral social structure. The Lord of the Rings is actually structured like Axis propaganda, with the end conclusion being that we have to stop Hitler rather than that we need to kill all the Slavs and Jews. If Tolkien had decided to write Lord of the Rings as a
pro-Hitler allegory, very little would have had to change. Mordor would be moved north a bit, the populace of the Shire would be dupes of Sauron, and all the shit about noble Numenoreans would stay exactly the fucking same. When Stormfronters embrace Lord of the Rings today, there is
very little they have to ignore.
Tolkien was a product of his time and place, as all people are. He was born in turn of the century South Africa, and his racial attitudes were even somewhat progressive for that time and place (he was against Apartheid long before it was cool to call for boycotts of the South African government). The racist things he said and wrote were pretty tame by the standards of the time. Nevertheless, time marches on, the zeitgeist of history continues to trundle ever forward and
writings do not change once written. Which means that when the Overton window shifts about what you can and cannot say about brown people and Mongolians, things you have written in the past get gradually shifted out of that window and become things that people in the future cannot praise without qualification. It's not like racism and anti-modernism magically vanished in 1945, people just keep being people and change
for individuals is slow. But the direction that things were going and the direction they were supposed to go was by that point obvious.
Tolkien wrote:I have in this War a burning private grudge – which would probably make me a better soldier at 49 than I was at 22: against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler (for the odd thing about demonic inspiration and impetus is that it in no way enhances the purely intellectual stature: it chiefly affects the mere will). Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.
Tolkien's problem with Hitler was that he was clearly doing his Germanic ultra-nationalism wrong.
Tolkien was able to correctly identify the good guys and bad guys of his time, but the sentiments he had were very much on the wrong side of history. And fantasy has been struggling with that core contradiction ever since.
Which is a really long walk to say that Tolkien's characterization of races and flavors of humans and stuff was nothing for Tolkien to be ashamed of, but if you wrote the same thing in 1986 people would tell you that you were being racist and should stop. And in the thirty years since then it has only gotten less justifiable. For the Race Descriptions appendix to not be awful, they would have had to put in caveats, walk back some of the stuff that makes modern egalitarians cringe, and generally put out something that has a “voice” that is considerably more conducive to late 20th century sensibilities. They did not do that.
This is from a different MERP book, but the point is that MERP never
updated their sensibilities to be something socially acceptable by 1980s standards – let alone by today's standards.
AncientH:
Note: for anyone not grokking where Frank is coming from, he's talking about the whole Aryan bit: in a lot of the racial categorizations of the 1930s, the British (Anglo-Saxons) and Germans (Teutons) were lumped together as "Nordic" Aryans. Since they both have Germanic languages, and this excludes most of the French, it probably appealed to Tolkien. But the Nazi atrocities pretty much put the kibosh on Aryanism, except for some neo-Nazi chucklefucks, and anthropology doesn't really bear out an "Aryan" race anyway.
Racial descriptions are a
lot like D&D. They didn't have to be, but D&D got them from Tolkien so they're pretty close already, and MERP is a D&D-clone. So it's a bit incestuous up in here as to where the racism starts. The only thing I can say is that MERP goes D&D several points further in doubling down on racial stereotypes - where D&D 3 at least presented the possibility of, let us say, a non-bearded, non-European archetype Dwarf, you're not getting that in MERP.
You can be the two in the middle.
FrankT:
Elf Flavors: We Has Them
The reason D&D has a bunch of weird ass Elf flavors is because of Tolkien. And the reason that Forgotten Realms has crap like Sun Elves and Moon Elves is because a bunch of D&D fans thought that Gray Elves and Wood Elves wasn't
close enough to Tolkienian copyright infringement. Tolkien had flavors of Elf, and fantasy role playing games got their start sucking at Tolkien's teat and here we are.
The thing about Tolkien's Elves is that they do not make particularly good RPG characters. They experience things on a time frame that no campaign is likely to do justice to and they are very specifically far more powerful as individuals than members of other races. Elf Guard #4 is pretty well expected to be able to wipe his ass with all but the greatest of human champions. Which was fine for the kinds of books that Tolkien was writing, where there was absolutely no expectation that individual characters would be equal power and only a couple of Hobbits were expected to grow or change at all.
Drink ent draughts, get character growth.
But think of how catastrophically bad a fit this shit is for a typical RPG. The zero to hero story is right fucking out. I don't know what a Tolkienian Elf would look like at 1st level, but she'd definitely be doing it like
eight hundred fucking years ago. And giving players equal screen time and influence on the story is pretty hard to imagine when one of the characters is an immortal sorcerer who is also a master swordsman and a gourmet chef while the other is a warrior with a beard.
Nevertheless, as you can see from the works of
Colin McComb there exists a substantial faction of RPG players & writers who want their Elves as Tolkienian as possible. Colin McComb can't get an erection without remembering that an Elf has a better erection. The very moment you write up rules for being an Elf, there will be a certain vocal section of the fanbase angry that the rules don't make them better-than-you
enough.
It's important to note that Tolkienian Elves are not in any way a problem for other kinds of games. IF you put Elves as Tolkien envisioned them into Dominions or Warhammer, you'd just have each unit cost more for being totally wicked sweet. The fact that this game balance needle is unthreadable applies only to RPGs where each character is expected to play exactly one character. If you were playing the general of an army in like King's Bounty where you could have a smaller squad of elves or a bigger squad of halflings, things could work fine. Hell, if you were doing some troupe play deal where one player played Legolas and another player played Frodo and Sam, that could work too. It's just that if you attempt to make the D&D assumption of “one player == one character”
and you make the Tolkienian assumption that Elves are quasi-angelic immortal creatures who are
very much better than you, that is a circle that cannot be squared.
Which is all a really long walk to get to what MERP actually did, which was to make different flavors of Elf in no way balanced with each other and even less balanced with other non-Elf races, and still makes them start at 1st level and doesn't give them nearly enough betterness to remotely do justice to the Tolkienian source material. So you get something which has poor balance and playability that also doesn't make the people who want to play Elves in Middle-earth happy. It's a perfect storm of fail where the design fantastically misses every goal it is possible for it to have.
AncientH:
This is also where we get the
Umli, who are the non-canon half-dwarves that I had mistaken for an obscure reference to Petty Dwarves. Mea culpa.
Petty Dwarves led to gully dwarves, which is terrible.
Umli led to nothing because no-one gives a shit, but here's a mul from Dark Sun, which is a half-dwarf that shits on the concept of half-dwarves.
There's not a lot to say about the Umli. They occupy a playspace that there was no call for and honestly no room in Tolkien's legendarium to exist. They're about as welcome as the dwelf in Forgotten Realms. Race-mixing is bullshit in
regular fantasy gaming, and encourages really distressing thoughts like hot skitty on wailord action, except with storm giants and fairies.
Tolkien offered exactly two cross-breeds: men and elves, which leads to half-elves, and that was rare and complicated, and men and orcs, which leads to uruk-hai, and
that was a sin against nature. It's not entirely clear what the difference is between men and elves biologically in Tolkien to begin with, as some folks just argue they're the same species with different spirits. You see what I mean by biology not quite having caught up to things here? This is why games like Shadowrun just nixed half-elves and half-orcs and shit entirely. Because nobody wants to have to explain what "miscegenation" means to a twelve year old that just wants to roll some dice.
FrankT:
Don't mind me, just doin some ethnic cleansing.
There is something quite disturbing about “evil races” if you think too hard about it. But they are super useful for storytelling purposes if you
don't think about it. We all love watching zombies or even Nazis get murderated in numbers, killing the “bad guys” is a great way for heroes to demonstrate their heroism. But racking up large numbers of kills is only a sign of greatness if you consider the targets to all be worthy of death – which is actually a pretty high bar. A just society doesn't kill people for most crimes, so it's actually fairly hard to imagine a large group of people who are all reasonable targets for murder. And treating thinking, speaking creatures as something less, something that is
not people has... let's just say that the main lesson of the 1940s was that this was a problematic thing to do.
In the Lord of the Rings the position of the Orc is one of the ugly dehumanized monster man that it is totally OK to kill with extreme prejudice without talking to them or asking their political views regarding the Sauron restoration or whatever. Stirring action pieces are written about stabbing them in the face and tense suspense scenes are written about stabbing them in the back. And as long as you simply accept the genre conceit that all the Orcs who get stabbed need to be stabbed, it makes for a good read. But... and of course there's a but... that genre conceit does not hold up when you pull back the curtain and look at things from other directions. Which is super unfortunate because looking at things from multiple perspectives is like 90% of what you do in a cooperative storytelling game. You have like six people at the table contributing to the story, and they all have different perspectives.
In an RPG, the protagonists can and very likely will go look at other parts of the setting. They might go into Orc villages and ask questions about Orc children and Orc women and Orc farming and all the other shit that Tolkien never really talked about. And that means you need to have answers available, and there pretty much aren't any answers you can give that won't make mass murdering them in their Orc faces sound like a monstrous thing to do. Tolkien himself was rather aware of the issue, and in his private letters he waffled back and forth about Orcs being ugly and evil. On the one hand it was narratively necessary for Gimli and Legolas to be able to “keep score” of how many dudes they murder stabbed and have that be a good thing, on the other hand talking up how ugly and evil the people you disapprove of until it is a good thing to murder stab large numbers of them without getting into the details of what any of them did or even what their names are is fairly Hitlerish. Tolkien talked himself round in circles trying to thread that particular needle with caveats about how they had those Mongolian traits least lovely
to Europeans and maybe they weren't able to not be evil because
Hitler Sauron or something, and he never really managed to make a coherent moral argument about all this in his lifetime. Lord of the Rings works if and only if you
don't think very hard about the Orcs.
MERP Orcs wrote:These hideous creatures are members of a race descended from Elves who were twisted and perverted by Morgoth during the First Age. Although they are not inherently evil, they are culturally and mentally predisposed toward Darkness.
That's about the worst compromise you could come up with. I guess if you were actively trying to create a setup that was as morally repugnant as possible you could go the full FATAL if you really wanted to, but this is pretty bad. Orcs in MERP are
individually not worthy of death but
collectively the world would be better off if they were exterminated. So in MERP you are justified in calling for Genocide, but you are
not justified in killing any particular Orc you happen to run into in the woods unless and until you find out some special reason that particular dude needs to die. But remember, this is an RPG where you discuss events from the point of view of a single bumbling warrior,
retail killing is all you'll ever be able to do. So the setting as described justifies the worst atrocities supported by Stormfronters, but
your character is still a monster if they attack first upon winning initiative. What the actual fuck?
AncientH:
MERP also has different races of "men." This is problematic because it comes the closest to actual racism. The thing is, back in the 1890s-1930s, people really did believe that there were biological differences between, let us say, the French and English and Irish. National stereotypes were also to a degree
ethnic stereotypes, and cultural differences were sometimes ascribed biological roots. So people thought that Jews were good with money because they were Jewish, or that
Native Americans can shapeshift. This also showed up in fantasy of the period.
Robert E. Howard kind of got away with talking shit about Stygians and Cimmerians and Shemites because it was the 1930s and was basically translating national/ethnic/racial groupings into a fantasy milieu; it wasn't cool, but he wasn't claiming they were a different
species or pretending this wasn't racism - it totally was 1930s racism, just 1930s racism in a fantasy world. Fair enough, right?
It gets more complicated in RPGs, because the cultural/national/ethnic divide becomes a lot more
indistinct when you through in the biological angle. You could biologically stereotype French people vs. Irish people in 1914; by 1944 it just looks bullshit and racist, and by 1964 it looks
really racist, and by 1984 it's a joke passed around on Stormfront. Having humans from culture A be as distinct mechanically as elf species B is just retarded. But that's what a lot of RPGs do. It's a lot easier to do that than break it down to "add race a modifiers, then nationality B modifiers" - which is what a GURPS approach would look like. Instead, we get...Beornlings and Dunedain and Easterlings and Black Numenoreans, etc. each of which is more distinct than Iron Hill Dwarfs vs. Lonely Mountain Dwarfs.
Tolkien didn't touch a vast deal on the racial make-up of various races of Men in his books - it was pretty much assumed that Middle Earth was fantasy Europe, and the Easterlings had some sort of "foreign" aspect, but he never went into it. You could probably write a fanfic where Middle Earth was fantasy Africa and it would work fine, but most folks have followed the fantasy Europe interpretation, so there's not really a lot of...diversity. No Asians, Native Americans, Native Australians, Africans, Middle Easterners, etc. Even the national ethnic stereotypes are pretty damn vague, though in the films at least they try for cohesive cultural trappings.
Spiky bits are a cultural trait, right?
The thing is, Britain is Old. And it is bullshit small, and every single part of it has been occupied for at least a thousand years, and there are villages there that have hated the next village over for the last hundred generations, and there are British people that very much like to look into all of that and write books and monographs on it, and trace genealogies and names and stories and shit. So Britain packs in more history per mile than mere geography would indicate, and the diversity there is low but if you insist on looking at it up close, it looks big. Which is why the Hobbiton Bagginses and the Sackville Bagginses are feuding. The thing is, all of Middle Earth is like the Shire, and Tolkien had zero fucks to give about Easterlings compared to his interest in whether the Proudfoot clan of Hobbits pluralized themselves as Proudfoots or Proudfeet. So these were all very sketchy grey areas about foreigners that Tolkien didn't give a shit about. It was ripe material for MERP to capitalize on...and instead they fucked it up, by falling back to "well, these are all swarthy foreign types."
FrankT:
As origin stories go “it was born that way” is at least easy to get across. Saying that something is super strong
because its dad was super strong is not an ultimate answer for where super strength came from in any ultimate sense, but it's a first order answer which always works. Tolkien used it a lot. Probably mostly because narratively he needed some scarier stuff and he didn't really care to discuss or even particularly think about the origin stories of any of them. But Tolkien was also a Christian and he was
pretty sure that it was blasphemy to say that anything other than God created anything, and also he wanted evil shit that characters could righteously face stab and it was probably also blasphemy to say that God created things that were a mistake – which creates a paradox with your Satan analog. You're in theological trouble if Morgoth is “creating” things, but you're in theological trouble if Morgoth's evilest monsters aren't Morgoth's fault somehow. Tolkien dug himself out of that particular self-made Gehenna by having the bad guys
breed and
corrupt monsters. Because even if
creation is off the table,
procreation obviously is not.
But that honestly just opens up more questions. If you can breed people to be powerful and cunning and evil, does that mean that there are evil genes in your world? Could you engage in eugenics programs to increase the
goodness instead of the evil? Would you be morally in the wrong to not do that? The implications of successful breeding programs of people are straight up nauseating to the modern viewer, because you're basically living in the world promised by literal Hitler. The only conscious breeding program in our history that has ever delivered positive results has been Japan's bonsai emperor program*. Every other human breeding program has involved a lot of rape and terrible ideas.
*:
Each Japanese Emperor is supposed to marry a woman shorter than himself with predictable results.
So when you go into an RPG you naturally get to questions like “is it morally acceptable to kill baby Trolls?” and “what do I have to do to get my own army of Uruk-Hai?” and that is where you would hope that MERP would come up with some not-upsetting answers. Trolls were bred by Morgoth but made from stone, so um... I got nothin. But it sounds like they breed true
and it's morally encouragable to murder stab their children. And I think the implication is that Morgoth fucked a pile of rocks and that the better Black Trolls happened because Sauron fucked a bunch of Trolls.
Tolkien never mentioned what the womenfolk of the team evil races were doing. But when you think about the breeding programs that give rise to the elite monsters, it all gets really gross!
AncientH:
Part of Tolkien's thing was the very common idea in his world that the it was getting
more crapsack. Remember, the Lord of the Rings is the close-out for the Third Age, as elves are leaving and the greatest, most long-lived lines of men have degenerated so they only live for a paltry 195 years, and most of the magic has gone out of the world. Nothing like the shit that was real back in the First and Second Ages, and still a fuck load more fantastic than the Fourth Age. Biologically, the idea that distinct populations would
decline in generations is very common - you can see it in World of Darkness, for example, and the vampire generation concept. It's the kind of view of the world written by old people that think their youth was awesome and perfect and young people just suck and are ruining everything.
Anyway, next up: Chapter 9.0 Appendix 2 - Creature Descriptions