Fixing racism in D&D (/rpgs in general)

[maglag]

Anyway, the larger issue there is that in World War 2 the pastoralists were the bad guys and the industrialists were the good guys.

Wait, whot? Both Germany and Japan were as heavy in the industry as the other sides back then.

The japanese ran out of skilled pilots and just started putting rookie pilots in their mass-produced planes for suicidical charges. Until the end they were churning out planes at such a crazy rate that they didn't care if they were destroyed in their first flight.

The german ran out of fighting-age men and just started handing mass-produced RPGs to little kids. Until the end they were churning out newer stronger weapons and handing them to any german left with hands to fire them.

Heck, the main reason Japan went to war was because they wanted moar oil, the lifeblood of industrialists and bane of pastorals.

As Tolkien said, all sides were orcs industrialists in WW2, and indeed a good part of the war was precisely crippling the other side's industry ability.

[Username17]

Wait, whot? Both Germany and Japan were as heavy in the industry as the other sides back then.

This is factually untrue. Between 1943 and the end of the war, Nazi Germany made six thousand Panthers, and Soviet Russia made twenty nine thousand T-34s. From its production in 1940 to the end of the war, the Japanese produced ten thousand Zeroes, while the United States made over three hundred thousand military aircraft and the third most numerous fighter plane (the P-40) was still more numerous than the Zero at over thirteen thousand copies. In 1943 Nazi Germany produced thirty million tonnes of steel, and Imperial Japan produced six million tonnes of steel. And the United States produced eighty million tonnes of steel. In 1943 the Axis as a whole produced less than forty percent as much steel as the Alliance as a whole.

But factual numbers of steel production and industrial efficiency are rather beside the point. The issue is that Axis propaganda constantly claimed that they were going to restore an older order, the Allies were not making that argument. At all. Hitler's vision of the Thousand Year Reich very much included space for traditional German farmers farming in traditional German ways. The rallying cry of "Blood and Soil" does very much concern itself with soil. Stalin's utopian vision involved absolutely no one reverting to traditional Russian pastoralism. The vision was one of "Progress and Unity" where the peasant farmers of the past weren't to be celebrated and restored but allowed (and forced) to advance.

Tolkien's very English idea of a peaceful retirement to the pastoral Shire is something that fits very easily into the narrative of Tojo, Hitler, or Mussolini, but has no place at all in the narrative of Stalin or Roosevelt. Captain America was not sending you back to work on a subsistence farm in the country, he was promising you a home in the suburbs and a job at the mill.

And this was an issue that Tolkien was aware of during his life, and he raged at it. He has very nasty things to say about fascists, not the least because he feels that their use of pastoral ideals that he personally holds was a corruption.

-Username17

[jt]

So how do you write subhuman orcs to kill on sight without turning it into political stuff

For the niche of "humanoid thing that's socially acceptable to kill," I have evil spirits that spontaneously generate in abandoned places, pick up weapons, and try to be human by mimicking the worst of us.

The spirits in question are variously called goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds, and ogres, depending on regional dialect and how nasty they are.

Notably this is a setting with a lot of spirits and no non-human races. It becomes more awkward of a solution if you want to have elves and dwarves who are other species of hominids that you could play as characters, and orcs and goblins who are evil spirits that you can't play as characters. But this is awkward because of one of the conceits of a fantasy kitchen sink, and what's even the point of a kitchen sink setting if you can't plow ahead and do two similar-sounding things completely differently.

[souran]

Anyway, the larger issue there is that in World War 2 the pastoralists were the bad guys and the industrialists were the good guys.

Wait, whot? Both Germany and Japan were as heavy in the industry as the other sides back then.

The japanese ran out of skilled pilots and just started putting rookie pilots in their mass-produced planes for suicidical charges. Until the end they were churning out planes at such a crazy rate that they didn't care if they were destroyed in their first flight.

The german ran out of fighting-age men and just started handing mass-produced RPGs to little kids. Until the end they were churning out newer stronger weapons and handing them to any german left with hands to fire them.

Heck, the main reason Japan went to war was because they wanted moar oil, the lifeblood of industrialists and bane of pastorals.

As Tolkien said, all sides were orcs industrialists in WW2, and indeed a good part of the war was precisely crippling the other side's industry ability.

Frank has the right of it on this one. Nazi propaganda was about restoring a concept of German people and nobility that never existed. They named their offensive against Russia after a Holy Roman emperror who mostly fought italians and turks but was reviered for his "eastern victories". Japan similarly was trying to reconstruct an order of society where east Asia. Although historically east Asia had the emperors of China as the leading power the Japanese felt they were in a better position to fill that role (also the shoguns of Japan and various claimed either actual title as or the desire to be emperor of China). The Italian facists claimed they were going to make the mediterranean sea a roman lake again.

By comparison, it has become very popular to argue that because Russia did the lions share of the dying in the second world war that they also did most of the winning. This ignores just how important industrial capacity was during WW2. The United States "won" WW2 in the most capitalist way possible. It bought and built victory by turning an entire content into a giant factory. In 1944 the outproduced all the axis powers combined. The basic soviet era army truck is built off the trucks that were given to the soviets during the second world war. There were factories in the pacific northwest that produced as much as half of the soviet style weapons and FOOD used by the red armies. The use shipped TRAIN ENGINES to the allied powers. The industrialists won the war definitively.