Was Eberron the most progressive D&D setting?
Recently, a hot-button topic in the Dungeons & Dragons community is a perceived shift to signal support for highly progressive social values. The most recent announcement, at time of writing, is the intent to remove the half-elf and half-orc, believing them to be inherently racist. This has taken a lot of the D&D community by surprise.
The following article is not about that issue, per se, and I do not intend to answer it in this article. Rather, it brings to mind a D&D campaign setting which made the half-elf a major race: Eberron. In retrospect, it may be the setting which holds up best overall in today’s political climate.
Eberron’s predecessors
The first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting published by TSR was Gary Gygax’s The World of Greyhawk (1980). A review by Kenneth W. Burke in Dragon magazine #46 spoke highly of the book in general, but had a particular criticism of the use of the term “savages”, a term evidently offensive already in 1980, not just the “woke” 2020s. Burke wrote:
The map says that both are inhabited by “savages”; the gazetteer describes one, the Amedio Jungle, as “inhabited by tribes of cannibal savages.” This talk of “savages” reminds me of the Tarzan movies that depicted black Africans as stupid “yasa, Bwana” types or animal-like monsters that would kill everyone they came across, usually via some barbaric method reminiscent of Josef Mengele. To use such terms in the product is an indirect insult to the black man, and should not have been done.
TSR’s vice president of product development Lawrence Schick responded in the same issue:
As regards the savages, nowhere in the text of the Gazetteer is there any indication of anybody’s skin color. Nobody here ever gave it any thought, because it doesn’t matter.
That attitude was revised in the 1983 World of Greyhawk boxed set, which definitively established major human ethnic groups of different skin tones, as well as that mixture between these groups is the norm. For example:
There are few pure racial groups extant on the Flanaess, save perhaps at the fringe areas of the continent. Of course, the races of demi-humans are relatively unmixed, but humankind, as is its wont, has industriously intermixed in the central regions to form a hybrid type which has actually become the norm.
In general, the skin color of an individual is of no particular importance. The dark Flan complexion shows up quite often in most nations.
It may surprise even many players of D&D that most characters are canonically what modern America would consider “non-white”. The monochrome art of historic adventure modules certainly seemed to depict most characters as pale-skinned.
Deliberate inclusivity in D&D is hardly a new invention, and certainly dates back at least forty years.
Still, other elements of that setting, and AD&D in general, draw scrutiny today. Many cultural elements are convenient stereotypes of real-world cultures. The drow, dark-skinned elves, are all evil and matriarchal. The orcs, violent and brutish by nature, are re-interpreted today as stereotypes of African-Americans. In 2023, long-standing D&D rules like alignment, racial ability score modifiers, and even the term “race” are on the way out.
Eberron Campaign Setting (2004)
The original Eberron Campaign Setting in 2004 brought with it a clean slate. Nowadays there are dozens of first-party Eberron sourcebooks and novels, plus blog posts by the Keith Baker that fill in many of the blanks. But in 2004, the Eberron Campaign Setting provided a single sourcebook as a framework for a campaign setting, and nothing yet existed to contradict the DM’s free development of a campaign in that world.
At first glance, Eberron has elements which can be seen as problematic. There are references to sexual assault in the core pantheon of gods. The world’s morality in general is flexible and vaguely defined, and the overall tone is intentionally darker than standard Dungeons & Dragons—evil heroes are most at home in Eberron, and more often must make difficult moral choices. The main continent of Khorvaire was taken from its original inhabitants and colonized by humans centuries ago, certainly an intentional historic parallel to the European colonization of the Americas.
Despite all that, this nearly twenty year old campaign setting manages to hold up well to the updated standards of morality being embraced by Wizards of the Coast in 2023.
Eberron on race
The half-elves of Eberron are a species with their own society and culture, tracing their ancestry in the continent of Khorvaire for centuries. An official 2004 Dragonshard article even gives them their own name, the Khoravar, which would be used by later books. Most are descended from Khoravar parents, rather than the rare offspring of a human and an elf as in traditional D&D.
The half-orcs have a controversial history in Dungeons & Dragons: firstly the distasteful implication that they are usually the offspring of an unwilling pairing of an orc raider and a human woman, and secondly that the brutish orcs and half-orcs are nowadays compared to stereotypes of black men. Eberron instead depicts half-orcs as primarily descended from human settlers of orc territory, where the two species live with mutual respect.
In many contexts, sentience and rights are explicitly recognized for humanoid species, even those traditionally considered monsters, such as kobolds, goblins and orcs. According to Sharn: City of Towers, the protection of the law applies to beings of all the major nations, including the Eldeen Reaches (3% orc) and the goblin nation Darguun (13% bugbears). The city of Sharn has some 9% goblinoid population, where they are very much workers rather than targets. This is a radical departure from early D&D tradition, where traditional non-playable species were largely monsters to be killed without moral complication.
(In researching this article, I realized that had incorrectly recalled that monstrous humanoids in general, such as ogres and medusas, also benefited from the rights of sentient peoples in Sharn, but it is elsewhere stated that the monster kingdom of Droaam do not have rights because their nation did not sign the Treaty of Thronehold, though a gnoll from that realm is still subject to the laws of Sharn if they visit. In retrospect, it seems bizarre that a gnoll living in the city should not be protected by laws against murder.)
For human characters, written description of human skin tone is intentionally avoided. There are nationalities, and humans of various skin tone are depicted in art, but there is no talk of discrete ethnic groups like in Greyhawk. And why should there be? D&D is a game told primarily through speech or text, and set in a completely fantastical world. The skin tone of any given NPC is hardly relevant. “Race”, in the 20th century meaning of divisions in human ethnicity based largely on skin tone, is not a meaningful part of Eberron.
Eberron on alignment
Alignment, too, is a hot-button issue, and there was a period around the publication of Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything where Wizards of the Coast omitted alignment from monster statblocks. The notion is that if we say that a certain creature tends to be good or evil, it invites comparison to racist stereotypes of black Americans which claim a tendency to commit crimes. As I recall, Wizards has since scaled this back to allow monsters to have alignment, but not race entries; e.g. dwarves will no longer tend to be lawful good. Even in 2014, D&D 5th edition’s Player’s Handbook did not include alignment-based detect evil as a spell or paladin ability.
Eberron was already ahead of the curve by a good decade on this one. In order to add moral complexity, the essential nature of alignment was reduced. A cleric of a good deity can be evil, and a chromatic dragon can be good. An evil NPC can do good deeds, and a hero can justify immoral acts.
D&D 3.5 in general also had a more nuanced alignment system than 5e. Orcs, for example, are “often chaotic evil”, with “often” defined in the Monster Manual glossary as 40-50%, with exceptions common. “Usually” means over 50%, and in both cases here the alignment may be either nature or nurture. “Always” means practically 100%.
Summary
I do not imagine that, at any point in its history, the writers of Dungeons & Dragons were intentionally writing racist content, or would have understood themselves to be doing so. In many cases, through their works or social media activity, writers have explicitly signalled progressive attitudes.
But certainly, we must admit that any game will inherit some amount of the authors’ unconscious bias, and D&D was designed by white Americans in the 1970s, inspired by works by mostly white male authors, in turn drawing mostly on northern European myth and history. LGBT representation was extremely rare, and D&D adventure modules represented a male-dominated society.
In 2023, there are concerns from some quarters that certain D&D traditions are incompatible with the latest trends in progressive ideology. An increasing segment of the playerbase is uncomfortable with fictional elements that remind them of real-world issues of race prevalent in the United States today.
Eberron, by some ratio of design and accident, turns out to have been perhaps the most progressive D&D setting from the beginning. There is no moral essentialism based on species, no outmoded concept of race in the context of human beings, no facile morality or reduction of sentient humanoids to monsters. It was somehow so forward-thinking twenty years ago, and I don’t think it gets enough credit for that.
The current Eberron sourcebook at time of writing is Rising From the Last War, but if you want to read the original, the 2004 Eberron Campaign Setting is available at DriveThruRPG in PDF for $9.99.