Colonialism In Dungeons and Dragons
My interest in starting a dnd campaign using Lorn Song of the Bachelor, aside from fun, is that it is possibly helpful for thinking through, perhaps, how colonialism operates on an everyday scale. There a both possibilities and limitations in the speculative fictions of rpgs, of course. This game will be set in a fantasy world, inspired by Southeast Asia but not an analogue of anything per se. Its speculative capacity is determined by the creative and improvisational style of those of us around the table. Thus, it might be an opportunity to work through the logics of colonialism. As Siew writes in the notes for Lorn Song, “This text presents a difficult situation’ there are no easy solutions. If they work for the Company, player-characters could enrich themselves at no direct expense to the Gleaming Fins. This is how good people sanction colonial projects–through self-interest, and insulation…the choice you face should echo, however dimly, the kind of calculus my grandparents faced.”
Perhaps more than that, however, my game might be a chance to think about the colonial ethos of dnd specifically, and see what happens when it is foregrounded through the fictional premise and historical resonance of the setting. The colonial ethos is perhaps most evident in the assumptions of one of the game’s most popular modules, The Keep on the Borderlands, which puts PCs in a kind of medieval-ish fantasy wild west, a militarized border regions in which the forces of law meet and conquer forces of chaos. These forces of chaos are of course the famously otherized humanoid monsters and the PCs are, most likely, ruthless mercenaries, clearing caves (Orc babies and all), for treasure and other rewards. With enough of said treasure, they will build their own keep.
This whole dynamic is less reminiscent of the geopolitics of medieval Europe than the geography in which Gygax and others invented the game, namely the American Midwest. As Blog of Holding writes:
But it is very difficult to write a document with no cultural assumptions at all. Gygax consciously excluded the trappings of a medieval society, and filled that vacuum with “real life” American details. Gygax wrote D&D in a country where, 100 years before, frontier land was considered free for the taking. (19th century propaganda depicted the land’s original Native American inhabitants as inimical savages, like orcs). At the same period, the success of America’s industrialist “robber barons” taught the country that birth and family weren’t the keys to American power; the American keys were self-reliance, ability, and the ruthless accumulation of money.
It will be objected that the fantastical nature of fantasy makes such comparisons moot (this is in fact the default reaction on social media/gaming forums when the topic is raised). That, because fantasy settings are mashups rather than analogues, these comparisons are ridiculous. But, fictional tropes–in fantasy or other genres–come from somewhere. And the Tolkien + Appendix N bibliography of dnd, in particular, is inseparable from the contexts of British and American empire (a topic for another day). Speculative fictions are a space for imagining otherwise, and perhaps even escaping our concrete reality, and yet they offer that space by being grounded and in relation to the concerns of that same reality.
If fantasy escapism does not mitigate the colonial ethos of the game, neither does a fantasy that removes those power dynamics necessarily serve to momentarily liberate us from colonial. As Siew and others have written, the colonialism of the game remains but goes unacknowledged. Granted, one way to deal with this would be to simply not play dnd; there are plenty of games that don’t center themselves around attack bonuses and armor class and acquiring gold and jewels and items. But I suppose I want this game to exist as a thought experiment of sorts, and I think an adventure like Lorn Song has a premise that might produce interesting results.
Links:
Fear the Swarth - The Truth of Colonialism in D&D
Legacy of the Bieth - Productive Scab-picking
Blog of Holding - d&d is anti-medieval
Prismatic Wasteland - The Keep on the Borderlands is Full of Lies
All Dead Generations - Classic vs Aesthetic