Your post is truly awesome. After reading the article and then reading you comments, it really opened my eyes to what Schultz was trying to do. I couldn’t agree with you more. Really awesome insight that made this article that much more a pleasure to read, even though the article (in my opinion) cast a slight negative…

Couldnt agree with you more. I think being critical of the way Schultz handled the character, takes away the impact of just having Franklin be a part of Peanuts

A T-TIE! I hate it.

Thank you for this. It’s all true. I’m black, I’ve been playing D&D for 30yrs, when I first started anyone who looked like me was portrayed as a cannibal, bone through the nose wearing, savage. I always had to make excuses for why my character would be so far away from home, pull up references on how people traveled,…

To be fair, I’ve been playing RPGs for 34 years and never, ever had anyone try to RP a language. Terrible, awful accents, sure...I’ve had more than one vaguely French sounding elf...but a full language? Nah. It’s either “You don’t speak their language, so you don’t understand them.” or it’s “they say XX to you.” I’m…

I’ve had ideas that I looked at and said “I’m not informed enough to make this into something” and “This is a good story, but it’s not my story to tell”.

Yes, here’s my quandary: the Prime Material Plane (aka the dimension/planet you play in/on) has two “echoes” called the Shadowfell (referenced in Stranger Things) and the Feywild. The problem is the Feywild is an entire dimension/planet that mirrors the main world but with more colourful/vivid/impressive flora and…

Shogun showed western audiences Japan through the lens of a westerner in Japan, so as Blackthorne learned about the people, culture, and land, so did the reader.

I found that shocking too - you have to think at one point in one meeting one of them looked up and thought, “well, shit I think we screwed up with this writer’s room”.

Why use people of color here instead of the more accurate “Sub-Saharan African”? It’s not like any black person, let alone any non-white person, would do here. Hiring a guy straight outta Compton to work on an African setting is not that much better than hiring awhite guy from Alabama.

PoC isn’t really good enuff to dover yer complaint tho. An American PoC doesn’t have any more clue about African cultures than some white history professor might. You need African people, from an African viewpoint to actually get any authentic take on an African fantasy setting. As an illustrative parallel, Ask any…

Dark skinned fae in the North who aren’t tribal / low tech?

The company I work for attempts to integrate diverse voices in our staff and writers. That said, the pool of professional RPG workers is overwhelming white and male, which necessitates looking outside the pool to find new voices — which is a good idea in any narrative enterpise, IMO.

D&D, being the grandfather of the…

I often wonder why we don’t see the water association more for Arab analogues in fantasy. The Muslim world in general, and the Arabs of al-Andalus in particular, were renowned in the early middle-ages for their knowledge of hydrodynamic engineering. Given how many fantasy geeks are also history nerds, you’d think…

It’s false that only three languages use clicks, and there’s a larger problem with the way this information is presented: “Dace noted that Africa has upwards of 2,000 languages and only three language groups use clicks. It is one of the most stereotyped aspects of Africa.” Dace suggested using Swahili as another point…

You basically described avatar: the last airbender

As far as the clicking languages go, I know they are rare, but they are something that is so uniquely African. I don’t believe a similar language has ever developed anywhere else. If I was running or writing a game set in a location based on Africa, I would definitely see myself including it. Not because I think…

I want to see a black civilization that is “Up North” and they hail from the “Frozen Mountains” or “Fae Forests”. They have survived because of their strong “Engineering/Architecture” skills. Their magic centers around “Ice” or “Water”. Everything in quotes are invariably attached to white races, so shake it up for…

Honestly, those criticisms—particularly concerning the language choices (I didn’t realize that only three of the languages spoken on the African continent included clicks; I definitely learned something about both the area and my own preconceived notions today)—seem both fair and perfectly reasonable.

While I will…

Sounds like it’s an impasse based on a matter of perspective then. Especially with me not having and personal history or affinity to the peanuts. All I see is a regular run of the mill critique on the concept of writing a good character.

And that’s coupled with me being a black man who constantly complains about black…