Dungeons and Dragons: Stories of Race, Power, and the Fantastical

Abstract

Fantasy allows for the intermingling of the imagination and the physical; it creates collective spaces that can reify, reiterate, or challenge socio-economic structures and power dynamics that create inequalities in our everyday lives. Fantasy spaces, and the storytelling practices that illustrate such spaces, create the possibility of the impossible, the unbelievable, and the extraordinary, while simultaneously being bound to the real world from which these ideas stem. The creators and storytellers manufacturing characters, stories, and worlds are conditioned by the social and political context in which they exist, with their own positionality drastically changing the way that they create and interact with stories and storytelling structures. We explore the history of race in the Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) 5e text, a gaming and storytelling system that creates a framework of races, classes, and backgrounds for character creation in a roleplaying game. We grapple with our own experiences of how the game can (re)create biases that often go overlooked, importing existing geographies of inequality into a fantasy setting, and creating both feelings of (un)safety for players in what should be a safe and creative bubble.