We are not quite as racist as we used to be. There is still plenty of racism, both personal and systemic, both overt and implicit, both imperial and domestic. But even at our most racist today in the postmodern West, we cannot quite manage the sheer, concentrated xenophobia of the ancient world. As much as we might see those different from us as other, centuries of globalization and civil rights movements no longer permit us to view each other as truly and categorically alien. We might be able to convince ourselves that some people are less human, less valuable, less worthy, but we cannot quite convince ourselves anymore that some people are genuinely inhuman. At least, not on a collective cultural level. Not in a way where everyone will nod their heads without blinking an eye. There are still racist horrors aplenty in the present world, and some new forms of racism we have only recently invented, but some of the old forms we used to employ thousands of years ago have passed out of our imaginations. Some of these old forms are present in the biblical narratives, and so anyone grappling with these stories finds themselves face to face with forms of racism that no longer make quite the sense they used to.
When adapting the biblical world for TWE, I struggled with ways to evocatively communicate the absolute depth of the xenophobia occasionally expressed in those texts. To say that someone is of a different race, that they are strange or foreign, simply does not hold the same sharp and bitter bite that it used to. Moreover, some insults, like the Israelite slur of "uncircumcised" that they threw at the Philistines, no longer seems like something even worth commenting on, let alone a vicious, racialized attack, full of disgust and the curious fetishistic focus that accompanies it. So if the present world analogs of race and circumcision misfire, and no longer evoke the original world feelings, how best then to evoke those same feelings with different analogs?
Fortunately, the fantasy genre already has a ready made answer to this question: meta-human races. From Tolkien's elves, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits, to Dungeons and Dragon's gnomes and half orcs, Drow and Tiefling, the fantasy genre and its many games and settings have long incarnated differences in human ethnicities in the form of fantastical and sentient humanoid creatures. When a human being from a slightly different place with a slightly different language and skin color fails to have the desired punch of racial difference, try instead a humanoid being with an entirely different biology, psychology, lifespan, and culture. These meta-human races are often close enough to human that they share basic human needs, motivations, and physical and intellectual capabilities, but also different enough that their race is dramatically manifest as something otherworldly and truly non-human.
It was this train of thought that led me to include the different races, called kinds, in TWE. The Isstiliphi, the TWE equivalent of the Philistines, was the first kind I wrote. How do you evoke the feeling of a genital slur, like the one the Israelites used for the Philistines? By creating a humanoid race with a completely different anatomy. The Isstiliphi are serpent-like, tall and powerfully built, with soft scales in place of body hair, vertical black bars in place of irises, and skin in varying shades of olive. The Isstiliphi also reproduce orally, and have no genitals between their legs. Their men and women both wear veils over their mouths to protect their modesty, but feel no compunction about going otherwise nude, much to the combined disgust and fascination of the other kinds. The Deiyen, the TWE equivalent of southern Judah, call the Isstiliphi "paikusi," which means "mouth-breeder" in their language. Here, the slur can have its appropriate alien feel. How strange that these paikusi reproduce this way? How do they do it exactly? Is it not gross? These sorts of questions arise from Isstiliphi anatomy for the modern reader and player of TWE, just as they would have arisen from the Israelites as they confronted the Philistines.
Fantasy races can also be used to downplay or mitigate racial hostilities in other places as well. The Biblical Israelites conceived of themselves as categorically different in ethnicity and religious practice from the various Canaanite tribes and city states they came to displace, yet modern biblical scholars of a sociological inclination have long concluded that there was practically no difference in ethnicity between the Israelites and Canaanites at all. The difference is almost entirely artificial, a product of the religious imagination of the Israelite elite and scribal class, and even then, largely only in long, historical retrospect. Fantasy races could be used to create vast differences between the TWE Deiyen and Nacannit, and yet in this case, I have chosen to make them of roughly the same kind, with the only physical difference between them being eye color, the Deiyen having eyes in dark shades, and the Nacannit in light. This difference is trivial to the modern reader and player, and so when Deiyen and Nacannit characters express naked hostility toward one another on the basis of eye color, it feels appropriately strange and trivial.
A third thing that fantasy races could do in adapting the biblical material is make characters of mixed race obvious. Each of the kinds in TWE have distinctive physical differences from one another. Atrians have colorful feathers, the Deiyen have black manes and subtle striping in their skin color, the Lisraii have fiery hair colors and pointed ears, Isstiliphi have their serpentine attributes, and the Lockan have their curved horns. When children are born of mixed pairings these defining features mesh together and become exaggerated. This not only allows players to create inventive and exciting combinations of traits if they so desire, but it also makes it easy for gamemasters to quickly communicate complex racial differences between non-player characters.
It would have been simple to make the differences between the kinds in TWE more "realistic," but because we no longer perceive race and ethnicity in the same sorts of ways that ancient people did, this seems like a better alternative for capturing some of those alien themes and feelings, and provides some unique advantages for telling interesting stories in a fantasy setting.
- ABH
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