Well, that didn't take long. Grasp of the Emerald Claw (Bruce R. Cordell), despite being only the fourth ever supplement for the Eberron campaign setting, managed to step on the biggest rake in the pulp genre - the story where "adventurers" travel to another "mysterious" continent and trespass on the decaying ruins the "dark-skinned" (and those words are in quotes because that's literally how the drow are described) natives hold sacred as a temple to their "god" (and that word is in quotes because it is also in scare quotes in the text) who is really just a big scary creature.
Now, to be entirely fair, the claim that "most eat humans and halflings if they can catch them" is uttered by an NPC who is subtly racist-coded (he's a Khorvarian [i.e. "European"] river-boat captain in a pulp adventure story set in Xen'drik [i.e. "Africa"]) But look, the Heart of Darkness vibes are real.
Is this okay? I don't fucking know. Probably not. It's just a subplot, though. The drow are an obstacle, but they're not really mad at the PCs, they're mad at Garrow (the wannabe vampire guy, still pretending to be a vampire) for busting into their temple and burning them out of the "mud tube dwellings" they added to the exterior. The PCs are just catching strays because they're similarly dressed and have no compunction about "searching for treasure" (up to 3 rolls on Table 3-5 in the DMG) in their hastily abandoned homes.
Oh, man, colonialism is a hell of drug.
. . .
Now, there's no way for you to see this, but the ellipses represent me taking a break from the post, walking around a bit, and changing my plan about what to write next. Instead of continuing the recap (it's a serviceable chase and dungeon crawl where whoa! it turns out the four pieces of the macguffin are dangerous if brought together!) I'm going to think long and hard about the way subtext will freaking sneak up on you.
See, I don't think we are dealing with intent here. And note, I'm not using the exonerative case - I don't mean "there was no ill-intent" except as logical other half to "there was no good-intent" - because there was no intent, period. I believe this was a case of a writer operating on pure cultural autopilot.
Let's play a game. Guess the movie I'm thinking of. It's that one where these people are on a river-boat going through the jungle and then they hear drums in the distance and the captain says, "the natives are tracking us."
Right? It's surprising how little that clue narrows it down. That's why I called it "stepping on a rake" at the beginning of the post. Because when you're sheltered in a bubble of white privilege, what this feels like, having your white explorers face danger from (maybe) cannibal natives who take exception to you treasure hunting in the cyclopean ruins where they worship their giant scorpion, is not perpetuating colonialist narratives. It feels, instead, just like you're quoting a thousand movies.
My evidence for this is just the fact that drow are generally presented in a fair-minded way. Their leader has a name (Amoxtli). He's got pretty decent stats for an NPC (in particular Int 12, Cha 10). He's got a Neutral alignment. And overall, the drow's motives are pretty reasonable "Garrow didn't attempt to parley - he ordered his men to wipe out the drow . . . In the day since Garrow and his task force entered the ruin, the drow have returned to reclaim their home. They have vowed to destroy the intruders, and the adventurers are seen in the same light as the Emerald Claw in the wake of the terrible disaster that has befallen the tribe."
Completely reasonable. I wouldn't even call it a case of mistaken identity. The PCs and Garrow are there for exactly the same reason - to find the priceless treasure at the heart of the ruins and take it back to their wealthy sponsor. The only difference is that the PCs are working for the family of ruthless capitalists whose ancestor originally drew the treasure map and Garrow is working for the militant arm of an undead-worshipping religion which recently stole the treasure map from the capitalists.
Is there a moral difference between them? Yeah . . . But I'm not sure it's a difference the drow are obligated to care about. I don't think any of us are seriously entertaining the idea that if the PCs got to the ruins first and encountered a thriving drow settlement in map area 2, that they'd take "um, sorry, but that temple and everything in it belongs to us and we'd prefer that the sacred treasures of our ancestors stay where they are rather than be taken to a foreign antiquities market" for an answer. I mean, that creation pattern needs its fourth and final schema, right?
And this is the dark side of autopilot. Because if you go beyond "fair-minded, considering your privilege" to "actually fair" then obviously this is a much more important conflict than whatever Lady Elaydren d'Cannith was getting mixed up in.
But you know what? I think achieved some kind of justice for the drow by proportionately inverting the word count devoted to them in this review. I don't need to spend much more digital ink on a 32-page adventure that was just kind of okay. The broader question of whether pulp as a genre is ultimately salvageable or whether you're destined to always step on these damned rakes is one I can leave for when I read Adventure! 2nd Edition.
Ukss Contribution: The very first book I ever deliberately skipped was The Complete Barbarian's Handbook and maybe it wasn't the first one I should have skipped, but it was the first one whose flaws were so obviously out in the open that they broke through my white privilege brain and made me feel . . . bad about including it in my silly fantasy rpg project.
I don't feel nearly as bad about Grasp of the Emerald Claw. The only reason I spent so much space talking about its . . . issues is because, despite my intent to just throw off a quick paragraph and move on, I found that once I started talking about, it felt wrong to suddenly change the subject and act like nothing happened.
This book didn't leave me disgusted and ashamed like Complete Barbarians Handbook did, but there is a broad, straight path between what I hated about the CBH and what I "noticed" here. And the path isn't even "racism, generally." It is literally "the adventure fiction genre's legacy of viewing indigenous people through the colonialist gaze." The only real difference is that Grasp of the Emerald Claw is sipping at that legacy through a reverse osmosis water filter and the Complete Barbarian's Handbook drank straight from the fucking hose.
On the other hand, I always feel so judgmental after skipping a book (pointing my finger and shrieking "EEEVVIILLL!!" has a way of doing that) and really, this book's worst crimes are those of omission (it really should have said . . . something about the PCs attempting to loot the "drow nests"). So let's compromise. Instead of something I really liked, let me pick something that made me uncomfortable, but in a way that challenges me to be more mindful in my own work - the colonialist theft of indigenous antiquities.
It's not a "cool" thing to add to an rpg setting, but in heroic fiction, you often show your values through the villainous schemes you choose to have your heroes thwart.
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