Sadly, I think I'm going to have to grapple with both questions if I'm to at all understand the Explorer's Handbook (David Noonan, Frank Brunner, Richard Burlew). Since I know I'm coming in real hot, I'm just going to clear the air right away and say what the word in question actually is - "savage." Now, technically, this is only contextually a racial slur, but, well, the context in which it's a slur is exactly the one being used in this book. Imagine a rich white hunter type, hanging out in a lushly-appointed gentleman's club, regaling his peers with the thrilling tale of his safari to the "lost continent" and when he gets to his less than convivial encounter with the indigenous population, he uses . . . that word. Full noun.
That's how Explorer's Handbook uses the word. It's not even a metaphor or a fantasy analogue. This book is about "explorers." You know, people who live in "civilized" areas going to distant places, where people already live, and "discovering" things that people have known about for thousands of years. "You get to name stuff after yourself. Not just little stuff either: mountains, rivers, lost cities . . ."
Talk about running afoul of the monkey's paw. Over the course of the past dozen Eberron books, I frequently wished it would draw more from its 19th century influences. And here we are. Instead of old-school adventure fiction being a background element in the implied setting's DNA, the subtext is made text and Eberron just directly emulates old-school adventure fiction. One of the prestige classes, the Thunder Guide, literally gets an ability called "Serial Hero," where a newspaper (sorry - chronicle) publishes fictionalized accounts of their deeds and pays them a healthy chunk of change (1000gp per Charisma bonus) for the privilege. Because escorting "aristocrats on safari" is part of the job class' job description, it is now canonical that those aristocrats and their safaris exist in the world of Eberron.
The most frustrating thing for me, though, is that if you ignore all that, you get the best Eberron supplement yet. It has a whole chapter on transportation infrastructure! The prestige classes allow you to make a dashing airship captain or something called a "Cataclysm Mage!" One of the sample locations suggests you can start your adventure in a "smoky nightclub" where a sexy lounge singer can slip you hints about nefarious goings-on! (Yes, all three facts are equally exciting to me.)
I'm in this awkward place where I have to do some serious self-reflection. I want the vibes but I don't want the baggage. Is it okay for me to be this way? Possibly. Maybe even probably. I'm still a Mage: the Ascension superfan, and that has all the same issues, cranked to 11. But I fear there's this temptation to try and protect the vibes by ignoring or downplaying the baggage.
So, obviously, I need to not do that. The bulk of this book is a series of interesting locations, complete with maps, resident NPCs, suggested adventures, and advice on how to adapt them to different campaigns. What makes it an Explorer's Handbook is the overall curation. You have "Points of Origin" - the aforemention smoky nightclub, a train station, an airship docking tower. Then you have "Midpoints" - a selection of adventure towns and base camps that abut treasure- and monster-laden ruins and cater to the aristocratic desperados who travel across the world to plunder them. And finally, "Destinations" - a diverse selection of dungeon-esque sites where your characters can go to do an imperialism.
Aesthetically, these are universally pretty great. You've got a crystal-filled cavern where a beholder lures people in by sparing one member of an adventuring party and then mind-controlling them to go back to town and tell everyone about this motherload of magic crystals. Or you could retrace the steps of a doomed arctic expedition and track down the frozen hulk of an important scientific research vessel to retrieve the valuable information they gathered. Or there's, like, this weird magical observatory that makes planar travel much easier, but it's run by a cranky dragon who doesn't appreciate adventurers interrupting his experiments.
But I couldn't entirely escape the looming background worry - that these aesthetics I was enjoying so much were entangled with a dangerous ideology, as aesthetics and ideology often are. Take Pra'xirek, Lost City of the Giants for example.
Perfect pulp location. Great D&D location. Imagine a dungeon-crawl where everything you do is complicated by the mismatch of scale. And though the book doesn't go so far as to suggest it or anything, you could have fun altering the treasure to match. You go through some ancient giant's long-abandoned sock drawer and find only a single gold coin . . . but it's as big as your freaking head! Very cool.
Now comes the ideology to sucker punch you in the side of the head. The ruins are inhabited. Not by foul creatures of cursed magic or deadly predators with animal cunning and claws like scimitars. No, by ordinary demihumans. Specifically, the drow, the semi-aquatic locathahs, and a small community of giants who linger in, what are to them the post-apocalyptic ruins of a more accomplished age.
The drow "believe that the city was once their ancestral home . . . [and] also covet any magic items from the lost giant civilization, viewing them as a rightful inheritance from that dead nation . . . Drow scouts look to protect 'their' ruins from grave robbers from Khorvaire, attacking all foreigners they spot."
An important bit of context here - the ancient giant civilization enslaved the elves, and while the core book PC elves fucked off to other continents, the ones that stayed behind eventually became the modern drow. Pra'xirec even has some extant slave infrastructure (elf-sized rooms attached to giant bedchambers and dining halls, a covert system of tunnels that was somehow allowed to exist, either through carelessness or indulgence, etc). And while it's entirely possible that the entire slave population of the city was wiped out in the magical cataclysm that ruined it, leaving no survivors to become the ancestors of the modern drow, it's fair to say that the drow are their descendents in spirit. If they didn't originate in this city, well, they must have come from somewhere almost exactly like it. So why is "their" in scare quotes? If these ruins don't rightfully belong to the descendents of the people enslaved therein, who do they belong to?
Maybe the giants?
First, don't let the characters think in terms of 'clearing out' an area. Traditionally in D&D, giants live at the outskirts of human civilization, raiding and destroying as they please. This behavior makes them prime targets for trusty adventurers to wipe out in the process of collecting a nice bounty. Things don't work that way in Xen'drik.This land belongs to the giants (in their own opinion, anyway), and for the most part, they don't pose any kind of threat to human civiliation, trapped as they are in the jungles far from Khorvaire.
Holy shit! But I am, of course, selectively quoting. This passage is clearly referencing Against the Giants and echoing Gygax's "fight to the finish" rhetoric, setting up a clear contrast between the Viking-coded giants whose babies the founder of D&D encouraged us to kill (seriously, it was gross) and the African-coded giants whose "alignments are not set in stone." Maybe it's building to something. A statement about how heroes don't generally bust into peoples' homes and kill them in order to loot their valuables. A strong conclusion could save the passage. I'll let you be the judge:
"Wiping out an entire giant settlement will thus be as unnecessary as it is unwise. . ."
Yeah, that's ideology all right. But more than that, it's the dark side of Eberron's otherwise forward-thinking habit of downplaying racial alignments. Standard D&D uses racial alignment as a sort of narrative tag. "Hey! Good news! We've invented a make-believe type of people it's okay to genocide, so you can keep telling those fun, action-packed genocide stories we all love so much!" And there's just enough plausible deniability there that a certain segment of the fandom is going to look at that last statement as an egregious straw man.
Except when it comes to Eberron. The Explorer's Handbook explicitly ditched the tag . . . but it kept the stories. Just standing out there in the full light of day, made all the clearer for its 19th century influences. You've got a world where your fantasy adventurers from Khorvaire can go out and do in Xen'drik exactly what the Europeans went out and did in Africa and it's barely even coded. You can be sent to the ruins by a university to collect antiquities, and the first leg of your journey will be on a train to a port where you'll take a steamboat to "The Lost Continent."
Yikes.
Overall, I'd say that the Explorer's Handbook was mostly pretty fun. But the thing about being mostly fun is that you are also partially unfun, and the unfun in this book is as bad as anything I've ever seen. Proceed with caution, I guess.
Ukss Contribution: I gave Grasp of the Emerald Claw a reluctant pass, because its geneological connection to racist adventure fiction was largely relegated to subtext. The Explorer's Handbook made it into text - the cheeky in-character sidebar "Wayfinder Foundation Travel Tip: How to Deal with Dark Elves" is basically recreating the Hovitos chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark and . . . it uses the word.
Maybe, if there were some indication that the Wayfinder society was an unreliable narrator meant to be opposed, something could be salvaged. But there's not. I've looked. As I've said before, sometimes there's a turd in the punch bowl and there's no kind of punch where that's acceptable.
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