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The Human Fantasy: Exploring race and ethnicity through Dungeons & Dragons

The subject of tabletop roleplaying games has many points of interest for researchers, may it be its social and cultural aspects, or even the games themselves. With the Black Lives Matter movement, many racial questions have surged in popular discourse. This paper proposes to study the question of race in many editions of the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons. By using the Player's Handbooks, we will show that its diegesis and rules includes a mostly essentialist definition of race where humans are at the center. Depending on the editions, we will show the descriptions of humans and half-humans (half-elves and half-orcs) point to the superiority of an imperialist human race that has more in common with an idealized colonial Europe than a representation of a diverse humanity.