Diversity Dungeons (PDF)

Diversity Dungeons

Diversity in games has generated oceans of digital ink, acres of mutual suspicion and enough furious denunciations to keep social media unpleasant indefinitely.

It has produced rather less practical advice for the person actually trying to build a fictional world.

Diversity Dungeons: Worldbuilding & Game Design in the Safe Space Age examines representation as a problem of writing, design and coherent worldbuilding rather than a compulsory exercise in ideological box-ticking.

How diverse should a setting be? What determines its demographics? When does historical plausibility matter? How might magic or advanced technology alter sex, disability, ethnicity or social class? How can a fictional minority be portrayed as disadvantaged without reducing its members to helpless victims? What happens when player characters resist the assumptions of their society—or attempt to change it altogether?

There are no answers guaranteed to please everyone.

That is rather the point.

Beyond the Usual Shouting Match

This is neither a demand that every fictional village resemble a modern international airport nor an argument that fantasy must remain permanently trapped in a second-hand imitation of medieval Europe.

Instead, Diversity Dungeons considers the competing pressures upon writers and designers:

• Representation and creative freedom

• Realism, plausibility and audience expectation

• The difference between demographic absence and deliberate exclusion

• Stereotypes, archetypes and cultural shorthand

• Historical settings and historical revisionism

• Race, sex, sexuality, disability, religion and social class

• Minority cultures within fictional societies

• Characters who defy the expectations placed upon them

• Social prejudice as a source of conflict, drama and adventure

• Ways player characters might influence or overturn the societies around them

• The risks faced by creators in an unusually febrile publishing climate

The aim is not to dictate what you must include. It is to help you understand the choices you are making, the consequences those choices may have and the opportunities they offer for better worlds and more interesting stories.

Diversity Within the World

Minority status is contextual.

A group may be dominant in one kingdom, persecuted in another and simply regarded as foreign somewhere else. A matriarchy creates different assumptions from a patriarchy. Immortality would transform inheritance and political power. Reliable magical healing could alter disability, childbirth and warfare. Shape-changing, artificial intelligence, alien species and reincarnation make contemporary arguments about identity look positively straightforward.

The fantastical gives designers room to explore unfamiliar social arrangements rather than merely repainting the present.

Used thoughtfully, diversity becomes part of the machinery of the setting: influencing law, language, religion, economics, family, conflict and adventure.

Used carelessly, it becomes a row on the internet.

An Explicit Perspective

Diversity Dungeons is written from a firmly pro-free-expression position.

It argues that creators should remain free to follow their own vision, whether that produces a highly diverse cosmopolitan setting, an isolated and homogeneous culture, a deliberately uncomfortable historical world or something stranger than any contemporary political category can comfortably contain.

It does not pretend that every approach is equally effective, immune from criticism or free of consequences.

It does insist that disagreement is not censorship’s prettier sister.

For

• Roleplaying-game writers and publishers

• Games Masters creating original settings

• Fiction writers and worldbuilders

• Designers working with historical or culturally inspired material

• Anyone interested in representation without wanting another sermon

• Creators attempting to navigate the gap between “include everyone” and “how dare you write about them?”

Format

Digital PDF download.

• System-neutral

• Worldbuilding and game-design discussion

• Written by James “Grim” Desborough

• First published in 2016

This is a design booklet rather than a standalone roleplaying game. Dice are optional; opinions are unavoidable.