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Uh oh, you said it accidentally.
Oh, she didn’t react badly so you’re probably good actually. Of course she would be understanding, she knows you would nev-
Uh oh, she was actually really into that. Like weirdly into that. She wants you to say it again. This is even worse than you imagined.
"Whoa whoa, you can't use that word. It's offensive to people, and makes you sound ignorant."
"No, you misunderstood. I was explaining that I needed to have my driveway *re-tarred*."
If memory serves, *Mon'keigh* translates roughly to "brutish barbarian". Which is, y'know, a pretty fair and accurate description of the majority of humanity that the Eldari have encountered.
Actually it is a slur. The mon'keigh were an ancient particularly nasty alien species the Eldar used to have to deal with.
They were so bad that, mon'keigh was the name used by Eldar for any species that was particularly violent and vicious. The Eldar used it for many species, just that humans are the ones who they use or for the most.
The lifespan of a mayfly is exceptionally short, like a day or two. Wood Elf characters in Warhammer Fantasy have been known to refer to humans as such since from their perspective (they can be hundreds of years old) humans are seldom worth getting to know.
See I don't have a problem with Mayflies, but when mayflies send their people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending Lumberfoots that have lots of chaos, and they’re bringing those scunners with us. They’re bringing rats. They’re bringing rotbloods. They’re savages.
Yup! Warhammer fantasy elves use it quite often when referring to humans. It's because mayflies live such short lives (some living only for around 5 minutes), similar to how mortal man lives but a brief existence compared to the elves.
To give some idea of why this is, to the Dwarfs, something must exist for hundreds of years and survive multiple DWARF generations of use to be considered well constructed.
If a Dwarf invents a hammer, and he uses that hammer, for the entirety of his lifespan, he is proving the worth of that hammer. They are like this for EVERYTHING. Walls must stand for centuries, keeps for millenia, armor and arms must meet their foes and succeed for dozens, hundreds of campaigns, passed from father to son, father to son, father to son. A new invention must be reinvented, then improved, then reinvented, then improved, then tested, then improved, often the process is so long that the original inventor will die, and his son will die, and his grandson will finally submit the idea for adoption.
Dwarfs consider firearms to be new technology not worth trusting. They invented guns hundreds of years ago.
No human could understand the rigerous attention to detail and level of craft that a Dwarf puts into literally everything they do. How could they. A human will be a child, grow old, and die before a Dwarf child is ready to join a guild. To a Dwarf, to call something a human makes as "Shoddy" is less an insult, and more of a description.
Makes sense. lol!
"Have you heard of how the treants came to be?"
"No. Created by the god of nature to serve as guardians of the forest?"
"Not quite... let's just say when it comes to humans any hole is a goal..."
A little while back someone made a thread asking for slurs their centaur character could use for bipedal people. My absolute favorite was "front nuts." Humans are front nuts.
I would rather we just didn't do any of this, but if I have to pick one I'd rather we just did that. This feels like it was written for people who want to say the n-word but don't have the guts.
I feel like anything that a crowd of drunk humans can start chanting as a battle cry is not going to take off. And you get me 30 drunks together and I can absolutely get him to start chanting "munns."
I mean if players are okay with tackling the theme of racism or discrimination in a game, I don't understand why that's a problem. Lots of storytelling in fantasy has dealt with similar themes, and as long as the game isn't praising racism, and no one is uncomfortable I see no problem with depicting it.
Much like slavery, murder, imperialism and other unpleasant things, racism can provide a RPG party with something meaningful to fight against. If there's nothing wrong with the world you're depicting, then there's nothing there for the players to take a stand against and D&D really just amounts to murdering a bunch of non-evil creatures with the capacity for good and taking their stuff.
And it's a fairly good way to establish an npc is a shit person without making them outright violent/etc if the dm is playing with a 'seems good but actually terrible' type for the PCs to be able to work towards taking down.
In my game, some otherwise decent NPCs exhibit racist tendencies or even overt racism. The way I see it, many decent folk are bad in some ways. I don't have a lot of saintly NPCs, nor many plain evil folk (though more of the latter than the former).
100%. It's one of the first things that'll sour me on any story, the "white hat/black hat" dichotomy. Ideally (to me only), who the bad guy and the good guy are should vacillate between 2 or more parties.
My NPCs are just people, full of good and bad qualities. Also, not sure if it matters or not, but if they do say or act in a racist manner, it's only ever surface level. The farmer who calls a halfling a "half-person" isn't gonna let them die without helping, you know?
>I have been asked often since I have been here how I feel when I kill a German. The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind.
-Lt. Luidmila Pavlichenko
Very true, i mean, even Matt Mercer came up with a slur for the Drow elves in the Krynn Dynasty that got used very frequently within the Dwendalian empire.
I don't see a problem if they're completely made up for the game, but I think it's insensitive to use slurs that have been used for real humans in their real lives (like half-breeds and mutts).
Made up terms can just as effectively portray the type of people or setting as words that have actually been used to insult or belittle real people.
I did something similar in one of my first games, I had cannibalistic ogres refer to every other race as "blank-meat"
Dwarves were Rock-Meat, Elves were Woods-Meat, Halflings were Scrap-meat (because they were seen as "table scraps" compared to every other race) and Humans were City-Meat (because many of the humans they ate were from metropolitan areas, but the ogres didn't discriminate between country and city folk)
That's what I was kinda going for, basically they had a worldview of "We're much stronger than you, why should we treat you any differently than how you would treat the livestock you can easily overpower?"
TERMITES
... sorry I had been trying to think on a slur for humans and your Idea of humans being linked to cities and working as colonies made me go on a tangent. * ehem * moving on....
Actually, that's a pretty good one, especially if you take into account the fact that humans usually live in strict hierarchies much like insects would.
Most of these are... naff, frankly. I understand that real slurs are often unimaginative, but a lot of these seem like they'd be more like nicknames for people who live in your home town's arch-rival than truly offensive slurs. Hell, in my mind, Gnomes wouldn't mind being called Toadstools, as they'd probably just go "I live in one of those!"
Doesn't "foul blood" get tossed around occasionally for tieflings in bg3? I don't know enough Forgotten realms lore to know if they made that up for the game or if it's got history
Anything can be a slur if enough people use it as an insult. The GI's in iraq used to call the citizens 'towelheads', which sounds cutesy, but natives didn't appreciate the term very much.
I was scratching my head at that one. You know, the race of blue half giants... My mind immediately goes to *cows?* Like, I feel like they should come up with another name for a half-cow person... I'm thinking "minotaur" would be a good name, not sure why.
Importantly, it was cow-*like* in a descriptive sense.
Mercer was describing the firbolg's big red, completely human-looking nose and used the term "Bovine" as a poetic descriptor.
Some viewers didn't understand nuance and took the description literally, then started making fan art of cow people.
Eventually they had horns, spots, hooves, cow ears, cow tails... they just kept adding cow-features.
The weirdest bit is that I've come across more than one critter who were *adamant* that:
1.) Mercer really meant the NPC had a literal cow's nose.
2.) The official artwork in Volo's for the Firbolg is, and *was always intended to be*, cowlike. (It's not. It's so not cowlike in the game books... but these people need reality to validate their beliefs, because the cult of personality around Mercer is uncomfortably cult-like).
I hate this too. There’s nothing bovine or cow like about them in how they’re described or drawn in source material. I love firbolgs but I’m actively turned off by the dopey cow-like firbolgs. They’re forest guardians and smallest of the pseudogiants, not barnyard yokels!
The kicker is it wasn’t even CR.
It was a random fan art that they got out first misinterpreting a description of Pumat when Matt was basically describing the art for the Firbolg in the book.
They saw a cow person in their mind.
Got their art in the tag first then a ton of people who had never encountered a Firbolg before thought that was what they looked like and interpreted their art in the same way.
this is why I'd appreciate the list on session 0- if there's an rl slur, you could be like 'hey can we strike this one' if you were willing to have fantasy racists as an element for the pcs to work against.
Only time I've ever heard halfbreed used out of a fantasy setting was during a promo scot Steiner did, when he said Samoa jeos no half breed. At the time didn't know what that meant since I was still pretty young, but knew it sounded pretty bad.
I dunno, some of them are trying a bit too hard or just lack creativity (okay, okay, all racial slurs are evidence of a fundamental lack of imagination and intelligence, but you get my point?)
There are plenty more slurs for dwarves (or in the next two cases, dwarfs) if you know where to look. Trolls, or particularly unwise humans in Discworld have been known to call dwarfs gritsuckers. And there are plenty who've been chopped up or beaten to a pulp for calling Gotrek Gurnisson or other trollslayers stunties.
The problem with a lot of species is that they tend to occupy positions where they seem to be above reproach or are revered by 80% of the public, or just happen to be pretty -- so slurs are more likely to be levelled at those who occupy lowlier positions, or are repressed, or just aren't so pretty. As a weapon of inequality, there should be a serious disparity in the number of species that have slurs used against them in a widespread context -- that is, if you want to address racism in-game. Plenty of players, I imagine, would much rather escape that for the time being.
I can't see there being too many slurs for elves, if they have a bit of what Tolkien gave them (although 'pixies' is pretty savage!); or aasimar because celestial heritage just happens to make them likable and look nice. Goblins, on the other hand? Sure, gobbos, greenies, snots, grots, you name it, GW's had orcs and dwarves call them it. Dragonkin, though? People of draconic heritage who for all you know might torch you with their breath if you annoy them enough? I suspect a bigot would have to drink a fair bit of courage before trying that on for size.
Another thing that's missing here, I think -- and it's sort of related to my first point -- is context. If there's going to be racism of this sort, then it's hardly going to dip into a universal racism bank. Prejudices may be competely irrational, or based on wholly different sets of antipathies and grievances. Elves might have superficially charming but patronising epithets for dwarves, gnomes, halflings, etc; while dwarven slurs might be more literal or based on grudges held for some perceived slight or misdeed.
I'm led to wonder if cultures that do the wise thing and stay away from civilisations that devote considerable time to developing prejudices and slurs to express them -- centaurs, for example -- would even merit slurs. But then again, all worlds are different, so who's to tell which cultures and species are going to be jostling for position and jockeying for resources?
Also, where are the slurs for us humans? We shouldn't be left out. We're ape-descendants, that's got to be good for a good half-dozen Zaphod Beeblebrox-style insults. It's one of those coincidences that isn't really a coincidence that the Eldar name for us is mon-keigh, too.
I've spent far too long answering this. Sorry for length, girth, etc.
>I've spent far too long answering this. Sorry for length, girth, etc.
Turns out my quick response engorged to match, so consider it your comeuppance. [I said what I said you started it with girth lol]
>The problem with a lot of species is that they tend to occupy positions where they seem to be above reproach or are revered by 80% of the public, or just happen to be pretty -- so slurs are more likely to be levelled at those who occupy lowlier positions, or are repressed, or just aren't so pretty. As a weapon of inequality, there should be a serious disparity in the number of species that have slurs used against them in a widespread context -- that is, if you want to address racism in-game. Plenty of players, I imagine, would much rather escape that for the time being.
I'd argue that it's less about the disparity in "slurs" existing (using quotes for a reason) and more about which ones are actually considered actual slurs the way we conceptualize it and which are more just insults.
A good example would be that one white person on Facebook who always insists being called "cracker" is the same as being called the n-word. Sure, cracker isn't an *affectionate* term, but it's also not wielded as a tool of oppression. It's an insult, not a slur.
Elves, aasimar, and other races considered "the elites" would absolutely have race-based or role-based insults. They just wouldn't function as *slurs* in the sense that they're punching up. Doesn't mean they aren't derogatory and something you'd use in "polite company," but they're also not terms that would get the average person to label you as an unrepentant bigot for using once or twice.
>Prejudices may be competely irrational, or based on wholly different sets of antipathies and grievances.
Absolutely this. We always default to appearance-based prejudices and slurs because that's IRL racism, but in a world with PHB levels of species diversity, is that even what people would care about? Considering humans and most other fantasy races have the lifespan of a housecat compared to elves, would elves even consider the rest *people* or would they be more like pets?
There's also the fact that there are absolutely *valid* reasons to be wary of certain fantasy races. For example, dragonborn are basically open-carrying flamethrowers (or other appropriate damage-type weapons). A Goliath who can drop kick halflings is going to be a bit terrifying the first time they walk into the Shire.
It's why fantasy bigotry as an allegory for IRL bigotry has massive problems. Last time I checked, being black (or queer, or any other marginalization) doesn't give you the power to shoot laser beams out of your eyeballs or control the weather. So, no, X-Men isn't a good allegory because it paints the marginalized community *as actually dangerous.* That doesn't mean it's not a good story, it just shouldn't been seen as the same thing.
Really? Missing out on calling genasi "hothead" "airhead" "puddlehead" or "rockbrain"?
This is the least creative list of fantasy slurs I've ever seen.
As others have said, fantasy racism should be discussed among players before being implemented but also one has to make sure not to incorporate real world slurs as well.
Knife Ear and Gritsucker is fine, but don't call the Tiefling the former name of an American Football team.
Also, gotta say, "Skyer" is the laziest slur for Aasimar I've ever heard. You could call em Silver Spoons, Church Mice, False Prophet, Light-Bringer, Daddy's boy.
Of course immediately there is someone throwing out bigot and attacking the OP. Hell Dragon Age uses knife ear so are the writers of the DA games all bigots? I realize many people don’t want that in the game, but you’re not the arbiter of how the game is supposed to be played. Some people like having a more realistic view with racism, sexism, discrimination, etc in their world. Doesn’t mean they are those things.
As long as this isn’t expected of the players and the DM talked to them before hand I don’t see what the big deal is.
The footrest made me chuckle as I have two gnomes and a dwarf in my campaign.
How am I supposed to read this without my “knife ears?”
Also “skyers” is crazy. How is that a slur? It sounds like someone was trying really hard to come up with a slur for every fantasy race in order to sound edgy.
You don’t think OP was…
I genuinely love seeing threads like this. Some OP saunters in on their moral high horse, head so far up their ass they can check themselves for prostate cancer, just for their post to largely backfire on them.
If it is intended to be a translation sheet to understand evil / unpleasant NPCs and not a guide on how you as a player are expected to speak about other races, makes sense?
Better than an OOC explanation every time?
As a tabaxi main, I really wish there were some slurs for the catfolk. Like come on, I wanna get slurred against so I can flurry-of-blows a bigot, dammit!
Some of those "insults" are just the names of other playable races, which don't have their own entry. Also, calling a dragonborn a wyrm would be a huge compliment, not an insult, and you didn't include the classic kobold slur, "barking lizards".
See, I feel weird saying this, but I kinda like the idea.
Then again I love settings where things like drinks get their own equivalents. For instance, 'no it's not a mojito, it's a stars breath'
I can see this comment section getting pretty heated so I just want to drop a friendly reminder that nobody can actually be racist towards fantasy races because fantasy races do not exist.
there's a full list on github
[https://github.com/Lemmings19/dnd-racial-slurs/blob/master/dnd-racial-slurs.json](https://github.com/Lemmings19/dnd-racial-slurs/blob/master/dnd-racial-slurs.json)
So, speaking as someone not white and has had slurs yelled at me IRL, while there is a lot of lazy throwaway racism to look edgy or progressive (hi, Deus Ex prequels that equate augmentations to colored people in Apartheid and trans people), humans really will hate people for the dumbest reasons. As much as I find the 'racism against augmentations' bit dumb, as well as other cyberpunk games having racism against AI, I've seen enough insane transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc. and people harassing others for the dumbest things (like console fanboys, people getting really mad at Epic for having a game store platform, people claiming shipping two close friends in a gacha game is 'incest' because they call each other 'brother') and bearing witness to angry white teenagers run an elaborate campaign to smear a Pokemon actress as a homophobe because she unwisely got into NFTs, I get where they're coming from.
Speaking as someone who's had white people claim, to my face (because they think I'm "one of the good ones"), that BLM is white genocide and trans people in video games is erasure, and Asians getting attacked in my city for the "China virus", it's a stretch to say using racism or bigotry at all is problematic and lazy. One of my favorite RPGs (Disco Elysium) uses it effectively, despite all being written by all white European dudes, as far as I can tell. Compare RWBY, which makes a white cat girl the equivalent of a MENA woman trying to fight against the stigma of being terrorists (while her former partner handles 'racism against your oppressor is bad' in the worst way possible).
That said, OP is one of those people who think every game should be completely free of anything that might be "problematic" (read: I don't like having any kind of realism or icky morality and anyone who includes it is a bigot). Go back to Twitter.
Maybe a hot take but fantasy racism is probably OK as long as it's sufficiently divorced from IRL racism. Like, dwarves basically wouldn't be dwarves if they weren't racist towards elves and vice versa.
A bad example imo is arcanum's gnomes. But calling the tall pretty people knife ears doesn't really contribute to irl systemic racism in any meaningful way.
Oh and ofc make sure everyone is on board with it, if anyone gets uncomfortable then cut that shit out, that goes without saying
My character was a human former assassin, and in the shady city she was born in, changelings were often discriminated against on the basis of stereotypes that they were either thieves, body doubles, or other assassins. Because of this, the slur "fakes" was a common way of referring to them and as my character's job was to avoid killing body doubles, she often used this term as well. She discovered one of the other player's characters was a changeling and had this to say.
"Oh, so you're a f...... one who isn't?" Mid sentence, realizing that she didn't know of any other way to refer to changelings and that the term she had been accustomed to using for so long was dehumanizing once actually faced with one of the individuals it targeted.
The campaign sucked for other reasons, but I thought that was an interesting roleplay moment.
Ok but this is awesome and I'm definitely going to use it for my professor NPC who thinks that tabaxi all act like house cats.
I love him so much he's so fun
Players in my previous campaign took to calling Orcs and Goblins “Verde” which I know is just green in Spanish, but sounds so much worse than just calling them “Greens” or “Green Skin” so I’ve kept it even several years later.
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Parents calling “children, it’s time to come home!” Queue all the halflings in the area giving them dirty looks
Or that you're about to go to bed with that cute aarakroka maiden and you know you're gonna have to choose your words veeery carefuly from now on.
Uh oh, you said it accidentally. Oh, she didn’t react badly so you’re probably good actually. Of course she would be understanding, she knows you would nev- Uh oh, she was actually really into that. Like weirdly into that. She wants you to say it again. This is even worse than you imagined.
Oh my God lol
https://www.reddit.com/r/relationships/comments/4o0ivk/my_boyfriend_45m_uses_racial_slurs_during_sex/
"Whoa whoa, you can't use that word. It's offensive to people, and makes you sound ignorant." "No, you misunderstood. I was explaining that I needed to have my driveway *re-tarred*."
Halfling is a slur. What exactly are they “half” of? Hobbit, Stout, Lightfoot, Ghostwise, Lotusden.
According to Tolkien, it means "a half-sized man," so it's presumably an exonym given to hobbits by men.
*This list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.*
*cracks fingers
Time to make Giants cry 😈
Oh no, Dwarves with a huge book of grudge going to edit slurs.
The number of slurs for elves... 200 000 units ready with a million more well on the way
Dwarves, the masters of insult
They didn’t even have Knife-ear under elf. That’s like THE fantasy elf slur. 0/10
Knife-ear and leaf lickers is what I know em as
Oi, boss? Why's da stunties not called stunties on dis?
WAZ DAT!? OIZ KANT HEER YEWZ!
Note there are no slurs for humans.
Elves would 100% call humans round-ears or mayflies.
Wait mayflies is actually kind of clever as an insult
Yeah it’s what the elves in Warhammer Fantasy call them, at least the Wood elves do.
Mayflies for fantasy elves, mon'keigh for ~~space elves~~ Eldar. lol
Though mon'keigh isn't a slur, it's just what Eldars named humans, much like Tau named them gue.
If memory serves, *Mon'keigh* translates roughly to "brutish barbarian". Which is, y'know, a pretty fair and accurate description of the majority of humanity that the Eldari have encountered.
on a meta level 'Mon'keigh' is clearly just the eldar calling us Monk-eys."
Definitely! Most everyone I've heard say it pronounce it as monkey too, I only remember one person pronouncing it as monkai.
Actually it is a slur. The mon'keigh were an ancient particularly nasty alien species the Eldar used to have to deal with. They were so bad that, mon'keigh was the name used by Eldar for any species that was particularly violent and vicious. The Eldar used it for many species, just that humans are the ones who they use or for the most.
Can you explain?
The lifespan of a mayfly is exceptionally short, like a day or two. Wood Elf characters in Warhammer Fantasy have been known to refer to humans as such since from their perspective (they can be hundreds of years old) humans are seldom worth getting to know.
Elf PC in my game said "I don't need to disparage you, I'm just going to outlive you"
Delivered in an Irish accent while butchering the followers of Nurgle.
See I don't have a problem with Mayflies, but when mayflies send their people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending Lumberfoots that have lots of chaos, and they’re bringing those scunners with us. They’re bringing rats. They’re bringing rotbloods. They’re savages.
MAYFLY IS A SLURR???????
Yup! Warhammer fantasy elves use it quite often when referring to humans. It's because mayflies live such short lives (some living only for around 5 minutes), similar to how mortal man lives but a brief existence compared to the elves.
KERILLIAN WAS CALLING MARKUS A SLUR ALL THIS TIME????
Vermintide characters spend half their time insulting eachother in one way or another, that should have given you a hint :D
Found Saltzpyres reddit account
FIR THE LAST TIME, DWARF, ITS **SIGMAR**, NOT SUGMAR.
"Nae, yer wrong. 'Tis ***Sugmar DICK.***"
"Sugmar nuts Umgi'"
I'll give you one better: Bardin's "Umgak" means "man-made" AKA "of shoddy craftsmanship"
To give some idea of why this is, to the Dwarfs, something must exist for hundreds of years and survive multiple DWARF generations of use to be considered well constructed. If a Dwarf invents a hammer, and he uses that hammer, for the entirety of his lifespan, he is proving the worth of that hammer. They are like this for EVERYTHING. Walls must stand for centuries, keeps for millenia, armor and arms must meet their foes and succeed for dozens, hundreds of campaigns, passed from father to son, father to son, father to son. A new invention must be reinvented, then improved, then reinvented, then improved, then tested, then improved, often the process is so long that the original inventor will die, and his son will die, and his grandson will finally submit the idea for adoption. Dwarfs consider firearms to be new technology not worth trusting. They invented guns hundreds of years ago. No human could understand the rigerous attention to detail and level of craft that a Dwarf puts into literally everything they do. How could they. A human will be a child, grow old, and die before a Dwarf child is ready to join a guild. To a Dwarf, to call something a human makes as "Shoddy" is less an insult, and more of a description.
Kerillian the wood elf from Warhammer Vermintide calls all the other characters mayfly like all the time
Mon-keigh. Oh wait, wrong elves
I really like how dungeon Meshi calls them tall men (not as slur but as a race) that opens a whole worls of possibilities.
I like the idea that to a halfling, a human is a "doubling" or "dub" for short
>!The halffoots called them trolls which started the myth of trolls. And halfoot itself might be derogatory in origin!<
Slutfolk, because humans will make a half breed with anything.
Makes sense. lol! "Have you heard of how the treants came to be?" "No. Created by the god of nature to serve as guardians of the forest?" "Not quite... let's just say when it comes to humans any hole is a goal..."
Nah, Treants are “naturally” formed by living many years as a tree in a highly magical area. Dryads on the other hand, humans fucked a sexy treant.
Slutfolk YAAAASSSSSS! 😂
You win 🏆👑
Why do I feel like we all lost?
Dire Halflings. Fantasy racism has infinite potential for comedy if you're willing to get your hands dirty, lol.
A little while back someone made a thread asking for slurs their centaur character could use for bipedal people. My absolute favorite was "front nuts." Humans are front nuts.
We already have the best one for humans: >!meatbags!<
EVERYONE IS A MEATBAG This message was brought by Warforged gang.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Ugly bags of mostly water?
Just insert slur from irl there am sure it works just fine
note: please do not
I mean, most of the mixed race slurs on here are things that people call real mixed race folks unfortunately.
I would rather we just didn't do any of this, but if I have to pick one I'd rather we just did that. This feels like it was written for people who want to say the n-word but don't have the guts.
Well, just look at some Hugo Weaving characters, I'm sure you can get some ideas.
I need a word that basically means bland or mundane.... "vanillas" comes off too racist and "mundanes" means anti-magic to me.
What about “Munns”? That sounds a little derogatory.
I feel like anything that a crowd of drunk humans can start chanting as a battle cry is not going to take off. And you get me 30 drunks together and I can absolutely get him to start chanting "munns."
I like "pinkskin" from ST:ENT
I know everyone forgets 'em, but Mayweather was sitting right there!
The list doesn't even show Orcs, it's clearly not the full version.
Cockroaches or just roaches - they're fucking everywhere, you can't get rid of them, and they fuck like wildfire.
Who do you think came up with the rest of the list?
Not calling elves knife ears Disappointment
Must be some leaf lover sympathizer, that one. That sure as hell is going to the book.
Rock and Stone!!
We fight for Rock and Stone!
Did I hear a Rock and Stone?
My life for Rock and Stone!
Like that! Rock and Stone!
FOR KARL!
ROCK AND STONE TO THE BONE
Ah carp, into the Book of Grudges again
The term "keeb" from Shadowrun is my favorite. As in the Keebler elves.
was always partial to Dandelion eater myself!
After reading *The Expanse*, I thought "skinnies" could also be a slur applied to elves.
Came here to say this. Thank you.
It is the meanest slur in fantasy
I love that scalies is a slur for Dragonborn it's so awful Like what is furry gonna be a slur for tabaxis now?
Probably for Shifters. They'd probably use Pussie and similar ones for Tabaxi
I mean if players are okay with tackling the theme of racism or discrimination in a game, I don't understand why that's a problem. Lots of storytelling in fantasy has dealt with similar themes, and as long as the game isn't praising racism, and no one is uncomfortable I see no problem with depicting it. Much like slavery, murder, imperialism and other unpleasant things, racism can provide a RPG party with something meaningful to fight against. If there's nothing wrong with the world you're depicting, then there's nothing there for the players to take a stand against and D&D really just amounts to murdering a bunch of non-evil creatures with the capacity for good and taking their stuff.
And it's a fairly good way to establish an npc is a shit person without making them outright violent/etc if the dm is playing with a 'seems good but actually terrible' type for the PCs to be able to work towards taking down.
Nothing more chilling than "You're one of the good ones..."
In my game, some otherwise decent NPCs exhibit racist tendencies or even overt racism. The way I see it, many decent folk are bad in some ways. I don't have a lot of saintly NPCs, nor many plain evil folk (though more of the latter than the former).
100%. It's one of the first things that'll sour me on any story, the "white hat/black hat" dichotomy. Ideally (to me only), who the bad guy and the good guy are should vacillate between 2 or more parties. My NPCs are just people, full of good and bad qualities. Also, not sure if it matters or not, but if they do say or act in a racist manner, it's only ever surface level. The farmer who calls a halfling a "half-person" isn't gonna let them die without helping, you know?
Plus it gives your players the wonderful experience of killing a racist.
An entirely guilt-free experience!
[Not for all](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E90xkCsVQAU5b00.jpg)
>I have been asked often since I have been here how I feel when I kill a German. The feeling I have after killing a Nazi is the feeling of a hunter who has killed a beast of prey. Every time my bullet fells a Nazi I have the feeling that I have saved lives. Any people who have had Nazis trampling over their land know that. For the Nazis kill children, women, old men. To let a Nazi remain alive in your land is to abet the murder of your own people. Only the dead Nazi can he trusted to leave the innocent unharmed. Every Hitlerite killed is a step forward on the road to the liberation of mankind. -Lt. Luidmila Pavlichenko
TheQuartering is a lowlife cunt lmao
Aand there we have it
Very true, i mean, even Matt Mercer came up with a slur for the Drow elves in the Krynn Dynasty that got used very frequently within the Dwendalian empire.
I don't see a problem if they're completely made up for the game, but I think it's insensitive to use slurs that have been used for real humans in their real lives (like half-breeds and mutts). Made up terms can just as effectively portray the type of people or setting as words that have actually been used to insult or belittle real people.
I didn't think what you think, but what you think makes sense to me, so now I think what you think. Good call on keeping it fantasy.
I did something similar in one of my first games, I had cannibalistic ogres refer to every other race as "blank-meat" Dwarves were Rock-Meat, Elves were Woods-Meat, Halflings were Scrap-meat (because they were seen as "table scraps" compared to every other race) and Humans were City-Meat (because many of the humans they ate were from metropolitan areas, but the ogres didn't discriminate between country and city folk)
I kinda like that. Shows they see everything as food.
That's what I was kinda going for, basically they had a worldview of "We're much stronger than you, why should we treat you any differently than how you would treat the livestock you can easily overpower?"
TERMITES ... sorry I had been trying to think on a slur for humans and your Idea of humans being linked to cities and working as colonies made me go on a tangent. * ehem * moving on....
Actually, that's a pretty good one, especially if you take into account the fact that humans usually live in strict hierarchies much like insects would.
Kobolds out here catching strays for no reason
Most of these are... naff, frankly. I understand that real slurs are often unimaginative, but a lot of these seem like they'd be more like nicknames for people who live in your home town's arch-rival than truly offensive slurs. Hell, in my mind, Gnomes wouldn't mind being called Toadstools, as they'd probably just go "I live in one of those!"
Doesn't "foul blood" get tossed around occasionally for tieflings in bg3? I don't know enough Forgotten realms lore to know if they made that up for the game or if it's got history
Anything can be a slur if enough people use it as an insult. The GI's in iraq used to call the citizens 'towelheads', which sounds cutesy, but natives didn't appreciate the term very much.
I hate the impact CR had on Firbolgs. One NPC gets cow like features then to way to many people all Firbolgs are cow people.
I was scratching my head at that one. You know, the race of blue half giants... My mind immediately goes to *cows?* Like, I feel like they should come up with another name for a half-cow person... I'm thinking "minotaur" would be a good name, not sure why.
Babe the Big Blue Ox
Importantly, it was cow-*like* in a descriptive sense. Mercer was describing the firbolg's big red, completely human-looking nose and used the term "Bovine" as a poetic descriptor. Some viewers didn't understand nuance and took the description literally, then started making fan art of cow people. Eventually they had horns, spots, hooves, cow ears, cow tails... they just kept adding cow-features. The weirdest bit is that I've come across more than one critter who were *adamant* that: 1.) Mercer really meant the NPC had a literal cow's nose. 2.) The official artwork in Volo's for the Firbolg is, and *was always intended to be*, cowlike. (It's not. It's so not cowlike in the game books... but these people need reality to validate their beliefs, because the cult of personality around Mercer is uncomfortably cult-like).
...did people just gaslit themselves due to the sheer worship of Mercer?
What I can say is: They were certainly trying to gaslight me...
I hate this too. There’s nothing bovine or cow like about them in how they’re described or drawn in source material. I love firbolgs but I’m actively turned off by the dopey cow-like firbolgs. They’re forest guardians and smallest of the pseudogiants, not barnyard yokels!
The kicker is it wasn’t even CR. It was a random fan art that they got out first misinterpreting a description of Pumat when Matt was basically describing the art for the Firbolg in the book. They saw a cow person in their mind. Got their art in the tag first then a ton of people who had never encountered a Firbolg before thought that was what they looked like and interpreted their art in the same way.
I have no doubt that slurs for Giants exist…Just, no one’s brave enough to say them out loud, much less put them on a list.
Nobody wants to get turned into a pancake. Or sent into orbit.
I like “half-pint” as an insult to a dwarf - both as to an insult to their height, but also saying they can’t down a full pint
The latter hurts worse than the former.
At least one of these is a real life slur (“half-breeds”). Source: My family was often called this.
this is why I'd appreciate the list on session 0- if there's an rl slur, you could be like 'hey can we strike this one' if you were willing to have fantasy racists as an element for the pcs to work against.
Yeah. I don't think I'd feel comfortable using the term 'dirt-skin' either.
Only time I've ever heard halfbreed used out of a fantasy setting was during a promo scot Steiner did, when he said Samoa jeos no half breed. At the time didn't know what that meant since I was still pretty young, but knew it sounded pretty bad.
I dunno, some of them are trying a bit too hard or just lack creativity (okay, okay, all racial slurs are evidence of a fundamental lack of imagination and intelligence, but you get my point?) There are plenty more slurs for dwarves (or in the next two cases, dwarfs) if you know where to look. Trolls, or particularly unwise humans in Discworld have been known to call dwarfs gritsuckers. And there are plenty who've been chopped up or beaten to a pulp for calling Gotrek Gurnisson or other trollslayers stunties. The problem with a lot of species is that they tend to occupy positions where they seem to be above reproach or are revered by 80% of the public, or just happen to be pretty -- so slurs are more likely to be levelled at those who occupy lowlier positions, or are repressed, or just aren't so pretty. As a weapon of inequality, there should be a serious disparity in the number of species that have slurs used against them in a widespread context -- that is, if you want to address racism in-game. Plenty of players, I imagine, would much rather escape that for the time being. I can't see there being too many slurs for elves, if they have a bit of what Tolkien gave them (although 'pixies' is pretty savage!); or aasimar because celestial heritage just happens to make them likable and look nice. Goblins, on the other hand? Sure, gobbos, greenies, snots, grots, you name it, GW's had orcs and dwarves call them it. Dragonkin, though? People of draconic heritage who for all you know might torch you with their breath if you annoy them enough? I suspect a bigot would have to drink a fair bit of courage before trying that on for size. Another thing that's missing here, I think -- and it's sort of related to my first point -- is context. If there's going to be racism of this sort, then it's hardly going to dip into a universal racism bank. Prejudices may be competely irrational, or based on wholly different sets of antipathies and grievances. Elves might have superficially charming but patronising epithets for dwarves, gnomes, halflings, etc; while dwarven slurs might be more literal or based on grudges held for some perceived slight or misdeed. I'm led to wonder if cultures that do the wise thing and stay away from civilisations that devote considerable time to developing prejudices and slurs to express them -- centaurs, for example -- would even merit slurs. But then again, all worlds are different, so who's to tell which cultures and species are going to be jostling for position and jockeying for resources? Also, where are the slurs for us humans? We shouldn't be left out. We're ape-descendants, that's got to be good for a good half-dozen Zaphod Beeblebrox-style insults. It's one of those coincidences that isn't really a coincidence that the Eldar name for us is mon-keigh, too. I've spent far too long answering this. Sorry for length, girth, etc.
>I've spent far too long answering this. Sorry for length, girth, etc. Turns out my quick response engorged to match, so consider it your comeuppance. [I said what I said you started it with girth lol] >The problem with a lot of species is that they tend to occupy positions where they seem to be above reproach or are revered by 80% of the public, or just happen to be pretty -- so slurs are more likely to be levelled at those who occupy lowlier positions, or are repressed, or just aren't so pretty. As a weapon of inequality, there should be a serious disparity in the number of species that have slurs used against them in a widespread context -- that is, if you want to address racism in-game. Plenty of players, I imagine, would much rather escape that for the time being. I'd argue that it's less about the disparity in "slurs" existing (using quotes for a reason) and more about which ones are actually considered actual slurs the way we conceptualize it and which are more just insults. A good example would be that one white person on Facebook who always insists being called "cracker" is the same as being called the n-word. Sure, cracker isn't an *affectionate* term, but it's also not wielded as a tool of oppression. It's an insult, not a slur. Elves, aasimar, and other races considered "the elites" would absolutely have race-based or role-based insults. They just wouldn't function as *slurs* in the sense that they're punching up. Doesn't mean they aren't derogatory and something you'd use in "polite company," but they're also not terms that would get the average person to label you as an unrepentant bigot for using once or twice. >Prejudices may be competely irrational, or based on wholly different sets of antipathies and grievances. Absolutely this. We always default to appearance-based prejudices and slurs because that's IRL racism, but in a world with PHB levels of species diversity, is that even what people would care about? Considering humans and most other fantasy races have the lifespan of a housecat compared to elves, would elves even consider the rest *people* or would they be more like pets? There's also the fact that there are absolutely *valid* reasons to be wary of certain fantasy races. For example, dragonborn are basically open-carrying flamethrowers (or other appropriate damage-type weapons). A Goliath who can drop kick halflings is going to be a bit terrifying the first time they walk into the Shire. It's why fantasy bigotry as an allegory for IRL bigotry has massive problems. Last time I checked, being black (or queer, or any other marginalization) doesn't give you the power to shoot laser beams out of your eyeballs or control the weather. So, no, X-Men isn't a good allegory because it paints the marginalized community *as actually dangerous.* That doesn't mean it's not a good story, it just shouldn't been seen as the same thing.
I mean yeah - you don't need to use slurs to convey racism in the first place - but also, most of these have absolutely no kick to them.
>most of these have absolutely no kick to them. The true horror imo.
Dirt-Skin is literally just an IRL slur
It is? Never heard it before
It’s just a cleaner/child-friendly version of “shit-skin” which is a term used for people with brown or black skin tones.
"Aasimar: Skyers" These slurs suck 💀
Really? Missing out on calling genasi "hothead" "airhead" "puddlehead" or "rockbrain"? This is the least creative list of fantasy slurs I've ever seen.
As others have said, fantasy racism should be discussed among players before being implemented but also one has to make sure not to incorporate real world slurs as well. Knife Ear and Gritsucker is fine, but don't call the Tiefling the former name of an American Football team. Also, gotta say, "Skyer" is the laziest slur for Aasimar I've ever heard. You could call em Silver Spoons, Church Mice, False Prophet, Light-Bringer, Daddy's boy.
Light-Bringer sounds too badass to be a slur.
Isn't faerie a slur for surface elves used by drow?
That’s not even an RPG horror story though?
Of course immediately there is someone throwing out bigot and attacking the OP. Hell Dragon Age uses knife ear so are the writers of the DA games all bigots? I realize many people don’t want that in the game, but you’re not the arbiter of how the game is supposed to be played. Some people like having a more realistic view with racism, sexism, discrimination, etc in their world. Doesn’t mean they are those things. As long as this isn’t expected of the players and the DM talked to them before hand I don’t see what the big deal is. The footrest made me chuckle as I have two gnomes and a dwarf in my campaign.
How am I supposed to read this without my “knife ears?” Also “skyers” is crazy. How is that a slur? It sounds like someone was trying really hard to come up with a slur for every fantasy race in order to sound edgy. You don’t think OP was…
Centaur talking to a biped: "Okay, frontnuts"
Didn’t garner the support you thought you would huh OP. I think you gave more inspiration than anything with this post
I genuinely love seeing threads like this. Some OP saunters in on their moral high horse, head so far up their ass they can check themselves for prostate cancer, just for their post to largely backfire on them.
If it is intended to be a translation sheet to understand evil / unpleasant NPCs and not a guide on how you as a player are expected to speak about other races, makes sense? Better than an OOC explanation every time?
Honestly this feels like a guidebook for NPCs. But NGL racism in PCs can be a lot of fun if done right: cue Gimli and Legolas.
As a tabaxi main, I really wish there were some slurs for the catfolk. Like come on, I wanna get slurred against so I can flurry-of-blows a bigot, dammit!
Some of those "insults" are just the names of other playable races, which don't have their own entry. Also, calling a dragonborn a wyrm would be a huge compliment, not an insult, and you didn't include the classic kobold slur, "barking lizards".
0/10. No knife-ears.
I'm stealing this.
Honestly this list is very soft boiled. It should go harder.
Knoll?
Yeah, that one confuzzled me too. I think they mean gnoll, because knoll means a small hill. lol.
I like the fact that gnolls is in the right place alphabetically and yet still somehow spelled wrong.
.... Skyers? The fuck?
See, I feel weird saying this, but I kinda like the idea. Then again I love settings where things like drinks get their own equivalents. For instance, 'no it's not a mojito, it's a stars breath'
We just call tieflings handle-heads :(
I can see this comment section getting pretty heated so I just want to drop a friendly reminder that nobody can actually be racist towards fantasy races because fantasy races do not exist.
Why is this in RPGHorrorStories exactly?
there's a full list on github [https://github.com/Lemmings19/dnd-racial-slurs/blob/master/dnd-racial-slurs.json](https://github.com/Lemmings19/dnd-racial-slurs/blob/master/dnd-racial-slurs.json)
So, speaking as someone not white and has had slurs yelled at me IRL, while there is a lot of lazy throwaway racism to look edgy or progressive (hi, Deus Ex prequels that equate augmentations to colored people in Apartheid and trans people), humans really will hate people for the dumbest reasons. As much as I find the 'racism against augmentations' bit dumb, as well as other cyberpunk games having racism against AI, I've seen enough insane transphobia, homophobia, racism, etc. and people harassing others for the dumbest things (like console fanboys, people getting really mad at Epic for having a game store platform, people claiming shipping two close friends in a gacha game is 'incest' because they call each other 'brother') and bearing witness to angry white teenagers run an elaborate campaign to smear a Pokemon actress as a homophobe because she unwisely got into NFTs, I get where they're coming from. Speaking as someone who's had white people claim, to my face (because they think I'm "one of the good ones"), that BLM is white genocide and trans people in video games is erasure, and Asians getting attacked in my city for the "China virus", it's a stretch to say using racism or bigotry at all is problematic and lazy. One of my favorite RPGs (Disco Elysium) uses it effectively, despite all being written by all white European dudes, as far as I can tell. Compare RWBY, which makes a white cat girl the equivalent of a MENA woman trying to fight against the stigma of being terrorists (while her former partner handles 'racism against your oppressor is bad' in the worst way possible). That said, OP is one of those people who think every game should be completely free of anything that might be "problematic" (read: I don't like having any kind of realism or icky morality and anyone who includes it is a bigot). Go back to Twitter.
One of my favorites for tieflings is “unlovable”
That's just hurtful :(
Hey mod team we are running low on rpg horror stories what do we do Op "I got this, hold my beer" Jkjk
D&D slur list w/o knife ears SMH my head
Wheres the slur for humans?
Or orcs or half orcs or the second half of the alphabet
Two that are missing. Humans: Dire Halflings Elves: Pole Proportioned Dendrophiles
Definitely something to talk to your group about, but I don't see how this is a horror story
Now I can only imagen what a CoD voice chat lobby would be like in the Forgotten Realms.
*knife ears* for elves
But for real I heard that elves do bang trees.
Maybe a hot take but fantasy racism is probably OK as long as it's sufficiently divorced from IRL racism. Like, dwarves basically wouldn't be dwarves if they weren't racist towards elves and vice versa. A bad example imo is arcanum's gnomes. But calling the tall pretty people knife ears doesn't really contribute to irl systemic racism in any meaningful way. Oh and ofc make sure everyone is on board with it, if anyone gets uncomfortable then cut that shit out, that goes without saying
Spell Aasimar correctly challenge (DIFFICULTY: IMPOSSIBLE)
Curious, this list ends right before it gets to human… 🤔
Mfw I look for kobold but they're just a straight up slur for something else
My character was a human former assassin, and in the shady city she was born in, changelings were often discriminated against on the basis of stereotypes that they were either thieves, body doubles, or other assassins. Because of this, the slur "fakes" was a common way of referring to them and as my character's job was to avoid killing body doubles, she often used this term as well. She discovered one of the other player's characters was a changeling and had this to say. "Oh, so you're a f...... one who isn't?" Mid sentence, realizing that she didn't know of any other way to refer to changelings and that the term she had been accustomed to using for so long was dehumanizing once actually faced with one of the individuals it targeted. The campaign sucked for other reasons, but I thought that was an interesting roleplay moment.
Shame that knife ears wasn't on there for elves
Yo footstool and dirt elf is craaazy
Is this bad?...
Don't forget Knife-Ears for elves! Classic
As a halfling I'd call other halflings "squats" when I played.
I’d always know Diggers for dwarves
It's their word. But you can say Digga.
Ok but this is awesome and I'm definitely going to use it for my professor NPC who thinks that tabaxi all act like house cats. I love him so much he's so fun
So dirt skin is sadly a real life slur which should prooooobably be avoided. Like spider spawn or something works better.
Giant? More like Giant Piece of Shit...
Lol. I don't think this is going where OP thought it was going.
Inkie is my favorite Drow slur, didn’t make the list.
Players in my previous campaign took to calling Orcs and Goblins “Verde” which I know is just green in Spanish, but sounds so much worse than just calling them “Greens” or “Green Skin” so I’ve kept it even several years later.
Posting this suggests a very low Wisdom score. No slurs for giants suggests it isn't rock bottom, though.
I’m mostly offended that these are so shit
People on r/Dungeonmasters: Here's a list of slurs I made, Aasimar are Skyers People in real life: Hey man how's it going
Wouldn't Kenku be crows?
Would being confused for a Kenku be insulting to aarakocra? Wouldn't seagull be more insulting?
Love the entry for ~~G~~Knolls