By Jennifer Asencio
| Updated
On October 15, Wizards of the Coast released new Pride-themed artwork on their Dungeons & Dragons social media. Almost immediately, fans of the game reacted to the picture with derision, including a few accounts run by major gaming personalities and creators. Dungeons & Dragons has been taking a lot of criticism over its diversity initiatives, and the new picture is an example of why.
The artwork centers on a gay male couple, a Black elf, and a burly Dragonborn, in a romantic pose where the Dragonborn is sweeping the elf off his feet. This is in the center of the town square, with onlookers of various D&D races: kobolds, owlbears, beholders, elves, dwarves, and even the occasional human. In the background, a wizard’s tower falls and a blue dragon twists through the air, as if about to do a barrel roll. The onlooking beholder has a heart-shaped pupil in its main eye.
Customers Complain The Game Is Only For Furries Now
Aside from the quality of the artwork (D&D books have featured much worse artwork, especially in the early days), the chief complaint has been about the forced diversity in the picture. Many of these races were considered “evil” until Wizards of the Coast started tampering with the property during its fifth edition, and many of them wouldn’t be together in public as pictured, or even part of civilization. A long-standing complaint about how races are treated in modern D&D is that they have become so sanitized that they are merely “humans in a costume.” Some races, like Dragonborn or the feline Tabaxi, have been likened to furries.
Without evil races, like orcs, kobolds, and drow, who is the “bad guy” in Dungeons & Dragons? The wizard tower in the background of the new art may be falling, but the focus is on the peaceful and friendly celebration afterwards, not on the adventure itself. By sanitizing the races, many critics argue, Dungeons & Dragons has taken the adventure out of the game, a notion which is practically confirmed by official Wizards of the Coast modules where characters run a coffee shop or look for dates to a dance.
Reactions From Former D&D Players
Mark Kern, the former World of Warcraft developer known on X as Grummz, reposted the picture with the caption “D&D is long gone.” User Nerdcognito’s caption on his repost was, “It’s getting really close to the point where we have to concede that Dungeons & Dragons does not exist anymore. Woke virtue signaling via the destruction of a beloved hobby is happening right before our eyes. Look at this atrocity.”
Sandy Petersen, creator of tabletop RPG Call of Cthulhu and developer of classic video games like Doom, Quake, and Age of Empires, made several posts, each targeting a creature seen celebrating in the picture, captioning them with their D&D lore. He posited in a separate post whether Wizards of the Coast was trying to drive people away from D&D, including other recent artworks that sanitize orcs and beholders. Beholders are some of the most feared beasts in Dungeons & Dragons, but recent artwork treats them like cuddly Pokémon.
Petersen and others also compared old D&D artwork to the newer material, finding the older stuff more enticing. Petersen described the difference as “a call to adventure” versus “a party.” The newer pictures do seem more appropriate for an episode of My Little Pony than for an action-adventure game, but it seems Wizards of the Coast is moving Dungeons & Dragons away from that genre and more toward romantasy and supernatural drama. Given the company’s treatment of the game’s creators and its attempts to make the game less “violent” and more “diverse,” it’s easy to believe that they don’t like D&D any more than our parents did in the 80s.
UPDATE: Robert J. Kuntz is one of D&D’s co-creators back in the days of TSR. He worked with Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and helped develop the original version of the game. He and the other creators of the game have been maligned by official Wizards of the Coast publications for including themes in the game such as evil races, violence, slavery, colonization, and imperialism.
In a post that was limited in visibility on X for “hateful conduct,” Kuntz responded to the new artwork by saying, “D&D has always been about participating in building and experiencing Fantasy and not “fantasies” or fantasizing. It’s about the fear and wonder of the unknown and not socio-political, postmodern and nihilistic claptrap.”
If anyone has a right to such a strong opinion, it is Kuntz, a living member of the original team that tested the game. He knows what works and stories helped inspire Dungeons & Dragons, because he was there to see it born, unlike its current developers and writers. He has seen what Wizards of the Coast has warped D&D into in the name of inclusivity, and how being “more inclusive” has actually pushed out the players the game was intended for.
His limited post continued, “It’s about adventure and the parties-in-arms who excel in such quests and not paper mâché parties. Legends are born with the former while the latter produces, at best, gruel for the simple minded who have no anchorage to the myths, legends and stories that birthed the genre and its sub-genres. The latter’s postmodern gobble-de-gook deconstructs the pillars of Fantasy and mocks untold years dedicated to its classical beginnings and the creativity, wit and imagination of its authors. It insults thousands of years of culture, literature and folk tales while while standing on their ashes like some uniformed, midget-minded arsonist. It is an affront to truth in all cases culturally & historically and unlike the target it aims to impugn, mock and destroy it itself will be consigned to the dustbin of history.”