Thank you for taking the time to read my message and respond to it in detail. Your links are quite interesting reading material, and in some places very funny.If you bring out the essence of all these texts-it is needless to play dungeons and dragons because everything is evil, and it isneedless to play any other games, there are stereotypes everywhere, colonialism and injustice and in general solid evil, evil, evil.es, I made a mistake in my previous post — worlds should not be racist, and they may not be everywhere, but in some places.
And in general, it seems obvious to me that all people are equal by nature, and what makes them different and unique as a race or nation, in addition to the processes taking place in their minds, is what these processes are caused by, namely, society, culture, history and place of residence(country/continent) that is, their background. And what were the first and subsequent books of dungeons and dragons and others, primarily due to the world around the authors. People of that time simply do not think in modern terms, like people of the past. I would look at how in the Middle Ages someone would have tried to instill at least a little similar views.
Those who were engaged in colonialism and the slave trade thought in the paradigm of their time and to reproach them now for this is quite stupid, especially without fully realizing what was going on in their heads, what was their perception of the world around them, if we speak in game terms — the background. All this is a mystery to us, no matter what scientists say, you can not look at Columbus and others in the head.
And to reproach Gary and the company that wrote the game, which still lives very smart of course. And these days there are games that try to meet the needs of the modern world and this is normal, but to take and rewrite what was written earlier, this is not good. WotC rushed to edit their books for allegedly incorrect and add notes to old editions, as if apologizing for the fact that they contain something unacceptable, and if they had their will, and enough resources, they would rewrite them (or delete them). Those books are what they are and if you use many favorite expression-Do not like — do not play/read.
As for whether such a vision offends Drow or Gnolls, I don't know, I don't see it as such. I don't know where you are from, but in my childhood there was an old Soviet book — What is good and what is bad. - a book about how it's bad to offend the weak — it's good to protect the weak, it's bad to trash, it's good to wash your hands before eating, it's bad to spoil things and create them well and all that sort of stuff. And if in life people followed more of this, then life would be much easier. In role-playing games, players of that time, like many modern ones, are guided by similar principles, you rarely see a purposefully evil party, and even if this is their goal, they have to use more effort to play such roles.
Clearing dungeons and capturing something is also guided by the most common classics of the genre, or what is funnier, truly capitalist motives. After all, the party cleans the dungeons not because evil Drow or Goblins live there, but in the desire to get treasures, artifacts and glory, and Drow and Goblins stand in their way, being an obstacle to what they want and are eliminated in one way or another. Perhaps everyone goes through this before plunging into a deeper level of hobby and doing not only shredding crowds of enemies, but also coming to the construction and arrangement of castles, cities or deeper studies of the world around them. As for your work, it seems to me beyond any doubt that you have the right to make edits to your own work, but it also seems to me that writing a whole manifesto about your awareness that you used the wrong words is somehow too much. Your edits speak for themselves and players will appreciate them, one way or another, and it is completely unnecessary to explain the reasons for their manifestation, and even more so to apologize for someone else's creativity or vision.