If someone were to transpose that way of thinking onto cultures or races today, it could lead to the worst sort of prejudice. First, it presents a world in which good and evil are so simplistic that an entire culture, race, or species can be inherently evil. Making “races” like orcs and dark elves inherently evil does two things. If you can’t see the problems with this, I can’t help you. Later illustrators of D&D products, perhaps more aware of the optics, have made them a purple-black or dusky-grey-black. But, as the public perception of these kinds of problematic, exploitative stereotypes grew, public facing images of the drow changed as well. One campaign module even riffs on Tina Turner’s appearance in promotional posters for Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. In his essay, Sturtevant writes that the some D&D’s earliest art featuring the drow appears directly inspired by edgy portrayals of real-life Black actors. Original cover art for The Crystal Shard, published in 1988. Sturtevant goes even further, calling race as a gamified concept “ the Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre.” As writer and game designer James Mendez Hodes wrote in 2019, “D&D, like Tolkien, makes race literally real in-game by applying immutable modifiers to character ability scores, skills, and other characteristics.” Historian Paul B. Since its inception in the 1970s, the game has codified racism, in the form of strict inequalities between its fantasy races, within its ruleset. But they’re also a symptom of longstanding issues with the lore of D&D. Today, the black-as-other and related tropes are widely viewed as a problematic narrative devices. What he did not fully comprehend when he created the character, he said, was how Drizzt’s blackness would contribute to how that othering was perceived by his audience. Savatore says this othering was always his intent. That feature, which marks him as a member of an inherently violent and untrustworthy race of elves, casts him as the other and invariably sets him at odds with his neighbors. While the humans, dwarves, and other fantasy creatures that inhabit the Dale present as vaguely Nordic or Viking, Drizzt has black skin. It tells the story of a drow named Drizzt Do’Urden and his adventures among the inhabitants of Icewind Dale, a northern region in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting.

The Legend of Drizzt began in 1988 with The Crystal Shard, Salvatore’s first published novel.

Salvatore and performed for YouTube by Benedict Cumberbatch. Drizzt as shown in the video Sleep Sound, a poem written by R.

Sojourn by ra salvatore