Tasha's Cauldron of Redemption and the Larger Forgotten Realms Landscape

I've labeled this as a review, but it should be noted that I have only had the book in my hands for a day, and I'm drilling down on only a couple of aspects and highlighting the implications of only a small portion of what Tasha's introduces. I will leave the comprehensive reviews to others. The fact is, what makes my Venn diagram (D&D player, female, older) interesting generally isn't any sort of technical insight on mechanics that I bring to the table - it's what my demographic has to say about the broader implications of certain aspects of gameplay. Since most of the online chatter I've seen about Tasha's Cauldron of Everything has to do with the mechanics that have been leaked over the last couple of months, this review is going to be rather different than most commentary thus far. With this in mind, let's dive in.

Tasha - a powerful female wizard who was originally crafted back in the day as evil - is now styled as neutral. Despite all the insanely cool subclasses introduced, and despite all the fantastic flexibility that now has a basis in canon (and believe me, I'm super excited) - this, to me, is the biggest news of all.

A quick trip through Tasha's history (she was invented by Gary Gygax) gives you a buffet of all the tropes about powerful women: seduction is her calling card and often her route to power, she's powerful-therefore-evil, her sexual predilections are cause for terror (she beds demons), and on and on... the sort of stuff that would keep a shrink in business for decades. There are good female characters from back then, too - Alustria Silverhand, leader of Silverymoon comes to mind - but they, too, are as tropey as they come, and in general, genuinely powerful women are rare as hen's teeth. Basically old-school D&D is one big madonna/whore complex when it comes to women, and Tasha was in the whore camp. Rewriting Tasha as true neutral is a conscious choice to avoid the madonna/whore complex altogether. As a woman who neither identifies with either the Madonna nor whores (not that there's anything wrong with that), I welcome this change.

    "Goddamnit, Mike, give me back my shirt!" 

    "Aw come on, Lisa, I just want to play 

'The Dominatrix and the Horny Boy Do 

Tentacle Porn' for 5 minutes."

    "No. Besides, you won't last that long anyway."

Courtesy of 1e dungeon module D3

Back then? Good luck finding a model of an adventurous woman with a complex personality or depth like Dian Fossey, Martha Gellhorn, Augusta & Adeline Van Buren, Amelia Earhart, or Louise Arner Boyd. I mean, it's not like those women didn't exist in history and literature, and hundreds more like them. Little girl me, playing D&D for the first time back in 1980 would have loved female protagonists or even villains based on real women like them. But D&D in 1980 wasn't written to indulge the wish fulfillment fantasies of girls and women. I don't think it ever occurred to the writers of those books and modules that girls would be likely to play, or that if we did, that the relentless tits and ass show ...saintly or sinful... that women provide in those works was pretty alienating and undermining. We were not a customer base they even considered courting, so it hardly mattered. Now, women comprise a significant percentage of tabletop gamers, and the optics have finally changed. 

Robe man: "Good gods! What's wrong 

with her right butt cheek?"

Helmet man: "Inorite? I mean, that's some

serious droop going on there."

Robe man: "I guess the artist

never took any life drawing classes." 

Helmet man: "Or is just, y'know,

unfamiliar with female anatomy

in general."

Robe man: "What does this have to

do with adventuring, again?"

Helmet man: "Hell-if-I-know."

1e module D3 again, but there were 

plenty of other choices. I was

just being lazy.

So, back to the new book. Marginalia? These are not marginal. They are written in Tasha's voice. What a transformation... Tasha has gone from being an objectified seductress constrained by a multitude of tropes to a woman with a distinct and individual voice. And it is a subversive voice, the tone distinctly sarcastic, ironic and intentionally overriding the editorial restraint Mordenkainen ostensibly imposes. She persists. To some she will seem like a bitch. To others she will seem like a world-weary sage. To others, she will seem a pragmatic adventurer. It's about options, people. Options.

It's taken awhile. I don't have any books from 4th edition, so I don't know if the artwork from that is transitional or not, but the difference between 3.5e (2003ish) and 5e (2015ish) is remarkable. When I first picked up the 5th edition PHB and the female fighters and whatnot were not a Tits'R'Us store but just, you know, regular people wearing armor, my jaw dropped and I honestly got teary-eyed. I have an entire post that I wrote devoted to diving into this difference in the presentation of women, but I never put it up because I figured I'd just get hate mail for it.

But now, Tasha's has arrived on my doorstep, and, well, I had to say something. Because it's also occurred to me that Tasha's is trying to undo more than the longstanding madonna/whore damage that has plagued the TTRPG industry over the last 40 years. It's also trying to address the baked in racism in D&D.

I can hear it now. "WHAT?!? This is fantasy! Stop bringing real-world issues into a literal imaginary world." I'd love to be able to say that 20th and 21st century racism wasn't baked in to D&D, but it wouldn't be true. Beyond the fact that people of color received almost no representation except for the "white elves are good, black elves are bad" treatment until 30 years after the game was created... there's another enormous sticky mess in just how characters are created: race and country of origin are directly linked to parameters like alignment and intelligence. 

Sounds like eugenics. Oops.

"But these are fantastical beings!!!" I hear the grognards growl. "It isn't real! You can choose whatever you want to be - no one's forcing you to be any particular race!"

Yeah, well sorry bud. There's a saying in fiction-writing that all stories are autobiographical. Not because you write your own life story into everything, but because everything that you can imagine is the product of your particular life. And, well, the people who came up with the D&D system of tabletop play brought their biases and ideologies with them, whether they were conscious of it or not. Linking race and country of origin to attributes like intelligence and alignment doesn't sound so bad if you come from a race and country of origin that has historically fared well in those associations. The people who have benefited from those associations are not the best judge of whether or not such systems are fair, or whether or not referencing such systems is painful in a game setting.

Gnome: "What's more annoying... 1) the fact 

that we're standing around showing our

titties for no real reason except fanservice, 2) the

fact that we're all white, or 3) the fact that

when showing detailed portraits of facial

differences between races, they only used 

male faces."

Half-orc: "Hard to say. I'm still trying to figure

out why only my boobs are worth protecting."

Elf: "Shut up. I'm not even wearing pants."

Thanks, 3e PHB.

I'm not (and I don't think anyone else is either) making the claim that the original writers of D&D purposely set out to subjugate women or alienate people of color. In fact, I think they're probably decent people, who if they knew their impact in this matter, would feel really badly about it. The fact that there was no intent to cause hurt doesn't mean no hurt was caused, however. It's a bit like a big rig overturning on the highway. Nobody does that on purpose, but just because it wasn't on purpose has nothing to do with whether or not people got hurt. And you know what? The driver of the big rig who walks away unscathed doesn't get to tell the person they crushed to a pancake in the little Hyundai that they're not dead.

So what does the new Tasha's do that begins to mitigate the damage? It uncouples race and country of origin from alignment and intelligence. Don't want to do that? Fine go ahead and play according to the original rules. But from Tasha's forward, people have a choice about how their fantasy world works without having to bust out on their own and call it homebrew like it's some sort of maverick idea. It isn't a maverick idea. It's a choice that should have been available from the start. 

I don't hold it against Wizards of the Coast that they're late in offering it. It is, after all, just a game. 2020 has certainly highlighted other priorities. And, in many ways, what the writers of Tasha's have done is much much harder than getting it right from the start. They basically are acknowledging a mistake and correcting it, knowing that they will get grief from both sides for it. The privileged who are profoundly threatened by leveled playing fields on the one side, and the aggrieved minorities (or majority if you count women) on the other side who are annoyed that it took well over 40 years for the powers that be to see the problems with the system as written.

And looking back on other books in my D&D library... I'm beginning to realize what a herculean task it can be to address these core issues. Take, for example, the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting book of 3e. According to that, huge chunks of Faerun are basically analogs of various civilizations on Earth, complete with a Western thumbnail view of whether those people are good/bad, trustworthy/treacherous, intelligent/stupid, civilized/savages. That's going to be a tough one to rewrite. Not to mention that there are other problems with it - like  there is virtually no room in the place for a homebrew setting. The continent of Faerun is so fully described that you have to go to great lengths to drop in a mountain stronghold, underground lair or even a hamlet without it being counter to canon. I mean, you can do it, but it's work to find undescribed spaces. For a game that is largely played in your head with a robust imagination, this is really constraining, especially as whole regions are defined by various cultures, often in insulting terms. 

Tasha's shows a path forward that opens up possibilities in our theaters of the mind, and it does so with simplicity and elegance. But that doesn't mean the birthing of these ideas was easy and pain free. Hats off... pointy witches' hats off... to the writers that tackled the hard stuff. I see you. I appreciate what you are trying to do.

Thank you for giving Tasha a voice and a choice. For, though I am not her, nor I am any of the other depictions of women in art or literature, I am grateful.