D&D exec explains how racist content made it into a campaign book

In September, Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast apologized for the inclusion of racist content in one of its campaigns. On Monday, during an hour-long interview on the 3 Black Halflings channel on YouTube, D&D executive producer Kyle Brink discussed the situation in detail — including what actions his team will take going forward to ensure it never happens again.

Spelljammer – Adventures in Space is a reboot of a setting first published in 1989 for D&D’s second edition. Wizards chose to include an older species of character in the product’s three volumes. This species is the hadozee. It’s a simian animal that Wizards introduced in 1982. The hadozee, as originally described in 1980s, was clearly an inaccurate representation of Black ex-slaves. Wizards’ goal with including them was, in all likelihood, an attempt to redeem that intellectual property and introduce it to a new generation of players.

The attempt was disastrous. The attempt was rebuffed quickly. Spelljammer – Adventures in SpaceWhen the episode began to circulate in public, hadozee were accused of being associated with in-fiction slavery and for using problematic themes or images which combined served to strengthen racism against Black people. Wizards offered a formal apology and revised their published content. They also promised to employ outside cultural consultants in the future.

In Monday’s interview, Brink alluded to the fact that there were professional consequences for those involved.

“That was a mistake and was taken very seriously, and some internal actions were taken as a result,” Brink said.

What was the point of making such an egregious mistake? Brink provided the first details about the circumstances at the studio in the interview.

“There was a particular paragraph in there that really made the connection to past depictions that we really didn’t intend to,” Brink said. “A senior person who was very trusted wrote it, and very few eyes got on it before it got into the final draft. […]There were two major breakdowns. We didn’t have time to review all the material, so no one had. And it even got in there outside the normal process.”

Going forward, Brink said, the inclusion of offensive content such as this is “not something that can happen again.” That’s because “every word” published for D&D since Spelljammer – Adventures in Space is reviewed by multiple cultural consultants — professional sensitivity readers — whose feedback is then integrated into the editing process before publication.

This kind of work will be even more crucial as the Wizards team digs into its back catalogue for new products, Brink stated.

D&D has a long history. It’s got a long and deep lore that goes back to some pretty troubling stuff. And so we’re in a place where we want to acknowledge and bring forward some of the cool nostalgia, but also fix the broken stuff. It’s time to fix the things that were wrong. In that space, it’s very possible for somebody meaning well to make what they think is a nostalgic callback that actually dredges up with that hook a whole big wad of terrible stuff that we did not want in there in the first place. Although I get the mistakes made, this does not make them right. It was a serious mistake that we did not take lightly. And it’s not something that can happen again with the current structure.

Wizards of the Coast isn’t the only one that has made the shift to cultural consultants. Numerous publishers are involved in tabletop publishing, which includes Gloomhaven And FrosthavenCephalofair Games is now using professional readers similar to the ones used by publisher Cephalofair Games.

The revised edition of Spelljammer: Adventures in Space is available digitally through platforms such as D&D Beyond and Roll20. Errata online is free.