Representing Cultures That Aren't Our Own

I am a white, Midwestern person who presents relatively masculine.  I was raised  middle class Evangelical Christian, and I still have tons of work to do to overcome perceptions and attitudes that stem from privilege and the bigotry I was raised with.  That being said, doing the work to overcome attitudes and perceptions I have that are racist is something I strive for continually, and I would like to encourage and enable the people I influence to do the same.  It's hard. It's humbling. It's frequently embarrassing and uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it's necessary, and (even though this is so far from the point), I truly believe it makes you a better GM and player in RPGs.

    I also want to stress that I am not the expert on this. I am not the voice to listen to when doing the work to overcome the histories of racism, sexism, homophobia, and colonialism that are woven throughout modern society. I'm mostly writing this, because as a white, Midwestern, masc presenting middle class person, it was daunting to even find a door into a space where I could listen to start doing the work, and I want to make those doors easier to find. This blog isn't a guide.  It's an example of what I attempted in a campaign I ran in order to better represent cultures that aren't my own without making them a harmful stereotype or joke. 

    The campaign in question was a Changeling: the Dreaming mini campaign.  I set the expectation that it would be 4 sessions long - it was our first foray into Changeling as GM and players - and I wanted it to be contained.  Prep for this game started almost six months before I ran the game when I was inspired by the Andrew Wyeth painting, Christina's World.  It evoked an image to me of a Selkie on the prairie, far from the ocean she loved.  My brain inserted the idea of her having a saltwater sensory deprivation tank made of metal cow troughs in her garage, and then the plot and other ideas filtered in from there.  I wanted to set it in Montana, found a real town in Montana called Glendive that fit the bill (and had good maps and fun landmarks), and started prepping. 

Christina's World by Andrew Wyeth

    However, since I wanted to set the game in Montana, Glendive specifically, that meant that there were several nearby Native American reservations.  That meant that there were indigenous people in the area with strong ties to their cultural roots, strong and ever present reminders of colonialism, and a ton of other baggage that would invariably tint reactions with outsider colonists coming in and messing in local affairs.  Being aware and recognizing that there was a cultural difference at hand was step one for realizing I needed to do a lot of work, and a lesson for me as a GM to examine the ethnic and cultural makeup of locales where I set my games to see what I need to do. I needed to make sure there wasn't just some Native window dressing or "flavor" added to the game to be "special."  The culture in this area was worthy of respect and representation. 

    Step two came in when I started trying to figure out what indigenous nations were represented in the local reservations.  Most of my research pointed to the Cheyenne being local to the area, and (since this was a game about supernatural stuff), I went to the gaming material to see if there was anything present.  Changeling: the Dreaming has the Nunnehi, Native American types of changelings, and since I wanted that representation in my NPCs, I went to the internet to see what Cheyenne legends were out there and tried to match them up to types of Nunnehi.  It took hours of work, but I settled on the Tunghat Nunnehi being local. I felt it was important to not just have random Nunnehi that could be based on legends from other tribes and nations.  I wanted a Werewolf pack in the area as well as several Nunnehi (alongside several non-native NPCs), and since the Werewolf: the Apocalypse werewolves often have native ties, I decided to tie that pack partially to the reservation as well.  I also added mortal Werewolf Kinfolk and focused on them over the Werewolves themselves. 

    The internet helped me find names (Cheyenne names), but I wanted to make sure they were realistic, so this involved cross referencing names between several websites as well as looking up currently living native authors, artists, activists, elders, and others with those names to make sure they were actually names and not jokes or nicknames or some sort of special or historical name that wasn't used out of reverence or respect.  I also tried for names I could find in videos of actual native people saying in video or audio recordings, and listened to/watched those on repeat to make sure I pronounced them right. That took, again, hours, but it was necessary work.

    Side note, I really love languages in general, and it was so much fun picking up pronunciations and a few phrases of Cheyenne. Also learning a bit about their cultural heritage under colonialism and how it affected their people and culture was heartbreaking and not something I would ever have learned otherwise. 

    All the above work was the easy and least time consuming part.  I needed to get an understanding of culture, and no amount of random articles from Google can give me that. I needed to listen to actual people from that culture.  This is going to sound ridiculous, but Twitter and TikTok were invaluable here.  Following activists and people sharing their culture in those spaces opened me up not just to their concerns and culture, but exposed me to articles and videos they were sharing which were almost invariably more insightful than the ones I found on my own. I even had the privilege of briefly sharing messages with a few people of Cheyenne descent and asking questions about what I was writing for these characters.  I obtained so much information and refining of my NPCs.  More importantly, I was able to drop some money into KoFi accounts and Nonprofits, because the work they were putting in deserved compensation. 

    That was the majority of my six months of prep time. NPCs were created with special attention made to avoid stereotypes (or if they verged on one, making sure they had dimensions that made them people and not just a stereotype).  I practiced speaking as them in my car or while I did dishes, or while I was in the shower. Honestly, I do that with most of my NPCs.  There is a delightful video (starts around 1:20:00) of Aabriya Iyengar, Matthew Mercer, and Brennan Lee Mulligan talking about DMing where they have a long aside about "Voices Time," that, while humorous, really drives home the amount of work it takes to embody a lifelike NPC. Watching my players falter when I slid in a "colonizers" joke I'd heard several Native TikTokers repeat while talking to a Werewolf Kinfolk in the game was a great payoff to the research, but it also changed the tenor of their attempts to relate to the character. 

    And in the end, the characters ended up meeting essentially only 3 of the dozen or so Native NPCs I had created.  There were four and a half scenes (the half was a phone call) where they interacted, but the NPCs felt real to me.  I had honest reactions as them.  I understood and was able to communicate to my players the context in which their decisions were made.  I was able to share parts of the amazing learning journey I had gone on with my friends, and we all learned a little bit about the culture which we were only briefly touching on.

    The important part is that I haven't abandoned what I discovered and learned in those six months.  Those activists and cultural social media personalities I followed haven't been unfollowed now that I don't have an immediate use for them.  Those are voices I continue to boost and support (silently, without inserting myself as an expert).  Now that I understand some of the injustices done to them, I'm better able to speak up when I encounter racism or bigotry over Native concerns. I have more empathy, and am taking that moving forward. 

    I'm lucky to have several Black people in my life who are also gamers, so bringing respectful representations in the NPCs I run in my games takes less overall effort since I have people I can just talk to and don't need to search for information (and have more passive familiarity over all), and in the past several years I've also started passively following, listening to, and researching other cultures.  Again, donating to KoFis and Nonprofits is essential work in regards to this. Part of being a good GM is presenting a world for your players, and, especially since the majority of the games I run are set in variations of the real world, it is imperative not to treat NPCs of cultural backgrounds that differ from your own like a vacation in that space, stereotypes, or set dressing or diversity for the sake of diversity.  

    No world is a cultural monolith. As people who present and create those worlds, not taking into account the differences in those worlds and addressing them with dignity and reverence does a disservice to our players, our work, and especially to those who identify with those differences.