RHoD Addendum - The Ideology of the Red Hand

Hey folks!

This is a post I've been thinking about for a while, as discussed in my History of the Vale post. My original vision for it was going through the history of Weimar Germany and trying to map that onto the History of the Vale, in order to help draw out the parallel of the Red Hand as Fascists. Unfortunately, I don't have time for the amount of research that would take, so I had decided not to post about it.

And then I saw a post claiming to discuss the Red Hand's ideology that I think fundamentally destroys the module. I'm not going to link it, because I am not trying to start beef, and I don't want people going and arguing with this person (if their group is having fun, they can do whatever they want! I'm not here to tell them how to run their game), but I will be quoting from it at length so you can probably find it if you really try. This post is not about drama, it's about thinking through the underlying ideology of the Red Hand and, therefore, better understanding both how to roleplay their members and how to flesh out the world around them.

Let's jump in!

"Sympathetic" Villains

This post has two contradictory arguments that the Red Hand puts forward. There is a third line, basically that the Hand are religious fanatics - I agree with this one, but don't think that it can reasonably explain their behavior. Religious fanaticism is a method used to enact a political agenda, it does not create that agenda. It follows from the material conditions/forces, it does not create them.

So, what are those two core lines that it puts forward?

Goblins Are Oppressed

First, that goblinoids have been oppressed throughout history, and are fighting back: "After suffering all these millennia being called monsters, hunted down and burnt to the stake, the creatures of Khulkor Zhul want to get revenge on the humans and the "civilised" races." This is reminiscent of the pogroms that targeted Jewish folks (including some of my ancestors) throughout Europe, of witch burnings, and of the lynching of Black folks in the so-called USA. Strong associations.

As for their deeper motivation, Wyrmlord Ulwai tries to win the PCs over with this speech:

To end this world and bring upon a new one, a better one. A world where the so called monsters may live with their bellies full and with family around them. Where everyone would be welcomed and accepted. Who would be better to symbolise such a world if not for the Mother, the personification of change, birth and life. But the greater the change one desires, the greater must be the applied force to change direction. Tell me, if your perfect world was an arm's reach away, would you not try to reach it? Even if it was with a bloodied Red Hand?

And from the conclusion, "the true purpose of the Khulkor Zhul is to create a world where the "monsters" and everyone else can live in peace."

I call bullshit.

But before we get into that, let's examine the other line here.

Goblins are "Uncivilized"

From the first quote again, "the creatures of Khulkor Zhul want to get revenge on the humans and the "civilised" races." Similar language is repeated a few more times: "the majority is still made up of bloodthirsty warriors who view this war not as means of change, but only as revenge on the civilised races. Azarr Khul is no full though and gladly cultivates this hatred. Wars after all are won by soldiers not philosophers." and "Tldr; while most soldiers are made into religious fanatics of the Mother(Tiamat) that seek only to destroy the civilised races.... Azarr Khul will destroy the Vale with his fanatics in order to rebuild it as he sees fit."

Over and over, the author refers to the people of the vale as the "civilised" [sic] races, implying the goblinoids are uncivilized. This implication is reinforced by saying that all they want is revenge, that they want to destroy everything, that they just hate the people of the vale, and, of course, that they are in fact "monsters" and "creatures" rather than people at all.

In other words, this post argues that not only have the people of Elsir Vale treated goblinoids like bloodthirsty monsters who deserve to be put down (in a manner reminiscent of countless oppressed groups throughout history), but they were right to do so. And the PCs should continue to do so, presumably, given that the whole rest of the module is about killing goblins and their monstrous allies for the greater good.

On Anti-Colonial Violence

There is, to some degree, a parallel in this post to anti-colonial violence (not a good one, but I'll get to that later):

Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one’s native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter’s weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.

- Franz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth 

In a colonial setting, the only path to freedom is violent resistance - colonizers will not simply grant the colonized their freedom, and indeed will violently repress any steps towards freedom. If the anti-colonial movement is to survive, it must fight back, and indeed in the act of fighting back the colonized reclaim their humanity, which the colonizers consistently try to strip them of!

You could honestly re-write The Red Hand of Doom to follow along these lines, and I think that'd be a pretty sick campaign! Marcia of Traverse Fantasy wrote up a one-shot around those lines, I've included similar themes / trope inversions in past campaigns, and I think a full campaign about a colonized people rising up against their colonizers would be sick as hell!

So, how does that map onto The Red Hand of Doom? Are the goblinoids a good analogy for the colonized or the oppressed? ... not that we can tell from the text? Certainly, the book has some of the same racist stereotyping that suffuses D&D's history, reproduces harmful and inaccurate colonial myths and structures, and seems in many ways seems to take for granted the idea that "monstrous" folk (like goblinoids, lizardfolk, and even giants/manticores/etc.) are inherently evil and deserve only death. But there is no textual evidence that goblinoids are indigenous to Elsir Vale and that humans/et al. are colonizers who either forced them out or subjugated them. You could add that backstory if you wanted, but in my mind that makes the module morally unsalvageable.

I Hate Hollywood

This post stems from the frustrating trend in media to create sympathetic villains, not by giving them a personally tragic backstory but by making them standins for legitimate causes that "go to far." This trend, while extremely vexing, is also deeply unsurprising given the deep ties between Hollywood and the military and the propagandistic power of film. Of course the people in power want to paint the status quo as good and worth defending, and all those who oppose it as power-hungry madmen who just want to watch the world burn!

By painting the villains as champions of a just cause who just "go to far," both Hollywood writ large and this post in particular seek to invalidate legitimate resistance struggles and defend the status quo. Sure, it might not be perfect, but at least it's not racially-coded barbarians seeking to destroy everything good and holy! They must be put down!

If this post's historical analysis and the stated goals of the Red Hands leadership are to be taken seriously, then they are the good guys! The PCs should immediately abandon humanity to fight back against literal millennia of violent oppression and subjugation, and any answer that does not contend with that is morally bankrupt. The post tries to prevent this by making literal the same racist tropes that have plagued D&D since its inception and saying "nuh uh, most of them are idiots and just wanna kill people, so you gotta stop them!"

By and large, it is not the oppressed who cause harm, but the oppressors. Even when the oppressed strike back, even when that strike is messy and wild with lots of collateral damage, it pales in comparison to the sheer mechanized violence perpetrated against them. There have absolutely been cases where a people have had genocide committed against them, only to turn around and commit genocide right back (either against the guilty party or against an unrelated people, as we are seeing right now), but that only happens when the balance of power shifts and the formerly-oppressed are oppressed no longer. It only happens when a struggle for national-liberation turns into a struggle for national-dominance, a world not where "everyone would be welcomed and accepted" as the post's version of  Ulwai claims, but rather a world where a new group has control.

I think there is a version of this post that could be salvageable, one that tried to deal with the cycle of violence, one where the enemy leaders were not deluded fools but rather rational actors, one that took seriously the material analysis of history, one that was not a simple black-and-white battle of good vs. evil - but that campaign would not be The Red Hand of Doom. It might start there, but it would have to be re-constructed from the ground up.

Let Villains Be Villains

For my money, The Red Hand of Doom only functions as written if the Red Hand are actually villains. The easiest way to evoke that in the modern day is to make them Fascists! (Though Fascism is largely the internal mechanisms of Capitalism re-asserting themselves in periods of crisis, so it's only somewhat applicable to pre-capitalist society like most D&D settings.) You can also make villains capitalists more broadly (in some settings), or other people with power, or even just people who are personally pissed off for whatever reason, but let your villains be villains! They might have qualities that make them personally sympathetic, but a well-intentioned-but-flawed character is not a villain. They might be an antagonist depending on context, but they probably don't deserve to die, and that's probably what will happen if you put them against your PCs in a combat-focused game.

I think there's a really interesting inversion of The Red Hand of Doom where Elsir Vale is inhabited by "monstrous" folk and the Red Hand are humans or similar trying to colonize it, but I don't think you need to go that far to make the Red Hand feel like genuine baddies that deserve to be defeated. I think it is possible to imagine the world complexly enough and take the material analysis of the in-world history seriously enough to bypass most of these problems. And, indeed, that'something I've been thinking about for literal years!

So, what does this look like in my campaign?

The Red Hand's Ideology

In my campaign, the Kulkor Zhul are fascists. I think it's perfectly valid to draw from Alexander the Great or other conquerors of pre-capitalist history as well, but I've spent a lot of time studying fascism so that's what makes the most sense to me. According to history Robert Paxton:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

- Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism

I think this definition misses key aspects of the development of fascism as well as its relationship to capitalism, but it works well enough for our purposes here today (especially since Elsir Vale is not really capitalist).

As mentioned in my history post, the Goblinblood Wars that ended about 10 years ago are our analogue to the Great War, World War I. Not only did it impact many NPCs the PCs encounter, however, but it also created a focus point for the Kulkor Zhul. 200 years ago, goblin-folk were strong! They not only pushed back the encroachment of humans (Rhestilor was expansionist, and over-extended following its losses in the Thornwastes), but they tore the great city of Rhest down and flooded it, preventing it from ever again rising. Now, even these lesser humans were able to defeat the goblins thanks to a lack of unity and the degeneracy of modern goblin culture. Or so Azarr Kul preaches to his followers.

I'm not going to go too deep into the internal dynamics of goblin society - that was my original plan, to draw from Weimar Germany to set the stage for the rise of fascism - but I simply don't have the time, and it's unlikely that (during the course of this module, at least) the PCs will spend a lot of time in the heart of goblin society. If I'm wrong, and they do, I'll give it my best shot!

One way or another, Azarr Khul began uniting the tribes, he took over the priesthood, and he killed everyone who opposed him (many after initial alliances of convenience), and now has the entirety of goblin society (or at least those who are alive and remain in his domain) convinced that they have been victimized (importantly: this is not true) and that they deserve "living space" - to expand, dominate, and control. IThis version of fascism is absolutely religious in nature, but it ties that religious belief to the purified ideal of "The People of the Dragon," with Azarr Kul as their leader, "The Son of the Dragon." It is time, they say, for the People of the Dragon to take their rightful place in the sun (despite goblins being better adapted to the underground), as rulers of all within their sight.

Complicating Racial Narratives

Because of the long history of racism in D&D, it's important to me that we flesh out the "monsterfolk" of the setting to be more than their stereotypes, and make clear that hobgoblins are not the problem. Fascism is. It can be very easy, in a module about a war against hobgoblins, to start hating hobgoblins, and I want to make that as difficult for the players as possible.

First things first, because I started with The Fall of Plaguestone, I had Phinnick the goblin make clear that he was a refugee from internal cleansings perpetrated by the Red Hand several years earlier. Fascists tend to start with internal ideological purification - "first they came for the socialists" and all that - before they move into outward expansion. I plan to also have groups of goblin (and hobgoblin) refugees hiding in the blackfens for similar reasons, though most refugees would likely have fled north or west given the history of contention with Elsir Vale.

In addition, it is not unlikely that, at some point, the PCs will travel north to the Endless Plains, where there will be not only centaur nomads and human "barbarians" (yikes), but also orc tribes that the PCs will likely want to make allies out of! I might include some Gnolls too, as the book mentions - in theory, all those years back it was Gnolls who Yael and co. fought off, so it'd be cool to see what they're up to several hundred years later / turn them into another potential ally.

Finally, it's important to me that we not paint Elsir Vale as a perfect utopia. It shouldn't be so horrifying that the PCs want to burn it to the ground, but neither should the impression be that humans et al. are moral paragons. First off, they are racist! Not horribly so, but I've had several people say pretty rude things about Phinnick, and there was a point where the PCs sent him on ahead to deliver a message and they didn't trust him enough to believe it wasn't some trick, thus delaying the evacuation and forcing the PCs to deal more directly. IMO, a pretty historically typical racism against a group they've historically fought.

I have also made a point of emphasizing human threats to the party (Vilree in Plaguestone, Lady Dagger, and bandits, so far), and will be doing even more of that in Brindol/etc.

P.S. Just for kicks I give all my hobgoblins British accents just to drive home the Imperialist themes while also challenging usual assumptions about accents/etc.

I am not claiming that my campaign is perfect, and anyone who does it differently is the worst, but I do think that it's important to think deeply, critically, and materially about how our worlds function and what narratives our stories reproduce. If I did anything dumb or wrong, please tell me! Criticism is a gift.

That's all for now - I'll be fleshing out various sandbox areas soon, possibly starting with Brindol given that my PCs are heading there before Rhest. Not sure where they'll head after that, but I've already begun light work on the Blackfens and Hammerfist Holds. See y'all then!