Abstract
This article investigates gaming paratexts related to the popular tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) as heuristics. Gaming paratexts are accessible communication and media artifacts that influence what new players learn about games as cultural and ludic texts. In this work we examine ‘official' and ‘unofficial' gaming paratexts about drow, D&D’s dark elves. We highlight authorship, circulation, and accessibility as key impact factors, then identify common themes such as insider knowledge, transmission of expertise, and knowledge acquisition. This analysis reveals how – beyond information about the game itself – gaming paratexts can lead players to receive biased or incomplete impressions of issues with D&D, such as racism within the game system. We find that this specific form of online discourse about TTRPGs influences popular conceptions about D&D and often parallels forms of fannish practise through its affective connections, citational politics, and modal variety.
The classic tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is currently experiencing a popular resurgence. This has been impacted by factors including its portrayal in mass media texts like Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016 – present); the growing popularity of ‘actual play’ shows, in which players record and broadcast their gameplay sessions (e.g., Critical Role [2015 – present] and Dimension 20 [2018 – present]); the Covid-19 pandemic and stay-at-home orders encouraging new avenues of socialization (Hughes, 2021; Scrivens, 2021), such that D&D sales jumped 33% (Whitten, 2021); and current parent company Wizards of the Coast’s ongoing push to make D&D a transmedia product (Perkins, 2021). Additional visibility has also come from mainstream remediations of D&D, including Paramount’s film Honor Among Thieves (2023) and Larian Studios’s videogame Baldur’s Gate III (2023). Through such iterations, Dungeons & Dragons continues to develop into a transmedia experience compelling to new audiences.
Amidst its resurging popularity, though, D&D also retains a long legacy of essentializing race and gender, perpetuating stereotypical depictions of Otherness, and lionizing violence (see Garcia, 2017). Simultaneously, it remains a complex, ‘rules-intensive’ game system (Snow, 2008) with an extensive back catalog of both products and also intricate, long-running metanarratives concerning its most popular storyworlds. Consequently, new players often need accessible – and updated – entry points into playing the tabletop game. Wizards of the Coast has tried to meet this demand with offerings like starter sets, free guides, simple adventures, and the digital toolkit D&D Beyond. Despite these official avenues, though, it is easier than ever for interested audiences to turn to a quick Google search with their pressing questions about D&D, counting on what Mia Consalvo (2007) has termed the ‘paratextual industries’ of gaming (9). Consalvo’s term delineates the ‘peripheral industries surrounding games’ (9), which produce reviews, strategy guides, hacks, and similar (para)texts that offer readers ‘more knowledge and help with games’ through tips, cheats, and other ‘insider knowledge’ (10). Such texts, and the industries creating them, bridge gaps between the expertise of long-time gamers and the interest but inexpertise of new ones. However, simultaneous to delivering this ludological information – that is, information based on the game, its content, and its rules – gaming paratexts also reveal and model their writers’ (sub)cultural values and community norms.
Gaming paratexts, we argue, become particularly significant for D&D, which is simultaneously a game and also a ‘system for cultural production’ that advances hegemonic depictions of power, gender, and race as well as adventure (Garcia, 2017, 235). The broader genre of tabletop games are also both meaning-making texts and a type of media – they ‘create and complicate messages’ (Booth, 2021, 6). However, what we explore in this article are the various ways that meaning can also be actualized through gaming paratexts. We use this term – ‘gaming paratexts’, not game paratexts – deliberately in order to highlight how these artifacts concern various processes of playing D&D, even as most also explore intricacies of the game system.
While the recent explosion of interest in D&D has drawn attention from new players, it has also revitalized popular discourse about D&D’s flaws, which include its foundation in violence, its quantification of race as a biological category, and its perpetuation of fantasy racializations inherited from Tolkien onward in the Anglo-centric fantasy tradition. D&D gaming paratexts impact this ongoing conversation because new players can easily access partial histories through the ‘insider knowledge’ of these works and their authors (Consalvo, 2007, 9). Likewise, we argue, these gaming paratexts betoken a clear parallel to fans’ affective but ‘affirmational’ (obsession_inc. 2009) knowledge production through sites such as wikis (Booth, 2009; Hunter, 2011; Mittell, 2009), the ‘geek journalism’ of early fanzines like Starlog (Britt, 2017), and the letter columns in science fiction magazines, where avid fans could ask detailed questions of the editor or authors (Ashley, 2000; Larbalestier, 2002). 1 Much like these predecessors, D&D-related gaming paratexts tend to evidence more than just their authors’ interests in the subject matter; additionally, they also demonstrate affective investment, expertise via experience with the hypotext, and value for the position and authority of the original texts and their authors/designers.
In this work, we situate two kinds of D&D-related gaming paratexts – official ones published through game-related avenues, and unofficial ones primarily available online – within two particulars of contemporary paratextual industries: their relative ease of access and their distinctly fannish nature. Here, official gaming paratexts are those produced by authors with close (and often commercially motivated) ties to D&D, then circulated via corporate-owned channels and targeting an audience who already play the game; meanwhile, unofficial gaming paratexts are those that lack those close, sanctioned ties to D&D and are circulated via public channels that may be accessed by audiences who do not already play the game. Despite their other differences, we note that both kinds of D&D gaming paratext exist only through the labor of a knowledgeable and engaged in-community that researches, writes, circulates, and discusses them – all practices that clearly reflect fannish production. Yet such works are rarely discussed as fan creations, a gap that obscures their affective connections to – and even biases regarding – their shared subject matter.
As examples of official and unofficial gaming paratexts, we consider: first, articles on drow from Dragon, an official magazine for the D&D product catalog, and second, articles on drow made freely available online via public sites or digital infrastructures. At first glance, this second type especially may seem to hold great potential as sites of cultural intervention into hegemonic depictions of race, gender, violence, and more. Instead, we find, they more often tend to support those hegemonic depictions, and may do so for a mixed audience of long-time players and newcomers to the hobby. That is, the sites that could be critical typically are not – and in this way, they create an echo chamber effect where designers, players, and community members often reinforce problematic stereotypes and essentializing texts through mutual, uncritical referencing. Thus, our study reveals key limitations of ground-up media interventions and continues complicating notions of popular fan discourse as progressive (see Stanfill, 2019).
We argue that the accessibility of paratexts like these is instrumental to understanding current discourse(s) regarding cultural productions, whether TTRPGs like D&D or other media products for which fan discourse shapes popular interpretation. For example, while there is ample material in official D&D texts that can be analyzed to discuss and support claims of racism in the game – which is a common critique that makes valid points
To demonstrate how the relative ease of access and distinctly fannish nature of D&D gaming paratexts together impact more casual audiences’ perceptions of this game system, we focus here on examples featuring drow, or D&D’s dark elves. Although not necessarily as well-known outside TTRPG and gaming communities as, say, orcs, drow are often cited as paradigmatic examples of systemic issues like racism in D&D (see Puls, 2017; Johnson, 2020; Dashiell, 2022b), and they often recur in conversations among players themselves as well (see DePass ctd. in Tito, 2022). 2 However, D&D lore about drow has been developed across decades of texts, which represent multiple genres (accessories, adventures, novels, etc.) and often iterate lore depending on the needs of the latest edition or perceived market interest (see Alberto, 2024). Consequently, discussions about drow as emblematic of racism in D&D often depend on passing examples from a contradictory metatext, an extensive back catalogue, and/or players’ own personal experiences of play. So for new players, this ongoing discourse may be most easily accessible via gaming paratexts – whose fannish nature and authorship, however, influence what information they contain and how it is presented. Thus, what D&D gaming paratexts say or don’t say about drow – and, by extension, about racism, bioessentialism, etc. – can prime new players’ reactions to actually encountering such issues in the D&D game system itself.
Ultimately, the present state of Dungeons & Dragons as a transmedia text necessitates considering where and how new audiences begin engaging with it, since any entry-point will present D&D from a specific angle and in a particular light. A beginner set will present D&D as easy to play and a fun way to connect with friends, while a popular culture text like Stranger Things may use D&D as vehicle for its own narrative – and gaming paratexts may do several things, ranging from guiding the reader through creating an optimized player character to bemoaning what the author sees as the current state of D&D as ‘woke’ (a term appropriated from Black communities [Robinson, 2022] and now leveraged to mean overtly, artificially focused on social justice issues). Gaming paratexts thus demonstrate how today’s new audiences of long-running media can begin developing their understanding of it – not just via the text itself, but also -- or even instead -- via paratexts that shape later experiences of the actual text (Gray, 2010). Moreover, the diversity and range of these avenues available for new audiences to begin making sense of Dungeons & Dragons illustrate a mechanism that should be taken into greater consideration with any contemporary media analysis: namely, how paratexts of various authorships come to serve as heuristics for consumption and engagement.
Unboxing D&D, drow, and gaming paratexts
Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) is a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) that lets players participate in ‘quantified, interactive storytelling’ (Schick, 1991, 7). Combining formulas from D&D rulebooks and random results from rolling dice, players create fantasy characters with abilities such as strength and wisdom, plus capacities such as casting magic. The dungeon master (DM) then describes a fantasy setting, its inhabitants, and a narrative taking place there; players decide how their characters interact with these elements and roll dice to generate random numbers that, when combined with their numeric scores for abilities and capacities, determine the characters’ success in adventuring, fighting monsters, and resolving challenges. Authorized D&D texts provide various kinds of information to facilitate such gameplay: D&D rulebooks help players to create their characters and DMs to adjudicate the game, while adventures offer the ‘script’ of ready-made stories (Stricklin, 2021), novelizations provide worldbuilding and cross-marketing (MacCallum-Stewart, Stenros, and Björk, 2018), and videogames or movies can offer more accessible entry points into playing the tabletop version (Perkins, 2021).
Drow first come up in D&D during the late 1970s. Early mentions emphasize their mystery, as when the first Monster Manual claims ‘The “Black Elves,” or drow, are only legend. They purportedly dwell deep beneath the surface in a strange subterranean realm. The drow are said to be as dark as faeries are bright and as evil as the latter are good. Tales picture them as weak fighters but strong magic-users’ (Gygax, 1977/78, 39). Successive D&D titles then build upon this early portrayal of drow as mysterious, inherently evil enemies. The adventure Against the Giants and its sequels (collectively GDQ) adds details of demon worship and political subterfuge, and this lore is developed further across game products like the 1981 Fiend Folio, 1985 Unearthed Arcana, 1991 Drow of the Underdark, and more into the present. D&D’s lore about drow is also developed in narrative texts like R.A. Salvatore’s Drizzt Do’Urden series (1988-present), Elaine Cunningham’s Starlight & Shadows trilogy (1995-2003), the multi-authored War of the Spider Queen series (2002-2005), and Lisa Smedman’s Lady Penitent trilogy (2007-2008). Salvatore’s novels in particular are highly visible, and many have been national bestsellers; his drow hero Drizzt Do’Urden also remains one of the most widely recognizable D&D characters, often recurring in transmedia tie-ins (e.g., the 2021 ‘Summer of Drizzt’ event; see Zambrano, 2021a).
The scope and intertextuality of authorized D&D texts like those named above can make piecing together overarching narratives or locating specific details difficult, even for long-time players. Still, some diegetic ‘facts’ about drow remain widely known, often via reputation or word of mouth, even if many people are not actually familiar with the abovementioned titles. Namely: drow are evil, corrupted elves who live underground in matriarchal societies organized around worship of a demonic spider goddess and built upon slave labor. Drow women control their church-state and practice sadistic, magical rituals that victimize both drow men and slaves of other races. Drow have dark skin, white hair, and an aversion to sunlight. Those few who can break away from the norms of their people continue to wrestle with their evil nature, and they are typically shunned and killed by surface societies. In recent years, Wizards of the Coast has announced their intent to portray drow in a new light (Wizards of the Coast, 2020) and made sweeping changes to this backstory (Crawford, 2021), which are reflected in Salvatore’s latest novels and other D&D texts featuring Drizzt (Zambrano 2021b). 3 Still, older versions of drow remain popular, visible, and even prominent in D&D spaces. Moreover, drow have certainly influenced portrayals of dark elves in other TTRPGs, such as Pathfinder, and in video games like World of Warcraft, Skyrim, and God of War – akin to how D&D’s depiction of the hag, a monster from pre-existing cultural traditions, then provided a quantified blueprint for portrayals of hags in later digital games (Stang and Trammell, 2020).
Given the depictions summarized above, drow are often cited as a paradigmatic example of racism in D&D. This last is a catch-all phrase that may reference the game’s replication of negative tropes and stereotypes about real-world cultures in fantasy guises; and/or its long-running mechanic of racial essentialism, where a character’s abilities – and in early editions, even their vocation or ‘class’ – are tied to their race (see Garcia, 2017; Stang and Trammell, 2020); and/or various creators’ sometimes ham-fisted attempts to revise these precedents, initially created by white authors for assumed white audiences. And with drow specifically, critics have pointed out that D&D’s dark elves conflate signifiers of Blackness with inherent evil, aggressive female sexuality, and even demon worship and slave labor (see DePass ctd. in Tito, 2022; French, 2023; Huddleston, 2021; Stang, 2021). Other scholarship cites drow as relevant but passing examples of how D&D intertwines race and monstrosity (see Ferguson, 2021; Johnson, 2020; Poor, 2012). Dashiell (2022b) also documents how drow are discussed among certain gaming communities in ways that see usually white, male gamers positioning themselves as societal outsiders or minorities oppressed by new, unreasonable demands for political correctness in their leisure activities. Few, though, delve deeply into that plethora of hypotexts about drow or draw on these to show intertextual connections between procedural and narrative depictions of D&D’s dark elves (see Alberto, 2024). For instance, LaPointe (2020) does argue that fans have pushed the needle on revising racist content in D&D, broadly speaking, but then positions Drizzt as an example of improvement – which ignores the fact that Salvatore’s novels primarily lionize their titular character as an exception among drow, which ‘places Drizzt squarely into the racist popular culture trope ‘You are a credit to your race’ where people are seen to supersede the inherent flaws of their race’ (Sturtevant, 2017), par. 29). Likewise, LaPointe's claim also underaccounts for how, due to their popularity, Salvatore’s novels have arguably done the most to popularize these problematic depictions of drow, including among audiences who do not already play D&D.
However, a critical piece we find missing in this conversation is that, as D&D re-enters the zeitgeist, gaming paratexts introduce these complex topics and long-running conversations to new audiences in bite-sized chunks. Moreover, these gaming paratexts do so by drawing selectively – and according to their authors’ own fannish knowledge and interests – from both a vastly under-mapped landscape of primary texts as well as long-running community conversations about them. The invisible dimensions of this phenomenon are particularly worth noting when such paratexts significantly impact the impressions of incoming audiences who may not even know such primary underpinnings exist, let alone how or why changes were instantiated.
Academic scholarship on D&D as cultural product(ion) is still racing to catch up with developments like these. For one thing, TTRPGs have only gained scholarly cachet in the last few decades (e.g., Fine, 1983). Following its sociological beginnings, scholarship on TTRPGs has drawn from particular fields, including performance studies (Mackay, 2002), rhetoric (Grouling Cover, 2010), psychology (Bowman, 2010), game studies (Tresca, 2011), and more (see Zagal and Deterding [2018] for an extensive overview of disciplinary approaches). Meanwhile, although studying paratextuality and/of gameplay is an important means of categorizing game-related material (see Arnaudo, 2020; Booth, 2015; Consalvo, 2017), this approach is not as common in D&D scholarship specifically, which more often turns to Jessica Hammer’s (2007) foundational model of primary, secondary, and tertiary texts. However, we look to paratexts – that is, creative works associated with but distinct from a media text (Gray, 2010) – in order to emphasize the public-facing nature of these works as well as the way they have less straightforward impacts on gameplay, which are not fully captured by focusing on distinctions among primary authorized texts, secondary DM creativity, and tertiary gameplay as Hammer does.
Beyond media studies, an important area of research that has explored paratextual industries in depth is fan studies, a field dedicated to investigating and positioning engaged media audiences as participatory and culturally productive. For instance, Henry Jenkins et al. (2006) have shown that contemporary interactions with media such as games are often playful and provide ‘strong incentives for creative expression and active participation’ (7). And, as Joost Raessens (2014) argues, play is fundamental to contemporary cultural activities: from cell phones to social media to the gamification of education, the ‘ludification of culture’ is a significant shift in the way everyday people play with their media (p. 95). For both Jenkins and his collaborators as well as Raessens, the way that paratexts interact with ‘main’ texts can be seen as playful – and similarly, those who engage with or participate in paratexts are often doing so in a playful manner.
Therefore, if what Consalvo calls ‘paratextual industries’ (and the paratexts they produce) play a critical role in how new audiences begin interacting with D&D, often even before encountering authorized ‘primary texts’ (Hammer, 2007) like game rulebooks, then examining these fannish discourses helps us unpack the heuristics by which players come to understand the game. And in that case, what these gaming paratexts say about topics like drow influences what players know and how they participate in these traditions in their own games, even without realizing the wealth of texts, discourses, and insider knowledge underlying them. Put simply: reading paratextual discourse about D&D as fannish reveals certain ideologies at play behind popular discourse and reveals how these can be replicated among new audiences who may not be aware of those ideologies and their history.
A brief note on methods
Given its focus not on games, play, or even game texts, but instead upon gaming paratexts, this project draws from multiple disciplines, including game studies, fan studies, and information science. Consequently, we have also employed methods from each of these areas to help guide our location, investigation, and analysis of these materials.
Game studies often calls for close, sustained study of specific game components to facilitate critical analysis (Consalvo and Dutton, 2006), but also supports a range of qualitative, quantitative, and mixed approaches (Lankoski and Björk, 2015). Meanwhile, common approaches in fan studies include ethnography (Jenkins, 1992), autoethnography (Monaco, 2010; Popova, 2020), and netnography (Chen, 2024; Perkins, 2012), as well as combinations of these or pairings of one with a method such as textual analysis – a preponderance speaking to the fact that fan studies scholars are often also fans of their subject matter. Finally, information retrieval (IR) and IR research comprise a long-standing interest for information science (Fidel, 1993), which has theorized important connections between information need and information retrieval as a ‘knowledge formulation/acquisition system’ (Cole, 2011, 1216).
Our project here occurs at a nexus of these interests. As game studies suggests, we pay close and careful attention to specific parts of an existing system: here our subject matter, drow, constitutes a character type and arguably a part of the analog interface of D&D. As fan studies often does (though not without criticism – see Popova, 2020), we also draw from our own deep and affectively driven knowledge of that subject matter, in order to uncover insider knowledge for analysis. And finally, we perform information retrieval ourselves, both to locate these paratexts for analysis but also to model the IR process that audiences new to D&D and its critical conversations may undertake. This combined method occurs in slightly different ways for both official and unofficial paratexts, and thus, will be explicated further as we turn to each type.
Finally, we quote freely from the gaming paratexts located here, since we do not find them indicative of how fan studies scholars such as Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson (2012), building on danah boyd (2005)’s term ‘layered publics’, argue that ‘plenty of fans who post publicly still expect certain forms of privacy’ because ‘they consider themselves part of a closed subculture that has traditionally existed under the radar and whose members have followed specific privacy rules’ (p. 46). While earlier examples such as Dragon articles certainly reached a limited subcultural audience, in general gaming paratexts are written and posted for broader public readerships – much more so than fan artefacts such as personal social media accounts or fanfiction archives, to which these discussions of ethics and citation are typically applied.
Designer-authored, player-oriented: ‘official’ D&D paratexts
For ‘official’ D&D paratexts we turn to Dragon, a magazine that provided source material on D&D along with sister publication Dungeon. Published by TSR, Paizo, and Wizards of the Coast at various points in its history, Dragon was released in print monthly from June 1976 through September 2007, resulting in 359 issues; it was then relaunched as a digital publication that ran through December 2013, resulting in 430 issues altogether before a ‘hiatus’ that became a full cancellation in anticipation of D&D 5e (Perkins, 2013). A successor, Dragon+, launched online in December 2015 and ran for 41 issues until its cancellation in April 2022, and as of November 2022, Dragon+ content is ‘no longer available’ (D&D Beyond Staff, 2022, par. 1) as Wizards continues building out D&D Beyond as its all-in-one digital toolkit and content repository.
Dragon was ‘Part fanzine, part gaming resource’ and part ‘social locale to reinforce game canon and discuss disputes’ with regular input from D&D creators and designers (Dashiell, 2022a, p. 621). 4 Issues contained a broad spectrum of material, ranging from sword-and-sorcery fiction by authors including Fritz Leiber and Andre Norton in early issues (Peterson, 2012), to columns where D&D designers answered player questions, as well as articles and features contributed by authors who were often D&D designers too. Credits to Forgotten Realms creator Ed Greenwood, Eberron creator Keith Baker, and novelization authors like R.A. Salvatore are visible throughout, and many later designers began their formal affiliation with D&D as Dragon contributors (Peterson, 2012). Consequently, paratextual material from Dragon offers an illustrative look at contemporaneous discourses about D&D (Dashiell, 2022a).
17 articles on drow from Dragon magazine (1986-2005).
The 17 articles identified in this fashion tended to stem from an authorial perspective that possessed knowledge; they also tended to address a reader’s perspective that was seeking knowledge, whether as a player or as a DM. This approach sometimes conflated the reader, presumably someone who already plays or wants to play D&D, with the fictional character they might play. All also provided Dragon readers with procedural information about drow – that is, information that will make these dark elves playable in a game of D&D.
Alberto then close-read and analyzed these results, noting emerging themes regarding the revelation and distribution of knowledge, the evocation and conditional sharing of authority, and the promise of novelty, which we now discuss further.
Ficto-informational approach
All 17 of these articles were informational, or working to apprise readers of ‘facts’ about drow. These facts might be ludological (i.e., game-based), focusing on drow as part of the gestalt that is the D&D game system; concurrently or alternately, these facts might be diegetic and quasi-narrative, in which case they focus on drow as part of a storyworld, or fictive setting. With one exception – the oldest article we found, which was a combined review-and-editorial – most of these results were written akin to fictionalized reference works, and thus make use of specific rhetorical features like active voice and instructional tone.
Similarly, most results address readers as if they are D&D players and/or DMs. There is also the implication that authors are experts on D&D topics, and readers are on their way to becoming experts by reading these articles, which they are doing in order to expand their cultural capital among fellow players or in present games. The article ‘Ask the Drow’, co-authored by long-time creator Ed Greenwood, takes this a step further in a way that Greenwood is well-known for: information here is framed as if the authors have been visited by one of the fictional characters they are writing about.
Another common informational element is the focus on making drow playable. Several articles included metatextual elements such as stat blocks (i.e., tables or columns that visualize a creature’s skills and abilities) for drow characters, classes, weapons, or equipment – the inclusion of which gives DMs the ability to introduce drow enemies in their own games quickly and easily. A handful of these articles also include sidebars offering readers ideas for how these concepts could be implemented with an individual player character (i.e., either a drow or someone who will fight drow) or across a D&D campaign. Two include maps, and one includes diagrams. These forms of knowledge production further highlight the authors’ expertise, which is now being passed along for readers to implement in their own games.
Novelty and antagonism
Since the late 1970s, drow have been framed in terms of their novelty to D&D players, their reversal of player and genre expectations, and their lurid opposition to ‘good’ fictional races and societies (see Mona et al. 2004). These 17 articles from Dragon carry on that tradition in various ways.
In procedural and ludological terms, several introduce and discuss new drow abilities that DMs can implement in their own D&D games. In his ‘Tone Down The Demihumans’, Lenard Lakofka discusses how drow have magical abilities that will give player characters eyesight capacities that give undue advantages at night or belowground. Eric Oppen’s ‘Children of the Spider Goddess’ from January 1988 may be the first D&D text that provides information on drow society in more narrative form, barely predating Salvatore’s first Drizzt novel as well as Greenwood’s campaign settings. Elsewhere Roger Raupp’s co-authored ‘Elves of the Dusk’ discusses how drow warfare can be taken airborne, creating new threats to player characters.
In quasi-narrative terms, several articles also expand upon drow culture, society, and/or history. For example Robin Laws’ ‘Flesh for Lolth’, published in the already drow-themed issue Dragon #298, is infamous – and still widely available online – for introducing lurid descriptions of drow sexuality and pregnancies, plus emphasizing details of homicidal drow society. Eric Cagle’s articles from the same issue also expand on punitive and carceral elements of drow society, while Keith Baker’s ‘Umbragen’ works to differentiate the drow of his steampunk setting Eberron from their counterparts in the high fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms.
Several articles also combine these ludological and narrative approaches. Examples in this vein often open with a quasi-narrative summary – this is what drow are, these are why drow naming conventions are hard, etc. – before proceeding to more reference-like coverage of concepts that a DM might use in-game as well as procedural information like stat blocks, maps, diagrams, and/or tables.
Intertextual
Most of these articles are written in dialogue with other D&D materials. Such references are not fully promotional, though they can certainly be understood as incentivization for readers to purchase game products. Of equal interest to us, though, is how this strategy presumes both that readers can access these materials, and also that they will be interested in doing so.
For instance, Greenwood and Schend’s ‘Ask the Drow’ is a deeper exploration of a location and cultural nuances introduced in Greenwood’s sourcebook Drow of the Underdark. Likewise, Richard Baker’s three-part article series is both supplement and cross-promotion for the 2002-2005 War of the Spider Queen novel series, providing character profiles and stat blocks for its cast. Then, in addition to expanding upon his steampunk setting of Eberron as tabletop players would encounter it, Keith Baker’s article also makes multiple references to the 2005 videogame Dragonshard, wherein players combat dark elves while racing to gain control of magical artefacts. Articles in this vein implicitly extol the need for authorized D&D texts, but they also offer additional information from authorial sources involved in the production of those texts.
The state of official D&D paratexts
The current state of official D&D paratexts is complicated. Dragon was discontinued in December 2013 and its successor Dragon+ was terminated in 2022, in keeping with Wizards of the Coast’s ongoing efforts to control the ‘meta-text’ of their extensive back catalog (Perkins, 2021). While these decisions removed decades’ worth of resources, they also eliminated the social space that distributed such insider knowledge and provided avenues for D&D players to converse with the game’s designers. Today, while new articles are released sporadically on D&D Beyond, the social affordances of Dragon have not been replicated, and neither has its serial release schedule or specific features (e.g., articles, columns, etc.) that functioned to create a sense of ritual or broader community. Likewise, even as official D&D materials increasingly move online, Wizards of the Coast has shown that they will summarily edit or outright delete content when facing public backlash, as they did in 2022 when criticized for language, concepts, and art of the space-faring Hadozee (Hall, 2022). These circumstances have all but eroded an entire subgenre of paratexts even though, as we see with the next section, articles from Dragon – particularly those on drow – continue to be influential and widely referenced when ‘official’ ones are no longer produced or as readily available.
Adding further complications, many articles from Dragon have been replicated and hosted elsewhere online, now utterly divorced from their initial context. (This is a separate phenomenon from the full run of Dragon as preserved on Internet Archive by assiduous readers.) For example, Laws’s ‘Flesh for Lolth’ is now hosted on an independent, fan-run website, from which it still shows up on the first or second page of results when using certain search terms related to drow. Thus for readers who are aware that there is some controversy about drow and utilize search engines trying to learn more, concepts such as Laws’s still come up quickly, now interspersed with the types of paratext we cover next.
Fan-authored, public-oriented: Unofficial D&D paratexts
We now turn to unofficial D&D paratexts, as more visible and widely available online. D&D has a long history of fan authorship, even if most scholarship and many long-time D&D players today might not use this term. For example, Jon Peterson (2012) documents, extensively, how Gary Gygax collaborated with fans and players while creating material during the early years of D&D, and how Dragon magazine actively solicited new materials developed by players who enjoyed the game (see Ch. 5 ‘The Dawn of Role-Playing’ in the first edition of Playing At the World). Similarly, well before Dragon was discontinued, D&D players were also making their own resources and social spaces online. Some of these would later be subsumed into official D&D materials, like Brian R. James’s Grand History of the Forgotten Realms, which began as a PDF on a personal website before its acquisition, expansion, and publication by Wizards of the Coast (Carbonell, 2019); others, though, would continue as autonomous resources. Today, venues dedicated to gaming specifically, and to pop culture more generally, both cover D&D through journalism aimed at casual readers. Yet simultaneously, other sites are dedicated specifically to gaming, to TTRPGs, or even to D&D itself, and thus will produce more specialized forms of insider knowledge for more invested and knowledgeable readers. There are also ‘official’ resources such as D&D Beyond, following its acquisition by Wizards of the Coast in 2022 (Vlessing, 2022), and affiliated venues like the Dungeon Masters’ Guild, though the latter focuses primarily on game products.
As previously mentioned, fan-created (para)texts have offered a central focus in previous fan studies work (Jenkins, 1992; Jenkins, 2006; Raessens, 2014). And while not fully synonymous with those works, unofficial gaming paratexts like the D&D material we explore next do largely rely on player labor, which is often freely given in venues like the aforementioned fanzines or online. As Jenkins (2006) has demonstrated, participatory culture theories help illustrate the cultural significance of fan-created paratexts.
To locate unofficial paratexts for analysis, both authors used Google to conduct information-gathering sessions, as if we were trying to learn about drow for the first time. In doing so we drew from Milena Popova’s (2018) autoethnography-influenced method for data collection, in which a scholar exploring what audiences may encounter online replicates ‘the path any fan new to a fandom, trope or pairing may follow to find [texts] that are considered good or impactful by the community’ (p. 6). In our version of this approach, we cleared our search histories and caches, then ran three searches as if looking up drow for the first time. The first search (‘about drow’) was general, and we skimmed the first several results, noting common themes among them. We then ran a second search (‘why are drow evil’), based both on the search terms recommended in Google’s 2023 ‘People Often Ask’ feature as well as on common themes and language encountered throughout our initial results. After skimming these new results and Google’s updated search term recommendations, we then decided and ran our final search (‘drow controversy’).
During each search, we documented the first 25 results that focused on ‘knowledge acquisition’ (e.g., learning either diegetic or nondiegetic information about media texts), which forms a significant part of both fan activity and gameplay (Booth, 2018). From these we discarded two dead links, one Pinterest link, and one link to a private game; we then collated the remaining 75 results and documented what kinds of resources these were. Finally, we re-read and analyzed these 75 top results in order to understand the types of information, discourse(s), and patterns that audiences trying to learn about drow may encounter through online searches focused on acquiring knowledge about them. In the following subsections, we describe these informational patterns and hypothesize how they impact casual readers trying to learn more about drow – which, we argue, is likely a microcosm of the larger project of learning about D&D.
Types of sources
We observed seven broad types of sources, namely: forums, games journalism, game guides/resources, personal sites, popular culture journalism, social networks, and wikis. Notably, this is a much wider range of forms than evidenced with the Dragon articles, and additionally, these all stem from notably different authorial contexts. That is, most are not produced by D&D-affiliated writers for D&D-specific venues, as was the case above with Dragon. Instead, some of these are produced by popular culture journalists who are fan community-adjacent at the least, and many more are outright fan-authored according to various existing traditions.
As an example, fan-authored wikis have a long history in fan studies (Booth, 2009; Hunter, 2011; Mittell, 2009). These digital texts are both encyclopedic, in that they attempt to collect as much information as possible, but also collaborative, in that anyone from the community can write, add to, or edit them. In this sense, a fan wiki – that is, a wiki that centers on a fan-favorite text or object and is maintained by that fan community – becomes a ‘narrative database’ highlighting the ‘interactive potential and actualization of the community that reads and writes on it’ (Booth, 2009, p. 92). Beyond mainstream Wikipedia, our three searches on drow turned up results from nine distinct fan wikis: the Forgotten Realms wiki, Fandom, the Greyhawk wiki, DBpedia, the Pathfinder wiki, Encyclopedia Exandria, DnDWikidot, Greyhawk Online, and WikiProject.
Likewise, the assortment of textual forms represented among our search results also brings up various degrees of authorial affect and different engagements with authorial intent. Forums, personal sites, and social networks are generally more opinion-driven and feature individual voices (see Holtz et al. 2012). Conversely, games and pop culture journalism strive to balance journalistic objectivity with subcultural expertise and enthusiasm (Perreault, and Vos 2020), while resources like game guides focus primarily on imparting procedural information (Consalvo, 2007) and wikis crowd-source credible knowledge to create new reference repositories (Mittell, 2009). These differences in aim and authorship lead to each type of source including different information, as well as valuing and framing that information in disparate ways.
For example, the fan wikis rarely referenced any form of critical conversation about drow. As of this writing, the Forgotten Realms wiki’s page on drow is almost 30,000 words long, includes 286 citations, and mentions none of the extensive critical discussion about drow. This absence reinforces how Sarah Ahmed (2013) describes citation as ‘a rather successful reproductive technology’ (par. 3) – one wherein a body of knowledge ‘can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part’ (par. 4, emphasis in original). In the particular case of the Forgotten Realms wiki, one of the most readily available sources on D&D cites primary texts that establish contentious lore and utilize controversial language about drow, race, essentialism, and gender – but it does not identify or describe these issues as such. Additionally, this wiki’s ‘Drow’ page has been locked to prevent editing – itself a sign that this has been a site of controversy in the past – but visiting readers can still access the ‘Talk’ page, which features conversations regarding its content. Nowhere on the ‘Talk’ page for drow does it mention anything other than ludological and narrative information about the drow, even though at times the conversation moves to areas that align with frequent controversy. For instance, a discussion of drow’s evil alignment could be an opportunity to discuss why racial characteristics are connected to alignment and how this plays out for a fantasy people with dark skin, but on this ‘Talk’ page, dialogue either treats drow alignment as a foregone conclusion or else justifies its existence.
Tendencies like this have significant impact on what can be learned from each type of paratextual source, particularly when readers may be newcomers to D&D and are thus seeking information about a complex topic for the first time. Likewise, while each type of paratext addressed this in distinct ways, we saw a continued trend from the ‘official’ D&D paratexts in Dragon, namely: there was still a perspective that possessed knowledge and addressed itself to a perspective that was seeking knowledge. Unlike Dragon, though, the former is not always the paratext’s author and the latter is not always the paratext’s reader: sometimes the one seeking knowledge was the first poster on a forum thread, who was then answered by multiple people with self-identified expertise in or knowledge of D&D. Alternately, the one seeking knowledge might initially be the games or pop culture journalist having communicated with industry or expert sources seeking their knowledge, and then delivering that to the article’s readers. That is, these unofficial paratexts evidence no single, universal perception of who their readers are, or why such readers might be interested in D&D and drow. Some sources, like wikis and journalism, presume an interested but potentially casual reader who may not play or referee D&D. Others, like forums and social networks, tended to presume and indeed solicit expert readers who can answer esoteric questions. Still others, like the personal sites, assume a wide range of audiences, including people who already agree with the authors’ personal opinions about D&D, as well as those who will vehemently oppose such opinions. Oftentimes there was also overlap between types, as with the combined personal site-and-gaming resource/guide from Aestus Guides, which states right up front in its ranking of playable fantasy races in the early-access version of Baldur’s Gate 3: ‘If you find this because you have googled something you will hopefully regret under the influence of rage, fear, and ethnic insecurity, I am not on your side. Find someone qualified to help you’ (par. 1).
To demonstrate, we now turn to an overview of our three searches and their results.
Search #1: ‘About drow’
The first 25 results for this initial search were largely informational, with the majority being wiki pages (n = 9), the next most common being gaming guides/resources explicating D&D gameplay (n = 8), and the remainder a sampling of forums (n = 4), games journalism (n = 3), and social networks (n = 1). A reader encountering these results while seeking information about drow is presented with an abundance of material that reiterates certain information: what drow are (i.e., subterranean-dwelling elves), what they look like (i.e., dark skin and light hair), and what it is important to know about them (i.e., they are evil and dangerous enemies). Some paratexts, like the wikis, point their readers to primary sources from which such information is garnered, and may even narrativize their own progression through primary D&D texts, as Dump Stat’s gaming guide/resource ‘Deep Dive – The Drow’ does with its walkthrough of D&D rulebooks and modules as well as its reposting of official, licensed artwork.
We also noticed a recurring theme of knowledge and expertise. In some sources, this occurred as invitations for site participants to share their own knowledge and expertise, as when a reddit thread titled ‘Let’s Talk About Drow’ (2019) created by a DM opens with ‘I’m looking to have others weigh in with their take on the race [drow] as well’, or an RPG.net user creates ‘Educate Me About Drow’ (2005) to post ‘I’m honestly interested in hearing from people who actually know all that setting information and novels…. All I know is second-hand information from what I learned in (A)D&D games and from gamers frustrated with the whole concept’ (par. 3) and a much more recent RPG.net poster (2023) asks for sources about drow ‘commoners’. The preponderance of fan wikis, which collect and collate knowledge, are implicit repetitions of this focus, and the scant journalism we encountered with this search often poses such questions upfront. For instance, in ‘D&D: Everything You Didn’t Know About Drow’ (2020), journalist Juliet Childer writes that: The recent success of the early access game Baldur's Gate 3 has brought the Drow back into the public eye. The series Critical Role also turned many new players onto the problematic race. Here's everything fans don't know about drow in Dungeons & Dragons. (par. 3)
This continuing theme, and the frequent but passing mentions of drow being evil, then inspired our second search.
Search #2: ‘Why are drow evil’
With this second search, the top 25 results flipped from being mostly informational to being largely opinion-driven. Here forums were the most commonly occurring paratext (n = 9) and gaming guides were a distant second (n = 5), with the rest being a fairly even scattering of games journalism (n = 3), wikis (n = 3), personal sites (n = 2), social networks (n = 2), and pop culture journalism (n = 1).
The predominance here of forums, wherein ‘members of certain (online) communities discuss matters of concern to the respective groups, with comparatively few social restraints’ (Holtz et al., 2012, 55), is telling. While the mostly informational paratexts from Search #1 offer fictive – and often extensively sourced – histories about the evil of drow with little debate visible, this second search turned up mostly opinions and debate about the matter. Forum findings tend to begin with requests for information, such as why drow are ‘taboo to play’ in a Quora discussion, ‘naturally evil’ in a Reddit thread, or ‘inherently evil’ in a Steam community discussion. Forum posters may also identify themselves as information seekers – whether they are ‘researching’ drow, as a Larian Studios forum discussion opens, or just want thoughts on what degree of evil drow are, as seen in results from EN World, Other Side, and a Paizo forum.
Drawing from the air of debate among our results here and the way that many authors framed their writing as responding to controversy, we then undertook our third search.
Search #3: ‘Drow controversy’
This third search led to yet another reversal of source types, this time turning up mainly pop culture journalism (n = 9) and then personal sites (n = 5), with other results being evenly mixed among forums (n = 3), games journalism (n = 2), gaming guides/resources (n = 2), social networks (n = 2), and wikis (n = 2).
Here, pop culture journalism predominates with titles such as ‘Dungeon & Dragon’s [sic] New Drizzt Books Will Work to Combat the Drows’ [sic] Racist Past’ from Gizmodo (2021), ‘“Dungeons & Dragons” Tries To Banish Racist Stereotypes’ from NPR (2020), and ‘Are orcs “racist”? The culture wars controversy tearing Dungeons & Dragons apart’ from The Telegraph (2023). Racism is immediately evident as the common theme, and is further emphasized by a swelter of personal sites and forums either taking umbrage at this ongoing conversation (e.g. D&DBeyond ‘Venting about D&D and Diversity controversy’ 2018) or offering more nuanced takes, sometimes coming from self-identified D&D fans of color (e.g. Latter Day Saint Geeks, 2021). Particularly with the former, we see echoes of Joel Penney’s (2022) contention that pop culture journalism has developed new ‘intersection[s] with hot-button social and political issues’ (pp. 8-9) – an intersection that can be seen as either, or simultaneously, a ‘rapid-fire embrace and subsequent discarding of the polarizing controversy of the day’ (p. 10) and ‘a rich discourse examining issues of inequality, discrimination, stereotyping, and more’ (p. 10). Popular culture texts are never untouched by such issues, but pop culture journalism’s coverage and framing of them can sway discourse in particular directions, as we see with these search results.
Reflections on unofficial D&D paratexts
Authorized D&D texts, sites, and content were relatively absent across all three searches. While often cited, no Wizards of the Coast material itself showed up in the top 25 results for any of these searches. And though D&D Beyond came up twice in the 75 combined results, this was only for forum discussions, and even so, one of these two results (‘Thoughts on The New Drow Lore’, 2019) is full of broken links that originally led to Dragon+ content, before its deletion just 3 years after this discussion. These circumstances reiterate our primary contention here: namely, that gaming paratexts – and particularly, the unofficial ones available freely online – become the easiest way for audiences to begin learning about D&D, often after encountering broad strokes elsewhere.
However, the Dragon articles discussed in our previous section were heavily cited in many of the fan wikis, and one prominent search result, the RealmsHelp website, had reproduced four of the most sensational articles, including Robin Laws’s ‘Flesh for Lolth’ and Eric Cage’s ‘The Punishments of Lolth’. These findings reiterate that while official paratexts like Dragon articles are less accessible now with the demise of the magazine and its fannish community, those materials still form an important part of learning about D&D – albeit now a second-hand, referential role than a primary one.
We also discerned that, while the authorship of these digital-born paratexts is more opaque than their predecessors in Dragon, and their modes of publication are simultaneously more diverse, these artifacts still draw on comparable evocations of expertise. For one thing, individual authors often justify and explain their writing of these paratexts by invoking their own expertise with D&D, which often takes the form of being dungeon masters (DMs) who claim they must know the D&D game system inside and out in order to adjudicate gameplay. These authors may also evoke their own ethos by noting that they have played multiple editions of the D&D game system, and thus, that they know what it was like before the current fifth edition, Wizards of the Coast’s push for media storytelling, and popular remediations of D&D like actual play entered the scene.
Finally, we must note that these unofficial paratexts are often responding to D&D-related exigencies. For instance, our searches were conducted in late summer and early autumn 2023, which followed a few major events: the January 2023 controversy of Wizards of the Coast attempting to revise their Open Game License (OGL), then walking back changes after a leak provoked far-reading backlash (for more see, Codega, 2023; Janse et al., 2023; D&D Beyond Staff, 2023); the March 2023 release of the film Honor Among Thieves; and finally, the August-September 2023 release of the tremendously popular videogame Baldur’s Gate 3. Exigencies such as these inevitably impact both what is being produced and also what is most visible at any given time, thus influencing what we found using the search methodology described above. However, these same exigencies also reiterate a second time, that D&D paratexts are a critical part of new players and other casual audiences learning about the game system.
Concluding thoughts
By now we have argued for the necessity of understanding popular paratexts, like the gaming paratexts examined here, as key to broader conversations about highly visible popular culture texts as heuristics – particularly texts recently re-entering the public imagination through adaptations or remediations aimed at general audiences. Such paratexts are often more accessible – and even, sometimes, more visible – than official franchise texts. Simultaneously, though, these paratexts also often draw from now-eliminated social spaces or long-running community discourse that new readers may not recognize, even as these exigencies impact how gaming paratexts present or cover certain content. We find all of this particularly visible with D&D, a complex game system with a long history of justified criticisms. Its recent renaissance has garnered D&D new audiences interested in learning to play, but who also absorb particular understandings of this game system depending on how and where they learn about it.
To explore this phenomenon, we have drawn upon Mia Consalvo’s notion of the ‘paratextual industries’ surrounding games (9) and the way these produce more digestible, accessible guides to gameplay that utilize authors’ ‘insider knowledge’ (10) and imply its transmission to new gamer-readers. However, in applying this lens to both official and unofficial D&D paratexts, we have also shown that a missing piece of this puzzle is the fan(nish) slant and degree of accessibility that govern such paratextual work. Across D&D gaming paratexts, we observed the privileging and silo-ing of particular information about the D&D game system. As particularly visible in gaming paratexts about D&D’s drow, we note that long-running conversations about racist tropes, bioessentialist game mechanics, and more, are not referenced at all in older, official paratexts, and tend to be either glossed over, referenced in passing, or disparaged using strong language in newer, unofficial paratexts.
As Booth (2018) has described, ‘the notion that board gamers can be fans has been little interrogated’ in academic scholarship (p. 428), and we argue this can be opened up even further: the notion that analog gamers can be fans has been little interrogated by gamers themselves. There is perhaps an implicit assumption among gamers that hinges on the (continued) negative representation of fandom in popular culture (e.g. We are not mere fans of D&D, we are players of D&D). This assumption rests on a continued – and, as fan studies has demonstrated, inaccurate – understanding of fandom as emotive (over)investment in the media object (see Jenkins, 1992 for the classic account). And yet, if we catechize players about the activities they participate in, especially in D&D, we find a remarkable similarity in certain types of engagements visible from both players and fans. For analog games more largely, these include acquiring knowledge, partaking in roleplay and identification, and participating in affective play (Booth 2018). TTRPGs bring additional connections, namely: the use of material construction, the social interaction and community-work, and even ‘fan expertise as a form of research competence’ (Golonka, 2019: p. 61). So even if players might reject the label of fan, it appears as though they are still participating like fans, or even anti-fans (see also Mason, 2012).
What are we to make of this? On the one hand, a majority of the gaming paratexts we have investigated here make it clear that many D&D players, like some fans in other areas of media (e.g. Proctor, 2017), seem to believe the text itself can or should be separated from contemporary politics and cultural significance. There is also what appears to be a deliberately occultation about what drow might signify outside the game, likely stemming from what Trammell (2023) has described as the ‘predominantly white communities’ that make up the history of this gaming hobby (p. 12). As Trammell suggests, such groups help structure and stratify discursive ways of thinking about the game, and in doing so, have the privilege to not consider race or racialized thinking during play – such as we see here in D&D specifically with drow being constructed *only* as game characters, and not at all as reflections of the biases and Othering of white game designers. Though some forms of D&D paratexts more than others have the opportunity to break away from this trend, most do not, and indeed, they instead pass along this stance to new audiences just beginning their journey into playing D&D.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
