Racism in Ravenloft

Note: this post isn't about real-world racism at all, be it the hadling of different ethnicities, elements of the setting design that could be considered racist, or what-have-you.

Most of the best D&D published campaign settings originated in 2nd Edition days, and suffer from a weird disconnect - the settings tend to be written under the assumption that the vast majority of the PCs will be human, while the 2nd Edition rules made humans the least appealing character option. (The only advantage to a human PC was that you didn't suffer level limits - but level limits were very rarely reached and even more rarely enforced.)

From 3e onwards, the game has done a much better job of balancing the PC races, to the point where humans are a perfectly respectable choice. However, my experience has been that players will tend to go for something different for their PC - very often the more outlandish the better.

In the Ravenloft setting in particular, this is something of an issue, as the setting assumes that 99% of all NPCs are human and they have an almost xenophobic hatred of the different. Combine that with a largely non-human PC group, and you have issues. (In fact, my party in "The Mists of Lamordia" is entirely non-human.) And given that I really can't be bothered dealing with racism in my fantasy any more, that's just not something I want.

Fortunately, the solution to this one is pretty easy, especially in the domain of Lamordia - change it. Where it comes to Lamordia, the people are noted as being rational to a fault, so it's a simple matter to have them simply accept the different as it is, and move on.

That's not to say that the matter will be entirely absent. I have a story point related to the absence of elves, in particular, in the setting, which means that the presence of the elven PC will lead at least to some comment. Additionally, part of the tiefling's shtick is about them being outsiders and shunned by society. Since the player in question chose that race knowing that, I'm assuming that that's something that will want at least some mention (and, again, it's easy enough to incorporate into the story). But for the half-elves and the dragonborn (and, later, if we have any gnomes, dwarves, or halflings), it will simply be a non-issue.

All that said, I do kinda wish we had an all-human party for this one. But it wasn't to be - and I'd much rather my players choose characters that they'd like to play, rather than ending up with something they're unhappy with just to fit "my precious campaign".