Open Collections

Abstract

While mainstream discourse suggests that Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) owners, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), have made strides to distance the brand from its racialized, Tolkien-era origins with each new edition, scholars and critics argue racial logic continues to appear in the game’s content. However, looking only at published editions and materials by WotC limits the exchange of knowledge, culture, and importantly, socio-critical responsibility to an overly simplified binary between a corporate entity and its consumers. Therefore, this dissertation looks beyond D&D’s published materials to examine the networks of participation, discourse, and fan-labour known as homebrew, which operate to sustain D&D’s cultural-economic popularity. In this sense, homebrew is the practice of creating or modifying game rules and settings for use in popular tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) like D&D. A person can decide to homebrew content for their private games and players, share it online, and/or shift into a professionalized context as a freelancer or self-published creator. This project frames homebrew as an experimental and collaborative process of learning how a game works, through which expectations of participation and discourse are navigated and co-constructed to reproduce communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991). Examining online posts in D&D forums and through a series of interviews and focus groups with 17 people who create, share, and sell homebrew content, I apply critical discourse analysis to demonstrate homebrew as both reinforcing and resisting discourses of white capitalist-coloniality. Centred between fan and games studies scholarship focused on practices of making, tinkering, and hacking as forms of resistance to dominant structures of power, this project is a necessary step in understanding the complex relationships between homebrew creators, their labour, and WotC. More broadly, this project highlights the negotiation of intersecting discourses within communities of practice to reinforce and/or resist the long-standing centring of white, cis-hetero, patriarchal ideology in D&D and fan and gaming cultures.