Ehdrigohr is nothing like those haphazard fumblings. Designed over the course of several years by black, American Indian game designer Allen Turner, Ehdrigohr filters Dungeons and Dragons-style roleplaying experiences through a distinctly Native cultural lens rather than a European one.
“Ultimately it came down to wanting [a game] that spoke to me,
where I could see myself and my friends as characters or heroes, and
feel like they belong,” says Turner. Although he’s a big fan of
table-top roleplaying games, he made Ehdrigohr precisely because he couldn’t find anything that integrated Native culture into its play and treated Natives as equals.Dungeons and Dragons
may have some Indian-inspired tribes in its expansions, but they are
always treated as different or inferior. Indigenous weapons do less
inherently damage than an equivalent weapon wielded by a dwarf or elf,
not to mention the gross depiction of Natives using primitive clubs. In
all cases, we’re treated as intrinsically lesser.
[…]
Ehdrigohr starts from the base assumption that there are no
colonizers. There are also no dwarves, orcs, elves, or gnomes. It’s a
world populated by nine nations of humans, inspired primarily by Native
cultures and mythologies. They’ve learned to coexist with spirits and
natural forces around them, but must also contend with monstrous
creatures called “Shivers” that emerge at night from dark places inside
the Earth. It’s a black-and-white mythos that reflects many of the
values inherent in Native culture—at least as I’ve experienced it.
It’s an incredibly broad and flexible game, one where you can
create almost any character imaginable, or even choose to play without
any combat at all. You won’t need a vast array of multifaceted dice in
order to play, and where Dungeons and Dragons has very exact and specific rules about how far you can move each turn or how many items your character can carry, Ehdrigohr
lets you do whatever seems reasonable. Like Indian time, it sounds like
a shortcut or a recipe for disaster, but in practice it allows people
get deeper into playing their roles—to focus on the experiences in front
of them, rather than externally imposed systems.
Kimchi and Justice 