[Ancelyn]

This is one of the most pointless discussions I have come across on this Forum. If you want a none caucasian force then create one and stop whining about supposed "racism". Gadzooks! Talk about making mountains out of mole hills.

[GAZKUL]

just curious, lots of good points, it just irritated me about how just about every army in WD looked like a KKK meeting, incidentally the Cadian range was influenced by the Mobile Infantry from Paul Verhoevens 1997 film Starship Troopers, google it for pics.

Ancelyn: that's right, shoot the messenger. 

[MarcoSkoll]

that's right, shoot the messenger.

Actually, that's a very effective way to stop them sending messengers...

[N01H3r3]

incidentally the Cadian range was influenced by the Mobile Infantry from Paul Verhoevens 1997 film Starship Troopers, google it for pics.

It really wasn't. The first Cadian imagery and background, which changed only slightly since then (when the Cadians became plastic, as they needed to simplify the design, notably around the shoulder pads, to make it easier to cast) appeared in the 1995 Codex Imperial Guard.

[DapperAnarchist]

Given that the ST movie was orignally called BUGS! and had nothing to do with Heinlein's book, its more likely that they were based on Cadians vs. Tyranids - Verhoven is odd like that, very pop-culture literate.

Ancelyn has a point though. Worried about the lack of non-white characters? Make some. I have. There's someone here, if I recall, who made transgendered characters because they themselves are transgendered. Inquisitor is the perfect place for this.

[GAZKUL]

you learn something new everyday.

[Macabre]

Well, transhumanism is a key byword in the 41st millennium, so gender identity (and by extension sexual orientation) are probably also explored there too (not to mention expanded to include a variety of new sciences and social interpretations).

[GAZKUL]

Well, transhumanism is a key byword in the 41st millennium, so gender identity (and by extension sexual orientation) are probably also explored there too (not to mention expanded to include a variety of new sciences and social interpretations).

intresting, better get to work then

[Ancelyn]

Funnily enough, my character Boamond le Savage is a black asian trangender lesbian, with one arm and a limp.

[Heroka Vendile]

Funnily enough, my character Boamond le Savage is a black asian trangender lesbian, with one arm and a limp.

That's one hell of a box-ticker for an equality assessment.

Dapper is right, she hasn't appeared round here for ages to my knowledge though.

[Alyster Wick]

who knows what the average human will look like in 38,000 years time anyway.

Clearly their hands will have grown  huge, which allows them to make weapons of enormous proportions.  

I think part of the issue is also uniformity of models.  Having characters in a 40K army with different skin tones has the potential to fracture the unity of the army's color scheme, not to mention being a pain in the ass.  True, if you're lovingly creating a small force of true-scaled marines who each have their own backstory and you're a fantastic painter then you can pull it off, but if you're slopping buckets of paint on dozens of guardsmen then god be with you if you decide to incorporate affirmative action into your guard recruitment.

In Inquisitor terms it's far easier to get away with different skin tones while maintaining a coherent force because we tend to tie our warbands together with only a few unified colors.

That all said, race is just a touchy issue now days.  Once you start viewing things through the framework of, "oh shoot, we need to add some diversity because I just realized we don't have any," then you're pretty much heading down the wrong road.  Some may say that armies modeled after certain ethnicities are offensive because they're stereotypical and pandering, while others may say they were inspired by historical imagery.  People tend to create what they know.  Jesus is generally depicted being the race of the painter or culture that produced the work in question.  Basically what I'm saying is that this stuff is complicated and I have no answers.

My solution?  All my dark eldar have dark blue skin  

EDIT:
On the subject of "What does 'race' look like in the 41st millennium" (probably the most pertinent question in terms of Inquisitor) I can't say anything that hasn't already been said.

[precinctomega]

The Mortifactors recruit from a world with a strong thread of African racial extraction, according to Graham MacNeil's Ultramarines Omnibus (I forget which book).

R.

[DapperAnarchist]

Thats who I was thinking of! I saw a really really good 54mm Mortifactor once, with a very well sculpted African face, and massive dreads.

Alyster makes a good point, that its offensive to start including "minorities" (as if Europeans are not a minority on Earth! We're all a minority) because they "should" be included - rather than because it suits for some other reason.

There's also the Glavians - they're all darkskinned, though it's rarely mentioned.

[N01H3r3]

they're all darkskinned, though it's rarely mentioned.

This is something worth pointing out. When it comes to the background, including but not limited to the novels, matters like skin colour (because race as we understand it today is unlikely to exist in the same form, as already established in this thread) are seldom mentioned at all and when they are, it's with occasional off-hand references. Midas and Medea Betancore aren't defined by their race... it's one of many details about them.

In those cases and others, the matter is presented as being something that everyone accepts and nobody much thinks about. Just because it isn't mentioned more frequently doesn't mean that everyone else is white... it just means that it isn't important enough to the characters and to the story to point it out as more than an incidental detail.

[DapperAnarchist]

In fact, the Betancores are an excellent example of good far-future SF writing that features different races. Too much SF assumes that, in a few thousand years, Africans will be Africans and Chinese will be Chinese and Americans will be Americans and so on and so forth... But the Betancores are dark-skinned, but clearly not Africans. They have Greek names and their own culture, unlike any Earth culture. They are Glavians. Even authors I adore, like Cordwainer Smith, have a bad habit of exporting current stereotypes into the future, mostly around Germans, with his Sixth Reich/Menschenjager, and Chinese, with the conquest of Venus and Lord Loveaduck - and don't start me on Star Trek, and their planet of Irishmen. Bleh.