What does humanocentrism mean?

From a setting perspective, I've long said that Dark Fantasy X, and its predecessor Dark•Heritage (or at least some of the iterations of it) are deliberately humanocentric. In fact, not just humanocentric, but "American-like" in a way that only people my age or older will remember; i.e. Eurocentric. The humans will really be running the show, and the other races are just there for some gratuitous exotica here and there. I think gamers (and me, for that matter) do want options racially, just to give them something new to latch on to from time to time while roleplaying, but the exotic races, i.e., non-human or demihuman races, don't play a super major role in the setting or campaign. At best, the fact that there's a small number of them in an area, possibly creating conflict because of their presence, would be one of many potential plot points in a campaign.

This is very much at odds with how the 4e and beyond design direction of the game has gone, where they want to minimize conflicts between races, because it makes SJWs sad, and maximize diversity because that makes SJWs feel smug and superior. Even my human races represent about four or five "real world" human races: British/American colonists that are like Robin Hood or Ivanhoe era people in an American frontier-like environment (Hillmen), Austrians/Germans as an upper class in a Transylvania-like country (Timischers), a Balkan/Romanian-like race that's the lower class in the same Transylvania-like country (Tarushans) (and a more Dark Ages post apocalyptic-like tribal long-lost cousins of the same in the Hill Country(Tazitta Tribes)), and a Cossack-like race in the steppes and sage prairies (Drylanders). There may be a handful of other races that come from "off map" that play minor roles in the game from time to time; the Mediterranean Nizrekh people, the Northlanders, the savage Inutos, etc. but I won't detail them, and I wouldn't support them as PCs until after quite some time into the using the setting in game. Just acknowledging that they exist is as far as I'm willing to go now, and none of them play any role whatsoever in the first campaign, SHADOWS OVER GARENPORT, although there's a possibility that one leg of the 5x5 for the third campaign, MIND-WIZARDS OF THE DAEMON WASTES will at least make reference to the Nizrekhs. And if I get around to a 4th 5x5, I do have some Hyperborean ideas in mind, where the savage Inutos, at least, would play a role.

Drylander Cossack

Tazitta ruffian

Tarushan thief

Timischer merchant

Hillman militia

So how does that jive really, with the presence of the other races in the setting, other than what I said above? No game is going to feel very humanocentric if no PCs are human, regardless of what the rest of the setting is doing. In fact, the PCs will look like a traveling circus relative to the more familiar setting around them.

I've mentioned this before, but this is part of what I've decided to do to address this:

• Nobody can start a game with any race other than human. Other races can only be "unlocked" down the line once the players have had a chance to become acquainted with them in game.
• I originally had nine races in the game and one in the appendix; I now have five and five. There are only four other races besides human in the main game itself: grayman, kemling, surtur, and woodwose. The dhampir, orcs, goblins, seraphs and wendaks are all appendix races. Realistically, being in the main game or the appendix is still in the game, but this should hopefully continue to push the idea that most of these races are fringe options, not mainstream ones.
• I do, however, still have some important iconics that are non-human; Kimnor the blood brother of Dominic is a grayman from Lomar, and Cailin, Ragnar's young wife, was turned into a dhampir after being attacked by a vampire—but the attack was thwarted before she was either killed or turned into a vampire herself, and she was transformed into a dhampir instead. The whole dhampir thing is a plot point; the whole race exists to be a plot point rather than a "normal" race. The same is also pretty much true for the seraph race.

In other words, humanocentric means humans are at the center of pretty much every question, but they're not literally the only races in the game. My level of humanocentrism is greater than The Lord of the Rings, but less than Howard's Conan stories.

The reason I bring this up, and it's not the first time I've mentioned it, is because it seems to me that the RPG crowd isn't going that same direction. The recent D&D movie had cat people and bird people prominently featured. It almost seems like they don't want to have humans at all, unless of course they can be "diverse" humans, by which they mean excluding white people. But I just saw a funny video of Kyle Brink's infamous "white people can't leave fast enough (but I'm not quitting my job)" audio overlaid over a video of people coming and going through the doors of the main halls of GenCon. Out of a good couple hundred people I saw, there were maybe a dozen women and girls (all white), two guys who looked Hispanic, and one guy who looked Asian. Literally everyone else was a white guy. That's still the audience for D&D. In spite of whatever "sexy" (and that's in some very serious air quotes) diverse players you may see online or even in Stranger Things, the reality is what it's always been; D&D is primarily a white guy hobby, with a few nerdy girls, most of whom probably enjoy it, but also most play it because their boyfriend or husband does. Any product that pretends that that fact isn't actually true is going to be a harder sell going forward. If there's anything 2023 has taught us is that woke has peaked, and normal people are pushing back against it.

Of course, it'll be quite a while before that zeitgeist picks up enough steam to be noticeable in everyday stuff, like the makeup of characters in art in D&D products. If it ever goes back to normal. But you know. After the flop after flop of woke movies, TV shows, streaming shows, Bud Light, Target and more, it's clear that ESG needs to rebrand itself because it has become toxic as it is. But make no mistake; the people who pushed it won't go away or learn from their mistakes. In their mind, the only mistake is that they need to rebrand it and try again, doubling down as SJWs always do.

Anyway, I didn't mean to wander into this kind of territory, but on the other hand, it's probably a little bit inevitable. I think my appreciation for humanocentrism and Eurocentrism is my rejection of wokeness. I was never woke, of course—far from it. I started off life with the Conservative Lite worldview that conservatives in Generation X typically had, and rapidly during the Obama years started realizing and accepting more and more red pill narratives as fundamentally more true than any other narratives, because they fit both my experience and actual real data. Maybe in the 90s and early 00s I thought fantasy based on Merry Olde England, Norse or Celtic baselines had become a bit boring because almost everything I'd read up to that point had been so, but my reasons for looking away from white, Eurocentric fantasy had nothing to do with the reasons wokesters did so, and ultimately I discovered that fantasy that is mostly based on the cultures of my own heritage is vastly to be preferred to something else after all. 

Also, although I'd always read a lot of older pulp era and other fantasy and science fiction, and always appreciated it, I've almost come to the realization that it's just about the only fantasy and science fiction that is really great, and the secondary wave of stuff in the 60s-90s or so had some high points too. Fantasy and science fiction today is absolutely terrible today, with a few notable independent or at least pseudo-independent authors. I'm mostly reading old stuff, and Kindle authors these days.

Sigh. The wreck of the SJWs cultural vandalism will take a long time to repair, assuming that there's anything like an America left when we get around to that.