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The talk about the Aztecs and the like actually ties in with some of the other issues in WW as well. oWerewolf has two Native American tribes (used to be three with the Croatoan but they got killed off) called the Uktena and Wendigo. The fact that they're both named after harmful spirits is bad enough - with the Wendigo being particularly troublesome - but they're presented in the write ups as living harmoniously with their kin before the encroachment of Europeans and their whole pillaging the world around them by building cities and farms and poo poo. Which completely ignores the very real large scale earthworks and agriculture works that native populations constructed. But for some reason their treatment of Mesoamerican culture's always stuck in my craw, possibly due to my peninsulares/criollo heritage on one side of the family. As mentioned the Aztecs were literally controlled by a bloodthirsty demon-worshipping vampire which falls in pretty well with popculture takes on them... a popculture take built around both the Spanish and the various vassal states of the Aztecs playing up certain aspects of their empire to justify what happened to them. The whole "holy poo poo these people have massive waterworks and are able to keep a massive city way more sanitary than what we can" thing that the Spaniards were awe-struck by is ignored. Even the various flower wars that the Aztecs waged were as much about keeping their vassal states under control as gaining sacrifices; for the life of me I can't see the big difference between those actions and what the Romans did to keep their empire. That's not even getting in to how Latino/Hispanic culture still continues to be displayed in media elsewhere. I've got an effort-post floating around in my head about both machismo and caballerosidad somewhere but i lack the cultural understanding and research chops to do it actual justice. *edit* And the post above mine made me think of the Bone Gnawers, aka The Best Werewolf Tribe. So much of that game line is about worrying blood purity concerns, battles for supremacy and dominance (using outdated understandings of how wolf packs work), and the like. And then you have a whole group of the rejects of that society. They're mostly treated as a joke in the setting - literal werewolf bums and hobos that are looked down on and mocked because they aren't out there being Elite Bad Asses and because wolves have to have an omega, right? The sheer fact that you are playing one as a PC puts your character in the top 10% of them because the other 90% can't be arsed to take part in most things and are presented as lazing about mooching for free food. Up until something actually no joke Needs To Be Done and suddenly you have a dozen random hobos showing up and throwing themselves in to the fray. In a post-Occupy world these things read radically different. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Aug 1, 2021 |
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Aug 1, 2021 16:20
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fool of sound posted:Oh yeah, see also "the practice of the Aztec folk religion is literally hastening the apocalypse and a dragon left a substantial bounty for the capture of their priests" in Shadowrun. The animal-sacrifice-as-demon-worship Christian attitude is depressingly common in fantasy writing, despite most world religions practicing it to a greater or lesser extent. Yeah. There's even a line in the Cult of Ecstacy book about how Mayan blood sacrifices were totally fine but gently caress the Aztecs. Granted that whole Tradition can be stupid as gently caress - drugs are good, sex is great, free your mind! Also sometimes you need to sneak some pot in your unwilling friend's brownies to expand their conciousness! It's because of poo poo like that which causes me to side with their Schismatics - the Anghori (based off the actual Shivan worshipers), the Hagalaz (which are based off of the very troubling Norse idealization you find in death metal), and the Acharne (Fight Club meets Eyes Wide Shut). But then you have poo poo in the same gameline with the Etherites - the group mostly seen as "steampunk for the sake of it" - having urban planners pushing for some very Leftist views, folks attempting to hack the very concept of Capital to undo it, and a massive groundswell of folks pushing for a more inclusive take in academia because surprisingly when you have POC and LGBT voices in things you learn new things. Another example of the unfortunate parts of the gameline is how it treats majority-minority cities in Vampire. The "evil for the sake of evil" vampire faction (as opposed to "evil because gently caress You Got Mine") is coded as being more active/secure in US cities where you have high African American or Latino populations. To the point where it's when lampshaded in one of the books when a young vampire runs a statistical analysis and proves that these disenfranchised groups are prime recruiting grounds and that if maybe things were made a little better for them then maybe it'll be a much better for everyone. The powers that be carefully read over this report, nodded their heads solemnly, and all agreed to double down on racism and disenfranchising these groups to make it just a little bit harder for their rivals to make use of them. Because it's better for their bottom line. If that doesn't sum up American politics i don't know what does.
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Aug 1, 2021 16:55
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I cometely forgot that Kill Six Billion Demons existed due to real life eating me alive for a while but not only has this thread reminded me that it exists i find out that it's a goon project. Gonna have to catch back up. And i welcome any weird-lore-turning-into-politics discussion.
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Aug 3, 2021 02:37
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Archonex posted:
Mithras is a bit of a mixed bag all around, what with him originally taking over Monty Coven after the latter ate him and wearing the Assamite like a meat suit. Trying to balance some of the more gonzo 90s stuff with the modern day is just weird at times and why some of the Dark Ages stuff can be more fun. Constantinople being run by an undead polycule whose relationship issues are the indirect cause of so much of the modern issues is one of those things that's *interesting* but hard to use outside the box since mechanically loving no PC would know that. As for the love of the elites/gerontocracy that seems pretty baked in, yeah. Most of my experience with the games are from various Digichats and the like, basically online LARPs which might color my views a bit but there is always a conservative slant to the games where folks want things to stay as they are. The biggest offender, to me, is WtA. One of the things that makes the setting "gothic punk" is that *everything* is corrupt and you should rebel against the systems in place. Werewolf society can't survive as is because all of these age-old conflicts and rivalries keep everyone divided and it's up to the PCs to change things... but the only way to advance and level up is to act like what the powers that be deem appropriate. Get too out of line and Totems start showing up to smack you around Rather than see that as a struggle to overcome most folks skip over the subtext and just go with how things are written. So you end up with players reinforcing the oppressive system both ICly ("it's what the book says that people should do!") and OOCly ("i had to put up with poo poo and now you do too!"). Another pretty good example of this sort of romanticizing of lovely power structures is Unhallowed Metropolis which goes all in on Victorian stuff but with zombies. Anarchists and socialists attempting to reform a clearly unjust system are villains because without the elites in place then the Compare that to Deadlands, which has a whole host of problems of its own but at least there direct action and helping a community has a legit benefit to the world as a whole.
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Aug 17, 2021 14:04
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Voormas was a Euthanatos, a hodge podge of Hellenistic death cults and "what if Temple of Doom, but the Thuggees have actual powers". But you are spot on with both the Tremere being huge flaming assholes and the Tzimisce being a cancerous poison. Their original clanbook went way too all in on "yeah no these guys totally chummied up to the Nazis" plus whatever weird poo poo they had with Myca/Sascha Vykos. Sexual violence, whether implied or otherwise, was always turned up to 11 when they were involved. Plus the various ethnic genocides. But at least pre-V5 they weren't orchestrated by vampires but rather taken advantage of.
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Aug 17, 2021 18:45
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My mind keeps parsing NHPs as Neil Patrick Harrison. That said Lancer seems cool and good - I'll recommend that to my Discord buddies.
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Oct 19, 2021 14:38
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Shrecknet posted:it's also interesting because if you think about it, in our world gods operate on faith. Jumping multiple pages back, but in at least one setting if you didn't worship any of the gods at all you ended up turned into a brick when you died so you could be placed in a wall with your other faithless fellows.
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Mar 11, 2022 15:08
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All the talk earlier about whether classical buddhists were atheists or deists or not reminds me of that bit in The Name Of The Rose where William's talking about his political views. Dude's basically trying to describe a modern, enlightened representative democracy. But he's trying to do it without the necessary tools, theories, and philosophies because those didn't start to come together until several hundred years in the future.
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Mar 17, 2022 22:53
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Xander77 posted:Any chance you could quote that? I'll need to track down my copy of the book, since it's a longish passage that I can't find quoted anywhere on the internet. It's just a potentially throw away section that's always stuck with me. And it ties in with things like Gloriantha because part of that game is being able to go "okay, have to get in the headspace of a bronze-age cow thief".
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Mar 18, 2022 14:14
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That's the bit, yeah. Poor dude's fumbling about in the dark attempting to express a philosophy that we'd recognize today using contemporary theology during a time where they were burning heretics. It's like trying to carve a delicate flower out crystal using a lump hammer and a rock you found you found on the ground. Vampire: Dark Ages, White Wolf's vampire game set in (you guessed it) the dark ages touches on this vaguely and inelegantly. But at least the feudalistic mindset makes sense for the setting. It's when you have their modern games fumbling about going "yeah this is totes the way" that it goes off the loving rails.
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Mar 18, 2022 16:31
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Xander77 posted:Ok, so it's not the idea of a republic (which was very well known to any educated medieval person), but rather a medievalist foundation for religious freedom (not familiar enough with the theology of the time to see if it actually makes sense). Religious freedom, separation between church and state, *and* undoing the divine right of kings. William of Baskerville is dealing with a way of thinking that predates the Protestant Revolution by 200 years to try and express an idea that we *still* struggle with implementing today. It also pointedly *doesn't* make much sense with the main-stream theology, with William making edge cases and cherry picking bits and pieces while relying on Aristotelian logic to make his argument. The background of the story involves peasant uprisings brought about by arguments about how seriously one should take the vows of poverty coupled with "do you go to Hell *immediately* after you die or only after the Last Judgment?". In short it is very much a must read. When a game line tries to make value judgments about stuff and relies on 'well it's *always* been this way' (Werewolf's whole revanchist, blood purity set up is one I always look at) my knuckles itch. But when it involves removing the tools we use to comprehend stuff, or points out that they've been perverted (Mage the Awakening's Exarchs warping reality to write tyranny into its defining traits so they will always be in power) it bothers me less. And Glorianthia just goes whole hog which i appreciate. Unknown Armies's magic system is another one that comes to mind.
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Mar 18, 2022 21:21
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SirPhoebos posted:The oWoD supplement on Holocaust ghosts is a perfect example. That's legit a great book. And has a side bar that's basically "if you think these NPCs have unrealistic stats then we kindly invite you to read up on these figures from the Warsaw Uprising and what they accomplished."
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Mar 20, 2022 17:38
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moths posted:Wasn't there a reveal that the Pakled had outsmarted the crew of the Enterprise? That was the point of the episode they first appeared in, yes.
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Mar 28, 2022 12:57
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13th Age has Orcs being an infection of some sort if I'm recalling correctly, created by the Elves to cause problems for the Dragon Empire/tear down civilization. It went about as well as one would expect.
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Mar 29, 2022 21:14
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Halloween Jack posted:It's very funny that no one saw "This sentient species is an infection" as a problem, and that they apparently managed a much worse take on it than Warhammer. It's less an infection and more a forced polymorph into a magical critter that was designed to tear down what is built up. Basically a WMD that grew legs and decided to do its own thing and build a society of its own. Is it perfect? gently caress no. But at least it's better than "gotta go kill all the babies so they don't grow up to be evil". *edit* Basically what Rand said.
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Mar 29, 2022 22:07
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Again this is literally just what 40k did in that the Orks are an out of control bioweapon made as a last resort to fight the Necrons (evil Terminator skeleton robots who have a grudge against all other life for existing) who long outlived their creators. The implication in 13th Age (which is malleable, with the ST and players expected to give their own spin while building the world together) is that they weren't a 'last resort'. They were just one tool/tactic the elves took against the Dragon Empire and the High Wizard. If anything they're the magical equivalent of mines left behind, with the elves denying that they had anything to do with. Then you have assholes like The Three, the Diabolist, and the Crusader taking advantage of them before you even get to the Orc Lord.
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Mar 30, 2022 15:35
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Drakyn posted:(1) why does this deep-cut subtlety come out for the space nazis in a setting where the orks get led by literally margaret thatcher This is WAAAGH! Grimtoof erasure.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:14
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Ah the Spec Ops: The Line approach to video games.
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Apr 1, 2022 23:33
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Servetus posted:Or destroying their armies in Risk? Let's pour one out for all the friendships ruined by Risk: Legacy. Any game where you can command bear-barians riding giant bears against tanks after causing the moon to fall on the nuclear wasteland that was left from the last session is a good game.
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Jun 15, 2022 00:54
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"What if superhero, but evil!" and "haha you fool, any being with that sort of power would be a terror in the real world!" stories/examples with regards to Superman as a monolith always lose the plot since it ignores a great deal many things. The most important one being that Clark's actions in the narrative metaverse actually led to the weakening of the KKK in the real world. Do you *have* to have a player actually play the Vagabond in a game session?
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Jun 15, 2022 22:51
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Tiler Kiwi posted:Dragonlance was infamous for being very mormon on its moral outlook so you had poo poo like the gods of law and good blowing the gently caress up out of an entire civilization because they didn't like their pope. I thought that Dragonlance's whole thing was "good can be just as authoritarian as evil, the pendulum swings" etc etc. I read dozens and dozens of those paperbacks and mostly just recall 1a) Kaz the minotaur is badass, 1b) the engineer draconians are cool and good, 2) that one green dragon that switched colors after being a slave to gutter dwarves, and 3) that one gnome who was evil and tried to sell the knight of the skull a literal nuke. As for paladins, any game where i can't play a good ol' boy spreading the gospel of moonshine and gunpowder is one i don't want to play. The talk about 'is it ok to play this game' brings to mind the Mormon dude who worked on Doom, who justified working on something with demons and hell by pointing out that you spend your time shooting them in the face with a shotgun. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jul 5, 2022 |
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Jul 5, 2022 15:08
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The undead elf that rules over the Sundered Hand in the Icewind Dale game was specifically an elven "not-lich" and was kept about by divine fiat until he learned his lesson. Then you have Crypt Things, neutral grave guardians that go "RETURN THE SLAB" if you fiddle about in there. As for languages, "Common as pidgin, Elf/Dragon as equivalent of Latin/French" was always enough for me. The last 5e game i was in had "common is pidgin, the-place-beneath/TOTALLY NOT THE UNDERDARK GOSH is monsterous-pidgin, this nation of atheists so extreme that they can cancel both arcane and divine powers have a scientifically advanced language that is both highly precise and good for arguing minutia, and this theocratic calvanistic slave state has a flowery poetic language". And yeah, it's nice that the technologically advanced egalitarian gunpowder state that seems morally correct until you realize that they're just as oppressive to anyone that doesn't act like them literally talks/expresses themself differently than the "our living saint said that he has a pet mouse once so now we kill cats on sight because they kill mice" state. But in the loving end I just want to roll dice and hit things with my PC, not go through some deep philosophical debate about whether you're making the world a better place by your actions.
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Jul 5, 2022 20:43
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Gloranthia's methods continue to be the best.Absurd Alhazred posted:It can actually be a lot of fun to have communications issues be an important adventure point. You can leverage that to, say, make one or more of your characters matter because you're the only ones who can mediate between two hostile factions who otherwise have no way of communicating with each other. I do not want my pretendy time escapist elf game to involve the equivalent of the Consitutional Convention. I have barely enough free time as is. At that point you'd be better served with a different system because if I was capable of roleplaying someone believeably with, say, Charisma 18+ i would be running for public office. AmiYumi posted:I once had a Dark Ages: Vampire group where we made characters separately and then discovered there wasn’t a single shared language in the party; the ST ended up going with the “well, everyone speaks some Romance language, let’s pretend that’s good enough so we can move on” I played a DA:V character that was an eastern emissary to the Isles of Avalon. Imagine his *horror* when he discovered the natives spoke *Latin* as opposed to *Greek*. So this over educated turbonerd spy had people think he was an idiot because he could only speak broken Latin. Edgar Allen Ho posted:
It is, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with that.
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Jul 5, 2022 22:43
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SlothfulCobra posted:the game was conceived more to be about no-strings-attached killing, not complex moral considerations. That's always been my issue with most efforts to get D&D anything near realistic and gritty, since it was basically pretend-y time war games only thr ballista needed to nap for 8 hours after it fired a few bolts. Trying to slam meaty, fluff centric stuff in to a game that's so crunchy just irks me. But i've also had to put up with Discord text games where you were expected to both roll for political machinations and also come up with the speech to go along with it.
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Sep 15, 2022 21:34
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Aztechnology actually being run by rear end in a top hat Penisulare is at least mildly funny, but I'm still irked that Mesoamerican culture continues to be the designated bad guys.LashLightning posted:I think there's a story about a guy getting rid of one that was investing a well. The Flight of Dragons book talks about a dude covering his armor in ground glass and going "eat me you coward!" so there's always been that undercurrent.
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Dec 15, 2022 00:47
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That whole transhumanist zeitgeist involved poo poo like Google Glass wearers not understanding why people at the dive bar they were gentrifying out of existance might hate them and the I loving Love Science-ification of the thoughtspace. You can see something similar with the softening of the Technocratic Union in the WoD. Which involved a very Western playerbase not grokking why folks might still be pissed at the group that did A Colonialism at the entire metaphysical world because, like, everyone has smartphones now!
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Dec 18, 2022 23:58
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Deadlands, if I recall correctly, had each of the four suits be better at certain tasks than others so it wasn't just the Jokers that got in on the fun. And the Hucksters doing card tricks was more due to Hoyle being one of the first to put out a grimore recently, just instead of it being written in backwards Latin through a key cypher it was laid out according to, you know, poker. It was also a game where not only was Lincoln running around as an undead avenger but the only real way to succeed was through direct community action and bettering the lives of people so there was less fear around for the big bads to feed on. And leaned *hard* on having cowboys actually being primarily POC like they were in the real world. (It also had Sasquatch. And an open invitation in the opening from Bruce Campbell to play a game of it with you.) And Scion... I really like Scion but it falls apart once you hit Demi-God. Plus, as I've complained about in this thread before, the Central American pantheon is yet again the designated bad guys. Glad they fixed that in 2.0. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Dec 24, 2022 |
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Dec 24, 2022 02:06
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I thought it was less "the South won" and more "Lincoln turned into a Harrowed, Jefferson Davis got eaten and replaced by a doppleganger hellbent on causing as much pain and suffering as possible leading to a stalemate, the dead are walking, rear end in a top hat railroad barons are starting up conflict, and most of California sank into the sea". I'll admit to some nostalgia/foggy memories so I could be wrong (i do recall the Louisiana rail line using literal zombies and other unfortunate tropes), and it does romanticize the whole manifest destiny thing. The writers just, to my recollection, went with "when you have jackalopes killing folks off on the frontier ethnicity becones less important".
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Dec 24, 2022 03:51
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SlothfulCobra posted:q DoctorWhat posted:As always, the big differentiator between Tolkien and his reactionary grotesque imitators & hangers-on is that Tolkien really did like to think. The biggest tell that Tolkien was just geeking out about linguistics and was more open minded than you'd expect for a shellshocked Catholic really into languages to be and not, you know, an antisemitic rear end in a top hat was that when Nazi Germany publishers reached out about translating his books. They asked him if he had any jewish heritage, Tolkien read between the lines, and he went 'unfortunately i am not that lucky also kindly gently caress off and don't translate my works'. It's akin to Pratchett's take on them which, while coming later than Tolkien, still had them being insular, 'loving' Gold (although they typically just tell it that to get it to sleep with them), and practicing their own culture in the middle of a cultural melting pot. But they were still people first and the only people who thought otherwise were huge flaming assholes. citybeatnik fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Oct 30, 2023 |
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Oct 30, 2023 00:05
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