Friday, 29 September 2017
Classic Rant: If Blue Rose Was Christian Allegory
In honor of a recent rpgsite review of Blue Rose, which was mostly fair but didn't seem to get the 'big deal' of what the problem was with the setting. It also tried to claim that Blue Rose was 'spectacularly different' and not just an "Americanized fantasy". Which is of course ridiculous. Blue Rose doesn't present some unique culture. It presents a way MORE Americanized culture than most medieval fantasy rpg settings do.
Blue Rose makes no sense at all outside of American culture, and its political bullshit. It just happens to not be center-right Wisconsin fake-medieval American land; it's far-left Seattle Fake-medieval American Land.
There's NOTHING about this book that isn't about the USA and its culture wars.
See, I get the feeling that if Blue Rose were inspired by something like Christianity instead, if it was one of these RPGs that sometimes come up, written by Christians, where they present all 'magic', 'supernatural' and any religion that isn't based on Faith in Jesus Christ as 'false' at best or 'evil' at worst; if the Magic Deer was Aslan/Jesus instead, and the Sovereign's Finest were crusading enforcers of Jesus' will, with the book being very clear that this is also what the authors think the ideal society would look like, all the people who are saying "what's the big deal?" would be OUTRAGED at it.
But that's EXACTLY what Blue Rose is. It's a religious tract masquerading as an RPG, presenting a setting that is about as meaningful as Narnia in terms of being little more than a vehicle for heavy-handed ideological propaganda delivery rather than any literary quality. It just happens to be the ideology that's trendy among left-leaning geeks, so it gets a pass for being a shit setting full of shit ideas with a really disgustingly obvious agenda. It's not an RPG setting, it's a manifesto. Quit trying to pretend it's something more than that
RPGPundit
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(October 10, 2015)
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lots of fans I know profess to be left but embrace this game - actually they like fantasy about romantic noble aristocrats which kind makes them romantic royalists
ReplyDeleteWell of course, in their socialist fantasies they are at the top calling all the shots, so naturally playing at being a noble is part and parcel, they just dress it up with a different title like Kommisar.
DeleteYou have to understand the cult mindset:
ReplyDeleteThe purpose of RPGs is to promote social justice.
Anything that is not social justice is fascism.
Those who do not promote social justice will be punished.
I have an idea for a dark fantasy campaign with a more Nietzschean mindset set in Aldiss but I don't need to buy the game to run it (and any BR fan would probably hate it anyway).
ReplyDeleteI don't know much about it, but I have seen Blue Rose at my FLGS. What you say here makes me want to avoid it.
DeleteThere is always a way to take an RPG and twist the plot into something way different from the writer's intention, even a propagandist writer.
ReplyDeleteI saw one slim copy #Feminism, a Nano-Game Anthology (Pelgrane Press) at my FLGS, but most of their stock is for board games anyway. We are not to the point where they mandatorily place these books in the hands of all RPGers as if it were Mao's Little Red Book. No, not yet, anyway.
Would you please elaborate how Blue Rose follows the pattern of Narnia. I can see similarities only on the surface.
ReplyDeleteNarnia is a world created not for its own sake, but to propagate, through allegory, a specific belief system. Blue Rose is the same.
Delete