Blue Rose: collectivist new-age utopia.
Deadlands: The Confederacy survives, but then ends racism immediately.
WW's Old WoD: science, technology, and western civilization are inherently bad.
The real tragedy with these three is that the choice of heavy-handed absolutism on the part of their authors made the settings much poorer than the possible alternative. A Deadlands where the Confederacy are still vicious slave-owning racists opens up the possibilities for PCs getting involved in the underground railroad, and sets up confederates as awesome bad guys (and if you really wanted, you could still have anti-slavery confederates with profound personal moral conflicts between their patriotism and their beliefs; there were a few of those in real life after all). A Blue Rose game where non-collectivist thinking isn't automatically evil would make a game where players are part of a kingdom struggling to be as good as possible far more palatable, as well as opening up the whole question (which is instead already pre-answered with a hammer-heavy deus ex machina in the default setting) of "what is the best way to create a good society"?
A WoD game (particularly thinking of Mage as an example here) where opposing paradigms fight each other both having a valid claim to wanting to create a better reality is far more interesting than the bullshit manichean crap that the setting actually consisted in.
What other games can you think of that end up failing in a similar because of heavy-handed partisan assumptions built into the setting? And what would the more interesting alternative have been?
RPGPundit
Currently Smoking: Lorenzetti oversize + H&H's Beverwyck
(originally posted July 22, 2013)
In Nomine (the Steve Jackson Games version): based on a French RPG which explicitly assumed Catholicism is true (mostly). The American version had to take a multi-culti, "all religions are true in their own way" approach . . . even though the player-characters all work for immortal Archangels who've talked to God. They should know _exactly_ which religions are true.
ReplyDeletewod's gnostic thing to me allied itself with anti body and so painfully rooted in christianity even poor japanese vampires stuck in this paradigm which is gross. Most blatently christian setting outside of dragonraid. Slain comic always has them as bad guys. I found interesting as a kid but decided the body cant be that bad.
ReplyDeletePathfinder's Golarion.
ReplyDeleteWhat about it?
DeleteI think this is why I didn't put anything more heavy-handed into my own campaign setting, Æthercoil, than I absolutely have to. As I said elsewhere, at its basis, it's an OSR setting set on top of the ruins of the Modern Day, after civilization fell due to geo-political, economical, and SJW-themed strife. (Okay, a little heavy handedness on that last one.)
ReplyDeleteI have the adventures go as "Explore the world and find any remnants of the Modern World." Once they do, now what? Would they want to use it, would they want to take it back to their village and see to get it working again, would they use it for Good, or Evil, or at all. Would they even just leave it where it lies as something that's best forgotten?
That part's very out in the open and I'm looking forward to what the players do with what they find.
With the World of Darkness, the SJWism crept in between Vampire and Werewolf. In Vampire, you're explicitly a Bad Guy. You're a vampire. Your task is to balance how bad you need to be to survive with the remnants of your human conscience — which mostly consisted of leaving all the predatory bloodsucking off-stage, or turning it into, essentially, consensual BDSM.
ReplyDeleteBut in Werewolf, you're not bad guys. You're explicitly defenders of "Gaia." All the murdering and cannibalism you do is to defend Mother Earth against the horrible Wyrm — a.k.a. Western Civilization.
The shift was from "what will you do to survive" to "let's all fantasize about murdering Mom and Dad."
Never heard of any of those. But if the Confederacy was going to end slavery immediately what were they at war over in this version?
ReplyDeleteI'm guessing in this version of the timeline it really WAS about "states' rights". That's the problem, it encourages apologists, to say nothing of those that want to make the Confederacy seem glorious or noble.
DeleteThey started the war for slavery, just like in the real timeline. The Civil War never really ended and the attrition suffered by the Confederacy let Major General Patrick Cleburne succeed in offering emancipation in return for enlistment. International pressure also encouraged them to drop slavery in exchange for recognition, but it isn't like people were happy about it. The Confederacy is probably still a hotbed of racism as well as cold war style paranoia. It has been a long time since I played it, but I don't recall the Union being much of a good place either.
DeleteNot that the point about agenda doesn't stand, just saying that "states rights" wasn't a thing, nor did the Confederacy simply do a heel-face turn and decide that slavery was bad.
DeletePretty much every game with a morality track that turns you into an NPC if you fall off the rails, but special attention to almost every Star Wars RPG out there - especially the SWd20 Dark Side Sourcebook which explicitly stated that the ONLY ways for a Dark Side campaign to end are redemption, death, or (ideally) redemption immediately followed by death.
ReplyDeleteJust another reason to buy the West End Games version.
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