Quote from: camazotz;908804(Proud owner of this)

Side note: I hope to learn one day that Wayne Reynolds is the exact copy of Bob "Calmness Incarnate" Ross.

"So here we're gonna add some blood... ohohohoho, so much blood... well, no mistake, just a happy accident"

Does he have the same hair as well as personality (because that would be awesome)?

Quote from: Willie the Duck;908899Does he have the same hair as well as personality (because that would be awesome)?

If the work resembles its author, Reynolds hairstyle would be a mix of this:



...this...



...and this...






Oh, and this is gonna be my new favorite insult thrown at bald people. "You have hair the color of your personality". Simple, clean, efficient.

Quote from: JesterRaiin;908905"You have hair the color of your personality". Simple, clean, efficient.

Also transparent. What you see is what you get.

Quote from: Bren;908916Also transparent. What you see is what you get.

"Your agenda is as transparent as your hair". Clever.

I forget the name, but one of Paizo's writers unironically calls herself a social justice warrior. Unsurprisingly, she has chauvinistic, racist and generally repugnant views that she shoehorns into everything she writes to get brownie points with minorities (they call her out on it and she ridicules them).

For example, she redefines the alignment scale: gender roles are the greatest evil, but slavery, infanticide, genocism, racism, etc are good or at worst neutral. Law corresponds to masculinity (so Hell is a grimdark no woman's land where the highest position a woman can hold is literally queen of whores), chaos corresponds to feminity (so Abyss is ruled by mother goddesses made of boobs and MRAs become the lowest ranking demons even below those who actually abused women).

Paizo's world building perpetuates deeply harmful racial stereotypes like noble savages, darkest africa, and wandering thieving romani. These stereotypes are dangerous because they are used to justify genocide to this very day.

This is why, as a supporter of human rights, I cannot in good conscience endorse Paizo.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;910360gender roles are the greatest evil, but slavery, infanticide, genocism, racism, etc are good or at worst neutral. Law corresponds to masculinity (so Hell is a grimdark no woman's land where the highest position a woman can hold is literally queen of whores), chaos corresponds to feminity (so Abyss is ruled by mother goddesses made of boobs and MRAs become the lowest ranking demons even below those who actually abused women).

Are you kidding, exaggerating, or is this true?  If it's real I'd like to see an example just to make my head explode.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;910360I forget the name, but one of Paizo's writers unironically calls herself a social justice warrior. Unsurprisingly, she has chauvinistic, racist and generally repugnant views that she shoehorns into everything she writes to get brownie points with minorities (they call her out on it and she ridicules them).

For example, she redefines the alignment scale: gender roles are the greatest evil, but slavery, infanticide, genocism, racism, etc are good or at worst neutral. Law corresponds to masculinity (so Hell is a grimdark no woman's land where the highest position a woman can hold is literally queen of whores), chaos corresponds to feminity (so Abyss is ruled by mother goddesses made of boobs and MRAs become the lowest ranking demons even below those who actually abused women).

Paizo's world building perpetuates deeply harmful racial stereotypes like noble savages, darkest africa, and wandering thieving romani. These stereotypes are dangerous because they are used to justify genocide to this very day.

This is why, as a supporter of human rights, I cannot in good conscience endorse Paizo.

WTF?

Are you being a somewhat hyperbolic here or is this literally what the material says?

Quote from: Nexus;910423WTF?

Are you being a somewhat hyperbolic here or is this literally what the material says?

I don't believe that there's any actual published Paizo content that says this; rather, BoxCrayonTales is saying that there's someone who writes material for Paizo who holds these views.

(EDIT: To be clear, there is published content that could be interpreted this way - e.g. Asmodeus, ruler of Hell, is an open misogynist, with the highest female devils being collectively called the "whore queens." Likewise, the strongest demon in the Abyss is a perpetually-pregnant female deity whose portfolio includes birthing monsters, and there are weakling "misogyny demons" - but the game materials rarely mention these, let alone go out of their way to overtly push an agenda.)

As someone who frequents the Paizo forums, I can think of at least one person on their staff who fits this description (though I haven't seen the above sentiment described, she has written other posts expressing similar sentiment), as well as one popular freelancer whose work Paizo seems partial to.

Quote from: Alzrius;910427I don't believe that there's any actual published Paizo content that says this; rather, BoxCrayonTales is saying that there's someone who writes material for Paizo who holds these views.

(EDIT: To be clear, there is published content that could be interpreted this way - e.g. Asmodeus, ruler of Hell, is an open misogynist, with the highest female devils being collectively called the "whore queens." Likewise, the strongest demon in the Abyss is a perpetually-pregnant female deity whose portfolio includes birthing monsters, and there are weakling "misogyny demons" - but the game materials rarely mention these, let alone go out of their way to overtly push an agenda.)

As someone who frequents the Paizo forums, I can think of at least one person on their staff who fits this description (though I haven't seen the above sentiment described, she has written other posts expressing similar sentiment), as well as one popular freelancer whose work Paizo seems partial to.

They also used the cliche "should we kill the goblin babies" as an example of the different ways good alignment responds to moral dilemma. http://www.d20pfsrd.com/alignment-description/additional-rules#TOC-Ethics-For-Adventurers

The slavery being moral comes from one of the Golarion setting books, where the white hat nations endorse it. I'm sure I remember it was mentioned by the devs on the forums (there was some long argument about it), but gender roles and being against gay marriage are evil (so, and I'm sure someone brought this up at some point, deities of fertility and family values are logically evil). Golarion has a modern day first world fertility/replacement rate (2.1) despite medieval living conditions and wandering hordes of mythological and tolkienesque monsters, but most of the time women are single, have jobs and equal to men in every way. There was argument about how this wasn't realistic and how it would make more sense for magical healing to improve quality of life without creating a pseudo-feminist utopia but the threads were locked because the devs hated logical rebuttals or something.

Basically the Paizo devs are a bunch of straight white males and a few straight white women who want to score brownie points with minorities because it's become trendy the past decade despite themselves having grown up sheltered and ignorant of reality.

Thankfully they aren't nearly as bad about this as Onyx Path (which hires individuals who genuinely seem deeply disturbed), but it's still harmful to the cause.

Most hate groups dislike logical rebuttals filled with facts, or well reasoned arguments.  And if they have the power, they will shut the conversation/discussion down.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;910564most of the time women are single, have jobs a

That's only true if you assume the major female NPCs in adventure paths and scenarios are representative and that's unlikely.  They tend to be very atypical people.  It's true of the male NPCs as well.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;910564They also used the cliche "should we kill the goblin babies" as an example of the different ways good alignment responds to moral dilemma. http://www.d20pfsrd.com/alignment-description/additional-rules#TOC-Ethics-For-Adventurers

Leaving aside that the question is "what do we do about the goblin babies?", I'm not sure why this is worth mentioning. As you note, that's a cliche regarding the moral dilemmas that can be - but don't have to be - brought up with regards to adventuring. The section you linked to gives the issue cursory treatment, and doesn't seem very slanted; it notes that there are a lot of possible responses, and doesn't seem to go out of its way to endorse any of them.

QuoteThe slavery being moral comes from one of the Golarion setting books, where the white hat nations endorse it.

I don't agree with this. I'm not an expert on Golarion, but as I recall the nation with the largest presence where slavery is concerned is Cheliax, the nation of devil-worshippers. They're typically opposed by Andoran, a more typical "white hat" country which is currently trying to export its abolitionist ideals.

Katapesh has slavery, because it's a nation of anarcho-libertarianism, where the pursuit of money (and self-indulgence) are held as the highest virtues. It's primary deity is the LN deity of commerce, and is a "white hat" nation only in that it's an economic powerhouse in the region.

Qadira and Osirion - as fantasy analogues of pre-Islamic Arabia and ancient Egypt, respectively - have slavery, but if I recall correctly this is largely championed by the heretical cults of the sun goddess, Sarenrae.

Beyond that, I'm not sure what other nations "endorse" slavery (maybe Thuvia?).

QuoteI'm sure I remember it was mentioned by the devs on the forums (there was some long argument about it), but gender roles and being against gay marriage are evil (so, and I'm sure someone brought this up at some point, deities of fertility and family values are logically evil).

I remember this too, and to be more specific it was them saying that Erastil - the LG deity of agriculture, farming, and family values - couldn't be good-aligned and also lionize "traditional (e.g. heterosexual) gender roles" as part of his religious doctrine. To be fair, it was mentioned that this was disqualifying from being good-aligned (and so could be neutral), rather than having to be evil-aligned.

I don't recall anyone saying that this therefore must mean that "fertility" or "family values" are evil (quite the opposite; Erastil is still a LG deity of family values; it's just that now they've retconned his doctrine to approving of all families, regardless of their makeup). I don't think that this follows as a "logical" extension; there's enough to react to without reading into any deeper offense.

QuoteGolarion has a modern day first world fertility/replacement rate (2.1) despite medieval living conditions and wandering hordes of mythological and tolkienesque monsters, but most of the time women are single, have jobs and equal to men in every way. There was argument about how this wasn't realistic and how it would make more sense for magical healing to improve quality of life without creating a pseudo-feminist utopia but the threads were locked because the devs hated logical rebuttals or something.

The thread I saw on this topic had a Paizo employee (possibly more than one) claiming that Golarion didn't have any bias towards "traditional" (e.g. patriarchal, heteronormative) gender roles - outside of the influence of evil characters and deities (e.g. Asmodeus's misogyny) - because Golarion's societies had never developed those gender roles in the first place, due to magic.

Several posters found this explanation sophomoric - I did too - for several reasons. Mostly because this brought up questions of how prevalent magic really is (and was historically, in the campaign world), how much it could really help with regards to issues of sexual dimorphism that would come up in a non-adventurer's life, and how the presumption of those dimorphic qualities interacted with the game rules being blind to such issues. Unfortunately, the employee(s) in question had no particular desire to debate the verisimilitude (and, to be fair, neither did quite a few other posters who agreed with those ideas), and the debate was stifled before it could begin.

QuoteBasically the Paizo devs are a bunch of straight white males and a few straight white women who want to score brownie points with minorities because it's become trendy the past decade despite themselves having grown up sheltered and ignorant of reality.

Leaving aside that Paizo does have a few transsexual employees (and I won't speculate with regards to anyone's sexual preferences), I think that the vast majority of the blame for Paizo's current stance can be put on the shoulders of a small number of people, almost all of whom are comparatively low-ranked in the company. The vast majority of the higher-ups (all but one, to my knowledge) simply don't talk about these issues when they come up.

QuoteThankfully they aren't nearly as bad about this as Onyx Path (which hires individuals who genuinely seem deeply disturbed), but it's still harmful to the cause.

I'm not sure what "the cause" is; I'm just calling it like I see it.

Aside from reading a little too eager to be "inclusive"... So far of the little I've seen of Pathfinder adventures they've been overall ok. Course could be I've just lucked out so far and missed the worse of it, or just didnt notice.

Quote from: Omega;910740Aside from reading a little too eager to be "inclusive"... So far of the little I've seen of Pathfinder adventures they've been overall ok. Course could be I've just lucked out so far and missed the worse of it, or just didnt notice.

I think that your take on Paizo's current materials is correct. As I see it, they have increased the instances where something seems to overtly push an agenda of "our game needs to advance social reforms," but only from "virtually nonexistent" to "pretty rare." In fact, there's a good example of this:

The current Pathfinder Adventure Path is issue #108, "Hell Comes to Westcrown," released about a week ago. One of the new monsters in the back is the "ninkonda" angel, which is themed around the redemption of evil mortals. The creature's appearance is that of a feathery-winged suit of armor, with a mirror set on its chest and nails driven through its hands, arms, and shoulders. There's no mention made of what they look like under their armor (or if there's anything under their armor at all), and their presentation is purely with regards to the how's and why's of redeeming evil mortals, along with noting how beings in the angelic hierarchy might progress into ninkondas.

And yet, for some reason, there's a small sidebar that says the following:

QuoteBEYOND GENDER

Outsiders do not reproduce sexually, and have existences that transcend the understanding of mortals. Some types of outsiders, especially angels, are genderless in their natural states. While some angels may choose to adopt a gender, whether it is one reflected in the real world or otherwise, most do not. A genderless creature has no gender entry on the race and class line of their stat block, and is referred to with the singular "they" in running text and ability descriptions.

...now, I can see that being somewhat useful information on the nature of angels, but I can't help but wonder if this doesn't clash - at least in its implication - with other materials in Pathfinder, such as the ubiquity of "half-celestial" and "half-fiendish" creatures, let alone aasimars and tieflings (e.g. beings with a trace of celestial or fiendish blood in them). Given that, it's easy to see this as trying to be a statement about presumed genders as much as it is trying to add anything to the game world.

Though, on a related note, Paizo has long pushed the idea that having a particular monstrous ancestry doesn't require that one of your ancestors fornicated with that creature. Half-dragons, for example, have been called out in that regard from the beginning to the very newest books.