Quote from: CTPhipps;913631Honestly, given the way real life history turned out, I fully support Alt-History on behalf of those who weren't white males. Also, it adds the option of the Union/Confederacy Cold War competition.

Agent vs. Agent!

Spy vs. Spy!

Well, except there's better tensions to run in the real historical wild west.

I'm running a Wild West game right now. And what you have to understand is that so much of what happened in the west only happened BECAUSE the war ended, and it happened the way it did because of how the war ended.  For another 20 years after the war, the American West was still largely about fighting battles between Northerners and Southerners brought over from back home; it was that instead of USA and CSA it was (northern) lawmen vs. (southern) outlaws, (northern) city folk vs (southern) farmers, (northern) republicans vs (southern) democrats, (northern) businessmen vs (southern) saloon owners, etc etc.

The gunfight at the OK Corral was a part of that too.

As for the "white male" stuff, there's tons of way better historical drama, and socially meaningful drama, to play out without just keeping the Confederacy either as a whitewashed 90s "We're not racist anymore!" cop-out or as the mustache twirling racist villains that simplify the problems.
In my campaign, we've only been playing for a few months and we've already dealt with the brutalities of the Indian Wars, the harassment of the Chinese, distrust and discrimination of scandinavian immigrants, and the black migrations to the West (like the real-history all-black Kansas settlement of Nicodemus).  The debates, conflicts and tensions within communities, where some of your neighbors end up acting as Night Riders and try to burn the barn of the black homesteaders, while the abolitionist mayor is demanding the ex-union Sheriff do something about it, is more interesting than just having the CSA agents being responsible for it all.

Quote from: Tod13;913732Lincoln was not anti-slavery. He adopted that stance as an excuse for the invasion. He himself wrote he would have supported whichever side of the issue gave him the most support.

The entire Republican party was anti-slavery; it was a key part of their platform. His election as president was what precipitated the Southern states' secession, so it seems really weird to be trying to pretend that this was somehow not a big deal to them.

Quote from: RPGPundit;916128Well, except there's better tensions to run in the real historical wild west.

I'm running a Wild West game right now. And what you have to understand is that so much of what happened in the west only happened BECAUSE the war ended, and it happened the way it did because of how the war ended.  For another 20 years after the war, the American West was still largely about fighting battles between Northerners and Southerners brought over from back home; it was that instead of USA and CSA it was (northern) lawmen vs. (southern) outlaws, (northern) city folk vs (southern) farmers, (northern) republicans vs (southern) democrats, (northern) businessmen vs (southern) saloon owners, etc etc.

The gunfight at the OK Corral was a part of that too.

Very true. The Earp/Cowboys feud was based as much in political gains as it was in personal vendettas.

Your campaign sounds terrific, by the way. Can I ask what system you're using?

I made a new thread to discuss these possible issues.

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?35118-Alt-History-Deadlands-Analyzing-how-society-changes-in-the-new-timeline&p=916171#post916171

Quote from: RPGPundit;916129The entire Republican party was anti-slavery; it was a key part of their platform. His election as president was what precipitated the Southern states' secession, so it seems really weird to be trying to pretend that this was somehow not a big deal to them.

I suspect from his posts that you're talking to somebody that's had an anarcho-capitalist reeducation, and I've observed some bizarre crossovers of CSA apologetics and ancap revisionism, attempting to reframe the secession as a civil liberties revolution that's relevant to the present day.  After the various pre-war political declarations unambiguously supporting chattel slavery as a positive social and economic value and citing potential threats to it as the primary cause of the secession, the tune began to change before the war even ended.  By the time the 'peculiar' social order of the South had been recategorized as crimes against humanity, the cognitive dissonance must have been intense.  I've heard sympathizers say the damnedest things, about how the CSA didn't have conscription, didn't have their own political prisoners or suspend habeas corpus, didn't have taxes or military expropriation, didn't constitutionally prohibit abolition of slavery in it's own states, etc.  I've had a friend who considers himself a scholar and intellectual wave off primary sources and tell me that the secession of the 1860s was a revolution of the states against over-regulation by the Federal Reserve Bank.  Of course, the Fed didn't exist until the twentieth century, but in 1860 there hadn't been ANY national bank for decades!  

You'll usually find "it wasn't about slavery" in the center of a lush, cultivated garden of ignorance, surrounded by a high wall of impenetrable alt-think that would make a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist blush with envy.

Quote from: TAFMSV;916211I suspect from his posts that you're talking to somebody that's had an anarcho-capitalist reeducation, and I've observed some bizarre crossovers of CSA apologetics and ancap revisionism, attempting to reframe the secession as a civil liberties revolution that's relevant to the present day.  After the various pre-war political declarations unambiguously supporting chattel slavery as a positive social and economic value and citing potential threats to it as the primary cause of the secession, the tune began to change before the war even ended.  By the time the 'peculiar' social order of the South had been recategorized as crimes against humanity, the cognitive dissonance must have been intense.  I've heard sympathizers say the damnedest things, about how the CSA didn't have conscription, didn't have their own political prisoners or suspend habeas corpus, didn't have taxes or military expropriation, didn't constitutionally prohibit abolition of slavery in it's own states, etc.  I've had a friend who considers himself a scholar and intellectual wave off primary sources and tell me that the secession of the 1860s was a revolution of the states against over-regulation by the Federal Reserve Bank.  Of course, the Fed didn't exist until the twentieth century, but in 1860 there hadn't been ANY national bank for decades!  

You'll usually find "it wasn't about slavery" in the center of a lush, cultivated garden of ignorance, surrounded by a high wall of impenetrable alt-think that would make a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist blush with envy.

*random historical digression*

Mind you, the Confederacy is quite possibly one of the most interesting governments you could ever do a series of movies or read throughs on if you ever wanted to do a Paranoia game. If you could somehow surgically remove the horror of the peculiar institution's apologists very real effect on the United States and how it continues to inflict misery to this day with its legacy (hello David Duke), you'd note the hypocrisy and self-lies and rationalizations were there from the beginning.

Just as the Republican party was an alliance of men who had absolutely nothing in common other than their distaste for slavery (and I remember to tell my students, "They were racists by our standards, all of them, but by that time even most of the world's die-hard racists found slavery abhorent."), so was the fact the Confederacy had nothing in common other than slavery.

You had to look no further than New Orleans where the culture of slavery was every bit as thick and in the blood as the rest of the South if not more so but the "rules" for justifying it were slightly but distinctly different. Blacks could rise to become plantation owners themselves, for example. and had a vested interest in wanting the system to continue even as the rest of the South looked at the concept with horror.

Also, no sooner had the ink dried on the Constitution that the government realized it couldn't function with the majority of its rules which it gradually threw away. Deadlands idea the South would have to liberate its slaves to win the war isn't one which was entirely without merit. Toward the end Robert E. Lee (who has way too much apologia himself) himself forwarded the idea but only so they could win--ignoring that was the reason they were rebelling.

The Confederacy from the very beginning was everything and nothing to a bunch of people and meant whatever was convenient. Which makes Deadlands concept fascinating as a surviving Confederacy would have to be rebuilt from scratch or be a kind of Brazil-esque dystopia even without slavery.

Quote from: CTPhipps;915117The developers have been quite candid about the fact they wanted to make their Western game something which wouldn't attract the worst sort of gamer. Our hobby is 99% made of wonderful people but that 1% who justify racism, sexism, and God knows whatever else weirdness they want to do at their table by "playing in character" or "being historical" or "true to the setting" is my own personal bugbear.

I find that really hard to believe, because I played Deadlands in the 1990s, and it seemed to me that whitewashing the confederacy was ALL about allowing gamers (who seemed as geeks to tend to be more pro-CSA than the average population) to be able to play a "noble and heroic CSA officer" without having to deal with the unfortunate ugliness of racism.

There were way more geeks who wanted to romanticize the Confederacy by claiming that the it wasn't a racist regime than those who wanted to play Confederates in order to live out some kind of racist fantasy. In fact, I don't remember actually running into a single one of those in a Deadlands game.  In general, actual full-blown 'want to get to oppress black people in an RPG' racists seem very rare to me, and they generally don't hang around with the rest of the general population.

So I'm pretty sure Deadlands' Confederacy, whatever the designers say now, was really all about getting to have your cake an eat it too: you could be a heroic Rebel opposing the oppressive north in the 'war of northern aggression' and show that the CSA was "actually not about racism at all".