Eh, what? In Alien etc. it's metaphorical impregnation, but mechanically, the xenos are more like wasps that give their larvae paralyzed prey to eat, yeah?

The Dragon Age darkspawn seem a little more on the nose actually.

Body horror sets off people's reactions because human reproduction is so strange and grotesque when viewed in any kind of alternate context. There's a reason why the playwright Edward Albee called sex "bumping uglies" and many authors have looked at pregnancy as the presence of a parasite.

Body horror works because its transgressive. Body horror monsters cause fear in the reader and the viewer because they cross boundaries of "decency" and scratch at both our sexual fears and our sexual fetishes.

But in RPGs, monsters are statblocks that exist to be killed. If anyone asks "how do they make half-orcs?", you step into questionable territory especially on a forum frequented by old men. Transgressive topics in general (and any innovation that may occur in body horror genres) is the domain of the young.

I never got the whole "half-orcs are always the result of rape".  Humans can be any race (incl. lawful evil) and, given a bunch of bandits or other group of humans similarly aligned with orcs who can say the resultant offspring wouldn't be the result of a consensual pairing?  I've never seen any implication that half-elves are the result of rape; the only term describing orcs in this fashion is "fecund" which (roughly) means "has a lot of babies".  Doesn't say "Orc females are raped, or orc males rape human females, that's why there are half orcs".

I think we've got half-orcs (and half-goblins, or goblin-men) and half-elves because both pairings exist in Tolkien's work where once again there's no implication of rape as the cause.

The Forgotten Realms has something like these, the Phaerimm

QuotePhaerimm reproduce asexually by injecting eggs through their stingers into paralyzed victims. Once the eggs hatch, the hatchlings devour their victims from the inside.

I guess one difference is that they are implanting already fertilized eggs, not impregnating someone, but...

Quote from: Benoist;689017BTW, this is already MUCH better. How long did it take you to think of it? Five minutes, tops?

The original idea was absolutely TERRIBLE. Somebody's got to say it.

Oh yeah, I agree, the original was terrible, and it didn't take long to fix at all, but that's kind of what the point of the thread was, as I read it, he was asking for options to fix it.

I don't want this place to be a haven for rapegames that can't be on purple, but Promised Sands (from what I remember of the setting) isn't like that.  There's just that one monster that's not very well designed, and with a little tune-up can be horrific, and fit the same role in the setting, and not be a future candidate for "WTF D&D".

Quote from: Spinachcat;689052Body horror sets off people's reactions because human reproduction is so strange and grotesque when viewed in any kind of alternate context. There's a reason why the playwright Edward Albee called sex "bumping uglies" and many authors have looked at pregnancy as the presence of a parasite.

No, they haven't. Dworkin's misanthropic looney cheering section might be vocal on the internet, but that's a result of the amplification effect emerging from the democratising power of the web rather than there being more of them. Feel free to wheel out a reading list of a dozen books where 'pregnancy as parasitism' is a feature and I'll direct you to twelve thousand others where it isn't.

If human reproduction is strange and grotesque so is all other reproduction, and don't dwell too long on eating your cornflakes in the morning because the monstrous manner in which you masticate using uneven bony protrusions from your skull, gorge the resultant mess down, and disperse it through your organs via mordant acids and semi permeable membranes will surely drive you shrieking across the boundaries of madness itself.

And don't even ask what happens afterwards.

Quote from: Spinachcat;689052Body horror works because its transgressive. Body horror monsters cause fear in the reader and the viewer because they cross boundaries of "decency" and scratch at both our sexual fears and our sexual fetishes.

A swing and a miss. Or rather more of the nutbag associating everything with sex, combined with a hat tip to 'transgressives' that are in reality amateur shock jocks trying to push peoples' buttons to get them to buy stuff cos that's how ya makes teh monies, amirite?

Done well, by a master like Clive Barker say, it can work. Done by the likes of Timmy McHack the armchair auteur, its true character oozes through immediately. It shows a lack of talent, reaching for the cheapest possible buttons to press in lieu of actual imagination.

I have nothing but contempt for idiots like that.

Quote from: Spinachcat;689052But in RPGs, monsters are statblocks that exist to be killed. If anyone asks "how do they make half-orcs?", you step into questionable territory especially on a forum frequented by old men. Transgressive topics in general (and any innovation that may occur in body horror genres) is the domain of the young.

If you were ten years old when the first Alien movie came out, you'd be what, 45 now? The seventies saw a lot of that sort of thing. Weave World came out in 1987, and it shits large all over the most fevered dreams of the 'transgressive' lobby. Hell, Mary Shelley was rocking the body horror in 1816.

It's not new, it's not cutting edge, and it's definetely not interesting. You constantly see the same thing in software - some hotshot tween comes out with a program that fixes a certain problem followed by a round of backslapping for the innovation, only to be told the same exact thing had been done in 1972, 1986 and 1994 and they could have saved a lot of time just by knowing more. Unless by 'young' you mean 'ignorant'.

All of the infinite wonders and possibilities of the imagination to call upon and this is the best some people can do.

Just as an aside, I heard the phrase "perfect parasite" from my ex-wife when she was pregnant with our first daughter. And it is true. An unborn fetus/embryo/whatever takes exactly what it needs from the host/mother/parent/etc.

And if you think too much about other things the body does it gets quiet icky. Obligatory XKCD on Dreaming.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;689038I think it would if you hammered on the "Women get raped/impregnated by the xenomorphs, they're its main prey".

To be fair, the very first film in the franchise ably demonstrated that this isn't actually the case.

Quote from: CRKrueger;688981Well Ben Rogers got his thread closed rather abruptly, are we gonna get all Glorantha threads closed because of Broo?

What I would do with the Uzmek is retain the essential horror of the creature without making it "rapey".  Having contamination by the creature's blood reproduces the creature not by having it's blood essentially be it's semen, but by having it's blood contain the virus, parasite, magical curse that turns ANY creature, male or female, into one of these beings.  Take gender out of the equation, take traditional biological reproductive fluids out of the equation and leave the monster as is, in the rulebook.

People who complain then, may as well complain about Zombies, the X-Files and all the works of David Cronenberg or the Body Horror genre in general.

So, you do have a third option, one which should keep both groups off your back as well as have the monster fill it's desired role in the setting.

See, what you have done there is create an interesting creature that can have a place in the game world, sets up a lot of potential scenarios beyond just horror, and isn't exploitative of any particular subset of the population. And it's pretty cool! You've clearly thought about it. I can't imagine you having typed that up... one-handed, shall we say.

What you didn't do is stumble into a topic to tell us about your awesome rape monster that upset people on another forum who just don't appreciate your genius (Oh, and by the way, please support our kickstarter kthxbi).

Quote from: The Traveller;689068Done well, by a master like Clive Barker say, it can work. Done by the likes of Timmy McHack the armchair auteur, its true character oozes through immediately. It shows a lack of talent, reaching for the cheapest possible buttons to press in lieu of actual imagination.

I have nothing but contempt for idiots like that.

Even Clive Barker would have been an armchair auteur once; you have to go through that phase to become a master, and that doesn't make your later work any less valid. I'm sure there's quite a bit of unreleased tat that he wrote while honing his craft (Frankly, anyone who claims they became a great anything without practice is a liar). But part of going through the phase, is leaving it behind...

Quote from: Ladybird;689089unreleased

The key word here.

There are plenty of places where offcolour fanfiction is welcomed with open arms, or at least nobody notices it amid the great drifts of other such inspired works.

What annoyed me was this 'new hotness' bollocks, whereas in reality it's just a flock of greasy poseurs warming over stuff that was interesting a quarter of a century ago and trying to peddle it as having no previous owners.

It's not new, it's old and busted, made worse by the way they're banging it off the hyperventilating rape-obsessed in the hopes of generating cheap sensation (a primary reason for this scouring of the bottom of the barrel), not pushing the boundaries of expression.

This is a trend I'm starting to notice more among other concepts too - that fail forward concept really means 'fail'. Partial failure tables were done in solo gamebooks back in the 80s, and they only have limited utility today unless you're using a very light system.

Yes, you'll have to work quite hard and really know what you're doing, what came before, if you want to make something new and interesting. Talent is helpful too.

Quote from: Ladybird;689089What you didn't do is stumble into a topic to tell us about your awesome rape monster that upset people on another forum who just don't appreciate your genius (Oh, and by the way, please support our kickstarter kthxbi).

There's a number of responders out there who feel that way, I didn't get that vibe.  He admitted the problem with the monster, and specifically said it was not going to be in the official book.  Maybe I just had a different reaction because I already knew the monster existed from Dan Davenport's review (I think Dan might be the one who coined "rape ogre").

Anyway, I think he can include the monster with modification and still please both groups, which was the original question.

Quote from: Warthur;689081To be fair, the very first film in the franchise ably demonstrated that this isn't actually the case.

Right, and I agree 100%; just saying that if the examples I gave were the ones presented, there'd be a hue and cry about the xenomorphs.

Just as an aside, and to inject some well-needed humor into this thread, every time I read "Uzmek" I hear this in my head:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hCCCRAcTAA

Quote from: Ladybird;689089Even Clive Barker would have been an armchair auteur once; you have to go through that phase to become a master, and that doesn't make your later work any less valid. I'm sure there's quite a bit of unreleased tat that he wrote while honing his craft (Frankly, anyone who claims they became a great anything without practice is a liar). But part of going through the phase, is leaving it behind...

"I paid my dues in a different medium. I wrote for the theater -- I was a playwright, and an illustrator. Neither of these professions made me money. I had tinkered around with some stories for friends and for my own amusement, and I gave them to my theater agent who sent them off to Livia Gollancz at Victor Gollancz publishers." --Clive Barker in a 1987 interview with Dennis Etchison, which was later published as "A Little Bit of Hamlet" in Shadows in Eden.

Gollancz rejected the stories out of hand ("The story goes that Livia took hold of her pearls and said, 'Eurgh! Get these off my desk and out of my company immediately!', which they've since regretted, of course"), and they eventually ended up at Sphere Books who made them the starting point for Books of Blood.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689018Of course rape monsters aren't always a terrible idea. Alien is a classic of the horror genera it's about a all about rape monsters. You just have to handle the material with finesse that Ben Rogers clearly lacks.

For one thing, you don't call it a "rape monster." Nobody calls the alien "a rape monster." They might call it a xenomorph, but it's horror rather speaks for itself.  Horror generally does that anyway.  It leaves implications and innuendo and lets you come to the horrifying, hair-raising conclusions all on your own, instead of stopping to explain why you should totally be scared, like a bad comedian trying to defend his joke to his confused audience.