TheRPGSite

First off, what is Cthulhutech? It's a Roleplaying Game made by WildFire. Currently they are signed with Sandstorm, last year they were signed with InMediaRes, and the year before they were trying to print and distribute their books on their own. They signed with IMR because it turns out they don't know how to get books bound properly, and they signed with Sandstorm because they had to drag IMR through a six month court case to get the money for the books that IMR sold on their behalf. So I'm predisposed to like Cthulhutech, because they are made by a plucky little company that has achieved some recognition and success in spite of some amazing obstacles. Keep that in mind while I rant about it.

Cthulhutech takes place in a Kitchensink Cthulhu Mythos / Near Future Giant Robot SciFi setting. Apparently this blows a lot of peoples' minds. I mean, Cthulhu and Science Fiction? Holy shit! But honestly the Cthulhu Mythos has always been science fiction. Yuggoth is Pluto, and it always was. So they really do get zero points for originality there. Still, it's a solid formula: madness inducing monsters and spaceships has been selling books since HP Lovecraft picked up a pen.

Nevertheless, there really is a lot of material from the original writings that don't translate well to modern audiences. Generations have passed and the ability to fly through space or destroy a city just isn't that impressive any more. We have rockets and nuclear weapons. And it isn't just the march of progress that has made a lot of the alien technology less scary, HP Lovecraft himself had some ideas that are... antiquated. The final revelation in The Medusa's Coil isn't even that she has snake parts, it's that "despite" being a sexy lady, she's part negro (I am not making that up (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mc.asp)). The whole "what if your pure White lineage got polluted with black blood?!" thing just isn't scary any more to the vast majority of people who aren't skinheads polishing their Gott Mitt Uns belt buckles, so if you want to retell those stories to people with modern sensibilities, you need to update things somehow.

So the Cthulhutech people decided that to update the whole lineage corruption thing they needed to replace it with institutional rape. Yes, really. Every time HP Lovecraft had some sort of inhuman (or non-White) people secretly interbreeding with humans to make secret hybrids, this has been replaced with rape camps. Cthulhutech has a lot of rape camps. The Deep Ones have Rape Camps, the Cult of Hastur converts every town they capture to a Rape Camp. The Horned Ones generate Rape with a magical field doohickey, and on and on and on. Lots of Rape. True story: if you dare to brave RPG.net to find the "Sell Me On" thread for Cthulhutech, three of words in the tags for the thread are the word "rape". That is not a joke. The tags are "cthulhutech, mythos, rape, rape rape, science fiction, sell me on". There is a lot of rape, is what I'm saying. It puts some people off the game.

Next we have the science fiction elements, because all this stuff happens in the future. Team Human has space ships and Evangelions. Yes, seriously. They have the giant robots from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Now I like Evangelion, but their inclusion here is rather corrosive to cooperative storytelling. We're not talking about the robots from Patlabor or Voltron here, the expectation really appears to be that there will be one mecha pilot and while he goes on a rampage the rest of the party will... play canasta? I'm not really sure, there's only so many times you can have the rest of the team running around shooting guards in the rape camp (all dungeon equivalents in this game are alien spaceships or rape camps, or in the case of Sub Niggurath ships: both at once) while the giant robot pilot keeps the defenses occupied before it starts to get old. The rest of the team really is incapable of doing very much that meaningfully interacts with what the giant robot does. Space Battleships have a similar problem, though it is possible for the party to do pirates vs. marines stuff while the ship is flying around.

But let's get to the basic mechanics. It's called the "Framewerk System" which probably tells you everything you needed to know about how well thought out it was going to be. Basically, you roll a pile of d10s and try to arrange the results to make the highest straight or pair you can. Then you take the best "feature" out of the pile and add the numbers on the dice together and then you add your static modifiers on top of that. It's incredibly random, and I invite you to play with A Dice Roller (http://www.voidstate.com/rpg/cthulhutech/roller.php). Actually, I don't really see how to play the game without the dice roller, because figuring out what your roll was with real dice is a time consuming ordeal.

-Frank

Sounds like the copyright and/or trademark holders of "Cthulhu" are willing to license anything for cash.  The sign of nobody giving a damn anymore about a particular IP?

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422356First off, what is Cthulhutech? It's a Roleplaying Game made by WildFire. Currently they are signed with Sandstorm, last year they were signed with InMediaRes, and the year before they were trying to print and distribute their books on their own. They signed with IMR because it turns out they don't know how to get books bound properly, and they signed with Sandstorm because they had to drag IMR through a six month court case to get the money for the books that IMR sold on their behalf. So I'm predisposed to like Cthulhutech, because they are made by a plucky little company that has achieved some recognition and success in spite of some amazing obstacles. Keep that in mind while I rant about it.

Cthulhutech takes place in a Kitchensink Cthulhu Mythos / Near Future Giant Robot SciFi setting. Apparently this blows a lot of peoples' minds. I mean, Cthulhu and Science Fiction? Holy shit! But honestly the Cthulhu Mythos has always been science fiction. Yuggoth is Pluto, and it always was. So they really do get zero points for originality there. Still, it's a solid formula: madness inducing monsters and spaceships has been selling books since HP Lovecraft picked up a pen.

Nevertheless, there really is a lot of material from the original writings that don't translate well to modern audiences. Generations have passed and the ability to fly through space or destroy a city just isn't that impressive any more. We have rockets and nuclear weapons. And it isn't just the march of progress that has made a lot of the alien technology less scary, HP Lovecraft himself had some ideas that are... antiquated. The final revelation in The Medusa's Coil isn't even that she has snake parts, it's that "despite" being a sexy lady, she's part negro (I am not making that up (http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mc.asp)). The whole "what if your pure White lineage got polluted with black blood?!" thing just isn't scary any more to the vast majority of people who aren't skinheads polishing their Gott Mitt Uns belt buckles, so if you want to retell those stories to people with modern sensibilities, you need to update things somehow.

So the Cthulhutech people decided that to update the whole lineage corruption thing they needed to replace it with institutional rape. Yes, really. Every time HP Lovecraft had some sort of inhuman (or non-White) people secretly interbreeding with humans to make secret hybrids, this has been replaced with rape camps. Cthulhutech has a lot of rape camps. The Deep Ones have Rape Camps, the Cult of Hastur converts every town they capture to a Rape Camp. The Horned Ones generate Rape with a magical field doohickey, and on and on and on. Lots of Rape. True story: if you dare to brave RPG.net to find the "Sell Me On" thread for Cthulhutech, three of words in the tags for the thread are the word "rape". That is not a joke. The tags are "cthulhutech, mythos, rape, rape rape, science fiction, sell me on". There is a lot of rape, is what I'm saying. It puts some people off the game.

Next we have the science fiction elements, because all this stuff happens in the future. Team Human has space ships and Evangelions. Yes, seriously. They have the giant robots from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Now I like Evangelion, but their inclusion here is rather corrosive to cooperative storytelling. We're not talking about the robots from Patlabor or Voltron here, the expectation really appears to be that there will be one mecha pilot and while he goes on a rampage the rest of the party will... play canasta? I'm not really sure, there's only so many times you can have the rest of the team running around shooting guards in the rape camp (all dungeon equivalents in this game are alien spaceships or rape camps, or in the case of Sub Niggurath ships: both at once) while the giant robot pilot keeps the defenses occupied before it starts to get old. The rest of the team really is incapable of doing very much that meaningfully interacts with what the giant robot does. Space Battleships have a similar problem, though it is possible for the party to do pirates vs. marines stuff while the ship is flying around.

But let's get to the basic mechanics. It's called the "Framewerk System" which probably tells you everything you needed to know about how well thought out it was going to be. Basically, you roll a pile of d10s and try to arrange the results to make the highest straight or pair you can. Then you take the best "feature" out of the pile and add the numbers on the dice together and then you add your static modifiers on top of that. It's incredibly random, and I invite you to play with A Dice Roller (http://www.voidstate.com/rpg/cthulhutech/roller.php). Actually, I don't really see how to play the game without the dice roller, because figuring out what your roll was with real dice is a time consuming ordeal.

-Frank

That almost makes World of Synnabar sound playable in comparison . . .

Help me, Nyarlathotep, help me.  That makes World of Synnabar[sp?] sound playable in comparison.

Based on human history, I don't see why you think rape camps wouldn't be common when humanity is run by people influenced by Cthulhu and his ilk.

Quote from: ggroy;422361Sounds like the copyright and/or trademark holders of "Cthulhu" are willing to license anything for cash.  The sign of nobody giving a damn anymore about a particular IP?

I'm pretty sure Cthulhu et al is public domain by now; even in his lifetime Lovecraft encouraged other authors to incorporate his ideas and concepts (and specific names) into their works.  Copyrighting this is probably as likely as the TSR copyright on the term "Nazi."

My "cthulhu in the now or immediate future" I outlined is way better than this.

For once Frank and I are in total agreement. I found that the setting of the game stripped out the cosmic horror of Lovecraft and replaced it with gore, rape, and other slasher movie tropes.

There's also a really uncomfortable racism-through-obliviousness element that's very obvious to this non-American.

For example, the future world government's headquarters are in New York, then when they get bombed, they move them to... Chicago (for no good reason). China, India and the entire continent of Africa are basically ignored in the setting except as exotic backgrounds where your white soldiers can storm rape camps despite containing about 1/2 of mankind between them IRL.

The Nazzadi, who are this clone race, are explicitly stated to look like either (and only) like whites or Asians (in the sense of Chinese / Japanese, not Indians, I'm pretty sure from the art). The art is pretty uniformly honky too.

It's not any one thing that pushes it over the edge, and I doubt it's intentional, but it's another strike against the game for me.

I didn't know about the "rape camps" thing. I am officially unsold. Thanks, Frank Trollman.

I've run Cthulutech, so I'm a fully credentialed expert.

I won't dispute that there are rape camps in the game, but the overt rapey sexualization of the game really doesn't come into focus until you add the later books.  Off the top of my head the only rape camps mentioned are the deep ones on the coast and pretty much all of china is one big rape/cannibalism fest to show just how bad things get when the great old ones are winning.

The Fun Guys from Yuggoth don't, to my recollection, have any rape camps, but they do mind rape people into being on their side... or maybe replace them with exact clones, I can't recall which.

There are four tiers of play that are not well seperated or balanced. You do have the Evangelion pilots, which are slightly better than regular mecha pilots, but they can and do go crazy... I think there was a real effort there to make the concept of trading humanity/sanity for power/survival here.  You can play with mecha and evangelions in the same party without much difficulty, as they are on the same general scale, and if the eva pilot is in a lighter 'mech' it probably won't feel too unbalanced.

Then you have the 'taggers', which are Guyver rip offs.  They are human sized but are much more powerful than humans, and much more flexible/powerful than humans with access to power armor.  At least you can mix them into a human party if some people don't mind not being as cool as others. Taggers, officially, have some sort of extradimensional symbiot attached to their soul that HATES the Elder Gods or whatever, but it still drives the people bonded to them crazy.

And lastly you have humans.  Given that none of the enemies you are likely to face are anywhere near as weak as humans this, I suppose, allows you to play an old school 'we all gunna die!' game of Cthulu, with tech.  

I ran a mixed tagger/human party. As long as the Taggers were scrapping with the human sized enemies, the normal humans could try to cast spells or fire bullets into the fray and feel like they were contributing.  

Spells: Seem to be fairly trad Cthulu in scope. Mostly weak and or goofy shit with the occasional OMG WTF BBQ!!!! spell thrown in for good measure, but all of them are bad ideas to cast, take days etc and so forth.  

Psychic stuff is very heavily referenced in the main book, but actual RULES for being a psychic don't appear until the supplements... as I recall.

Insanity: Does not seem to be nearly as big a threat as it could be... and its offset by therapy rules.

Framewerk System:  Frank is basically right, its ass. Predicting odds is nigh on to impossible, resolving anything quickly  either means a truly abominable roll or ignoring the rules.  The game/system looks very quick in the book, very streamlined.  You don't have a lot of numbers to mess with, characters could be easily expressed on a 3x5 card if you wanted (Not mentioned in the game, just sayin'...), and the rules chapter is the thinnest part of the book.

But when you actually start trying to roll the dice?! Dear GOD!!  Chunky mess.

I mean: I taught it to very casual gamers very quickly, and ran it easily enough, but it never ran SMOOTHLY thanks to those damn dice conventions.  

I am thinking, however, that stealing a note from L5R/7th Sea and just assigning a 'kept dice' convention might work without having to massively rebalance the Difficulty ratings in the game.


Regarding the Cthulu Mythos itself: Even moving into expansions, the Cthulutech world seems to be streamlined fairly well.  Rather than referencing characters and events in near centennial books, you have a small handful of bad guys who are not at all on the same side, with one or two cults apeice.

Hastur is on the Plateau of Leng, its his cannibal hordes that have destroyed asia.  Cthulu sleeps, but the Deep Ones, who don't care about Hastur one way or the other (as far as I recall), are rising and raping, and have their own mecha and kaiju.

Then you have Nyarlythotep who appears to be on human's side, insamuch as he is the CEO of the big mega-corporation that makes a lot of this shit, though thats not to say he isn't evil and dastardly... I'm just saying what his main mask is doing.  The Fungi are invading earth to destroy humanity because they want to keep human pyschic/magic tech from awakening/empowering the elder gods.  Lastly there are the pleasure/rape/infiltration cults that worship... uh... I forgot.

And that is really it. Names are dropped, but really you just have three or four big bads fighting each other to be the one to finally fuck over humanity once and for all.

In game fiction appears to alternate between various military/commando operations, some doomed some not, and all either flavor of mecha or tagger, and 'investigations' inside the walled enclave cities, generally only involving humans or taggers.


EDIT::: You know your post is too long when you go from being the second poster to the ninth...

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;422380For once Frank and I are in total agreement. I found that the setting of the game stripped out the cosmic horror of Lovecraft and replaced it with gore, rape, and other slasher movie tropes.

There's also a really uncomfortable racism-through-obliviousness element that's very obvious to this non-American.

For example, the future world government's headquarters are in New York, then when they get bombed, they move them to... Chicago (for no good reason). China, India and the entire continent of Africa are basically ignored in the setting except as exotic backgrounds where your white soldiers can storm rape camps despite containing about 1/2 of mankind between them IRL.

The Nazzadi, who are this clone race, are explicitly stated to look like either (and only) like whites or Asians (in the sense of Chinese / Japanese, not Indians, I'm pretty sure from the art). The art is pretty uniformly honky too.

It's not any one thing that pushes it over the edge, and I doubt it's intentional, but it's another strike against the game for me.

If it was intentional it might at least be funny . . .

Quote from: danbuter;422370Based on human history, I don't see why you think rape camps wouldn't be common when humanity is run by people influenced by Cthulhu and his ilk.

It's got the same attitude towards rape as a 14 year old boy. Also, I personally would never play a female PC, or run it for a female PC because the sheer number of things that by the book have "save vs. rape" mind control powers and "auto pregnancy" abilities.

Quote from: Professort Zoot;422373I'm pretty sure Cthulhu et al is public domain by now; even in his lifetime Lovecraft encouraged other authors to incorporate his ideas and concepts (and specific names) into their works.  Copyrighting this is probably as likely as the TSR copyright on the term "Nazi."

American copyright law:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/302.html

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/304.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_length


The first publishing of "Cthulhu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu)" was in 1928.

According to American copyright law, the copyright on something first published in 1928 will expire 95 years later in 2023.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Copyright

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;422380The Nazzadi, who are this clone race, are explicitly stated to look like either (and only) like whites or Asians (in the sense of Chinese / Japanese, not Indians, I'm pretty sure from the art). The art is pretty uniformly honky too.
.

I hate to say it, Bub, but this is very much looking like 'I want to be outraged against something'.

The Nazzadi are fucking Dark Blue.  They don't look like any human race whatsoever, and I strongly doubt you could find a single line of text anywhere in the entire line of books that suggests their facial features look like any particular ethnicity.  The art is cartoony enough, and in the character chapter at least all one artist, that trying to assign an ethnotype to Fucking Blue People is silly.

Also: China DOES get plenty of mention in the main book: Hastur's Cannibal/monster horde has over run it and eaten and or (in no particular order) raped everyone.

Seriously though, your complaint about the Nazzadi being white is like saying the Drow are racist because they are obviously the coolest race in the game and despite being black skinned have white facial features. Its a nonsense statement.
(http://i13.photobucket.com/albums/a298/DerinaJean/Cassandra-1.jpg)

Re: PC professions/classes

I don't own the game, but I have read it, and I thought everyone was supposed to pick either the same or similar professions?  Eldritch folk run in secret societies, so you can't have a military grunt along for the ride.  Mecha pilots do their own thing, so you'd want a squad of them instead of ground troops/scouts as support.

Quote from: ggroyAccording to American copyright law, the copyright on something first published in 1928 will expire 95 years later in 2023.

I thought it was shakey for Cthulhu since there were disagreements over who exactly owned the copyright?

Quote from: ggroy;422386American copyright law:

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/302.html

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/304.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_length


The first publishing of "Cthulhu (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu)" was in 1928.

According to American copyright law, the copyright on something first published in 1928 will expire 95 years later in 2023.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Copyright

Obviously this only applies if the right is defended/asserted.  The history of the Lovecraft genre would seem to make this moot.

Quote from: Peregrin;422390I thought it was shakey for Cthulhu since there were disagreements over who exactly owned the copyright?

It most likely will not stop the Cthulhu (alleged) copyright holders from launching infringement lawsuits.

For a small rpg company or book publisher, it can be the difference between being in business or bankrupt.

Quote from: Professort Zoot;422392Obviously this only applies if the right is defended/asserted.  The history of the Lovecraft genre would seem to make this moot.

Of course.

The only flare up I'm aware of, was the Cthulhu mythos issue in the 1E AD&D "Deities and Demigods" book.

Quote from: Spike;422388I hate to say it, Bub, but this is very much looking like 'I want to be outraged against something'.

The Nazzadi are fucking Dark Blue.  They don't look like any human race whatsoever, and I strongly doubt you could find a single line of text anywhere in the entire line of books that suggests their facial features look like any particular ethnicity.  The art is cartoony enough, and in the character chapter at least all one artist, that trying to assign an ethnotype to Fucking Blue People is silly.

pg 38 of the corebook, under the two page section marked "Nazzadi"

"Based closely off of our DNA, the Nazzadi are graceful Caucasian- or Asian-appearing people with jet-black skin and hair and red eyes that shine in the dark."

QuoteAlso: China DOES get plenty of mention in the main book: Hastur's Cannibal/monster horde has over run it and eaten and or (in no particular order) raped everyone.

No, over half of China is free of the cult of Hastur, as the map on pg 43 of the corebook indicates. As well, though I don't expect the Cthulhutech authors to realise this, the section that the cult of Hastur has is mostly barren desert & mountain (the Migou have barren plains and tundra). China's RL population is massively concentrated on its eastern seaboard, which is almost untouched by the Migou and the Hastur cult.

China is brushed over rapidly, as is most of the world that isn't white people. Heck, I've seen fans of the game on RPG.net complain that the setting expansion barely even touches on it as well.

Now, by itself, ignoring China is not proof of racism, but there's a lot of little things like that (including the Nazzadi thing) that collectively add up to making the game "Whites and Japs save the world aka themselves!"

Eh. That'll show me to ignore maps... :)

Also: where do I send you the cookie for beating my challenge?  Talk about a stupid line to put into a description of blue alien hybrid clones!

Quote from: ggroy;422396Of course.

The only flare up I'm aware of, was the Cthulhu mythos issue in the 1E AD&D "Deities and Demigods" book.

Which is strange, really, because there has been a shit ton of Mythos fiction written over the years, and to my (completely fragmentary and unimpressive) knowledge, all of it has gone uncontested. I'd also be interested to know if the guys who made the Call of Cthulu silent film had any kind of license.

I guess I'll start wringing my hands and crying now.

Seriously, look at Africa now or Eastern Europe 15 years ago. Rape camps happen a LOT even without Cthulhu influence. Not adding them would deny human impulses.

I've run the game as urban horror conspiracy. Went just fine. I only own the corebook though and people generally agree that it is pretty good and the strongest part of the line.

Quote from: Spike;422426Eh. That'll show me to ignore maps... :)

Also: where do I send you the cookie for beating my challenge?  Talk about a stupid line to put into a description of blue alien hybrid clones!

No worries mate, it's not like you wrote it. But yeah, I read that and was all WTFBBQ?!?

I'm kind of pissed at the game, because the idea of a technologically advanced humanity taking on the footsoldiers of the elder gods is a great idea (cf. Delta Green, Laundry Files), and Cthulhutech manages to do it in what I consider just about the worst way.

Quote from: danbuter;422441I guess I'll start wringing my hands and crying now.

Seriously, look at Africa now or Eastern Europe 15 years ago. Rape camps happen a LOT even without Cthulhu influence. Not adding them would deny human impulses.

It's not the rape camps per se that seem extraneous, it's the focus on them, on forced impregnation, on Nazi rape machines that rape you to steal your soul, boss monsters with save vs. rape powers, and at least two major factions (Shub-Niggurath's cult and the Order of Dagon) whose masterplan is "YOU GONNA GIT RAPED!".

Also, it's mainly inhuman monsters doing the raping, not people.

Even weirder, the rape isn't actually necessary under the technological scheme of the setting. They can grow body parts and have highly advanced genetic engineering. They create and alter lifeforms all the time. The Migou and the Cthulu forces doing this have access to even better tech in that regard than the NEG (the good guys). But instead of doing that to produce say, perfect clones of the Deep Ones, it's rape, rape, rape.

Quote from: Aos;422439Which is strange, really, because there has been a shit ton of Mythos fiction written over the years, and to my (completely fragmentary and unimpressive) knowledge, all of it has gone uncontested. I'd also be interested to know if the guys who made the Call of Cthulu silent film had any kind of license.

Well, considering that August Dereleth and Arkham Press and a couple other folks have all laid claim to being the rightful inheritors I don't think anyone's going to clean up that mess.

With that said:

the Lovecraft (and Elric) sections in the D&DG were put there with the permission of Chaosium, after TSR asked.

They were removed (after a print run of 40k or more books - they are not rare) after the Blume Brothers discovered that a TSR product was "advertising" a competitors products (Elric! and Call of Cthulhu).

Had Los Bros. Assholes not thrown a hissy, there'd never have been an "expurgated" D&DG.

TSR asked, permission was granted.  There were no IP violations on the part of TSR.

Quote from: Spike;422382I've run Cthulutech, so I'm a fully credentialed expert.

I won't dispute that there are rape camps in the game, but the overt rapey sexualization of the game really doesn't come into focus until you add the later books.  Off the top of my head the only rape camps mentioned are the deep ones on the coast and pretty much all of china is one big rape/cannibalism fest to show just how bad things get when the great old ones are winning.

The Fun Guys from Yuggoth don't, to my recollection, have any rape camps, but they do mind rape people into being on their side... or maybe replace them with exact clones, I can't recall which.

So, lotsa rape but not quite that much rape. That's reassuring to read, since there are too few games that get the amount of rape just right. :)

_______________________
(caveat1: rape is horrible, evil, and I will not have it in my games. just to make this absolutely clear.)
(caveat2: the basic idea of Cthulhus-vs-mecha is cool as hell, though, the best spin on the Mythos since Delta Green)

Mecha + Cthulhu = x

Cthulhu = Tentacles, therefore

Mecha + Tentacles `= x

Mecha = Anime, therefore


Anime + Tentacles = x

I am not surprised!


What naive Settemrbini thought, though:

Cthulhu + Mecha = x

Mecha = Battletech, therefore

Cthulhu + BattleTech = x

Cthulhu = ultra-bad-ass aliens that are hard to kill, therefore

Great Old Ones vs. House Steiner == AWESOME!!

Sadly we got anime in the mix and that spoilt it all.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;422456Well, considering that August Dereleth and Arkham Press and a couple other folks have all laid claim to being the rightful inheritors I don't think anyone's going to clean up that mess.

August Derleth having himself, through/with Arkham House, stepped forward to stop the NY ex-wife to lay claim on Lovecraft's literary legacy herself (who, by all accounts, was quite the utilitarian/bitch ex-wife, if you get my drift).

I agree that any copyright dispute over the Cthulhu Mythos are unlikely to ever be resolved before it is certain every single piece of writing makes it into public domain.

It's kind of pointless now. The Mythos is, in effect, into the public domain. Might as well accept that.

Still fantasizing about Deep-Ones vs. Jägermechs...

"Hauptmann Redlich, where is your goddamn Rifleman company, we need help here with that Wing of Byakee!"

"Alpha-Lance requesting LRM-strike at ze-ro-se-ven-fi-ver, Shoggoth armed and dangerous, repeat..."

"LAM-Regiment Osano-Wo: It is my honour to inform you that the Dragon has chosen you for the Kamikaze attack on Hastur. BANZAI!"

I'd do it with Heavy Gear rules, personally. HG even has a psyche score representing how well-balanced psychologically you are.

Quote from: Settembrini;422472Still fantasizing about Deep-Ones vs. Jägermechs...

"Hauptmann Redlich, where is your goddamn Rifleman company, we need help here with that Wing of Byakee!"

"Alpha-Lance requesting LRM-strike at ze-ro-se-ven-fi-ver, Shoggoth armed and dangerous, repeat..."

"LAM-Regiment Osano-Wo: It is my honour to inform you that the Dragon has chosen you for the Kamikaze attack on Hastur. BANZAI!"

I won't lie. I'd probably play this at least once.

Quote from: Melan;422466So, lotsa rape but not quite that much rape. That's reassuring to read, since there are too few games that get the amount of rape just right. :)

_______________________
(caveat1: rape is horrible, evil, and I will not have it in my games. just to make this absolutely clear.)
(caveat2: the basic idea of Cthulhus-vs-mecha is cool as hell, though, the best spin on the Mythos since Delta Green)

To be perfectly honest, I didn't even really notice it until I bought the book with the psychic powers so much (with the elder god secks cults and rape mind powers).  I vaguely recall thinking that it was a little too upfront with the deep one villages, you know: we know what breeding camps are, do we really need to have it thrown in our faces that that it is 'rape camps'?

As for The Hastur cannibal connection, the fiction that establishes what is really going on there is designed to be as horrific as possible (The POV is a deep cover spy slowly growing to like the horrible stuff). I mean, if you are eating people and wearing entrails as hats, and you still aren't as nasty as your bosses, the fact that rapes (or necro-rapes, or random, not entirely natural orifice rapes) are ALSO going on is just one more overwhelmingly 'do not want to go there without lot and lots of fire-of-the-burninating-kind' detail.

But as Psuedo pointed out tengentally, there are various mind control rape powers... starting really in the supplements. Though I believe that they affect men and women in the adventure therein, though the focus is on the female victims.

I think the problem is that mere existential horror just doesn't seem very horrific to modern audiences, so they are spicing it up.  I'm reminded of Stephen Kings commentary re: tommyknockers where the dude dies to the toilet monster... if it don't make you uncomfortable it ain't really that scary.

Of course, it doesn't necessarily reverse either: Just because its squicky don't make it horror. The King died on the toilet, which is just pathetic in a vaguely amusing sense, not horrific.


I am not under the impression that the Cthulutech guys are actively promoting or glorifying rape, which is a huge step in the right direction over the alternative.  I can't tell you if their handling of the topic is appropriate or not, for me it was not offensive but it did get worse in select cases.  Recall that the explicit focus on the game is always stopping this sort of thing, there are no canon rules/examples for playing Team Evil that I am aware of. Then again, I've already been checked once...

Chaosium Mythos =/= HPL Mythos.

Chaosium has not only created images based on HPL's own descriptions, but also got rights from many Mythos authors to their creations....and many people aren't aware than only a fraction of the current CoC mythos family were actually created by HPL.    

YOU are 100% able to do anything with HPL's original writings, but your images and interpretations should not be identical to Chaosium's or anyone else.  That's where there could be an issue.

BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

Quote from: Spinachcat;422494Chaosium Mythos =/= HPL Mythos.



BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

No orcs-->no half-orcs--> no problem.

So basically the creators of this game watched abit to much urotsukidoji and hentai then mixed abit of migou mythos and evangelion into the mix along with some drow coz there awesome then said fuck it why not set it in the future and add mechs that arent evangelions coz not everyone like those kinds?

Sounds interesting though i'd definitely downplay the utosukidoji and hentai references and go for a more starship troopers style humans versus the nasty aliens style game instead or maybe a urban horror/guyver game.

Edit: just checked how much the books cost and have totally changed my mind, £35 for a sourcebook is a pisstake.

Quote from: Settembrini;422468Mecha + Cthulhu = x

Cthulhu = Tentacles, therefore

Mecha + Tentacles `= x

Mecha = Anime, therefore


Anime + Tentacles = x

I am not surprised!


What naive Settemrbini thought, though:

Cthulhu + Mecha = x

Mecha = Battletech, therefore

Cthulhu + BattleTech = x

Cthulhu = ultra-bad-ass aliens that are hard to kill, therefore

Great Old Ones vs. House Steiner == AWESOME!!

Sadly we got anime in the mix and that spoilt it all.

That's all the review the game needs, right there. It would be pretty neat without the anime.

Bloody elves raping our women...

Actually the dark secret of the High Elves in my first Rolemaster campaign was that they couldn't reproduce because they had turned away from the gods that created them.  So they'd kidnap and rape woodelves for the purpose.

There was this high elf Paladin the PCs really, really hated...

Yeah, Chulhutech; I know I've gone on record before as saying they took an awesome name and premise and fucked the whole thing up.

You'd be better off mashing up your Robotech and Beyond the Supernatural. It'd be a much more awesome game then Cthulhutech's Emo claptrap.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Quote from: Spike;422426Eh. That'll show me to ignore maps... :)

Don't feel too bad. I'm pretty sure that the authors of Cthulhutech don't read maps either. Not only do they not seem to appreciate how many people are on the coast of China, they also don't seem to know where cities are in Russia or even where there are rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. It's like they were operating from one of those children's maps, that contains just boldly colored countries and their capital cities but no topographical or population distribution information.

-Frank

Just for the record: I CAN read maps, and quite well.. I just don't bother with game maps...usually.

At least I know all the stuff you just pointed out, anyway.



Grumble, grumble... just gotta salvage my pride somehow...grumble grumble...

Quote from: KrakaJak;422623You'd be better off mashing up your Robotech and Beyond the Supernatural. It'd be a much more awesome game then Cthulhutech's Emo claptrap.

Hell yeah! Wouldn't it be AWESOME if someone took created a Beyond the Supernatural/Robotech mashup game?

Oh wait...

(http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:nRxKhrCWLBFKHM:http://i302.photobucket.com/albums/nn91/Gameologists/rifts_sb.jpg&t=1)

And despite what the cover might suggest, I assure you, this game is 100% tentacle-rape-free. :D

I once entertained the notion of running a campaign with the PCs as the Science Police, emptying Monster Island in a last-ditch effort to stave off the day of the Old Ones.

Plus Ultraman. And Spectreman, what the hell.

Lord Hobie

Yeah, the Cthulhutech / RIFTS comparison is really very apt. They were even both in lawsuits this year.

Anyway, on the rape camps thing. In the core book it isn't so bad. It tells you that the EOD (that's the Deeps Ones and Tentacles faction) have rape camps. Why? I'm not really sure, they have cloning vat technology, so there doesn't seem to be any actual reason to bother. But sure, they are bad guys. They have decided for whatever reason that they want to grow hybrid soldiers over a period of decades in rape prisons full of angry and hostile humans instead of over a period of weeks in their cloning facilities. This is the sort of thing that villain factions do. I'm sure that the EOD's leader has a backup plan where he turns into a snake and devours an energy field larger than his head to ascend to near godhood.

But as books come out, it gets ground into you like glass under Rodney King. Not only do they talk um... more about the Deep Ones' rape camps, but they add more rape camps belonging to other factions. One set of rape camps is fine in context, but there's a certain remorseless sameness about how the other factions have rape camps. It really doesn't help that the Hastur flavored rape camps are "for no reason". That doesn't make it any different from the Deep One rape camps that are there to make hybrid foot soldiers. And it's even worse when the Shub Niggurath aligned rape camps are also there to make hybrid foot soldiers, just for a different faction.

There are even rape camps there to make babies to sacrifice to dark gods. Why would anyone ever do that? There are babies already made. They are just sitting around in hospitals and daycare centers. Why would anyone operate a rape prison for 40 weeks, when you could just attack a maternity ward instead? You'd have the same number of newborns in like an hour and wouldn't have to hide, feed, and imprison hostile women for most of a year.

When you start throwing in all the monsters who have coercive sex or insidious impregnation as a special power or even combat maneuver, it goes from simply no longer being interesting or funny to being a straight up depressing theme. The game starts getting you worried that maybe the authors really like talking about rape. It's not FATAL, but it's uncomfortably close in too much of the later material.

-Frank

Cthulhutech is something I picked up cheap to mine for ideas and kind of ended up ignoring altogether... it did remind me a bit of Rifts, with less power to the fun.
I think that if I wanted to run 'Lovecraft in Spaaaaaaaace!!!' I'd go with Chaosium's 'Cthulhu Rising' (on the subtle end) or the setting from 'Dark Space; (on the wilder side)... or maybe 'Dark Heresy'.

An Ultraman/Science Patrol game sounds like a lot of fun... especially mashed up with Gerry Andersonverse elments... someone should go make that.

I am terribly sorry, but I keep imagining this as some Command and Conquer kind of game where instead of tiberium, the rival factions' harvesters fight over, uh, human resources. :hatsoff:

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422356First off, what is Cthulhutech? It's a Roleplaying Game made by WildFire. Currently they are signed with Sandstorm, last year they were signed with InMediaRes, and the year before they were trying to print and distribute their books on their own. They signed with IMR because it turns out they don't know how to get books bound properly, and they signed with Sandstorm because they had to drag IMR through a six month court case to get the money for the books that IMR sold on their behalf.

We were with Mongoose Publishing initially, and they are the ones who had problems binding the books. Then we went to Catalyst Game Labs/In Media Res, with the resulting law suit. We are now with Sandstorm, who has brought everything back into print as well as put out three new products since August.

Matthew Grau
Creator of CthulhuTech & Framewerk
WildFire LLC

Quote from: eldritchcat;422814We were with Mongoose Publishing initially, and they are the ones who had problems binding the books. Then we went to Catalyst Game Labs/In Media Res, with the resulting law suit. We are now with Sandstorm, who has brought everything back into print as well as put out three new products since August.

Run! Run away!

Seanchai

Quote from: Spinachcat;422494Chaosium Mythos =/= HPL Mythos.

Chaosium has not only created images based on HPL's own descriptions, but also got rights from many Mythos authors to their creations....and many people aren't aware than only a fraction of the current CoC mythos family were actually created by HPL.    

YOU are 100% able to do anything with HPL's original writings, but your images and interpretations should not be identical to Chaosium's or anyone else.  That's where there could be an issue.

BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

After a hard day of slaughtering the evil orc hordes and stea--er, liberating their loot, the normal male human adventurer (who does not have any camp followers) will be desperate enough to bed an orc or two.  And howza human supposed to know if a goddamned orc sow is willing or not?

Quote from: Simlasa;422795An Ultraman/Science Patrol game sounds like a lot of fun... especially mashed up with Gerry Andersonverse elments... someone should go make that.

Yeah, good idea - how WOULD International Rescue react to a Mi-Go invasion? :)

Lord Hobie

Quote from: Lord Hobie;422837Yeah, good idea - how WOULD International Rescue react to a Mi-Go invasion? :)

Lord Hobie

With some sort of gigantic vehicle I imagine.

Quote from: Professort Zoot;422833After a hard day of slaughtering the evil orc hordes and stea--er, liberating their loot, the normal male human adventurer (who does not have any camp followers) will be desperate enough to bed an orc or two.  And howza human supposed to know if a goddamned orc sow is willing or not?

The orc (and troll) girls in World of Warcraft were cute... in a burly sort of way. Mind you I'd want to be careful where they put those tusks...

Half Orcs only exist because they were a thing in Tolkien's work. In Lord of the Rings, there are barbarian tribes where people are debased and loathsome and not nearly as White as the Numenorians, and they interbreed with Orcs sometimes. It's a thing they do. Them polluting their skin tones with Orcish blood is one of the things that lets you know that Dunlandings are bad people. It was a different era, and astounding levels of racism by today's standards were standard.

But anyway, the original source material for half orcs did not in fact require institutional rape for them to exist as a people. These days it's considered impolite to discuss "race mixing" as a sign of poor moral character, but on the flip side modern fantasy has produced PlayOrc.com, which is dedicated to pictures of sexy ladies with green skin and tusks. So imagining people volunteering to make halforcs the natural way is still very conceivable. Who wouldn't like a man or woman who has strong arms and good teeth.

Bottom line: there isn't any reason to believe that halforcs require rape to exist, and there never was.

-Frank

Quote from: Spinachcat;422494BTW, in regards to Rape in RPGs....where do half-orcs come from?  We can romanticize half-elves all day long, but not so much with the half-orcs.

Holy shit, you are a retard.  Half-orcs come from evil humans breeding with evil orcs.  Ta-fucking-dah.  It's not that difficult of a concept.

Honestly, I am sick to fucking death of half-orcs being used as an example of the constant and unrelenting rape that goes on in AD&D as a way to justify the inclusion in any other game ever.  It really is precisely the same as asking (all innocent-like) "Where do half-blacks come from?" as though the only possible answer is 'rape'.  The underlying concept is that a woman could not possibly be honestly attracted to a man of different ethnicity enough to have children with them.

So, seriously, shut the fuck up about half-orcs already.  Absolutely nothing in any D&D book has ever so much as insinuated that half-orcs are the product of rape, let alone exclusively the product of rape.

EDIT:  Frank ninja'd me.  I have to be quicker when he is around.

Why is it always the orcs raping the humans anyway? Don't orcs, male and female, have cranial vaginas?
I think we all know what that can lead to...

Quote from: Aos;422904Why is it always the orcs raping the humans anyway? Don't orcs, male and female, have cranial vaginas?
I think we all know what that can lead to...

To half-orcs?

and shotgun weddings.

You know, it wasn't until I came to talk about RPGs on the internet that I ever heard anyone suggest that half orcs came from anything other than rape, or spawning from magical curses, usually rape.

The idea that evil humans are more likely to be sexually aroused by orcs because they are ugly seems a touch silly.

I think orcs rape people because in a lot of fantasy, humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings are all good, and orcs fill the role of the villain by taking on all the negative traits of real people. Just like when someone thought it would be cool to make a race of evil, black skinned elves, they thought it would be cool to include half orcs. It was all in bad taste.

Personally, I don't have half dwarves, half hobbits, half elves, half orcs, or anything else unless one of the parent races can shapeshift, and barely ever then. I don't have them because it is a stupid idea.

Anyway, yeah, half orcs, fucking stupid, obviously in bad taste, and 90% of gamers everywhere they come from orcs raping humans.

Quote from: Cranewings;422911You know, it wasn't until I came to talk about RPGs on the internet that I ever heard anyone suggest that half orcs came from anything other than rape, or spawning from magical curses, usually rape.

"You said 'rape' twice."

He likes rape.

Lord Hobie

Quote from: Cranewings;422911You know, it wasn't until I came to talk about RPGs on the internet that I ever heard anyone suggest that half orcs came from anything other than rape, or spawning from magical curses, usually rape.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;422924"You said 'rape' twice."

Well, it makes sense, parsed as "It only comes from either A or B, and of the two, it's usually A."

But, I always thought that a substantial portion of half-orcs result from humans who live among orcs, and they interbreed. It's not that "evil humans are turned on by the ugly," it's just that they cohabit. Though, presumably most of such humans would be evil, since most orcs are evil. Frank's got a point, upthread. Tolkien invented the half-orc, and they result from orc tribes and human tribes that mingle.

Presumably some half-orcs would be the result of rape - as would some half-elves, and more 100% humans.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422843Half Orcs only exist because they were a thing in Tolkien's work. In Lord of the Rings, there are barbarian tribes where people are debased and loathsome and not nearly as White as the Numenorians, and they interbreed with Orcs sometimes. It's a thing they do. Them polluting their skin tones with Orcish blood is one of the things that lets you know that Dunlandings are bad people. It was a different era, and astounding levels of racism by today's standards were standard.

*snip*
-Frank

:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

Quote from: skofflox;422949:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

Possibly in At the sign of the Prancing Pony or The Scourging of the Shire? I'd rather set myself on fire than touch LoTR again, but I seem to remember something of the sort.

Quote from: skofflox;422949:hmm: can you quote me the pages from Tolkiens works where this intermixing of barbarian humans and Orcs is explained?
I though that the Uruk Hai where the result of experiments Suraman undertook intermixing some human traits with Orcish ones...maybe rape was part of it but I don't recall it ever being stated as such...or are there other "half orcs" mentioned?
:idunno:

This is, obviously, from after the publication of AD&D, but it's just what a quick look at Wikipedia gives for citation. I don't have my copy of Two Towers handy at the moment.

^ "Finally, there is a cogent point, though horrible to relate. It became clear in time that undoubted men could under the domination of Morgoth or his agents in a few generations be reduced almost to the Orc-level of mind and habits; and then they would or could be made to mate with Orcs producing new breeds, often larger and more cunning. There is no doubt that long afterwards, in the Third Age, Saruman rediscovered this, or learned of it in lore, and in his lust for mastery committed this, his wickedest deed: the interbreeding of Orcs and Men, producing both Man-orcs large and cunning, and Orc-men treacherous and vile." Tolkien, J. R. R. (1993), Christopher Tolkien, ed., Morgoth's Ring, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, "Myths Transformed" - Text X, ISBN 0-395-68092-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-orc_(Middle-earth)#cite_note-5)

Quote from: Aos;422952Possibly in At the sign of the Prancing Pony or The Scourging of the Shire? I'd rather set myself on fire than touch LoTR again, but I seem to remember something of the sort.

Aos Pictures Presents : Shotgun Wedding at the Prancing Pony

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422843Half Orcs only exist because they were a thing in Tolkien's work. In Lord of the Rings, there are barbarian tribes where people are debased and loathsome and not nearly as White as the Numenorians, and they interbreed with Orcs sometimes. It's a thing they do. Them polluting their skin tones with Orcish blood is one of the things that lets you know that Dunlandings are bad people. It was a different era, and astounding levels of racism by today's standards were standard.

Oh my God. Did you just go there? I think you just did. *shakes head*

Quote from: Benoist;422976Oh my God. Did you just go there? I think you just did. *shakes head*

Yeah, but, how is it not true?

Quote from: Cranewings;422977Yeah, but, how is it not true?

To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

It's some stupid, backwards rewrite psychology, the same that inspires scholars today to look at ages past and think that their "modern enlightenment" gives them some sort of moral high ground on people long dead and burried. I don't think so, no. Not by a looong shot.

Statements about the different houses of the Edain on Middle-earth don't equate to some sort of ethnographic statement about the real world, nor does it hide some sort of conscious or unconscious racism on Tolkien's part. Not at all.

Quote from: Benoist;422978To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

It's some stupid, backwards rewrite psychology, the same that inspires scholars today to look at ages past and think that their "modern enlightenment" gives them some sort of moral high ground on people long dead and burried. I don't think so, no. Not by a looong shot.

Statements about the different houses of the Edain on Middle-earth don't equate to some sort of ethnographic statement about the real world, nor does it hide some sort of conscious or unconscious racism on Tolkien's part. Not at all.

Dude, the Easterlings were swarthy and had dark hair and eyes. Aragorn, who is "most like" the Númenóreans of old has a "pale face" and "grey eyes". Do I have to draw you a diagram?

There is a reason that Neo-Nazis use Lord of the Rings as reading group material - even though Tolkien himself was quite outspokenly anti-Nazi.  His views on race really aren't that different from theirs.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422982There is a reason that Neo-Nazis use Lord of the Rings as reading group material - even though Tolkien himself was quite outspokenly anti-Nazi.  His views on race really aren't that different from theirs.

-Frank

There is a reason why JRR Tolkien told the Nazis to go fuck themselves when they wanted to use The Hobbit to somehow fuel their racial delusions. And you're falling for exactly the same fucked logic as they did: that somehow the work of Tolkien represents some sort of racial commentary about the real world, but since there's no such commentary, you basically inject your own imagery onto the text of the LOTR and come to your own retarded conclusions. Just like "Tolkien's gay, look at Frodo and Sam," and zillions of other bullshit interpretations of the LOTR.

So yeah. You really are coming up with imaginary correlations, here.

A few more comments: note that the Men of Westernesse, the Numenoreans, fell SPECTACULARLY to Evil themselves. Also note the existence of the Woses, or Druedains:

Quote from: Encyclopedia of ArdaA strange and ancient branch of the race of Men. A secretive people, living apart from other Men, the Drúedain had their own strange wisdom, and at times demonstrated uncanny powers. During the First Age, they played a part in the wars against Morgoth, and those of the Forest of Brethil formed a loose alliance with the Folk of Haleth. They were granted the name Drúedain in recognition of this (as the word Edain was reserved for those Men who aided in the struggle against the Dark Lord). Indeed, it seems that some were even granted a home in Númenor as a reward for their part in the Wars of Beleriand.

The Drúedain were a short-lived people, and by the end of the Third Age only a few remained in Middle-earth. Some were said to remain in the coastlands above Andrast, in the region known as Drúwaith Iaur (which took its name from the Drúedain who dwelt there). Another small group was to be found far to the east, in the Drúadan Forest in Anórien, at the eastern end of the White Mountains, and it was these that aided King Théoden in his ride to the relief of Minas Tirith. In reward, after the War of the Ring, Aragorn granted the Forest to the Drúedain who lived there.

These people are uncivilized, Wild Men ("the word 'wose' is a name from British folklore, referring to a hairy, troll-like being supposed to inhabit woods and forests. It represents Tolkien's translation of an actual word of the Rohirrim into ancient English; the Rohirrim themselves would not have called such a creature a 'wose', but a róg.") who certainly do not represent any "White People's" racial ideal, and they are amongst the greatest foes of Morgoth and Sauron.

So really, your whole notion that there is some sort of racial hierarchy in Tolkien's work is just taking a word like "black" and thinking "OMG BLACK people!" and taking the word pale to mean "OMG WHITE people!" It's just very short-sighted, and kind of mind-boggling, to be honest, from my POV.

The same way, equating orcs somehow to black people, or the word "race" to mean not a particular stock as the word was used in the classical sources that inspired the LOTR, but "race" as we mean it as a loaded word today, is blatantly wrong - wrong on the level of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons, which used the same rhetoric you used here. This just shows to me that you have no grasp whatsoever of what you are talking about, but as usual, you are coming to your own conclusion and then present it as "fact," as if it was so obvious as to make anyone doubt about my own education or intelligence.

Well, no, Frank. You really are wrong, here. Really.

Quote from: Benoist;422978To me, the notion that Numenoreans somehow equate to "White People" in our world and that Dunlendings (who dwelled by the White Mountains, by the way - is there a statement on modern skin colors there too?) and other Edain who did not share the fate of the Men of Westernesse equate to "Non-white People" in our world is right up there with the notion that Tolkien had some issues with his own sexuality by portraying the friendship of Frodo and Sam the way he did through the Lord of the Rings.

That's pretty crazy, too, since last I heard, it was commonly accepted that Faramir was Tolkien's "artist avatar" (if you want to be nice, "Mary Sue" if you don't).

Quote from: StormBringer;422892Holy shit, you are a retard.  Half-orcs come from evil humans breeding with evil orcs.  Ta-fucking-dah.  It's not that difficult of a concept.

Not to mention there is a huge difference between orcs imagined as "ugly humanoids with piggish faces" and orcs imagined as "loathsome, bestial monsters that barely resemble humans". The first case makes voluntary interbreeding more likely, and artwork depicting orcs is all over the scale from brutish humans who wouldn't look that out of place in a human city to green monsters from hell.
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/Melan/odnd_orc.jpg) (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/Melan/adnd_orc.gif)
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v198/Melan/dnd3_orc.jpg)

(Also, I searched for these images with the Google safety filter off. Don't do this. :eek:)

One last piece before I go to bed, to get a sense of what Tolkien thought about this, since Tommy makes an allusion to Faramir (and I do agree that Tolkien had a great admiration for Faramir, and would have liked to be him, in a way, as he confirmed in a letter, though I do not think he thought of him as a conscious Mary Sue):

In the Return of the King, Faramir says to Sam: "The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from. And if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there ... in peace. War will make corpses of us all."

There you clearly see that he is not talking of men as Evil because of their birth, or because of the color of their skin (the Haradrim, for instance), but because of their choices of allegiances. If they were not victims of lies and threats on the parts of Sauron's envoys, then they chose to serve him. And if they were victims of lies and threats, then they might not have been evil at all, despite the color of their skin.

Make of it what you will.

Plus: in threads like this, never forget to link Starship Stormtroppers (http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html)! :D

Quote from: Michael MoorcockStarship Stormtroopers
by
Micheal Moorcock

(From Michael Moorcock's "The Opium General" Harrap (1984), reprinted from Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review 1978)

There are still a few things which bring a naive sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I experience them -- a church service in which the rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants -- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly reactionary in one form or another (as well as being predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping -- not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so many people who would be horrified to be accused of subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris Commune.

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this article I could not for years bring myself to buy another issue. I'd been confused in the past by listening to hardline Communists offering views that were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans at the conventions which are held annually in a number of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always assumed these were for one reason or another the exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy with most of their attitudes -- but once again I saw the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists, crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism of these authors and as often as not found myself accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's request, to present arguments which I have presented more than once before.

Quote from: Cole;422932But, I always thought that a substantial portion of half-orcs result from humans who live among orcs, and they interbreed. It's not that "evil humans are turned on by the ugly," it's just that they cohabit. Though, presumably most of such humans would be evil, since most orcs are evil. Frank's got a point, upthread. Tolkien invented the half-orc, and they result from orc tribes and human tribes that mingle.

As I understand it, most anthropologists seem to think that red hair is derived from human and Neanderthal interbreeding, a result of living in close proximity and trading extensively.

Quote from: Benoist;422983There is a reason why JRR Tolkien told the Nazis to go fuck themselves when they wanted to use The Hobbit to somehow fuel their racial delusions.

Yes, because he could plainly see that the Nazis were evil. He even want Sauron to stand in for Hitler when the book was used as allegory. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up in that respect at all. The people promising a resurgence of people "knowing their place" and invoking the ideals of pastoralism and the nobility of the past were the bad guys. The war wasn't won by people clinging to ancient virtues, it was won by the real heroes - the people industrialized the shire.

Tolkien's work reads exactly like Nazi propaganda from the time, and that's because his actual social and political position really wasn't that different from the Nazis. Hitler was a Conservative European Catholic with romantic notions about the past and an interest in ancient European cultures and so was Tolkien. Tolkien knew that Hitler was a bad guy, but through his entire life he was never able to really explain how he knew that, or what the specific differences in ideology were. It bothered him, a lot. I actually think it's fairly praiseworthy that Tolkien did do a lot of introspection on that issue.

It was a different time. A time when I remind you: keeping Black Slaves was still totally legal in several of parts of Tolkien's empire (Northern Nigeria Colony, for example). Eugenics, racial hierarchies, and divine right of aristocracy were all respectable positions that real people in polite society would simply have. Darwin's theory that Black People and White People were the same species was still controversial, and books talking about it were banned in Germany and the Soviet Union.

But ultimately this thread is not about Tolkien and the similarities he himself lamented between himself and Hitler. This thread is more about HP Lovecraft. And HP Lovecraft was a fascist sympathizer who wrote extensively and often in support of Adolf Hitler until 1936 when the realities of concentration camps and possibly the influence of his own Jewish wife caused him to change his mind and begin writing letters discouraging people from supporting the Axis.

People being astonishingly racist by todays standards in the early part of the 20th century doesn't mean that they were bad people, it means that they were products of their times. The belief that Whites were a "superior race" was considered enlightened and scientific, and belief that aristocrats and kings were a superior breed of Whites was considered normal. Belief in the true equality of man was a fringe belief, and it is very much unsurprising that writers of the day such as Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Howard did not hold to it.

But that is ultimately a very strong reason that material from those old books, whether they be The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Lord of the Rings, or The Phoenix on the Sword, should not be used without heavy adaptation in modern gaming or storytelling. Books from the 1930s simply are very offensive to modern sensibilities and the worlds they describe are not something that people feel comfortable with. Villains need a better motivation than "they were born with wicked blood", and psychological horror needs a better reveal than "you might be part negro!"

So to bring it all back to topic, yes the Esoteric Order of Dagon needed to be updated to have some sort of real villainy appended to it, because the original horror element was mostly just that some people who looked like humans were actually part fish. And these days, if you found out that some of your ancestors were fish people and that as you grew older you'd eventually be able to breathe water, your response would be "Awesome!" rather than shooting yourself in the head before you turned. And indeed the EOD's use of apparently completely pointless rape camps is a perfectly fine way to make the EOD be "bad guys" to modern sensibilities. The problem sinks in with the later books, where completely pointless rape camps are used to make several other factions be bad guys, which robs the rape camps of impact and makes the setting feel comic and rape heavy - which is never a good combination.

-Frank

Quote from: StormBringer;422992As I understand it, most anthropologists seem to think that red hair is derived from human and Neanderthal interbreeding, a result of living in close proximity and trading extensively.

Haven't dug into this extensively, but AFAIK this isn't true (perhaps I'm biased here since I'm a ginger :) ).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071025-Neandertals-Redheads.html (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071025-Neandertals-Redheads.html)

Note particularly this bit:
Variations in this gene's sequence limit melanin production in people with pale skin and red hair, although the particular mutation found by the researchers is not known to occur in modern humans.

Red hair certainly appears in the Neanderthal gene pool, but the specific mutation in modern humans is different to the one that they've found - thus far anyway. Later research does suggest interbreeding through - perhaps a 1% to 4% genetic contribution to modern humans according to the popular article here.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/ (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/)

Quote from: Melan;422989Not to mention there is a huge difference between orcs imagined as "ugly humanoids with piggish faces" and orcs imagined as "loathsome, bestial monsters that barely resemble humans". The first case makes voluntary interbreeding more likely, and artwork depicting orcs is all over the scale from brutish humans who wouldn't look that out of place in a human city to green monsters from hell.

Good points.  While a fetish for the grotesque has undoubtedly existed since day one, I would agree it not to be enough of a factor.  I prefer the former sort, myself.  Metaphors for human failings work best when the metaphor still largely resembles a human.

Quote(Also, I searched for these images with the Google safety filter off. Don't do this. :eek:)

"Ok, important safety tip, thanks Egon."  :)

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;422994Haven't dug into this extensively, but AFAIK this isn't true (perhaps I'm biased here since I'm a ginger :) ).
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071025-Neandertals-Redheads.html (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/10/071025-Neandertals-Redheads.html)

Note particularly this bit:
Variations in this gene's sequence limit melanin production in people with pale skin and red hair, although the particular mutation found by the researchers is not known to occur in modern humans.

Red hair certainly appears in the Neanderthal gene pool, but the specific mutation in modern humans is different to the one that they've found - thus far anyway. Later research does suggest interbreeding through - perhaps a 1% to 4% genetic contribution to modern humans according to the popular article here.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/ (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/)

Thanks for the assist, I hadn't seen any follow up since I read about it originally some time ago.

In any case, Neanderthals were hardly noted for their Brad Pitt like countenances, and there were few problems interbreeding.

Ah, the racist subtext in Tolkien. Never gets old... :D

Yes, Tolkien -- born and raised in late-1800s, early-1900 South Africa -- probably was racist, as were Lovecraft, Howard, Hergé (of Tintin fame), and your great-grandfather.

The Lord of the Rings is not a primer on racism. Sure, it can be easily deconstructed as such, because some villains are swarthy (Easterlings), and some examples of racial miscigenation are considered "wrong" (half-orcs). Again, it was an early 20th Century thing; racism was not yet the taboo it is today (no sane, contemporary fantasy writer would ever risk being interpreted as racist), and was an accepted stance in politics, religion, science and polite conversation.

But Tolkien was openly anti-Nazi, Lovecraft married an Ukrainian Jew, and Howard... yeah, well, Howard had issues, but to the best of my knowledge, never acted on his racial prejudices. So, even if these dead white men wrote "racist stuff" (or, more accurately, fiction which reflected the racist biases of their time), they didn't exactly practice what they preached.

Just for the sake of clarity, racism is bad, and stupid. This is not "modern enlightenment" bias, this is one of the rare examples of real, honest-to-God progress the Humanity has made in the last few decades, that we now finally recognize institutionalized, unjustified prejudice and hatred for what it is, and that we've mostly purged science, politics, religion and societal norms of its heinous influence (and relegated any and all remaining racist elements of these disciplines to the fringe). If you write racist stuff on a fantasy novel, or God forbid, a RPG (RaHoWa, I'm looking at you), you are a complete fucking idiot.

Tolkien, Lovecraft et al. get away scot free because they didn't know any better. Context, people.

Quote from: Melan;422991Plus: in threads like this, never forget to link Starship Stormtroppers (http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html)! :D

Michael Moorcock is a tool sometimes, really. Love his fiction, hate his politics.

Though "Epic Pooh" (http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953), his classic essay dissing Tolkien, might be more relevant to the issue at hand.

I'll readily admit that Moorcock is a good writer, even when writing about politics, but his stance reeks of a particular brand of Leftist indignation and self-righteousness, to which I was frequently exposed back in the day, and which I've come to utterly revile.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422993It was a different time. A time when I remind you: keeping Black Slaves was still totally legal in several of parts of Tolkien's empire (Northern Nigeria Colony, for example). Eugenics, racial hierarchies, and divine right of aristocracy were all respectable positions that real people in polite society would simply have. Darwin's theory that Black People and White People were the same species was still controversial, and books talking about it were banned in Germany and the Soviet Union.

That's seven kinds of wrong. The particular laws and customs of Northern Nigeria were at the time just as irrelevant to thinking in Europe and America as the laws and customs of the Congo Basin are irrelevant to them now: a faraway, unpleasant peculiarity.

The ideas of the nazis and communists were not derived from these feeble and obscure traditions; both ideologies were modern and - in the sense of Fordism and industrialisation, not its contemporary meaning of "liberal leftist" - relentlessly progressive. Tolkien's toryism and romantic views of a rural past have little to do with that, and his views on social divisions and aristocratic descent come from tradition, not a modern declaration of racial inequality. The roots are entirely different.

Mixing up the two, or treating traditionalism as the wellspring of fascism is a typical Western marxist idea (as seen in Moorcock's article above), and while popular, it has little to do with reality (a thorough debunking was done by John Lukacs in Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred as well as The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age). Reading fascism into Tolkien is "deconstruction" of the worst kind - while he had rejected the work's interpretation as an allegory right in the introduction. A writer is always subconsciously influenced by his or her times, but the misreadings of Tolkien as a racist or someone with fascist sympathies in face of all contrary evidence are simply bunk - a projection of the reader's anti-Tolkien or anti-conservative leanings onto the original work.

As for Darwin's theories or books being banned in the Soviet Union, that's, uh, nonsense considering that Darwin was treated as a major ideological predecessor of scientific socialism. The Soviet Union's ideological conflicts occurred entirely within the darwinian paradigm, and it was the conflict between Lysenkoism (a descendant of Lamarckism) and Mendelian genetics that ended with the state-backed triumph of the former and the purge of "Mendelists". Here are a few passages from B. A. Keller's How Man Transforms Plants (http://www.antikvarium.hu/ant/book.php?konyv-cim=hogyan-alakitja-at-az-ember-a-novenyeket&ID=122921), a typical Stalin era propaganda pamphlet that pretty much places Darwin next to the holiest figures of communist thought:

QuoteDarwin's teachings placed solving the question of human origin on a scientific foundation. In 1871, Darwin published a book on the origins of man, where he proved that man on Earth has come from animals similar to advanced apes as a result of natural selection. Engels proved that in the process of the ape's transformation into man, the most important, decisive role was played by collective, social work.
...
What urged Tymirzaev to commit so much attention and effort to spread the teachings of Darwin, and to develop it in the old, Tsarist Russia? The Tsarist government had grasped every means to keep the people, the workers and peasants from science, and to keep them in the darkness of religious prejudices. Darwin's teachings gave a correct, materialistic view on living nature, and this proved that the entire world of plants and animals is subjected to the general natural law of change, development and transformation.
...
When in foreign countries, they tried to contaminate and displace the materialistic teachings of Darwin with idealistic teachings (Mendelism), Tymirzaev proved their falsehood through a hard struggle.
...
...
Real science, in the teachings of Tymirzaev and other progressive scientists, completely unmasks the contemporary pseudosciences of these fascist fanatics.

If books related to Darwin were banned in the Soviet Union, that's because of either Mendelism or because the author was purged, not because of the basic ideas.

Also,

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422993But ultimately this thread is not about Tolkien and the similarities he himself lamented between himself and Hitler. This thread is more about HP Lovecraft. And HP Lovecraft was a fascist sympathizer who wrote extensively and often in support of Adolf Hitler until 1936 when the realities of concentration camps and possibly the influence of his own Jewish wife caused him to change his mind and begin writing letters discouraging people from supporting the Axis.

Again, death by a dozen basic errors. Lovecraft had long-long been divorced by the 30s, while "the realities of concentration camps" (of which he writes, if not approvingly, but at least as a necessary institution in The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931 but published in 1936) were at the time basically unknown, so Lovecraft's reasons for "discouraging people from supporting the Axis" would have to come from other factors - that is, if there was an Axis before the 1940 Tripartite Act.

I typically avoid nitpicking others' arguments, but your pronouncements are built on an incredibly shaky foundation of factoids, mistakes and misunderstandings.

Quote from: The Butcher;423001Michael Moorcock is a tool sometimes, really. Love his fiction, hate his politics.

Though "Epic Pooh" (http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953), his classic essay dissing Tolkien, might be more relevant to the issue at hand.

I'll readily admit that Moorcock is a good writer, even when writing about politics, but his stance reeks of a particular brand of Leftist indignation and self-righteousness, to which I was frequently exposed back in the day, and which I've come to utterly revile.

I actually like Moorcock's criticism even while I consider many of his political conclusions false. Epic Pooh formulates some of the problems I have with Tolkien, while his reflections on fantasy in other chapters of Wizardry and Wild Romance - on the exotic landscape, in particular - are witty and insightful. He is a thought-provoking essayist.

I actually have more trouble with his fiction - some of it is great, some of it, including major works like some Elric books and the Hawkmoon series, is lazy, formulaic hackwork with brief, very brief flashes of brilliant imagery.

Trouble with boiler-plate marxists is: bourgeois == fascism. Reason & differentiation break down right there.
Moorcock is on the money re: romanticism, though. And the funny thing is that Elric-Fans usually are goth-romantics of some sort.

Elric is perfect fiction to read when you are 14 and have some Hair Metal blaring in the background. Still, though, even at that age, I vastly preferred Leiber.

Quote from: Melan;423004That's seven kinds of wrong. The particular laws and customs of Northern Nigeria were at the time just as irrelevant to thinking in Europe and America as the laws and customs of the Congo Basin are irrelevant to them now: a faraway, unpleasant peculiarity.

Tolkien was BORN IN AFRICA. The views and peculiarities of the African colonies are very much the point, considering that his mother was a colonial in the darkest continent.

QuoteAgain, death by a dozen basic errors. Lovecraft had long-long been divorced by the 30s, while "the realities of concentration camps" (of which he writes, if not approvingly, but at least as a necessary institution in The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931 but published in 1936) were at the time basically unknown, so Lovecraft's reasons for "discouraging people from supporting the Axis" would have to come from other factors - that is, if there was an Axis before the 1940 Tripartite Act.

Quote from: HP Lovecraft Biography pageBy 1935, the atrocities of the Fascists began to poke holes in Lovecraft's fantasy portrait of them, and he stopped sounding their praises. A neighbor visited Germany in 1936, and returned to tell Lovecraft exactly what the Nazis were doing to the Jews. Despite his intellectual prejudice against Jews, he had no actual hatred toward them, or toward any other racial group for that matter. Lovecraft was shocked, and began to actively discourage pro-Nazi sentiments when these were expressed among his circle of literary friends.

Those are apparently the conclusions of L. Sprague de Camp (http://www.donaldtyson.com/lovecraf.html), who I trust on this subject more than you.

-Frank

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422993...It was a different time. A time when I remind you: keeping Black Slaves was still totally legal in several of parts of Tolkien's empire...

:confused:

The Slavery Abolition Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_Abolition_Act_1833) (as its name indicates) abolished slavery throughout (almost all of) the British Empire in 1833.

I'm surprised by the claim that slavery was still legal in "several parts of Tolkien's empire" (i.e., the BE during Tolkien's lifetime).  Could you provide a link to support this claim?

Quote from: Settembrini;423006Trouble with boiler-plate marxists is: bourgeois == fascism. Reason & differentiation break down right there.
Moorcock is on the money re: romanticism, though. And the funny thing is that Elric-Fans usually are goth-romantics of some sort.

I love Moorcock's writings, still do, and I very much like the guy, his humour and personality as a human being, but sometimes he just is such a cliché leftist-anarchist intellectual (I suspect because he yearns to be recognized as a valid intellectual to begin with, despite all that 'fantasy tripe' he used to write) that I can do nothing but smile.

I just wanted to add:

Quote from: Melan;423004That's seven kinds of wrong. The particular laws and customs of Northern Nigeria were at the time just as irrelevant to thinking in Europe and America as the laws and customs of the Congo Basin are irrelevant to them now: a faraway, unpleasant peculiarity.

The ideas of the nazis and communists were not derived from these feeble and obscure traditions; both ideologies were modern and - in the sense of Fordism and industrialisation, not its contemporary meaning of "liberal leftist" - relentlessly progressive. Tolkien's toryism and romantic views of a rural past have little to do with that, and his views on social divisions and aristocratic descent come from tradition, not a modern declaration of racial inequality. The roots are entirely different.

Mixing up the two, or treating traditionalism as the wellspring of fascism is a typical Western marxist idea (as seen in Moorcock's article above), and while popular, it has little to do with reality (a thorough debunking was done by John Lukacs in Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred as well as The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age). Reading fascism into Tolkien is "deconstruction" of the worst kind - while he had rejected the work's interpretation as an allegory right in the introduction. A writer is always subconsciously influenced by his or her times, but the misreadings of Tolkien as a racist or someone with fascist sympathies in face of all contrary evidence are simply bunk - a projection of the reader's anti-Tolkien or anti-conservative leanings onto the original work.

As for Darwin's theories or books being banned in the Soviet Union, that's, uh, nonsense considering that Darwin was treated as a major ideological predecessor of scientific socialism. The Soviet Union's ideological conflicts occurred entirely within the darwinian paradigm, and it was the conflict between Lysenkoism (a descendant of Lamarckism) and Mendelian genetics that ended with the state-backed triumph of the former and the purge of "Mendelists". Here are a few passages from B. A. Keller's How Man Transforms Plants (http://www.antikvarium.hu/ant/book.php?konyv-cim=hogyan-alakitja-at-az-ember-a-novenyeket&ID=122921), a typical Stalin era propaganda pamphlet that pretty much places Darwin next to the holiest figures of communist thought:

If books related to Darwin were banned in the Soviet Union, that's because of either Mendelism or because the author was purged, not because of the basic ideas.

Also,

Again, death by a dozen basic errors. Lovecraft had long-long been divorced by the 30s, while "the realities of concentration camps" (of which he writes, if not approvingly, but at least as a necessary institution in The Shadow over Innsmouth, written in 1931 but published in 1936) were at the time basically unknown, so Lovecraft's reasons for "discouraging people from supporting the Axis" would have to come from other factors - that is, if there was an Axis before the 1940 Tripartite Act.

I typically avoid nitpicking others' arguments, but your pronouncements are built on an incredibly shaky foundation of factoids, mistakes and misunderstandings.

(http://enrill.net/images/forump/clapping.gif)

That is all.

Quote from: Benoist;423063I love Moorcock's writings, still do, and I very much like the guy, his humour and personality as a human being, but sometimes he just is such a cliché leftist-anarchist intellectual (I suspect because he yearns to be recognized as a valid intellectual to begin with, despite all that 'fantasy tripe' he used to write) that I can do nothing but smile.

That is a pretty believable, plausible characterisation. Also, you like Moorcock, and would admit having had a liking for WoD, no? So goth-Elric fan would not be too hard a stretch, right?

I SOLD all my Moorcock, btw. Could. Not. Stand. It. One and a half Elric stories and three Eternal Champion ones were the furthest I could get.
I cannot stand Faust, so Elric is just totally contrary to my tastes.

Quote from: Settembrini;423081That is a pretty believable, plausible characterisation. Also, you like Moorcock, and would admit having had a liking for WoD, no? So goth-Elric fan would not be too hard a stretch, right?

No it's not a stretch. Same thing that makes me love John Keats, Shelley, some of Shapespeare's outlook on the human tragedy... it's all part of the same mental landscape, if you think of it, that inspired Gothic artists for ages now.

But I'm a conflicted individual on these things. These types of imagery do speak to me, but at the same time, the Epic, the depiction of what is best in human beings, or what they should be aspiring to, is something that I hold dear as well. So when I read Tolkien talking about the reasons why he despises Shakespeare, I totally see where he is coming from, and that speaks to me. At the same time, when I see a representation of Hamlet I can't help but fall in love with Shakespeare all over again.

So that's not like I'm two-dimensional in that regard. But then, who really is, but the simplest minds amongst us, right?

Quote from: Settembrini;423081I SOLD all my Moorcock, btw. Could. Not. Stand. It. One and a half Elric stories and three Eternal Champion ones were the furthest I could get.
I cannot stand Faust, so Elric is just totally contrary to my tastes.

I like Elric, I really do. But then, I think I'm actually more in love with Hawkmoon, probably because it blends these two seamingly contradictory aspects of human romance I was just talking about above.

If anything, for all this implies of blends and contradictions, I think I could be characterized as being Arthurian at heart.

Quote from: Benoist;423089I like Elric, I really do. But then, I think I'm actually more in love with Hawkmoon

Meh.  Corum kicks both of their arses! :)

(I find Elric whiny and grating -- although I like the first few Elric stories, namely, the stuff before 'Stormbringer'.  Hawkmoon is a rather shallow character IMO, but the setting is cool.)

This...

Quote from: Melan;423005I actually like Moorcock's criticism even while I consider many of his political conclusions false.

...and this...

Quote from: Benoist;423063I love Moorcock's writings, still do, and I very much like the guy, his humour and personality as a human being, but sometimes he just is such a cliché leftist-anarchist intellectual (I suspect because he yearns to be recognized as a valid intellectual to begin with, despite all that 'fantasy tripe' he used to write) that I can do nothing but smile.

...both sound spot on.

I like Epic Pooh, and agree with him in regards to romanticism, but man, there can be no forgiveness for his Michael Kane mars stories. None. I don't mind a bit of pastiche here and there, but the author needs to make a genuine effort to entertain me, and in the case of the Kane books, Moorcock doesn't even bother. They are the worst kind of hackery, and there is a flat quality to them that is, in my opinion, present to some degree in everything I've ever read by him.

Quote from: Akrasia;423093Meh.  Corum kicks both of their arses! :)

I like Corum. I like the aesthetics of the characters and cycle, for sure.

Quote from: Akrasia;423093(I find Elric whiny and grating -- although I like the first few Elric stories, namely, the stuff before 'Stormbringer'.  Hawkmoon is a rather shallow character IMO, but the setting is cool.)

You mean the stuff before Stormbringer, in order of writing, correct? Assuming that's what you mean, I too prefer Mike Moorcock's earlier Elric stories. The original saga, up to Stormbringer. In particular Bane of the Black Sword, anything having to do with his insane feud with Theleb Kaarna, really.

Hawkmoon is deliberately shallow, and I like that about him. The character mostly exists through his many proxies, friends, enemies and love interests, and that makes him... very Arthurian indeed, when I think about it.

Quote from: Benoist;423097Hawkmoon is deliberately shallow, and I like that about him. The character mostly exists through his many proxies, friends, enemies and love interests, and that makes him... very Arthurian indeed, when I think about it.

If there's one real failing I can attribute to the Hawkmoon stories, it's that the "Almost...too sane" issue was resolved before Moorcock developed the potential there.

I could never get through Hawkmoon.  It just did not grab me.

I know most people don't connect with Hawkmoon because they see some blandness there that they really have a hard time liking or disliking. It's just not grabbing them, like you say, Aos.

I guess what I'm seeing is a lot of subtleties there that make me love it very, very much. Like indeed Dorian Hawkmoon being so bland that he exists through his proxies, the fantastic imagery used to depict the Empire of Granbretan, the sheer mind-bending cosmology of it all, the Grail-like Rune Staff, the Warrior in Jet and Gold and the ghostly knight errant he is, the hilarious Chirchill and Adulf allusion, that kind of things. There's some richness there that I really love.

Quote from: Aos;423100I could never get through Hawkmoon.  It just did not grab me.

De gustibus, etc.

I have to give it to you on the Old Mars books, though. As I've said before, even MM's taken the attitude "If you absolutely must, here they are, but don't say I claimed they didn't suck."

And btw, as for the Hawkmoon role playing games, I love the first edition, because it doesn't try to fill in the blanks left by Moorcock in the tapestry like other editions try to do with their own post-apocalyptic/metaplot stuff. In a sense, Hawkmoon, the novels themselves, are very "Old School" in the role playing sense, to me, and wanting to build a fully fleshed out universe out of the Tragic Millennium steals some of its thunder in a major way, IMO.

Quote from: Benoist;423103I know most people don't connect with Hawkmoon because they see some blandness there that they really have a hard time liking or disliking. It's just not grabbing them, like you say, Aos.

I guess what I'm seeing is a lot of subtleties there that make me love it very, very much. Like indeed Dorian Hawkmoon being so bland that he exists through his proxies, the fantastic imagery used to depict the Empire of Granbretan, the sheer mind-bending cosmology of it all, the Grail-like Rune Staff, the Warrior in Jet and Gold and the ghostly knight errant he is. There's some richness there that I really love.

I am not going to pretend Moorcock doesn't have flaws as a writer - most I think, due less to the ravages of ideology on his works and more due to a "better done than good" attitude, but his wild creativity almost always more than makes up for it - and I'm sure his fast-and-loose approach to writing helped liberate his imagination even if it sometimes hampered his characterization or plots. Maybe Elric is whiny and grating. So is Achilles. So are the hobbits.

I completely agree, Cole.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;423049Tolkien was BORN IN AFRICA. The views and peculiarities of the African colonies are very much the point, considering that his mother was a colonial in the darkest continent.

It would be great to see a cite from a reliable source that described slavery in Northern Nigeria in Tolkien's time as something condoned by the British colonial administration. I can well imagine it may have existed in backwater areas where the British authority could not eliminate it, but that's like saying slavery exists in modern London - it sure does, but not by consent of the Cameron-Clegg government.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;423049Those are apparently the conclusions of L. Sprague de Camp (http://www.donaldtyson.com/lovecraf.html), who I trust on this subject more than you.

On a general principle, I would rather have something by S. T. Joshi than de Camp, whose reputation is a tad dubious in Lovecraft scholarship. Nevertheless, even take him at face value, it is those pesky details again. Not "fascist atrocities", but "the realities of concentration camps", which resulted in him "discouraging people from supporting the Axis".

Quote from: Aos;423100I could never get through Hawkmoon.  It just did not grab me.

I could not take it seriously after the section where Hawkmoon was camping in the mountains of Future Bulgaria, and encountered a character described as "short", and wearing a "broad hat" and "soft leather boots". Right at that moment, I knew that little runt would be the current Companion. Except for the details, the novel read like a botched copy-paste job modelled after the other Eternal Champion novels, and never got further than the first volume.

Granbretan and the jewel in the skull were cool,though.

Quote from: Cole;423104De gustibus, etc.

I have to give it to you on the Old Mars books, though. As I've said before, even MM's taken the attitude "If you absolutely must, here they are, but don't say I claimed they didn't suck."

And you're right, but man, there is suck and there is SUCK!  I made the mistake of not reading the introductions* before buying/reading them. It took a while for the banality of them to become apparent to me and I kept expecting some kind of improvement. In my own defense, I wised up around page 20 of book three.


*as is my custom.

Quote from: Melan;423114I could not take it seriously after the section where Hawkmoon was camping in the mountains of Future Bulgaria, and encountered a character described as "short", and wearing a "broad hat" and "soft leather boots". Right at that moment, I knew that little runt would be the current Companion. Except for the details, the novel read like a botched copy-paste job modelled after the other Eternal Champion novels, and never got further than the first volume.

Granbretan and the jewel in the skull were cool,though.

Yeah, I stalled in the first volume as well.

Quote from: Aos;423116In my own defense, I wised up around page 20 of book three.

Your fortitude as a reader seems to outstrip my own.

Quote from: Cole;423120Your fortitude as a reader seems to outstrip my own.

I just couldn't accept that any halfway competent writer could write such a bad mars story.

Quote from: Aos;423130I just couldn't accept that any halfway competent writer could write such a bad mars story.

There is a certain magic combination of laziness and fidelity to a narrow genre and format that is a pretty reliable recipe for crap.

I.E. "Maybe if he'd either put more work/heart into them, or not worried as much that they be Burroughs/Kline -esque and just went hog wild, they might have been better, but I suspect he got caught bare-assed on both fronts.

Quote from: Benoist;423097...You mean the stuff before Stormbringer, in order of writing, correct?...

Yeah, that's what I meant.  Sorry for not being clearer.  Stormbringer is barely tolerable, and the stuff written after it rather tiresome.  (Although it's been years since I've read any Elric tale, so perhaps my recollection is a bit foggy.)

Quote from: Cole;423108Maybe Elric is whiny and grating.

"Maybe?! :confused:

Quote from: Cole;423108So is Achilles.

Yes.

Quote from: Cole;423108So are the hobbits.

Now I must destroy you.

Quote from: Akrasia;423135Yeah, that's what I meant.  Sorry for not being clearer.  Stormbringer is barely tolerable, and the stuff written after it rather tiresome.  (Although it's been years since I've read any Elric tale, so perhaps my recollection is a bit foggy.)

For whatever reason, I love the stuff - for example the luridly titled Revenge of the Rose is a favorite of mine (including Gaynor helps). I don't dispute Elric's unappealing personality, but I enjoy reading about him and his adventures, self-pitying as he may be. But then, I also own all the Bauhaus albums.

Quote from: Akrasia;423136Now I must destroy you.

Let us agree first that when the duel ends, neither of our bodies be ignobly left to the birds and dogs.

Quote from: Cole;423133There is a certain magic combination of laziness and fidelity to a narrow genre and format that is a pretty reliable recipe for crap.

I.E. "Maybe if he'd either put more work/heart into them, or not worried as much that they be Burroughs/Kline -esque and just went hog wild, they might have been better, but I suspect he got caught bare-assed on both fronts.

I am in complete agreement.

Quote from: Cole;423142Let us agree first that when the duel ends, neither of our bodies be ignobly left to the birds and dogs.

Ha!  When I'm done with you, there will be no body!

Quote from: Aos;423119Yeah, I stalled in the first volume as well.

I'd say that, in the original History of the Runestaff (http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_the_Runestaff), the Sword of the Dawn and The Runestaff are arguably the best in the series (though really, I like them all). I think the Jewel in the Skull might be the weakest of the original volumes, actually. The Chronicles of Castle Brass (http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Chronicles_of_Castle_Brass) have their brilliant moments as well. Count Brass being totally awesome. And of course, the Quest for Tanelorn.

Quote from: Akrasia;423145Ha!  When I'm done with you, there will be no body!

That's acceptable, then :)

Quote from: Cole;423140For whatever reason, I love the stuff - for example the luridly titled Revenge of the Rose is a favorite of mine (including Gaynor helps). I don't dispute Elric's unappealing personality, but I enjoy reading about him and his adventures, self-pitying as he may be. But then, I also own all the Bauhaus albums.

I like the Revenge of the Rose for Wheldrake. That alone makes it worthwhile, to me. :)

Quote from: Benoist;423147I'd say that, in the original History of the Runestaff (http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_History_of_the_Runestaff), the Sword of the Dawn and The Runestaff are arguably the best in the series (though really, I like them all). I think the Jewel in the Skull might be the weakest of the original volumes, actually. The Chronicles of Castle Brass (http://www.multiverse.org/wiki/index.php?title=The_Chronicles_of_Castle_Brass) have their brilliant moments as well. Count Brass being totally awesome. And of course, the Quest for Tanelorn.

Pretty good assessment - I feel like I've heard the same opinion from a decent number of people. Frankly I think sometimes Moorcock needs a book to "warm up" on a series. One of those flaws I can't deny :)

Quote from: FrankTrollman;422993Yes, because he could plainly see that the Nazis were evil. He even want Sauron to stand in for Hitler when the book was used as allegory. Unfortunately, it doesn't hold up in that respect at all. The people promising a resurgence of people "knowing their place" and invoking the ideals of pastoralism and the nobility of the past were the bad guys. The war wasn't won by people clinging to ancient virtues, it was won by the real heroes - the people industrialized the shire.

Tolkien's work reads exactly like Nazi propaganda from the time, and that's because his actual social and political position really wasn't that different from the Nazis. Hitler was a Conservative European Catholic with romantic notions about the past and an interest in ancient European cultures and so was Tolkien. Tolkien knew that Hitler was a bad guy, but through his entire life he was never able to really explain how he knew that, or what the specific differences in ideology were. It bothered him, a lot. I actually think it's fairly praiseworthy that Tolkien did do a lot of introspection on that issue.

It was a different time. A time when I remind you: keeping Black Slaves was still totally legal in several of parts of Tolkien's empire (Northern Nigeria Colony, for example). Eugenics, racial hierarchies, and divine right of aristocracy were all respectable positions that real people in polite society would simply have. Darwin's theory that Black People and White People were the same species was still controversial, and books talking about it were banned in Germany and the Soviet Union.

But ultimately this thread is not about Tolkien and the similarities he himself lamented between himself and Hitler. This thread is more about HP Lovecraft. And HP Lovecraft was a fascist sympathizer who wrote extensively and often in support of Adolf Hitler until 1936 when the realities of concentration camps and possibly the influence of his own Jewish wife caused him to change his mind and begin writing letters discouraging people from supporting the Axis.

People being astonishingly racist by todays standards in the early part of the 20th century doesn't mean that they were bad people, it means that they were products of their times. The belief that Whites were a "superior race" was considered enlightened and scientific, and belief that aristocrats and kings were a superior breed of Whites was considered normal. Belief in the true equality of man was a fringe belief, and it is very much unsurprising that writers of the day such as Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Howard did not hold to it.

But that is ultimately a very strong reason that material from those old books, whether they be The Shadow Over Innsmouth, The Lord of the Rings, or The Phoenix on the Sword, should not be used without heavy adaptation in modern gaming or storytelling. Books from the 1930s simply are very offensive to modern sensibilities and the worlds they describe are not something that people feel comfortable with. Villains need a better motivation than "they were born with wicked blood", and psychological horror needs a better reveal than "you might be part negro!"

So to bring it all back to topic, yes the Esoteric Order of Dagon needed to be updated to have some sort of real villainy appended to it, because the original horror element was mostly just that some people who looked like humans were actually part fish. And these days, if you found out that some of your ancestors were fish people and that as you grew older you'd eventually be able to breathe water, your response would be "Awesome!" rather than shooting yourself in the head before you turned. And indeed the EOD's use of apparently completely pointless rape camps is a perfectly fine way to make the EOD be "bad guys" to modern sensibilities. The problem sinks in with the later books, where completely pointless rape camps are used to make several other factions be bad guys, which robs the rape camps of impact and makes the setting feel comic and rape heavy - which is never a good combination.

-Frank

The assumption that because people could achieve prominnce in the past with views we hold today to be repulsive is too often used as an excuse for those views.  Something along the lines of "our poor benighted ancestors were too stupid and primitive to understand reality."  There is a story about Wittgenstein being at a cocktail party and getting into a conversation with a woman who said something like, "Think about how stupid ancient people really were.  They thought the Sun revolved around the Earth!"  Wittgenstein supposedly responded, "I'm sure you're right.  But I wonder what it would look like if the Sun did revolve around the Earth."  A response which may have been too subtle for her to pick up on.
Believe it or not our ancestors were not any stupider than we are and a variety of views on race were possible even back then.  The difference is primarilay that people who hold certain race beliefs today do not fee free to express them.
I am a huge fan of Lovecraft, but I do not accept the apologists logic that his racial beliefs were a product of his times.  Rather Lovecraft's racial beliefs sprung from his embrace of modernistic pseudo-scientific racial theories.  Lovecraft was a screaming lunatic racist, not just for today, but for his time as well.
My great-grandfather who was a near exact contemporary of Lovecraft (but while Lovecraft was born and lived his whole life in urban sophisticated East Coast communities, he was born rural Ohio and lived most of his life in the Oklahoma outback), was famed in his community for a stand he took.  He was at the opera one night (yeah, opera and opera houses existed in the Oklahoma outback) when the KKK had an unscheduled demonstration.  The marched into the opera house waving flaming brands and American flags to the organ player's strains of "Onward Christian Soldiers" (the Klan anthem).  Every man in the house stood and doffed his hat, save for my great-grandfather; a neighbor seated by him hissed, "Cleveland, aren't you gonna stand?" and my great-grandfather reply in his best field shout, "I ain't standing for a bunch of morons wearing sheets!"  Supposedly the crowd, who were friends of him and knew his family then laughed the Klansmen off the stage.
Now at this time the Klan was primarily an anti-Catholic (particularly anti-Catholic immigrant) organization.  But Cleveland's father (my great-great-Grandfather, C.C.{short for Christopher Columbus}) had maintained a farmhouse where "colored" farmhands hired for the harvest sat with the family for meals.  Now, Cleveland's views may have been no more common than Lovecraft's, but I don't they were any rarer either.
Tolkien deserves credit for how little race effected his work, particularly when compared to the works of someone like C.S. Lewis whose Narnians are explicitly whiter than the other races of men and thus nobler and purer (and presumable more Christian).

As far as "cliche leftist-anarchist intellectual" writers go, I much prefer LeGuin to Moorcock. I found Elric pretty dreary, and never bothered with anything else he did.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423152As far as "cliche leftist-anarchist intellectual" writers go, I much prefer LeGuin to Moorcock. I found Elric pretty dreary, and never bothered with anything else he did.

While I haven't read everything LeGuin wrote, I've never read anything by her that I didn't enjoy.

Now that I think of it, the Sword of the Dawn, the artefact itself, is like Excalibur in Arthurian legends. My, my, the parallels are really hitting me right now. I never really thought of the Hawkmoon cycles that way before. It was always in the corner of my mind, but it's like I just put the finger on it, now.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423152As far as "cliche leftist-anarchist intellectual" writers go, I much prefer LeGuin to Moorcock. I found Elric pretty dreary, and never bothered with anything else he did.

I'm just not a fan of the anarcho-leftist intellectual frame of mind myself. ;)

Quote from: Cole;423153While I haven't read everything LeGuin wrote, I've never read anything by her that I didn't enjoy.

I found her Hainish cycle stuff to be incredibly inspiring for world-building. Same with Mieville, actually. One great thing about left-wing sci-fi is an emphasis on investigating and critiquing systems of power in society and the relationship of those same systems of power to individual lives and agency.

In turn, when I design a setting, some of the first questions I ask myself are "Who has power over other people, and why?" I've always found this particularly productive.

Has anyone ever run a fantasy campaign in which something similar to "Deep One" hybrid was available as a player character type?

Quote from: Benoist;423155I'm just not a fan of the anarcho-leftist intellectual frame of mind myself. ;)

The jokes on you then: My Moragne setting is my filthy commie take on feudal society! :p

Quote from: Cole;423157Has anyone ever run a fantasy campaign in which something similar to "Deep One" hybrid was available as a player character type?

Yes. In my Laelith/D&D game. Though no PCs ever came in contact with them, so they weren't aware the choice existed.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423156I found her Hainish cycle stuff to be incredibly inspiring for world-building. Same with Mieville, actually. One great thing about left-wing sci-fi is an emphasis on investigating and critiquing systems of power in society and the relationship of those same systems of power to individual lives and agency.

In turn, when I design a setting, some of the first questions I ask myself are "Who has power over other people, and why?" I've always found this particularly productive.

I agree here - independent of its ethical or practical value, having an idea of the way power is set up in a setting is good value for the design effort in that it often gives the PCs a lot of situations to interact with.

Quote from: Cole;423157Has anyone ever run a fantasy campaign in which something similar to "Deep One" hybrid was available as a player character type?

The Laundry Files RPG will probably allow it, since there was a character in Jennifer Morgue who was one. Deep One aren't quite as disgusting in that though, and they can use their inhuman magic to cast glamours that make them look like humans.

Quote from: Benoist;423162Yes. In my Laelith/D&D game. Though no PCs ever came in contact with them, so they weren't aware the choice existed.

What were they like in the game world, and how would they be implemented as PCs?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423159The jokes on you then: My Moragne setting is my filthy commie take on feudal society! :p

I did notice. :D

But just because I wouldn't treat the subject (and as a matter of fact do not) in the same fashion in my own games doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy playing at your game table tremendously nonetheless! Maybe it would make me appreciate it even more if I was playing on it, like coming up with some characters that would engage those precise thematics in the game!

Quote from: Cole;423165What were they like in the game world, and how would they be implemented as PCs?

Survivors of the ancient city that existed before the metropolis. They knew the secret relationship there was between the city's founding, the stars, and the cults that developed around their worship. They were depicted as hybrids, pretty much in the same particular fashion HPL used for Innsmouth, but with a malediction related to their knowledge of the truth, and their struggle against the evil poisoning their line, rather than an inherent submission to it by birth.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423164The Laundry Files RPG will probably allow it, since there was a character in Jennifer Morgue who was one. Deep One aren't quite as disgusting in that though, and they can use their inhuman magic to cast glamours that make them look like humans.

Interesting. I haven't ready any of those - by that author, only Singularity Sky.

For me half the fun would be the disgustingness.

Quote from: Benoist;423170Survivors of the ancient city that existed before the metropolis. They knew the secret relationship there was between the city's founding, the stars, and the cults that developed around their worship. They were depicted as hybrids, pretty much in the same particular fashion HPL used for Innsmouth, but with a malediction related to their knowledge of the truth, and their struggle against the evil poisoning their line, rather than an inherent submission to it by birth.

Sounds promising!

Quote from: Cole;423172Sounds promising!

That's reassuring. :D

Quote from: Benoist;423168I did notice. :D

But just because I wouldn't treat the subject (and as a matter of fact do not) in the same fashion in my own games doesn't mean I wouldn't enjoy playing at your game table tremendously nonetheless! Maybe it would make me appreciate it even more if I was playing on it, like coming up with some characters that would engage those precise thematics in the game!

Glad to hear it!

I've played with people of a number of different political beliefs over the years, and I'm surprised at how it influences the campaigns they run. It's rarely a dominant influence, but you can tell here and there.

For example, I game offline with a guy who believes in the Strong Man theory of history & who is arguably a cryptofascist (though not a neo-Nazi, thankfully).

His strength as a DM comes from how he comes up with campaign ideas: The first thing he does when he creates a game is come up with strong, powerful, dynamic characters and details their interaction with one another. This leads to really dynamic, memorable NPCs who drive the story forward by their actions and decisions, rather than preplanned events.

On the other hand, his weakness is that he doesn't really care about the rest of the world. He once described his attitude towards it as "stage setting", and I thought that was pretty accurate. People who aren't these dynamic, powerful NPCs tend to be either tools and pawns of them, or fundamentally irrelevant. The world exists mainly as a place for the NPCs and PCs to interact with one another in various challenges and tests until the stronger ones triumph.

I'm pretty much the opposite, as a left-wing type. It makes for an interesting dynamic at the table, to say the least. I've seen similar, though less extreme versions of this kind of ideological framing in almost every game I've run where I've been aware of the socio-political attitudes of the GM.

Quote from: Cole;423171Interesting. I haven't ready any of those - by that author, only Singularity Sky.

For me half the fun would be the disgustingness.

I've only read the Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue. I'll probably pick up the Fullerton Memorandum with post-Christmas giftcards. They're OK - there's about a half-dozen good ideas on tech + Cthulhu in each book, spackled together by a lot of inane overly trendy, techno-babble and improbable plot developments (so much so that Jennifer Morgue has a McGuffin that is actually magically causing the improbable plot developments).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423181I've only read the Atrocity Archives and Jennifer Morgue. I'll probably pick up the Fullerton Memorandum with post-Christmas giftcards. They're OK - there's about a half-dozen good ideas on tech + Cthulhu in each book, spackled together by a lot of inane overly trendy, techno-babble and improbable plot developments (so much so that Jennifer Morgue has a McGuffin that is actually magically causing the improbable plot developments).

That doesn't sound much to my liking That last point is close to a deal-killer - just sounds unacceptably corny.

Singularity Sky was a "less than the sum of its parts" book, which I feel is pretty typical of modern high concept SF.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423177I'm pretty much the opposite, as a left-wing type. It makes for an interesting dynamic at the table, to say the least. I've seen similar, though less extreme versions of this kind of ideological framing in almost every game I've run where I've been aware of the socio-political attitudes of the GM.

Interesting. I consider myself a left leaning person, but I do find that my campaigns often end up with a heavy focus on ambitious and willful NPCs and even more ambitious and willful NPCs.

Quote from: Cole;423185That doesn't sound much to my liking That last point is close to a deal-killer - just sounds unacceptably corny.

Singularity Sky was a "less than the sum of its parts" book, which I feel is pretty typical of modern high concept SF.

Of the two Laundry Files books I've read, Atrocity Archives is by far the better one. It's really a collection of short stories or episodes with recurring characters rather than a single progressive narrative.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423177Glad to hear it!

I've played with people of a number of different political beliefs over the years, and I'm surprised at how it influences the campaigns they run. It's rarely a dominant influence, but you can tell here and there.

Totally. I agree!

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;423177For example, I game offline with a guy who believes in the Strong Man theory of history & who is arguably a cryptofascist (though not a neo-Nazi, thankfully).

His strength as a DM comes from how he comes up with campaign ideas: The first thing he does when he creates a game is come up with strong, powerful, dynamic characters and details their interaction with one another. This leads to really dynamic, memorable NPCs who drive the story forward by their actions and decisions, rather than preplanned events.

On the other hand, his weakness is that he doesn't really care about the rest of the world. He once described his attitude towards it as "stage setting", and I thought that was pretty accurate. People who aren't these dynamic, powerful NPCs tend to be either tools and pawns of them, or fundamentally irrelevant. The world exists mainly as a place for the NPCs and PCs to interact with one another in various challenges and tests until the stronger ones triumph.

I'm pretty much the opposite, as a left-wing type. It makes for an interesting dynamic at the table, to say the least. I've seen similar, though less extreme versions of this kind of ideological framing in almost every game I've run where I've been aware of the socio-political attitudes of the GM.

I do think that we all view the world in a certain way. Our political leanings are in many ways an expression of this inherent bias coming from who we are, where we come from, what our life experiences were, etc etc. So it's not so much that I see many GMs actively injecting political ideas in their campaigns, rather than the natural bias that expresses itself in a different way through the fantasy, whatever its particular details may be.

I like to consider myself open-minded. In France, I label myself as squarely Gaullian, which probably most people would understand as right-wing, in most instances, at least. In the US, I'd probably be considered as either a moderate Republican in some instances (mostly economically speaking), or a moderate Democrat in others (on morality issues, for instance, like a woman's right to choose what to do with her own body, the separation of Church and State, those kinds of things). While running games, I'm not thinking consciously "oh there I got to make a conservative counter-point to that progressive idea!" But there is no doubt in my mind that my personal bias do show up through the game, in one fashion or another, because I am who I am, and inspiration is rooted in who you are, how you perceive things and get inspired by them. The creative act of running a game, whether it's role playing an entire world in motion, or a particular player character, is an act rooted in bias and subjectivity, as it should, IMO. Pretending that whatever fantasies you and I would come up with on the spot would be in any way shape or form "objective" would be really fooling ourselves, that's pretty obvious, to me.

Quote from: Akrasia;423135Yeah, that's what I meant.  Sorry for not being clearer.  Stormbringer is barely tolerable, and the stuff written after it rather tiresome.  (Although it's been years since I've read any Elric tale, so perhaps my recollection is a bit foggy.)

Neon Genesis Evangelion is better Stormbringer than Stormbringer. I mean it. And even the whiny protagonist is more of a man than Elric. :hatsoff:

Being a bona-fide Battletech fan, I never could relate to any anime-style Mecha. The stories themselves, that is. The only Mecha-Anime I could sit through was Patlabor. Neon Genesis Evangelion...after 15 minutes I switched it off. Just. Could. Not. Stand.