BLUE ROSE Returns, Championing Diversity & Inclusiveness

Back in 2005, Green Ronin published a roleplaying game called Blue Rose. It was designed by Jeremy Crawford (yep, him who works at WotC on D&D 5E), Steve "Mutants & Masterminds" Kenson (that's his actual middle name), Dawn Elliot, and John Snead, and was billed as a "romantic fantasy" game, of the genre for whom Tamora Pierce, Mercedes Lackey, and Jacqueline Carey are known. It used the True20 System, which was a slimmed-down, modified version of the d20 System, and won multiple ENnies. And now it's back!

This time round, the game will be using the Adventure Game Engine, which powers the Dragon Age RPG, and will be funded via a Kickstarter launching in April. One of Green Ronin's reasons for bringing it back is that the game tackled a number of diversity and inclusiveness related issues, and those issues are very much the subject of intense - and often unpleasant - debate and conflict today.

You can click on the cover image below for the full announcement from Green Ronin's Chris Pramas.

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What's Romantic Fantasy? It's "a subgenre of fantasy fiction, describing a fantasy story using many of the elements and conventions of the romance genre". According to Wikipedia, the genre's focus is on social, political, and romantic relationships.

 

[Umbran]

If you want to look at other settings with politicial leanings embedded within them:

World of Darkness: Left-wing horror, since it focuses on alienation of the self from society.
Call of Cthulhu: Right-wing horror, since it presents human society as something fragile that needs to be protected against the alien Other at all costs.

That doesn't mean either can't be enjoyed by gamers of particular political leaning, but these games were never really "apolitical" in the first place.

I'll grant that oWoD was not apolitical, but not for the reasons you metion - I'd cite that it had clearly stated themes of environmental protection (Werewolf) and conspiracy The-Man-Is-Out-To-Get-You (Mage's Technocracy).

But trying to stuff Call of Cthulhu into that mold on the basis of the antagonist seems pretty much over-analyzing. Sometimes a beast from the deeps is just a beast from the deeps.

 

[shamsael]

Fair enough. I didn't realize the setting was so 'fantastical'. The complaints leveled on this thread implied that it was lacking in the sorts of things you just mentioned.

And for the record, yes: there is a distinct lack of dungeon delving and monster slaying in my real life experience.

 

[TreChriron]

...

And for the record, yes: there is a distinct lack of dungeon delving and monster slaying in my real life experience.

Me too! I guess we should be happy? I mean, testing software has thus so far been a somewhat safe profession...

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Isn't fantasy supposed to be about imagining a life you couldn't otherwise live? I'm sad to think that there are enough people in the world with a lack of real world romance and politics that we can support an RPG based on imagining them.

In defense of the concept, my wife and her cohorts who do engage in a lot of online RP that involves romance mostly seem to focus on the obsession with tall buff gay blood elves and other oddities which, I can assure you, are completely not part of RL. So there is just as much fantasy in romance as there is in monster slaying.

 

[WayneLigon]

Has anyone around here play or have read the original BR? If so how do the rules support the genre? What is the setting like? How do the rules and/or setting support diversity and inclusiveness?

I have the original BR. I would not say that the 'rules support the genre' specifically; the original rules with only a few small changes went on to be able to support pretty much any genre. Perhaps they mean that the rules do a better job of supporting the genre than many others, since they are written with the idea of customizing your PC to a significant degree, and that there are rules for social contact, etc.

Many of the adept paths reflect character archetypes usually found in romantic fantasy: shapeshifters, healers, psychics, etc. A lot of the magic will also be familiar - there are lots of 'shaping' spells, much like in ElfQuest. There is discussion of romance, conviction, your reputation score, and several other 'soft' aspects of role-playing. Really, even having those sections in there perhaps goes a long way to saying that the 'rules support the genre'.

The setting owes a great deal to Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar - there are intelligent animals here and there, the main civilization is a pre-industrial one where the rulers are 'vetted' by a magical force for good, the culture of the main civilization is very open and inclusive of what we might call 'non-traditional' romance - fluidly bisexual and same-sex pairings are not treated any differently, gender roles are very blurred, etc. They adopt the Valdemarian idea of 'there is no One True Way' to anything, and so remain a very flexible and adaptable culture. One of their chief enemies has a very unforgiving religion that act as rulers, though they don't go for the 'religion is evil' trope. They are treated as a very harsh and conformist culture that I seem to remember has some reasons for being that way.

That would make BR the first game setting to even talk about that subject matter at any real length, other than perhaps a sentence or two here and there. Any depiction of non-traditional romance or gender roles is very, very rare in most game settings - heck, outside of oWoD you might never see even a mention of it, never guess that it occurred - and that was doubly true at the time the original game was written.

 

[pemerton]

I'm trying to think of a way to marry romance/relationships and game mechanics and I just can't make those ideas fit together.

<snip>

Relationships aren't mechanical

<snip>

This entire concept (strong mechanics of relationships) seems a step backwards to me.

Here are some examples I can think of:

In The Riddle of Steel and HeroWars/Quest, action taken in furtherance of a relationship gains bonuses;

In Burning Wheel, action taken that pertains to a relationship (furthers it, comes into conflict with it) earns fate points;

In Gygax's AD&D, kind and generous treatment of a friend, henchman or servitor increases their loyalty, which means they are less likely to betray or abandon you.​

I'm sure there are plenty of others from different RPGs over the years and decades.

 

[Celebrim]

If you want to look at other settings with politicial leanings embedded within them:

World of Darkness: Left-wing horror, since it focuses on alienation of the self from society.
Call of Cthulhu: Right-wing horror, since it presents human society as something fragile that needs to be protected against the alien Other at all costs.

That doesn't mean either can't be enjoyed by gamers of particular political leaning, but these games were never really "apolitical" in the first place.

I refuse to view life through a lens of politics. While it is I guess in some sense true that World of Darkness encodes for modern "left-wing" values simply because the writers held these values in a sort of stereotypical way - back in the '90's a book buyer I knew hated to call World of Darkness because, as he put it, "you could smell the smoke hanging in the air all the way through the phone." But even so, I don't think you can simplify the World of Darkness down to "alienation from self" nor can I think you call something as generic as "alienation of the self" an inherently left-wing fear or experience. The very modern of the moment liberal politics of the writers show up in much more overt ways than that.

Still, "chaos" and "lawful" mean far more and have far more coherent definitions than "left-wing" and "right-wing". You might as well say that people really are "chaotic" or "lawful" as say they are "left-wing" and "right-wing". If you think alignment arguments are useless, perhaps you should try a mixed political forum and try to get agreement about what words like 'left-wing', 'right-wing', 'liberal', and 'conservative' mean. I assure you, no alignment discussion every generated as many contradictory opinions as you'll get regarding such words. 'Liberal' is particularly bad because the English word also has about a half-dozen unrelated meanings to its political meaning, and this fact is often not known to users of the word who will assume all uses of it refer to the same thing, and worse its political meaning has demonstrably changed radically over the course of its existence (and equally "conservative" means radically different things geographically, and is almost equally misused).

And you simplification of the horror of Lovecraft down to "fear of the alien" and "fear of societal destruction", and your equation of those fears and experiences with inherently "right-wing" is even more strained. For me, the big fears in Lovecraft are fear of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, fear of quantum spaces, fear of the big bang, fear of the heat death of the universe, fear of general relativity, fear of cosmological vastness, and the general fear that the faith of the Enlightenment that the world could be made sensible had ultimately shown through those very tools a world which was provably unknowable, alien, and incomprehensible. That's not an inherently left-wing or right-wing problem. And fear of the unknown is very much a human fear, and as such is inherently apolitical. It's not as if Lovecraft himself had any sort of easily classified political leaning, especially not in the trivial - and meaningless - way the words are used to refer to modern political parties.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Lovecraftian horror is also based in the existence of powerful, otherworldly beings who- contrary to all such beings in mainstream human religion, in which humans are loved or hated by the gods- generally care for us less than humans care for gnats. Not hate, not love, but supreme indifference. As such, it is lying an uncomfortable theological space between religion and atheism.

That's not political, that's psychological.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Lovecraftian horror is also based in the existence of powerful, otherworldly beings who- contrary to all such beings in mainstream human religion, in which humans are loved or hated by the gods- generally care for us less than humans care for gnats. Not hate, not love, but supreme indifference. As such, it is lying an uncomfortable theological space between religion and atheism.

That's not political, that's psychological.

This is often rather hard to separate, with Lovecraft. Lovecraft himself was very reactionary, not to mention racist. His loathing of miscegenation echoes in "The Shadow over Innsmouth", and his story "He" could be interpreted as "Guy freaks out because some Asians have a Rave Party in Future New York". "The Horror at Red Hook" also has deeply racist overtones, and likely do a number of other of his stories which I forgot.

I mean, I enjoy Lovecraft's stories as much as the next guy, but his stories aren't "apolitical". And the Cthulhu Mythos originated from his writings first and foremost. We can try to remove all the racist undertones from his writings - and we probably should - but many of the fears that his stories and the Mythos as a whole tap into are the same fears that are frequently tapped into by right-wing political leaders and pundits.

 

[Bluenose]

Here are some examples I can think of:

In The Riddle of Steel and HeroWars/Quest, action taken in furtherance of a relationship gains bonuses;

In Burning Wheel, action taken that pertains to a relationship (furthers it, comes into conflict with it) earns fate points;

In Gygax's AD&D, kind and generous treatment of a friend, henchman or servitor increases their loyalty, which means they are less likely to betray or abandon you.​

I'm sure there are plenty of others from different RPGs over the years and decades.

Pendragon is the oldest I'm aware of. You can roll against your passions (which include relationships) for a bonus (or penalty if you fail) on actions which serve to advance those passions.