D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[pemerton]

I'm the same... I always sum him up as 'great ideas, kind of a turgid writer, despicable politics'. That said, there are a couple of his stories that I found to be fascinating, particularly "At the Mountains of Madness"...

I find At the Mountains of Madness to be one of the sloggy ones.

When the PCs in my Traveller game were excavating an alien installation frozen in ice, which they were suspecting might have strange psionic tendencies and lurking dangers, I suggested to one of the players who reads a lot of sci-fi that he should read At the Mountains of Madness to get into the zone. I don't know if he's forgiven me yet for that particular bit of advice . . .

There are things that humankind was not meant to experience . . . like long accounts of Antarctic latitudes and longitudes, and page-long descriptions of Pabodie's amazing drill.

 

[jgsugden]

I agree with this bit, but it strongly supports my point that any D&D coming out then would have suffered.

Critical Role started playing 4E and I don't think it hurt them. The reason they got big wasn't the edition they were playing, it was the cultural zeitgeist.

They played one session with a simplified version of 4E before converting to Pathfinder. I doubt many of them (outside perhaps Liam) know a lick about how 4E works.


Regardless, I tend to run a very story driven game when I DM and I found it much more difficult to do so under the 4E rules. The arcade nature of combat (which felt so much more like a MMORPG than D&D) just pulled people out of the story, as did the constant magic item churn and continual addition of materials.

Pathfinder and 5E are much easier systems to put the story first and not have the system pull attention away from story.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Current young adult is fantasy and scifi in a post apocalypse.

A few years ago the common refrain was that it was okay to like problematic things just so long as we recognized they were problematic.

Problem is that no one follows that and still try to explain away the problematic parts as 'product of their time' or 'but they were influential, so it's okay' instead of recognizing it as problematic.

There's a difference between 'sure it's rooted in the final evolution of fantastic racism, but I dig the existential horror' and 'you have to respect this scumbag because he was born a long time ago and also other people did better work based on his'.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Okay. I don’t agree that the above is “abundantly clear” at all, but that’s tangential to anything I was discussing.

Yes. And?

 

[Filthy Lucre]

Current young adult is fantasy and scifi in a post apocalypse.

Problem is that no one follows that and still try to explain away the problematic parts as 'product of their time' or 'but they were influential, so it's okay' instead of recognizing it as problematic.

There's a difference between 'sure it's rooted in the final evolution of fantastic racism, but I dig the existential horror' and 'you have to respect this scumbag because he was born a long time ago and also other people did better work based on his'.

I like authors such as HP Lovecraft and I recognize that they were 'problematic'. But what exactly does that do? Nothing about my recognizing that changes anything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There's a difference between 'sure it's rooted in the final evolution of fantastic racism, but I dig the existential horror' and 'you have to respect this scumbag because he was born a long time ago and also other people did better work based on his'.

I don't see a whole lot of people giving Lovecraft a pass here, so I don't know who that's aimed at.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

I don't see a whole lot of people giving Lovecraft a pass here, so I don't know who that's aimed at.

Same - in fact I don't think I have ever seen anyone defend HPL's character or beliefs. There's a world of difference between respecting him as one of the greats of cosmic horror/weird fiction (along with the lesser known Clark Ashton Smith) and respecting him as a person.

 

[Voadam]

I like authors such as HP Lovecraft and I recognize that they were 'problematic'. But what exactly does that do? Nothing about my recognizing that changes anything.

It can inform how you think about it and so how you talk about it with others.

I can remember playing a Cthulhu board game with my brother and two people from his D&D group, one of whom was Black and had no knowledge of Lovecraft but a strong interest in fantasy and supernatural horror. When talking about the Mythos we said it is based on a 1930s horror writer's work who basically defined the cosmic horror genre and inspired a ton of neat stuff but he was also pretty racist and this came across in some of his stories. I had not read Herbert West Reanimator at the time but having done so now I might have given him some suggestions if he had been interested of neat things like the Color out of Space or the Dunwhich Horror and warned him about the racial characterizations in Herbert West.

He could then decide whether he wanted nothing to do with any of it, whether he wanted to explore some Lovecraft or mythos stories that are not explicitly insulting to Black people, or explore it all aware of the context.

If I had thought there was nothing problematic I would have had a different conversation and he might have delved in to encounter surprise racism in something recommended to him that he was expecting to purely enjoy.

I am a big proponent of the value of awareness in these types of issues for people to make their own choices.

 

[MGibster]

Problem is that no one follows that and still try to explain away the problematic parts as 'product of their time' or 'but they were influential, so it's okay' instead of recognizing it as problematic.

I don't think I see that a lot. I've yet to run into anyone who says Lovecraft's beliefs were okay because he was influential. And while I've heard people say he was a product of his time, I've yet to run into anyone who said that this made his beliefs okay. I think the real problem is that when many people bring up Lovecraft's racism they do so with the expectation that others will say, "Ewww, racism! I won't read anything by him from now on."

There's a difference between 'sure it's rooted in the final evolution of fantastic racism, but I dig the existential horror' and 'you have to respect this scumbag because he was born a long time ago and also other people did better work based on his'.

Who has made that argument? I don't really care if anyone respects Lovecraft or not.

 

[MGibster]

If I had thought there was nothing problematic I would have had a different conversation and he might have delved in to encounter surprise racism in something recommended to him that he was expecting to purely enjoy.

I also give people a heads up by telling them Lovecraft had some very unfortunate beliefs which are reflected quite vividly in some of his stories. In Herbert West, I find the description of the boxer to be more painful than the name of the cat.