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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ezrael" data-source="post: 369133" data-attributes="member: 6262">I hope this thread is still here, because I wanted to mention one thing:I don't *need* the BoVD to do evil. I'm quite capable of DM'ing some frightfully evil NPC's, and I'll do so whether or not anyone outside of my game approves. I don't believe mature audiences = lazy (I've read MAUS, Watchmen and other comics with some graphic and disturbing ideas in them, watched movies with graphic scenes of torture and murder and so on, and even read Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, where the main protagonist is a member of the Torturer's Guild) and I don't need anyone's sanction to play my game my way. The only people I consider are my players, because they're the ones who I want to keep coming back so we can keep playing the game.When I was twelve, I would have found the sealed section boring and tame. I already knew about the myth of Tantalus by then, who'd served a child to the gods to be consumed to determine how divine they really were. I knew about the death of King Edward II of England, who was killed by the insertion of a heated metal rod through an apeture in his body so as to avoid marring his flesh. I knew about the guillotine. I even worked on my family farm and saw the blood and viscera of many a cow, sheep or goat. I knew about the Donner Party, about the Sabine women, and about other, possibly darker issues. I doubt either the BoVD or Dragon 300 can possibly even come close to reaching the depth of human depravity, and even if it did, children are not so fragile that they will shattered into a million fragments if they somehow get their hands on this book. Considering that nursery rhymes often include self-mutilation, cannibalism, murder, abandonment of children by their parents, mass kidnapping of whole villages...considering that, I don't fret much about the BoVD.There's been a lot of talk about the BoVD serving as some sort of disgusting egradation of the hobby. Well, if the hobby that produced Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Kult, the various and sundry WW games, Deadlands, Tomb of Horrors, etc can be so easily degraded by one book, then that book must be the most ineffably awful collection of evil ever released, and is artistic just for that. I mean, the writings of the Marquis de Sade (not his honest exploration of the philosophical idea of total freedom and how such would require the destruction of any and all powers that could possibly hinder one, but his vulgarities) could be endured by humanity without destroying French Literature, why can't the gaming hobby survive a compendium of evils *that will exist primarily to be overcome?* I mean, that is the stated goal of the book, isn't it? To provide new options for DM's in creating villains and threats for players to defeat? If discussing evil automatically glorifies it, how are we to discuss it? If confronting evil in a role playing game is to be equated with endorsing it, then there's no way to proceed.I have always felt since I was old enough to make such judgements on my own that people who worry overmuch about the salacious or repellent content in a publication have had little real-life experience with such. I have read books in my life that detail in exquisite detail the horrors of hell (Dante's Inferno) and which explore the mentality of Satan himself (Milton's Paradise Lost) without losing my critical faculties. Franz Kafka's *In The Penal Colony* depicts a scene of a man being crushed and stabbed to death by a malfunctioning device as horrible as anything I've ever read...why is that acceptable, and this is not? How are we to be expected to depict an atrocity *without being atrocious?* Admittedly, everyone's threshold is different. Also admittedly, in a free country with a respect for freedom of speech and discourse, we will be told what to think and what to feel by others. Objectivity is exceedingly difficult. Yet the old advice by that book out of the middle east to mind the beam in one's own eye before pointing out the mote in anothers is still valid: if you are not willing to be told how to think yourself, it might not be a great idea to command others. For myself, this book is neither some abomination on the face of the hobby nor an automatically immature work. It exists in a continuum of products that have dealt with the same topics, and until it is published we can't judge it. Furthermore, being interested in such topics is not automatically juvenile or immature...or if it is, then the History Channel and Steven Spielberg and dozens of mythographers from Robert Graves to Edith Hamilton and Friederich Nietzsche are all to be consigned to the ashpile of juvenalia?I admit I find human brutality, human cruelty, and yes, human evil to be fascinating. I see no real reason to censor a discussion of those evil actions; indeed, maybe if more people knew, really viscerally knew what kind of hideous actions real life humans have committed, more empathy would be engendered. For myself and my past games, it has never hindered us to have villains who really *were* as loathsome as I could make them. The players did not emulate them, they defeated them. If I buy this book, I will use it in that spirit. I don't need any help to make my own moral judgements, and when I do make them, it will be by examining the book itself.</blockquote>

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