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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Caliburn101" data-source="post: 7410091" data-attributes="member: 6802178">I forgot to include my observations on the sexism and racism of the 1930's and how it doesn't figure in the game at all. I posted this on another thread but it is useful and relevant to include it here also.Let's cover all stereotyping while we are here; Firstly, basically they have removed the sexism inherent to the 30s. Every other picture in the archetypes is a female character, there is no sexist art insofar as the few times a woman is scantily clad in the book it's usually next to a man equally so. After all, musclebound barbarian in leather underpants as he was once or twice in the books, Conan does for the sake of consistency have to be so in the art. The vast majority of the time however people are fully clothed and appropriately armoured etc. including the 'sword sisters'. There are actually not that many sexist passages in the original stories, there were actually more introduced in the 70's with the Frazetta front-covered pastiche stories. This is studiously avoided by sticking to the original material and being sensible in the use of quotations etc. In addition, people do tend to think the original material was more sexist than it is. Howard was actually well ahead of the curve for his time in having not only lady warriors who killed men like they were cannon-fodder, but were in a few cases a direct match for Conan steel vs. steel. This really was not the kind of thing that was written at the time, women almost universally needed rescuing by men from other men - they didn't carve out their livers themselves! I have female players in both my Conan games - 2 in each in fact, and they are more than happy with the portrayal of women, so I would say that's a useful acid test in itself. On racial stereotyping, in the core book several of the archetypes are black or oriental. This continues in artwork at about the same proportion as one might expect in a modern rpg book. Whilst the Black Kingdoms are yet to have their expansion book released, the fact is there are as many white barbarian races as black, and the worst of them all are white - the Picts. The Black Kingdoms (African), Vendhya (Indian), Hyrkanian (Mongol), Turanian (City building Mongol) and Khitai (Chinese) races are all powerful in their own right and have significant influence on the world. They are not regarded as inferior. There are of course racial hatreds in place, described in the expansion books, but these are equally prevalent between the different western kingdoms and barbarian domains where they are all white. Basically whilst remaining true to the original material in terms of who is where and who they are racially, there is not so much as an undertone of racism in the books, and this is pretty cool. One thing that always bothered me when I was studying archaeology was the early history of it when the ruins of the advanced Zembawei civilisation in Africa was found and was interpreted as having been built by white settlers and not the indigenous people (which of course turned out to be racially motivated crapola). Remember, in the 30's racist interpretations on black cultural achievements in history was pretty widespread. Yet here was Howard with multiple city-building, civilised and educated black cultures in his world with their own significant power and prestige. Pretty radical stuff at the time! In short, you need have no worries over racist or sexist elements to the game, it is not an issue.</blockquote>

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