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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9095616" data-attributes="member: 18">They like it less when someone makes them all into animal-people though.Which was part of the issue with Mystara.Or worse when it introduces horrifying racial stereotypes of oppressed minority groups and then assigns them to orcs (let's not even get into The Orcs of Thar).So whilst you're absolutely right that "real world equivalents" (rather than allegories) are the core problem with Mystara, I don't think they're quite as innocent and wonderful and flawless as you're implying. Plus standards for representation in the 1990s were vastly lower than the 2020s.And even the 1990s, you might be unaware, but there an ongoing issue with sourcebooks about [Country X], which is that, yes, we, as Brits, bought every Britain sourcebook for every RPG we owned. Problem was though, 99% of them SUCKED MONKEY NUTS. They were absolutely awful. So they got sales, sure! But they also got me STILL ANGRY 25+ YEARS LATER. I guarantee you some of the Mystara sales have a dude in India quietly fulminating about how much the Mystara take on India sucked or whatever. I mean we could go through the UK sourcebooks and I could identify the big problems with each one - the least awful was the Cyberpunk 2020 one, which seemed dumb in the 1990s but turned out to be somewhat prescient re: flag-shagging, Brexit and so on. The one that wound me up most was one of the World of Darkness ones, which seemed to have been written by someone who had last been young or cool in about 1981, and was absolutely certain that UK nightlife and party culture and so on was still exactly like that, in like 1994. How do you do like an entire chapter on the nightlife of the UK, writing in the 1990s, and not mention raves? And that is tinest point of the tip of the iceberg of how much that sucked. It was written by a Brit too, to add insult to injury. Just one who was completely out-of-touch (and also probably didn't live in London, given some strange ideas about that).</blockquote>

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