Dungeon Crawl Classics What is cool to you from a player perspective?

[Voadam]

If someone makes their Space Nazis or their Space Confederacy heroic, barring other data to the contrary, you can reasonably infer some things about their worldview.

You then get the question of whether dark satire space marines as the heroic good guys of the 40K universe are taken straight as non satire space Nazi heroes. Judge Dredd gets this too.

 

[Parmandur]

also with the Wheel of Time's Seanchan who are sort of a glorified mythic fantasy Confederacy who are slavers and brilliant military people and administrators and full of honor and the results of their conquering and enslaving people is portrayed as an overall positive thing.

...

That...is not how I read the books. In fact, I'd take it a very different critical direction, that the Seanchan are an Orientalist-tinged negative take on non-Western societies. Not Confederacy apologetics.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If someone writes fan fiction making the pro-slavery and the anti-slavery sides of a conflict morally equivalent, or, worse, the pro-slavery side the good guys, and we choose to completely suspend judgement and shut our eyes to the implications there, that's a moral abdication. As Neil Peart wrote, "if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." Desmond Tutu had some words as well, about people who are neutral regarding injustice.

Your choice to take personal insult to a general point is your own. Your choice to assume the most hostile possible interpretation is your own. It's one I've seen you make a lot. Which is a bummer.

It's a big world, there are a lot of different types and degrees of depictions of unsavory content. I'm not saying that it's always an easy black and white line or that liking fiction with morally-dubious stuff in it is inherent immoral, by any means. But ignoring history and context rarely gets us anyplace good. If someone makes their Space Nazis or their Space Confederacy heroic, barring other data to the contrary, you can reasonably infer some things about their worldview. If they make their Space Federation one where slavery is explicitly protected by interplanetary law, likewise.

My entire point here is simply that I think it's wrong to levy moral judgement on those who don't criticize a given work of fiction to the degree or extent that you do. Whether or not a person calls out a lack of attention to the unsavory aspects of something they are reading doesn't IMO imply anything about them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don't know about that, in many things I would really want at least a little more data.

I think even if this isn't applicable to you, it's not hard to look around the world and find examples of people for whom "the noble lost cause" stuff is associated with darker beliefs. I would go as far as to say that, while it's obviously not a 100% correlation, it's a pretty strong one. (And I have a direct ancestor who fought for the Confederacy, before anyone decides I'm some uppity Yankee making pronouncements from atop an ivory tower somewhere.)

If you are in Viking fandom spaces (for lack of a better term), you are almost certainly tripping over people who will occasionally come out with some pretty extreme views in the same way. (The heavy metal scene is open about this being an issue, for instance.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

You then get the question of whether dark satire space marines as the heroic good guys of the 40K universe are taken straight as non satire space Nazi heroes. Judge Dredd gets this too.

And whether everyone gets that it's a satire. A lot of the Warhammer 40k memes floating out there are extremely political and are from people who definitely don't seem to get who the bad guys are in the setting.

 

[Argyle King]

Re Firefly: I agree that the browncoats (and the civil war of that show in general) have parallels to the Confederacy from the US Civil War. Though, I would also say that there are elements of the Second Boer War mixed in, as the primary point of contention in Firefly's (fictional) conflict is central authority vs autonomy.

When writing fiction for a contemporary audience, there are times when it is difficult to understand where the line is at between "write what you know" & using touches of real-world inspiration to help with verisimilitude VS causing offense.

Similarly; RPG-wise, the friction between writing for games in which the primary method of conflict resolution often involves unaliving VS a contemporary culture seeking to humanize monsters can be tough to navigate.

A lot of large corporations and gaming companies have grown risk-adverse, and that brings me back on topic to something about Dungeon Crawl Classics that is cool to me as a player.

I like that, generally speaking, Goodman Games does seem care about the people who play their games as people and as human beings. At the same time, Dungeon Crawl Classics is not under the oppressive yolk of corporate overlords, so the game can take chances and try new things.

Right now, there is a Backerkit campaign for a series of adventures based upon pinball machine artwork. It's creative, cool, and something different. To the best of my knowledge, there is no other company writing an adventure that features a half-man/half-motorcycle. Even if there were, there are very few who I believe would do so and somehow manage to make it good.