In Vance's Lyonesse books, written in the 1980s, are not as satirical as the Dying Earth books, but just as full of disturbing magic and vicious acts of violence and crime. Fairy tales, in other words. I don't think Vance needs to be excused for writing Cugel as he did in 1950; I'm pretty sure he simply intended Cugel to be a bad person, and that's that.
Vampire: The Masquerade is a game in which everyone played, basically, monsters that killed humans to survive and regularly engaged in activities allegorically similar to rape, addicting others to drugs, and knowing infecting people with disease. Assuming, of course, they weren't engaged in those activities literally. Vampire: The Requiem is basically the same in that respect, although it dispenses with the pretense that most or even many vampires attempt to maintain a sense of moral worth.
I think rape in fantasy fiction is a hot issue for a number of reasons.
1. We live in a Puritan society that often regards sexual impurity with a horror beyond that generated by violence.
2. We live in a post-feminist society in which there is a raised awareness about how the repeated portrayal of women as victims and sexual chattel has disempowered them culturally.
3. It highlights the often anti-social, hypermasculine qualities of male-oriented adventure fiction, which could potentially taint the enjoyment of the work itself, if the reader feels they are being asked to ally themselves with a patriarchical, rape-entitled worldview.
4. We live in a soceity with has relatively desensitized us to violence, especially against "bad guys." Thus, because it shocks, rape > murder, even though in reality it's a lot easier to recover from being raped than from being murdered.
5. We don't like the idea that in many times and places, characters we would otherwise admire might engage in coercive sexual activities of various sorts, possibly including rape, and we don't like to be reminded of this via fiction.
All of the above are very good reasons to treat rape carefully in fiction, and ten times so in roleplaying, which is a social activity. The goal of fiction, or roleplaying, is to draw your reader into an imaginary experience. If rape produces too much horror and sympathy, the reader is horrified and leaves the fantasy. And if you horrify your friends, of course, you may have difficulty finding new ones.
I personally prefer evil to be really evil. That's why I think Darth Vader is such a great villain; it's easy to believe he is capable of pretty much capable of anything. He kills people left and right just for pissing him off, commits mass genocide, and, it turns out, murders children and mortally wounded his own wife. The Joker, too; check out The Killing Joke. The Godfather movies, too, are about a man descending into evil. By the end, he has destroyed his soul and committed every act he might once have condemned, all while pretending to be a noble man. A Clockwork Orange.... yeah, it's, wow, not nice stuff. Mordred's Curse -- great book about a terrible person, but you get a sense of a Mordred who nonetheless was not fairly treated by Arthur, and who in turn is horrified by the wizard Merlin. And if you don't like rape in your fiction, avoid A Boy and his Dog.
So I am willing to give a wide pass to vicious acts in fiction, provided the author proceeds to justify it to me. Cugel... well, he's just a real $@#$, ain't he? That's basically the premise of the series. Characters beneft from moments of nobility simply because they are so rare, not only in their own lives, but seemingly in the whole world.
