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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fox Lee" data-source="post: 7471169" data-attributes="member: 4346">I am extremely proactive about inclusion in my games, and designed my setting accordingly. It's great to see more mainstream publications finally starting to lean this way too—women, people of colour and people under the LGBT+ umbrella have spent quite enough of our time being sidelined by TTRPGs in the past, and remaining "neutral" on social issues only ever reinforces the current balance of power.Since you could already drown in the number of RPG settings mostly recycling medieval European social ideas, it's also vastly more interesting (to me, of course) to do virtually anything else.Since the default mode for mainstream fiction is to require justification any time a marginalised person is cast, I use the opposite perspective; basically, nobody of importance is going to be a straight white cisgender man unless I can think of particular reason they need to be. Funnily enough, if you are anything but this artificial default, it makes for a much more interesting and relatable world.That's not to say that every culture in my game world embraces equality, of course; the fascist theocracy pushes white male human supremacy, for example, and the barbarian gnoll clans are almost always matriarchal (they are based on hyaenas, after all). One nation was founded by singular female hero, so the ideal of a mountainous warrior woman is an important cultural touchstone for them, while another is strongly concerned with family lineage, so they tend to be obnoxiously heteronormative. One of the player races is naturally psionic, with a degree of shared racial consciousness and a cultural belief in reincarnation, so they find human ideas of gender and class to be virtually incomprehensible. The important thing is that the setting, as a whole, takes deliberate measures to welcome people who have often been excluded in the past, and demonstrate that their fantasies are recognised and validated as much as those of anybody else.Because fantasy is for everybody's escapism, right? If Rory's fantasy is being a seven foot tall monster-slaying badass, and Clay's is not having people hate them for being queer, there's no reason there should be several hundred FRPG settings for one, but barely any for the other. And since my fantasy is equal parts of each one, I have little use for a game which doesn't accommodate both.</blockquote>

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