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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6175013" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm an academic lawyer and philosopher who publishes mostly in just war theory, human rights theory and constitutional theory. So I have fairly well-developed and fairly strong views on a wide range of political, legal and ethical questions.That said, those views don't really influence my game directly (except in certain minor ways - eg my games are mostly free of overt sex, race, sexuality etc based discrimination, even though such discrimination is ubiquitous in pre-modern (and many modern) societies, just because it makes it easier for me to enjoy the game if I don't have to deal with those sorts of things in it). I'm a fairly strong believer in the view that aesthetics and morality don't track one another too tightly - and for me, at least, part of the aesthetic appeal of fantasy (and this applies to it's pseudo-modern form in 4-colour superheroics as well as its overtly romantic forms in Tolkien, Wagner etc) is its invocation of and dealing with pre-modern values like loyalty, honour, rulership, the symbolic and magical connections between glorious individuals and broader social/historical trends, etc (and putting off to one side modern concerns like efficiency, the general welfare, why is Storm not ending droughts the world over rather than wasting her time fighting Magneto?, etc). And this is what my games tend to default towards.What I would say is that while my academic background doesn't influence my game too much in terms of content, it does influence it in terms of structure and technique: it shapes how I think about the themes and values in play, and how I can push the players (via their PCs) in engaging with them.Also, my games aren't very S&S in flavour, and I think my background informs my own understanding of why that is: namely, despite its tropes S&S is very modernist in its themes, and I fairly self-consciously steer my game away from those themes towards the romantic/pre-modern.</blockquote>

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