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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8038237" data-attributes="member: 6993955">I was only really talking about for RPG purposes. So, for my use of the mythos in a game, I'd drop miscegenation. As for the stories, they are what they are. Shadow Over Innsmouth is fantastic, and the creeping sense of wrongness, of alienation, of being the other or possibly surrounded by the other that it paints works for a lot of common fears that aren't racist. I'm also just as happy to read it as change brought about by the active worship of unfathomable evil. That's also the take I'd mostly roll with in a game. I like to give my villains some personal responsibility for their evil.I don't actually have an issue with the whole 'consorting' with evil thing, except for the fact that it's always women doing the consorting and the consorting is either unwiling or passive. The whole notion often ends up coming across as quite misogynist. The next time I run dark forest type Mythos it'll be a male cult leader impregnating the Goat with a Thousand Young to sire monstrous children, just for something different. That character certainly could be an active, empowered, female villain, but it can be tough to navigate the rapids there. To go back to my first paragraph, I have in the past and will again use the trope of 'evil blood', of a taint that washes down from father to daughter and mother to son. This is very much in the 'evil orc' range of ideas, which we've talked about a whole lot here recently. What liberates that idea from potential racist undertones is that I always pair it with a struggle against inner evil, whether it demonic blood, the influence of a god, or whatever, and the evil is always actual evil, not just 'other'. So long as there is personal responsibility for the evil, a choice being made, then it escapes the gravity of the racist ideas about mixed blood that can make it problematic.</blockquote>

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