Quote from: S'mon;1085099Kipling got there first with subverting the Mighty Whitey trope like that:

A great movie about Freemasonry.

Quote from: Theory of Games;1085433Well, something GOOD but also ENGAGING.

I've read many games that were GOOD. But, to create a game ENGAGING enough to be bought and run --- different.

I think CoC is good. But, I find Delta Green far more engaging as an RPG. Largely because every offline or online run of this game ignores the very real racism & sexism in the U.S.

I'm no SJW. I kind of despise them. But, you need a degree of realism in a game based on 1920's America that reflect the racism & sexism. Otherwise, how is that CoC?

But most CoC games run online have no hint of Racism/Sexism. Again, I'm no SJW, but the U.S. was wildly racist/sexist then --- how do you ignore it?

What if, you ran a game with racist/sexist PCs who were investigating the supernatural? I think THAT is the true representation of CoC. I should not be able to run an African-American or
female PC for C0C and not have them feel out-or-place. I would think my group mature enough to handle that based on an earlier discussion.

Fun? Having a player with no racist inclinations, playing a racist PC. That's REAL roleplaying, despite what anyone told U.

In the original 1920s New England Call of Cthulu setting, racism should basically never come up. PCs are typically  upper middle class Yankees. There may be class prejudice vs rural lower class. If they go out of area then some ethnic (not racial) prejudice vs eg the Mexicans in Secret of Castronegro - it would be wildly ahistorical to treat that as equivalent to anti-black racism. Obviously a game set in the South could be very different.

Quote from: Theory of Games;1085433But, you need a degree of realism in a game based on 1920's America that reflect the racism & sexism. Otherwise, how is that CoC?

But most CoC games run online have no hint of Racism/Sexism. Again, I'm no SJW, but the U.S. was wildly racist/sexist then --- how do you ignore it?

Easy.

Who are the PCs? People touched by the supernatural? People who've seen the truth of the Mythos? AKA, people who everyone else in society considers nuts. When the only people who believe you or who share your background or who might possibly be able to help you or who are equally willing to fight to save the world happen to be people you used to not like, all racial hatreds get lost in the fight for survival.

What are the PCs up against? Monsters from beyond doing unspeakable evil. Dagon doesn't care if his fish monsters fuck white, brown or black women. They fuck anything wandering into the waters and make them give birth to hybrid monsters that lead cannibal cults. Racial bigotry goes out the window in the name of survival of the species.  

And what's my basis? War and disasters. We have a gazillion real life stories of how enemies became allies when the shit hit the fan. We have many accounts of how soldiers who were shooting each other in the morning were saving each other that night. Now imagine YOU know of the gravest threat to humanity and nobody believed you or would help you, except your most hated enemy?  Somehow, you'd figure out a way to work together.

But I know this is too hard for adult gamers in 2019. This impossible feat requires the long lost wisdom of 1980s teenagers.

Quote from: S'mon;1086127In the original 1920s New England Call of Cthulu setting, racism should basically never come up. PCs are typically  upper middle class Yankees. There may be class prejudice vs rural lower class. If they go out of area then some ethnic (not racial) prejudice vs eg the Mexicans in Secret of Castronegro - it would be wildly ahistorical to treat that as equivalent to anti-black racism. Obviously a game set in the South could be very different.

I think you touched on something important. You don't have issues with racism unless you are going out of your way to build a character for the express purpose of exploring your SJW outrage.

Quote from: Lynn;1086255I think you touched on something important. You don't have issues with racism unless you are going out of your way to build a character for the express purpose of exploring your SJW outrage.

Either GM or players, yes. The GM could certainly create a scenario where racism in 1920s USA was a factor, but it's not going to come up naturally in most HPL-style stories, unless you create an Investigator very different from his protagonists. One possible exception I can think of would be investigating Cthulu cults in the Louisiana swamps - cultists might be creole or cajun. But I would think the typical HPL-esque New England WASP professor would be too busy hating everyone (and the environment in general - no A/C in the 1920s!) to worry overmuch about racism per se.

Fuck 'em with a jalapeño.

Quote from: S'mon;1086127In the original 1920s New England Call of Cthulu setting, racism should basically never come up. PCs are typically  upper middle class Yankees. There may be class prejudice vs rural lower class. If they go out of area then some ethnic (not racial) prejudice vs eg the Mexicans in Secret of Castronegro - it would be wildly ahistorical to treat that as equivalent to anti-black racism. Obviously a game set in the South could be very different.

I disagree about prejudice. In the 1920s U.S., the KKK had a burst of popularity beyond the South, reaching over a million members and able to put on mass public events like a 50,000 member march in Washington DC in 1925. And there were millions more who weren't KKK members per se, but who had related prejudices. The prejudice of the wider second klan wasn't exactly the same as anti-black prejudice in the South - like including a lot of anti-Catholic prejudice, but it was still very real and common. I think drawing distinctions of ethnic vs racial prejudice is largely theoretical, as they are similar enough in practical effects.

It's certainly not like racism was a narrow issue limited to the American South in the 1920s, or that Call of Cthulhu campaigns are restricted to typical New England people and locales. One of my campaigns was set in 1930s Chicago, for example - where racism was very prominent historically. Racial and ethnic prejudice was extremely common throughout the U.S. - as well as in other parts of the world. Sure, the prejudices in continental Europe was different than in the American South, which were different than those in Japan - but they were very distinct from modern egalitarianism.

Overwhelmingly, my experience has been that historical Call of Cthulhu campaigns tend to downplay or ignore historical racism rather than exaggerating it. I had an ethnically prejudiced 1890s PC, but within my wider experience, he was a rare exception. The vast majority of players and GMs that I've met tend to have ahistorical egalitarianism.

Quote from: jhkim;1086425It's certainly not like racism was a narrow issue limited to the American South in the 1920s, or that Call of Cthulhu campaigns are restricted to typical New England people and locales.

Well I only have 2e CoC. It has the Secret of Castranegro set I think in New Mexico, and the Mystery of Loch Feinn in the highlands of Scotland. Otherwise all the adventures are in New England.

Since the wave of black migration from the South to the Northern cities occurred after WW2, I would think a 1920s urban campaign might have issues among white ethnies - Polish, Italian, Jewish, Irish - but actual American racism is and was largely a black/non-black thing, apart from anti east-Asian racism on the west coast at times, and so I wouldn't expect it to come up much outside the South.

(I wouldn't be surprised though if the extent of anti-black racism was downplayed in situations where it would logically come up. I think there is a tendency to conflate 'prejudice', historically near universal, with US anti-black racism, which is a distinct, much stronger phenomenon with relatively few global parallels)

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;1086421Fuck 'em with a jalapeño.

Southwestern porn gets pretty weird then, eh?

Quote from: S'mon;1086426Well I only have 2e CoC. It has the Secret of Castranegro set I think in New Mexico, and the Mystery of Loch Feinn in the highlands of Scotland. Otherwise all the adventures are in New England.

It's hard to tell in the wider CoC gaming community, since individual experiences differ. Still, that is my experience. From later publications, my impression of CoC adventure books is that maybe a quarter or less are set in New England. i.e. More than any other single part of the world, but less than the majority of adventures. A number of longer adventures jump around the world - to New York, London, Cairo, Antarctica, etc.

Quote from: S'mon;1086426Since the wave of black migration from the South to the Northern cities occurred after WW2, I would think a 1920s urban campaign might have issues among white ethnies - Polish, Italian, Jewish, Irish - but actual American racism is and was largely a black/non-black thing, apart from anti east-Asian racism on the west coast at times, and so I wouldn't expect it to come up much outside the South.

(I wouldn't be surprised though if the extent of anti-black racism was downplayed in situations where it would logically come up. I think there is a tendency to conflate 'prejudice', historically near universal, with US anti-black racism, which is a distinct, much stronger phenomenon with relatively few global parallels)

It's true that anti-black racism is different and stronger than other ethnic/racial prejudice in the U.S. - but I don't agree that non black/white prejudice was negligible in 1920s America. In my experience, both anti-black racism and other racial/ethnic prejudice is broadly downplayed in historical Call of Cthulhu. For example, if there are signs that an NPC is Jewish in an adventure, then players and GMs will tend to ignore it as an irrelevant bit of color - and they'd be shocked if a character was role-played expressing any anti-Semitism -- but anti-Semitism was quite widespread in the 1920s, both in Europe and the U.S.

On the rare times when a character does express historical prejudice, they might get details about it wrong - but I feel that ignoring all prejudice and having ahistorical egalitarianism is even more wrong.

Greetings!

Yes, throughout our history, virtually everyone was hated by the English and French elite here in America. Irish, Scots, Welsh, Italians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Blacks, Indians, Asians. All were considered scum, and essentially animals. Yes, even the Germans and Nordic peoples, too. In some areas they were accepted and embraced by the English and French elite, while in other areas they were scorned. Plenty of hate to go around. Kicking, beating, crushing people. Treat them all like sub-human animals. It was rough in this country for many people, all along the years. Gradually, group by group, race by race, were embraced as acceptable.

If you're playing in COC in the 1920's America, do you want the game to be about surviving monsters, or dealing with a harsh, rough society that doesn't give a fuck about a lot of people that are diffrent looking from them? And it isn't just race, or colour that many Americans didn't like, either. Wierd fucking cultures weren't much tolerated either. If authorities didn't like your wierd sounding foreign name, you changed it. Or they changed it. Or you got beaten, and not hired to push a fucking broom. Why? Because Americans don't like twisting their tongues to try and pronounce some wierd fucking foreign names. I guess, you know? That's the way it was back then. Not just culture and languages, though, either, but also religion. Ben Franklin said "Thank God we do not have any Muhammedans here in our land like they plague the coasts of Africa." Paraphrasing. Fuck, back in the Colonial days, various Pilgrims and Christians didn't like Dutch anglicans, or quakers, or whoever. Catholics, etc were not just "not hired for work", but beaten, jailed, ridiculed, oppressed, and driven out of towns and villages alike. If I recall, some of that was what went into the forming of Pennsylvania, because various Germans and Dutch were considered freaks then, and rejected. So they all traveled to Pennsylvania, and set up shop there.

Mormons in Missouri, Kansas, and throughout the west and south were beaten, oppressed, and even killed in riots. Eventually, they were crushed and driven to live in the wilderness of the Utah Territory.

So, lots of hatred and prejudice around for different races, colours, cultures, and religions. I would think though in a COC game you'd rather focus on monsters and such. Focusing on many other aspects of American society can shift the focus to many of those other aspects which can be significant, very difficult, and even fatal in many cases.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

The thing is CoC is not meant to be historical roleplaying, but basically playing HPL's stories. (Well, more August Derleth's, since he typically had far more proactive protagonists).  And while HPL was certainly racist, it really didn't come up much in his stories. He's not flattering about Poles or Italians in Dreams in the Witch House. He's rather gross in describing a black man in Herbert West Re-Animator. Despite marrying one, HPL's biggest prejudice was against Jews, and I can't think of one ever appearing in one of his stories.  Hell, women really didn't appear in his stories, despite him collaborating with a dozen or so women in his lifetime.

But there's nothing where race was central to the plot, like say in Robert Howard's Black Canaan.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;1086421Fuck 'em with a jalapeño.

And cornhole them with habaneros!

Hope everybody had a fun Cinko De Drinko yesterday!!

Quote from: JeremyR;1086490The thing is CoC is not meant to be historical roleplaying, but basically playing HPL's stories. (Well, more August Derleth's, since he typically had far more proactive protagonists).  And while HPL was certainly racist, it really didn't come up much in his stories. He's not flattering about Poles or Italians in Dreams in the Witch House. He's rather gross in describing a black man in Herbert West Re-Animator. Despite marrying one, HPL's biggest prejudice was against Jews, and I can't think of one ever appearing in one of his stories.  Hell, women really didn't appear in his stories, despite him collaborating with a dozen or so women in his lifetime.

So... you think that CoC games are meant to be playing HPL's stories. And since women didn't appear in HPL's stories, does that imply they shouldn't appear in CoC games?

That seems very limiting. I feel like the point of role-playing is to move past just what an author wrote, and create stuff that is distinctly new. I'm actually more of an HPL purist than most of the CoC gamers that I know -- but even so, I still feel like my favorite scenarios are pulling in a lot of material that he didn't use - historical places, events, phenomena - or inspirations from other fiction or mythology. Particular if the historical features are things like women. Plenty of my CoC games have included them.

Mostly I just want to keep to some vague spirit of HPL, like having more internal horror than pulp shoot-outs. However, I've enjoyed and included in my own games a ton of material that wouldn't have appeared in HPL stories.

Quote from: jhkim;1086450For example, if there are signs that an NPC is Jewish in an adventure, then players and GMs will tend to ignore it as an irrelevant bit of color - and they'd be shocked if a character was role-played expressing any anti-Semitism -- but anti-Semitism was quite widespread in the 1920s, both in Europe and the U.S.

Again I think it'd be easy to get this sort of prejudice completely wrong (eg following the modern 'Nazifying the Confederacy' trope & treating Southerners as anti-Semitic and northern white ethnics as pro-Jewish, when reality was much more the reverse), and it's not something that would come up much unless your Jewish PC is trying to marry the daughter of a Boston Brahmin.

Whereas obviously if you are playing a black PC in 1920s Mississippi it is very much going to come up, because that is a situation where you are going to encounter actual racism. Not prejudice, racism. Not 'Jews in Nazi Germany' level of racism, but it is going to severely impact your PC.