Quote from: oggsmash on May 02, 2024, 11:38:20 AMIf you look at their iconic figure "Red", her wardrobe is drastically different in covers or anywhere she appears in the books now.  Her face even looks different, as I said they nerfed her all around.

Sure. I'm game. Let's put this to the test and see where we land! BRB!

Quote from: tenbones on May 02, 2024, 11:10:24 AMI honestly don't know if they "caved" on the art. While it would be concern if they did (and said so - if they did let us know), it's not a dealbreaker for me since I've found the *vast* majority of their art forgettable in the first place. There are always exceptions to the general rule, but this is just my experience with their books.

The old forums are long gone, so there's no thread to link to. But it went something like this:

1. SFC is announced and numerous people, including me, pre-order. The first look shows the cover where a female commander stands on the deck of her ship watching a battle. Her left hand is raised and her fist clenched. If you've got the previous SFC, you know the scene.

2. A few people post on the forums bitching about the fact you can see her (fully-clothed) ass since the point of view is from behind. Others say it's fine and we don't see any issue. The whiners complain that such sexualized covers make  it embarrassing to carry Savage Worlds products out in public, and they specifically focus on the Companion books and compare them to pornography.

3. PEG caves. The SFC's release is pushed back so the cover can be "fixed"--now Red stands calmly with her hands clasped behind her over her backside, and her pants have been altered to look more loose and shapeless.

This is the only sign of the original cover I could find online: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com/2014/06/savage-worlds-science-fiction-companion.html. I believe the preview cover had a smaller logo or was zoomed out such that Red's body was in profile like in the released cover; you could see her from her head down to about her knees.

A very similar thing happened with the Savage Rifts Kickstarter a few years ago. One of the covers was a less-explicit homage to an original Rifts cover. A handful of people complained in the Kickstarter comments, and even though the majority of the people who commented thought the image was fine, PEG again sided with the woke complainers and had the image censored further to appease them.

Compare the old Fantasy companion to the new one.  Pretty stark difference.  Even on the cover of the SWADE book, her facial features are hardened a bit and almost masculinized to a degree compared with how she was usually depicted.  Now possibly there is a different artist...but the clothing has changed quite a bit.

Okay from the top - I've never *really* looked at the Savage Worlds art before strictly, unless something caught my eye that was very cool. For the most part my feelings have always been their art is middling and sufficient to "meh" with a few exceptions that would make me double-take.

So the whole "Red got Ugly" thing. Honestly, I never knew she was an "iconic" character until they mentioned her in SWADE and as someone that has a thing for redheads (I married one) you'd think I'd notice. When it comes to Red, and most of the images in SW, not really. But naturally, I *did* notice the character on the cover of the original Fantasy Companion - which as I understand it is Red. Let's ALL keep in mind, these are generic rule books, they're not for a specific setting, so many of these images are contextual (usually) to the respective sections/genre they're writing about.

and

Now... I went through the whole Deluxe edition of the Fantasy Companion. There is not a lot of female art in the book, and the ones that do exist, may/may not be Red, but none of them were "sexy" by my standards.



They're pretty basic "fantasy" art. MEH. So Lets take a look at the other Deluxe edition books.

This is the cover of the Sci-fi Companion.


Nothing really to write home about. That's pretty much *IT* from the Deluxe Editions. That's all we got for Red. If I'm mistaken, please let me know, I went through  the Deluxe and SWADE Core rules and Companions. Yes, there are semi-sexy pics in those books of a few women, but nothing racy. I'll provide pics. But when it comes to Red, to my knowledge this is the entirety of her appearances in the Deluxe books.

So we're clear - we're basing this on Red getting uglier from her proto-depictions before she was labeled "iconic" in the later SWADE editions from 14+ years ago.

Here is Red on the cover of the SWADE Fantasy Companion


Not sexy. But very fantasy. Let's move on.

This is Red as she is depicted in the Fantasy Companion.









Not sexy. But very fantasy. To the point that she is less attractive - sure. But there is an important point to be made. They're all drawn by the same artist (I think) or at least in the same style. Because in the book there *are* feminine pictures of women (if you find them sexy - okay, I don't).





The point being that other artists are drawing their women differently than the ones used for Red. Why? No idea. But Pinnacle doesn't seem to be making that distinction based on anything in particular other than the artist they use for Red draws her consistently like an adventurer - not a sexpot. So I think there is something to be said about that. Is it *caving in*? Let's dig a little deeper.

SWADE Core. Here is Red looking like a Laura Croft-type adventurer.


In the book she appears a few times, usually with her male partner.







Or running solo...





UGH. This one is egregious.

Savage Worlds Superheroes Companion SWADE edition cover


Interior Red pieces



But also inside are pics like these:









Are there unattractive female art? Yes. Are they meant to be unattractive - some of them for sure. Others? It's just not good art.

I think this is where I land on it. Did Red "become" more unattractive? Yes, but it was because of the artist. She is being consistently portrayed as an "adventurer" sort... But the point that she has been de-emphasized as feminine seems pretty apparent to me.

That said - if they were completely woke, this would be more consistent throughout the books and they simply aren't. There aren't that many pieces of art with Red in them and there are much more feminine pieces of other characters that otherwise "balance it out".

Ultimately, after going through these all, I find myself thinking their art is more mediocre than I thought. But while Red has several pieces I find atrocious, I feel it's more to do with the consistent use of a specific artist than any real design choice by Pinnacle.

I could be wrong, but I'd need someone at Pinnacle to come say it. Maybe that's happened?

Quote from: Brand55 on May 02, 2024, 12:45:37 PM3. PEG caves. The SFC's release is pushed back so the cover can be "fixed"--now Red stands calmly with her hands clasped behind her over her backside, and her pants have been altered to look more loose and shapeless.

This is the only sign of the original cover I could find online: http://realmsofchirak.blogspot.com/2014/06/savage-worlds-science-fiction-companion.html. I believe the preview cover had a smaller logo or was zoomed out such that Red's body was in profile like in the released cover; you could see her from her head down to about her knees.

LOL wow. You're right. Well it's not enough for me to ditch SWADE over. But yeah that sucks. I don't think either cover is particularly good. But they should not have given in on principle.

Quote from: tenbones on May 02, 2024, 11:01:18 AMIf people wanna be reactionary and presume the worst - then thats up to them but it's putting a different set of interests in front of the hobby itself. I'm not even saying it's not currently not justified, but I want to give credit to everyone that we have reasonable bullshit-detectors. At some point we're here for gaming. I'm not looking to fight where there is no fight to be had.

I wish everyone here would read and understand these lines.

I am not arguing they went to the woke insanity.  I am just saying they nerfed Red.  No argument about having very mediocre art for a good while now.  I thought the old art was a bit more pulpish (though also mediocre) and liked it a bit more.  I like their stuff and buy it still.   The nerf is still a thing though.

Quote from: tenbones on May 02, 2024, 11:01:18 AM

Quote from: GhostNinja on May 01, 2024, 11:28:02 AM

Quote from: tenbones on May 01, 2024, 10:46:15 AMWe do not have the final product yet.

Savage Worlds has generally been pretty good about Woke shit. Their only real hubub was Deadlands Confederacy retcon which caused people that don't really play Deadlands to freak out.

I think it was a stupid move to try to appease the people who don't even play the game.  Doesn't matter to me.  Because of it I just won't play Deadlands.

But that's just it - I take Shane at his word. The "retcon" didn't happen to appease anyone other than it made in-canon sense once they started tying Weird Wars to Deadlands.

I mean, the whole premise of the Confederacy in the original Deadlands was that they won Gettysburg because their dead rose from the ground and turned the tide of the battle for them.

The problem is the optics of people (including me) that engage in culture-war discussions assuming bad intentions from everyone. I know I took a long look at the situation, as someone heavily invested in Savage Worlds, because I *do* vote with my dollar. Just like I still own most of the full runs of Basic through 3e D&D, and World of Darkness through New World of Darkness which rest on my shelves - once the Woke Virus hit, I don't give those companies any of my money. I'm prepared to do that with Pinnacle too should the time come.

But at the same time - I'm willing to give people the benefit of the doubt with some basic logic. I'm perfectly fine with Shane's explanation (as well as the other Deadland's writers) who walked into this situation without taking a single step. The Situation(tm) came to them while they were in the process of doing a full redesign of their entire line of products. Not the other way around.

If people wanna be reactionary and presume the worst - then thats up to them but it's putting a different set of interests in front of the hobby itself. I'm not even saying it's not currently justified, but I want to give credit to everyone that we have reasonable bullshit-detectors. At some point we're here for gaming. I'm not looking to fight where there is no fight to be had.

Well, I was gaming in Blacksburg when Shane was running Fun & Games (mid '90s) and, based on the limited interactions I had with him back then, I'm not as inclined to take this explanation at face value.  In fact, I would say that the inclusion of the Confederacy in Deadlands originally had a tone of... defiance?  Now, I never knew him well, so I don't feel qualified to make declarative statements or speculate as to motivations, but considering how strongly he was attached to the idea back then, his setting changes stink of finger moistening and testing the wind direction more than some kind of planned narrative culmination.  I can't really blame him much, because no one wants to see everything they've worked for torn down because the world has gone cancel culture.  But, frankly, not everyone has the courage to stand up to the mob.  So his rationale for the setting change is... questionable (nah, actually, it's just bullshit).  Doesn't really change anything, but I'd have respected it more if he had been honest about it...

Don't know him. Don't pretend to. But while it's definitely intriguing, nothing on this remotely rises to my notions of bad-intentions towards *anything* I care about in terms of my purchases.

I take your opinion for what it is. If I believed Shane was an idealogue - he sure as hell could do more. Protect his brand? Sure, I'm willing to believe that and fully understand it. Woke? No. At least not yet. YMMV of course.

Quote from: oggsmash on May 02, 2024, 03:26:16 PMI am not arguing they went to the woke insanity.  I am just saying they nerfed Red.

It definitely seems that way based on the art.

But the artist from the original books had an entirely different style. But it does seem a definite de-emphasis on her femininity.

On Deadlands, I'm skeptical. PEG is a small company. Their ability to weather the storm is limited. It was a "bend, don't break" situation. To the degree that they did cave to the woke mob, they retconned the setting with pulp time travel fuckery that the setting already had a precedent for with Stone. The result is that the Cold Civil War and the Great Rail War are both over, and the Reckoners are weaker as a result. Shane didn't disrespect his fans or his setting. I'm sure the woke cancel mobs weren't the only reason for the change, the claim that they made the change to harmonize product lines is true, but it's not the whole truth. Yes, they did make the change because of cancel culture pressure. It was definitely a factor.

As for the art, and specifically nerfing Red, I think I remember seeing a picture of Shane's wife on the PEG website, and her hair looking a bit reddish. The other two longest-running PEG employees are another husband-wife team. I'm inclined to think the art wasn't woke pressure, it was wife pressure.

It brings up an interesting question - are any of you boycotting Savage Worlds over this? Not judging, just curious.

Frankly, I'm late to the Deadlands thing, I came into it during the Deluxe edition, and it was my introduction to the Savage Worlds system. While I didn't hang around in Deadlands long, the system struck me more than the setting. But what I noticed immediately of course was that even in the proto-Woke era of 2010 (or whenever it was around then when I first played) that the fact the Confederacy was a thing, was very interesting to me. Not a lot of RPG's out there used the Confederacy as a vehicle for gaming. I've read Shane is a history-buff with educational degrees in it,  his narrative for the Confederacy hanging on in game as long as it did was "okay whatever" to me.  I questioned a lot of those narratives internally because I'm a world-building "details guy" and I felt (and still do) that the settings for most of the Savage Worlds games are "loosey-goosey" intentionally to justify the elements within it.

This brings me the entire notion of why I thought the Confederacy element was interesting - I certainly wouldn't have ignored it, but I'd have leaned into it harder. In hindsight, my version would probably have been much darker as I tend to be a little misanthropic in my views of people (but not always) in gaming narrative, because it makes for good gaming conflict.

I don't get that vibe from Shane's writing. Mind you, I'm not projecting motives, I'm just speculating on what I think I know. Never met the guy, only watched some interviews and videos of his. Seems like a nice family man. Which is another element to all this. Pinnacle games are at worst PG-13 in tone despite all the supernatural stuff, they don't get into detail. Which is kind of the point - it gives you as a GM the ability to tone up/down the volume on the elements you want to emphasize. Personally I like that.

I rely more on third-party content to give me more detailed settings - Beasts and Barbarians for instance is a pretty epic knockoff of Hyborea in the best way.

It always felt like the Confederacy in Deadlands was a very (then at the time) PG-13 narrative that kept things interesting for the setting without getting bogged down in details. I mean c'mon they summed up the entirety of the Civil War in a page and-a-half. They reframed the entirety of the Confederacy in 5-paragraphs for the new conceits of Deadlands. This isn't *supposed* to be historically accurate. It's supposed to be a justification so we can play with it without needing a degree in 19th Century American History.

It's tongue-in-cheek-history to match a tongue-in-cheek setting. But it leaves you wide open to dial it up as you see fit. They *do* nod at societal norms and give justifications on how they're different in Deadlands. I disagree with all of them in terms of realism - but I do that with 99% of all RPG's as written - D&D wouldn't remotely look as its presented if all its elements were true either.

The real issue of course is slavery. And Pinnacle did their disclaimer on how to handle it - it's not for *emotionally mature gamers*. It's for those that are historically ignorant and/or less emotionally developed that get reactionary to the idea of slavery because they're conditioned to. Pinnacles disclaimer/explanation isn't a bad one, narratively it works, I think like much of the "history" in Deadlands, it serves to justify the setting.

Much like in Crimson Skies, the justification of having widespread zeppelin and air-piracy as the primary theme of the game required balkanizing America into multiple nations to impede interstate commerce by road. Who cares about the details! It's time to dogfight in the skies above New York City, in blimps and P51's!

Same is true of Deadlands.

That the woke mob would *immediately* attack Pinnacle for the simple fact they pushed a narrative that allowed the Confederacy to exist in the game is a foregone conclusion. I don't sweat Pinnacle one bit for how they handled it. They're a family operation that makes tabletop games with a small dedicated following, not a gigantic corporation hellbent on converting you to their Marxist ideology.

Is it a bad look they made changes to assuage the mob? Yeah. Could it have been worse? Most definitely. But did they sell out to them? No. They tossed a piece of meat on the ground to let the jackals eat, and they kept moving. Nothing about their games or settings are political in that manner. Do any of you really feel that way about them? I'm genuinely curious.

Edit: I should also add, I don't care what people's political or religious beliefs are at my table - just don't be an asshole. But I'm also not interested in purchasing propaganda masquerading as something else. Which is the dividing line for me. Playing a game is *not* the same as having a discussion about politics, which is not the same as me passing judgement on your value as a person. But like all things where I make discernment - bad ideas lowers your stock in my marketplace, and you're free to double-down and drop that price just like you're free to let them go and raise that value.

I am not.  I casually noticed the thing with red a few years ago while looking at older books and had no idea if it was driven through taste or pressure.  This day and age I do assume pressure.  I think SW and pinnacle is about as good as I am going to get from the industry as a whole regarding their positions on social insanity.   They could lose me...but it generally takes some overt and hostile comments directly for that to happen (games workshop...) so I am still in. I like their stuff.

Quote from: tenbones on May 03, 2024, 10:45:35 AMIt brings up an interesting question - are any of you boycotting Savage Worlds over this? Not judging, just curious.

No. It irked me at the time, but I've quashed it. As you say, PEG is a small family-run gaming studio trying to stay in business not a big megacorp trying to push a Marxist agenda. They got bullied by the woke mob and did what they felt that had to do at the time.

As I outlined in my previous post, the story change they made was faithful to the Deadlands world. Marty went back in time by accident and while he's trying to get back home, he has to help his dad get together with his mom. When he returns to 1985, Biff Tannen is a totally different guy because of stuff that happened due to Marty's presence. That kind of plot is definitely "in-theme" for Deadlands. They've had goofy time travel plots before with two Stones, and I think they did it with Hellstromme, too. Also, Doc Brown is a valid Deadlands character. I'm willing to die on that hill.

I think at the time, Shane was trying to do an alternate Earth thing. Other games had similar things going on. Rifts had a weird political rearrangement of North America. Shadowrun had the Great Ghost Dance, and now you've got UCAS, CalFree, and Denver with some Amerindian territory somewhere in all of that, because the magic came back and they reclaimed their land from the White Man. Shane's idea for Deadlands is not too different from Shadowrun, except it happens at Gettysburg rather than the end of the Mayan calendar. The Confederacy surviving was his answer to, "Well how would this play out if zombies suddenly appeared at Gettysburg?" It wasn't a Confederate victory, rather the Union and the Confederacy had to join together to fight the zombies. Then there's a Cold War after that because both governments were more concerned with keeping a lid on the whole zombies thing to prevent a panic.

As time goes by, that gets cumbersome. Hell on Earth is hard, because what actually happens during WW1 and WW2 if the Confederacy is still around? How do those wars play out if the USA isn't unified to come across the Atlantic and throw down? What if the Union and the Confederacy are on opposite sides? There start to be way too many variables. Hell on Earth waves that away by being so far in the future from those wars that it doesn't really matter and you can just make shit up. But when you read Hell on Earth, you have that at the back of your mind. "Is this really what would have happened?" It kinda nags you.

It's believable that Shane really did sit down and work on Weird Wars and think to himself, "This should be in the Deadlands timeline. This fits and should be part of Deadlands." Then the next thing he thought was, "I can't actually figure this out. I have to rewrite the Deadlands timeline to wrap up the Civil War." That's a perfectly plausible scenario.

Then there's the social aspect. 150 years later, the Confederacy is a pretty uncomfortable thing for your typical normie American. I don't want to condemn my fellow Americans who weren't around back then and weren't responsible for what happened, and just happened to have been born south of the Mason-Dixon. There were more things going on than just slavery, but it was a big deal, it had been a big deal for decades leading up to that, it was at the heart and center of that war, so yes, hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers absolutely gave their lives to end slavery. If you look at the stuff Shane has worked on, it's not hard to figure out what this guy thinks of America. He's done western stuff, he's done colonial era Revolutionary War stuff, he's done Civil War era stuff, he's done WW era stuff. I think it's pretty clear this guy thinks the Good Guys won the war in the real timeline, and the Confederacy surviving in Deadlands was never anything more than, "What if Gettysburg got interrupted by zombies?" Meanwhile, the entire game takes place west of the Mississippi where slavery pretty much didn't exist. The Confederacy is still around, but the game isn't about that, the game is about being cowboys out west and having weird monsters show up. Really, the only thing the Confederacy is for in Deadlands is to drive a long-term war which sows fear and chaos and strengthens the Reckoners. Within the Deadlands setting, it is an objectively Bad Thing that the Confederacy is still around, because one of the Reckoners is War. In the new timeline, the Union wins, and that is a Good Thing because War has lost a source of strength. Also, the Civil War is no longer causing Famine, Pestilence, and Death.

Basically, after 25 years of posses playing his game and fighting against his bad guys, Shane appeases the woke mob by rewriting the setting so that all those heroes have dealt a major blow to the Reckoners. I can live with that. Yes, he caved to pressure, but he respected his fans.

Not sure you could call it boycotting as I don't buy the new SW material for a variety of reasons. Deluxe is probably my go-to system these days, and I find SWADE to be annoying. It's a lot easier for me to house rule Deluxe into what I want it to be rather than try to fix SWADE. That's the biggest reason. But the art changes and Deadlands retcons just reinforce my decision that I don't need what PEG is selling these days.