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I intend to do a proper review of this book when I have time and energy, but I don't want to get side tracked into a long side-rant when I do, so I thought I'd get this issue off my chest, and open up a hopefully interesting conversation along the way.


Simply to get it out of the way, the creators of Eclipse Phase are quite obviously very much pro-social justice and 'allies' and all of the other issues of the progressive left. This is not meant as an aspersion upon their collective characters, but a simple statement of fact, of where their beliefs lie.  This is relevant to the topic at hand, as presumably they are deeply concerned with being 'allies' if they themselves do not identify as some species of 'queer', and this informs their worldbuilding.


There are three topics of sex that are raised in Eclipse Phase 2nd Edition, which were largely (and appropriately) glossed over in 1st Edition, and the writers of EP seem to have allowed their perceived status to have overcome their common sense in world building. These three topics are, approximately, Homosexuality, Transexuality and Interspecies Romance.  Note that I am forced to condense complex topics into simple subject headers, so please keep your outrage at my 'hate' confined to your pants until I've actually addressed these issues in the post.  Its only going to be a paragraph or two until I get there, you can wait.  As a bonus round I will also briefly gloss on the subject of childcare in the Transhuman Future.


To understand why these are issues, it is necessary to understand the explicit and implicit nature of the Eclipse Phase setting.  The core premise which EP is built around, and thus can define itself as distinct from any and all other Science Fiction RPGs and settings, is the fundamental idea that "you" is not a body but a mind, an 'ego' which can change bodies the way people of today change clothes.  Thus, any attempts to define a person by their origins or flesh is fundamentally doomed to failure. A coded computer program can run a biological body and call itself 'Bob', while the person who was in 'Bob's' body yesterday is now  a digital entity slaving away at processor stacks, probably mining cryptocurrency. 


This has drastic implications for the setting, for Humanity as a whole, and a great deal of the writing for Eclipse Phase involves inviting you to explore those implications.


Well, with a few exceptions.  Namely: You can explore them as long as you are willing to indulge in draging early 21st Century sexual politics into a setting that has fundamentally changed the scene, complete and unchanged.   Frankly I'm surprised BLM didn't get dragged into this new edition... perhaps it hit the presses a couple of months too early? 


When I want to talk about homosexuality in Eclipse Phase, what I really mean to talk about is the entire spectrum sexuality as we understand it.  In a way, this should be my second topic, but I think it is the most interesting so its first.  You see: while in one way Eclipse Phase 'solves' the entire "Problem" of homosexuality in society, what it actually does is make it far more complex and interesting, at least from the perspective of a writer wanting to explore the human condition.  Once upon a time you were relatively limited in what you could do: heterosexual romance, homosexual romance, cross sexual orientation attraction... that is a gay man attracted to a straight man (and how that influences their character dynamics), a straigtht man attracted to a gay woman (etc) and so on.  The first option is the default, and will always be the default simply due to demographics (that is: a majority gay population, favoring a majority gay romance in literature, will quickly spiral into demographic death), and the second is currently the most popular in our modern culture. Both are relatively simple and mined out, you are not saying or doing anything interesting by exploring either. The third option I mention used to be fairly popular, and because it offers complex dynamics could be interesting even in a side character (I'm thinking of Travolta's gay henchmen in the Punisher film, and how their relationship plays out in the film).  But there are only limited ways to play that out. Unrequited romance, tragic unrequited romance, or eventually a homosexual romance.


Enter Eclipse Phase and body swapping. A new variable appears, and the equation gets much more complex.  Allow me to set an example: A man working for firewall goes on a mission to Mars, where he is expected to shoot a bunch of Exhumans in the face. He naturally wants to get into a combat morph, and that means a Fury. He doesn't see himself as a woman, doesn't pick his morph because of the tits, he just wants a solid combat morph, and prefers biomorphs. So, for the duration of his trip to Mars, he is in a woman's body. While he is there he meets a woman who just hits all his buttons. She's hot, of course. All morphs default to hot unless otherwise specified, but there is a real connection.  This woman, as it turns out, is a woman. And she likes him back. As a woman, and plans to follow him back to, lets say Venus, where he normally lives. As a man.


Hopefully, just in the setup of this premise, you can see how this creates entirely new dynamics of sexual attraction and queerness. NEW dynamics, it eliminates the old dynamics entirely.   Unfortunately, I rather suspect that Posthuman studios caught some flak after first edition for 'erasing' the LGBTWTFBBQ issues in 1st Edition, because you sure as shit see a strong emphasis on modern queer identity based issues in the 2nd. No Erasure in this edition, my friend...


Which brings me to my second topic, Transexuality, or to put it a bit more broadly: Sexual Identity Politics. If the 'gay' issue was utterly transformed by the premise of Eclipse Phase, then the Trans issue was completely 'solved'.  See yourself born into the wrong body? Don't worry, mang, you ditched that one long ago for one that is more to your liking. Before the game even started!. I mean: If you are 'lucky' enough (per the setting's premises) to actually have a gendered body at all.     


This is where politics come to the fore, however. You can't just erase the entire Trans movement, and all the surrounding prenumbras of sexual identities just because your setting's core premise magically solves every single issue raised!  Not that EP set out to cure the Trans movement's ills, or this is something they added to the setting because of Sexual Identity Politics... this is the entire premise of the setting, this is the core, the foundation upon which it is built!   


But as I said, Posthuman Studios are very concerned with Social Justice Issues and with being good allies (they go so very far as to insist that their game should not be played by fascists or pro-fascist people.  Curiously, I am unaware of any actual fascists who are interested in RPGs. They are rather hard to find these days, but Posthuman Studios inability to define a fairly well understood political movement is a digression...  The point is that Posthuman Studios absolutely must display their Trans Ally Bonafides or risk being ejected from the club of good-thinkers, regardless of what their setting actually does.  Frankly the end result is fucking hilarious, and it raises far more questions about the setting than it could ever hope to answer. 


For example: While the number of example characters has vastly expanded, and said characters have expanded into fully developed characters rather than frameworks, what is more noteworthy is that now it is super important that we understand each character's biological sex, gender identity AND sexuality. I feel compelled to point out that the idea of neckbeards playing lesbian stripper ninjas is well over thirty years old at this point, Gamers REALLY don't need to be told that they can play whatever gender and sexuality they like, but I digress.  This insistance on providing these details for well over a dozen distinct individual characters means that some... interesting... examples are raised.  Just to prove their virtue, one of the examples was born Intersex, and is listed as Non-Binary.    To clarify the point:


Unless your parents were horrible, evil no-good bioconservatives (and probably fascists!), then you were born into a Splicer  Morph by default, which means that all of your genetics were 'cleaned' to ensure no unfortunate health problems arose. One would naturally assume that 'intersex', the condition of being born with both sets of genetalia (usually with one set being non-functional, or less than fully functional) would have been 'erased' from Splicers, and all 'up-scale' biomorphs even if it isn't seen as being an actual 'health issue'... and if not, why not?  But lets continue delving into this example character's issues, shall we?  Since this character is NOT in a Splicer Morph (because... ew! That's almost as low-rent as being a Flat! (where being intersex would be understandable).    No, they are in a Sylph Morph. So, does this mean that Morph Designers are creating a significant numbers of Intersex models for the tiny handful of naturally intersex individuals and the even smaller amount (presumably) of Intersex afficionados?  I can't speak for everyone, but my explorations of the Interwebz has taught me that far more people would be interested in functional Hermaphrodites and Futas than in the semi-nonfunctional, but all too real, Intersex.  Weirdly, however, Eclipse Phase doesn't have any morphs that I can recall that are Herms, but somehow this individual can always find an Intersex Morph whenever they resleeve. Curious.


That would be one weird character with some questionable design choices, but it goes on. THe very next character has 'Gender:Female" and 'Sex: Male" listed without a single bit of commentary as to why someone who identifies as female apparently consistently chooses male morphs. I'm not saying its not possible, or even likely, but now that you've raised the issue, you kinda need to tell me why, Posthuman Studios.  This is a very interesting facet to this charater that needs to be given at least some explanation, right?  I mean, if you showed me a D&D Elf who preferred living among Orcs, I'd expect some commentary about why.... or is the answer 'This is nonsense we had to include to appease our fellow travellers and we really don't know why someone would do that in our setting other than to prove a point of 21st century queer politics...'?


Moving on: We have the character with Gender Neuter and Sex:-, which would be fine if they were an AGI, but apparently they were born and raised a person who then decided to live an utterly asexual life as a spider robot. Again: Not saying it can't happen, but isn't the entire point of the modern Gender Politics movement that biological sex is innate, but Gender is a choice? Who were they before they were a spider robot? Small potatoes, lets move on... I'll speed it up: THe next character is also a sexless robot, but this one has a male gender. M'kay...  a few more pages we have an AGI (computer person) slotted into a genderless Synth robot shell who has the Gender of Female, but no Sex...


But I missed one: I missed the character with an 'undefined' gender, a female sex and an apparently (based on Pronouns... for all I know it could be a Riley Denis and 'her' 'lesbian' girlfriend who really enjoyed Riley's dick on the regular. I'm old fashioned, but to me that means Riley is a man, his girlfriend is straight, and everything they say about sex is needlessly complex and probably wrong...). What does Undefined MEAN? That's female looking art and a female 'sex', so what exactly is 'undefined' in this context? Now I don't even know what you mean by Gender OR Sex in these examples!  So Confuse.


I am not, but I thought it would be fun to say.  What I actually mean is that clearly Posthuman Studios threw all of this in the second edition because in the decade or so since the publication of the first edition the Progressive Stack altered RADICALLY and the culture war went hotter than ever, which meant that new, hotter takes were necessary, even if it merely winds up exposing how made up most of this all is, how much of it was crammed into a setting which cannot support it meaningfully, just to make a public declaration of allegiance.


I haven't even got to the best example yet:  In a later chapter on sexuality in the Transhuman Future (A waste of three pages, in all fairness, regardless of your setting...), there is a 'in character' sidebar of some size written from the perspective of a Trans Activist in the setting, pointing out that Trans is still a thing, etc. It is extremely abrasive and in your face and ends with a parting shot about being off to a Drag Show, and the entire thing is so, unbelievably bad... bad optics, bad representation, bad...everything (also: There is a difference between Transwoman and Drag Queen. Yes, yes... plenty of cross over, but they ARE Different Areas of Interest despite the similarities) that I can only think that one of the writers must have been as offended by including it as I was at reading it... it reads like a Poe, or like the writer was TRYING to make the Transhuman Trans Activist look as bad as possible as a passive aggressive shot at whomever insisted he write it. If so: I tip my hat to you, good sir or madam or xim...


But I've gone a bit too long, so lets get to the third point while we are fresh on the topic of the chapter on sexuality.


So, Posthuman Studios really, really wants to make a thing out of sexless robot Case Morphs having romantic dinners with their uplifted Octopus mate, and infomorp AGI sex workers masturbating based on which filing system they use to archive conversations. It is all very, very sad. 


But it fits all too well with one of the less well understood facets of the Progressive worldview, which is that whole Pansexuality thing (you know: Lando Calrissian banging his Droid Co-Pilot...). I'm not suggesting all progressives, or all left leaning individuals go for this, but it is a part of their movement, and Posthuman Studios, with a setting ripe for exploring that sort of weirdness, had to go there.  A huge part of what makes this assumption work is the idea that sexual attraction is all in the mind, biology need not apply. This is an evolution of the post-modernist idea that attractiveness is a social construct, that standards of beauty vary wildly from culture to culture. I certainly agree that different cultures can value different things in 'beauty', but that these tend to be variations within a surprisingly tight tolerance... that biology creates attractiveness, from there a culture layers on additional factors, sometimes to surprising degrees, but never too far out from that biological baseline.


However: Posthuman Studios also thinks that 21st Century Mental Disorders are merely lifestyle choices in the Transhuman future, and thus we are forced to assume they think paraphilias (people who want to fuck cars, or mannikens, or brick walls) are, in fact, on to something rather than people with an actual, if mostly harmless, insanity.  If you start from the premise that car-fucking is perfectly natural and normal, than I suppose assuming that a genderless robot body (with out genitalia or a hormonal system) having a functional erotic relationship with an octopus (a species with absolutely no attraction vectors in common with humanity... I assume. Bold choice, I know.), is similarly natural.


Note that I don't dispute that it is possible. People fuck cars, after all. If you have sentient cars, it is only a matter of time before you find one that is into people rubbing their ugly bits on it.  I do dispute that it is natural, or common, or that it needs to be pimped by the writers as something that should feature heavily in their Eclipse Phase Games about fighting Post Singularity AI-Gods turned Cthulu by body-hopping and shooting things in the face.  I further would argue that someone in a Case Morph (genderless cheap robot bodies) who is sexually attracted to uplifted octopoids is far more likely to succeed at the romance of their dreams by actually getting an octopoidal body of their own.  And if they are in it for the Hentai? Why a sexless robot body?


Why am I asking all of these weird questions? Because Posthuman Studios clearly didn't. And since they wanted to write about it, they sort of needed to.   No one was satisfied by the Lando question being answered with 'It just works', and that was a movie, a 90minute time filler. You are a three hundred page book meant to be explored by groups of, say, four people at time for four or more hours at a shot, week after week. 'it just works' is a cop out. 


Oh, do you care about my opinion on software masterbation via filing systems?  Its three shades of stupid, but lets save time by leaving it at that, shall we?


Part one

Continued:


Now really this is sort of off topic, but it isn't unrelated. One of the many, many setting issues in Eclipse Phase 1ed was how they handled the topic of children. Mostly I'm against children in games with a fair share of caveats. One of which is that a functional setting should acount for the existance and rearing of children in a way that makes sense. Focusing on it is sketchy and misguided, but... look, knowing that Dwarves have family units and homes, and that young dwarves grow up to be apprentice miners or what have you is probably all you need. If your game clearly focuses on your players interacting constantly with those children I may call Chris Hansen on you, that's all I'm saying. Eclipse Phase made the opposite mistake, they more or less eliminated children from their setting entirely.  Rather unnaturally, ten years after a horrible apocalypse which wiped out ninety percent of humanity the ONLY people interested in repopulation (other than those icky, evil no good bioconservative fascists out by Jupiter) were mad scientists interested in fast growing children in VR or something, because who wants to actually raise little humans, amirite?  And it went predictably bad.And Eclipse Phase seems to have caught a bunch of fire from critics for ignoring that in a setting with communities of millions of people, at least some of those people are going to WANT to have families... so how does that work when everyone is a body hopping pan-sexual slut?  So EP2 answers that question, and good on them for trying.  We do get some practical answers to how different morphs (bio-morphs only, for once. Pan-sexual procreation seems to be a piety too far) go about resolving their engineered DNA for compatibility that sound eminantly practical (defaults to Splicers I believe, probably involves doctors/genetic technicians doing the actual blending. You can use your natural DNA, if you have it somewhere and other things that would actually matter to people trying to create little humans to fill their emotionally dead lives of hedonism and Cthulu killing...) Where EP2 goes wrong is that they assume (and this isn't a review, so I'm not fact checking... I may be mis-interpreting a minor bit I read in passing) that families are putting the little tykes into a biomorph that is permanently child sized, then upgrading every few years into a new permanently child sized, but age appropriate, morph as they develop mentally. WTF?  Why would you even...  I... Look. Bodies grow. M'kay? Like, naturally, and neural development takes years... so either you are putting infants into bodies with inappropriately developed neural networks (brains, man.. brains), or you are...You are doing it wrong, Eclipse Phase.   'Baby's First Morph' can totally be a thing, but how about you just have people WAIT until the 'baby' is, I dunno, a teenager or something?  Why in the everliving fuck would you even go shopping for baby-bodies, aged 3-6 months?  Why would you open yourself up to hard questions of artificial (but possibly biological) brains and infant Egos, of aborted natural neural development and all of that? WHY? ???   I just...There is a snippet of the setting of a tranhuman 'nuclear' family where the two teenage boys are 45 and 41 respectively, trapped forever as teenagers in their presumably emotionally smothering parent's home.  I don't know if Post-Human studios meant for it to be creepy and depressing as fuck or not, but given the nature of the setting I'm going to default assume they did, so... kudos for being creepy I guess?  I mean: Given the ever expanding definition of childhood in our society, maybe its aspirational?  A ray of hope for NEETS everywhere?   I report, you decide. 


So, teh new forum software kills my Wallo'text. Sad.

I was sorely tempted to write a character background for a bioconservative neo-octopus who persists in pointing out that, y'know, if you've just burned your house to the ground it's going to be hard to convince some people that fire is awesome. So maybe, just maybe, the Jovians have a point about eschewing certain technologies in the short term.


That and EP (at least, the editions I've seen) never explains WHY the Jovian habitats have such problems... which leads me to wonder if certain radical autonomists are sabotaging the habitats. Which would most certainly piss off a number of factions and not just the Jovians (Firewall would certainly disapprove, since there are MUCH more serious targets).


But yeah. Body dysphoria should only be a long running issue if you're sleeved into a morph that you're having trouble adapting to, or if you're literally rock-on-ground poor and can't afford a morph swap.

Great thoughts! I laughed many times. It's a perfect example of politics ruining games. EP is a self-masturbatory creative endeavor designed to thrust (obviously) a bunch of fetishes into your eyeballs until you die. I really liked 1e for a small moment until I couldn't figure out what you do in the setting or why you would venture out of whatever hole you were hiding in. The system itself was overly complex for no appreciable gain. I tried running it at a con with some other industry peeps and they did not enjoy it.

I'm enjoying The Void thus far, although it is a mess of poor editing, poorly thought out ideas, and gloss-overs. However, it's easy to hack, so easy to fix. However, The Void has a great setup. You know what you're doing (playing Wardens) and you know why you're doing it (the Solar System is likely coming to an end with the approaching Chthonian Star...). Also, I just included some laws against cloning, uplifts, sleeves, and genetic engineering. Viola! No more worrying about three character sheets and constant refiguring. :-D

And shouldn't have they dropped the "sleeve" thing? Since Richard K Morgan was cancelled, as the horrible transphobe he is, "sleeve" should have been considered a dirty word...

Man, I got the impression that Eclipse Phase was a game about adventures in a transhumanist setting.
This writeup makes it sound like an RPG about fucking robots.

Some thoughts.
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I think that EP1 got it right in that a sufficiently advanced culture would eventually totally solve these problems from multiple angles. And that this is a GOOD thing. A person could be WHATEVER and happy rather than how 2e practically lock-steps certain characters into what can only be misery as they are denied a "cure" by activists obsessed with making sure everyone else is as miserable and fucked up as they are. Joy.
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All to make a "statement". It comes across as more fascist than the supposed fascist they are "fighting" with these "bold" changes. mm-hmm.-As for why a supposedly straight woman would be wearing a male body. That one could be fairly simple like its just more practical for their line of work. Or for anonymity somehow, or for fun, etc. The rest? Some of it looks like they just rolled on a random table or threw darts at a board and the players and DM are supposed to interpret that however.
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Its an odd way of going at it for sure and whole chunks of the changes make no sense in the context of the setting. Whats next? 3rd ed and theres people demanding to be handicapped and refusing actual cures? Or parents stuffing their kids into limbless shells, because activism!
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The future is bleak.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on September 23, 2020, 08:40:00 PM
Man, I got the impression that Eclipse Phase was a game about adventures in a transhumanist setting.
This writeup makes it sound like an RPG about fucking robots.

It was till 2e and its gender obsession.
To be fair you can get through 2e and ignore the weirdness. But like the gay gnomes in 5e Essentials. It is still weirdly... there... But at least not meaninglessly so as in 5e D&D.

Honestly, the reason to point all this absurdity out is that I do think EP actually is improved in the second edition, mechanically as from folding in more of the setting development that came as the line matured after release. These are good things. As I noted in the children side of things, it does seem that they took many of the criticisms to heart.  I'm not a huge fan of pool mechanics, but as a means of handling the different capabilities of different Morphs, its an elegant solution to the problem 1e suffered regarding Character Sheets and resleeveing. It's not perfect, but its light years beyond 1e on the topic, and that is a very difficult row to hoe. 


The problem with the Bioconservatives is of course purely a matter of politics.  In the setting the Jovians are absolutely right, if not quite on every topic, but because religion would be certainly a strong starting point to be suspicious of body hopping (Philosophical questions of the ramifications of suicide and rebirth as a means of travel will, eventually, fall onto the sword of the Soul, after all), so they get a bunch of other 'evils' crammed on them because if you have wrong-think on one subject, you clearly are a truly evil monster about all things, so they are also creepy fascist authoritarians who practice mind control, or something.


The real 'wrap your head around it' change to the setting was to take the Ultimates Faction, playable in 1e, and turn them into a still present, still dominant, but non-playable faction in 2e, even going so far as to assign them the meme cultural value of being 'Pro-Fascist'.


Rootless mercenaries with a philosophical drive towards personal perfection with a ruthless meritocratic system and no state are somehow pro-fascism?  Fascism: the political philosophy best summed up with the motto coined by one of its intellectual fathers as "Everything For the State, Nothing Against"?     There is a wide gap to leap between those two points. Not necessarily unbridgeable, I suppose... like I said in the rant: if you have sentient cars, eventually you'll get one that wants a person to fuck it, but man..


Meanwhile the poor rivals to the Ultimates, Direct Action, get name checked every other chapter but other than they are mercenaries who use Reaper Morphs, not one detail is ever revealed.   Like... you could have just, I dunno, ignored the Ultimates if you disliked people wanting to play them that much, dude. Why reveal that you literally have no meaning to 'fascist' but 'stuff I don't like'?   Like... I don't think the Jovian Bioconservatives are called Fascists explicitly, despite the fact a credible argument could be made (from what little detail the actually give us.. god forbid you actually develop one of the factions of wrongthinkers we're supposed to hate so we can fight them or whatever...I guess that's giving them free press and borderline wrongthink!), that they ARE in fact Fascistic.

Quote from: MigRib on September 23, 2020, 06:04:42 PM
And shouldn't have they dropped the "sleeve" thing? Since Richard K Morgan was cancelled, as the horrible transphobe he is, "sleeve" should have been considered a dirty word...

Since I don't really follow the background trivia, I need ALL of the context for this. What?

Well, I am not completly sure about the origin of the term "sleeve", but I do think it was coined by the author of the Altered Carbon books (the trilogy has been mentioned as one of the inspirations, probably the main inspiration for the Eclipse Phase setting, so even if the term has another origin there's still a strong connection). Richard K Morgan has dared to defend the reality of biological sex - I think it was when the woke mob first tried to cancel JK Rowling - and has been since deplatformed from just about any social media. The story is in his blog:
https://www.richardkmorgan.com/2019/11/the-trouble-with-twitter/

Ah. Thanks for the update.  I suppose I've been meaning to get up to speed with Altered Carbon, since the show has garnered some... interesting... commentary.  I'll be honest, my respect for Rowling went up immensely in the last year or so. I mean: Low Bars and all that, but still.  I'd rather someone stood by their beliefs, even if I find them wrong, than they allowed the current fads to dictate them even if I agreed with the current fads.  Rowling had looked an awful lot like a trend follower, with her post-hoc gay Dumbledores and her 'Hermoine could be black even though I described her as white' retconning, but at least she has stuck to her guns on this issue.


What is so terribly tragic about this politicization of fiction is that none of this is new. Somewhere (not here, on my travel laptop of cheap disposability) I have a PDF of a essay written in 1946 or thereabouts from a Communist Party Member of all people, warning his brethren about how forcing art to be propaganda was ineffective because it was always going to be bad art (he was a writer, so the art in this case is writing). He was, of course, unpersoned immediately.


It sucked when my grandfather was a young man, it sucks now. The primary difference is now the people calling for this crap are the ones holding all the gate keys.

I also have no interest in JK Rowling as a writer. She may be good, I have no idea, I suppose the Harry Potter fandom appeared too late in my life to capture my attention. I watched the first movie and that was it. But she does keep on fighting the cancel mob, so that's something. As for Richard Morgan, I only knew him vaguely as the author of the AC books, but after I knew the Twitter mob had come for him I decided to read his books. I was tempted to try Eclipse Phase because of the Altered Carbon connection, but then... well, then I come upon a small portion of what you exposed on your post and I just gave it up. There's a lot of trans in the setting, but I thought it was supposed to be mostly transhumanism.

Bemusingly enough, TSR way back explored this some in their Amazing Stories anthology books. One that stands out after all this time still and spot on to Eclipse Phase's setting was a short story about a person who was raised from birth to hop bodies for various tasks by their parents. If recall right one was male, one was female, one was some sort of beast thing, and so on. And at the back of the closet was their original body. The character had some notable psychoses from having to live like this.
Think the term they coined in that one was "Hanger Queen" as those with the setup kept the other bodies in a sort of closet. Pretty sure it came up in one of their Amazing Engine settings as well. It was certainly a thing in d20modern Gamma World. With some people stuck now in whatever body they were in when civilization was crashed.
On a similar note theres DeathNet also for d20m which has thousands of people in VR trapped in the system and stuck in whatever avatar they were in at the time.

I largely ignore dumb ideas in settings, so... despite posting more than 20000 words (according to the forum software that made me cut my post in two) on the topic, I actually don't care much.  I use written settings as starting points, not ending points for setting up games. I'm more interested in what the rules let me do or don't do.


NONE of this sex talk actually impacts the rules. At their worst you have a tiny waste of space on your character sheet for useless details about gender and sex.   The setting is full of interesting elements, the gate exploration and the alien worlds generated, the conflicts on mars between nomad barsoomians and the more corporate and urbanized terraformers dropping cometary ice, the elements of post-singularity intelligences creating a sharp divide between transhumanity trapped on the wrong side of the Singularity, and the godlike beings and their motives on the other side...


All of that is interesting. Comments about climate change wrecking Earth... before Skynet techno-gods unleashed nano-swarms and headhunter droids to wreck it is a pointless bit of commentary and easily ignored.  Comments about the sex lives of secret agents in an apparently doomed effort to stop Cthulu from ending Humanity once and for all is easily ignored once the book is closed and the dice are picked up. To me, anyway.


So there is still a lot of Transhumanism left in the setting. This crap, this nonsense, is little more than a tasteless bumpersticker on the car (and we haven't even talked about the legacy silliness of the economic regression to a barter system being seen as the next step forward towards the socialist utopia of a purportedly post-scarcity setting that still insists on creating scarcity... which is ALSO easily ignored unless you treat the writers as canon gods...

Quote from: Spike on September 23, 2020, 04:01:48 PM
Simply to get it out of the way, the creators of Eclipse Phase are quite obviously very much pro-social justice and 'allies' and all of the other issues of the progressive left. This is not meant as an aspersion upon their collective characters, but a simple statement of fact, of where their beliefs lie.  This is relevant to the topic at hand, as presumably they are deeply concerned with being 'allies' if they themselves do not identify as some species of 'queer', and this informs their worldbuilding.

Don't support RPGs written by feminists.

I can't say the same, unfortunately. I am unable to ignore this sort of thing and use the setting without it. Probably because I would much rather use the settings as they are, or else create my own from scratch than to imvest time and work making adjustments. Lately that has become a problem, of course.

I bet the Albedo setting would make their heads explode then. A VERY regimented space faring civilization where mental screening is mandatory and medical screening is extensive. You arent going to get very far in the EDF if you cant pass the SPI exams, or much anywhere else important for that matter.
The ILR is so fucked up because aberrants disabled the protocols and took over.

Quote from: Omega on September 24, 2020, 05:22:38 AM
I bet the Albedo setting would make their heads explode then. A VERY regimented space faring civilization where mental screening is mandatory and medical screening is extensive. You arent going to get very far in the EDF if you cant pass the SPI exams, or much anywhere else important for that matter.
The ILR is so fucked up because aberrants disabled the protocols and took over.

Off-topic, but I just noticed Albedo on drivethru yesterday. Hard military scifi is a draw, furry element puts me off, but I think I will prob pick it up and see if I can just ignore the furriness. (Maybe I shd start another thread.)

In EP, sex is about one piece of software fucking another piece of software. Their point is to not to get caught up on what pieces of hardware those pieces of software are using when they interface.

I knew something was off with EP when all the major religions were on the decline except for Islam in the 1E version of their EP. So in a world where imo it is shown that not only is their no afterlife after a person dies, the same person can just awake in a new body. Yet somehow one of the more intolerant religions not only survives it thrives. No bias there or anything.


Too bad about 2E I might still take a look at the PDF as I bought it way before Spike post. It went from the top of the list to the bottom in terms of reading. I rather read non-errata SR6 before. If they put as much effort into including their politics as they do their releases well they would have more releases. Instead their next big product is USB Digital Archive of all their existing work for the small price of 125$. Already it took them forever to get 2E out their next product is an expensive rehash of their current material.


Another example of get woke go broke.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll on September 24, 2020, 02:00:53 AM
Don't support RPGs written by feminists.

An interesting idea, but not terribly practical, given the nature of gatekeeping and public discourse today.  Any author or creator with a belief system not based in modern progressivism (including feminism) is perforce going to keep their heads low, with rare exceptions.


You essentially are asking people to utterly absent themselves from modern pop culture, to... in effect... cede the high moral ground rather than participate in the public discussion. 


I, myself, take the rather Socratic view that the artists are not wise, in fact are mostly fools, but that the successful ones nevertheless manage to, if only accidentally, tap into a greater wisdom than they actually possess in their art.   As I've said before Eclipse Phase is very good at what it does, and in gaming terms occupies a unique space as even other transhuman themed games (Mindjammer comes to mind) don't attempt to pare the body of a character into a mere vehicle for their consciousness.   


Besides, how else can I mock their silly and ill formed opinions unless I read them?  I am constantly reminded that criticisms are invalid if you haven't endured the entire product, that I can't... for example... argue against anarchism unless I've read an entire bookshelf of the big anarchist thinkers.  Well, I've read Eclipse Phase, so I'm qualified to critique by their own rules.

Quote from: Marchand on September 24, 2020, 05:28:06 AM

Quote from: Omega on September 24, 2020, 05:22:38 AM
I bet the Albedo setting would make their heads explode then. A VERY regimented space faring civilization where mental screening is mandatory and medical screening is extensive. You arent going to get very far in the EDF if you cant pass the SPI exams, or much anywhere else important for that matter.
The ILR is so fucked up because aberrants disabled the protocols and took over.

Off-topic, but I just noticed Albedo on drivethru yesterday. Hard military scifi is a draw, furry element puts me off, but I think I will prob pick it up and see if I can just ignore the furriness. (Maybe I shd start another thread.)

If its the "platinum" edition then give it a hard pass.

I find our modern understanding of transhumanism in action is as accurate as 1900s understanding of space exploration.


People already struggle with identity and a sense of self. I see nothing but eugenics wars and complete sociatal collapse from something like eclipse phase.


What people fuck with is secondary.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 24, 2020, 03:00:26 PM
People already struggle with identity and a sense of self. I see nothing but eugenics wars and complete sociatal collapse from something like eclipse phase.


What people fuck with is secondary.

Respectfully disagree, with the corollary that your entire post is a refutation of the entire idea of speculative fiction.


People struggle with identity in modern society for a large number of reasons that, to be honest, aren't terribly hard to identify. Part of the issue is the relatively modern movement (150 years or so...) of attempting to build one's identity, one's sense of self, around who one fucks, and eventually adding in all sorts of deeply personal ideas about identity, such as forging an identity around a psychological diagnosis, or worse, a self diagnosis.


Simultaniously our society has slowly eroded every traditional marker of identity, often with cruel deliberation.  You are not allowed to identify with tribal groups, unless it is to claim a privileged status based on a loss of agency, of 'historical oppression'. You can't identify with a polity because Nationalism is bad and Globalism (eg: A lack of national identity) is good. You can't identify with your work, because efficiency experts have reduced us all to disposable, interchangeable cogs, and the average length of time at any given employment hovers around five years... and that is for the half of the population that works, as again, efficiency experts determine the best ways to reduce headcount to maximize short term destructive products. Men can't identify with their families, because that is patriarchal oppression, and even if they do no-fault divorce and an unacheivable idealized myth of romance, combined with legally enforced financial incentives means that they will probably lose their family within ten years... and if that was the source of your sense of self good luck not eating a bullet. Women can't identify with their families because that is seen as surrendering to patriarchal slavery, of betraying the feminist sisterhood and lacking 'ambition'...


In short the very modern problem of people struggling with identity has everything to do with current societal trends and very little to do with Transhumanism. Beyond that, Eclipse Phase actually does offer a speculative evolution, a solution to that problem, ironically because of the very progressive world view that leads them to making otherwise mock-worthy statements about sex... group identity formed around your political ideology, and very often your collective and the culture that grows... presumptively organically... from that ideology and collective becomes a real cornerstone to your Identity.  I think 1ed did this marginally better, but it remains a core feature of the game. It doesn't matter that you come from Mars, what matters is if you identify yourself as a Barsoomian, or a Hypercorp... or perhaps an Exhuman seeking to leave humanities failings behind. 


Honestly I think that is a pretty natural source of Identity for a lot of people, whether they know it or not.




Though I do want to comment on your rather incoherent idea that our current loss of Identity will somehow lead to eugenics wars.  One might very well argue that Eugenics Wars comes from too strong a sense of Identity, at least at the group level, and that a completely atomized society with no sense of personal, much less collective, identities can not organize itself well enough to conduct full scale wars, much less wars over demographics and generational improvement of their group. 

Quote from: Spike on September 24, 2020, 04:57:40 PMRespectfully disagree, with the corollary that your entire post is a refutation of the entire idea of speculative fiction.

Im not refuting I'm largely counter speculating.

QuoteIn short the very modern problem of people struggling with identity has everything to do with current societal trends and very little to do with Transhumanism.

I didn't say it was right now. I'm saying that in a situation LIKE eclipse phase society would largely implode on itself. How sense of identity is threatened by just social level changes. How catastrophic would be if it where genetic and technological changes to the human being.

QuoteThough I do want to comment on your rather incoherent idea that our current loss of Identity will somehow lead to eugenics wars.

No-I said that our lack of reading comprehension would lead to eugenics wars. Or I guess yours.
Or more accurately I said a scenario like in eclipse phase would lead to eugenic wars. Because if you can just decide what people can be on a genetic level its a race to decide what humans SHOULD be on a genetic level. If you can transfer & control thought then it becomes a race of what thoughts SHOULD be transferred and what thoughts you should be able to think at all.


What I mean is that the view of a mind as something you can just stimulate with a brain in a jar is largely pulp fiction. The brain and mind is just as much the product of the body it inhabits.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 24, 2020, 05:12:32 PM

Quote from: Spike on September 24, 2020, 04:57:40 PMRespectfully disagree, with the corollary that your entire post is a refutation of the entire idea of speculative fiction.

Im not refuting I'm largely counter speculating.

QuoteIn short the very modern problem of people struggling with identity has everything to do with current societal trends and very little to do with Transhumanism.

I didn't say it was right now. I'm saying that in a situation LIKE eclipse phase society would largely implode on itself. How sense of identity is threatened by just social level changes. How catastrophic would be if it where genetic and technological changes to the human being.

QuoteThough I do want to comment on your rather incoherent idea that our current loss of Identity will somehow lead to eugenics wars.

No-I said that our lack of reading comprehension would lead to eugenics wars. Or I guess yours.
Or more accurately I said a scenario like in eclipse phase would lead to eugenic wars. Because if you can just decide what people can be on a genetic level its a race to decide what humans SHOULD be on a genetic level. If you can transfer & control thought then it becomes a race of what thoughts SHOULD be transferred and what thoughts you should be able to think at all.


What I mean is that the view of a mind as something you can just stimulate with a brain in a jar is largely pulp fiction. The brain and mind is just as much the product of the body it inhabits.

There wouldn't be eugenics of the body you wear anymore than there are eugenics of what car you drive. Sure, those with the high-end fancy sleeves have better toys, but there's no "perfect" toy that everyone agrees is best. However, tinkering with the ego (i.e., the "software" of transhumans) can lead to something along the lines of eugenics--even if eugenics is technically the accurate term. Super-egos that eventually become the type of intelligences that almost destroyed transhumanity. I think that some ex-human faction is already going that way.

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 07:09:44 PMThere wouldn't be eugenics of the body you wear anymore than there are eugenics of what car you drive.

As I pointed out: The belief that the body you "Drive" is akin to a car is the equivalent to saying a rocketship is just a fancy bullet. We have millennia of wars over these "Cars" we drive, and that's before the cars and minds can be altered in a factory.

Quote[size=78%] Sure, those with the high-end fancy sleeves have better toys, but there's no "perfect" toy that everyone agrees is best.[/size]

Because its pulpy sci-fi and there aint nothing wrong with that. But I was discussing this on a more "realistic" level. Eclipse Phase is Gattaca taken to a horrific extreme and Gattaca was already oppressive.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 24, 2020, 07:36:12 PM
Because its pulpy sci-fi and there aint nothing wrong with that. But I was discussing this on a more "realistic" level. Eclipse Phase is Gattaca taken to a horrific extreme and Gattaca was already oppressive.

The setting has (artificially created/grown) space whales that "swim" through the sun's corona and space habitats made of meat. I can't really discuss EP on a more "realistic" level.

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 10:18:07 PMThe setting has (artificially created/grown) space whales that "swim" through the sun's corona and space habitats made of meat. I can't really discuss EP on a more "realistic" level.

Then its a shame sex took priority in such whackiness. Still if I want Space Wahales  (https://youtu.be/5uj0W6oBzd4)Il go for spelljammer.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on September 24, 2020, 10:36:37 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 10:18:07 PMThe setting has (artificially created/grown) space whales that "swim" through the sun's corona and space habitats made of meat. I can't really discuss EP on a more "realistic" level.

Then its a shame sex took priority in such whackiness. Still if I want Space Wahales  (https://youtu.be/5uj0W6oBzd4)Il go for spelljammer.

I've read the EP2 pdf. There's probably less words on sex in it than in the OP's first two posts.

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 10:44:01 PM
I've read the EP2 pdf. There's probably less words on sex in it than in the OP's first two posts.

Given that it is two posts only because teh Forum software screamed at me for going too long, I must concede that you are probably correct.


Mind you, its rarely the actual word count that is the issue, but the presentation and placement of those ideas and the correctness or incorrectness of those ideas.


An odd example might be a newspaper story that has a headline that reads 'Happydaze murdered fourteen', and followed by a twenty paragraph story that clarifies that what they actually mean is Happydaze totally owned fourteen posters in internet arguments.  Three words will have far more impact that twenty paragraphs in that case.


In Eclipse Phase we have nothing in the rules about assigning Gender or Sex, or what even EP actually intends to mean by these increasingly obfuscated words, but by smacking them all over the example characters and prominantly placing boxes for this information on the character sheet, Posthuman Studios gives the topic much more weight than even they seem to think it deserves.


And if you care about how its 'wrong', well... I delivered a very nice essay/rant on the topic to start the thread... ;D

I'm going to throw Eclipse Phase a bone here and say that because the setting indicated that bodies are pricey, I can see legitimate scenarios for transgenderism.  Specifically, person low on cash can only afford a "slightly-used" body, body is a different sex from what the person's born as, now they're stuck in it until they can afford to swap it out, bam, valid in-game situation for there to be a transgender character.
The thing is, that character should be viewing their situation much like a person today who bought a used car that turned out to be a lemon: An annoyance that will be rectified as soon as means allow.  They wouldn't have all of the identity baggage that comes along with 2020 transgender people, because the fix for their problem is obvious and straightforward by the standards of the setting.
My bigger beef with the setting is, like other people mentioned, the way it tries to portray the Jovians as being crazed in their dislike of technology after out of control technology went and murdered like 99% of humanity.  And their very valid fear that copying yourself into a new body isn't actually copying "you", but making a software duplicate of yourself who walks around and acts like you.

Quote from: Spike on September 24, 2020, 11:54:47 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 10:44:01 PM
I've read the EP2 pdf. There's probably less words on sex in it than in the OP's first two posts.

Given that it is two posts only because teh Forum software screamed at me for going too long, I must concede that you are probably correct.


Mind you, its rarely the actual word count that is the issue, but the presentation and placement of those ideas and the correctness or incorrectness of those ideas.


An odd example might be a newspaper story that has a headline that reads 'Happydaze murdered fourteen', and followed by a twenty paragraph story that clarifies that what they actually mean is Happydaze totally owned fourteen posters in internet arguments.  Three words will have far more impact that twenty paragraphs in that case.


In Eclipse Phase we have nothing in the rules about assigning Gender or Sex, or what even EP actually intends to mean by these increasingly obfuscated words, but by smacking them all over the example characters and prominantly placing boxes for this information on the character sheet, Posthuman Studios gives the topic much more weight than even they seem to think it deserves.


And if you care about how its 'wrong', well... I delivered a very nice essay/rant on the topic to start the thread... ;D

I think we need to coin a new logical fallacy about arbitrary limits of brevity. Philosophers and English teachers will be driven out of existence if we don't stop it.

Quote from: Spike on September 24, 2020, 11:54:47 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 24, 2020, 10:44:01 PM
I've read the EP2 pdf. There's probably less words on sex in it than in the OP's first two posts.

Given that it is two posts only because teh Forum software screamed at me for going too long, I must concede that you are probably correct.


Mind you, its rarely the actual word count that is the issue, but the presentation and placement of those ideas and the correctness or incorrectness of those ideas.


An odd example might be a newspaper story that has a headline that reads 'Happydaze murdered fourteen', and followed by a twenty paragraph story that clarifies that what they actually mean is Happydaze totally owned fourteen posters in internet arguments.  Three words will have far more impact that twenty paragraphs in that case.


In Eclipse Phase we have nothing in the rules about assigning Gender or Sex, or what even EP actually intends to mean by these increasingly obfuscated words, but by smacking them all over the example characters and prominantly placing boxes for this information on the character sheet, Posthuman Studios gives the topic much more weight than even they seem to think it deserves.


And if you care about how its 'wrong', well... I delivered a very nice essay/rant on the topic to start the thread... ;D

Beyond sex, consider the other issues that EP skirts around... (https://youtu.be/jhJDAI7XaAA)

If these are just brains in a robot body, how is their any sexual attraction at all? You're missing all your hormone bits.

The funny thing is, transhumanism is the ultimate refutation of identity politics.  If you can swap your race, sex, age, anything at all physical about you, the only things left to differentiate people are wealth and one's personal choices.  But identity politics have steered away from wealth, coincidentally ever since Occupy Wall Street, no connection there, and 'I was born this way' is an integral part of the IdPol creed but no longer valid in a world where your body at birth is fairly irrelevant.  But by golly they've still got to cram that into their game, even if it's the worst fit ever.

It supposed to be a universe where people swap bodies like shirts in a changing room. Yet somehow the person sleeved into the body of a nanite swarm self-identifies as a sock. It just goes against the setting immersion and basic tropes of the setting imo

I'm postgenderist, so I totally agree. The identity politics are nonsensical.


The irony is that the identity groups could still make sense as bioconservative cultures.


For example, here's an excerpt from the 1986 scifi novel Starhammer by Christopher Rowley:

QuoteThere are some fascinating cults. Like the Pansperm Sympathoea, an extreme male-supremacist group who have been homosexual with reproductive cloning for forty generations or more. They are said to be radically altered from the human norm in patterns of thought. Their visual arts, for example, have progressed into new, quite bizarre experimentation in the religiosity of sexual depiction.

You could have omegaverse-style cultures where all females are engineered to develop into transmen (i.e. display no sexual dimorphism).


You could have a literally non-binary culture where everybody is either hermaphroditic or parthenogenic.


You could have people suffering psychological trauma as a result of military neurosurgery to make them identify as attack helicopters (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Sexually_Identify_as_an_Attack_Helicopter).


If you want to have a setting where people still clash over race and gender and all those icky human issues, then you need to build the setting to support those things.

They could have used this space to do something else, why do rpg companies feel pressure these days to be woke? Its not like it matters at all, this is a niche hobby, people dont care about the body poilitics in their rpgs unless they are shoved in. A pdf with this stuff as an extra on their site would be just as effective. Still, if its nothing really supporting the setting but supporting our current politics into the political garbage bag it goes..

Quote from: Warder on September 30, 2020, 04:06:22 AM
They could have used this space to do something else, why do rpg companies feel pressure these days to be woke? Its not like it matters at all, this is a niche hobby, people dont care about the body poilitics in their rpgs unless they are shoved in. A pdf with this stuff as an extra on their site would be just as effective. Still, if its nothing really supporting the setting but supporting our current politics into the political garbage bag it goes..

I don't get the feeling that the EP writers felt pressure to be woke; I think that's what they want to be and what they want their product to say.

The more I learn about Eclipse Phase, the more interesting Warhammer 40k becomes to me.

While the woke crowd has made a couple passes over 40k, the lore and overarching ideas make it a tough nut to crack. 40k has this weird kind of almost cheery nihilism about it. Oh, sure, there's a handful of 'thou shalt nots' -- female Space Marines are the big one -- but for the most part, none of it matters because, well, in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. And war doesn't care about your gender, your pronouns, or your preference for a pumpkin spiced latte, because chances are good your latte will be splashed across a wall along with your innards soon enough.


It's why I laughed at the handful of people bitching about the Sisters of Battle getting front-row honors in the 9E trailer, because long-time 40k players know the Sisters have been getting the short end of the stick for MANY editions. Most of us don't mind in the slightest that GW has brought the bolter bitches back into the fray, and we welcome the challenge.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on September 30, 2020, 09:18:01 AM
While the woke crowd has made a couple passes over 40k, the lore and overarching ideas make it a tough nut to crack. 40k has this weird kind of almost cheery nihilism about it. Oh, sure, there's a handful of 'thou shalt nots' -- female Space Marines are the big one -- but for the most part, none of it matters because, well, in the grim darkness of the far future there is only war. And war doesn't care about your gender, your pronouns, or your preference for a pumpkin spiced latte, because chances are good your latte will be splashed across a wall along with your innards soon enough.


It's why I laughed at the handful of people bitching about the Sisters of Battle getting front-row honors in the 9E trailer, because long-time 40k players know the Sisters have been getting the short end of the stick for MANY editions. Most of us don't mind in the slightest that GW has brought the bolter bitches back into the fray, and we welcome the challenge.

The irony is that female space marines would probably look identical to male space marines (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Female_Space_Marines#What_Would_A_Female_Space_Marine_Look_Like_If_They_Could_Exist.3F). A bunch of those armored minis could be female and you would never know by looking at them.


https://www.deviantart.com/sigvardsteel/art/Female-Space-Marine-338739042

Quote from: HappyDaze on September 30, 2020, 05:31:08 AMI don't get the feeling that the EP writers felt pressure to be woke; I think that's what they want to be and what they want their product to say.

  Agreed, I think very little of this comes from external pressure--I think there are a lot of progressive and Hard Left 'true believers' in the industry.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 30, 2020, 12:14:43 PM
The irony is that female space marines would probably look identical to male space marines (https://1d4chan.org/wiki/Female_Space_Marines#What_Would_A_Female_Space_Marine_Look_Like_If_They_Could_Exist.3F). A bunch of those armored minis could be female and you would never know by looking at them.


https://www.deviantart.com/sigvardsteel/art/Female-Space-Marine-338739042 (https://www.deviantart.com/sigvardsteel/art/Female-Space-Marine-338739042)

I wouldn't take 4Chan fanfic as any kind of serious essay on female Space Marines.


Female Space Marines would have huge boobs and curvy hips and their power armor would be form fitting and sexy because exaggerated appearance sells, and activists whining about representation and "practical armor"* don't buy hundreds of dollars of GW product.


*Fuckin Space Marines are already ludicrous with brightly colored armor and chainswords and don't bother wearing a helmet if it looks cool.

Oh right. What was I thinking? This is the same setting that has chainswords.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on September 30, 2020, 08:08:52 PM
Oh right. What was I thinking? This is the same setting that has chainswords.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on September 30, 2020, 09:18:01 AM

It's why I laughed at the handful of people bitching about the Sisters of Battle getting front-row honors in the 9E trailer, because long-time 40k players know the Sisters have been getting the short end of the stick for MANY editions. Most of us don't mind in the slightest that GW has brought the bolter bitches back into the fray, and we welcome the challenge.

When I was picking my faction for starting with the 9th edition release, I picked Sisters partly because GW is increasing support for them.

Theres been sporatic bitching about Warhammer Skaven by feminist too. Really. There isnt anything these sociopaths wont take offense at.

Quote from: Omega on October 01, 2020, 08:32:33 AM
Theres been sporatic bitching about Warhammer Skaven by feminist too. Really. There isnt anything these sociopaths wont take offense at.

The Skaven have a ridiculously patriarchal society where all females are forcibly transformed into giant bloated lobotomized brood mares.

Why is this the case? Chaos magic doesn't need you to be born female to turn you into a brood mare.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 02:29:04 PMWhy is this the case?

Because Skaven are evil. Not 100% this was a serious question or just trolling. 

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 02:29:04 PMWhy is this the case?

Wrong question: Why is it a point of contention? Why is everybody else in the universe on the backfoot to your personal demands for how all fiction must be represented? When did you get into the position to start making demands? And what makes you qualified to do so?

The answer is people with too much time on their hands and are so deeply fragile that they cannot handle even theoretical elements they consider problematic.

You can tell these people never read the Infernals' backstory in Exalted 2E.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on October 01, 2020, 04:12:30 PM
You can tell these people never read the Infernals' backstory in Exalted 2E.

Pretty much everybody agreed that shit was disgusting and unnecessary.

Quote from: hedgehobbit on October 01, 2020, 02:53:16 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 02:29:04 PMWhy is this the case?

Because Skaven are evil. Not 100% this was a serious question or just trolling. 

I'm really sick of "the patriarchy" being used as generic villains. That doesn't change whether the designers are SJWs or not. I'm sick and tired of seeing the male sex villainized as toxically masculine psychopaths obsessed with oppressing the female sex and competing over who has the biggest penis.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 01, 2020, 03:58:02 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 02:29:04 PMWhy is this the case?

Wrong question: Why is it a point of contention? Why is everybody else in the universe on the backfoot to your personal demands for how all fiction must be represented? When did you get into the position to start making demands? And what makes you qualified to do so?

The answer is people with too much time on their hands and are so deeply fragile that they cannot handle even theoretical elements they consider problematic.

I don't play Warhammer so I don't actually care.

Here's a thought experiment. What if the roles were reversed? What if skaven were feminazis who used males as only lobotomized brood studs? Do you think that would alter their appeal among male players?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 04:39:36 PM]

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 01, 2020, 03:58:02 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 02:29:04 PMWhy is this the case?

Wrong question: Why is it a point of contention? Why is everybody else in the universe on the backfoot to your personal demands for how all fiction must be represented? When did you get into the position to start making demands? And what makes you qualified to do so?

The answer is people with too much time on their hands and are so deeply fragile that they cannot handle even theoretical elements they consider problematic.

I don't play Warhammer so I don't actually care.

Here's a thought experiment. What if the roles were reversed? What if skaven were feminazis who used males as only lobotomized brood studs? Do you think that would alter their appeal among male players?

They already have a race that's kinda like that in D&D. They're called Drow. They're one of the most popular races in the game.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 04:39:36 PMHere's a thought experiment. What if the roles were reversed? What if skaven were feminazis who used males as only lobotomized brood studs? Do you think that would alter their appeal among male players?

Yes. Again Drow Exist: No complaints from male players for......decades?

I also agree that 'Male oppressor' races are boring, but Skaven are not really that. The nature of their females matters very little to their identity as largely hateful, frightful little nothings that want to eat everything else because they hate everybody else slightly less then they hate each other. The nature of their women comes not from any patriarchy but more akin to 'magic' versions of cloning pods. Gender doesn't really exist to them.

Unlike say classic 'Enslaver' orcs or something that kidnap elven ladies to ravage or whatever, Skaven don't really have a space in their mind for sexual pleasure whatsoever. They are more like biological machines focused on consuming all rather than living beings.

They are furry versions of this:

What I mean is, why even mention that all the females are reduced to slavering broodmares? Why not have skaven armies consist of an equal mix of males and females because they lack sexual dimorphism? Unlike the drow, this wouldn't affect their general depiction because they aren't otherwise characterized as rabidly patriarchal.

It feels like the broodmare thing is just a lazy excuse for why there aren't any female skaven models. I suspect the real reason there aren't any female skaven models is because the artists would try to make them "sexy" with boobs covered by chainmail underwear or something, then realized how stupid that would have looked and gave up.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 01, 2020, 06:16:58 PM
I also agree that 'Male oppressor' races are boring, but Skaven are not really that. The nature of their females matters very little to their identity as largely hateful, frightful little nothings that want to eat everything else because they hate everybody else slightly less then they hate each other. The nature of their women comes not from any patriarchy but more akin to 'magic' versions of cloning pods. Gender doesn't really exist to them.

Gender does exist to them, otherwise they wouldn't only force females to be breeders. They'd use chaos magic to mutate anyone into a breeder.

They are male oppressors. It's stated that the females are only accessible to high-ranking skaven, like harems. The Gotrek & Felix novels feature a moment where a lower-ranking skaven is rewarded by being allowed to mate with a female.

This patriarchy is incongruous precisely because it's irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 01, 2020, 06:16:58 PMUnlike say classic 'Enslaver' orcs or something that kidnap elven ladies to ravage or whatever, Skaven don't really have a space in their mind for sexual pleasure whatsoever. They are more like biological machines focused on consuming all rather than living beings.

You mean tyranids? The skaven behave nothing like tyranids. They have individual egos, a religion, an oppressed sex class, ridiculous amounts of backstabbing... In fact, the highest-ranking tyranids like dominatrices and norn-queens are explicitly gendered as female to the point that some magos biologis research notes speculate the former is the "female" counterpart of the "male" hive tyrant.

I'm sick and tired of seeing single sex/gender races like skaven and asari. In the overwhelming majority of cases, they don't serve any purpose besides either fetish fuel or sheer laziness. It's a pointless and unnecessary erasure of an entire sex class. One should be allowed to criticize this trope without being dismissed as a loony SJW.

Why can't the skaven use chaos magic to cause dudes to grow uteruses? Why can't there be female representation among skaven characters, like that one female grey seer from 1st edition or the four-breasted cheerleaders in Blood Bowl? Why do the tyranids get better female representation than skaven do and nobody complains about that? Is "skaven cannot have female representation because we refuse to cede any ground to SJWs" really a molehill worth dying on when GW retcons their own shit all the time for the most frivolous reasons?

This whole argument makes about as much sense as arguing that there are no such thing as female imperial guard or genestealer hybrids because there aren't any models for them, even though the lore states that many of them are female. The only reason nobody is arguing that there cannot be any female imperial guard or genestealer hybrids is because their codices never included single paragraphs saying all females were reduced to brood mares like the skaven do.

But, again, I'm not actually invested in this so I don't care if GW doesn't make any changes. I don't expect them too.

If there were skaven players who wanted female representation, although I never heard of any, then why do you think they're playing the game wrong?

The reason why there is resistance is simple and cynical: 1) the typical nerdy aversity to change of any kind and 2) refusal to cede any ground whatsoever to perceived SJW interests.

If GW retconned the skaven so that they always had female representation rather than being male oppressors, then would you actually be upset about it? I highly doubt you would care one bit unless GW announced a press release where they made a big deal virtue signaling about it.

Again, I don't care because I don't like skaven. I'm a cat person.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 08:41:39 PM
What I mean is, why even mention that all the females are reduced to slavering broodmares?

....Why not? Again your talking like somebody in a position to make demands. I feel your arguing in bad faith.

That's an awful lot of words for someone that "doesn't care."

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 08:41:39 PM
One should be allowed to criticize this trope without being dismissed as a loony SJW.

You're not criticizing this trope. You are DEMANDING "representation" and insisting that the trope shouldn't exist because...reasons.

Like a loony SJW.

You're working yourself up into a self-righteous, moralizing frenzy because depictions of stuff you arbitrarily don't approve of exist somewhere in the realm of fiction, and you a want it to be different. Again, because...reasons.

Because you're not providing any valid reason. You're just asking "why can't things just be this completely other way?" like that somehow justifies things being different. But the fact that they're not somehow signals this HUGE failure of humanity. And the reason why we should be hit by a comet, or something.

Which, I don't necessarily disagree with, TBH, but not for stupid reasons like these. There are far more depressingly moronic things things that humanity is capable of than failing to fulfill some arbitrary expectation that you have, that you happen to confuse with simple "criticism".

Man, all I knew of Skaven were they were the Chaos Rat army for the version of Warhammer that I don't play.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 01, 2020, 09:17:25 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 01, 2020, 08:41:39 PM
What I mean is, why even mention that all the females are reduced to slavering broodmares?

....Why not? Again your talking like somebody in a position to make demands. I feel your arguing in bad faith.

Author fiat? I am in no position to make demands and I have no demands to make. I feel you are arguing in favor of maintaining the status quo for its own sake.

Unlike the drow or the khepri or a bunch of other sexist races, the skaven being a misogynistic dystopia is the most insignificant aspect of their lore. If that aspect was changed, then it would not have a cascade effect on their overall characterization.

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 02, 2020, 01:33:32 AM
You are DEMANDING "representation" and insisting that the trope shouldn't exist because...reasons.

Are you not demanding that the status quo should remain the same because reasons?

Why am I not arguing that the drow or khepri should be changed to have better male representation? Their sexism is explored within their own lore. There are many instances of male drow representation, such as Drizzt or egalitarian drow societies. The khepri are divided into several cultures based on whether they are sexist towards their non-sapient males or worship them. For the drow and the khepri, their characterization is integrally tied up in their gender norms.

Should the skaven have better female representation? In reality this is a function of the market, so it is only really important if there was a sufficient cohort of skaven fans who for whatever reason wanted female skaven characters featured.

In terms of the writing, the skaven culture would not be harmed by altering the way they treat females because it not an integral part of their characterization in their lore. It is an afterthought at best.

I don't think anybody would be upset if skaven patriarchy was changed by any writer in the future, given its insignificance. Whereas if the drow matriarchy were changed, I imagine many people would complain.

Before this thread brought it up, I never really thought about the skaven and I have no desire to petition giving them female representation. Once I lose interest in this tangent, I will stop thinking about skaven.


Was there anything else you wanted to discuss?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 05:02:22 PMI feel you are arguing in favor of maintaining the status quo for its own sake.

Again the whole world is on its backfoot because you don't like something, and think what YOU like is better. All the rest of your arguments are utterly and completly insignificant because you argue from a position that your taste is the BEST and everything else should hula dance to suit you.

Your walking into a restaraunt that you admit you don't care about, and ask:
"Why do you serve peanuts here? Don't you know there are people allergic? You primarily serve seafood, so you not having peanuts shouldn't matter to you. And if you want to keep the peanuts around then your just arguing for the sake of the status qou"

What if the Skeven being sexist or the nature of their brood pods WAS integral to their lore? Would you then suddenly retract that argument? If the answer is 'No' then your arguing from a disengenous position. If its 'Yes' then your arguing that sexism should only be allowed to exist if the central plot element.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 02, 2020, 05:31:05 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 05:02:22 PMI feel you are arguing in favor of maintaining the status quo for its own sake.

Again the whole world is on its backfoot because you don't like something, and think what YOU like is better. All the rest of your arguments are utterly and completly insignificant because you argue from a position that your taste is the BEST and everything else should hula dance to suit you.

Your walking into a restaraunt that you admit you don't care about, and ask:
"Why do you serve peanuts here? Don't you know there are people allergic? You primarily serve seafood, so you not having peanuts shouldn't matter to you. And if you want to keep the peanuts around then your just arguing for the sake of the status qou"

What if the Skeven being sexist or the nature of their brood pods WAS integral to their lore? Would you then suddenly retract that argument? If the answer is 'No' then your arguing from a disengenous position. If its 'Yes' then your arguing that sexism should only be allowed to exist if the central plot element.

I'd go play Scarred Lands instead because it doesn't disallow playing ratwomen.

If I don't like a product, then I'm going to go find a product I like. Or make something.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 06:01:27 PM
I'd go play Scarred Lands instead because it doesn't disallow playing ratwomen.

Why is playing Ratwomen important? And what makes you need to have the option to play ratwomen (for a race you don't even care about) important? Is a product flawed in your eyes unless it validates every persons sexuality? Is there a logical limit?

Also you dodged my question. So where you arguing in bad faith, or insisting that sexual relations MUST be the dominant force in a story element if its allowed to exist?

Repulsive inhuman monsters should be gender-equal because I feel them to be repulsive otherwise. The Skaven are like they are because you are not supposed to like them.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 02, 2020, 06:14:56 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 06:01:27 PM
I'd go play Scarred Lands instead because it doesn't disallow playing ratwomen.

Why is playing Ratwomen important? And what makes you need to have the option to play ratwomen (for a race you don't even care about) important? Is a product flawed in your eyes unless it validates every persons sexuality? Is there a logical limit?

Also you dodged my question. So where you arguing in bad faith, or insisting that sexual relations MUST be the dominant force in a story element if its allowed to exist?

Neither.

If I want to play a ratwoman or a flying pink elephant or a bloodsucking radio or anything else I please, then I don't have to justify myself to you.

You don't want to open up your game to certain concepts? Great! I am entirely within my rights to go elsewhere to find something that suits my current tastes without intruding on your fun.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 09:54:03 PMYou don't want to open up your game to certain concepts? Great! I am entirely within my rights to go elsewhere to find something that suits my current tastes without intruding on your fun.

But thats not what your opening statement was. It was 'Well there COULD be a explanation for Skaven to be X way so why are they not that way! I find this degrading to male sexuality!"

Whats all this about status qou? About me needing a reason to even defend this idea? After demanding justification from everybody else, now suddenly demanding the same from you is too far?

If the gender roles were reversed and it was the male Skaven who were those who gave birth to the race none of the SJWs including Box would give a crap. As usual because it's female Skaven they get triggered and offended.

We are not supposed to sympathize with Skaven as another poster used a counterpoint. Rodents warped by Warpstone who want to take over and possibly destroy the world. Fit only to be exterminated and nothing else.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 05:02:22 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 02, 2020, 01:33:32 AM
You are DEMANDING "representation" and insisting that the trope shouldn't exist because...reasons.

Are you not demanding that the status quo should remain the same because reasons?

NO ONE here is upholding the "status quo". YOU are the one insisting that things should be changed because...reasons. So the burden of proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)) is on YOU, as the party who has some sort of dispute on this issue, to provide sufficient warrant for your position. Not on the rest of us to provide justification for why you shouldn't be allowed to just roll in and bulldoze something that you didn't create and doesn't belong to you simply because you don't like it and you feel morally justified and firm in your belief that you know better. As if the default state of things is that any rando that wants to propose "change" for the sake of change has to be allowed to make arbitrary changes, and anyone objecting is somehow making an unwarranted imposition.

That's not how burden of proof works. These are NOT equal positions. Someone storming in and demanding changes "because" is not on equal footing to people raising an eyebrow at the arbitrary demands. There has to be sufficient justification why these changes "have" to be made, and you haven't provided them. You've simply complained that you find something morally objectionable, and lamented the very existence of OUTLIERS in fiction that aren't even common (the vast, VAST majority of cultures in fiction aren't like this), as if the mere fact that ANY of them exist is this gargantuan obstacle in a sea of bullshit you have to constantly deal with, when its just ONE. FUCKING. CULTURE. In ONE, fucking game.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 02, 2020, 10:42:34 PM
But thats not what your opening statement was. It was 'Well there COULD be a explanation for Skaven to be X way so why are they not that way! I find this degrading to male sexuality!"

Indeed, I think it is degrading to reduce men to misogynistic pigs who hate women so much that they will physically mutilate them into lobotomized bloated uteruses. While I wish this was not the case for the skaven or any of the other fictional races for which it happens, I am not so entitled that I actually expect it to ever change. A more productive use of my time is to either play the game as intended or play a different game.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on October 02, 2020, 10:42:34 PM
Whats all this about status qou? About me needing a reason to even defend this idea? After demanding justification from everybody else, now suddenly demanding the same from you is too far?

You are right. Neither position needs justification. It is a matter of personal taste.

Quote from: sureshot on October 03, 2020, 09:43:57 AM
If the gender roles were reversed and it was the male Skaven who were those who gave birth to the race none of the SJWs including Box would give a crap. As usual because it's female Skaven they get triggered and offended.

What is to say that is not already the case? Are the "males" actually male in the sense that they have testicles and produce sperm, or we all assuming they are male because they do not give birth? For all we know, those dangly bits are ovaries and an ovipositor.

And if that was explicitly the case, then I would certainly hope that men's right advocates would criticize the lack of male representation. Maybe GW would introduce a Drizzt-esque male skaven hero who fights for men's rights against those evil feminazis.

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 03, 2020, 12:42:13 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 05:02:22 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 02, 2020, 01:33:32 AM
You are DEMANDING "representation" and insisting that the trope shouldn't exist because...reasons.

Are you not demanding that the status quo should remain the same because reasons?

NO ONE here is upholding the "status quo". YOU are the one insisting that things should be changed because...reasons. So the burden of proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)) is on YOU, as the party who has some sort of dispute on this issue, to provide sufficient warrant for your position. Not on the rest of us to provide justification for why you shouldn't be allowed to just roll in and bulldoze something that you didn't create and doesn't belong to you simply because you don't like it and you feel morally justified and firm in your belief that you know better. As if the default state of things is that any rando that wants to propose "change" for the sake of change has to be allowed to make arbitrary changes, and anyone objecting is somehow making an unwarranted imposition.

That's not how burden of proof works. These are NOT equal positions. Someone storming in and demanding changes "because" is not on equal footing to people raising an eyebrow at the arbitrary demands. There has to be sufficient justification why these changes "have" to be made, and you haven't provided them. You've simply complained that you find something morally objectionable, and lamented the very existence of OUTLIERS in fiction that aren't even common (the vast, VAST majority of cultures in fiction aren't like this), as if the mere fact that ANY of them exist is this gargantuan obstacle in a sea of bullshit you have to constantly deal with, when its just ONE. FUCKING. CULTURE. In ONE, fucking game.

You are right.

The patriarchal skaven clans do not need to cease existing in order for there to be clans that are not patriarchal. It should be simple for anybody to just introduce new clans that aren't patriarchal with "chaos magic" as an easy explanation.

It is not like special snowflake armies are not already commonplace. GW has introduced dozens in their supplementary lore.

So accusing the skaven of sexism is missing the obvious point that Warhammer is a game where you can create armies with special snowflake backstories, like a non-patriarchal skaven clan.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 03, 2020, 01:39:52 PM
And if that was explicitly the case, then I would certainly hope that men's right advocates would criticize the lack of male representation. Maybe GW would introduce a Drizzt-esque male skaven hero who fights for men's rights against those evil feminazis.

Speaking as a Men's Rights Advocate (I did identify as one, and still do when I think it's productive) this is a complete misunderstanding of what MRAs stand for.

QuoteIndeed, I think it is degrading to reduce men to misogynistic pigs who hate women so much that they will physically mutilate them into lobotomized bloated uteruses. While I wish this was not the case for the skaven or any of the other fictional races for which it happens, I am not so entitled that I actually expect it to ever change. A more productive use of my time is to either play the game as intended or play a different game.

Real life men are not fantasy rat creatures.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 03, 2020, 01:39:52 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 03, 2020, 12:42:13 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 02, 2020, 05:02:22 PM

Quote from: VisionStorm on October 02, 2020, 01:33:32 AM
You are DEMANDING "representation" and insisting that the trope shouldn't exist because...reasons.

Are you not demanding that the status quo should remain the same because reasons?

NO ONE here is upholding the "status quo". YOU are the one insisting that things should be changed because...reasons. So the burden of proof (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)) is on YOU, as the party who has some sort of dispute on this issue, to provide sufficient warrant for your position. Not on the rest of us to provide justification for why you shouldn't be allowed to just roll in and bulldoze something that you didn't create and doesn't belong to you simply because you don't like it and you feel morally justified and firm in your belief that you know better. As if the default state of things is that any rando that wants to propose "change" for the sake of change has to be allowed to make arbitrary changes, and anyone objecting is somehow making an unwarranted imposition.

That's not how burden of proof works. These are NOT equal positions. Someone storming in and demanding changes "because" is not on equal footing to people raising an eyebrow at the arbitrary demands. There has to be sufficient justification why these changes "have" to be made, and you haven't provided them. You've simply complained that you find something morally objectionable, and lamented the very existence of OUTLIERS in fiction that aren't even common (the vast, VAST majority of cultures in fiction aren't like this), as if the mere fact that ANY of them exist is this gargantuan obstacle in a sea of bullshit you have to constantly deal with, when its just ONE. FUCKING. CULTURE. In ONE, fucking game.

You are right.

The patriarchal skaven clans do not need to cease existing in order for there to be clans that are not patriarchal. It should be simple for anybody to just introduce new clans that aren't patriarchal with "chaos magic" as an easy explanation.

It is not like special snowflake armies are not already commonplace. GW has introduced dozens in their supplementary lore.

So accusing the skaven of sexism is missing the obvious point that Warhammer is a game where you can create armies with special snowflake backstories, like a non-patriarchal skaven clan.

You are allowed to make up anything you want in your personal campaign and fanfic. But just because you have this arbitrary notion that EVERY. SINGLE. RACE or culture HAS to include ample "rEpReSeNtAtIoN" of gender or whatnot that doesn't mean that NO race/group/culture, etc. in fiction can ever be anything but a glowing rainbow of cultural pluralism and includes every possible presentation of gender identity and opportunity, etc. for every member of their society, like we're not allowed to explore different and even weird or unlikely or morally objectionable social structures or cultural norms in the realm of SPECULATIVE fiction--when that's what its for!

Quote from: Ratman_tf on October 03, 2020, 01:50:22 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on October 03, 2020, 01:39:52 PM
And if that was explicitly the case, then I would certainly hope that men's right advocates would criticize the lack of male representation. Maybe GW would introduce a Drizzt-esque male skaven hero who fights for men's rights against those evil feminazis.

Speaking as a Men's Rights Advocate (I did identify as one, and still do when I think it's productive) this is a complete misunderstanding of what MRAs stand for.

Pretty much. RePrEsEnTaTiOn is strictly an Intersectional feminists concept and concern borne out of privileged, well to do, upper middle class pampered westerners with an over abundance of "education", who have it so good, their idea of "rights" is whining about characters in FICTIONAL media having to look like them--which is the primary concern of entitled, narcissistic idiots who think only about themselves and expect everything to be made about them. It's the glowing definition of first world "problems".

MRAs are concerned about actual issues that affect men, like male suicide rates, custody laws, male genital mutilation (aka "circumcision"), etc. Not with superficial, narcissistic nonsense like "representation".