Quote from: Corolinth on February 02, 2024, 08:41:15 AM
I'm changing my mind about cancel culture. If the left wants to have blacklists so bad, let's add communists.

No need as they eventually add each other in typical circular firing squad fashion.   The first people lined up in the dark alley are those who opposed them; the second group line up is the fragile cohort of idealogues who thought they were ultimately doing a moral good despite the immediate evil.  That just leaves the strongmen and butchers left to fight amongst themselves for the societal scraps.

Quote from: Brad on February 02, 2024, 07:04:22 AM
RE: Nazi crap, I saw that mentioned on this messageboard a while back and literally DGAF. Barker was so involved and invested in Hindu culture I wouldn't doubt he had a couple old school swastikas and some retard took it the wrong way. Dredging up this sort of garbage is a waste of everyone's time.

Barker wrote a neo-Nazi science-fiction novel under a pseudonym that was published by National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance, which also published the infamous novel The Turner Diaries.  He also spent more than a decade on the advisory board of a journal that specialized in holocaust denialism.  This isn't a case of someone hyperventilating over a misinterpreted swastika.

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 02, 2024, 09:01:48 AM

Quote from: Brad on February 02, 2024, 07:04:22 AM
RE: Nazi crap, I saw that mentioned on this messageboard a while back and literally DGAF. Barker was so involved and invested in Hindu culture I wouldn't doubt he had a couple old school swastikas and some retard took it the wrong way. Dredging up this sort of garbage is a waste of everyone's time.

Barker wrote a neo-Nazi science-fiction novel under a pseudonym that was published by National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance, which also published the infamous novel The Turner Diaries.  He also spent more than a decade on the advisory board of a journal that specialized in holocaust denialism.  This isn't a case of someone hyperventilating over a misinterpreted swastika.

Unless playing or reading the game is transforming people into card carrying nazis it's largely irrelevant what Barker believed.

Quote from: S'mon on February 02, 2024, 08:18:26 AM
I run FR without Time of Troubles, and usually without Harpers either. And generally distant non meddling gods. Seems to work.

Fair enough, but that's exactly my point about Tekumel. You CAN sort of handwave all the social stuff and do dungeon delves, but it's really not taking full advantage of the game world. Not that I like FR whatsoever...

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 02, 2024, 09:01:48 AM
Barker wrote a neo-Nazi science-fiction novel under a pseudonym that was published by National Vanguard Books, the publishing arm of the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance, which also published the infamous novel The Turner Diaries.  He also spent more than a decade on the advisory board of a journal that specialized in holocaust denialism.  This isn't a case of someone hyperventilating over a misinterpreted swastika.

Okay, so? I literally had no idea any of this was a real thing and still DGAF. It has nothing to do with Tekumel, so it has nothing to do with me. I am not going to real Nazi novels or supprt that crap, hence irrelevant. This is the same horseshit argument against HPL currently being toted around...oh he was RACIST! RACIST I TELL YOU!!! Yeah who cares, he wrote good stories. REH was a fucking absolute maniac and probably had severe mental illness, Conan is still one of the best characters in the modern era.

Just keep wringing hands over shit that has zero impact on your life! I choose to not care.

Quote from: Llew ap Hywel on February 02, 2024, 09:06:52 AM
Unless playing or reading the game is transforming people into card carrying nazis it's largely irrelevant what Barker believed.

I corrected to an incorrect claim, which I helpfully quoted so that people could see exactly what I was referring to.  My post is directly relevant to the post that I responded to.

Quote from: Brad on February 02, 2024, 09:28:37 AM
Okay, so? I literally had no idea any of this was a real thing and still DGAF. It has nothing to do with Tekumel, so it has nothing to do with me. I am not going to real Nazi novels or supprt that crap, hence irrelevant. This is the same horseshit argument against HPL currently being toted around...oh he was RACIST! RACIST I TELL YOU!!! Yeah who cares, he wrote good stories. REH was a fucking absolute maniac and probably had severe mental illness, Conan is still one of the best characters in the modern era.

Just keep wringing hands over shit that has zero impact on your life! I choose to not care.

If it was irrelevant, you wouldn't have suggested that people who think that Barker was a Nazi were just misinterpreting his interest in Hinduism.  Barker wrote a neo-Nazi novel that was published by a prominent neo-Nazi organization, and he also served on the advisory board of a publication dedicated to holocaust denialism.  These are simple facts.

I'm not wringing my hands over anything.  You made an incorrect claim.  I corrected it.  I didn't say anything about whether people should enjoy Tekumel or not.  I certainly didn't say anything about H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard.

Let's try and apply a bit of perspective to the human flaws of Professor Barker. First and foremost, he was a Muslim convert, and from what I can glean, a rather fervent one at that. Is anyone alive today in the least bit surprised that a devout Muslim might harbor antisemitic beliefs? These days, antisemitism is crawling out from under rocks in US universities, for heaven's sake; Never mind on some of the more uncensored social media platforms (Looking at you, Gab). Barker was an anti-Semite, but not a fascist, Nazi, nor, from what I can see, a racist. The man created an entire world with zero white people inhabiting it. Yes, he wrote fiction about Nazis, and worked with holocaust deniers. That's where the other anti-Semites were hanging out in those days, as opposed to marching in the streets and holding sit ins in Universities. And he seems to have taken great pains to keep his antisemitism separate from his gaming activities. Even those close to him, among them members of the Tekumel Foundation, were gobsmacked when the information of his extracurricular activities came to light.

As someone whose first experience in TTRPGs was in the original Empire of The Petal Throne, I have a soft spot in my gamer's heart for the Tekumel setting. I have no problem segregating the man from his creation, if that is what I must do. I leave any ultimate judgement of Professor Barker to those who knew him well, and to the god he worshiped.

Quote from: Quasquetonian on February 02, 2024, 09:55:06 AM
I'm not wringing my hands over anything.  You made an incorrect claim.  I corrected it.  I didn't say anything about whether people should enjoy Tekumel or not.  I certainly didn't say anything about H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard.

I was making an analogy about how stupid this whole thing is, "the royal your". Again, I could care less if Barker was goosestepping at Auschwitz in his later life, that in no way affects Tekumel which has zero to do with Nazism. It is 100% irrelevant and, again, I was simply dismissing the entire argument as stupid. This is the same bullshit that is occurring in Real Time right now, removing statues of fucking Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves or something. So? Does this in any way diminish his contributions to Western civilization? Using this logic, the Constitution should be shredded and Marxism instituted in whole to remove the stain of such a horrid man. Oh, that's exactly what's happening.

Communists are not people. The End.

Quote from: Melan on February 02, 2024, 06:54:07 AM
Nobody who discussed Tekumel before Barker's views became known considered it nazi-adjacent. Too weird to use, yes. Unsavoury due to sexual and violent elements, sometimes. Nazi, they totally did nazi that. (Sorry.) You don't have those "Aha! Told you so in 2007!!!" blog posts either because nobody made them. If anything, Tekumel was cited as a positive example of a non-western setting. If nobody noticed, is it really there in a meaningful sense?

This seems to be a case where the art can be separated quite well from the artist.

There is also an element of chronology here. Was Barker a nazi from his youth, or did he become one later in life, once he had already developed and published his world? We don't know, because we don't know much about Barker in general. His life was a lot more private and obscure than Gygax's. He was active in a specialist academic field few people care about, and wrote niche material for a very small circle of dedicated fans. I don't recall any in-depth interviews with him which would have given us a deeper insight into his life and ideas (even if he tried to conceal some of them). What we have is a mystery that may never be properly solved, and wild speculation that may not reach far beyond the surface.

Thank you, for your thoughtful reply.

Quote from: Brad on February 02, 2024, 07:04:22 AM
I have the original Tekumel, the GOO one, Gardasiyal, Tirikelu (which is free and probably the best actual game), and Swords and Glory. Two of these had no direct involvement from MAR Barker that I can find, and you would be hard pressed to tell the difference. They're dense as fuck and have a very consistent theme of a pseudo-ancient society that relies on near-magic technology (and some actual magic) given in the context of an Indian (dot, not feather) caste-based society if it was like 20 thousands years in the future. To me it's basically Dune but some backwater world that got sucked into a pocket universe and developed independently of anything else.

It's been said Barker was the only one who could run a Tekumel game, and I believe it. There are just too many moving pieces to give the setting justice. You CAN just run adventures in the underworld and do tech raids or whatever, typical D&D fare, but that's almost like playing Forgotten Realms and totally ignoring the gods, the time of troubles, the harpers, etc. Kind of defeats the entire purpose of using the game world.

RE: Nazi crap, I saw that mentioned on this messageboard a while back and literally DGAF. Barker was so involved and invested in Hindu culture I wouldn't doubt he had a couple old school swastikas and some retard took it the wrong way. Dredging up this sort of garbage is a waste of everyone's time.

Thank you, for your informative reply.

I have seen accusations of racism and fascism leveled at all kinds of people that just don't bear tight scrutiny.  Here's a couple:

1.  Henry Ford - Supposedly, he was a big supporter of Hitler so he's a racist and a fascist.  Here's the problem, Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year because he pulled Germany out of an economic death spiral.  His early efforts considerably raised the quality of life for the German people that were truly suffering.  This was during the Great Depression that was seeing Americans starving to death and America was doing better than Germany in 1935.  The horrors of WW!! like the holocaust weren't well known until the concentration camp liberation in 1945; there had been some rumors but many of them had been "debunked."  Once Henry Ford saw what was going on as it really was, he backed the US and the allies 100%.  Many, many prominent figures in the US and in the broader world were pro-fascist up until the late 30s.

2.  H.P. Lovecraft - He gets slammed for racism frequently.  There's all kinds of "proof" from his depictions of various groups in his writings to the name of his cat.  First, the guy was born in 1890 and died in 1937 living his entire life in New England.  He had never met people from the various groups he supposedly hated nor did he take any social or political stance that in any way hurt or hindered any group.  A more honest evaluation would be an exploration of his fear of the unknown and his social anxiety in the language and terms he was familiar with.  In truth, except for a few letters he exchanged with some friends (Robert E Howard being a big one) and his books, there's almost nothing to judge his character with.  We can say that there was probably something wrong with him due to the fact he was a social recluse and he reacted in fear to exchanges with his own neighbors.  The way I see it, he was a flawed man with mental health needs that was doing the best he could while the cancel mob picks a few features to condemn him to woke hell for.

I know very little about Barker but given I am familiar with the leading lights pushing for white supremacy, I doubt he was a NAZI.  Tekumel material I've read doesn't reflect any of the white supremacy ideologies or basic moral or social assumptions I would associate with it.

Given some the posts above, I feel it's important to point out that Serpent's Walk, by MAR Barker, is a novel about heroic SS soldiers.

Quote from: The back cover
"Serpent's Walk ... assumes that Hitler's warrior elite - the SS - didn't give up their struggle for a White world when they lost the Second World War. Instead their survivors went underground and adopted some of the tactics of their enemies: they began building their economic muscle and buying into the opinion-forming media. A century after the war they are ready to challenge the democrats and Jews for the hearts and minds of White Americans, who have begun to have their fill of government-enforced multi-culturalism and "equality."

So actual Nazi stuff. Barker was literally a neo-Nazi.

For convenience, here's a link to the Tekumel Foundation statement on Serpent's Walk. It's pretty tepid, but this should make it at least clear that MAR Barker's Nazi hobby is an acknowledged fact, even by the publishers of his RPG work.

If anyone wants to know why a neo-Nazi would be fascinated by dark-skinned, indigenous people, let me help you: it's not uncommon. Literally, most of Europe decided they wanted a piece of Africa, they had to have what the Africans were having. Same thing in the Americas. They fucking loved walking around in their pit helms being carried by human beings on litters. You can't be a master race, without an inferior race to lord over. Barker is also not the only European intellectual to decide Islam was better than Christianity, even while harboring his own racial, class, and ethnic prejudices. Terms like "exoticism" and "Orientalism" exist to describe this fascination some Europeans have with other cultures, even while demeaning their intrinisic worth or shitting on the same cultural achievements they find so charming. That's just garden variety racism, you don't even have to be a Nazi for that.

Nazis admired "primitive," warlike, "savage," people. They simply though they were better. They did not any issue with the concept of a warrior race, they considered themselves one. Their attitude was not one of moral condemnation but simply condescension.

Even though this place often devolves to a low level of discourse, I am honestly a little disappointed at the number of people here willing to state on record they are fine with Nazis.

As for Tekumel itself... it's one thing to read it and think, okay, this reflects certain worldviews and prejudices of the author. It's another to recognize, okay, this is a book that reflects the ideological lean of a Nazi. It's just uncomfortable, and it's not something I care to go through just to play a game where people have blue swords and I have to learn a new alphabet. Tekumel had an exalted place in RPG history. That legacy has been tainted, not simply through association with a deeply flawed and evil author, but as a source of inspiration. I don't trust it, and I think it will be along time before I'll be able to look at it coolly and dispassionately.

That is not to say that you can't read, enjoy, perhaps even play it. I'm sure the Tekumel Foundation people aren't ideological white supremacists. I just think it's important to know what it is.

Quote from: BadApple on February 02, 2024, 01:11:07 PM
I have seen accusations of racism and fascism leveled at all kinds of people that just don't bear tight scrutiny.  Here's a couple:

1.  Henry Ford - Supposedly, he was a big supporter of Hitler so he's a racist and a fascist.  Here's the problem, Hitler was Time Magazine's Man of the Year because he pulled Germany out of an economic death spiral.  His early efforts considerably raised the quality of life for the German people that were truly suffering.  This was during the Great Depression that was seeing Americans starving to death and America was doing better than Germany in 1935.  The horrors of WW!! like the holocaust weren't well known until the concentration camp liberation in 1945; there had been some rumors but many of them had been "debunked."  Once Henry Ford saw what was going on as it really was, he backed the US and the allies 100%.  Many, many prominent figures in the US and in the broader world were pro-fascist up until the late 30s.

People don't say that Henry Ford was an antisemite because he admired Hitler's economic miracle.  People say that Henry Ford was an antisemite because it's a well-documented fact that he hated the Jews and promoted Jew hatred.  After he took over his hometown newspaper, he published antisemitic articles under his byline for many years, collecting them into a series of booklets he called The International Jew.

You also have it exactly the wrong way around.  It was actually Hitler who admired Ford.  Hitler was known to keep a prominent photograph of Ford in his office, and he even said this in 1923:

Quote"I wish that I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections," the young leader of the Bavarian Fascisti party said grimly. "We look on Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing Fascisti movement in America. We admire particularly his anti-Jewish policy which is the Bavarian Fascisti platform. We have just had his anti-Jewish articles translated and published. The book is being circulated to millions throughout Germany."

Ford ended up with several libel suits being brought against him by Jews he had named as part of the conspiracy and lied about.  Although the first was declared a mistrial, it was utterly embarrassing for Ford, and he quickly settled out of court.  He negotiated an agreement with the American Jewish Committee, promising to stop publishing antisemitic materials.

I'm going to stop there, because this is obviously getting way beyond roleplaying games.

Quote from: BadApple on February 02, 2024, 01:11:07 PM
I know very little about Barker but given I am familiar with the leading lights pushing for white supremacy, I doubt he was a NAZI.  Tekumel material I've read doesn't reflect any of the white supremacy ideologies or basic moral or social assumptions I would associate with it.

The National Alliance was a neo-Nazi organization.  National Vanguard was its publishing arm.  Those things weren't secret at the time Barker submitted his book and had it published.  The book itself promotes neo-Nazism, directly (through its subject matter) and indirectly (through the ad for The Turner Diaries and Hunter at the back of the book). 

Barker also sat on the advisory committee of the Journal of Historical Review for over a decade.  Mark Weber, the publication's editor-in-chief for most of the time that Barker was on the committee, had not only been a member of the National Alliance, but had been the editor of its magazine, National Vanguard (which the publishing company was named after).  The whole reason that the Journal existed was to give holocaust denialism an academic gloss. 

You may doubt that Barker was a Nazi, but the evidence strongly suggests otherwise.  I might buy that he had somehow naively stumbled onto the advisory committee of the Journal, if not for the fact that he had a neo-Nazi novel published by a neo-Nazi organization.

I'm not one to tell people how to spend their time, so I have no opinion on whether or not people should enjoy his work.  However, I think it's a really bad idea to soft pedal the guy's neo-Nazi associations.

Yet another thread pawsplay has managed to derail onto politics...

Yes, Barker WAS an anti-semite and probably a neo-nazi...

So. Fucking. What!?

Is any of that in Tekumel? or any of his other gaming materials?

NO! Ergo, since the POS is dead and won't benefit from people playing his shit, who fucking cares what kind of lunatic the guy was?

I'm in the interesting to read, but too weird to play camp.  The language elements that he so loved are a major barrier for me and thus making it unplayable.  When I read the white box back in the day, I did not get that Nazi vibe.  I guess I should re-read it as some point and see if that still holds true.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 02, 2024, 01:34:30 AM
HP Lovecraft WAS a racist, does that mean we shouldn't read his books or play CoC? Is every publisher that uses his mythoss a bad person by proxy too?

Yes, unless you devote a portion of your word count to reminding readers that he was racist and racism is bad.  Bonus virtue signaling points if you say he was a misogynist too (not that he was, but it helps separate the folks who've read up on the guy from the ones who Have Something Important To Say).

If you don't do that, expect "helpful" people to call out your hate crime.