Quote from: I on February 03, 2023, 06:58:52 AM
I'm seeing a pattern here:

Me & everyone else:  Evil Hat is hypocritical for making money off a guy they hate, when they could have made another game altogether

jhkim:  Lovecraft was racist!

Everyone else:  Nobody argued that

jhkim:  It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist

Everyone else:  Again, nobody said that

That's fair as far as it goes, but I would add in:

jhkim: It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist, and also play, game-master, and/or publish Lovecraft-based RPG material

Would you also agree with this?

Quote from: jhkim on February 03, 2023, 01:05:04 PM
That's fair as far as it goes, but I would add in:

jhkim: It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist, and also play, game-master, and/or publish Lovecraft-based RPG material

Would you also agree with this?

Yes, sure. I've never claimed Lovecraft wasn't a racist, he absolutely was.

However, I wouldn't engage in performative hand-wringing about it if I were publishing a game based on his works. At most I would acknowledge it briefly - literally like two sentences is all you need - and get on with it.

Because, first, it's not going to be relevant to my work - I'm not Lovecraft, I don't share his bigotry. And second, because I assume my audience are not ignorant idiots.

Quote from: Bruwulf on February 03, 2023, 01:08:21 PM

Quote from: jhkim on February 03, 2023, 01:05:04 PM
That's fair as far as it goes, but I would add in:

jhkim: It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist, and also play, game-master, and/or publish Lovecraft-based RPG material

Would you also agree with this?

Yes, sure. I've never claimed Lovecraft wasn't a racist, he absolutely was.

However, I wouldn't engage in performative hand-wringing about it if I were publishing a game based on his works. At most I would acknowledge it briefly - literally like two sentences is all you need - and get on with it.

Because, first, it's not going to be relevant to my work - I'm not Lovecraft, I don't share his bigotry. And second, because I assume my audience are not ignorant idiots.

I think a published RPG should assume that the audience is ignorant, though not that they are idiots. The audience might not know anything about Lovecraft and/or be new to role-playing. Anyway, all this back and forth has gotten me to go look up what is actually in Fate of Cthulhu. So here's the part about Lovecraft's racism:

QuoteFate of Cthulhu is a game that deals with many hard topics, including mental health, systemic abuses of power, and the deaths of huge portions of the human species. Make sure all the players are aware of these things and give enthusiastic consent before they begin playing.

Also—Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a racist and an anti-Semite.

There. We said it.

We could give a litany of examples, but they are easy to find with a simple Internet search. Look up the name of his cat, for instance (HPL was over-the-top, even for his time). Go ahead, we'll wait.

Now that we've gotten that issue out in the open, let us turn our attention to why we still find the Cthulhu mythos, of which he planted the seed, a fruitful garden in which to find stories. Lovecraft once said, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." He filled that void of knowledge with his imagination, creating Old Ones and forbidden knowledge, strange religions and fantastical superstitions, threats to society and suspicion of what science might unlock. We can acknowledge the fear behind his imagination while also re-examining what came out of it.

The middle part is more than two sentences, but it seems to me that in principle it is still acknowledging the point briefly and then getting on with it, just as you say. The latter part is about what is good and interesting about his stories.

Ooo, can I be racist too?

How much Lovecraft and Howard do I need to read first?

The Left seems to love racism--it's all they ever talk about, it's all they every think of themselves, maybe I can join in?

Gonna get me some sweet, sweet Painter-Points for sure, spend them all at Beer Halls, yeeeeeaaaaahhhh...

Really should start another thread, but honestly I feel this discussion has been had before and there's little left to say which hasn't already.

Except...

Quote from: Bruwulf on February 02, 2023, 09:08:50 AM
He was also an elitist wannabe-academic.

If you pay attention to his stories, the only people that ever really come across as "wholesome" people are academics and a few others that operate in a very similar, narrow band of society. The wealthy are morally degenerate, rural people are inbred and morally degenerate, cities are presented as dark, decaying places full of squalor and degeneracy, and so on.

And by an astoundingly bizarre coincidence the Radical Left is also full of elitist wannabe-academics who (except for the city part) make exactly the same conclusions.

Quote from: jhkim on February 02, 2023, 12:53:04 PM
My point was that while Lovecraft was racist, I think it is possible to run games that are Lovecraftian without promoting racism.

You forget we're dealing with a contingent that considers all otherness to be a metaphor for racism. And their beliefs aren't even coherent here as they consider Orcs to be stand-ins for Blacks despite the former thinking and acting exactly like the Fascists they claim to hate.

So no, it isn't, not as far as these folks are concerned. And they'll be more than happy to tell you why right before they cancel you.

Quote from: jhkim on February 03, 2023, 01:05:04 PM

Quote from: I on February 03, 2023, 06:58:52 AM
I'm seeing a pattern here:

Me & everyone else:  Evil Hat is hypocritical for making money off a guy they hate, when they could have made another game altogether

jhkim:  Lovecraft was racist!

Everyone else:  Nobody argued that

jhkim:  It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist

Everyone else:  Again, nobody said that

That's fair as far as it goes, but I would add in:

jhkim: It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist, and also play, game-master, and/or publish Lovecraft-based RPG material

Would you also agree with this?

"jhkim: It's not hypocritical to...publish Lovecraft-based RPG material. Would you also agree with this?"

No I wouldn't. They are making money off someone they are shitting upon. If he is so deplorable stop mining his creative talent for your own benefit.

Newsflash - Lovecraft didn't live in 2023. Fuck 'em for the grifters they are.

Quote from: jhkim on February 03, 2023, 01:05:04 PM

Quote from: I on February 03, 2023, 06:58:52 AM
I'm seeing a pattern here:

Me & everyone else:  Evil Hat is hypocritical for making money off a guy they hate, when they could have made another game altogether

jhkim:  Lovecraft was racist!

Everyone else:  Nobody argued that

jhkim:  It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist

Everyone else:  Again, nobody said that

That's fair as far as it goes, but I would add in:

jhkim: It's not hypocritical to think Lovecraft was a good writer and a racist, and also play, game-master, and/or publish Lovecraft-based RPG material

Would you also agree with this?

Yeah, I'd agree with it.  It's just hardly relevant at all.  So tell me:  every time Martin Luther King, Jr. comes up in a conversation, do you insert "Of course, he routinely beat his wife and accepted funding from the American Communist party, which was in turn directly funded by the CCCP" ?  Do you just randomly insert not-relevant-to-the conversation-at-hand bullshit into every conversation you have?  Like, "It's possible to revere MLK as a civil rights leader while also acknowledging he stood to the side and laughed while his friend raped a woman."   Or every time you hear somebody say the U.S. should have stayed out of Vietnam, you observe "Yes, but the North Vietnamese murdered 10,000 civilians in house-to-house massacres in Hue"?  Somehow, I doubt that these conservative counter-points (and pretty irrelevant points, btw) ever make it into your arguments.

I think that, like most liberals, you're just absolutely obsessed with the topic of race and, Tourette's-like, you just can't help spouting off about it at all times and in every situation.  By the way, Lovecraft was also a die-hard atheist and, by the end of his life, was thinking Socialism was the way to go.  Shouldn't we bring up these two facts every time the man is mentioned?  I've never seen you do it, not even once.  It's possible to run a game based on his work without being an atheist or a socialist, you know....  Did you warn your kid before handing Lovecraft to him that Lovecraft was an atheist, and that worldview permeates his work far more than his views on race do?  To be on guard as he reads, so that he doesn't become a godless Commie from being exposed to such ideas?

Finally, I think it's hilarious that some one who supports Burn Loot Murder, Inc. is criticizing somebody else over RACISM.  Liberals are famously un-self aware, and man, you are the living proof of that.

You know what's funny is, I had no idea HPL was a racist until people on Twitter and now the RPG community felt the need to keep reminding me of that fact. I get it, he had racist views. He probably hated people of my ethnicity too. I don't care, I just know I like his stories and universe.

Quote from: Skullking on February 04, 2023, 05:59:28 AM
"jhkim: It's not hypocritical to...publish Lovecraft-based RPG material. Would you also agree with this?"

No I wouldn't. They are making money off someone they are shitting upon. If he is so deplorable stop mining his creative talent for your own benefit.

Newsflash - Lovecraft didn't live in 2023. Fuck 'em for the grifters they are.

The Freudo-Witch*-Left are probably just frustrated that conservatives et al. won't go all the way after cancelling the likes of Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot for themselves;

so their only course of action now is to force everyone else into cancelling Lovecraft and Howard via guilt-by-association with Leftism, using their raw talent for social-abuse to maximize the effect.

Which is not totalitarian at all!--because they dearly care about the mental health and personal agency and consent of others as Leftists, so its all a-ok. We should really sincerely thank they/them for stepping in for our absolute inability to think for ourselves, and be in awe and wonder of all that they've learned from their BDSM sex-dungeon parades.


* Ask Rob Zombie

Quote from: mudbanks on February 04, 2023, 09:18:29 AM
You know what's funny is, I had no idea HPL was a racist until people on Twitter and now the RPG community felt the need to keep reminding me of that fact. I get it, he had racist views. He probably hated people of my ethnicity too. I don't care, I just know I like his stories and universe.

Irish? 

Quote from: Brad on January 16, 2023, 04:13:01 PM

Quote from: migo on January 16, 2023, 01:36:54 PM
We shouldn't forget about Palladium.

What's wrong with Palladium? Kevin Siembieda might have issues running a business, but he doesn't actively despise anyone who buys his games.

It's not an evil thing.  It's more of a hair pulling thing.  Palladium should be better than it is.  However, Kevin Seimbeida is a bit stubborn and won't fix some of the wonky or unclear rules. 

It's not uncommon for Palladium players to not know how to correctly calculate their combat bonuses or even how the turn sequence plays out. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 04, 2023, 10:40:58 AM
It's not an evil thing.  It's more of a hair pulling thing.  Palladium should be better than it is.  However, Kevin Seimbeida is a bit stubborn and won't fix some of the wonky or unclear rules. 

It's not uncommon for Palladium players to not know how to correctly calculate their combat bonuses or even how the turn sequence plays out.

Again, not helped by the fact that Kevin himself apparently doesn't really use his own rules. But yeah, the system is a mess to begin with, and the books are horrifically badly organized. Rifts is one of those systems that every table is really going to be running their own version of it.

And I would argue some of Palladium's treatment of writers borders on "evil", at least by publisher standards.

Quote from: mudbanks on February 04, 2023, 09:18:29 AM
You know what's funny is, I had no idea HPL was a racist until people on Twitter and now the RPG community felt the need to keep reminding me of that fact. I get it, he had racist views. He probably hated people of my ethnicity too. I don't care, I just know I like his stories and universe.

So it works. You didn't know he was racist and now you do but you can still like the stories, everybody wins.

Quote from: I on February 04, 2023, 08:44:23 AM
I think that, like most liberals, you're just absolutely obsessed with the topic of race and, Tourette's-like, you just can't help spouting off about it at all times and in every situation.  By the way, Lovecraft was also a die-hard atheist and, by the end of his life, was thinking Socialism was the way to go.  Shouldn't we bring up these two facts every time the man is mentioned?  I've never seen you do it, not even once. It's possible to run a game based on his work without being an atheist or a socialist, you know....  Did you warn your kid before handing Lovecraft to him that Lovecraft was an atheist, and that worldview permeates his work far more than his views on race do?

I think you have a skewed perspective here. When I look back over the past few weeks, here are the topics I started:

• Broad generic classes vs skill-based
• Using monsters from other cultures
• The draft OGL v1.2
• Acting in your local community
• Liberating the hobby from OGL 1.1
• Genres of D&D modules

I talk about RPG design, module design, copyright issues, my current D&D5E campaign, many of my past campaigns, and lots of other stuff. Within this thread, I commented on company ethics and the Terminator hook for Fate of Cthulhu at first. It was Valatar who brought up the topic of Lovecraft's racism - and Garry G and you commented on that subtopic before I did.

From my perspective, it seems like I'm posting on all sorts of topics - and you're only engaging with me on the topic of race. I'd be happy to talk to you about other topics, particularly here on the RPG forum.

As for introducing Lovecraft to my son, of course I mentioned other stuff like his atheism and nihilism. I did not mention his socialism because I don't think it is core to his character or writing. He only softened towards socialism in the last few years of his life, and even then, he was still strongly opposed to radical Marxism.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 04, 2023, 10:40:58 AM
It's not an evil thing.  It's more of a hair pulling thing.  Palladium should be better than it is.  However, Kevin Seimbeida is a bit stubborn and won't fix some of the wonky or unclear rules. 

It's not uncommon for Palladium players to not know how to correctly calculate their combat bonuses or even how the turn sequence plays out.

Well no argument there; I first learned how to play Palladium games with TMNT and it was not that straightforward, to say the least. However, I WILL say that my 12 year old self had far better patience and attention to detail than my 48 year old self, and saw no problem with the system whatsoever. But this could also be a function of having no money and spending every nickel made mowing yards to buy a new book, so you bet your ass I was going to learn the system.

Still, I think Palladium is okay as a company if you're comparing them to something like Evil Hat. KS might be a maniac but he actually likes roleplaying games and gamers, he wants people to have fun. I think that's the whole point.

Quote from: Garry G on February 04, 2023, 01:21:25 PM
So it works. You didn't know he was racist and now you do but you can still like the stories, everybody wins.

Ha! With that crazy crowd, there's no winning until everyone chants the same tune. Even me saying I like his stories and not caring about his views will get me cancelled in some circles because indifference allows evil to spread or some drivel like that.

Quote from: ClusterFluster on February 04, 2023, 09:20:05 AM
Irish? 

Nay, I'm the furthest from being Irish.