im posting this here despite the website being extremely white centered, I want people to understand how in this country it's basically ok to murder and victimize black people, especially women and children in the name of "self defense" and white America will reward you for your antiblackness.
The headlines of the two articles don't really convey how fucking horrible this was. To anyone scrolling by who wasn't going to click on the links, here is a short summary:
The store owner got his gun out, and he and his son started chasing the 14-year-old boy, because they FALSELY believed he stole FOUR BOTTLES OF WATER.
The boy who was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON did carry a gun, and it would have been very much justified to actually take it out (because he feared for his life since he was being CHASED WITH A GUN FOR NO REASON), but witnesses never saw it in his hands, and at no point did he actually point it at his two pursuers. He had his back towards them the entire time because he was FLEEING.
The kid stumbled and fell, dropping his gun in the process. The gun was only ever seen on the ground next to his body, it probably fell from his waistband or pocket or whatever, not his hands. And since it was dropped, he did not have it on him AT ALL when he was murdered. He was SHOT IN THE BACK WHILE LYING UNARMED ON THE GROUND.
The sheriff's report written in 2023 said that this was "not a bias-motivated incident" even though there is literally zero ambiguity that this man was just itching to shoot a Black kid. There is no other explanation for why you would take your gun out and chase him more than 100 yards over a vague, weak, unfounded suspicion that he might have stolen four (4) bottles of water. In and of itself, the train of thought "this Black kid was holding four bottles of water at some point, and now he's leaving the store, clearly there's no chance that he simply put them back, he must have stolen them" is already racist as hell. But the cops say "well there's absolutely no indication that shooting an unarmed 14-year-old Black boy because you falsely suspected him of stealing a few dollars worth of water was motivated by bias" because of fucking course they do.
The murderer was found "not guilty" because the self-defence reasoning was accepted even though multiple witnesses confirmed that the kid did not have a gun out as he was running from the store, and definitely did not point it at his pursuers at any point. If anything, the kid would have been the person for whom self-defence would have been justified since he was the one being actively chased with a gun.
not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as âmy liegeâ would come strangely naturally
the "empathy fatigue" stuff is also very revealing because when you examine health professionals' self-reporting on the matter there is a specific type of person they describe losing empathy for- unsurprisingly, it's people with particularly chronic health issues and disability, drug users, people who "refuse to take care of themselves" and especially anyone with a health condition perceived to be "their own fault". very often what they describe as "empathy fatigue" is actually just the mask slipping on the seething contempt they already held
oh, during burnout you happen to feel less empathetic toward criminals, alcoholics, teens and drug users? that's really interesting and i feel so sorry for how hard your job must be that its caused these feelings in you.
You know, back when I worked as a dispatcher my coworkers and higher-ups would talk about "empathy fatigue" and I thought for a long time that the discussion had certain assumed caveats. As I understood it, the term was supposed to be a strictly employee-side one, and was a phenomenon that was meant to be managed and resisted.
You take a hundred calls a day about horrific things happening to people, and over time some people stop processing that as "people who need help" and more as "work problems to be solved." There's a tendency to abstract away the human element, to sort people and problems into efficient little organized boxes, and that can really easily mean that the people you're supposed to be helping get a lower quality of assistance than they should be receiving. I think there is something cogent in that.
But then I listened more to those coworkers and higher-ups, and I realized that isn't what they meant at all. They meant that they were increasingly contemptuous of the people and communities they were supposed to be serving, and increasingly resentful of their responsibilities to those people. And I just have no time or respect for that position at all.
bringing this one back bc nobody saw this but this ad made me laugh so hard. extremely appealing picture guys, this is definitely the one you should use for your ad copy
something I explained to my brother yesterday that rocked his world: itâs not that scientists canât decide whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, nor is it that itâs âreallyâ one or the other. Itâs both, because weâre talking about two different categorization schemes.
Botanically, a tomato is a fruit. A fruit is scientifically defined as the part of a plant that develops from the ovary after flowering and surrounds the seeds. Itâs defined by its structure and function. In botanical categorization, apples, peaches, grapes, tomatoes, bananas, avocados, pumpkins, peppers, and corn kernels are fruits.
Culinarily, a tomato is a vegetable, because itâs a plant food that is neither starchy nor sweet and you usually donât just eat it raw. Vegetables are culinarily defined by their flavor and how you cook them. In culinary categorization, any part of a plant can be a vegetable: roots (carrots, parsnips), leaves (lettuce, kale), stems (celery), seeds (peas, lima beans), and yes fruits (tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins). In culinary categorization, âfruitsâ are usually botanical fruits, though occasionally they are other parts of the plant instead, as long as theyâre juicy and sweet (strawberries are actually the stems of a plant; the ovaries surrounding the seeds are the little seeds on the outside! Pineapples and figs are a weird flower-ovary fusion called multiple inflorescence!)
These are simply two different categorizational schemes that through the weirdness of historical linguistics use the same word âfruitâ to mean different segments of the totality of plants. Neither is incorrect, because they are two different ways of categorizing plants for two different purposes.
Categories arenât âreal.â Categories donât exist in nature. Things exist in nature, plants exist in nature, rocks and animals and genes and hormones and human experiences exist in nature. And humans look at the totality of everything and we come up with names and categories to sort and understand them. A category is not real; it is only useful or not useful. Botanical categories are useful for different reasons than culinary categories are, but theyâre both useful ways to break up and understand the world. And they are useful in their own contexts, and may not be useful in other contexts. Botany has no use for defining what is and isnât a âvegetableâ so thatâs just not a category in scientific botany. Itâs a useful category for low-sweetness low-starch plant parts you cook in order to eat, though.
And we put everything into categories, and we have reasons for categorizing things the way we doâbut we choose what traits are important to group by, and what traits arenât. Vegetables, nuts, fruits, and grains are culinary plant food categories. And some categories are silly, like âis a taco a sandwich?â Thatâs a categorization game: what traits do we decide make an individual item part of the category or not?
But we categorize other things too. Sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, DSM diagnosis. Age categories such as senior/adult/teenager/child/toddler/infant, or age categories like adult/minor. These are all categorization schemes where humans decided what the categories are and what traits make an individual count as one thing or another. And then we decided how to treat people based on the category we assigned them to. The traits (such as hormones, genital shape, number of years having lived, brain neurochemistry, place where you were born, desire for a romantic relationship with people of a certain gender, desire for a sexual relationship with people of a certain genderâŠ) are real. The categories are how we prioritize, classify, and understand them. Are the categories useful? Or are they not useful? In what contexts are they useful and in what contexts are they not? And what are the effects of playing âis a taco a sandwich? Is a tomato a fruit?â type categorization games with people?
removing body hair is so painful. whether it's pulling it out by tweezing/waxing etc. or shaving. it hurts no matter what: if it's not while removing it, the regrowth is painful (especially in hot weather when it itches bc of regrowth AND sweat). the fact that women are socially shamed into removing their body hair is torture and im not even exaggerating
Anon I am not publishing your ask because it contains rumors I have no desire to spread, but if you're checking my page you should know that I didn't know that people were smearing her. She blocked me following that exchange and I could not see the notes nor did I do any further following up, but I certainly don't wish her any ill.
One thing that makes me kinda sad is seeing people who feel like TTRPGs just aren't for them because they bounced off of some element that is clearly just a symptom of them trying out D&D5e. Like people who have had a hard time with learning the rules would probably do well with any system where the rule formatting and play culture around learning them aren't a mess. One friend of mine didn't like waiting a long time for turns to come up in combat, not even knowing that many games don't even use a turn-based structure.
A lot of D&D5e defenders on here like to claim that asking someone to learn a new system is "gatekeeping" somehow, but I'd argue that acting like one game is emblematic of the entire medium to the exclusion of people who don't click with that one game is way more meaningfully a form of gatekeeping, even if it's fully unintentional.
I strongly believe that not all RPGs are gonna appeal to everyone, but there is an RPG out there for everyone, and I just hope that people who haven't clicked with the most common option to be introduced to can find something that works for them.
Eureka, by A.N.I.M, is a ttrpg that lets the players take actions as various mystery solving detectives, finding their own clues to deduce conclusions themselves!
Things that will never make me think less of someone: Enjoying media, entertainment, or aesthetics with ideologically reactionary elements
Things that will IMMEDIATELY make me think less of someone: Insisting that the ideologically reactionary media, entertainment, or aesthetics they enjoy are actually Le Hecking Epic Wholesome Leftist Praxis
To draw upon a semi-recent Discourse topic, if you encounter a claim along the lines that, idk, for example, the imagery and cultural idea of Knights as it exists in pop culture is entrenched with a long history of islamophonia (due to how much of this cultural imaginary comes directly from the narrative of the Crusades) and your response is "I still think knight imagery is cool, I don't enjoy things based on how ideologically correct they are" I'll respect you infinitely more than if your response was "Actually liking knights is leftist because there's nothing more leftist than protecting those weaker than you"
"I don't engage with this thing to have my politics parroted back at me" will always be 1000x more graceful and productive than trying to argue that everything you like is Fundamentally Leftist, Actually.
That's not at all what's being said here. But rather referencing a tendecy from people who have only ever engaged with D&D as their first and only TTRPG to kinda put a Leftist/found family/bright fantast coat of paint onto D&D games that at the core are not any less of a cynical murder fantasy, because they're still interacting with the base affordances D&D, which are mostly concerned with the act of Killing Things and Taking Their Treasure
(phenomenon that I've seen hyperbolically referred to as the "well, my campaign is about a world where transgender women of all races can work as knights defending the Good Kingdom from the assaults of the Barbaric Hordes that have Threatened Its Borders for Thousands of Years")
Extremely weird of you to single out trans women like that but go off, I guess. I'm sure your moral superiority over people who just wanted to be reflected in the games they play with their friends will benefit you in some meaningful way.
Fellow trans woman here to tell you that you are still completely missing the point (it almost feels like intentionally missing the point, in fact) and misrepresenting what OP is saying. Nobody is saying that you can't enjoy representation, lighter settings, or seeing your own identity or values reflected in media. The point is to engage honestly with the media you consume. Painting a transgender flag over D&D doesn't stop D&D from fundamentally being a game about killing and looting, or assuming that monarchy is cool and good, or having a pretty fucked up set of racial politics tbqh. Like, modifying your game doesn't change the text or its history.
It's still fine to like and enjoy the media on its own terms, and nobody has ever said you can't alter it to your taste. However, you should be aware of what you are altering and the limitations of that. You can create a righteous queendom with transgender knights, knock yourself the fuck out! That entire framing still comes with a truckload of baggage. You have to twist yourself into pretzels if you want to pretend that the text as it exists doesn't include problematic elements. Whether you like it or agree with those elements or not, it does contain them. Which brings us back to the original point - you can pretend that the text is actually totally progressive, or you can engage with the text honestly. The latter will always serve you better.
Cool except none of that was what was being quoted. What was quotes was that only amoral interpretation of DnD and Lancer are valid.
Furthermore, saying 'modifying your game doesn't change the text' is like. Literally the opposite of a true thing.
All you've done is restate the part of the post that I already agreed with and then seemingly completely fail to read my actual complaints in favor of moral elitism.
I am so tired of you useless people who think consumption is the highest level of political engagement. Genuinely exhausting.
Lancer and DnD (for example) have amoral/immoral elements in the text. You seem to want to pretend otherwise, but you cannot, in fact, separate those elements from the text. They are there whether you like them or not.
No, modifying your game *doesn't* change the text. Your version of D&D isn't the version that exists. The books and what they say don't change because your table alters elements of it locally.
Your insults are just bizarre. Neither moral elitism nor the position that consumption is the same as political engagement are positions espoused or implied by anyone in this thread. I think that you are reading everything said here in incredibly bad faith.
Things that will never make me think less of someone: Enjoying media, entertainment, or aesthetics with ideologically reactionary elements
Things that will IMMEDIATELY make me think less of someone: Insisting that the ideologically reactionary media, entertainment, or aesthetics they enjoy are actually Le Hecking Epic Wholesome Leftist Praxis
To draw upon a semi-recent Discourse topic, if you encounter a claim along the lines that, idk, for example, the imagery and cultural idea of Knights as it exists in pop culture is entrenched with a long history of islamophonia (due to how much of this cultural imaginary comes directly from the narrative of the Crusades) and your response is "I still think knight imagery is cool, I don't enjoy things based on how ideologically correct they are" I'll respect you infinitely more than if your response was "Actually liking knights is leftist because there's nothing more leftist than protecting those weaker than you"
"I don't engage with this thing to have my politics parroted back at me" will always be 1000x more graceful and productive than trying to argue that everything you like is Fundamentally Leftist, Actually.
That's not at all what's being said here. But rather referencing a tendecy from people who have only ever engaged with D&D as their first and only TTRPG to kinda put a Leftist/found family/bright fantast coat of paint onto D&D games that at the core are not any less of a cynical murder fantasy, because they're still interacting with the base affordances D&D, which are mostly concerned with the act of Killing Things and Taking Their Treasure
(phenomenon that I've seen hyperbolically referred to as the "well, my campaign is about a world where transgender women of all races can work as knights defending the Good Kingdom from the assaults of the Barbaric Hordes that have Threatened Its Borders for Thousands of Years")
Extremely weird of you to single out trans women like that but go off, I guess. I'm sure your moral superiority over people who just wanted to be reflected in the games they play with their friends will benefit you in some meaningful way.
Fellow trans woman here to tell you that you are still completely missing the point (it almost feels like intentionally missing the point, in fact) and misrepresenting what OP is saying. Nobody is saying that you can't enjoy representation, lighter settings, or seeing your own identity or values reflected in media. The point is to engage honestly with the media you consume. Painting a transgender flag over D&D doesn't stop D&D from fundamentally being a game about killing and looting, or assuming that monarchy is cool and good, or having a pretty fucked up set of racial politics tbqh. Like, modifying your game doesn't change the text or its history.
It's still fine to like and enjoy the media on its own terms, and nobody has ever said you can't alter it to your taste. However, you should be aware of what you are altering and the limitations of that. You can create a righteous queendom with transgender knights, knock yourself the fuck out! That entire framing still comes with a truckload of baggage. You have to twist yourself into pretzels if you want to pretend that the text as it exists doesn't include problematic elements. Whether you like it or agree with those elements or not, it does contain them. Which brings us back to the original point - you can pretend that the text is actually totally progressive, or you can engage with the text honestly. The latter will always serve you better.
Cool except none of that was what was being quoted. What was quotes was that only amoral interpretation of DnD and Lancer are valid.
Furthermore, saying 'modifying your game doesn't change the text' is like. Literally the opposite of a true thing.
All you've done is restate the part of the post that I already agreed with and then seemingly completely fail to read my actual complaints in favor of moral elitism.
I am so tired of you useless people who think consumption is the highest level of political engagement. Genuinely exhausting.
Lancer and DnD (for example) have amoral/immoral elements in the text. You seem to want to pretend otherwise, but you cannot, in fact, separate those elements from the text. They are there whether you like them or not.
No, modifying your game *doesn't* change the text. Your version of D&D isn't the version that exists. The books and what they say don't change because your table alters elements of it locally.
Your insults are just bizarre. Neither moral elitism nor the position that consumption is the same as political engagement are positions espoused or implied by anyone in this thread. I think that you are reading everything said here in incredibly bad faith.
Things that will never make me think less of someone: Enjoying media, entertainment, or aesthetics with ideologically reactionary elements
Things that will IMMEDIATELY make me think less of someone: Insisting that the ideologically reactionary media, entertainment, or aesthetics they enjoy are actually Le Hecking Epic Wholesome Leftist Praxis
To draw upon a semi-recent Discourse topic, if you encounter a claim along the lines that, idk, for example, the imagery and cultural idea of Knights as it exists in pop culture is entrenched with a long history of islamophonia (due to how much of this cultural imaginary comes directly from the narrative of the Crusades) and your response is "I still think knight imagery is cool, I don't enjoy things based on how ideologically correct they are" I'll respect you infinitely more than if your response was "Actually liking knights is leftist because there's nothing more leftist than protecting those weaker than you"
"I don't engage with this thing to have my politics parroted back at me" will always be 1000x more graceful and productive than trying to argue that everything you like is Fundamentally Leftist, Actually.
That's not at all what's being said here. But rather referencing a tendecy from people who have only ever engaged with D&D as their first and only TTRPG to kinda put a Leftist/found family/bright fantast coat of paint onto D&D games that at the core are not any less of a cynical murder fantasy, because they're still interacting with the base affordances D&D, which are mostly concerned with the act of Killing Things and Taking Their Treasure
(phenomenon that I've seen hyperbolically referred to as the "well, my campaign is about a world where transgender women of all races can work as knights defending the Good Kingdom from the assaults of the Barbaric Hordes that have Threatened Its Borders for Thousands of Years")
Extremely weird of you to single out trans women like that but go off, I guess. I'm sure your moral superiority over people who just wanted to be reflected in the games they play with their friends will benefit you in some meaningful way.
Fellow trans woman here to tell you that you are still completely missing the point (it almost feels like intentionally missing the point, in fact) and misrepresenting what OP is saying. Nobody is saying that you can't enjoy representation, lighter settings, or seeing your own identity or values reflected in media. The point is to engage honestly with the media you consume. Painting a transgender flag over D&D doesn't stop D&D from fundamentally being a game about killing and looting, or assuming that monarchy is cool and good, or having a pretty fucked up set of racial politics tbqh. Like, modifying your game doesn't change the text or its history.
It's still fine to like and enjoy the media on its own terms, and nobody has ever said you can't alter it to your taste. However, you should be aware of what you are altering and the limitations of that. You can create a righteous queendom with transgender knights, knock yourself the fuck out! That entire framing still comes with a truckload of baggage. You have to twist yourself into pretzels if you want to pretend that the text as it exists doesn't include problematic elements. Whether you like it or agree with those elements or not, it does contain them. Which brings us back to the original point - you can pretend that the text is actually totally progressive, or you can engage with the text honestly. The latter will always serve you better.
There's this category of TTRPG where the seemingly only selling point besides maybe artwork is giving players permission to jerk off to their own moral purity as manifest from buying the TTRPG.
Candela Obscura is the strawman put forward in this post, but itâs a game that actually exists:
[This was partially written by @ashweather, another member of the A.N.I.M. team.]
Let me preface this by saying that I donât think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if youâve played or enjoyed this game. Itâs just that, at best, the game has a really obnoxious and cowardly tone and at worst has a lot of shit in it that looks really bad if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.Â
If you think that tabletop RPGS are art (and we do), then they can be analyzed like art. They can have unfortunate implications or reflect unexamined reactionary politics. This post is going to be taking screenshots from both the quick start guide and the full rulebook to make this point - while the text between the two is broadly similar, the quickstart guide is more overtly finger-wagging and hostile, saying the quiet part out loud.Â
The thing about Candela Obscura is that it takes place in a fantasy 19th-century England/USA, but it really wants to pretend that it doesnât. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like itâs above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. Itâs so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something âproblematicâ that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.Â
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an âexplorerâ is? Also, I think I have some bad news about 19th century doctors.)
Okay. Look. A lot of this is gesturing at principles that are unobjectionable or even useful to keep in mind when writing a setting like this. Yes, itâs ideal to have a non-Eurocentric historical understanding of technology and culture. Yes, refugees are human beings with their own valuable skills and perspectives. Yes, if you uncritically write an expy of Victorian England or late 19th-century New England, youâre gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldnât just blithely put to the page without thinking about them. And yes, bigotry is a bad thing, obviously.
The problem is twofold: The first is that Candela Obscura feels the need to take a patronizing tone towards its own readers, as though they were incapable of engaging critically with the setting or subject matter on their own terms. The second is that despite all of this finger-wagging, Candela Obscura absolutely does not present a setting with any critical thinking put into its basic construction. (We checked, by the way. None of what we are about to present is supposed to be in-universe propaganda. If it is intended to be, this is not made clear at all in the text itself.)
The game takes place primarily in the city of Newfaire and its surrounding environs - the Fairelands. The Fairelands are prosperous and idyllic, and all but outright stated to be âthe good guys.â All of the âproblematicâ aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..Â
(Donât worry guys thereâs no colonialism here, this version of fantastical New York was settled on a Terra Nullius where nobody lived, right over the ruins of an ancient society with a mix of Egyptian and Mesoamerican coding who practiced strange and corruptive magicks. Remember, reader, this game wants you to go out of your way to avoid reproducing any harmful stereotypes from the era.)
..or are present without any historical or structural reasons for them to be present:
(Donât worry guys, sex work is lawful, profitable, safe, and socially acceptable! Oh yeah all the sex work happens in shady, spooky-looking crime districts that cops monitor, filled with drug-filled dens of illegal vice, though. By the way, there is no brothel listed in this districtâs points of interests, or any further discussion of what sex work in Newfaire is actually like.)
There are so many examples of this that we could spill a novelâs worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just donât have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the âradium girlsâ where the primary victim of the dangerous substance in question is a customer who is already dead when the adventure starts and not the workers who make the products.) Honestly though, this paragraph says more than we could in a hundred pages:
Here we find out that we are reading a TTRPG setting that has the same understanding of bigotry as the movie Crash. No institutionalized bigotry, just âbad actors who hold terrible beliefs.â Just bad apples, with no personal history or cultural roots to their ideas, who presumably sprung out of the ground one day declaring themselves Republicans. Not only do these bad actors come from nowhere, they donât go anywhere either. They donât belong to any social movements, they donât get organized, they donât push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.Â
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? Theyâre under assault.
Thatâs right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of⊠uh, âOtherwhere.â (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) Thatâs where all of the dirty foreigners invaders come from, who want to take away the prosperity of the Fairelands!
Oh, or maybe their whole culture were all coerced into doing it by an evil rock or something, which is definitely less xenophobic. But whatever, who cares what the reasons were. The Fairelands are under attack, and as the dominant power in the world, they need to defend themselves. Against the âcolonists.â With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on âtens of thousands..â You get the picture.) So, whew, glad thatâs over! Otherwhere is still really dangerous, though. They might even be developing weapons of mass destruction of their own:
You know, if Candela Obscura were a person, I have a feeling I wouldnât want to hear its thoughts on Israel.Â
You might be asking, where do the PCs fit in this? Well. The PCs are members of the in-universe organization Candela Obscura. They are an enormously powerful and widespread secret society of sometimes-cops sometimes-vigilantes who fight against the corruptive forces of magick to keep humanity safe. They keep dark secrets, âperform questionable acts in the name of the common good,â and operate entirely without oversight or responsibilities to anyone other than this organization. We are assured that this organization has the best interests of the regions they operate in and of all humanity in mind.
Itâs actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaireâs society being deeply flawed is fine! The Fairelands as a political entity furthering an explicit narrative of being persecuted is fine! The problem is not that any of these elements exist, the problem is that Candela Obscura is utterly allergic to examining them. The text seemingly does not understand the setting it has presented at all.
The game wants to be anti-conservative, but the only kind of story it can produce is one of heroes who are ultimately aligned with the dominant power of the world, preserving the good and righteous status quo by fighting against corruptive, foreign, magical forces. âGay transgender women of all races can be holy knights secret police fighting to protect the good kingdom democracy from the endless hordes of the evil dark race that has threatened its borders for a thousand in recent years!â
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscuraâs gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create âactual-playâ shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, thatâs more true than I even realized at the time. The reason the game has all these bits about how not to be problematic - all of these instructions for avoiding engaging with the more controversial aspects of the setting - is because itâs not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. Itâs intended as brand guidelines for putting on an actual play show. If you google Candela Obscura, the IMBD page for the actual play series appears before the store page for the rulebook.
It seems like the game really doesnât want you to play a character outside of your own culture. And sure, as stated earlier, it is a good idea not to have a mysticized idea of other cultures, or represent them in a callous way. For a private game played at home, though, this is not really something you need to dedicate pages accounting for. Nobody outside the table has to hear a poorly-done accent or contend with a less-than-perfectly researched religious portrayal - and if there is a pervasive issue with someone being bigoted or leaning on stereotypes at the table, frankly, that is a problem that is outside the scope of a TTRPG to address.
However, if you are an actor on a show, portraying people from different cultures comes with a whole different set of (much more justified) baggage. Candela Obscuraâs approach to player attitudes on the setting makes so much more sense as brand guidelines than it does as a codification of how to play a game. "Donât have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Donât have actors say foreign words they donât know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Donât show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
Weâd like to end this by contrasting this attitude with Coyote & Crow, a game made by indigenous Americans, and one that is also actually meant to be played. Coyote & Crow invites all players to (respectfully, in good faith) create characters from indigenous cultures. The creators have challenged those who avoid their game on the basis that âthey donât want to be disrespectful by playing itâ because that would involve portraying a Native character - in the end, who is that helping? That attitude results in potential players who remain just as ignorant of Native American cultures and - more importantly - donât buy or support their game!
