[max0r voice] a jet game, syntax? you've gone insane. jet games are played by dads that have twelve keyboards and people with actual money
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hello there, my name is Syntax or Omen, It/Zhey, aroace and an adult
my art blog is @syntaxsynapse
BY THE WAY "please enjoy arbys" is my transformers tag and "please hate arbys" is my shattered glass tag dont WORRY ABOUT IT
also "arbys custom menu items" is the tag for my tf ocs
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stares into the camera. I hate my fucking country
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also TERFS FUCK OFF I LOVE TRANS PEOPLE <- is a trans people
ALSO if you use AI fuck off, this includes c.ai. that's AI. fucking leave thank youuuuuuuu
@security-unit for murderbot posting
please do not interact w/ me if you post incest/adult x minor stuff, it makes me uncomfortable. tyty
also I run the tangotek Tumblr community, hii! you can join here >:]
I am Tidestrider on Flightrising (don't let the name and graphic fool you, I am, always have been, and always will be arcane)
retired from the EPPRBCU, you may know me from my posts [LIKE THIS].
ALSO you may know me from my hit sideblog @baba-is-blog where I post Whatever The Fuck I Want in babaspeak. it's a blast over there. if you found me from over there via artfight: hi yeah it's me . you got me. im cyanmod
favorite character trope: "I probably have something I should look into getting diagnosed BUT there are other more important matters rn so I don't really wanna deal with that yet.." and they put it off forever or at least until the city is saved
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!
I have encountered this firsthand. I'm a massive history nerd, especially about pirates (among other things, but pirates are relevant to the story). I was hanging out in a system agnostic TTRPG server and Pirate Borg was mentioned so I talked about my idea for a historical fantasy campaign set around historical pirates and the Nassau Pirate's Republic. Started explaining some basic ideas, how it's basically about trying to keep this rogue nation together amid external hostility from England, France, and Spain and internal strife caused by a lack of trust and Edward Teach's descent into madness. Naturally this brings up Blackbeard and his crew, which contained several escaped slaves, and that the Queen Anne's revenge was a former slave ship. I immediately get the *several people are typing...* and am welcomed with several messages that Pirate Borg takes place in an alternate history where slavery never happened. I end up trying to have to defend myself, explaining the *true facts* that most pirates were escaped slaves, both native and black, and that a lot of pirate ships were captured slave ships because they had thicker hulls and could take more punishment in a fight. They were like "But you can have diverse crews and sturdy ships without bringing slavery into it." My response was "you *could*, but then you lose valuable historical context and systemic evils to fight against, I like running stories about making the world a better place." Some people understood that, but many of them *literally* shot back "But thinking about slavery makes me uncomfortable, so maybe just write it out of the setting?" That's when I shut up but I was just screaming in my head "YES, THE POINT IS IT SHOULD MAKE YOU FEEL UNCOMFORTABLE AND WANT TO CORRECT IT"
"trans men are identifying as lesbians!!" "people are transitioning without experiencing dysphoria" "people are claiming to be afab tfem!!" "people think theyre animals!!" "trans women don't want to medically transition!!"
'being secular does not automatically make you progressive and being religious does not automatically make you conservative', i say. everyone boos, but i know I'm right
i really need to shake some people and say âbeing passive in every situation does not mean you are not making active choices and it does not absolve you from harming others. consistently choosing to do nothing in every situation and believing that you couldnât have possibly been the problem because you chose inaction and not a more agressive approach can in fact also be harmful.â because this keeps happening and its driving me nuts
Southerners really went off with âyâallâ and the Brits really went off with âinnitâ but most of all the Aussies really went off with calling everyone cunts all the time
people đĽď¸ď¸đĽď¸ď¸ who are anti-emoji đŤâď¸ piss me off đĄđ¤Źđ¤ they made little pictures đ¤đź to help us convey our emotions in text đ˛đ and you đ wanna act đŹ like you're above it all? âŹď¸âď¸âď¸ fuck you buddy đ and fuck your dog too đđ
