Really happy that King Gus being gay is coupled so well with his whole plot about being a king and not having a direct heir! Like obviously Luis is right and gay people can have kids and also we’ve already seen that trans people exist in this world and are somewhat accepted but it’s a fun radical act in this place where feudalism still runs the land (and we see with Julien that there’s intense pressure for nobles to breed and have many heirs) for Gus to essentially be saying “I’m not taking a wife or having a kid even though it’s supposedly practical and pragmatic and I will be doing old Celtic tradition stuff by passing the throne to my nephew”. Just really well put together stuff from Brennan
Also, man. None of this would have landed as hard for the audience if we didn't already have history with the hounds of the king/gus' reputation from the Soldier's table and all of the background for the sundered houses from the Seekers
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 it’s 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 don’t think that the makers of Candela Obscura are morally evil, or that I think less of your moral worth if you’ve played or enjoyed this game. It’s 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.
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.
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 doesn’t. It wants the aesthetics of this setting and almost every trope that comes baked into it, but also wants to act like it’s above all that. It wants to have its cake and denounce it too. It’s so pants-shittingly terrified that it or the players might say or do something “problematic” that it loops back around to being incredibly offensive.
To take just a few examples, the text is absolutely riddled with this kind of sentiment:
(What the fuck do they think an “explorer” 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, it’s 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, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of insane stereotypes (especially Orientalist ones) that you probably shouldn’t 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 “the good guys.” All of the “problematic” aspects of the societies the game is emulating are either scrubbed without thinking about the implications of scrubbing them..
(Don’t worry guys there’s 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:
(Don’t 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 district’s 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 novel’s worth of digital ink talking about it. (We just don’t have time to get into, for instance, their adventure inspired by the “radium girls” 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 “bad actors who hold terrible beliefs.” 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 don’t go anywhere either. They don’t belong to any social movements, they don’t get organized, they don’t push for regressive political changes, and if they ever do, they certainly never succeed at those goals.
You see, despite these bad apples, the soil they grew from is pure. And you know something else about the idyllic, almost utopian Fairelands? They’re under assault.
That’s right! Hale (which the Fairelands is a part of) is under assault from the dastardly, corruptive forces of… uh, “Otherwhere.” (Yeah, do they all have hooked noses and recessed chins too?) That’s 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 “colonists.” With nukes chain lightning.
(That last sentence continues on “tens of thousands..” You get the picture.) So, whew, glad that’s 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 wouldn’t want to hear its thoughts on Israel.
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, “perform questionable acts in the name of the common good,” 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.
It’s actually fine - cool, even! - that PCs are secret police/CIA agents who engage in morally dubious acts for the purported common good. Newfaire’s 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. “Gay 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!”
On a first read a while back, I said Candela Obscura’s gameplay mechanics make it sound like a game more meant to create “actual-play” shows than to be actually played. On examining the text more closely, that’s 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 it’s not really intended as a game to be played in a private environment. It’s 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 doesn’t 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 Obscura’s 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. "Don’t have actors appear in insensitive costumes on camera." "Don’t have actors say foreign words they don’t know how to pronounce on camera." "Remember not to have your white actor do a Romani 'fortune-telling' scene on camera." "Don’t show anything that could negatively affect the perception of the brand."
We’d 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 “they don’t want to be disrespectful by playing it” 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 - don’t buy or support their game!
Yeah I kinda had all the same complaints about it when I first saw it come out, like I get that people want to have their fantasy horror steampunk gothic eldritch scifi whatever without all the sticky implications of real world oppression and dynamics or whatever but it tends to just render stories inert and kind of make them about nothing in a lot of cases imo, or worse, basically just recreating all the terrible structures and systems of the real world but making it #diverse or whatever. I think what really hits it on the head is the point about a lot of these guidelines and systems existing for streamed actual play shows rather than for private games. In games I play with my friends that I trust, we absolutely go into these topics and themes, but so much of the way it’s talked about in the space is about “I don’t want these white/cis/straight/make/etc popular ttrpg streamers to badly do stories about other cultures or marginalized groups or real-world oppression”
day one after changing sheets: ok im gonna kick my bad habits i won't eat in bed or leave knives or scissors or lighters in bed I'll have only normal bed things in my bed and I'll change the sheets more often too
day two after changing sheets: oh yeah this half eaten bundt cake is sleeping with me tonight
Andrei Dalca is a rumpled, soft-spoken engineer who once believed humanity had outgrown war — until the Tranquility attack nearly killed his son. Now he’s helping build something powerful enough to protect the future, even as he fears he’s becoming complicit in the very forces he’s spent his life warning against.
Vera “Fishcakes” Lam is a feral, sharp-eyed Martian orphan who looks like a kid but moves like a blade. Torn from her parents during Mars’s first great betrayal and raised among the Moon’s forgotten children, she learned early that survival isn’t about safety... it’s about choosing her own freedom.
Lachesis “Kiki” Davis has built a name on charm and nerve. With a rare-metal asteroid to her name, she’s fielding offers from across the system and leaning into the thrill while it lasts.
Project Daedalus: build a spaceborne first-response defense platform capable of intercepting any Martian threat before it reaches Earth space.
The Icaron: Part Ark, part battleship. First of its kind Thermoplasmic Routing Core drawing from solar, nuclear, EM fields. Deploys smaller craft with pinpoint precision.
Breaking my silence on heated rivalry. Here's my main thought. It is so fabulous to me to watch these two like proper acting theory pilled animal work clowning physical theatre guys (a type i am highly familiar with) grappling in some kind of sisyphean hand to hand combat with some of the most awkward fanfiction dialogue ever written. And well sometimes they win. But always the point of fascination is the fight.
there's so much cool shit in our stretch goals that I think I may have failed to mention that one of them is having a phantom pulse ttrpg (rock band fights ghosts) designed by Jonny Sims and Sasha Sienna. yes, that Jonny Sims.
Do you love 90s rock, queer found family, ghosts, and also fiction podcasts? Well, do we have a show for you!
From the creator of The Bright Sessions comes a thrilling new original rock audio drama. Phantom Pulse is the story of a 90s rock band going out on their very first tour. But this band isn't like any other–they don’t just play music, they exorcise ghosts with it.
Phantom Pulse is currently crowdfunding for their first season. You can give to the Kickstarter now and get exclusive, limited edition merch, early access to the show, and much more.
The five band members are being played by truly incredible actors: Nicholas Podany, Erika Ishii, Briggon Snow, Juliana Gutiérrez Arango, and Erin Caesar. And the creative team is made up of audio drama veterans: Lauren Shippen, Ella Watts, Evan Cunningham, and Brandon Grugle.
If you believe in original, queer art that is earnest and inclusive, but also messy and dramatic, please consider giving to our Kickstarter!!!
and if you can't support monetarily, please reblog THIS post and help us hit our community goals!!
New episode of Conversations with Ghosts! Baseball!!!
We absolutely didn't plan to release this right after the world series ended... but the new episode of Conversations with Ghosts is all about baseball! And the Brooklyn Dodgers! And loss and regret and all that jazz. Take a listen wherever you get your podcasts!
Got into baseball properly like two months ago right as the Bluejays were on the come-up, so very prolific time to be listening to this as I seethe about the Dodgers post-world-series
If you haven't checked out Conversations with Ghosts, the new podcast from the creators of Archive 81 - you absolutely should. It's available wherever you get your podcasts, and there's three episodes already in the feed, with a fourth one coming tomorrow.
We’ve got a really special episode of Conversations with Ghosts for you this week! It features the spirit of a raver from the 90s, includes some INCREDIBLE dance music… and is features acting AND writing by Dan Powell! Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.
https://pod.link/1843137773
This is the first full episode of a Dead signals production Dan’s ever written… and this season of conversations with ghosts features three Dan-authored eps. (Out of seventeen in total)
God this one is so so good, the music is fantastic… feeling very introspective after this
(Also sidenote, it’s crazy how good Dan and Marc are in this one, like they were great all the way back to s1 of Archive 81, but there’s just so much nuance and warmth and melancholy and beauty in the performances this ep)
turnnoffyourmind
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