âWake up early. Drink coffee. Work hard. Be ambitious. Keep your priorities straight, your mind right and your head up. Do well, live well and dress really well. Do what you love, love what you do. It is time to start living.â
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"
When it comes to worldbuilding advice, I do try to steer people away from the old flat tropes of making any singular people group "good", "bad", "more civil", or "primitive", or whatever. It's important that you, the writer of a fictional world, don't just rehash the same problems that have been present in the genre for decades and which are heavily tied to racism and other forms of bigotry. And no, just flipping the script on which group gets to be "good" and which group is now "evil" is not subversive and it does not solve the problem.
but also!!! attempting to write a shiny utopia of a world where all the inequality is just magically non-existent and everyone gets along without any issues will often get you the problems illustrated in this post. you still have to actually understand why the world is the way it is, and what it really takes to create peace and equality. People are people. there will always be some trouble between them. You can tackle that trouble in unique and interesting ways in your own fiction!
I've found in my own worldbuilding, that trying to just make things Fine And Good actually makes it a lot harder to build a coherent world with stories that feel alive and have believable conflicts. For example, the ttrpg setting described above here, where there is somehow a whole world of people who have fled to this perfect little utopia country where everyone is free of all bigotry ever... but also somehow there are still other people in the world beyond that are super mean and want to conquer the good country (for their resources. which... previously they seemed to be sharing just fine as a population built primarily of global refugees. why is it suddenly a problem that other people want their resources. is this the only place with bountiful resources? why? how? I don't want to make this post too much longer but man are my analytical gears spinning.)
tldr: turns out systemic problems are actually kind of better for worldbuilding than trying to just avoid being Problematic. If you do your research and actually understand why the real world is the way it is, you'll have an easier time building a fictional world that makes sense, with conflicts that are actually organic.
feminist killjoy hours again, what the actual fuck is âweird girl literatureâ and how often do we acquiesce to the latest degrading gendered advertising campaigns
Wow wtf HIV/AIDS was discovered by Flossie Wong-Staal, an Chinese-American woman, and sheâs the reason the HIV test even exists. AND THEN she invented the molecular knife that lead to treatments for HIV/AIDS. And sheâs STILL ALIVE. We donât hear about the contributions of Women of Color enough, my word. Madness.
you can always tell a major breakthrough is made by a woman, a woc or any poc because itâs either completely ignored or never credited like it just happened by itself
the year is 2035. the new beauty standard is for women to cut their ears off, as ears are a masculine trait which make the face look too big and hearing isnt necessary as it doesnt align with being demure. evil feminists say perhaps this is unnecessary and ears are natural. women are agressively proclaiming they are cutting their ears off due to sensory issues
it pains me to say it but the more people talk shit about the women who wear those shorts/leggings with the weird butt seam that looks like it gives you a terminal wedgie, the more compelled I feel to take the womenâs side
and while weâre at it, Iâm done worrying about cameltoe. I donât have time to be pulling and tugging at my clothes all day. if you can see the outline of my pussy you should say thank you and go about your business
in case you didn't know it, this is also related to how cyclosporiasis spreads. when farm workers are not given adequate bathroom breaks or access to restrooms, they have no choice but to relieve themselves directly into the fields, especially if they are already suffering from diarrheal disease and have been made to work while sick. the pathogen ends up in irrigation ditches and, eventially, all over your food. this is why human rights like sanitation need to be available to everyone in order to be effective for anyone.
Okay so. The Romans think that sex doesn't count as real sex unless Someone Is Getting Penetrated By A Dick Or Dick-Adjacent Object. Very sort of dick-centric system.
So Latin has six words for "to fuck", divided into three pairs: one pair for each of the possible Holes (ass, mouth, pussy). In each pair there is a word for topping and a word for bottoming.
Most people who know a little about Latin fuck verbs know 'pedicare' and 'irrumare' from the first line of Catullus 16 (PÄdÄŤcÄbĹ ego vĹs et irrumÄbĹ), which is a poem about saying "absolutely shut the fuck up and piss all the way off" to fandom antis and purity police who are making repulsive accusations about you personally, based on things they're reading into your work from a bad-faith perspective. Catullus was so real for that and it's incredibly endearing to me that he was dealing with the same thing we are still dealing with. I got a hater in my askbox doing this about The Wisdom of Emperors just the other day, but I took the high road and, unlike Catullus, did not tell them "I will assfuck you and I will facefuck you"
So here sort of a chart about the verbs:
Topping | Bottoming
Mouth: irrumare | fellare
Ass: pedicare | cevere
Cunt: futuere | crisare
Another fun fact related to the fuck verbs was that the Romans didn't think about sexual orientation in terms of who you're attracted to, they thought about it in terms of "which is your favorite hole and what do you like to do with it." So you'll get graffiti (ancient roman subtweeting) about things like "Marcus is a fututor [cunt-fucker] and a pedico [ass-fucker] but omg girlies I also heard he's a fellator [cock-sucker] đđđđ" In the modern day we'd just call him bisexual, but in Ancient Rome it is not enough to know if someone is bisexual (they think it's kind of perverted if a man only fucks women, like do you have some kind of freaky pussy fetish???? you've never once even fucked a twink??? dat's gay, bro. gay to not be bi), you also have to know if he's being bisexual in a respectable sort of way
You will notice that pussy-eating is not on this list, because those words do not mean "to fuck", they translate more directly to just "pussy-licking" (cunnilingus), and because the Romans are sexist as all hell and think that's gross and filthy anyway. This is not ONLY because of pussy terror, it's also that the mouth is the most sacred part of the body -- so eating pussy or sucking a dick is actually considered slightly more "shameful" than getting fucked in the ass. (Please note as well that the fuck verbs are gender neutral -- if you're a roman man and your girlfriend owns a strap-on, she can [pedicare] you. but be careful because your sworn enemy in the forum will have a fucking FIELD DAY if he hears about that and will write a Mean Poem about you or subtweet you on a public wall)
The moral of this story is that the Ancient Romans were absolutely *GAGGING* for social media (see Martial's Epigrams, aka My Best Tweets), and the second moral of this story is that if this was a fun post for you, you should look at my kickstarter for alllllll of this kind of nonsense in the form of A Fantasy Novel That's Pretending To Be An Academic Paper With A Fake Bibliography And Foonotes aka The Wisdom of Emperors. And please signal boost this so everyone can know about Latin Fuck Verbs and Roman Subtweeting, we've really learned so much here together
Your artstyle is like your gut microbiome in the way its everything you consume and like and it also has all your bacteria up in it. Thats probably how that works
I feel like you can lick my drawings and get a very clear mental picture of the art I studied as a child, but maybe the ones I think I see arenât as obvious to others as they are to me!
people still getting mad at this post i made in 2014 so I will add here. in 2026. that the point of this post isnât âhappy endings badâ its when the storyâs only way to imagine a happy ending is a heterosexual nuclear family for everyone.
It is kind of radicalizing to see just how much better the economy often performs under Democrats, despite their looney socialist wing.
Republicans wax poetic about free markets but thereâs little evidence they do more to advance them nationally. Dems for their part shy away from the capitalist label but, with Trump in the equation, spend less and ink out more free trade.
How Lord Peter Wimsey reacts to His Child Being Born
"Good God!" said his lordship. "Did I do that?"
"All the evidence points that way," replied his wife.
"Then I can only say that I never knew so convincing a body of evidence produce such an inadequate result."
The nurse appeared to take this reflection personally. She said in a tone of rebuke: "He's a beautiful boy."
"H'm," said Peter. He adjusted his eyeglass more carefully. "Well, you're the expert witness. Hand him over."
The nurse did so with a dubious air. She was relieved to see that this disconcerting parent handled the child competently; as, in a man who was an experienced uncle, was not, after all, so very surprising. Lord Peter sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed.
"Do you feel it's up to standard?" he inquired with some anxiety. "Of course, your workmanship's always soundâbut you never know with these collaborate efforts."
"I think it'll do," said Harriet drowsily.
"Good." He turned abruptly to the nurse. "All right; we'll keep it. Take it and put it away, and tell 'em to invoice it to me. It's a very interesting addition to you, Harriet; but it would have been a hell of a rotten substitute." His voice wavered a little, for the last twenty-four hours had been very trying ones, and he had had the fright of his life.
The doctor, who had been doing something in the other room entered in time to catch the last words. "There was never any likelihood of that, you goop," he said, cheerfully.
-Excerpt from The Haunted Policeman by Dorothy Sayers
I want to learn more exclamations that arenât strictly just religious stuff. âJesus Christâ this, âoh my godâ that, nah I want something fresh.
What are some of yâallâs favorite exclamations that arenât about god?
had a friend who used to make new ones up on the spot. The only one that stuck with me was 'good golly jelly beans'. If something catastrophic happens I go for 'that's not ideal.'
why be radically exclusionary abt queerness when you could be radically inclusionary instead. let's inflate the numbers. let's become the majority. the sky's the limit
"we can't let just ANYONE call themselves queer!!" what are you talking about. I'm steepling my fingers and gleefully cackling every time we Get Another One and you should be too. lock in.
Fuck yeah, let's make this little raft we're surviving on big as hell. If I bring my bit of driftwood and you bring yours and we let as many people join in as want to, we might end up with a functional boat.
Back when I was active on AVEN (I have no idea what it's like now), we had two definitions of asexual -- an external definition and an internal definition. The external definition, the one that's on the wiki and the press material and that everyone uses when talking about asexuality, was of course "an asexual is someone who does not experience sexual attraction". The internal definition, the one we kept in mind when talking to each other, was "an asexual is someone who calls themself asexual".
The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.
And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.
Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.
And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.
An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.
An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.
These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.
And that is absolutely not exclusive to asexual communities.
