Post by Harkovast on Feb 4, 2015 14:07:17 GMT
Shadowrun is an interesting rpg to me.
The reason is that it was clearly written by some real granola muching white hippie types with dreadlocks who wanted to make an enviromental, anti capitalist, anti imperialist game. It was above spirituality over coming cold, evil machines, native people rising up against their white oppressors and mother Gaia purifying the land.
But virtually everyone who actually plays it totally ignores all that pseudo spiritual crap in order to play a-moral cyborg mercenaries with machine guns.
The game is based on the quite cool concept that in a grim cyber punk type future run by corrupt mega corporations, magic returns to the world. People turn into orcs and elves, magic spells now actually work, a dragon ends up running for president. All pretty cool.
A sort of mash up of genres.
But there was another side to the game, one that the rule book kept banging on about.
In this future the Native Americans were having their land stolen off them by the evil corporations who told the US government what to do, so the natives decided to fight back with magic!
The native Americans, it turned out, were super amazingly good at magic and could basically use it to over power the US military.
The US was forced to concede a large swath of its territory to the native people, who then proceeded to evict everyone living in those areas who wasn't a native american.
Wow, quite a bit to break down there, huh?
So apparently Native Americans are all kinda chomping at the bit on their reservations to destroy the US (who knew?)
They also must have used all that magic to clone themselves, since there are in the region of about 5 million people identifying as Native American in the US at the minute compared to a current total US population of around 300 millions.
Evil Whitey could die ten to one and still win this kind of war.
It also raises the logistical problem of all that territory will now be deserted. What's more, all the houses will be left empty, entire cities depopulated. Is it all just being left there?
But the biggest bug bear with all this is that ITS INCREDIBLY RACIST!
Native Americans in this narrative are one homogeneous group, all banding together purely on racial grounds.
The story is very clear that the natives are the goodies and the ones we are supposed to be cheering for...as they drive people from their homes for no crime other than being of the wrong race.
The books just sort of hand wave how this was done, but it apparently went pretty smoothly.
While I'm sure a bunch of super powered shamans COULD force people from their homes if they wanted to...the idea you could do this peacefully? Just taking into account how many Americans own guns and would have a response of "Holy shit! The NRA were right! They ARE coming for my gun!" and hunker down...the whole concept is laughable.
Did people get to take their stuff with them? How did they transport it? Were they paid for their houses? If not, the native americans were stealing their belongings before kicking them out, but where would the native americans get the money to pay for half the real estate in America?
Also, the idea that you could divide Native Americans from none natives is laughable. Loads and loads of "white" Americans have some native americans ancestory. One of my adopted daughters does, but her mother and me do not. Would she be allowed to stay while we were evicted? How much blood of the tribe (and apparantly any tribe will do at this point) to be let off?
If you want to make it really amusing...imagine how it looked when the Native American shaman troops go into the Jewish Areas.
Jews clearly aren't native american! They will have to go.
We they will have to leave their houses, get on the trains and go east.
Yes, the hippies that wrote this shit managed to turn Native Americans into the Nazis.
The irony is that none of this shit ever comes up in the main game.
No one wants to roleplay about a bunch of tribal throw backs who aren't ever treated as the bad guys (even when they do evil shit) because the patronisingly racist authors dont want to get called racist.
A senario where the heroes mow down waves of native americans just won't fly these days.
So you can pretty much take all this crap out of the background and no one would care. All the games anyone plays in shadowrun involve big cyberpunk cities and high tech stuff like blade runner or robocop, not dances with wolves.
The whole thing reads as some horrendous white man's guilt fantasy, but ends up becoming the most horrendously racist to the very people its trying to big up.
If I told you the natives only used technology that didnt harm the environment, that probably wouldn't makes things look any less patronising and offensive, would it?
The reason is that it was clearly written by some real granola muching white hippie types with dreadlocks who wanted to make an enviromental, anti capitalist, anti imperialist game. It was above spirituality over coming cold, evil machines, native people rising up against their white oppressors and mother Gaia purifying the land.
But virtually everyone who actually plays it totally ignores all that pseudo spiritual crap in order to play a-moral cyborg mercenaries with machine guns.
The game is based on the quite cool concept that in a grim cyber punk type future run by corrupt mega corporations, magic returns to the world. People turn into orcs and elves, magic spells now actually work, a dragon ends up running for president. All pretty cool.
A sort of mash up of genres.
But there was another side to the game, one that the rule book kept banging on about.
In this future the Native Americans were having their land stolen off them by the evil corporations who told the US government what to do, so the natives decided to fight back with magic!
The native Americans, it turned out, were super amazingly good at magic and could basically use it to over power the US military.
The US was forced to concede a large swath of its territory to the native people, who then proceeded to evict everyone living in those areas who wasn't a native american.
Wow, quite a bit to break down there, huh?
So apparently Native Americans are all kinda chomping at the bit on their reservations to destroy the US (who knew?)
They also must have used all that magic to clone themselves, since there are in the region of about 5 million people identifying as Native American in the US at the minute compared to a current total US population of around 300 millions.
Evil Whitey could die ten to one and still win this kind of war.
It also raises the logistical problem of all that territory will now be deserted. What's more, all the houses will be left empty, entire cities depopulated. Is it all just being left there?
But the biggest bug bear with all this is that ITS INCREDIBLY RACIST!
Native Americans in this narrative are one homogeneous group, all banding together purely on racial grounds.
The story is very clear that the natives are the goodies and the ones we are supposed to be cheering for...as they drive people from their homes for no crime other than being of the wrong race.
The books just sort of hand wave how this was done, but it apparently went pretty smoothly.
While I'm sure a bunch of super powered shamans COULD force people from their homes if they wanted to...the idea you could do this peacefully? Just taking into account how many Americans own guns and would have a response of "Holy shit! The NRA were right! They ARE coming for my gun!" and hunker down...the whole concept is laughable.
Did people get to take their stuff with them? How did they transport it? Were they paid for their houses? If not, the native americans were stealing their belongings before kicking them out, but where would the native americans get the money to pay for half the real estate in America?
Also, the idea that you could divide Native Americans from none natives is laughable. Loads and loads of "white" Americans have some native americans ancestory. One of my adopted daughters does, but her mother and me do not. Would she be allowed to stay while we were evicted? How much blood of the tribe (and apparantly any tribe will do at this point) to be let off?
If you want to make it really amusing...imagine how it looked when the Native American shaman troops go into the Jewish Areas.
Jews clearly aren't native american! They will have to go.
We they will have to leave their houses, get on the trains and go east.
Yes, the hippies that wrote this shit managed to turn Native Americans into the Nazis.
The irony is that none of this shit ever comes up in the main game.
No one wants to roleplay about a bunch of tribal throw backs who aren't ever treated as the bad guys (even when they do evil shit) because the patronisingly racist authors dont want to get called racist.
A senario where the heroes mow down waves of native americans just won't fly these days.
So you can pretty much take all this crap out of the background and no one would care. All the games anyone plays in shadowrun involve big cyberpunk cities and high tech stuff like blade runner or robocop, not dances with wolves.
The whole thing reads as some horrendous white man's guilt fantasy, but ends up becoming the most horrendously racist to the very people its trying to big up.
If I told you the natives only used technology that didnt harm the environment, that probably wouldn't makes things look any less patronising and offensive, would it?