RPGaDay2024 Day 7 - RPG with Good Form

The RPG world has become a wonderful landscape of choices. Even within the proliferation of "5e compatible" games, there is an exceptional variety of settings, themes and stories to be told.

One of the best features of this trend is the rise of BIPOC and other minority authors creating representative and inclusive games that feel welcoming to everybody, but allow the represented minorities to feel seen. And since RPGs are inherently devices to tell stories, it helps players to understand, envision and tell stories that wouldn't normally be part of their repertoire.

While I have an art header for this entry, I'm going to call out a few different works that I think show the "good form" of being exceptional products that also promote representation.

Coyote and Crow

Coyote and Crow bills itself as a "Sci-fi RPG set in an uncolonized future", and is written by North American indigenous authors. This tops my list because it's popular; it created its own RPG ruleset to support the mechanics it wants to emphasize, and it's very well done as both a product and a framework for storytelling.

It is concurrently both welcoming, and exclusionary. It doesn't claim to be for any specific people, but it does have two statements early in the rulebook:

• If you are an indigenous person, and have your own stories and traditions, by all means, don't feel bound by what's here. Include your own.
• If you are not indigenous, don't bring in things that you "know" from other sources.

Some people have taken offense to this, but when I was visiting Alaska, I got to see this same viewpoint in a very practical way. The indigenous guides in one stopover told a story from their people. It was a great story, and one of the questions they got was how it compared to other tribes' stories; They responded that they don't tell other tribes' stories, because they are not theirs to tell, and to get it wrong in even the most subtle ways would do a disservice to the story.

What makes this game work so well is that while it's based on a speculative Native American culture where colonialization didn't happen, it also throws the setting in the the (near) future, so that new stories can be played out without risking the integrity of those historic myths and legends.

The book was successful enough that they are (going to be) crowd funding a sequel that gets deeper into their world of myth and story

We Are All Mad Here

Monte Cook Game's We Are All Mad Here is a book that combines fairy tales and mental health. The book title is a reference to the Cheshire Cat quote in Alice and Wonderland. The game is about telling fairy tales, but that's qualified that true fairy tales are often quite wild and illogical, and so it explicitly also included mental health deliberately and respectfully.

Several friends and family members have anxiety and depression, are bipolar and even a few who are schizophrenic. I have friends who are autistic, and in fact one person blew me away by pointing out that his Asperger's diagnosis didn't change who he was, it just gave him a framework to better deal with the differences in perspective.

As such, I'm a big proponent of normalizing mental health, as being no different than physical health, so a role playing game that puts this at the front if its design criteria is always going to be a win in my eyes. The fact that it's highly reviewed, and a lot of fun is a bonus.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

I am also an outspoken LGBTQIA+ ally, and always support normalizing it in normal society. There are several great TTRPGs that support and explore this theme, but I'm going to call out Evil Hat's Thirsty Sword Lesbians as my representative choice. Based on the popular "Powered by the Apocalypse" engine, I was sold on getting this as soon as I saw the title.

It speaks of high adventure, LGBTQ representation, and somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek approach to it all. Without looking I'd have guessed the art was Kaja and Phil Foglio, just because of the vibe, but it turns out that it was by Kanesha Bryant, and she nailed it.

Besides being a representative game, it also won the "best game" Ennie, plus awards for best writing, and several other things.

Pathfinder: Mwangi Expanse

I wanted to include something about African RPGs, because there is so much ancient culture and history there, which most of the world doesn't know anything about.

Looking it up, it turns out that there are dozens of them, all written by native Africans or people with strong native African connections. A simple google search took me to some wonderful articles that explained the themes, authors and strengths of several TTRPGs set in African cultures.

While I haven't had a chance to read through it, I did read the reviews of several games, and I chose this one, because it's very popular, well reviewed, and supported by the popular 3.5/5e alternative "Pathfinder" system. Paizo has gone out of its way to be respectful and inclusive in its games in general and deserves credit for funding and selling a book like this.

Honorable Mention: The Strange

No article on "good form" would be complete without retelling the story of Monte Cook Game's cultural faux pas in their Strange RPG, and what they did about.

The Strange is a world-hopping game. While the specifics vary, it's generally that you are from earth, and you can jump to other worlds--fantasy, biotech, Arthurian, a land of sentient trees, etc. And while there, you take forms that are appropriate to the world, and change your core abilities for something that works in that world, instead.

In the original Strange Corebook, they included a Native American world as one of the places you could go. While it was solid writing, it also played to some disrespectful stereotypes of Native Americans--an extreme example of what they ask you not to do in Coyote and Wolf. 

Some indigenous Americans contacted MCG about it, and they both admitted to their mistake, and worked to fix it. They issued a public apology, rewrote that section with the support of Native American cultural specialists, released the updated world as a free product on their site, and replaced the previous world in future copies of their PDF.

Whether it's companies creating RPGs that lets people see themselves and their identity in stories, or RPGs that help people tell stories that respect and explore cultures other than their own, or simply companies admitting where they did something wrong, and striving to do better in the future, the RPG industry is changing for the better...and that's Good Form.