I hope you have read up to this point, and are about to retort (clever boy!) something like "Keep Politics Out of My Tabletop Roleplaying Games!" Because, you Clever Boy (probably almost always a White Dude) of course, of course you are about to say it. You are merely an antibody in a vast system, a White Blood Cell, so to speak, so to stretch a metaphor. Wargames are an offshoot of War, always (in the UK and the US) the province of the Dyspeptic Old Rich White Men who send the poor and disenfranchised youths off to die. To die with a funny dream in their heads, that the cause of the Wealthy is also the cause of the Poor. In the beginning, the hobby's roots in Wargaming, Kriegspiel, Violence and Suppression of the Hideous Other for Riches... Well, how did it give rise to a population of people quibbling about the niceties of nipples in Officially Licensed Projects?
Man, you gotta understand that for the most part, the business end of the Industry upon which the Discourse thrives. It's extractive. It eats your good ideas and it shits money into some guy's pocket. It's colonial in the sense that it goes into your brain and stays there taking up space like all memes do. It takes the clever ideas of the people who use it, gussies them up a bit, and sells it all back to them and makes them think that they (The Users) are not in charge of things. If there wasn't a whole thriving industry of Desktop Roleplaying Publishers making awesome, free, and easily distributable products, WoTC would not now be selling 60 dollar full-color glossy-paper tomes of whatever it is they sell these days. WoTC would have died 10 years ago and RPGs would be a pleasant and hilarious memory made fun of on what is left of network television.
So: it depends on this monolithic industry, protected by legions of vocal fans who want New Stuff, but don't want Things to Change Too Much. So like: Ravnica and Sword Coast stuff, because for example Mystara and the old D&D stuff that were attempts at diversity were (A) shitty (because they didn't really go to the people they needed to go to to find out about the real history of stuff) and (B) not well received because at root, the hobby has almost always been until relatively recently about the Dumb Hero Fantasies of proto-fascist White Guys. Thanks, Tolkien! Thanks ER Burroughs! Thanks, I mean the list and the Road Goes Ever On, dig? Even Dune was some misguided shit, as forward thinking as it may appear in retrospect. You're seeing the tension of Everybody Wanting to Play Their DnD vs. the Party Line, is partly where the problems' are arisin'. I told somebody the other day that shit-heel that he was, Zak at least Head Cultist Cabbage, uh, Savage, uh whatever, at least he had an interesting notion about beating the Corporate Guys at their own game. I mean, he's a total shit heel, but anyways.
In late summer, maybe the fall of 2015 when Orange Hitler announced his thing and came down the Golden Escalator, I ran a couple of games that was a fun and booze-fuel'd joke about the Never-ending Presidency of The Orange Emperor - the Google group for it was named "Twilight of The Orange Emperor" and it was about a ragtag group of drug-abusing, hot-rodding mutants on the way to Grammas' House but like there was a Quarantine and you wasn't supposed to travel and the deathbots and the foot soldiers and jackboot thugs of the Orange Emperor's forces was tryn real hard to stop youse. And the real magick was the friends we made on the way, and also high levels of radiation and environmental pollutants. The end of the first session there was a giant chrome Ivanka combiner-bot because who the fuck knows or cares who that asshole's current wife is (I think if I were to refactor the thing it would be The Sinister And Long-Suffering Mother of The Barron, Freemarket Jesus Bless Her Heart). At the time, I thought of the thing only as a sinister joke in Poor Taste. Don't Blame Me, I Voted For The Other Guy is the age-old refrain, yes?
In late summer, maybe the fall of 2015 when Orange Hitler announced his thing and came down the Golden Escalator, I ran a couple of games that was a fun and booze-fuel'd joke about the Never-ending Presidency of The Orange Emperor - the Google group for it was named "Twilight of The Orange Emperor" and it was about a ragtag group of drug-abusing, hot-rodding mutants on the way to Grammas' House but like there was a Quarantine and you wasn't supposed to travel and the deathbots and the foot soldiers and jackboot thugs of the Orange Emperor's forces was tryn real hard to stop youse. And the real magick was the friends we made on the way, and also high levels of radiation and environmental pollutants. The end of the first session there was a giant chrome Ivanka combiner-bot because who the fuck knows or cares who that asshole's current wife is (I think if I were to refactor the thing it would be The Sinister And Long-Suffering Mother of The Barron, Freemarket Jesus Bless Her Heart). At the time, I thought of the thing only as a sinister joke in Poor Taste. Don't Blame Me, I Voted For The Other Guy is the age-old refrain, yes?
SO: What does the current Winning Empire of The Orange Emperor look like?
Well, The Imperial Cult of Free Market Jesus, a sort of friendly, blood thirsty, avaricious talking head - that's the base. There is nothing He wont say to keep you in the chair, sending money, hoping for some far-off savior to come and make things right. Every GP sent to his spokespeople ensures the hurrying-up of the Happy Apocalypse so don't worry about fixing things here on the Aeurth.
Under that, there is a Deep Death Kult. A cult of fire, of hatred, of child sacrifice, of strange and insidious sexual proclivities. The DDKists have various mutations - gills, wall-eyes. Cork-screw tails beneath their robes, man-faced rat things nipping at their heels and whispering agendas into their ears while they loll in post-frenzy bliss.
Together, these two march The Military across the globe in immense battle vessels, where they abuse each other and literally itch for a fight, ingesting combat drugs and engaging in sex-violence riots.
Well-meaning but totally inept unelected officials run the infrastructure of the Imperial Continent and Territories (including the Moon). They are under-funded . The Law is the most notable and has resorted to seizure of citizens' assets and they promote the myth that (although they have access to cutting-edge weapons of war handed down/cast off from the Military) that they are under Intensely Dangerous Circumstances at all times. They mostly crack down on the Poor, The Mongrel, The Clever, The Curious, not Elves because of course elves are conservative in their cruelty. Nipples are not permitted on men, of course, but nipples are permitted on succubi and sorceresses if we may have our 50% cut up front and you can't get a permit anywhere else. If the whole system fails, then they too will be without a job and then who will buy The Products? The gizmos? The expensive dice and glossy books? So they wittingly or unwittingly work to keep the thing propped up. The Emperor you know is better than the stark terror of trying some new thing that might not work, even if the thing is really and truly not working.
There is a plague afoot, of course, of Nurgle or Orcus, or Apollo, or the Handsomest Talking Head. If you catch the plague, of course you die coughing blood, but it does make you very interested in what Charismatic People on TV have to say, which fits in nicely with the Cult of Freemarket Jesus. Millions dying but it's okay, because they are The Poor, The Tired, The Downtrodden and their utility for the Empire is limited and FMJ and Nurgle have agreed to split the benefits.
Everywhere there are tiny enclaves of Regular Old People of varying colors and creeds, trapped in their houses and villages. Most don't want to die, but some catch the thing going around and of course don't stand for living in fear when it's very likely you're going to die coughing up blood soon.
Other games sort of depend upon the Hubris of the Ancients, and how they fucked up, and let's get their treasure through Sword and Wits, but of course no savior is coming, no kwisatzhadderachs are permitted anymore (the permits simply not issued since infrastructure will not support it)
Everywhere there is promise, but there is no more hope, techonology is abundant but it's never put to good use, unless of course it will make some cultist Even More Wealthy. The guiding hand of The Market is guiding everyone into a crypt, or a tomb, to commodify what is there or die trying. Imagine all the best ideas that early Star Trek had, but like IN REVERSE. More like a funny Rogue Trader (not the recent one the one in 1986). Like if Thatcher and Reagan had commingled their ichors and gave birth to an insipid Orange Fart in a cheap mobster's suit, spread thinly over a frothing war machine. things have gotten so stale on Earth that the emperor has even declared the whole of Space an enemy so as to point The Miltary's ire skyward, and to spread The Plague out to the Stars and Beyond
Everywhere there is promise, but there is no more hope, techonology is abundant but it's never put to good use, unless of course it will make some cultist Even More Wealthy. The guiding hand of The Market is guiding everyone into a crypt, or a tomb, to commodify what is there or die trying. Imagine all the best ideas that early Star Trek had, but like IN REVERSE. More like a funny Rogue Trader (not the recent one the one in 1986). Like if Thatcher and Reagan had commingled their ichors and gave birth to an insipid Orange Fart in a cheap mobster's suit, spread thinly over a frothing war machine. things have gotten so stale on Earth that the emperor has even declared the whole of Space an enemy so as to point The Miltary's ire skyward, and to spread The Plague out to the Stars and Beyond
All right, time to roast some meats. Drink some distilled liquors and avoid heat.
Fuck Trump. Fuck all charismatic narcissists with their hands in your pockets. To say that politics don't belong in games (or therapy, or any other human endeavor) is laughably stupid, short-sighted, and in the interest of the status quo of which we may or may not be a part.
See you in the gulags. Wear you goddam masks.
