Is the world of the Blue Rose RPG a social-justice utopia or a fascist dystopia?

Is this the new "you mad bro" meme?

This is a bait thread, but I'll show up because it's a game I've definitely wanted to play.

If this is a genuine question, it's not portrayed as dystopic in the books. It's played as an imperfect but forward-thinking society. In a way it reminds me of the kind of mindset Roddenberry had in creating the Federation in Star Trek, same sort of egalitarian optimism, but through a particularly feminist lens. Personally I think the most interesting thing about the society's that how they've taken the alignment-as-actual-detectable-phenomenon thing to its natural conclusion and made an alignment test a part of their governance structure.

I just want to play a psychic dolphin in a fantasy game that isn't just about killing shit. Is that so wrong?

I think it's more of an "user spends his free time searching the Internet for things to get upset about and doesn't realize he's become the tumblr he claims to despise" kind of thing.

>In a way it reminds me of the kind of mindset Roddenberry had

You mean:

'These Ferengi need giant codpieces to show off how large their dicks are and they should talk a lot about all their exotic sexual positions...why is everyone telling me to please stop'

This isn't actually in the game, though. Aldin culture sees LGBT acceptance as normal and the default, and people generally don't spend much time discussing things their culture views as normal. The books don't talk about sexual acts in any gratuitous detail at all; they merely contrast Aldin tolerance with Jarzoni rigidity. What exactly angers you about that?

One could hold a similar social position, but they'd have to have a radically different approach to combat.

It was originally going to be a Mercedes Lackey setting till the author told them she didn't like it or their politics.

Source? That sounds like amazing BTFOing.

In 1e the view on Jarzonians was insanely hypocritical, but if you're talking about 2e they toned down the politics a lot and Jarzon is less grimderp while Aldis is more realistically dysfunctional.

...

isn't "man tears" a slang for cum?

Yes. SJWs have this thing where they have to tell you how they love cum so much. It's because of their long-repressed masochism and submission fetishes.

So, any thoughts on how the mechanics work in play? I've never played an AGE game, so I have no practical experience with the system.

?

Yeah, that works.

The 1e rules are widely considered to be superior. You may know them as True20, which is the setting-neutral version that Green Ronin begrudgingly put out because people wanted the rules without the shite setting.

No, I was joking about how much of a big perv Roddenberry was.

Really? Why are they considered better? I'm not very familiar with True20 as a system, and its reliance on feats bothered me, from what little I saw of the first edition. I was never a fan of feats, or really d20 in general.

Autism, mostly. Although AGE has its flaws (having to roll doubles on 3d6 and succeed to pull off the really cool shit, for instance), I'd take it over most versions of d20 any day.

Aren't doubles on 3d6 like, 40% of the rolls?

Yep, about that.

Still need to succeed at the check, and only one of the dice determines what kind of cool shit you can pull off (its number is a pool of points you can spend).

>RPGpundit

Not even once.

I really liked True20. Toughness saves, wealth checks, one of my favorite d20 iterations, really.

...

Hah, that's hilarious, if true.

>I just want to play a psychic dolphin in a fantasy game that isn't just about killing shit. Is that so wrong?

I think we can be friends, user.

Source?

Sounds too much like something made up for alt-righters to cream themselves over.

It's literally just Green Robin's Dragon Age, which they still have the demo of up if you want to play it. Just make note that the setting assumes everyone is bisexual, monosexuals are explicitly "tolerated," and expand the Stunt table to include "Flirt."

Oh and two-handed weapons are master race.

>Dragon Age
Do people still play that?

And that other one, made by Wheaton, whatever that was called, I forget.

>something made up for alt-righters to cream themselves over.

Ironic given that Blue Rose is something made up for ctrl-lefties to cream themselves over.

I'm frankly surprised BR doesn't have a kingdom where the Religion of Peace brings love and sunshine to evil white men through magical re-education camps.

t. triggered alt-rightist

DA's an interesting game, but combat takes a while since everything has lots of HP and damage reduction. Blue Rose focuses on alternative solutions, but just on case, greatswords with the 2hand talent give you 3d6 damage and a consistent 1d6 bonus.

Wheaton's a cuck. Please don't mention him again.

I noticed that instead of answering user's question, you opted to whine about liberals.

Yes, but being man hating feminazis the tumblrinas had no idea that "man tears" means cum because they are all either lesbians or virgins. Despite how much porn they draw. Hell, they are probably obsessed with drawing porn BECAUSE of it. So when they started using it they thought it would make them look cool. Instead it just showed how fucking stupid and out of touch with the rest of the world they really are.

I'm glad someone wrote a containment rpg for you

>isn't "man tears" a slang for cum?

That term's probably been used that way for less than two months.

You're a busy boy!

you might even say he's a big guy

No. You wouldn't. That has nothing to do with being busy. Stop it. Stop is now and kill yourself.

you miss anons point Roddenberry was a coked up sexual deviant who had to be restrained from cramming his fetishes into the show

Was getting caught part of your plan?

So what exactly is the meme thats so bad about this game then

Is it that it has a fantasy setting where trans are accepted and women are equal?

Because that's been Base D&D since 3e.

This has nothing to do with what I typed. Stop it and die.

The meme is it takes ideas from elsewhere and tries to pass it off as its own. The main villain is literally the Lich King.

Yep. Also, Teh Gayz.

You're a big guy!

You have a disease. A bullet is the cure.

So still no source for the claims of Mercedes Lackay disowning Blue Rose and the creative team behind it. I see.

Making facts up to support your argument instead of formulating your argument based on facts just like the SJWs. Proving once again that Alt-Righters and SJWs are just two sides of the same shit-smeared coin.

I mean... one of the main villains is a lich king. Is that really stealing? A lich is one of the main villains in pretty much every fantasy RPG setting, and most fantasy media.

I'm kind of interested now. I feel like back in the day, RPGs offered more wildly different and non-humanoid character options than they tend to these days.

Anyone played an animal or other seriously non-humanoid character recently? It's become rarer, but why?

>Roddenberry was a coked up sexual deviant who had to be restrained from cramming his fetishes into the show
The original magical realm guy.

Also, he was a boring humanist that just wanted all episodes to be "vanilla, boring crew meets new aliens and shit in the name of science and progress"
All that klingon, borg, whatever, stuff were things other people pressured him into adding so the show would have some tiny bit of conflict and drama.

Don't reply to trolls, dummy.

>meets new aliens and shit in the name of science and progress

That sounds pretty great, though. Optimism about the future is part of what made Star Trek popular.

user probably means the lich from that John Goodman screencap.

Are you new?

I mean, not knowing anything about Blue Rose lore... is their Lich King a former holy warrior who succumbed to vengeance and hatred while fighting a force of evil, literally losing his soul to a cursed artifact of doom in the process, resulting in him becoming an evil at least as profound as the one he fought, commanding legions of the undead to swarm the land and slaughter the people he once saved, before finally transitioning to the status of uber-powerful Black Knight/Necromancer of the frozen north?

Because that would be stealing. If he's just a lich and a king that's only stealing if Blizzard stole it from D&D (Szass Tam, Vecna) who in turn stole it from Robert E Howard or something. probably ending the chain with somebody stealing from Russian Folklore and Koschei the Deathless

>social justice
An ideology based on the categorization of group identities (race, gender, sexuality, wealth) that operates on the assumption that privileged groups are always privileged because they exploit the unprivileged and the unprivileged are in that state because they are being exploited by the privileged. Oppression is recognized as a virtue and the most respected people are not the warriors against exploitation but rather the most low and exploited (except if they are white, white people can't be oppressed). Due to the nature of the world, any uprooting of oppression would simply shift the balance and put new groups into privilege, and the social justice warriors would either have to betray them in a neverending cycle or abandon their ideology.
Core: Divide people under a totalitarian government, judge based on group identity, hate inequality

>fascism
An ideology named after the fasces, a bundle of rods, under the idea that the multiple rods united are harder to break than the individual rods. Very simple doctrine - strength through unity. Fascists despise weakness and would sooner spit on the unprivileged than claim they are superior because they are oppressed. They want a population to be united by any means necessary, and for this population to uphold a meritocratic dictatorship that controls their speech, education, and economy in order to keep them united. The most competent people are the most respected people (as opposed to the most oppressed being the greatest) and have more rights. To add later flair, fascists are fundamentally opposed to all materialistic ideologies (capitalism, equity socialism, communism).
Core: Unite people under a totalitarian government, judge based on merit, love inequality

Just because they are both anti-discourse authoritarians does not make them the same.

Nigger, the reason we hate sjws is becasue they're literally /pol/. The only people calling non-mental randos sjw/alt right are sjws and /pol/

So which one are you? Either way get the fuck out.

>the reason we hate sjws is becasue they're literally /pol/
True words.

SJWs literally use fascist controls and tactics to sustain their virtue signally cult of the opressed, and the very nature of the movement makes sure rich white (jewish) women are always the ones signaling who is opressed and who is the opressor.

>Optimism about the future is part of what made Star Trek popular.
Well, yeah, but it becomes as boring and sterile as saturday morning christian stories for children.
There is no contradiction between the future being awesome and utopic, and also being full of lots of factions, personal conflicts, shades of gray and whatever(see Orion's Arm, The Culture, etc.)
You still need a driving force behind a story.

You are absolutely correct that stories require conflict - and that Orion's Arm is great. Honestly, though, Klingons are one of the weaker aspects of the setting: they are just space Mongols who shoot at the good guys and do not even look different from humans in the original series (Borg are interesting on the other hand). Star Trek can (and does, in many episodes) generate dramatic conflict purely through encountering strange alien lifeforms and the like.

>Nigger, the reason we hate sjws is becasue they're literally /pol/. The only people calling non-mental randos sjw/alt right are sjws and /pol/

I'm sorry, I don't speak retard. Could you repeat that in English?

SJWs are dividers and they don't care about merit. Division is anti-fascist, plain and simple.

>fascist controls and tactics
Strawmanning/labeling followed by silencing is a common tactic, fascists don't own it. Even if they did, SJWs are fundamentally anti-fascist and they contradict its core principles. Vaguely similar tactics does not equate to the two ideologies being the same, that's ridiculous logic.

Gygax hated nonhumans, and 3e, which set the tone of rpgs for a decade, made playing anything other than a variety of the big 6 so broken that it tainted the idea.

>I just want to play a psychic dolphin in a fantasy game that isn't just about killing shit. Is that so wrong?

It's not fantasy, just softish sci-fi Space Opera, but I would play the SHIT out of an Uplift Series RPG. Neo-fins forever. Never met anyone else who's read those, though. It's perhaps my favourite sci-fi series, tied with the Culture and the Commonwealth Saga, and it really does go into detail about the different mindset of the uplifted animal races (AKA everyone except possibly humans, so to avoid a crushing species inferiority complex about joining a multi-billion year old Galactic culture as dirt poor and low-tech wolflings the Terragens govt. promotes HFY to an extent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets our asses kicked because we don't know the protocols to not get fucked for our tricks afterwards.).

The Earthclan species, Neo-Dolphins and Neo-Chimps aren't just humans with different bodies, too, which is nice. Dolphins think REALLY differently and have different culture and morals too.

One of the many bad things is that it condones Mind Rape as long as the ones doing the mindraping are the leftie Good Guys(tm) of Progressive Justice and Equality!

At least in 1E, I have no idea if that got fixed in 2e.

anyone have this pdf.

GURPS Uplift is a thing.

>Nigger, the reason we hate sjws is becasue they're literally /pol/.

10/10 post user. was eating breakfast and nearly choked on my cereal while reading this.

You know D&D maintains the same ideals, right?

I am pretty sure Mind Rape has the Evil tag attached to it, user.
And its Good counterpart Sanctify the Wicked does not work the same way.

Daily reminder that mind rape is a humane alternative to execution or imprisonment.

It's pure SJW garbage. Think left wing MYFAROG.

Oh, fuck yes. Does mean I have to learn to GURPS, though, but whatever. Let me guess, the missions are all on bloody Jijo, though?

>mind rape isn't mind rape when the good guy uses it
C'mon, user, I've seen the shit roll already.
I've watched paladin's enslave entire tribes of goblins and orcs to "rehabilitate" them, but it wasn't evil because "he knew what was best for them".
Except every time MYFAROG gets brought up, it's cast down because it's mechanics are objectively shit on top of the intentionally skewed world view.

If you consider that mind rape effectively destroys one personality and replaces it with another that is more useful to you, mind rape becomes the most ethical outcome any time you would otherwise be forced to execute someone. It's the difference between wasting resources and keeping them.

>ethical

Are you sure you don't mean "efficient?"

>Except every time MYFAROG gets brought up, it's cast down because it's mechanics are objectively shit on top of the intentionally skewed world view.
Exactly like Bluerose. You can't seriously think that AGE is a worthwhile system or that the SJW pandering nonsense that constitutes the world is a good setting.

The difference is that the game tells you that overriding the free will and sanctity of others is evil, full stop, but then gives the good guys ways to do this whilst holding themselves above it all.
Also, , what this guy said. It is not ethical, it is efficient, for YOU.
The only time I've seen such a thing not be shit is when I watched a paladin slowly teach a defeated frost giant what it meant to be "good", because it fundamentally did not understand.
It took a long time ingame, and the giant turned on the paladin repeatedly. It required work on the player's part to do this, on top of the giant having the choice to walk away at any time.

*shrugs*

I suppose I was conflating one with the other, yes, but I often tend to do so because resource scarcity affects survival which impacts morality. If you were to discover that an accomplished surgeon has been selectively killing some of his patients and were able to mind rape him into doing what he's supposed to do you're saving more lives.

>The difference is that the game tells you that overriding the free will and sanctity of others is evil, full stop, but then gives the good guys ways to do this whilst holding themselves above it all.

Ah. Yeah, that's fucked.

projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/kai-tave/blue-rose/

Probably the most in-depth, unbiased review of this product on the internet. Delves into this question quite a bit. TL;DR: no, it's not a fascist dystopia, you're going to have to find other reasons to hate it. You could say a great many things about the game: the mechanics are bullshit, the setting is far from everyone's cup of tea, and it wears on its sleeve some pretty controversial politics (especially for its time), but it doesn't describe a dystopia. If anything, it describes a situation which many people might find too saccharine, which may be the reason people try to turn it into a dystopia in the first place - many RPG players are so used to dark, cynical settings it's almost absurd how difficult it is for them to accept one that's supposed to be genuinely nice.

The best comparison I've found (sadly, not in the same review) is that Blue Rose is the fantasy version of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Its setting is fundamentally optimistic and upbeat, the main "good guy" faction is designed specifically to appeal to the target audience as a place they'd want to protect, conflict is generally the result of external factors OR aberrant insiders (e.g. a rogue admiral in Star Trek, or a corrupt noble in Blue Rose), and ideally, should be resolved diplomatically by coming to understand the opposition's motive and worldview (e.g. the rogue admiral was doing what he believed was best for the Federation, or the corrupt noble originally got into dark magic to revive his dead children. In the end you MIGHT still have to kill them, but redemption should always at least look like a possibility and potentially carry greater rewards than violence).

I'm not saying it's for everyone, but it helps to see it as what it is and decide for yourself whether you like it or not rather than relying on regurgitated hearsay and memes from Veeky Forums.

You guys sure are good little totalitarian genocidaires. You'd fit right into any fascist or communist party.

Except this is one of the first times in a while someone has brought up this game, and oddly enough, 3 threads all pop up within a few hours of each other all featuring excerpts from the Blue Rose core book.
MYFAROG usually gets a thread every few days, near all of them begin with "Hey, all I heard about the game is politics, is it REALLY a good game?".

>a paladin slowly teach a defeated frost giant what it meant to be "good", because it fundamentally did not understand.
That guy was awesome.

Regarding a few of the most common claims about the setting secretly being a fascist dystopia, and why even skimming through the book rather than a Veeky Forums meme circlejerk will immediately show you they're wrong:

>The absolute monarch is chosen by a magic deer!

First, Aldis is not even a monarchy in the traditional sense (the titles used for its rulers are actually a relic from the distant past): power is not hereditary and the ruler isn't all powerful. They rule alongside a council of several others and while their voice does count for double, they can still be easily outvoted on almost any issue. The magic deer, meanwhile, doesn't confer its chosen ruler any sort of power or protection: it merely selects it. Technically speaking, there's nothing preventing the people from ignoring his selection and picking a better option however they like at any time. This has happened in the past when the chosen ruler proved to be a dick.

>Nobles are screened by a mind probing device

The Blue Rose scepter doesn't read your thoughts, it merely detects "Shadow Taint". Basically, unless you've murdered or tortured someone or have a habit of dealing with demons, it won't reveal any of your secrets. It also only works once on any given person, which is how corrupt nobles come to be (all they have to do is not kill anyone BEFORE entitlement). As I've mentioned before, the title is a bit of a misnomer since Nobles are, as you've seen, chosen rather than born. They need to pass several aptitude and academic tests and the function is more bureaucratic than anything (I'd say it actually reminds me more of Imperial China and its selected governors than European nobility). It is possible to strip a corrupt noble of their title, if their corruption is proven. The justice system is not flawless, but it does work more often than not (keeping with the setting's generally optimistic bent).

(cont.)

(cont.)

This does not give the children of nobles as much of an unfair advantage as you might think, since Aldis provides free basic education for everyone and even has a system in place to allow disadvantaged students with great potential into its universities (did I mention it has those? In many ways, thanks to omnipresent magitech, it's practically more of a modern society with a medieval aesthetic than a truly medieval one).

>The secret police always read people's minds!

I have no idea where people even get this from, there's nothing even close to it in the book. Presumably, this is the result of some kind of snowballing rumor that started when people began bashing the game for unrelated political reasons and everyone jumped the wagon to show how secretly evil the self-professed leftist wish-fulfillment dream society was. While it's true that Aldis employs telepaths, reading someone's minds without their consent is considered an extremely serious offense and we are flat out told (not by a biased, in-universe document but by canon) that it almost never happens and when it does the parties responsible are dealt with harshly. Actually MANIPULATING someone's mind without their consent is one of the most severe crimes in the setting.

>Criminals are brainwashed into being good citizens!

As above, this isn't true. They are ALLOWED, if they CHOOSE to and CONSENT, to receive psychiatric help from a telepath who will read their mind for the purpose of being able to better assist them. Under no circumstances is said telepath allowed to actually manipulate them and any who does is considered both in-universe and by the canon to be a villain of the highest order. Headbands to inhibit aggression are used only on repeat, extreme offenders on which no other method worked (practically as an alternative to death), and even then, don't result in A Clockwork Orange style mob justice as they only stop INITIATING violence, not retaliating.

(cont.)

The DM was the one who really brought it home, I think.
The giant did what he did because it was what he knew, it got him fed and a place to sleep, kept him alive, and everything else around him did the same, so what made it "bad"?
I could see the player getting frustrated with the fact that he would have to provide solid grounding to justify why being self sacrificing was a noble idea to aspire to, and the player, when we went to drinks after game, would quietly gnash his teeth at the "goddamn DM who is making this so much harder than it ought to be".
I think the real kicker was that eventually, the paladin and giant became friends and held respect for each other, one for his strength, the other for the simplicity of ideals, and that was the hinge that got them to come to an accord.
And so the world's first frost giant paladin was born