# Towards the Death of the Author in RPG Politics tags: #thoughts ![[Burning the City to Save the Political.png]] I think there's an issue that needs to be dealt with in the online space, not just the TTRPG space, but I'm going to approach it very deliberately from that direction. It's equally a problem in video games and other mass media, just so we're clear. Basically, it is everything that led up to someone who I generally respect the work of and the opinion of saying this:  It's in response to an article linked to by Rascal News on their own website, which they, unfortunately for issues of public discussion and debate, have locked behind a paywall after the first several paragraphs. The gist of it is pretty simple; they lay it out right there in the first few paragraphs that *are* readable, and if you are any connoisseur of games journalism, you know exactly which direction the rest of the article is going to play out. To wit, there is an indie RPG publishing company called *[The Red Room](https://moordereht.com)* ([@moordereht](https://x.com/moordereht)). I believe they live in Portugal, and contrary to the typical expectation of the Euro they hold and express opinions publicly which lean fairly conservative, certainly opinions which are not in lockstep with the current trends at both ends of the mass media field, whether it be highly corporate video games or micro hobby RPGs. They enjoy, not to put too fine a point on it, trolling the woke libtards in a very public and frankly amusing way, while producing games which are fairly strongly a classic OSR-bent in design, but which don't shy away from elements of egregious horror, personal discomfort, and radically extreme depiction of other nasty stuff. Sometimes even that most taboo of things: *consensual sex* I own a few, and if I were the type to like traditionally architected RPGs a bit more, I would probably own more of them. But it's that compulsion to troll the woke left on a regular basis that gets them in trouble. [They've been kicked off of DriveThruRPG](https://moordereht.com/tag/drivethrurpg/?srsltid=AfmBOoqXwwZ1uw_3PDgCecHTGXxANP6zSeymXc2b1kiyyDHPyFeGetjd) for not being cool enough for the cool kids' table and essentially excluded from vast swaths of the killing fields wherein stalk a lot of other luminaries in the RPG community.^[Hell, they even have a [MeWe](https://mewe.com/myworld?previewGroupId=632074962819b24f8e119775) account. Who does that unless they're forced to it?] RPG sites won't run their ads even if those ads are perfectly in line with ad requirements and almost any time they show up in a mention or even in an interview, the woke slither out of the walls to hiss and bitch about the idea that anyone would even *speak* to them, much less *like* them. Hell, I'll probably be called a Nazi in under 35 seconds after this gets posted, to which I can only reply: You guys are decades late. [I was the LiveJournal Hitler for a hot week back in the early 2000s thanks to a concerted effort by 4chan](https://squidlord.wordpress.com/2005/08/04/the-modern-hitler/).^[Flattery does, in fact, get you everywhere.] I take that sort of thing as a massive endorsement of my talent, skill, and charm. Let's just get ahead of the curve. Back to the original concept that we are approaching, which is the statement: *"Politics don't belong in games."* We know that's transparently bullshit. Politics have been involved in games for as long as there have been games. The idea of the social cut and thrust, the delicate balancing of factions against one another, the uses of the right word in the right ear at the right time… politics. If you accept that war is simply politics by other means, the scope broadens even further. Even Marsial Bohemond's current bête noire, **[[Warhammer 40k]]**, is overtly and utterly laden with politics. The whole idea is that it's a very political setting in which terrible things can happen because of those politics — and sometimes despite them. That's part of what's compelling about the setting, beyond simply *"Pointy end of sword go into squishy demon there."* Likewise, there are vast swaths of games from the classic to the modern that thrive on the idea that you as the player are enmeshed in the process of politics, and that those politics are critical to understand to engage with the media. So what he's means can't be the *literal* words that he's saying, because that doesn't make sense. It would be stupid. The marshal is not a stupid man.^[This is called *"giving someone the benefit of the doubt,"* and it's something that happens not nearly enough in discourse.] He also can't be saying that reflecting current day politics has no place at the table because commenting on current events is one of the primary functions of fiction, and one of the greatest uses of science fiction, in particular, since its inception. This may be closer to the ring, however. I suspect that the real problem dates back to the introduction of a phrase which has been with us entirely too long, used to justify all sorts of crimes against literature and generally spurred an increase in the distaste for the writer in general as a person. It runs thus: *"The personal is the political."* Writers as a whole do tend to tend toward progressive values, which was not a terrible problem for quite a while, because people held writers in a certain level of cultural disdain. That is, they didn't take them particularly seriously because what they were observed to be doing was drinking too much, making bad life decisions, spending too much money, and then writing a book containing fairly keen observations on modern society through the lens of someone who drinks too much, makes bad decisions, spends too much money, and then writes a book. This was fine because serious issues could be brought into public consciousness through the back door, being oblique, being clever, and not preaching to the audience but sharing your thought with the audience. Once the personal became the political, it became almost de rigueur for the author to make everything in their life in line with whatever political message they felt was the hottest of the moment and then into and throughout their work. When you didn't have to see your favorite authors' every insane muttering crammed in your face amidst a fire hose of everyone else's stupid rambling, it was a lot easier to just not care. To simply experience the work, and if it spoke to you, enjoy it, and if it didn't, maybe the next one would or it wouldn't. Mass social media changed that significantly for writers in general. Writers, as a group (and I include myself because I'm not *that* kind of hypocrite), tend toward accumulating in one place and rubbing our mental illnesses against one another until we feel raw and overexposed and then we write about it. It takes great personal discipline not to make that what happens when you enter the public space. Personal discipline in the field of writing hasn't been something even remotely considered respected for almost as long as I've been alive, and that's been probably way too long. Simultaneously (because this series of thoughts hasn't rambled on long enough, even so), we are enmeshed in an ideological whirlwind in which everyone thinks they have the right to blow someone else around as long as they feel like they have the moral high ground. The fact that this occurs when everyone is standing in equally low holes continuously acts as a point of hilarity for me. So it goes. The lower the bowl, the more the bloviating. This brings us neatly back around to the tabletop RPG space where that state of affairs has been absolutely the case since the days of Usenet in the online space. That's been what *we've* been dealing with for longer than many of you who are reading these words have been alive. One could argue it goes back even further to the earliest issues of **[Wizard Magazine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_(magazine))**, something which most of you have probably never heard of. In the 90s, we had people getting all up in arms about what White Wolf published. Now as an organization and honestly as a content generating machine White Wolf of the 90s was simultaneously extremely progressive and working hard at being extremely edgelord. At the time, the prevailing cultural gestalt was largely conservative. So in order to be an edgy outsider, you had to adopt not just the content but the persona of progressivism. White Wolf took to that like a dog to a bowl of kibble. If you were there, you know. And if you weren't there, I'm not sure you can actually be told how true that statement is. You just have to look at the content and in particular the online discourse and find out for yourself.^[How I, even then a more corporate/conservative-leaning Libertarian ended up writing for them is another story, but I may have literally been the only Technocrat they knew who could speak their language.] Personally I suggest checking out the Hey, Net Punks Usenet thread (https://groups.google.com/g/alt.games.whitewolf/c/ZLVNWrOIAOM/m/9Sj21YgScp0J) in which I was a participant along with many other people who actually ended up writing for White Wolf after the fact.^[Irony is a cruel mistress.] But at the moment we were ganging up to kick them repeatedly in the crotch for being stupidly, publicly, socially inept. It was an amazing time. That's a lot of words and rambling history to bring us to the current state of affairs where indie RPG authors flee X because people who generally disagree with their politics (that is, anyone to the political right of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin) have fled to **[BlueSky](https://bsky.app)**, a platform where the primary content is people telling you about their mental illnesses and then making a list of things that they like and don't like while expressly excluding anyone who expresses an opinion outside the echo chamber.^[I hate it there, can you tell? It's where good RPG discussion goes to die, screaming, in pain. It's absolute fucking Hell. **[Mastodon](https://social.vivaldi.net/@lextenebris)** is a better discussion platform - once you write filters to just skim off the trans, gender, and other bullshit stuff so you never see it. They helpfully use hashtags there. It's nice.] It's beautiful. It's wonderful. How could anything possibly go wrong? It's worth noting that they fled not because of a sudden influx of people who disagreed with them politically, but because the platform simply stopped treating them differently than the classic blue checks/progressive woke who previously had complete run of the site. It's not that they were treated any more poorly by the platform itself, it's just that others were treated equally well and that was unacceptable. It was unacceptable that they live by the same rules. And that, my friends, is what this is all *really* about. This brings us back to the top with the blanket declaration that politics don't belong at the table. It is a fantastically untrue statement, but it is trying to say something that's both important and an artifact of the way social interaction has become perverted. *The personal is political.* Once you adopt that philosophy as a guiding light, that means everything in your life beyond yourself, everything that involves interacting with other human beings, everything that you expect from a government, everything that you expect from other people, including your family, all those things which involve politics, well, they're just *you* writ large. You're the only thing that matters. It's personal. When you reach that point, you are beyond insufferable. Your politics, your current beliefs about what other people should be and should do, infiltrate everything you make, everything you share, everything you do. There is nothing that you can touch that doesn't become mostly you. And the more that you believe that the personal is political, the more that you judge yourself when you create even a little something that *doesn't* reflect exactly who you are to the nth degree at that very moment in time because, of course, you are never wrong and you will never change. You become your own best Stasi, and since you've taken it up for yourself, it's even easier to police those around you. You must, you see, because if they are less than your ideal then you must be less! So when the good marshal lays a blanket declaration that politics don't belong at the table and will get you kicked out, the reason that he's saying that is because too many people have made the personal political and the political personal. They have given up their ability to see, accept, and portray bounds and boundaries. Not only that, they think it is fine for *them* to do so, while simultaneously demanding that *you* walk on tiptoes around them because *their* every boundary is a minefield to the point if you get near one of their explosive points they throw their arms up in an X and deny that you can even talk about it.^[You just knew that I was going to bring safety procedures in RPGs into this, didn't you? You was right. It's all part and parcel of the same emotional and intellectual failure.] Politics absolutely *belong* at the table, and we can deal with political issues within the context of play. I enjoy it. Games like **[[Grey Ranks]]** demand it. But what we can't do is have you as a player or as a creator unable to separate yourself from the work, whether the work is playing a character and having a good time and doing things that you as a person would *never* do, enjoy, or even agree with, or the work is writing a world or managing a setting, or building a game in which there are characters who believe things that you do not, sometimes very strongly, and yet remain good people. Without the ability to do those things, aside from being a failed person who is of far less value to all the people around you than someone who *can* do those things, you just turn everything you work on into a grey goo, featureless, meaningless, empty, a pointless reflection of yourself. It's a sermon that can only be delivered to a church full of empty pews one way or another. It's programming for the [p-zombies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie). That's all it is. That's all it ever can be. *Demand* politics at your table. Just make it the politics of the world *in play*. They can *refer* to the politics of the current day. They can *parody* those politics. They can use them as a *springboard*. They can *comment* on those politics. But what they *can't* do is be intensely personal to the point you can't talk about or think about anything else. Otherwise, you can't be challenged. There can never be conflict, at least not with the political because then you turn into a crying mewling whining bitch and that's no fun for anyone. And shout out to Miguel and his girl over at Red Room. You keep doing what you do. While you're not necessarily producing games for me personally and I'm not completely on board with the overall PR campaign, I'm totally here for it and I think you deserve a fair consideration for walking the walk and talking the talk which mimics and mirrors those in the same industry who just have a different polarity. I appreciate you if no one else does. I suspect at this point we both sit in the same penalty box among some of the same people — so get comfy and I hope you bought some local cuisine for me. Break out that latest edition of **[MEN](https://moordereht.com/product/men/)**, and maybe we can get a session in. For the rest of you, this has gone on so long that it was going to be a Twitter thread, but it's going up on **[Grim Tokens](https://grimtokens.garden)** instead so that's where you're reading it. If you think you've stumbled over some insights or just enjoyed listening to my weird rambling, poke around and see if anything interesting catches your eye — it's largely a platform for exploring ideas within the framework of tabletop RPGs and occasionally tabletop wargames. I'm a huge fan of **[[Ironsworn]]**/**[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Starforged]]**, even though I'm dead certain that the author would consider me a dead-souled Nazi. That's alright, he still does amazing work. This is how you know *I* don't believe that the personal is political. Go out, find games you like, and play them however you want. That's the only thing that matters.