Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Montgomery
I wanted to add my two cents as a 25-year gaming veteran and a gay man. It's nice, I guess, to have a game that addresses these issues, but in Blue Rose it all seems too overt and overpowering. To me, the ideal treatment is how Buffy handled Willow and Tara...gay, sure, but still just a part of the gang. Even Xena did a better job by being playful with it all. The thing is I don't recall heterosexuality being a central theme in a game before, so I question the need for homosexuality to be. Gay characters could pop up in any world or setting: do we need a special enclosure where it is "safe" to let them roam free?
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Out of curiosity, is your "it all seems too overt" a reaction to having read the game, or to Dan's description in the review? Because while some reviews have said "Agh! The cloying PC!" or "it beats you over the head", others have said all the gay-related text gathered together might add up to a page. And saying "this is a nice and tolerant society, including poly and gay marriage" and including gay god myths (like, um, Zeus and Ganymede, or Apollo and Hyacinth?) doesn't seem like a huge deal, or making it a "central theme".
Personally, after a lot of exposure to White Wolf's mix of angst, "you're monsters", doom, and unstable god-kings[1], a setting geared toward heroic fantasy where you play actual good heroes who have a society worth defending (including a government other than unexamined quasi-feudal hereditary) sounds like a nice variation. My biggest second-hand complaint about be about the intelligent animals: not that they exist, but that they seem like furry angelic sources of Good. OTOH, no review has complained about them being immune to corruption, so I imagine PCs can fall just like humans even if NPC animals haven't.
[1] I am impressed by the Exalted setting. WoD mostly makes me dream of high explosives.