Quote:
Originally Posted by capnzapp
I couldn't disagree more.
The reviewer is basically giving the game a lower grade because he[sic] personally doesn't like how it fails to address his[sic] personal issues with the Mythos world?
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(I'm not a guy.)
I don't think that my issues with the Mythos world affected my grade. I.e. I did no deduction for percieved racism in the setting. I knew this was a Cthulhu game going in.
That said, I think
CthulhuPunk handles this issue better. The black "spooks" staging a musical version of
The King in Yellow in that work might be racist, but it's at least different - the horror is at the cutting edge of fashion, not in the backwoods "impure" savages.
CthulhuPunk is about the decline and fall of "western values", while 30s pulp is about the rise of totalitarianism. I expected more from Hite on this. It could've been a really interesting and central part of the setting if handled right. Sure, we're just specks of dust in the cosmos, aren't we? It's red ants vs black ants. So why's Lovecraft so focused on the race issue and genetics? I'm not just talking about the absurd negro charicatures in
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, I'm talking about integral things like "the Innsmouth look". I wanted this to be handled more head on.
There's another, bigger problem with my review, though. At the end of the review, I'm totally going off tangent ranting away about how the Gumshoe rules are "too visible", and did deduct points for it. My bad. The conflict between what used to be called "gamism" and "narrativism" is still alive in my head since I'm personally torn about this, and haven't settled in.
I read
role-playing about nothing and it looked like fun, and it's what leading me to my experiments with more "visible" rules like Gumshoe and
Feng Shui (not to speak of
D&D, which I've yet to play), and I'm not used to this visibility getting in the way of the horror, while I'm simultaneously grateful for the extra excitement it does seem to bring to the table. While I've never understood the charm in
Yahtzee, I hope it can become something else when it's got flavor, when you're running from flesh-eating monsters in a burning building.
Thanks for your comments.