Books I Don't Want to OSSR

[Ancient History]

I was talking about this with Frank earlier today, and somehow felt the need to share. In part, this is inspired by Libertad's OSSR of Deadlands Back East Down South, but also general stuff that has been sitting around in the backbrain for years. So, in no particular order...

GURPS Alternate Earths
I have a soft spot for GURPS, as shown by the many OSSRs of their product that I've participated in, and I have a particular soft spot for the GURPS Time Travel concept, where you travel to various "What if?" alternate worlds, going sidewise rather than backwards or forwards in time.

But this setting includes a Dixie timeline where the CSA won, and as Frank said: fuck that.

In the 1990s, I guess I was less aware of how weirdly white supremacist apologia intersected with science fiction, fantasy, and roleplaying games, but at this point the idea of the CSA surviving past 1865 is just fucking terrifying and tiresome. I guess ever since the mask was ripped off and it was revealed that people who championed the Confederacy were racist assholes all along!, I've just not had any desire to engage with this shit any more.

World of Darkness: Mafia
Okay, folks can probably recall that Frank and I are singularly against reviewing World of Darkness: Gypsy and Charnel Houses of Europe: The Shoah because they're nakedly racist and terrible, and Time of Judgment and Gehenna because they are objectively fucking unambitious and horrible failures even by the weak standards of White Wolf, but World of Darkness: Mafia is different:

It is utterly fucking boring.

The WOD line was never great shakes to begin with; crap like The Risen, The Enchanted, and Mediums: Speakers of the Dead were pretty minor fare even during the generous days when standards for splatbook utility were hilariously low, but WOD: Mafia fails to meet even that low bar. There is like nothing in here to use in any game, ever. It's the splatbook you and your friends could write better, without a lot of work, during a Godfather/Sopranos marathon.

Bookhounds of London
I don't care much for Trails of Cthulhu to begin with. It's a heartbreaker without heart. Bookhounds is a half-assed idea set in a very oddly overpopulated setting. There have been a bunch of Gaslight London-era Cthulhu roleplaying products released, and they're all more or less compatible if you care, which you largely don't because London is...just sort of fucking eternal. Seriously, there is more than enough material published on Mythos London to run multiple London-based campaigns, and Bookhounds just doesn't stand out from the pack. So it has no rules you care about and a bunch of fluff you don't need to care about. If you're a completionist and have run through every other lead in every other London Mythos book and want to write your own stats based on some fluff not written for CoC in mind, I guess this is the book for you. But I don't want to delve into it.

Crucible
I have a copy of this, somewhere. It's buried in a box, under other boxes. I don't want to dig it out. Nothing good will come of it.

Dark Continent - Adventure & Exploration In Darkest Africa
I can understand the appeal for guys in the 70s and 80s to want to roleplay H. Rider Haggard. People didn't know any better. They should have, but they didn't. I have no fucking idea why people thought this was a good idea in the new millennium. Anyway, I think I'm done with openly racist gaming books for a while.

Chromebook (Any of them)
I feel at some point we will have to delve back into cyberpunk RPGs, but you can't review just one. You can't really talk about the Chromebooks without comparing/contrasting them with the Shadowrun cyberware books or Rifts or GURPS and...and...I don't have time for that. I don't have the energy. It feels like work having to read all that shit, but if I don't cover them all then I feel incomplete. It's how my brain is wired. So yeah, first step to not getting addicted to crack is don't take crack. Not even once.

ExXxalted: Scroll of Swallowed Darkness
I'm not against adult-oriented RPG products. I wouldn't want to play them with pretty much anyone, but I respect that there is a select market for that kind of product, even joke products. Hell, Book of Erotic Fantasy got an OSSR. Everything is open to criticism, we're all adults here (seriously, I think the average age of the Den has been crawling upwards for at least a decade).

But I don't want to review this one. Because by the dark gods I hate Exalted. It is such a shit game it makes me want to stress eat. It is not entertaining to riff Exalted books. They're just fucking stupid, and it is exhausting to get angry at these books these days. So no scroll for you.

[RelentlessImp]

ExXxalted is a garbage fire that's more about making punny jokes than treating anything seriously. Say what you will about Book of Erotic Fantasy, but they at least tried - in a juvenile sort of way, but they tried. ExXxalted doesn't even have that going for it. An OSSR of it would just be dry and boring and repeating This! Isn't! Funny! over and over.

[Libertad]

Generally speaking hate reviews are toughest. They are the most draining, and when it comes to longer books it makes you question the validity of the review. I generally review books I find unique in some way, or need to have some sunlight-grade disinfectant shone on it in an otherwise uncritical industry.

I did Back East: the South primarily b/c it was the biggest thing written for Deadlands' blackest mark, and had no critical reviews elsewhere on the Internet as far as I could tell. Approaching bad reviews as a kind of public service actually does wonders for motivation, particularly when you know that it will help illuminate something significant gone relatively ignored in tabletop culture.

Edit: An alternative may be a "snapshot review," where instead of reviewing a whole book you look at particularly cringy bits to highlight while skipping over the natter.

[Username17]

Rageviews can be funny, and some of our most popular reviews are anger rants. Heck, I did a review of the 4e DMG2 and SR5, both of which are garbage fires.

There's a big problem though when it comes to things like World of Darkness: Gypsies. I am not Romany. I haven't lived with that discrimination my whole life and I have no special expertise to talk about what parts are "the worst." I mean, there's some things that I could highlight that are obviously really bad, but it's very plausible that some of the most insidious and insulting bits are things that I wouldn't even notice.

It's also true that it takes a lot of effort to do a good rageview, because bad books are bad. Like, I read Revenant Gun (Book Three of the Machinery of Empires series by Yoon Ha Lee) in two days in between shifts working full time as a doctor because it's a good book and after each page was finished I wanted to read the next page. Reading a book like Shadowrun 5 is a chore that I put myself through because I want to finish the project. It's masochism for art or sometimes the kind of misery tourism rubber necking that keeps you from looking away from a traffic collision.

But basically reading explicitly racist books is painful and disgusting and also I'm not really qualified to tell you what parts of racist diatribes sting the worst. We did our best with Ebony Kingdoms, but I'm not sure we did it justice. Someone who'd spent more time in Africa than I have could probably go into a lot more detail as to the why and how of how fucked up that book is.

-Username17

[Libertad]

The list.

I tried some of my own, actually.

Oh No Frog God Games

I tried a snapshot review of various books published by Frog God Games, one of the bigger-time OSR/Pathfinder/5th Edition publishers known for their massive doorstopper sourcebooks. Due to sheer size and scope I decided to view smaller parts. Notably the really cringy stuff which may not be worth a full review that just kept on popping up as some kind of persistent theme. Things like in the Caribbean-flavored Razor Coast where the implied result of a side-quest's completion is returning the fantasy-counterpart indigenous Pacific people to a fantasy-counterpart European slave plantation. Or where a Lawful Good paladin order in Bard's Gate who helps the PCs bust up a sex slavery ring then tells the initially voluntary sex workers who were kidnapped to repent of their sins and become holy warriors.

Things which could easily fall through the cracks in a larger review I may not have felt the energy for: Bard's Gate is one of the most bland whitebread low-fantasy city you can imagine plus or minus some minor novelties.

I tried this for a time, but stopped due to lack of interest from readers.

Deadlands Back East: the North

I considered doing this one after the South, but realized that whatever I could cover in this tome would not measure up to its Southron counterpart. The ghost of John Brown being a crazed villain may have measured up, but besides that we mostly had EVUL FREEMASONS and the Agency up to no good.

Kingdoms of Kalamar: Svimohzia: the Ancient Isle

I made a threat for it in the Den a while ago, but it was intended to be my fourth "Fantasy Africa D&D" review after the initial 3 of Nyambe, Southlands, and Spears of the Dawn. But I lost motivation and interest due to a variety of factors: one was that it was clearly inferior in both fluff and crunch to the aforementioned ones, and despite some genuine hair-raising racist elements was overall bland in that it read like an Elder Scrolls' in-game text covering mundane minutia which wouldn't be enjoyable for readers to hear about. Something I've noticed was a problem in other Kalamar sourcebooks.