Gumshoe seems like it blows

[Chamomile]

I would be down to have a Mystery Manual with 100 write-ups like that. The casual reference to servants being purchased rather than hired definitely popped out at me, but if your setting is "literally exactly ancient Greece" rather than "ancient Greece with the serial numbers filed off" (or if you have something specific to say about ancient Greek society that relies on slavery being present), that makes sense. Like, you'd scrub that from the generic release, obviously, so I'm basically just padding out this post to make it look like there's more content than there is.

[MGuy]

I mentioned I would like a procedural encounter producer before during one of the threads about getting warfare rules into dnd. I would also like a mystery producer and I believe that one exists in a system I can can't remember the bab name of that I read about on thealexandrian. I'll have to look it up later but there was something about some system where you would generate nodes that would connect into a mystery. I took notes in my giant design notes document but didn't jot down the actual name of the system being referenced.

[amethal]

That depends on whether you actually sell the system properly or you fell for the sales brochure of games like Night's Black Agents and Mutant City Blues.

Thanks for the interesting response.

And yes, I certainly did fall for the sales brochure!

[Dean]

A number of people have mentioned the Alexandrians node based mysteries. The problem with making a node based system is it takes a long time. The Alexandrian talks about how using his own model takes him about 3 hours to make a mystery, I made my own that's a little tighter imo and it still took me over an hour so I abandoned that as a viable direction. I just don't think that's user friendly enough to be worth purchasing. I do think it might work for very simple mysteries so I think I should include a node based system for no-frills murders and thefts. With those you could just make huge lists of clues that connect and let people do little building blocks with them but that would feel more like the mystery elements in an action movie. Where Keanu Reeves looks around a crime scene, finds a bullet, has someone analyze it, then goes to shoot the bad guy he learned about from that analysis.

I'd absolutely benefit from a book of mysteries as described above, though some useful keywording would be nice, perhaps describing scope (individuals, organizations, governments etc.), theme, motive or even kinds of crimes?

I would be very interested in any suggestions you (or anyone) had for keywords you would find helpful. Do you just mean that all the murders could be under "Murder" or maybe a little list at the top of each Mystery with a list of things that might draw you to use it. Like this one might say "Attempted Murder, Royal Politics, Unrest, Forced Marriage". So if your story had a forced marriage angle you were looking for you could skim through the book to find what ones you could repurpose a little.

The casual reference to servants being purchased rather than hired definitely popped out at me, but if your setting is "literally exactly ancient Greece" rather than "ancient Greece with the serial numbers filed off" (or if you have something specific to say about ancient Greek society that relies on slavery being present), that makes sense. Like, you'd scrub that from the generic release, obviously

That's actually something I've debated a lot. On the one hand Greece had so much slavery that it seems almost dishonest to wipe that from it entirely and some places like Sparta would seem wholly incomplete to describe without the constant slave revolts and slave suppressions that their entire society was crafted around.

My plan is to tone down the slavery elements obviously but some things I think are valuable to the stories of Greece are.
-Sparta being formed around being a militant slave society
-Some places having "Free Citizens" with voting rights and all and some people who are second class citizens
-Maybe some of the slave armies, some of which are cool. Cause the Unsullied being freed slaves is kinda cooler than them just being guys.
-Families having their "Oikos" which is basically a family company composed of all of the servants and skilled workers in their employ under one entity with all of the resources being the technical property of that noble house (or, again, "Oikos")

I'm totally willing to be convinced that the optimal amount of slavery to include in a game is none, but at the moment I'm erring more towards reframing most of the Greek worlds second class citizenry as "serfs" and having some places still have proper capital S slaves so that you can know that Sparta is bad and slave uprisings and slave armies can still be around when their existence is narratively important.

[Chamomile]

I oppose white-washing historical atrocity to any degree. If your setting is "literally ancient Greece" with actual Athens and actual Sparta (even if you're taking a "myths are real" approach), it should have slavery to about the same extent and in the same way as actual ancient Greece did. If your setting is not-Greece, then you should include slavery if and only if you have something to say about ancient Greek slavery.

If you're not comfortable depicting slavery as it was in ancient Greece, you are not comfortable depicting ancient Greece. Don't pretend otherwise.

[Dean]

Well I don't really think it's my role when designing a game to confront people with the brutalities of history, demanding they not look away lest they fail to learn it's lessons. I really don't think that's a responsibility I have nor that it would benefit anyone if I did. As a comparison I definitely have been removing as much rape and misogyny from the writeups as possible, trying to bring as many female characters from both myth and history forward as possible and to construct a version of the setting that is mostly sexually egalitarian. I think that would be much more enjoyable and palatable to people as a fun game to play in their free time and I certainly don't think it's my responsibility when designing a greek myth based ttrpg to confront women with the brutality of sexual oppression.

Again I could accept the position that the optimal amount of slavery for a greek history/mythical setting might be zero. But I also think it's possible with things like slavery or sexual assault in greek myth the answer might be to try to only include it when it seems central to some valuable story. Such as with Sparta or Medusa in either case.

[Thaluikhain]

If you're not comfortable depicting slavery as it was in ancient Greece, you are not comfortable depicting ancient Greece.

Second that. It's perfectly fine not to have slavery in your setting, as it's perfectly fine not to depict ancient Greece. Hell, your stock fantasy England isn't anywhere like the real England (usually not a conscious decision, though), and thus isn't white-washing things.

I mean, presumably you'd not want to have a super happy Third Reich or Confederate States, that's crossed a line which has been drawn somewhere.

[Red_Rob]

Any RPG setting based on a real time/place is going to be filtered through the GM, their knowledge base and whatever sources they are working from anyway, so strict adherence to historical detail is going to fall down at some point. All that matters is the setting providing a sense of verisimilitude for the players, which will depend heavily on their knowledge base regarding the period/location in question.

If you really don't want to include an element of the setting for any reason you just explain to the players beforehand that you will be avoiding/removing said element. If that is a dealbreaker for them they can pull out at that point.

[Pedantic]

I would be very interested in any suggestions you (or anyone) had for keywords you would find helpful. Do you just mean that all the murders could be under "Murder" or maybe a little list at the top of each Mystery with a list of things that might draw you to use it. Like this one might say "Attempted Murder, Royal Politics, Unrest, Forced Marriage". So if your story had a forced marriage angle you were looking for you could skim through the book to find what ones you could repurpose a little.

Yeah, organization by kind of crime seems reasonable (though, "Crime" might not actually be the best description, given that players are probably extra-legal entities anyway), and then a smattering of appropriate setting elements like you listed above.

In particular, I think "scope" is important for things like level gating. That is, are the players trying to find like, one guy who got away with a murder? Or are they trying to uncover a conspiracy within a merchant guild? Or is this more like a full secret cult summoning demons under the village situation. Each of those has a viable mystery plot, but the scale of the perpetrators determines a lot about the kind of resistance and nature of clues the players will run into.

Also, maybe a listing by motive would be good? I feel like crimes motivated by passion vs. money vs. fervor or whatever are going to end up being structurally different enough that you'd want to be able to skim that before going in, to judge how much rethemeing/restructuring might be necessary.

[Chamomile]

Hearing stories is one of the primary ways people learn. It's perfectly typical for people to learn about a subject by consuming media relevant to it. My grounding in Greek mythology came from Zeus: Master of Olympus, a video game. Obviously, no one is under any obligation to provide information on any particular subject as part of whatever media they're producing, but I feel pretty comfortable saying people are obligated not to provide misinformation. Likewise, just because your game is getting filtered through your GM and you don't have absolute control of the end product is no excuse to completely give up.

As Thaluikhain brought up, there have been RPGs that depicted the Confederate cause as equally right and moral as the Union cause, and up until a few years ago, this wasn't even considered particularly extreme or partisan a position in most RPG communities. But I doubt Dean would disagree that this is morally unacceptable. Confederate slavery was significantly more brutal an atrocity than Greek slavery, but while it is possible for a line to be drawn between the two, I really doubt there is any specific line, and any specific line that gets dreamed up now, after the issue has been raised, is obviously going to be designed not with actual morals in mind, but specifically to go in between "pretending the Confederates were good guys" and "pretending the Greeks were good guys."

It's not like Greek slavery is a footnote in the mythology, either. The Iliad's entire inciting incident revolves around Agamemnon being forced to give up his kidnapped sex slave in order to halt the wrath of Apollo, so he seizes Achilles' sex slave in a fit of pique, and then Achilles refuses to come out and fight and the Trojans are suddenly at an advantage over the Greeks. If you don't want to deal with all that, you can just use a not!Greek fantasy stand-in and if people assume that everything about your not!Greek setting is exactly the same as Greek myth and early iron age history except the proper nouns, they have no one but themselves to blame. But if you include the story of Agamemnon, specifically, seizing treasure from Achilles, specifically, and the travails this causes the Greeks, and you fail to mention that this "treasure" was an actual human being, you are lying to people about the contents of that myth.

Actual ancient Greece is an iron age, Game of Thrones-y society where the fact that Achilles and Agamemnon are outright villains has no bearing on whether or not they're on your side, and that's a central conceit of some of its most famous stories. If you don't want that setting, then look up a random name generator. Your setting is already a pastiche, own it.

[Dean]

Hearing stories is one of the primary ways people learn. It's perfectly typical for people to learn about a subject by consuming media relevant to it. My grounding in Greek mythology came from Zeus: Master of Olympus, a video game. Obviously, no one is under any obligation to provide information on any particular subject as part of whatever media they're producing, but I feel pretty comfortable saying people are obligated not to provide misinformation.

Zeus: Master of Olympus rules. I actually bought it to play it again while designing this greek-themed game's city building rules. So the game I'm designing has a whole subsystem based on how much Zeus ruled and how much I loved it as a child.

But the thing is Zeus ruled and you liked it and you don't feel cheated by the fact that Zeus was a friendly buff dad in that game who never raped any of your citizens. You don't feel lied to because the game never featured any missions about having to sell slaves and instead had missions about building stadiums to let you host the Olympics And even though the game used proper place and people names like Sparta and Hercules you didn't feel it was doing you a disservice when you played the Sparta campaign and it focused around getting Ares to send you his awesome red Dragon pet instead of focusing on murdering Helot children. The game may not have given you a very accurate view of greek myth but it certainly stirred a love for those mythological elements in you.

I love Zeus: Master of Olympus and I think it is better for having downplayed the worst parts of the actual bronze age to instead focus on being a fun PG rated game where I can start colonies and try to get wine to my military barracks. I may not be understanding your point but I genuinely don't agree with the conceit that any representation of Greek myth MUST be a hard R setting where we are front and center about the rape slaves. I partially don't understand it because you talk about a product you enjoy that is doing the same thing I'm describing, where you keep the elements of the myth and time that are fun and cool and let those be the things people play your fun game about. I do think it's totally fine to have Hercules in a game or movie without having him murder his wife and to still have him called "Hercules" instead of "Strongulon" even if that's not the most technically accurate picture of Hercules. You can just have him have to do 12 labors for some other reason you make up instead of wife murdering and this is what almost every product about Hercules does. That might not be accurate information but without that misinformation you can't make that disney movie.

[Chamomile]

But the thing is Zeus ruled and you liked it and you don't feel cheated by the fact that Zeus was a friendly buff dad in that game who never raped any of your citizens. You don't feel lied to because the game never featured any missions about having to sell slaves and instead had missions about building stadiums to let you host the Olympics And even though the game used proper place and people names like Sparta and Hercules you didn't feel it was doing you a disservice when you played the Sparta campaign and it focused around getting Ares to send you his awesome red Dragon pet instead of focusing on murdering Helot children.

You're making a lot of assumptions, and they are dumb assumptions. Because, y'know, I was the one who brought Master of Olympus up specifically in this context, so obviously if I did not feel Master of Olympus handled Greek myth poorly I would have noticed that when I brought it up. Zeus was a game intended for a broad audience and would not have benefited from calling Briseis a sex slave, but it would have benefited from calling Briseis a captive rather than leaving it at "Agamemnon managed to offend him somehow." It would have benefited from admitting that Zeus abducted people sometimes, even if direct reference to rape is probably not appropriate to its target audience. And even then, Zeus didn't supply a white-washed version of the story in which Agamemnon had taken Achilles' favorite golden chariot or whatever, it actually drew attention to the fact that they weren't telling you why Achilles was angry. Your audience is probably old enough to handle a frank admission that Briseis was a sex slave, but if your setting is intended for twelve year olds, there are options that don't involve misleading people about what the ancient Greeks were actually like. And it's worth noting that the cultural and moral superiority of the ancient Greeks is an actual racist lie spread by actual fascists trying to draw connections between the Trojan War and the current "invasion" by starving bedraggled refugees. No particular piece of media is obligated to fight that narrative, but you are obligated not to contribute to it.

[Mord]

And even then, Zeus didn't supply a white-washed version of the story in which Agamemnon had taken Achilles' favorite golden chariot or whatever, it actually drew attention to the fact that they weren't telling you why Achilles was angry.

That is called lying by omission and that is still very much white-washing; it's a question of degree rather than kind. From the perspective of an uninformed listener who may not pick up on or think to question the omission, a retelling of the story that leaves the cause of the trouble nonspecific is just as much an alternative facts version of the events as one that posits a specific alternative.

You have to weigh the damage of presenting a distorted narrative against whatever positive good you're trying to serve. I can't help but think of all the kids' illustrated bible story books that carefully omit the senseless incest, rape, genocide, and capricious divine punishments from the Old Testament in order to deceive children into believing that the Bible is not a terrifying record of Bronze Age atrocities but rather a sane and benign foundation for morality and society.

Maybe you can instill a love of Greek myth in people by omitting the objectionable contents, but by exposing them to the good stuff early and ignoring the bad, even if you don't actively make up something more palatable to replace the bad, you're still inoculating them against rejecting the ethically unconscionable elements when and if they come across them later. Really, the worst outcome here is that someone grows up on whitewashed Greek mythology thinking the Achaean big names at Troy were heroes and, when that person finds out about all the rape Achilles was doing, they downplay and handwave its badness in order to preserve their worldview founded in part on the idea that Achilles was a positive role model. That has real-life consequences for how that person thinks about powerful men in the here and now doing the rapes. Like, say, the President.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Greek myth is a lie. The Iliad is a lie. Both are fiction, and the events they depict never happened. Telling a version of either that doesn't include rape is exactly as valid as telling a James Bond story that doesn't include rape.

[Chamomile]

That is called lying by omission and that is still very much white-washing;

This is true, and I didn't mean to suggest that this wasn't white-washing, just that even what Zeus engaged in was still better than rewriting the story so that there was explicitly no slavery. Like I said, given Zeus' intended audience, using comparatively gentle but not particularly misleading words like "captive" and "abduction" would've been ideal.

Greek myth is a lie. The Iliad is a lie. Both are fiction, and the events they depict never happened.

But Greek civilization was real, and had real values that were encoded into their real stories that they really told each other. When you tell people the story of Achilles at Troy and the only difference is that you've whitewashed the slavery out, people are going to assume you're faithfully relaying the myths in their entirety. If you tell people the story of Space Achilles at the blockade of Planet Troy, then it's their own damn fault if they can't figure out that you've changed a few things. That's not true if you're telling a story that is distinguishable from a real Greek myth as was told by actual real ancient Greeks only if you are already familiar with the original myths so as to pick up on the differences.

[angelfromanotherpin]

The original James Bond stories are products of a real culture too, one that's far more relevant to our lives than anything the Bronze Age produced. And the people who are disappointed that later adaptations don't include the original rape content are really creepy.

[deaddmwalking]

It's totally possible to be inspired by something that happened in real life and build legends around it that are not actually that thing. Atlantis anyone?

And you can find out a lot of things that you like before you ever find out anything that you don't.

If you are inspired by Mongols, but don't do 'rape capture weddings', I wouldn't say you're doing it wrong or erasing actions you don't approve of.

Every real culture in every time has done some deplorable shit. You can still have fun with the setting and just not have the deplorable shit. There's are a few bad guys where their raison d'être is so wrapped up in that shit that you can't extricate them - Nazis and Confederates are in that camp - but you can have Greeks and just NOT have murder-babies and rape-kidnappings. Those are ancillary enough that you don't lose anything by dropping them and certainly gain a lot.

[Chamomile]

The original James Bond stories are products of a real culture too, one that's far more relevant to our lives than anything the Bronze Age produced. And the people who are disappointed that later adaptations don't include the original rape content are really creepy.

But the people who get angry when the Confederates are presented as fighting for the preservation of slavery in weird west settings are totally fine?

You can rewrite the stories so that James Bond, specifically, is not a rapist, and you could rewrite the stories so that, I dunno, Odysseus is explicitly not a rapist, if you wanted a story where Odysseus was the good guys. You can just set a James Bond story in a more modern setting where being opposed to rape in principle is, while less ubiquitous than would be ideal, not super weird, and setting James Bond in 2018 instead of 1968 is a setting update just like Space Troy is. You could also just accept that James Bond as originally written is a villainous character and write new, significantly darker stories that reflect that he is a terrible human being who can nevertheless be pointed at equally evil but far more ambitious people who want to blow up the moon or whatever.

But whatever standard for writing new James Bond stories you adopt, it can't be "whitewashing is immoral if and only if the specific subject being whitewashed is strongly enough associated with my outgroup as to provoke shaming from my peers." Unless you're going to say that depicting the Confederacy and/or Nazis as heroic is totally dandy because it's all fiction anyway, the burden is on you to explain where the line is that friendly Mycenaeans are okay but friendly Nazis aren't.

[Dean]

Unless you're going to say that depicting the Confederacy and/or Nazis as heroic is totally dandy because it's all fiction anyway, the burden is on you to explain where the line is that friendly Mycenaeans are okay but friendly Nazis aren't.

I would argue that that line is that if I'm sitting down to game in the modern day the people at my table will be regularly dealing with bigots and oppressors that are explicitly and vocally pro-nazi and pro-confederacy. Telling people you like Odysseus isn't telling them you are part of a movement attempting to kill or oppress them, so that's probably the big difference. It's not a thing that you can prove in a philosophical sense, as if there is some logical proof as to why being pro-Mycenean is morally superior to being pro-nazi. The Myceneans killed people, I get that, but it's a social issue. The fact is there will be people sitting around my table (including me) who's lives are directly affected by people in the pro-nazi and pro-confederacy crowd. Fuck in 2019 it's possible someone at your table doesn't show up anymore cause they've been fucking killed by them. Propagandizing for Nazi's simply isn't comparable to taking liberties with the Thracians because no one at your table knows a Thracian or is a Thracian or cares about the Thracians or is affected by the Thracians because there haven't been Thracians for thousands of years. It's like why you're allowed to be known for liking Napolean and the Napoleonic Wars but will be rightfully identified as a cretin if you're known for loving Hitler and the bombing of Yemen.

[Chamomile]

Greece has a fascist movement, too, and the fascists there talk to the fascists here. The people who think of Achilles as a representation of European civilization fighting the evil Middle-Eastern Trojans are the Confederates and Nazis. Either you think your friends who feel threatened by pro-Confederate settings are idiots who shouldn't feel that way, but do anyway, and you refrain from pro-Confederate settings out of accommodation for their stupidity, or else you are conceding that pro-Confederate settings are harmful because stories matter, in which case a setting that supports the narratives of Greek fascists (who have internet connections and talk to American fascists daily) is not meaningfully distinct from one that supports the narratives of American fascists.

[MGuy]

Ultimately Dean, what are you arguing here? You already said it yourself. You are not obligated to teach anything you don't desire to. Whether or not you're making a moral move by not educating your players about how horrible Greece and its myths are by modern standards is really dependent on your own moral system. No one can tell you whether it is moral to do so unless you subscribe to the same framework they do. Even if you can be convinced that not doing so is immoral it's. not exactly world ending if you just accept that you're not willing to take on that responsibility in this case.

Some number number of people have given you their ruling. Are you looking to convince 'them' that they are wrong or to find reason to do what you already want to do despite their opinions?

[Kaelik]

I want to know what Cham's argument is, because I'm confused if he really can't see a difference between writing James Bond but no rape vs writing Nazis but no Holocaust or if he's just trolling.

[OgreBattle]

Having Nazi characters that are just characters who happen to be Nazis has been done:


What your gaming audience abhors will vary from table to country. Like recently a mainland China WWII fight against evil Japanese movie seems to have been cancelled because Republic of China flags are flown. War Thunder is fine with German vehicles, but mainland China players raised a stink about Manchuko and Republic of China symbols (they're fine with the rising sun of Japan though...)

[Dogbert]

I mean, presumably you'd not want to have a super happy Third Reich or Confederate States, that's crossed a line which has been drawn somewhere.

Too late:

Also, someone correct me if I'm wrong (because it's 3:00 AM and I can't be arsed to go re-read history) but, weren't Spartans all-round horrible people already? Fuck Snyder and fuck Frank Miller, you don't romanticize people who killed their own babies if they were born with any disabilities. Ancient people used to joke that one of the reasons for Spartan bravery was that their food was so godawful that they no longer feared death.

...and then, Games Workshop made kosher romanticizing monsters decades ago, so whatever.

[Thaluikhain]

weren't Spartans all-round horrible people already?

Well, yes, but standards were set very low some 2.5 millenia ago. Everyone had slaves and kept fighting each other for no good reason. Spartans were much worse to their slaves than most, but much better to their citizen women than most.

The Spartans did kill their disabled babies as an official policy, though I imagine that was standard practice (but not a requirement) in lots of places.

Fuck Snyder and fuck Frank Miller,

Having just watched (as in, finished in the last hour) the sequel to the 300, yes.

...and then, Games Workshop made kosher romanticizing monsters decades ago, so whatever.

Decades ago it was supposed to be social satire or a parody of Thatcherism or something. Unfortunately it lasted long enough for people to lose interest in that and want the Catholic Space Nazis to be heroes. Judge Dredd had a similar problem.