So Black History Month is over.  Time to forget about everything until next year, right?

Nope.  I think that enough people were interested into the folklore/culture pieces that we will try to make that a regular once a month (at least) item.

I still have a lot of things to say about hip hop and RPGs that will be coming soon.

I should add that I hate having to talk about inclusiveness and what it takes to expand the demographics and read of RPGs.  Hate it.  But I hate more that the appeal of RPGs is still so limited.  I love RPGs a lot, I’ve loved them for the last nearly three decades of my life.  I want my son to feel comfortable playing them, and all of his friends and their friends.  I want roleplaying to be something that fits in with whatever else they are doing. I want them not to feel isolated or alone inside gamer culture. So I have to do this.  I’ve been intimidated in the past by the resistance of the culture to change, but I’ve decided to use my fear as fuel.

I’d rather just be working on my own individual bliss.  I don’t really want to be known as the ‘diversity guy’ or the ‘black game designer’. I think I’m a decent game designer in my own right, and I hate having this asterisk applied to something I spend so much time on. But you know what? I’m proud to be a black game designer, and I’m happy to do the industry the favor of trying to expand its reach.

I am driving towards making more inclusive products, helping people make more inclusive products, and supporting products that broaden what fantasy is. I’m sure there are many people who don’t think I can do this, or that it doesn’t need doing.  That’s your right to believe what you will.

I really hope you enjoyed the content we provided this February.  If there was something you wished we drilled into more, let us know!

I want to thank everyone who supports Thoughtcrime’s mission of making good games for everyone.  We are taking time in the blog to analyze what we like about this hobby and learning how to spread it.  The goal is to make games that are accessible in time spent and in demographic reach.  I personally believe that the future of our hobby lies here if it has a future (I am pretty sure it does).

I want to thank in particular this month, in no particular order: Chris Chinn, Ryven Cedrylle, Tracy Hurley, Milton Davis, Jeremy Morgan, David Hill, Filamena Young, Judd Karlman, Raymond Terry, Richard Rogers, Meguey Baker, Emily Care Boss, Mark Diaz Truman, Kip Hampton, Eric Duncan, Ryan Macklin, John & Brianna Sheldon…I’m sure there is someone I forgot here, but hopefully not! There have been a lot of awesome people actively supporting and boosting our mission this month.  Thank you all.

Last, to my incredible wife and my amazing son: The future is ours.

The only thing ending in February is complacency.

I’m a big hiphop fan.  I’m surprised and not surprised that hiphop hasn’t been merged into an active product yet (someone might tell me about Wyrd is Bond but that’s more about gangs and tribes than hiphop).  I’m not surprised because I think a game that really loves hiphop is something that overall gamer culture is probably not ready for. I know a lot of gamers who are at least into hiphop as I am, but I don’t know that RPGs publishers know that these people are there and potentially looking for something that embraces the music and culture in an interesting way. There are cool things about gaming culture, but it’s not a sterling example of a subculture ready to truly adopt the other (working on changing that!).

I am surprised though, because the fundamentals of making hiphop music and RPGs are , to me, pretty damn similar. A  tabletop group when it meets is a lot like a freestyle cypher. Both are groups who meet to create a story and expression through speech.  Both follow informal and formal rules to produce that speech (creativity needs constraints), and both are rooted heavily in a sense of improvisation and experimentation. We push each other and play quite literally with our words, forming sacred spaces where imagination is the prime value.

That’s when it all works, anyway.  Half of the fun of playing at freestyling and RPGs is learning the skills to get you to that space consistently. Time is a factor, but more important to developing that skill is your commitment to experimentation and improvisation. Building your “vocabulary” gets you consistently to that space and lets you bring others with you.

In my head, that’s how hip hop and RPGs are very similar.  Having done of both (I’m a much better roleplayer than rapper, sorry!), these are the commonalities I see.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk about ways we can use hip hop as a creative launching point for RPG play.

On thing I often hear from people when I discuss the diversity and expanding the range of our hobby is :

“Well I’m afraid that I’ll get it wrong, or that I’ll be accused of appropriation.  I’ll get it wrong and then people will call me a racist/sexist/etc.”

I get that fear, but it’s pretty irrational for two reasons:

1) Gaming is just not that diverse.  There aren’t a ton of people from these groups that you’d be hearing from in the first place!  Most PoC I know see media that we think is offensive and we roll our eyes, complain about it to each other, and go about our business.  Who has time to educate and argue with people who are clearly uninterested in learning?  How do I know they are uninterested in learning? Because….

2) Too frequently, criticisms based on culture are treated as invalid.  Less valid than a complaint about mechanics, or a complaint about typos or any number of things. I see publishers savaged for things I consider far less important, but I see publishers bend over backwards to appease these.  It is interesting when you posit that something could be culturally insensitive that the first thing that happens is now someone’s explaining to me how I don’t understand, and they don’t see, and now I’m the asshole trying to explain color to someone who doesn’t see color.  Any complaints go immediately to how the person claiming the offense is actually the one inflicting harm, or is silly or stupid or politically correct ,etc. When this happen I know that it wasn’t a good-faith effort because the person in question is not actually taking in new information.

To be fair, I do see these feared blow-outs on occasion, but almost always these are proxy complaints. By proxy, I mean it’s often people not in the “aggrieved” group making a fuss. I get why that happens but that’s not a reason I’m going to accept for why people otherwise motivated to venture forth and make gaming material with a different perspective and possibly accessible to a new audience. If you can’t hear me explain to you why this thing you did misses the mark without instantly making it about your hurt feelings, I can’t accept that you were ever truly moving beyond your boundaries.

And hey! That’s fine.  Build what you want, but don’t make excuses. Just say you are interested in making other things.  There is a whole list of stuff I’m not interested in making, and I’m not going to apologize for it.  But I’m not going to blame phantom causes for it either.

Still with me?  Are you really interested in expanding your boundaries and making games about other cultures that aren’t just reskins of D&D? Cool.

The first thing we need is humility. You need to accept that you could get it wrong without breaking into cold sweats.  You’d think that as a PoC I would feel more comfortable with the material that I’m working on, but I’ll share a secret with you: I’ve spent most of my life terrified of getting it wrong too!  It’s not been until fairly recently that I have embraced the basic humility that allows me to risk being wrong without taking it personally.  You try to get things right to the best of your ability. Do you flip out at an editor when they correct your grammar, talking about how they can’t call you stupid, some of your best friends are punctuation  etc? Or do you accept that your work needed to be fixed, honestly try to understand, and move on?

Similarly here.  Have humility.  Be an arrogant jerk everywhere else but be humble when your work is assessed culturally.

Next: research!  I think the links I’ve shown and the work we’ve done this month show plenty of ways you can convert a few hours into a productive bit of research for use in your games.  The internet + your public library make this endeavor almost laughably easy, so do that.  Get enough information to learn what actually is there.  Don’t just fit another culture to your own preconceptions.

Last: read Writing the Other.  It’s a great and short read that provides great guidance for when you want to stretch outside of yourself.  This is meant for fiction writing, but it’s a very easy port to game design and GMing.

I know I make it sound easier than it is, but getting to it is not complex.  It’s hard, but not complicated.  Find all the information you can, but accept that you won’t know everything, or that your viewpoint could be obscured by your cultural perceptions.  Expand your boundaries. Have fun!

So far we’ve seen ancient Ethiopia (Part I) and the Aksumite Kingdom (Part II). In this final part, we will look at Ethiopia in the Middle Ages up to the arrival of the Portuguese in the 1500s.

A Strange Story Ark!

Writing about Middle Ages Ethiopia is a little awkward as many of the perceived ‘important events’ aren’t  contained within the borders of continental Africa. It seems to be very important to the Ethiopians, however, and at the end of the day that’s the key to these sorts of endeavors – telling the story the people you are talking about would want known.

Aksum’s decline came while it was largely a Muslim nation despite having a nominally Christian ruling class. In 980, Queen Yodit, a woman of some undiscerned ethnicity, led an army that laid waste to what remained of Aksum. She claimed to be descended from the Hebrew warlord Gideon. She ruled the area for 40 years and handed the crown down to her descendants. At some point, one of Yodit’s descendants marries into the old Axumite ruling family, restoring what was traditionally seen to be a Solomonic lineage for the Axumite rulers.

The Ethiopians feel a particularly strong kinship with the Jews. The Kebra Nagast is an Ethiopian holy text explaining the full story of the meeting of Solomon with the Queen of Sheba. The Ethiopians claim the Queen to be one of theirs and that the start of their royal dynasty, Menelik I, was Solomon’s son by the Queen. (This was in fact written into the official Ethiopian Constitution, up to the time of the end of the reign of emperor Haile Selassie) Other parallels exist as well. The language of the Ethiopian regions are mostly Semitic like Hebrew, Arabic, etc. There is a community of Jews in Ethiopia sometimes referred to as Beta Israel who claim to have come back to Ethiopia with Menelik I and practice a pre-Talmudic variant of Judaism. (Queen Yodit may have been one of these Beta Israelites or possibly part of the indigenous people known as the Sidamo.) The historian Josephus records tales of Moses fighting against the Ethiopians and marrying an Ethiopian princess. Even the very Ark of the Covenant may have made its way down to Ethiopia, brought by Jews fleeing the Babylonians; it is said to rest in the cathedral of Maryam Tseyon (Mary of Zion) to this day. I’ve even heard arguments that Judaism’s seemingly aberrant monotheism amongst a sea of polytheism in the Sinai peninsula indicates that it is truly an African tradition that wound up far, far from home!

What arises then in the post-Aksum Ethiopian empire is a form of Christianity (via the Aksumite lineage) that remains largely a branch of Judaism and doesn’t inherit the hierarchy or theological culture of the Roman or Orthodox traditions. It is surrounded on all sides by Islamic nations but doesn’t seek to convert them. Additionally, because it is mostly cut off from the rest of the Christian world except for a small persecuted group of Coptic Christians, it adds different books to its canon. The Orthodox Tehwado tradition (Ethiopian Christianity) recognizes almost every Old Testament book used by every other major Christian tradition and then adds on the Paralipomena of Jeremiah (4 Baruch), Jubilees, Enoch, and the three books of Meqabyan. Its New Testament canon adds another 8 books, one of which is purely Ethiopian in origin.  In short, Ethiopian Christianity at the time looked almost nothing like the Christianity of the Western world, yet had grown  from the same roots.

Middle Ages Ethiopia can be seen for our gaming purposes as an excellent model destination for standard faux-medieval adventuring games. (Can’t do a gaming series without a nod to D&D, right?) On one level, it’s not too far from what we’re used to. There’s a king and a feudal system. Standardized coinage is being minted. The gods worshipped in your home are the gods worshipped here. They’re people just like you, really. Then again, they’re using texts and tomes you’ve never heard of.  Their images of the gods don’t look like yours (or you!), but  you can see the important similarities if you look closely.  Questing knights might end up here looking for assistance against a terrible foe from a dynasty of wise regents who aren’t already caught up in the petty wars and politicking of home. Sure, they have their own petty wars and politicking, but there’s a fresh perspective . Clerics can look for lost artifacts or texts that have been kept safe by an isolated group of faithful. In a modern setting, your Farewell to Fear characters (Archaeologist, I’m looking at you) might consider proving or disproving the royal lineage as one of their cultural revolutions.

Ethiopia serves for us as an image of a far-off exotic land that, upon arrival, turns out not to be so exotic or different after all. That’s how these things tend to turn out, isn’t it? The bigger the world is, the smaller we find out it is as well.