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Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I'd post this in the Frostgrave thread but well... I'm the only one posting in there :(

Northstar are going to release a multi-part plastic kit for making wizards this year! I'm not sure if it'll be like the other kits, where you get 20 models (i doubt it) but hey, more dudes with fancy hats!

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LashLightning
Feb 20, 2010

You know you didn't have to go post that, right?
But it's fine, I guess...

You just keep being you!

Irate Tree posted:

I'd post this in the Frostgrave thread but well... I'm the only one posting in there :(

I try! :( I just don't have anything of my own work to show...

It'll be interesting to see what they do. One/two sprues of five "bodies" each? A sprue of 4 bodies?

I was expecting something along the lines of the resin/metal sci-cultists/outlaw sets they sell, to be conversion fuel with the various soldier box sets.

Being able to make two warbands with a wizard box and a single soldier box would make marketing sense.

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

LashLightning posted:

I try! :( I just don't have anything of my own work to show...

All good duder. I just get embarrassed at seeing my name so many times in a row =S

LashLightning posted:

It'll be interesting to see what they do. One/two sprues of five "bodies" each? A sprue of 4 bodies?

I was expecting something along the lines of the resin/metal sci-cultists/outlaw sets they sell, to be conversion fuel with the various soldier box sets.

Being able to make two warbands with a wizard box and a single soldier box would make marketing sense.

It makes me happy to see them continuing with the game for so long, as well as GA! Just such neat little minis.
I can see them sticking to their usual formula of five bodies and bits on one sprue. Maybe they'll include a second sprue of just bits and bobs?

Lumbermouth
Mar 6, 2008

GREG IS BIG NOW


Irate Tree posted:

I'd post this in the Frostgrave thread but well... I'm the only one posting in there :(

Northstar are going to release a multi-part plastic kit for making wizards this year! I'm not sure if it'll be like the other kits, where you get 20 models (i doubt it) but hey, more dudes with fancy hats!

To be fair, I was going to post this but couldn't find any corroborating evidence of this :)

I'm glad this thread exists though! I'm getting into cheap miniatures gaming and have been messing around with the assorted Andrea Sfiligoi rulesets (Song of Blades & Heroes, Mutants & Death Ray Guns, A Fistful of Kung Fu)

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

So, at some point, the plastic Frostgrave miniatures will actually exist, yeah? Or will they be perpetually out of stock until the end of time?

Lumbermouth
Mar 6, 2008

GREG IS BIG NOW


S.J. posted:

So, at some point, the plastic Frostgrave miniatures will actually exist, yeah? Or will they be perpetually out of stock until the end of time?

I got mine from Bad Squiddo in December. Since then, it looks like she sold out of the Female Soldier box, but the regular soldiers are still available.

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

Lumbermouth posted:

I got mine from Bad Squiddo in December. Since then, it looks like she sold out of the Female Soldier box, but the regular soldiers are still available.

I want the Cultists and Gnolls so bad :(

Thanks, though, I'll keep her in mind

LashLightning
Feb 20, 2010

You know you didn't have to go post that, right?
But it's fine, I guess...

You just keep being you!

S.J. posted:

I want the Cultists and Gnolls so bad :(

Thanks, though, I'll keep her in mind

Where do you live? Where do you want to buy them from?

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

I'm in the US. Most of the distributors I go through haven't had those minis in stock for a long time, it seems, or I'm just missing the window.

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
You could always go through Northstar directly! Or, is the cost of shipping to the US prohibitively costly?

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

Irate Tree posted:

You could always go through Northstar directly! Or, is the cost of shipping to the US prohibitively costly?

An extra 25% to the US and up to 4 weeks for delivery :/

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I mean, four weeks from the UK sounds about par for the course. The markup is less than good, though =/

Zark the Damned
Mar 9, 2013

I think the issue with the FG plastics is they weren't quite prepared for how popular they are and didn't produce enough, and now reprints of the old sets are stuck in the production queue behind newer stuff like the Oathmark sets and the Tribals for Ghost Archipelago. Hopefully they'll be able to ramp up production at some point, the kits are ace.

Occasionally North Star will sell the older stuff by the sprue instead of the boxed sets which indicates to me they're having issues getting enough boxes printed too.

(or at least that's my assumption based on a vague and possibly incorrect idea on how plastic minis manufacturing works)

S.J.
May 19, 2008

Just who the hell do you think we are?

I totally understand that and I don't completely hold it against them, I just want the drat things for D&D :v:

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
Speaking of Ghost Archipelago, I was looking at the box sets and saw this, and, uuuh...



Has someone... mentioned this to the guys who make this? At the very least it could do with being retitled to "natives" or something.

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
Pardon any ignorance on my part but i'm not sure what the issue is? Like, it's a bunch of pseudo-Polynesian guys ready to gently caress someone up.

Pierzak
Oct 30, 2010

Irate Tree posted:

Pardon any ignorance on my part but i'm not sure what the issue is? Like, it's a bunch of pseudo-Polynesian guys ready to gently caress someone up.
Not politically correct, apparently.

LashLightning
Feb 20, 2010

You know you didn't have to go post that, right?
But it's fine, I guess...

You just keep being you!

I have to say, PoC also make up some of the imperialist invaders (well, I guess we can call them that - they mostly just want a sip from the magic fountain and presumably would bugger off again) and the book has a mention of caucasian tribes - presumably one would be able to throw something together with ancient Briton/germanic figures and sets.

...

Now I just want to make a crew based on Asterix and Obalex. Obviously Gitafix has ran out of one of the major ingredients, which is water from the Ghost Archipelago's magic fountain!

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
PC: realistic, authentic, accurate portrayals of various indigenous groups living a hunter-gatherer or basic agrarian lifestyle in a historical context
Not PC: an amalgamation of random stereotypes smashed into a single generic "native" caricature that is portrayed as backwards and savage in comparison to westernized colonialists (see: basically every King Kong film).

Here's an example: you're making a WW2 miniatures game and have an expansion book for the Japanese colonization of Taiwan and want to have stats and models for various Taiwanese indigenous peoples. Including details that they were in fact headhunters and releasing village terrain with dried head ornamentation would be historically accurate. That would be PC.

Having them be inhuman cannibals for no other reason than that they are native peoples to Taiwan would not be PC (they were not in fact cannibals, just headhunters).

I don't know enough about Frostgrave or this setting to have an opinion on if this is a PC or not portrayal. I would worry that they took random bits and pieces of actual groups and mixed them with a dose of nonsense to arrive at a King Kong style fictionalized portrayal of "savages". Again though, I don't know that that's what's going on. It's just something you would want to tread carefully around and be as respectful as possible to avoid.

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
Yeah, Atlas nailed my exact first reaction. The term "Tribals" combined with a mishmash of native garb traits is at least concerning given the historic trend of RPGs and other fantasy fiction to represent natives or proxy-natives as a caricature of "savages". My primary issue, aside from "tribals", which I doubt was chosen for it's sociological significance, it looks a lot like they've jumbled up a bunch of different influences; I'm not an expert but it looks a lot like they've got a mix of polynesian, native american, mayan, and african traits.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
Well, going after a single culture for your tribals/savages would be more problematic than just going for a mixture of traits, no? It would probably be hard to make an entirely original bunch of islanders for your superhero golden age pirates to fight/ally with.

spectralent
Oct 1, 2014

Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops
That's fair; I can also see the flipside argument, which is that an age-of-sail game about plundering doubloons from places that features no indigenous peoples is just erasing them. I think on reflection it'd feel better if they didn't look like general-purpose "savages" and had gone for a more unified stylised look of the carribean peoples specifically (or native american or whatever cipher they're applying). The fact they have polynesian and african influences visible feels like it's throwing things into a blender.

Indolent Bastard
Oct 26, 2007

I WON THIS AMAZING AVATAR! I'M A WINNER! WOOOOO!

JcDent posted:

Well, going after a single culture for your tribals/savages would be more problematic than just going for a mixture of traits, no? It would probably be hard to make an entirely original bunch of islanders for your superhero golden age pirates to fight/ally with.

Be smart and use troglodytes or orcs as your "tribals" the coding is obvious, but at least you don't have "dark skinned savage" humans in your game.

MeinPanzer
Dec 20, 2004
anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts
I like North Star, but they're also the company that produces this very dubiously-named game:

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all

Indolent Bastard posted:

Be smart and use troglodytes or orcs as your "tribals" the coding is obvious, but at least you don't have "dark skinned savage" humans in your game.

This is problematic in its own way though. Why should we code indigenous peoples as orcs or other monstrous creatures? Rather than stereotyping them as inhuman, you've crossed a bridge and simply declared them inhuman. You've avoided one problem to make another basically and I don't know that one is better or worse than the other.

spectralent posted:

That's fair; I can also see the flipside argument, which is that an age-of-sail game about plundering doubloons from places that features no indigenous peoples is just erasing them. I think on reflection it'd feel better if they didn't look like general-purpose "savages" and had gone for a more unified stylised look of the carribean peoples specifically (or native american or whatever cipher they're applying). The fact they have polynesian and african influences visible feels like it's throwing things into a blender.

It becomes a question of why are we trying to perfectly recreate actual history in our fantasy game. There's no need for indigenous peoples to be living hunter-gatherer lifestyles with low technology in your fantasy setting. It's fantasy! You can do anything at all. It would be a bigger issue if you were doing a historical game set in that period and strictly had colonial powers battling each other for territory and ignored that there were people already living there altogether. If these are lost islands that for magical purposes have recently been reconnected to the main reality, there's nothing stopping you from having a high tech empire or otherwise comparable society to the invading one present. Do something subversive where the first islands are populated by fishing villages recently affected by some cataclysm giving the impression to the treasure hunters that they've discovered a tribal people but as they push deeper, they run into the representatives of the centralized government and find that their initial reactions were wrong.

JcDent posted:

Well, going after a single culture for your tribals/savages would be more problematic than just going for a mixture of traits, no? It would probably be hard to make an entirely original bunch of islanders for your superhero golden age pirates to fight/ally with.

We make original European style cultures all the time that have elaborate histories explaining how their original features fit together with the assorted aspects of real world cultures that the creators borrowed or were influenced by. All it would take is asking a couple of questions and doing a bit of research. What does food production look like on these islands? That tells us what kind of technology would have developed or would be necessary. What kinds of animals are there? As soon as you introduce large domestic animals or magical beasts that fit those roles, it completely changes the nature of the society. What's the geography of the islands like? You could easily have different types of cultures based on altitude and jungle density. What's their relationship with other humans and why? Cannibalism is a real thing that happens, but only under specific conditions (lack of protein in the diet being common). Head hunting and ritual sacrifice are more common, but again, why does it exist in your fantasy setting? Look to real world examples to see if your setting has the same necessary pre-conditions.

And if your fantasy setting is analogous to a real world location, then make sure the elements you are borrowing all originate in that area. Don't throw in bits and pieces of South American society into fantasy Polynesia for instance.

I just get the impression that the developers of games like these find it easier to grab a couple of recognizable features of indigenous peoples (skulls, feathers, loin cloths, stone weapons, dark skin), mix them together, and call it a day without any thought to how or why these things could or wouldn't fit together neatly or logically.

Ashcans
Jan 2, 2006

Let's do the space-time warp again!

Wakanda is a pretty good mainstream example of a good way to handle this, because it has been designed with intentional references to actual African culture and draws on it for aesthetic/inspiration, but clearly avoids portraying them as being backward or uncivilized.

Just simple things like replacing a handshake with an alternative greeting makes a difference

Sanglorian
Apr 13, 2013

Games, games, games
I'm really interested in ideas about representing indigenous people in fantasy fiction/games in a way that's respectful and nuanced. Each approach - using monsters as proxies, basing them off a single culture, making them a blend of cultures, etc - is fraught, but I'm sure there are better and worse ways of taking each approach. So I'd love to hear more discussion - and examples of it being done well, if people have them. Miniatures have the extra limitation of having to communicate visually, of course!

I do worry about making the indigenous people secretly technologically advanced (or worse, magically advanced) or a fallen civilisation. Better I think to recognise the qualities that various indigenous peoples did have - whether it's egalitarianism, proto-democracies, sophisticated continent-wide firestick farming, oral histories recording events from hundreds of years ago, navigation, medical knowledge, art and song, justice and honour, etc. - than to play into the "technologically advanced is better" trope.

A bit of context for the Tribal figures is that the term comes from Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago. In Ghost Archipelago there are "Tribals" with a range of skin colours, heights and clothes, as well as the Bronze Age tech Dricheans. Not saying that exonerates North Star or anything, just explaining where they're getting it from.

I think a really simple way they could have improved Ghost Archipelago is by having "Tribals" be just a different flavour of warbands. No reason why the superhero Heritors and magical Wardens have to be limited to raiders/treasure hunters from over the sea.

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Atlas Hugged posted:

I just get the impression that the developers of games like these find it easier to grab a couple of recognizable features of indigenous peoples (skulls, feathers, loin cloths, stone weapons, dark skin), mix them together, and call it a day without any thought to how or why these things could or wouldn't fit together neatly or logically.

Well, that is the reason, innit? I assume they didn't have great rich backstories for the soldier boxes or the gnoll box or the cultist box, so I don't think there's interest in doing that here, either. It would make sense if the "tribals" were a discrete faction in a game that runs on factions (like 40K).

Sanglorian posted:

I do worry about making the indigenous people secretly technologically advanced (or worse, magically advanced) or a fallen civilisation. Better I think to recognise the qualities that various indigenous peoples did have - whether it's egalitarianism, proto-democracies, sophisticated continent-wide firestick farming, oral histories recording events from hundreds of years ago, navigation, medical knowledge, art and song, justice and honour, etc. - than to play into the "technologically advanced is better" trope.

These things can make an appearance and make an impact in an RPG (look at 7th sea 2e), but it's a wee bit hard to demonstrate your proto-democratic tendencies in a box of mook miniatures.

Sanglorian posted:

I think a really simple way they could have improved Ghost Archipelago is by having "Tribals" be just a different flavour of warbands. No reason why the superhero Heritors and magical Wardens have to be limited to raiders/treasure hunters from over the sea.

Well, yes, then this would also give more motivation to flesh out the faction.

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I guess I don't really see what the problem is basing a fictional indigenous people on a real one, or at least on one particular region, especially not if your fictional region is analogous to a real world location. If you're doing fictional Polynesia in your fantasy world, then base some aspects of the culture on actual Polynesian tribes and practices. It answers several of the questions I posed in my previous post. You just wouldn't want to have your fictional people be a random grab bag of Inuit, Mesoamerican, or Australian aboriginal cultures.

I also don't see making the indigenous people technology more advanced than their real world counterparts a problem while I'm also trying not to equate technology with being better or more human. The reality is that indigenous peoples were less technologically advanced for actual reasons and when the barriers to advancement were removed, they adopted modern technology immediately and without issue. So if you're creating a fictional indigenous people who are not technologically advanced, my question to you is why? What conditions have you put into place that would cause technology to stop progressing or even to regress? What about these islands make them desirable to treasure hunters despite them not supporting conditions where the indigenous peoples would have needed better technology?

There are plenty of perfectly valid real world examples for this. There's no feedback loop of food production, population density, and technological innovation in a lot of places around the world. This leads to small populations with either limited food production and equivalent technology or populations living hunter-gatherer lifestyles despite people only a few thousand miles away leading world conquering expeditions. But that's the real world and we're not talking about the real world.

I have to stress that this is fiction and fantasy. I think it's incredibly lazy and frankly bad history to think you're avoiding the race issue just by making the tribes a variety of skin tones. People aren't just naturally hunter-gatherers "in the wild" if those places have domesticable plants and animals that promote the development of tools and technology and support complex political structures.

We're talking about fantasy settings that presumably have magic, magical beasts, and powerful technologies derived from both or remaining from some ancient civilization. If that's your starting point, and the home of your fictional indigenous peoples has access to those, why are they still "savage" at all? Something has to have happened to have stopped them from developing like every other society on Earth did when the proper conditions presented themselves. Just saying that these people have to be living hunter-gatherer lifestyle because their real world counterparts were is really sketchy.

And that's exactly what works about Wakanda. You give a group in Africa an immensely powerful resource and also literal magic and they don't develop the same way as other tribes in Africa. It's still not great history because plenty of indigenous peoples were sitting on top of excellent resources and never made use of them (they had no need for them as the conditions requiring them weren't met), but there's an attempt at an explanation being made.

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS
I still have to pick up the book for GA but if it's anything like Frostgrave, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from using the figures for your own warband. In fact, it's encouraged!
In Frostgrave, they've released five different soldier kits. Some of them are used for scenarios (Cultists, Gnolls and Barbarians) but they also encourage you to make warbands using those kits and whatever else takes your fancy. Some people have warbands of goblins, dwarves, elves, whatever!

Knowing that, i feel like people are reading a little too much into this. No two fantasy settings are the same and fantasy does not necessarily equate to equality amongst regions and/or cultures in their respective settings. A real world example would be the Mayans and Incas, i think. They were some of the most advanced people of their age and they still performed rites of sacrifice and used weapons made of wood, bone and jade. Hell, the Spanish, who would be your civilised people, would go on to slaughter, enslave and ultimately erase them from existence. Similar to the Romans and their campaign against the Celts/Picts. You still have examples of peoples today, who have dwelt their entire lives in the Amazon and some scattered islands, using stone tools and weapons to hunt and defend themselves. That's not an indictment on them in any way, whether they're white or brown or whatever. it's just what is.

At the end of the day, it's a game about magical people (who didn't in any way earn it, they inherited it from their forebears) looking to juice themselves back up by finding a magic macguffin in an archipelago, filled with jungle terrors and native peoples, yelling at them to get off their lawn. I sincerely doubt that the imagery of that box set is in any way motivated by a dim or ill view of people of colour.

Irate Tree
Mar 12, 2011

by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

I feel like you're answering your own questions here. "Why are these people like this and not like this, instead?" Because that's how they've decided to structure it.
The issue you have with them still wielding clubs and blow darts, while the invaders have flintlocks isn't unreasonable. However, it comes down to timing and ubiquity of the technology. Just because they stripped the pistols off a guy, does not mean they have immediate and comprehensive knowledge of its use, let alone its construction. Same thing the other way; just because you have a guy who's good with words, that doesn't automatically equate to comprehension of the large, multi-layered dial of pictographs, glyphs or words that they're looking at.

That being said, if you want to model those dudes with pistols and/or rifles, go for it! I'd love to see them and whatever story you create for them! :D

As far as the 'generalist' aesthetics of the models, a lot of their kits are like that. The only ones that are notably different or that stand out are the monsters (Gnolls and Snakemen).

Atlas Hugged
Mar 12, 2007


Put your arms around me,
fiddly digits, itchy britches
I love you all
I don't have any issue at all with them being portrayed with stone or wooden weapons. That's not at all my concern. I have an issue with arbitrarily portraying indigenous people as less advanced and with throwing together multiple stereotypes because you want a savage aesthetic. I raised my questions because "we designed them that way" isn't a very good answer for all the things I elaborated on.

The issue is one of context. A generic, historically inaccurate portrayal of a European fight-man has not been used to denigrate, marginalize, misrepresent, or otherwise negatively portray white Europeans in culture or media (at least not usually or typically). But that cannot also be said of portrayals of indigenous peoples. That's the fundamental problem.

From the sounds of it these models were developed without any real thought to that context. I certainly don't think it malicious, but that doesn't erase the problems associated with that kind of portrayal.

And while you're free to use these as the grunts in your warband, I have to wonder about the intent. Are these strictly generic models to be used by players in their forces or do they fulfill a more "wandering monster role" where they're actually in the rules to be NPCs to be killed. Because if it's the latter, uh....

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!
I dunno about Ghost Archipelago, but Frostgrave was, in general, about two assholes wizards, their aprentices and bands of expendable soldiers duking it out in the ruins of the city of Frostgrave. I dunno about the Kultists or Gnolls - there's really nothing preventing you from using them in your band, but Tree mentioned their use in scenarios, soo...

E: Since I'm a person who knows how to spend time wisely, I went and checked. Tribals fall under sentient races heading of the beastiary. They're the other hostile humans, the first ones being bronze-armored warrior culture of Diracheans. The description of tribals is non-comitant: from "pigmy to giant" (their words), from white, to black. Some are cannibals, some are peaceful, and so on.

Stats given are mentioned for a regular hunting party.

Going by the scenarios, only one of them places human-like opponents against the player, being Dirachean guards that guard a prisoner. Most of the time you're dealing with random encounters and snakes. So many snakes.

There are also snakemen. The book says that it's unknown whether the snakes have a single kingdom or many, and whether they inhabit the ruins because they built, mostly because neither Heritors nor Wardens care as they're here to loot their poo poo.

JcDent fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jan 17, 2019

Ashcans
Jan 2, 2006

Let's do the space-time warp again!

There's kind of a lot to dig into here, so I'm going to roll back to the original question, which is about the box name. 'Tribals' is not a good name to pick here. They appear to be using it as a sort of byword for indigenous peoples - I am going to go ahead and give them the benefit of the doubt that they don't intend it to be any indication of backwardness or savagery which it is often attached to. But a tribe is just a system of social organization, and there are many existing and functioning tribes and tribal systems in the modern world. So the question is, what is it they are intending to convey? Given that it's a wargame, I am guessing that actual social organization is not really the point, and they are using it as a byword for the aesthetic, which is not really good. I am hesitant to say they should use 'Native' because of the history of association with backwardness as well. I would probably say, hey, do these people have a name? Is there backstory enough that you can provide them with with a Faction title instead? If not, maybe use something that describes their role in the setting more neutrally, like 'Islanders'. It describes who they are in the context of the game (the people already living on the islands) without the excess baggage.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
TBH I don't think they've thought it through at all. The general tone of the UK right now is they're surprised and slightly put out that Ireland gained independence a hundred years ago so...

Ashcans
Jan 2, 2006

Let's do the space-time warp again!

My impression is that many of these issues don't even have much visibility in the UK; in the US you get more attention on certain things, like sports teams with lovely names and existing-while-black arrests and persecution so that even people who don't care about it have heard about it, while in the UK a lot of it seems to sail by without a thought. I see this sometimes with UK shows, where they'll do an impression or something that would screech to a halt on US broadcast television but doesn't raise brows there. I don't know that the US is any better on any of these topics in the end, but they seem to have a higher awareness at least.

I'm ambivalent about that 'Death in the Dark Continent' title, because it's specifically about wargames in 19th century Africa, so it's possibly just trying to allude to the way Africa was regarded by European invaders at the time - it's different than if it cropped up in the 2000s in a regular conversation, for example. For me, it would strongly depend on how the internal material handled African nations and peoples. I can imagine using 'death in the Dark Continent' as a sort of ironic pulpy title for a game that takes the conflicts and players seriously, like if you wrote a book about women in social and political movements and called it something like 'Ladies of Hysteria' because it's knowingly thumbing its nose at their contemporary critics. Now, is North Star that nuanced? You know, probably not in its wargames rules, but maybe.

MeinPanzer
Dec 20, 2004
anyone who reads Cinema Discusso for anything more than slackjawed trolling will see the shittiness in my posts

Ashcans posted:

I'm ambivalent about that 'Death in the Dark Continent' title, because it's specifically about wargames in 19th century Africa, so it's possibly just trying to allude to the way Africa was regarded by European invaders at the time - it's different than if it cropped up in the 2000s in a regular conversation, for example. For me, it would strongly depend on how the internal material handled African nations and peoples. I can imagine using 'death in the Dark Continent' as a sort of ironic pulpy title for a game that takes the conflicts and players seriously, like if you wrote a book about women in social and political movements and called it something like 'Ladies of Hysteria' because it's knowingly thumbing its nose at their contemporary critics. Now, is North Star that nuanced? You know, probably not in its wargames rules, but maybe.

To be fair, I'm not familiar with the actual rules set, but given the general tone and tenor of military wargaming and its primary demographics, I think you might be overly generous with that last statement.

Sanglorian
Apr 13, 2013

Games, games, games

Ashcans posted:

I would probably say, hey, do these people have a name? Is there backstory enough that you can provide them with with a Faction title instead? If not, maybe use something that describes their role in the setting more neutrally, like 'Islanders'. It describes who they are in the context of the game (the people already living on the islands) without the excess baggage.

I think "Islanders" would have been a good pick. They're not a single culture or faction (the follow up book, Gods of Fire, describes and names six different tribes and gives rules for creating others).

JcDent
May 13, 2013

Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Sanglorian posted:

I think "Islanders" would have been a good pick. They're not a single culture or faction (the follow up book, Gods of Fire, describes and names six different tribes and gives rules for creating others).

Hard agree on Islanders.

They stills screwed the pooch by going "oh, the tribal people come in all shapes, sizes and colors."

Now, make a not!Maori a playable faction that's really, really excited that Wardens and Heritors (what a stupid name) are bringing in guns.

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LashLightning
Feb 20, 2010

You know you didn't have to go post that, right?
But it's fine, I guess...

You just keep being you!

Hey, Heritors are inheritors of their powers...

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