Hi all, this is our second post about the rules review. In this one we’re going to talk about how we’re changing ‘race’. Firstly we’ll talk about what changes we’re making and then we’ll talk a little about why.
The short story is that we’re getting rid of the concept of race. This means that going forward there will be no peoples who gain access to specific skills by dint of their birth, of who their parents were or because of the colour of their skin. With all progression based on Archetypes and experience, there’s no influence from ‘race’ at any point in a character’s life.
Further to the above we are also dropping the idea of there being universal racial types such as elves, orcs, goblins etc. They aren’t necessarily going away but in this magical world that forms the backdrop for Curious Pastimes we are saying that they aren’t all somehow related to one another.
There are a bunch of reasons for this but there are two that stand out. The first is that the races as we typically encounter them in most Western Fantasy are based on the idea of racial essentialism. This first suggests that people are capable according to the race of which they are a part. This is bad enough but the foundation of this idea is worse still and that’s the idea of racial hierarchies.
This idea in its C18/19/20th construction is most likely built on the Atlantic slave trade and its post hoc rationalisation by White Europeans and Americans (see references below) supposed the following: that White people were by default capable of anything and would also therefore be the yardstick by which all other races were measured. Some were naturally beautiful and wise, some were seen as cunning but physically weak, others were naturally fascinated with gold, some were seen as barbarous but stupid although potentially noble if properly educated. Others were seen as inherently evil and inscrutable/mysterious.
Do you recognise the descriptions of human, elf, goblin, dwarves and orcs? Now reread it and see how racial hierarchies were formalised into legal systems in numerous places in Europe as White, Aryan, Jewish (and South/East Asians), Jewish (again) and Sub-Saharan African. Not quite so innocent now is it.
This is a far cry from previous views of ‘race’ which often indicated a common language or cultural group.
This means we thought about a lot of possible options but rejected most and settled on the idea of falling back on the concept of culture, defined here as the ways of life of a society. Why? Because culture is entirely constructed and links people together via social solidarity, common practices, experience and history. It means that all the things people celebrate as heritage can remain without the more difficult associations with skin colour, nationalism and hating the ‘Other’.
So you can remain an elf because that’s what you call yourself. It may be that your whole group call yourselves elves and that’s fine too because it’s what you call yourselves and that, as with all of human experience is a story that is constructed via social interaction.
Did your group of orcs and trolls find social solidarity and common cause with a group of goblins in a different warhost? Awesome, nothing will change for you in practice. To make all this clear we will also be writing example characters just so the impact of all these changes is brought to life including thoughts about makeup, appearance and kit.
What it will change is a little about how we build our world here and the types of stories we want to tell as a community. We want to decolonise storytelling – which is an academic way of saying that we want to tell stories that aren’t always about the hero going from X to Y and beating the evil enemy.
Enemies will exist, our battles will be epic, but so will our stories about living together, collaborating, exploring, building and creating. Crucial to that, for us, is creating a world in which all kinds of people from outside of Larp can arrive and see themselves in what we’re doing.
Some examples of this that you may or may not have already noticed – we have been removing or tweaking creatures with explicit links to Christianity and Judaism from our game (among other real world belief systems), not least because they are frequently anti-semitic or otherwise problematic but also because their origins and associations do not exist in the world of Curious Pastimes. For example – demons are a classification of creature from a specific place in the Curious Pastimes cosmos, not agents of the devil. They have their own society, lore, laws, cultures and histories unique to them. The same goes for how we’re treating our undead such as vampires and liches. The cultures who recently visited from other planes were also designed with this in mind – and were developed to show different ways of living, of socially organising and valuing ways of life.
If you want more detailed articles on this then we recommend the following:
Larp Book posted a video of a talk we gave at LarpCon you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWqHKSf_gYs
That talk is based on a paper that one of the team wrote for the Journal of the British Fantasy Society. Although access to that journal is behind a paywall, you can also find the paper itself here:
And if that’s not enough then please see here too:
On the racist problems of fantasy races https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/ws/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1648836976448254&disposition=inline
On the history of the hierarchy of race https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/spc3.12953
There are many other resources available with a short search at your local bookshop or using the search engine of your choice. Key search terms are colonialism (try A Legacy of Violence for instance), postcolony, decolonisation and anti-racism.
We also note that the discussion here is a UK focused one and does not, therefore, take in all the various nuances that might be at play elsewhere such as in France, the US or Germany to pick 3 at (not) random because those legacies and experiences remain radically different to ours. Although they may overlap, even the accepted meaning of basic terms such as ‘White’ may not be the same from one place to another.