However, I don’t think either Alexandria’s response nor Bruce’s plan fall into the traps you’re worried about. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on the final product for playability and fun — with the fact in mind that not everyone’s fun is the same. I mean really, no body seems to mind beating up Nazis while researching Atlantis, so beating up the KKK while researching the Timurid dynasty shouldn’t be unfun.

However, this is something that I know Bruce is keeping an eye on. The balance between playability and reality is often a fine thing, but its also not one that can’t be done with some attention. If that still won’t work for you, then good news is its a supplement and so you can enjoy Spirit of the Century without it.

Surely you mean to add a little fantasy and unreality into the pulps.

That said - there were stories which were indeed sympathetic. The standard pulp hero is ideed a white man, but he often relied upon other racial and sexual achetypes to get things done and more often than not, treated them as equals even if society did not. I’m beginning to see this supplement being an opportunity to put reality in and I’m really thinking that’s the last thing we want to do. Reality is and was bigoted and ugly.

You have a choice. You either make race irrelevant so someone can play a female asian hero who leads the charge against the darkness (and thus rewrite the genre and change history) or you include reality and run the same character and spend half your time smacking landlords and officials about for their lack of modern sensibilities. Said like that it seems like a petty revenge plot.

8. But isn’t this the kind of thing that gamers can just do on their own? I mean, if you want to do it, why not just do it?

The very first thing I did when I got Spirit of the Century was to make The Brothers Rajput. It was no problem at all for me to just whip out some South Asian folks who had a compelling story that was kinda pulpy-exotic but still gave props to the historical culture without trivializing or overly orientalizing it. (There was a bit where they were Rajput princes who cared about the common people, which wasn’t common, but….) So yea, obviously it can be done.

The thing is, I don’t know how easily everyone that plays Spirit could have done it. I was living in India at the time that I wrote the characters, and when I wanted to know how an actual Indian would feel about them I went out and found one and asked. I have a degree in History with a focus on South Asia. I’ve read a billion books on the subject and written a 300,000 word RPG supplement based on India. So I could make the Rajputs both interesting, non-bland, non-orientalist, and with enough history to give them what, to me, is a real pulp flare (because the pulp writers were smart guys and did research). No problem for me, but for someone else with no knowledge of India, getting the mix of history, politics, religious and political observance and everything else that makes the characters pop out of the overly simplistic retro-pulp school of “Cowgirls and First-Nations” might take some work.

It’s a similar thing with a lot of groups in the 20s. Despite the fact that it was less than 100 years ago a lot of people don’t know much about the time, and don’t realize how different it was. They don’t know about the Red Scare of 1917-1920, or the rise of the International Workers Union in the mid 20s. They don’t know about America air-bombing its own cities to stop riots by black service men from WWI who returned home with combat training and no willingness to go back to sub-human conditions. They don’t know about a lot of this stuff at all, and even when they find it out it isn’t always immediately obvious how to apply it to game — especially if they want to do it well.

It is easy to come up with off the cuff answers, but they tend to be inelegant and rough. But because many people either aren’t experts on the subject or simply don’t have time to do more detailed work, that is the kind of solution lots of people come up with when they try to do things quickly on their own without putting in the time and effort to really make it work. It isn’t what Bruce will be doing though, because he’s a professional and is going to put in the time and effort to make his solutions more elegant, more integrated, and less strawmanny than that. The ability to do it well rather than just club your way through it, isn’t easy and isn’t something every group can do without putting a lot more effort into it than a game is usually worth.

So, you could read dozens of books about different groups in the 20s, work those into your game, figure out enough historical analysis technique to make it combine gracefully with pulp, and then make NPCs and plot hooks based on it — or you can just buy this book and have the work of others provided for you. For some people it won’t be worth it, because they have more time than money. For many it will be, because they have more money than time. And for a lot of people the ability to have one slim book to read that lets you do it in both the time and money that are worth spending on a game is a very good thing.

(For an early idea of my take on it, the Brothers Rajput show some exotic other that I tried to balance with respect and a sense that they had lives and values of their own rather than just as entertainment for the white boy.)