Let's Play Arkham Horror: The Card Game

At long last, we've gotten our hands on a copy of Arkham Horror: the Card Game, and we're here to tell you if it's any good or not.

Nicholas Roerich: Рассвет (незакончена) [Sunrise (unfinished)], 1930

**

Full disclosure: as a household full of H.P. Lovecraft fans and several devout Lord of the Rings card game players, we were very much looking forward to this game. If anyone unfamiliar with the Lord of the Rings LCG happens to read this, I apologize in advance for comparing Arkham Horror to it constantly. This post will also contain mild spoilers for the first scenario in the core set.

Here's what's inside the box:

There's five investigators, enough player cards to make full decks for two of them, three scenarios for them to tackle, and all the counters and paraphrenalia required to make that happen. Unsurprisingly, it's a lot like the Lord of the Rings LCG; one of the major exceptions are the Chaos tokens, which basically work like the Hunt pool in War of the Ring. The cards and counters are made of good quality material, although as always, I do strongly recommend sleeving all the cards before playing. The art on the cards is of fairly high quality, as I think we very much expected, but although I can't say we're disappointed, the cards aren't quite as lovely overall as the Lord of the Rings card game's. For the backs of the player and encounter cards, they've gone for a sort of art deco Cthulhu look, which is quite all right, but especially the flat beige of the encounter cards isn't the most attractive choice. Art deco is a bit cold at the best of times, and here it comes off as quite distant. But certainly nothing here is ugly!

In terms of content, the cards aren't really terribly evocative or even all that interesting on their own. I suppose this is one area where the comparison to the Lord of the Rings card game is at its most unfavorable, but going from, I don't know, Light of Valinor to Physical Training or Blade of Gondolin to Switchblade is a bit of a downer. Most of the cards are very generic and and only take on any life once you've used them in the game. By themselves, few of them evoke anything at all. Even fairly obvious opportunities for thematic hooks are ignored; we get Research Librarian rather than, say, Miskatonic Librarian and Guard Dog rather than watchdog or even "canine guardian" as they're referred to in the Dunwich Horror. Even the flavor texts aren't usually from Lovecraft or the broader mythos. So the initial impression from the cards is unfortunately almost bland.

**

The proof, though, is in the pudding: now that we've seen the actual physical game, it's time to try playing it. We're going to start with the first scenario in the core set, the Gathering, and use the recommended starter decks. That means one of us gets Roland Banks, the Fed:

While the other gets Wendy Adams, the Street Urchin:

Because we both think we'll want to make different choices later when we settle on a particular deck to call our own, I picked the Fed and my partner got Wendy. The numbers across the top right-hand side of the card are their skills: willpower, intellect, combat and agility. As you can see, both investigators have fairly well-rounded stats, Wendy's lousy combat score being the only exception. The cards also detail their abilities: Roland can find clues by defeating enemies, while Wendy can swap a horrible Chaos token - used to resolve skill tests - for a hopefully better one. Finally, there's the starting health and sanity for both characters.

The reverse of the investigator cards gives us a little backstory on the character and, crucially, their deckbuilding requirements. Arkham Horror has five different classes of characters and cards; Roland's class is Guardian, and the back of his investigator card tells us we can include Guardian cards from levels one through five in his deck. He can also use Seeker cards from levels 0-2, and neutral cards. A starting deck for Roland will have thirty cards from those classes, plus his two special cards, Roland's .38 Special and Cover Up. The last of these is a Weakness: a card you draw from your player deck that hurts you. So far, each investigator has one specific weakness, and must also include one random basic weakness.

The deck itself is made up of three kinds of cards in addition to the mandatory weaknesses: assets, events and skills. Assets include allies, tools, weapons and so on; they remain in play, and the number of "slots" your character has restricts how many you can have at any time. For instance, characters only have two hand slots, which means you can have two assets that take up a hand slot, or one two-handed asset. Events are played and resolved immediately, while skill cards are committed to boost skill tests. Each card has one or more skill icons, and when you take a skill test, you can discard card to boost your skill score. Skill cards are only useful when discarded to skill tests, and will have a specific effect when discarded. For now, though, we don't really have to worry about deckbuilding, since we'll be using the ready-made starter decks.

**

Now to get the game started! As in the Lord of the Rings card game, we pick a scenario to play against; in this case, the first scenario of the core set, the Gathering. We make progress in the scenario by working through the Act deck, which we do by collecting clues from the various locations in play.

The first Act, above, requires us to find two clues per investigator in order to advance. However, while we're working to find those clues, the Agenda deck will simultaneously be advancing.

As you can see, you're meant to read them in the opposite order. But the agenda card tells us that once three Doom counters have been placed on the Agenda deck, the agenda will advance, and that's not going to be very good for us. So we'd better get cracking on those clues!

The scenario setup instructions tell us that we start in the Study. All locations enter play with their "unrevealed" side up:

Once an investigator enters a location, in this case by starting there, it's flipped over to the "revealed" side:

The number of the left is the location's Shroud value: in order to discover any clues there, we need to beat the Shroud value with an investigator's Intellect. The number on the right is the total amount of clues at this location; it's two per investigator, i.e. the same number as we need to advance the Act deck. The circles at the bottom of the card tell us which locations this one connects to; they're all blank, meaning we're not going anywhere!

Each turn, every investigator gets to take three actions. Obviously we need to find those clues, and as lead investigator, Wendy gets us started by Investigating. This is a skill check pitting her intellect of 3 against the location's Shroud value of 2. To make it more interesting, we also have to draw a Chaos token, which will either modify the skill value or cause something different and unexpected. In this case, the token is a -1, meaning that Wendy's intellect counts as 2 for the purposes of this test. It's still equal to the Shroud value, though, which is enough for a success: we've found our first clue! A clue token is moved from the location card to Wendy's card. On my turn, I play an asset card and summon an ally:

Given that we're trapped in the study, I don't know how he got there, but this is a card game, let's not get hung up on details. The icon in the lower right corner tells us that Beat Cop occupies my ally slot. He has a health and sanity of two, meaning I can use him to absorb some damage if necessary. He also grants me a bonus of 1 to my combat score, and I can discard him to do damage to an enemy. The fist icon on the upper left edge of the card means that instead of paying four resources to put him into play as an ally, I could've discarded him for a +1 modifier to a combat skill test. In addition, I also investigate, succesfully netting a clue, and use my last action to gain one resource.

This all sounds a bit too easy, which is why from the second turn onward, the turn starts with the Mythos phase. First, we place one Doom counter on the Agenda deck, moving it one step closer to presumably something bad. Then each of us draws a card from the encounter deck, which are pretty much always something bad. I drew an enemy that couldn't spawn because the location where it would've appeared wasn't in play, so it was discarded, but my partner drew A Swarm of Rats, which engaged Wendy.

After the investigation phase, where we take out turns, those rats are going to attack Wendy, so we'd better do something about them. Wendy is our lead investigator, but my partner decides that this turn, Roland will go first. I'm not taking any chances, so I'll start off by playing a Knife.

Armed with a knife and backed up by my Beat Cop ally, my combat score is an unnecessarily high 6 against the rats' 1. The only Chaos token that could defeat us is the autofail tentacle one, but I don't draw it, and the rats are toast. For my last action, I investigate and find a second clue. On her turn, Wendy finds the fourth and last clue, and we decide to advance the Act deck. As soon as we spend the required amount of clue tokens, we flip over the first Act card and carry out the instructions on the reverse side:

The second act tells us that our way out is still blocked, and we'll need a total of six clues to advance:

We now find ourselves in the Hallway.

There are now three icons at the bottom of the card, signifying three locations that connect to the Hallway. With no clues to be found in the Hallway, obviously we'll need to look in one of the connected locations. Finding herself with actions left, Wendy chooses to descend into the Cellar.

There are four clues to be had in the Cellar, but its Shroud value is an uncomfortably high 4, which Wendy will struggle to beat with her intellect of 3. So for her last action, she plays a Flashlight, which ought to help us find some clues.

However, before she can do that, the Mythos phase rolls around and my partner draws a Ghoul Minion from the encounter deck.

A slightly tougher enemy, the Ghoul Minion has a combat score of two and two hit points. Since their combat scores are equal and each succesful attack only does one point of damage, Wendy might need all turn to defeat the ghoul, and there's a pretty good chance she's take damage doing it. So once again, I start our turn, and Roland charges down the stairs. I use the second action on my Knife, discarding it for +2 combat and one point of additional damage; the combat check is succesful, and the ghoul is discarded from play. This time, I remember to use Roland's special ability, meaning that since I just defeated an enemy, I get to discover one clue at our location. Roland Banks: stabs ghouls, finds clues.

After some succesful investigating with Wendy's flashlight and my Magnifying Glass, and a visit to the Attic, we find ourselves in the Hallway with the required number of clues. First, though, since I have a bad feeling about breaking down magical barriers, I'll play one last asset.

With my .45 Automatic in hand, we bust down the barrier and enter the parlor. Here we have a choice: we can run away through the front door, ending the scenario as unresolved, or fight the Ghoul Priest attacking us.

Misreading the Ghoul Priest's hit points as five rather than five per player, I take the first turn and blast him with my .45 automatic. Two succesful attacks deal four points of damage, and finally, discarding Beat Cop does a fifth point of damage, which we wrongly believed was enough.

To be fair, though, Wendy still had her turn as well, and with some of her card and one of Roland's actions remaining, I'm pretty sure we could've defeated a ten-hitpoint Ghoul Priest as well. It's also a pretty good reminder that when you play one of these games, mistakes are going to happen, even in a scenario as simple as this one. I mean come on, when you actually hold the card in your hand, that investigator symbol next to the hit points is really small...

**

But be that as it may, we won! That takes us to the Campaign Guide, where we find out what happens next. There are four possible outcomes for this scenario. The worst happens if we fail to complete the Act deck, but the bad guys finish the Agenda deck, and it's, well, not good. The campaign goes on, though! If we'd both been defeated, or if we chose to escape out the front door after reaching the parlor, a different set of conditions would ensue. Finally, because we, in fact, won, we have to make an additional choice after the scenario, and what we did is noted down in the campaign log. This is definitely one of my favorite things about Arkham Horror: instead of each scenario being a more or less isolated episode, like the Lord of the Rings quests outside of the saga expansions, they all belong to a campaign where, hopefully, the choices you make will make a difference further on down the road. Also, even in the worst possible case, we'd be able to continue the campaign, only at a disadvantage.

In addition, we gain experience! Each victory point we've earned gets each of us a point of experience, and because we defeated the Ghoul Priest (Victory 2) and cleared the Cellar (1), that's a total of three victory points. The scenario resolution we ended up with grants us a +2 bonus, so we each have five experience points we can use to upgrade our decks before the next scenario. I could upgrade some of my existing cards, but since we've worked out a pretty good division of labor where Roland does most of the fighting, I'm going to pick a new card to help with that: Extra Ammunition. It's a level 1 card, meaning that I need to spend one of my experience points to add it to my deck. Another card I think looks promising is Police Badge: it goes on the accessory slot, which Roland isn't currently using for anything, and in addition to boosting my willpower, I can discard it to give another investigator extra actions. Police Badge is a level 2 card, so it'll cost me two experience points, leaving two which I'll save for later. Because the size of my deck is capped at 30 cards, I'll remove Mind over Matter and Research Librarian to make room for the new cards. Now I'm ready to continue the campaign.

**

So there's gameplay for you. You advance through a series of locations, finding clues and fighting off enemies, trying to outrun the inexolerably advancing Agenda deck. What about building your own starting deck?

Unlike the Lord of the Rings LCG, which was billed as being for 1-2 players but really supported 1-4, this is actually a 1-2 -player game, and in a way that creates some problems. For example, I can tell you right now that my investigator of choice going forward is going to be Agnes Baker, the Waitress.

Now, admittedly, "the Waitress" may not sound like much if you're one of those pompous bastards who don't appreciate the hard work that the men, women and others of our hospitality industry do. The gorgeous Magali Villeneuve art certainly helps, and a willpower of 5 is nothing to sneer at, but what seals the deal is her background story: she's a reincarnated Hyperborean witch. Her card text literally says she is from an age undreamed of. I'm completely sold; she is awesome and I will fight you.

The back of her card tells us that her character class is Mystic, and that she can pick Mystic cards from levels 0-5 and Survivor cards from levels 0-2. The starter deck that we can build for her from our single core set uses all of the 0 level Mystic and Survivor cards, and approximately half of the available neutral cards, so there's not a whole lot of deckbuilding to be done with just one core set. Unfortunately, that also means no-one else can be using those cards at the same time, which means that we're left with the Guardian, Seeker and Rogue classes. The only core set investigators using only those cards are Roland Banks and "Skids" O'Toole, the Ex-con. So if I want to play as Agnes, my partner is forced to choose either the ex-con or the fed, and we don't have enough cards for a third player whatever we pick. I can't help but contrast this with the Lord of the Rings LCG, where we immediately got four fully interoperable decks and could get right into a three- or four-player game, which was crucial in getting us hooked.

Now, admittedly, we've been promised that the very first expansion will feature as many as five new investigators and a pile of new player cards, so hopefully that'll help. But to be honest, it's still a little disappointing. Another thing it does, which I'm not sure the people in charge of these things entirely appreciate, is that it makes it a lot harder to get other people to play the game. With just the Lord of the Rings core set, me and my partner can invite another couple or two friends over and have a game. With Arkham, this is impossible; without multiple core sets, the only way to demonstrate the game is one-on-one. So I really don't think this was a good idea. I'd rather have taken smaller starting decks, for example.

What's more, you'll actually need a second core set just to have reasonable deckbuilding options beyond the starter decks, since there's only a single copy of each player card. And that's just for two people! There are people on the forums talking about buying three or four core sets. Why? Suppose we got a second core, and used the new Guardian, Seeker, Mystic and Survivor card to kit out our investigators properly. What's left for a third player? Our leftovers and a full set of Rogue cards. So actually, if we want two decks with full cardpools and two other starting decks, we'd need three core sets. If the third player wants two copies of each player card, that would require four core sets.

Obviously we'll have to see what the expansions are like; if the Dunwich Legacy really offers us at least one additional fully viable player deck, then this isn't so bad. But I'll be honest, I really don't like that we're pretty much expected to buy two core sets, let alone more. So from a deck-building perspective, this is not good. Coming to this from the Lord of the Rings, I kinda feel like I'm being shaken down for money. If the deluxe expansions only come with one copy of each player card or something like that, meaning that we'd have to buy multiple deluxes, I fucking quit.

**

Deckbuilding dubiosities and our own incompetence aside, we definitely enjoyed our first experience playing Arkham Horror! We're going to at least try to finish the core set campaign, and then get started with our investigators of choice and look out for the first deluxe expansion. Based on the first scenario, the fundamental game mechanics are sound, and I'm looking forward to playing more. Arkham Horror succeeds in blending a little bit of roleplaying feel into the cardgame format, above all by being at a considerably lower level of abstraction than, say, Lord of the Rings. Instead of locations and enemies floating around in a staging area, generating threat against your heroes and army of allies, you're in the cellar, looking for a clue with a flashlight while a ghoul is stalking you. There's definitely some atmosphere here!

The lack of real deck-building options in the core set is a bit of a disappointment, but hopefully that'll start getting corrected soon enough. I'm horribly tempted to buy a second core set, but I resent the fact that even if I did, we'd effectively have to choose between expanding our starting card pools or accomodating more players. So in terms of further purchases, I think we'll wait for the Dunwich Legacy to show up and assess our options.

It's definitely a fun game, though! If the deckbuilding aspect didn't make me feel like I'm being fleeced, and even rudimentary three- or four-player play was possible right out of the box, I'd think this was an awesome game with no ifs or buts attached. As it is, I'd cautiously recommend it if you want an engaging experience for one or two players. We'll wait to see what the expansions are like before going further than that.

CKII: What to buy

To unwind amidst all the PhD stuff and the dystopianly horrible teacher studies, I started playing Crusader Kings II again this fall. I do genuinely consider it to be one of the best video games I've ever played in my life. In the spirit of my previous buying guides, and with the Black Friday Steam sale approaching, here are my thoughts on what expansions to buy if you do get the game.

There are two DLCs that I think are definitely worth buying fairly soon. Sons of Abraham is one of the cheaper expansions, but it provides some really handy mechanics for novice players, especially when playing Christian rulers. You can get rid of annoying courtiers or even unwanted heirs by making them take holy orders: this will disqualify them from succession, and quite often they'll leave to join a militant order like the Templars. Perhaps more importantly for starting players, you also get to borrow money from either Jewish merchants in your realm or a holy order. When you've overreached yourself in a war, your army's been trashed and the enemy is bearing down on your capital, that loan will be the difference between watching yourself lose a siege and hiring a mercenary troop to save your ass. I can personally testify that this will get you out of a number of pickles you'll manage to get yourself into. So I'd definitely buy Sons of Abraham.

Incidentally, Sons of Abraham also allows heresies to supplant their parent religions if they become more widespread. In my previous game, after the Almoravids converted to Catholicism and the Mongols invaded, the two branches of Islam were the Shi'ites and the Yazidis, and Sunni Islam became a heresy!

The other expansion I'd get fairly soon is Way of Life. It lets you pick a focus for your character, like, say, War, Business or even Theology. This replaces the attribute-based ambitions of the base game and lets you react more intelligently to your situation. For example, if you're married but have no heir, the Family and Seduction foci will increase your fertility. The War focus increases your Martial skill and lets you learn leadership traits, the Hunting focus boosts health, and so on. Not only id this strategically useful, but the foci and the event chains that go with them make your characters feel much more fleshed out. As an additional bonus, the Scholarship focus can trigger an event chain that lets you build an observatory and, among other possibilities, get your hands on the Necronomicon and risk going mad... I highly recommend Way of Life, and couldn't imagine going back to playing without it. If you're only going to get one expansion and don't have your heart set on any of the others, I'd make it this one.

**

Three other older expansions add significant features to gameplay across the board. Legacy of Rome adds depth to playing as the Byzantines, and unlocks retinues for all rulers.

The Old Gods slightly changes revolts to make them a bit more dangerous, and introduces adventurers, who may try to raise troops and attack you. This can lead to some interesting developments, since if you defeat and imprison them, the adventurers will at least sometimes actually become your vassals, and if they don't have any dangerous claims, you can employ them. In my last game starting from Dublin, a Norse adventurer attacked me as I was fighting the King of Norway for control of Glamorgan. I defeated them both, but since the Norse fellow had a better martial score than most of my commanders, I gave him a job. After succesfully commanding a flank of my army against the infidel, he became the count of Alcácer do Sal in Irish Portugal.

More significantly, the Old Gods unlocks an earlier start date in 867 AD, and lets you play as a pagan ruler. I'm mildly annoyed that Finnish paganism is called Suomenusko, which is a modern-day pseudo-nationalist neopagan "revival" whose very name would have been completely nonsensical to the vast majority of medieval Finno-Ugric people, but in general, I do very much approve of the new pagan religions. I'm currently playing as the Hämäläinen dynasty from the 867 bookmark, and it's been tremendously good fun.

Charlemagne gives you an even earlier starting date in 769 AD, some more narrative events, especially involving historically important characters, and several new administrative options. Perhaps most notably, you now get to create your own titular kingdoms and even empires! This last bit will come in very handy indeed to larger realms, since emperors can have kings as vassals, drastically cutting down on the number of direct vassals you need to have. Conversely, I think beginning players will do just fine without it.

**

The latest two expansions are also really interesting, but I haven't gotten my hands on them yet. The Reaper's Due only just came out, and I like the idea of advanced disease mechanics! Very medieval. Conclave also looks fun, but I'm waiting for a sale.

In addition to these, there are the expansions that unlock a certain kind of playable character. Sword of Islam lets you play as a Muslim, The Republic allows merchant republics, Rajas of India gives you Buddhist, Hindu and Jain rulers, and Horse Lords unlocks nomads. In addition, Rajas of India gives all characters the ability to convert to their capital province's religion or culture, which can allow some unusual combinations. Horse Lords adds new rules for nomads and the Silk Road, but all of the other major features of these expansions were patched into the base game for free, so the only reason to buy any of these is if you want to play as the kind of ruler they unlock. Of these, I only own Rajas of India, and have yet to try a game in India.

Finally, there are the graphical DLCs, like unit packs, portrait packs and so on. Of these, I haven't really found the unit packs to be worth bothering with, but the portrait packs do make for a more interesting experience since if you play a game through within the same cultural group, I can tell you that you'll get tired of seeing the same faces over and over again! There are also Music DLCs, which I haven't invested in yet, but you can listen to them on Youtube.

**

So, to sum up, if you're just getting started, I think I'd buy Way of Life, and a portrait pack for the culture I intend to play as. If you still feel like spending some money, Sons of Abraham is also a good choice. In my opinion, that's plenty to get started with. Finally, though, I want to reiterate that this is a very dangerous game. If you like it, you may obsess over it. A lot. Over this past fall, the only thing that's occupied my mind as much as my PhD has been House Hämäläinen. So enjoy yourself, but don't say I didn't warn you!

Racial thinking in fantasy role-playing

Years ago, I've run a couple of role-playing campaigns with ICE's Rolemaster standard system. For all its flaws, not least of which is encumbering the GM with a metric ton of tables and charts, it works surprisingly smoothly, and even if I wouldn't say I like it, I've found it useful. As a curiosity, one of the first things I ever wrote was a small article for a role-playing "netzine".

A while back I picked up a copy of ICE's RM supplement "Races and Cultures", from 2004. The way they published the system was that they came out with the basic rules, the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), and then started adding supplements to cover areas they'd only done sketchily in the basic ruleset. Some examples include the ludicrously overpowered Martial Arts Companion and various sets of magic rules.

Races and Cultures (R&C) aims to expand on character creation. In the RMSS, each character had a race, and if they were human, a culture. So dwarves and high elves were just dwarves or high elves, while humans were hillmen, mariners or something like that in addition to being humans. So humans had cultures, while everyone else just had race. As a side note, I have a personal gripe with R&C because it practically eliminates urban cultures, and a lot of the material on cultures is, to a person with even a nodding acquaintance with anthropology or cultural studies, ridiculous. But that's beside the point.

Now, using RM as an example, I'm going to argue that the vast majority of fantasy role-playing games reproduce European racism. I'm sure that some people reading this are going to be completely turned off by that, but bear with me. This is important.

As far as I know, one of the first civilizations to put an intellectual gloss on "us versus them" were the ancient Greeks. To them, the world was divided into Greeks and barbarians. "Barbarian" was a racial pejorative; while Greeks spoke Greek, the barbarians didn't even have real languages but just made a kind of "bar-bar-bar" noise when they talked. Modern Finnish also has several racial pejoratives for people from the Middle East and Africa based on the same idea.

In Greek thinking, all Greeks were individuals with their own motivations, desires and personality. If a Greek did something, and you wanted to know why he did it, you would find the reasons in his individual attributes. On the other hand, if a barbarian did something, it was because he was a barbarian. For example, a Greek who murdered a fellow Greek would probably do it because he was somehow disturbed, or maybe the other guy had insulted him, or whatever. If a barbarian killed a Greek, it was because of his "barbarian nature". Greeks were individuals with personalities, but barbarians were just animals driven by their animal natures.

This thinking went on to form the basis of all European racism since. Alert readers may notice powerful parallels between what I've just described and the discussion on immigration and Islam going on in Europe right now. In that discussion as well, European violent crime is caused by a complex series of forces and motivations, but immigrant crime is caused by the fact that immigrants are immigrants. The IRA, for example, are terrorists because they are pursuing a political agenda through violent means, but Hamas are terrorists because they're Muslims. This kind of thinking is still everywhere, and that's why it's interesting, and scary, to find it replicated in fantasy role-playing.

**

In fantasy, humans take the place of Greeks/Romans/white Europeans. As I said, in the original RMSS, humans had different cultures that determined their background and outlook, while Halflings were just Halflings no matter where they lived. In other words, for humans their cultural background determined a lot about the character, but for the other races, their race determined everything.

R&C tries to eliminate this by giving every character both a race and a culture. Now elves, dwarves and even orcs have cultures, too! However, it isn't quite that simple.

The writers of R&C couldn't bring themselves to jettison the determining role race plays in their world. Here's some pieces of text from the race entry for Common Men:

However, the prejudices of all Men, their affections and disaffections, are always subject to local circumstance. (...)

Religious Attitudes: Mannish religious practice generally conforms to the norms for their particular cultural template.

Preferred Professions: All professions are open to Common Men. (...)

Typical Cultures: A full range of culture options are available to Common Men. (...)

Character Concepts

Men are everywhere; they exist in just about every cultural niche, every profession, every situation in which an intelligent being can find himself.

Basically, humans don't have racial attributes in R&C. They can go anywhere, do anything, and their attitudes are a product of their culture and environment. To a 21st century person, this seems like a reasonable description, and I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have agreed.

However, when it comes to other races, it turns out they're not such a tabula rasa.

As a race, Dwarves have a universal reputation for ruggedness, practicality, unwavering loyalty - and stubbornness. They are intensely clannish and stand up for their fellow Dwarves regardless of circumstance and come what may. (...)

Character Concepts

A concept for a Dwarven character could take into account his inherent racial prejudice.

The entry for Dwarves also describes their distrust of elves, their hatred of the "evil" underground races, and their religious beliefs. Remember that these are racial characteristics; Dwarves are this way because they're Dwarves. In the R&C system, a Dwarf raised in a harbor city hundreds of miles from the nearest mountains would "instinctively" hate other underground races. The same thing goes for Halflings and Elves, too. And then there are the Orcs.

Prejudices: Orcs hate all other races (...)

Religious Attitudes: Orcs worship dark gods and calue nothing so much as power and dominion over others.

Preferred Professions: Common Orcs stick to the non-spell using professions: Fighter, Rogue, Thief. They are not intelligent enough to make good spell users and they never bother to try.

That last bit isn't even true, by the way: going by their stat bonuses and power point progressions, Common Orcs could actually become spellcasters. Except that they're expressly prohibited because of their race. In the "Character Concepts" section they lay it on particularly thick:

Orcs are living, breathing fighting machines. They exist for no other purpose than to do violence, and war and mayhem are all they ever really think about.

Again, remember that this describes any Orc anywhere, regardless of where or how they grew up. They can pick any culture template they like, but apparently none of it really applies to them, because the fact that they're orcs overrides any influence their environment could possibly have on them. For them, the culture template only provides adolescence skills and starting items.

**

So, the Races & Cultures supplement sets out to undo RMSS's confusion of race and culture, but ends up replicating it exactly. Elves were actually the only race that was in any significant way freed from the constraints of its "racial nature"; Dwarves are still always Dwarves, Halflings are always Halflings, and Orcs are always Lawful Evil, as the trope goes. It's a D&D trope, by the way, and it's alive and well in third edition D&D: elves are always good, orcs are always evil, humans are anything they want to be or end up being.

This is precisely the same thinking as the original Greek racism and its descendants, and it persists throughout fantasy role-playing. A human's individual outlook and personality are shaped by his personal attributes and background, but a non-human's is a product of his racial characteristics. It is testament to how deeply rooted this thinking is that even a determined effort to break away from it, the Races & Cultures supplement, failed to do so.

To a large extent this is because the other races don't really have any intrinsic value. They're mostly there to define humans, not themselves. R&C is quite explicit about this:

Build: In a sense, it is useless to describe the body shape of a Common Man, because it is the baseline to which the shape of all other races and creatures are compared. All other reference points relate to the typical range of body types for Common Men, so to use those other reference points to try to define Common Men would create a circular description.

Obviously, this selection shows a terrible intellectual poverty. Surely one can fairly describe humans as, for instance, bipedal mammals with a given average height and weight? That isn't a circular definition. But more importantly, this piece of text very powerfully conveys the way the authors, and I daresay nearly all other fantasy RPG authors, think about the various races. Humans are the baseline, and everything else is defined by how it's different from humans.

This informs the racial thinking when it comes to culture and attitudes as well. Really, the definitions of the other races aren't there to define themselves, but to define humans. Dwarves are stubborn and prejudiced; compared to them, humans are open-minded. Elves are unworldly and haughty; compared to them, humans are humble and practical. Halflings are comfort-loving and gluttonous; compared to them, humans are rugged and Spartan. The other races serve to define us. In order to do this, they have to be denied the same subjectivity and freedom of choice that humans have, to preserve the caricature. A liberal, open-minded and cosmopolitan Dwarf would destroy the very idea of the Dwarf as a cultural marker.

The most drastic contrast is with Orcs, who in most fantasy role-playing games are little more than animals. Orcs are inherently evil and violent, and they hate everyone else. How could anyone not fight orcs? After all, they're always evil! Orcs are a handy way to escape any kind of moral dilemmas: killing orcs is always right.

The history of orcs in fantasy fiction is very informative in this respect. J.R.R. Tolkien "invented" orcs as we know them, and his orcs were originally elves who had been corrupted by the Great Enemy, Morgoth. So in Tolkien's world, even the orcs are ultimately victims, not offenders. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has Gandalf express pity "even for Sauron's slaves". Much of the Lord of the Rings is informed by Tolkien's experience of World War I, and it's not hard to understand how witnessing the senseless slaughter of trench warfare would make him feel sorry even for the enemy.

After Tolkien, though, these distinctions have gone out of the window. To most of the English-speaking world, the Second World War was morally absolutely black-and-white, and the same mentality entered into fiction as well. Orcs are the Nazis of fantasy; fighting and killing them is so deeply, inherently right that it never needs to be questioned. In much of post-Tolkien fantasy, orcs have simply become cartoon villains.

Later, there's been a partial rehabilitation of orcs, and in many games and books they've come to symbolize strength and stupidity. The big, dumb, working-class orc has even taken on something of a class nature, and I say this as someone who abhors Marxism in any way, shape or form.

**

In conclusion, fantasy literature and games have become one of the most direct ways in which racism and racial thinking are reproduced. Given that fantasy is usually considered "young people's" reading, this is actually more than a bit scary. It's been fashionable in leftist circles to lambast Tolkien for this for decades, but I believe this is based on a fundamental, and to some extent deliberate, misunderstanding of his works and of the context he wanted to set them in. After the Second World War, Tolkien's imitators met with the other big strand of fantasy, pulp, which was usually explicitly right-wing, chauvinist and conservative. Conan the Republican is hardly an exaggeration in contemporary American terms. Two of the most influential pulp authors to modern readers were Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft; the first occasionally wrote blatantly racist stories, and the second we know was a nearly hysterical racist.

Like conspiracy theories, part of the appeal of fantasy literature is that it often provides simplicity in the middle of a complex world. Unless you're a lunatic, the world just doesn't divide neatly into friends and foes who you can tell apart by their flags and uniforms. In this day and age, the kind of fantasy where elves are always good and orcs are always evil has a definite appeal.

There's nothing wrong with that in itself. All the partly leftist counter-movement to the perceived right-wing character of fantasy has managed to accomplish is to produce "intellectual" fantasy that usually collapses under the weight of its own pretentiousness and is only read by fellow travelers, or fantasy works that are practically indistinguishable from the ones they supposedly oppose. A case in point is Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, which makes a point of making the villains white and the "good guys" colored. How the author feels that upholding the fundamental idea of different "races" fighting each other is antiracist is beyond me, and anyway, the first time I read the books I didn't even notice that she'd swapped the skin colors, so to speak.

So I don't mean to endorse the left-wing "countermovement", because as far as I'm concerned, China Mieville is just as bad, if not worse, than Andy Remic. Mieville has accused Tolkien of furthering exactly the thinking I'm talking about here, which to me indicates that like many other Tolkien critics, he hasn't actually bothered to read the Lord of the Rings.

I don't really mean to endorse anything. I do, however, want to draw attention to the way in which fantasy role-playing games and literature perpetuate and reproduce a way of thinking that I find worrying and frightening. In fantasy, ethnicity is more important in determining a person's nature than culture, upbringing, environment or anything else. Our worldview is so permeated by racism that this is perfectly natural to us, and we accept it without question. After all, it doesn't matter how an orc is brought up or what he's like as a person, he's Always Chaotic Evil. Because he's an orc. Because that's just how orcs are. All of them.

And that's really racism in a nutshell.