Confronting some questions

Age of Sail began with two concurrent thought processes. The first was a growing interest in the history of the 16th and 17th centuries, brought on in part by reading the Cartoon History of the Modern World. Whereas the European medieval era that forms a popular basis for a lot of fantasy roleplaying seemed to me to be characterized by a certain degree of fractious stagnation "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing", the age of world exploration that followed was one of massive upheaval, collisions of cultures, cosmopolitanism, and the birth of "the world" as an idea and a place. On the other hand, it was also an era of horrific, bloody genocide, wherein real people and real cultures were really oppressed, enslaved, slaughtered, and scattered to the ends of the earth. So the first question that must be confronted is "why would you turn the history of a people's destruction into a game?"

The other thread of thought concerned the fantasy races of Dungeons and Dragons and other fantastic fiction and the unfortunate implications of their assumption of cultural stereotypes and artifacts borrowed from real history. I found it all too easy to map fantasy races, which are often characterized as "good" or "evil", onto the actual cultures and ethnicities that had been the source of their artistic and descriptive motifs. So the second question that must be confronted is "why would you say that Africans are orcs?"

To the first question, I would answer this: it is better to confront the evils of history, in study and in play, than to ignore them. I do not intend to portray the exploration and conquests of the nations of Europe as a triumph of civilization over savagery; every side of this great collision is a perspective the players can assume, and although the cultural forces in motion are perhaps too immense for any one person to turn, every individual retains their freedom of moral choice. Every hero may be someone else's villain. The shifting of this era and its conflicts to a fantastic setting, more divorced from reality, rather than dehumanizing and simplifying the conflicts, may help players understand the forces driving individuals to act in the way they did, and the ways in which people are still susceptible to those forces. History is not dead, not gone forever, but with us still.

My response to the second question can be summarized thus: I do not wish to denigrate the African, but to dignify the orc. I find it profoundly creepy from time to time how, in our escapist fantasies, we create intelligent humanoid creatures which for the sake of simple enjoyment we define as irredeemably evil and then kill for fun and loot - when, at certain times in our actual history, we created labels for actual human beings which for various reasons we defined as subhuman and then killed for fun and loot. In noting this, I am not saying that all fantasy gamers are racists, that we cannot distinguish between our carefully constructed escapist fantasy and the complexities of the real world. But I am also saying that it is rare that these complexities are not elided, and fantasy gaming may be the poorer for it. So I decided to confront the issue head on.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am an American of European origin. I am aware that this means I have blind spots about issues of culture and ethnicity, although I lack the hubris to claim that I know what those blind spots are - that's what makes them blind spots. This blog is open to public comment, and I would be happy to hear from people with different perspectives regarding their feelings on this endeavor. On the one hand, this is a fantasy gaming project, and not a factual statement about real people and real history - I explicitly state and maintain that I only draw inspiration from history when it is more interesting than anything I could make up. On the other hand, I won't try to pretend that fiction doesn't have real implications and shouldn't be taken seriously. The purpose of this project is not to strip-mine painful events for entertainment or whitewash history in fiction, but to create a fun context for coming to grips in a fictional context with the forces that shaped a real era - and I want to know when I'm doing the former rather than the latter.