Gosh, Nudity did you say?

 RPG.Net is the absolute worst. The pearl-clutching and virtue signaling is puerile and infantile. The forum is an utterly vapid exercise in neutering bracing science fantasy

in all its utter bloody, don't give a shit about your fragile sensibilities.  Voluptuous, yes using the word voluptuous will bring out the torches and pitchforks. Get this, slavery in your fantasy game is "problematic". Fucking accurate is what it is. 

Why was I even there? I google USR Sword & Sorcery every once in a while to see if I can ferret out any new reviews. This popped up someone reading out the setting guide to Xoth, the only decent and evocative sword & sorcery setting out there for your grim game of savagery. It predictably got shut down with the usual boilerplate -

"So, starting from the top, it's been a long standing guideline on the site that nudity needs to be two clicks away. The very first thing you see when you click that link is, to put it frankly, an astonishingly racist picture of female upper nudity.

Now, there is a history of racist and sexist issues with Sword and Sorcery, though Howard, for instance, moved during his lifetime in far less troublesome directions, he was still a product of his time. It is fine to enjoy the genre and it's writing, but if you are going to discuss them on this board, you need to both recognize the issues, acknowledge them, and for gods sakes, not take them as written truth.

So, just from the start of this Let's Read, with the intro immediately denying women could be the heroes(A vast surprise to Jirel, at the least), accepted without comment. Then the next with the race chapter....okay, you know what, let's just say that there are issues and move on, because this could be a book in itself.

And then here is where we get into the weeds. Let us just say that regardless of the source material, using terms like "Savage" and "Degenerates", especially as they are defined here, is something that draws the ire of the entire mod staff. And that's even avoiding the vastly troublesome depiction of nomadic cultures, the Enlightened being...whatever the heck that is. And then the casual aside that some of the people in the book are unavoidably Savage or Degenerates, focused on a group that, to be honest, has been horrifically portrayed by Racists for centuries as exactly those things. No, this is not less problematic. This is exactly the sort of thing problematic media was coined for.

In all honesty, even just reading the thread and not the book is incredibly alienating to people who might prefer not to be described as "voluptuous", "Savage" or "Degenerate" because of their gender or ancestry, and even though there is a (rather weak) disclaimer in the book, it's not even referenced in the thread. If you are going to be doing WIR or Let's Read or any sort of discussion involving media, you need to be critical of what you're reading. Just because a book, movie, genre or setting is racist or sexist, does not mean you get to decide it is absolutely fine to accept those as is without commentary.

Now, World of Xoth is not a banned topic. But if people wish to talk about it, they need to acknowledge that there are issues(Like there are in other books), and not just accept them as "this is what is."

Smarttman, take three days off. Everyone else, this thread is done."

As it says in this blog's banner, fantasy is the playground of the inappropriate! And of course you need to purchase your POD copy of The Black Book of Sorcery. It is wholly inappropriate!