Blue Rose, and my issues with it

[taichara]

Okie. So. Blue Rose.

This is a long and honestly probably pointless post literally years in the offing -- mostly because while Blue Rose annoys the shit out of me it doesn't annoy the shit out of me enough to actually be willing to spend a lot of energy elaborating on why. I have limited energy, other things to write/doodle/play, and it's over there. *gestures*

That said, it does annoy me and has always annoyed me. Not for the same reason(s) that certain ridiculous branches of the OSR have tilted at the floral windmill, though; Blue Rose got my goat because when it was announced -- Valdemar pastiche! romantic fantasy rpg! yay! -- I was really looking forward to it, goddamnit, and then I got ... well, I got Blue Rose.

It's been some years now. I don't own 1e BR any more, and my 2e core is inaccessible atm, but I have enough in the old skull to be able to hit on my most salient problems and even with a specific example or two or so. But I do want to put on the table that I don't have a pile of the books immediately to hand and can't quote page numbers or the like.

Why am I finally mustering the energy now? A couple reasons, in no particular order:

- I've been plagued by an itch (so far unacted-on for other reasons, mostly lack of energy/drive) to tinker up an appropriate Lindwyrm class or two, or adapt the sly-wink job I wrote for Crack!, or both
- there's a Valdemar bundle on HumbleBundle right now and it reminded me
- there's a new Blue Rose crowdfund running and it also reminded me
- I want to write something and creative block is real so fuckit
- If I finally write this out maybe I can kill at least some of the annoyance, or something

So, here we go.

Also, let me get one element out of the way first:

The goddamn deer is fine, okay.

(as I have flashbacks to that idiot Pundit's ridiculous tantrums about "venisonocracy" on RPG.net)

The Golden Hart isn't even a living animal. It's a magical construct/apparition that comes from an enchanted stained glass mural and selects the ruler of Aldis according to the criteria it was given when it was created. It is literally the same conceit as the Sword That Knows The True King trope, just in a different shape, and the number of dipshits that absolutely lost their minds because they couldn't grasp this part will never stop being funny. And exasperating. Funasperating.

I do have a mild nitpick about the origin of the Hart but it's so easy to just delete, whatever. More on that later.

Also, in the interest of brevity and sense, before we go any further I'd like to introduce the excellent look at romantic fantasy in the OSR to be found over on Against The Wicked City, which helpfully also includes some nice defining of the genre so I don't have to make this thing even longer than it is:
- On Romantic Fantasy And OSR D&D
- Romantic Fantasy Revisited: [1], [2], [3], [4]

All that out of the way, it's rambling time. Again, in no particular order:


* Why Is There A Dark Lord In My Valdemar Pastiche: basic theme issues

Look, I understand and understood that Blue Rose wasn't going to be Literally Valdemar (or the Green Rider books; but I haven't read those). That's fine. But Blue Rose chucks all sense of human evil for what amounts to a really bad and obvious Tolkien pastiche with some of the author's own issues stapled on and plastered over with a really poor understanding of the source material being pastiched.

Tl;dr the major sources of antagonism in the Blue Rose setting, the adversaries of yon Kingdom of Aldea, are Fundie Christianitya theocracy to the east, Jarzon, and an actual Evil Undead Empire to the north, Kern.

To the north, in a scary mountain range, ruled by a nigh-omnipotent Lich King (I shit you not) with his terrifying army of undead and the lackeys who follow him oh and also the corrupted~ vata'sha and also also he made the orcs Night People and ahahaha no I can't keep going. It was just flat out Let's Do A Sauron. Conveniently this makes a huge pile of the baddies villains you can just dispatch, because they're Of The Shadow and the corruption and undead and evil and bad mmmkay. No human evil mastermind here! Good luck!

2e mysteriously removed the Lich King offscreen and made the place slightly more believable, insofar as there's mortals scuffling for the reins of power, but come on now. Kern was and is laughably derivative and also what's it doing here really?

Meanwhile I still can't decide all these years later if Jarzon the Scary Repressive Cod-Christianity Theocracy was a badly underinformed pastiche of Karse, the (~pagan~) author's issues showing, or yes. Probably yes.

(in the Valdemar series Karse does persecute folks with magical powers, or recruit them into the Sunlord's church ranks. until it stops. with noting, however, is this is actually on-paper a reaction over centuries of time to the terrors Herald-Mage Vanyel inflicted on Karse in a totally secular war with Valdemar. it's also not a grey, colourless, totally repressed hell where all is drab and controlled. this turned into the hilariously overwrought version in Blue Rose for ??? reasons -- but then a lot of the BR actual Valdemar pastiche is both hilariously overwrought and misunderstanding the source material. more on that later.)

But it's Kern that really gets me. Blue Rose just absolutely needed to have a Big Bad who is 100% Unambiguously Evil And Also Inhuman and ... look, that shit is fine, I like me a Capital-E Evil, but not here?

Which brings me to


What in the actual fuck is this alignment system: and also corruption can fuck itself today

Anyone who has ever bitched about D&D alignments has never seen the fresh hell that is what Blue Rose runs with. Honestly a fuck of a lot of my major issues with the whole thing (aside from the racism and other shit, we're getting there) can devolve onto this goddamn alignment system.

On the face of it, it seems simple: you have Light (all that is pure and good and noble and etc etc), Shadow (Eeeevvviiiiil), and Twilight (for the middle ground, except it's framed a lot more like Oooooh You're Sliiiiipping and weird grey morality).

However.

However, these are literal fundamental forces in the universe and Shadow ~corrupts you, including through actions you don't realize (hold that thought), and ooohhh you can ~fall to the Shadow~. Tainted. Honestly the whole Shadow corruption thing comes across a lot like the Taint in Legend Of The Five Rings and why the fuck is there something like that in a romantic fantasy setting again exactly?

I know this sounds stupidly overdramatic of me, but I don't care. It's some gross shit, especially in 1e which is the edition I know best. Using certain kinds of powers automatically is Shadow-aligned and can corrupt you -- not the reason for it, just using it. This includes mind-altering powers ... except oh look at that, Aldea puts fucking emotion-affecting "calming" collars on its criminals. It's good (sorry, Light) when the Designated Protagonists do it?

Also all flesh/body-altering powers are Shadow and evil and corrupting. Yes even if the subject is willing; even if the subject asked for it. And let me assure you this did not go unnoticed by trans players, but the author was adamant. (I have Thoughts[tm] about that let me tell you.) The companion book later introduced a personal shape-altering power after enough outcry but it was punishingly high in its requirements.

More to the point, it's a moral absolute, tangible forces in the setting and you're either for or against them. Again, this can be a fun style of play! But what the fuck is it doing here?

... Except no, unless you're planning grimdark or horror I can't say that former statement with a straight face. Let me give an example; the example that along with a handful of smaller stressors and a blistering example of racism just fucking broke me of being willing to deal with this game.

There's a fiction piece that serves as a chapter intro in one of the 1e supplements; I want to say World Of Aldea but it might be the Companion. Anyway.

In this bit of fiction, which is from the point of view of a teenaged girl, a small caravan of folks are escaping the terrible repression of Jarzon via some swampy wildlands on the border. They're running out of food; they're lost and afraid and desperate. The girl's family happens to come across a white one-horned creature in the swamps (a unicorn); they shoot it with arrows, killing it, and bring it back to the caravan's camp. At no time do they recognize the unicorn for what it is, and neither does the POV character -- unicorns are ~incarnations of the Light~ and the mightiest of the rhydan special animals -- they only see a strange deer-like creature that can stave off their hunger.

The story not only portrays the POV character (who is of course better and purer, I guess) instinctively recoiling from the offered meat from her now somehow scary-to-her family and friends, said family and friends are described as acting colder and meaner and more callous after they eat. Aka they've been Corrupted and are Evil because they killed and ate the unicorn, not knowing what it was, as an act of necessity not malice. Because Light and Shadow are absolutes.

Remember, these people were fleeing the scary terrible not!Christians. Just can't win, I guess?

The POV girl flees her "uncognizable" kin, comes across an injured rhy-cat in the swamp, befriends it (because she is pure and of the Light of course), and presumably goes off to be Light and purity. We aren't expected to care about the others.

Reading this was the fucking moment I decided no one could ever bitch to me about Planescape, or paladins, ever again.

Running perpendicular to all of that is Blue Rose's deeply galling take on "talking animals", the rhydan. You see a lot of intelligent, sophont animals in romantic fantasy.

Valdemar has two very distinct takes simultaneously, non-human species like kyree, hertasi, gryphons and the like (some originally created by human archmages waaay in the past), and the Companions, the intelligent magical horses bonded to the Heralds. I bring up Valdemar specifically again here because Blue Rose seems to have smashed the two groups together conceptually -- all rhydan, regardless of species, can bond with a human (or other bipedal hominid), but they also are all of Nature and judge humanity for destroying Nature and Know Better and man I can just go play Werewolf: the Apocalypse for this? Oh and the most revered and powerful of the rhydan are unicorns and gryphons and they're of the Light directly.

And it's the rhydan who came together and made the Golden Hart, because humans can't be trusted to choose their own noble and well-meaning leader. I shit you not. This part, this part can fuck right off.

It's also really painfully hahaohno when you realize this is another place where the pastiche falls apart because it's trying to draw on Valdemar -- the special, powered directly by the Light rhydan guiding humanity -- but while the Companions in Valdemar look like horses, they literally are not horses. They have that shape because, well, it's convenient. Companions are dead Heralds returned from the afterlife to continue to serve their kingdom alongside living Heralds (who don't know this because the Companions have centuries of mindwhammying about it). Instead of some variant of this (or, granted, something else), Blue Rose gets to wedge in a lecture about how two-leggers are fundamentally ecologically destructive, or something. *eyeroll*

Now, if it was just the above, Blue Rose would sit snugly in Just Not For Me and all would be well in the land of lone knights, or multicoloured cats, or whatever bad joke about myself I can make today. It's more Tolkien high fantasy with a set in stone tangible good-evil and some handwaving at Valdemar trappings than romantic fantasy, but I could live with my personal disappointment.

Alas, it is not just the above.

This has been a lot of fucking words and these two following parts might come out shorter because of it, but also because hell no I'm just getting to the point of this fuckery. No need to invoke general or specific romantic fantasy tropes here.


Inclusion for me but not for thee

Blue Rose, frankly, spends a lot of wordcount on who people want to fuck. It's downright maddening in places for general and also personal reasons. It gets belaboured hard how much Aldeans want to see people in ~relationships~ -- by which they mean romantic as in who are you fucking -- and will try to matchmake and omgomgomg you neeed to know who all these people are fucking and who your PC is fucking or would like to fuck. All. The. Time. It keeps coming up. Very very import to know who everyone likes to fuck and also that Aldea accepts all of this unlike the evil theocracy or the lich king.

And there are fancy flowery phrases to use as terms for gay folks, and for straight folks. (okie, okie, one Valdemar ref: this is clearly lifting from Valdemarans ultimately deriving their term for gay folks from a phrase in Tayledras.)

Conspicuously missing from all of this belabouring throughout the text are:
- Bisexuals
- Asexuals (Aldea as written comes across as extremely hostile to the very idea)
- anyone remotely not cis (unless you count describing the sea folk as androgynous and can we not make that equivalency? also see above and the what the actual fuck about, say, wanting to use magic to transition.)

2e decided it was going to correct that last point by admitting trans individuals exist but did so by calling out trans folks as somehow being closer to spirits (or the gods? I forget which) on account of their transness and oh my fucking god this is not an improvement. I do not need to hear that I'm a step away from human because I'm not cis, fuck you very much. Weird overcorrecting if you can call it that into "having a special spiritual state" or whatever the fuck is just as fucking othering! (I have no idea if the writer also thought they were being clever and making some kind of riff on "two-spirit" but at this point I wouldn't exactly be shocked.)

So, yeah. Someone had and has some clear biases and they are not great let me tell you.

But wait, there's more!


What The ACTUAL FUCK Did I Just Read: Lar'tya

Holy fuck is there blisteringly racist shit in Blue Rose. Hoolleeee fuuuuck.

Not even just the side-eye I give the really goddamn bad First Nations stereotypes of the "plains folk".

Not even just the ohgodyoujusthadtoincludethis of there being "Roamers" who are literally yes Roma right down to their fallen lost kingdom being "fate"-obsessed mystical not!India as revealed in its art (and connected to the not-human vata, who are also blatant not!elves to the point of having their own "drow" version) and also having allll the stereotypes of the "Gypsy" trope.

(did I mention Blue Rose 1e was published in fucking 2005 and there is no goddamn excuse for this?)

Oh no.

No, you see, the World Of Aldea 1e sourcebook introduced a new nation across the ocean. This is Lar'tya, which is described in the following ways and I am listing and not just paragraphing for clarity here:

- Lar'tya is the Token Fantasy Matriarchy (this itself is fine enough if threadbare, but it's here for completeness)
- this land was discovered -- yes, discovered -- by the predecessor of the Kingdom of Aldea
- the people of Lar'tya are explictly described as dark-skinned (and hang onto that) and the art is clearly depicting a culture inspired by various of African tropescultures
- the discoverers from Aldea brought civilization more advanced technology and agriculture and culture to Lar'tya
- the discoverers married into specific families who now in modern times are the higher ranking families in Lar'tya, recognizable by their lighter, though still darker than Aldeans, skin that sets them apart from the common folk

*screams into a pillow*

I think you get the fucking point. Just. Just oh my fucking god. And this is the teal deer version. Oh my fucking god.

And --

Aaaaand --

When BR 2e was afoot one of the dev team was all over RPG.net and I was still active there at the time, and in one of the drumming-up-excitement threads for 2e I cornered the (lying) fucker and quoted chunks out of the 1e Lar'tya text at him.

This fuck swore up and down that yes, GR was aware of how skullfuckingly racistbad the Lar'tya material was, and they were going to rewrite it and get rid of that shit, and I had nothing to worry about, they were on it for real for real.

I backed that fucking Kickstarter because of this fuck's reassurances.

Not only is the skullfuckingly racist shit still there, swathes of it are direct text lifts from the original.

Lying fucker. Disgusting lying fuckers.

And that's why I'm a lot weaker on 2e and there may be other tweaks I'm unaware of, because I DID NOT GIVE ONE SOLITARY FUCK TO READ IT AFTER I CHECKED LAR'TYA.

So yeah. Yeah.

This is the game that's supposed to be so much better and more progressive, folks.


Murder, arson and jaywalking: some parting deep-sigh but inconsequential comparisons with inspirational material

So here we are. As an ending palette cleanser(?) I just want to comment on how much the superfical trappings of Blue Rose and its setting can be basically summed up as "just Valdemar, but ridiculously overexaggerated and the writer doesn't seem to have understood the inspirational material":

- Valdemar is founded by people who left an empire ruled by a jackass; Aldea is founded in the aftermath of the "old empire" of Aldea that was ~corrupted by the Shadow~ and all the wizards were evil sorcerers making shadowgates and etc etc

- Valdemar has intelligent animals and animal-people and Companions, all of whom are fallible; Aldea has rhydan, who Know Better Than Humans Because Nature and some are Light Pure

- the fun of colour-coded uniforms! in Valdemar the Heralds, as well as Healers and Bards from their specific Collegia (associated with the government) wear specific colours and in the Heralds' case, a uniform: Heralds = white, Healers = green, Bards = red. in Blue Rose this turns into a hilarious case of a half-dozen groups and societies with overwrought and frankly ugly uniforms with two or more colours and also multicoloured patches worn on the chest and its just laughably bad

- the Karse / Jarzon contrast up above

- Heralds (who are basically roaming troubleshooters and govt agents and judiciary) are Chosen by Companions, neither party being infallible, and Valdemar's ruler must be a Herald; Envoys and Nobles are "chosen" by the Scepter Of The Blue Rose, but once they pass the first time that's it, no more tests (admittedly this allows more adventure possibilities. it's still funny though. the Aldeans can also amass more personal influence/title than any Herald, who aren't nobility)

and there's probably other things but it's been a while, yo. *lolsob*

So there you have it; my major sticking points with Blue Rose. I'm sure I'd be reminded of more if I had the books in front of me, but it would probably also devolve into deep pixelbitching of details and I needed to stay on point of the important points.

Blue Rose is a shit "romantic fantasy" rpg if you ask me. If you want the kind of setting it is selling, it should work fine. I can't overlook the non-genre issues though, sorry -- getting some things right and inclusive doesn't excuse the rest.


Honestly, if you asked me right now to name an rpg better suited, I don't think there's a specific perfect one you could just use an old D&D-type easily enough, though, AtWC demonstrates that nicely in all those posts *lol* but I have two suggestions:

- Perils & Princesses feels pretty good to me

- the best example, though? Dungeons & Kittens. no, trust me. this game and setting and how characters interact and can interact is practically purrrfect.

I don't have a conclusion beyond this or a punchline. If you made it this far, congrats; no, seriously.

Sudden onset offended bodies of any stripe will get promptly bitbucketed.