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This journal is NOT in-character. It is more of a place where I can post my thoughts about the games of Grimoire Entertainment Inc. when I feel like sharing them with the community in a way that might not be appropriate for the official Dark Grimoire board. I do not know if I will post often, but now I will have a place to do so if the urge strikes me. I would like my journal to be an interactive experience, so I invite you to comment, discuss and ask questions under my posts.


Monday, 28 November 2005
Well, I don't think people believed me. I really tried to steer this one, too, so people would NOT chase away the folk. I worked hard to put lots of little clues in the NPC's bios on their characters, and did the same on the forum. Most people figured it out. Those that didn't figure it out usually took messages such as "leave us now or we will declare war and never let you into our continent again" seriously and THEN left. Heck, such statements are so clear and blatant they are close to being OOC, but I made them... often multiple times. The last group got warnings like that three times over the course of about 2 minutes of chat. They didn't leave.

You can't say I didn't try.

I think maybe they (and others annoyed by the Ethucan mannerisms) just haven't had much experience dealing with traumatized, paranoid, xenophobic folk in their life. I guess it is a testament to the free world that most people have not had to deal with that sort of thing in the real world within their lifetime. Of course, as we have established before, this is not the real world.

I think some automatically decided to slap the label of Nazi Germany on the Empress and her folk. Some of the same themes are certainly there, probably not by accident: a powerful empire, folks in power, paranoia against a certain race/class/profession and persecution of those folks...

but of course we know that, in the real world, Crazy Hitler and the Nazis had no place persecuting the Jews... so anything mirroring that in the game is automatically viewed with suspicion by your Earth-based mind. However, your CHARACTER should know NOTHING of Nazi Germany, and should have no preconceptions. This leads to one of the hardest parts of roleplaying... leaving your preconceived notions based on Earth experience and history behind.

The thing is nobody really knows if the Ethucans were paranoid little Hitlers, or paranoid people who actually were right that all enchanters are evil. Unfortunately, they were chased away before anybody could find out the truth. Some just decided that it "wasn't true that enchanters are evil" without any real fact-finding attempts... because as we all know, if something is declared to be "completely evil" in the real world, it usually is propoganda and lies. There IS no pure evil in the real world... no Demon Lords prancing about killing folk just for the joy of it. Even the aformentioned Hitler thought he was doing the right thing somewhere in his crazy mind.

Valorn, not being the real world, DOES have pure evil. So the supposition that Ethucans are racist/classist Nazis, which would be a very VERY likely in the real world, falls all the way down to "oh we are living in a crazy fantasy world where anything can happen" likely... meaning its a toss up and you really should have no idea.

Does that mean the Ethucans are definately NOT Nazis either? Of course not. It is fully possible that they actually were evil themselves, and I had planned for them to come out as evil eventually all along. Or not. What does it all mean in the end?

All it means is YOU DON'T KNOW. And really don't have a good way to find out anymore.

P.S. Anybody who thinks I WANTED things to end up like this is dead wrong and is just making excuses. If I wanted things to end up this way, I wouldn't have spent so much time posting warnings and updates on the forum nor would I have made the almost-OOC statements (ie "back away or we will keep you from visiting us ever again. I'm serious." over and over and over. This whole concept stems from my love of the game Asheron's Call, my first MMORPG. In that game, each month there was an event that changed the world, and the people who played had a direct effect on influencing that change... but it would happen over and over. I always wondered what it would be like if instead, people's decisions could only happen ONCE, and that once that decision was made the quest could not be repeated by other parties and corrected over and over. Things in games like not being able to permanently die tend to make us think of game worlds as places with no real consequences... where you can do anything and everything will just reset the next hour. This tends to make people sloppy. I'd like to see what a game world where being sloppy equals real, lasting consequences is like. Fortunately, I help run a game world, so I am free to run that particular scenerio. =)
Ben of Admin posted at 09:06 - Link - comments (12)