Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I suspect no matter how carefully I phrase all of this someone will take issue, but for the record there's no malice or ill-intent behind it.

I've been reading through the new WHFRP 4th Edition book from Cubicle 7, and there's a lot to like, but the one thing I find perpetually confusing is the pretty overt attempt to be "inclusive" even where it makes no sense. The political cabinet of the Emperor is gender balanced. More than half the Middenheim city watch are apparently women. Female Witch Hunters are apparently commonplace. Rather than using gender neutral terminology, they've used gender-specific terminology and then asserted that it's meaningless(male Nuns? why not...). Now to be clear, the reason I take issue with those examples and the trend they represent is not that gender-balance in politics is bad or some belief women can't be police officers or other kinds of authoritative or "physical" professions and archetypes in reality, and I do consider gender to be largely(though largely not consciously) constructed rather than inherent based on whether you were born with an innie or an outie, nor is the reason I take issue that I hold to the idea that all fantasy fiction that's vaguely European in flavour has to be whiter than snow and a no-girls-allowed club. My "problem" in this case is that these sentiments make no sense in the context of WHF specifically as it has already been well established.

The Empire is a backwards(by modern standards), xenophobic, patriarchal society at a level of social and cultural development roughly equivalent to the 17th century Holy Roman Empire, and yet is apparently also an equal opportunity employer? This particularly irks for two reasons. Firstly because by reducing the negative aspects of the Empire as a society, you make it more into "the good guys", when before you had an interesting contrast whereby the "goodies" were ignorant berks and the supposed "baddies" often treated marginalised groups and peoples better. Secondly, because the way they've written things it requires an almost Orwellian level of intentional cognitive dissonance to accept, because they haven't actually changed the underlying structures at all - the Empire is still a patriarchal society, it still appears to prioritise patrilineal inheritance and naming, it's still at a stage of social development that reinforces stifling gender roles, but by authorial fiat we're supposed to hold all those things in our head at the same time as a depiction of the Empire as a place where sex and gender are irrelevant. I'm by no means arguing that WHF makes powerful or adventurous female characters impossible, quite the reverse there are several examples in the fiction and many other plausible concepts that fit into it, but by the nature of the world they would not be considered the norm, they would by and large not be part of what should by all evidence be institutions bound by patriarchal attitudes towards women, they would be "oddities" to the common folk and institutions of the Empire in the same way that an Elf or a Dwarf or a Wizard is an "oddity" - in a WHFRP party where other such "oddities" are commonplace that's not and never was a problem, but by trying to push the "anyone can be anything" ideal into the setting itself while maintaining it's still the same setting they create an untenable tension between what they assert is, and what all logical conclusions based on the mechanics of the world suggest things should look like.

I find the normalising of female Witch Hunters(meaning, specifically, official sanctioned members of the Order of the Silver Hammer, the Templars of Sigmar, ie the ones in the funny hats) to be particularly egregious, and a nigh perfect example of how focusing on inclusivity to the exclusion of all else can have unintended subtextual consequences - the basic concept of witch hunters that WHF draws from, one informed thoroughly by all the real horrors of witch panics and institutions using them as an excuse to oppress and murder women who attempted to step outside the bounds prescribed for them by the power hierarchy of the time, is one that is thoroughly diminished when you strip that aspect away. Like the Empire as a whole you remove a layer of moral ambiguity within the setting, and it can be read as trivialising the negative elements of the concept, as if superficial gender-neutrality can cleanse the idea of "witch hunter" of all its misogynistic baggage.

All in all, it seems very much like C7 have fallen victim to the same mental trap that crops up time & again in the modern discourse - the belief that depiction is equivalent to endorsement, and so depiction must be avoided. You can depict a patriarchal society without that being an argument that patriarchal power hierarchies are or were justified, normal, or good. It is not necessary to impose modern social sensibilities on an existing setting where they make little sense in order to use that setting to reinforce those modern social sensibilities. Though of course simply declaring "sex and gender don't matter" is easier than using such a setting to make nuanced, thought-provoking, subtle points about sex and gender and power structures in society, so that they went that route is unsurprising if disappointing.

Its a difficult thing to balance well - off back to work now but will have better reply later.

The Warhammer World and the Empire has always had quite a few human women in positions of power - especially the older background and specailist institutions such as Wizards.

However I do agree that making it gender neutral compltetly would be odd, but not got the book yet.

Interested to see what they have done with Middenheim which in many canon sources was cosmopolitan but in later ones less so - moving from being the original home for Wizards in the Empire and them being fully intergrated into the society to hating them.....

The Empire is definately a patriarchal society - its not really xenophobic as legitmately worried about Chaos worshippers and invasions - dwarves and to a lesser extent elves are fine in the Empire - they even had a vampire heroine of the Empire

The Empire is decidedly xenophobic in nature - its concept of itself is triumphalist and superior, viewing the other human nations with ill-disguised contempt of varying degrees, and even down at the level of the peasantry the residents of one village will view those from the next town over with suspicion, not to mention the views of the populace of one province will hold of inhabitants of the others. Yes, that's all made more intense by the fact that the stranger you welcome to your fire could actually be an 'orrible gribbly mutant or soul-eating witch, but even underlying that is the element of the Empire that's drawn from history.

If you liked old-style Middenheim(and just to be clear, when we say "old" we mean "ooooooolllld", that version of the background was largely expunged in tone if not by direct retcon with 4th Edition WHFB all the way back in 1992), you'll probably enjoy the new version - honestly when I was reading the sections and box-outs that related to Altdorf, it felt more like I was reading about Ankh-Morpork from Discworld than the Empire as I've known it since I was six.

And your wizards remark is another good example - when the Empire is as fundamentally patriarchal as its ostensible social structure would imply, organisations like the Colleges of Magic treating women with genuine equality adds an additional layer to the contrast between them. As with the (properly executed) Witch Hunters, it recalls historical attempts to brand women seeking temporal power and freedom from oppression as being some mystical and existential threat, and pushes the reader to question the bigoted attitudes most citizens hold regarding magic users, even in the context of a world where Chaos is a thing. But when you can be a Templar of Sigmar or the Lady-Commander of a Knightly Order or the most powerful Sigmarite on the Emperor's Council as easily as you can a graduate of the Colleges, that contrast vanishes.

For clarity - the WHFRP rules should absolutely encompass, allow, and encourage characters like Angelika Fleischer and Ulrika Magdova, and should absolutely highlight powerful NPCs like Emmanuelle von Liebwitz and use every appropriate opportunity doing so grants to make pointed remarks about the Empire's society(and in so doing about ours), but that's not the path C7 took, rather they have simply depicted sex & gender as being irrelevant on a social and institutional scale despite not actually modifying the Empire's society and institutions in order for that assertion to make sense.

I would assume it was done more to allow players to take female characters without having to think too hard about character creation.

Take Lord of the Ring's Eowyn for example, if a player wanted to play a female Warrior and gender is irreleavant they would not have to create a back story where Eowyn has to disguise herself as a man. Eowyn can simple be a warrior and none will comment.

I think it has less to do with gender inclusion, but rather more to do with 'wide net' product creation.

 StygianBeach wrote:
I would assume it was done more to allow players to take female characters without having to think too hard about character creation.

Take Lord of the Ring's Eowyn for example, if a player wanted to play a female Warrior and gender is irreleavant they would not have to create a back story where Eowyn has to disguise herself as a man. Eowyn can simple be a warrior and none will comment.

I think it has less to do with gender inclusion, but rather more to do with 'wide net' product creation.

But Warhammer is not LotR. There are female warriors, murderers, assassins etc in the fiction and room for plenty more, they just tend to be outside the established and patriarchal social order. It's not "female characters can pick the Knight/Witch Hunter/Watchmen class" that's at issue, in the end classes/careers are just bundles of skills and abilities and any character can be an able investigator or be motivated to hunt down evil; it's that the background material and art in the book depict women as routinely being a substantial part of large institutions and organisations like knightly orders, the Witch Hunters, city watches and etc, to the point sex & gender apparently have less impact on your employment prospects in what amounts to 17th century Europe socially speaking than it does in modern real life, while at the same time not actually changing anything about those institutions and organisations and society to give that assertion any proper logical backing. It's that they use gender-specific career names like "Nun" and "Riverwoman" and then assert gender is meaningless for careers when they could have just used a neutral term like "Ascetic" and referred to Nuns & Monks in the flavour text. Taken together it seems more like a conscious choice on their part to make "gender doesn't matter" a thing, regardless of the motivation.

I mean they have a big box-out comment on one of the character creation pages that specifically says (to paraphrase)"hey, if you don't like any of the restrictions in this section, just talk with your GM and pick whatever you like" - it relates to species/career and career path progression, but there's no reason it couldn't have specifically called out sex & gender as well.

EDIT: Oh, and is "not thinking too hard about character creation" really a thing in RPGs? That seems antithetical to the whole point of them.

I think you have a good point.

There are specific gender roles in the Empire and human/Dwarf cultures - elves seem to be less concerned depending on the writer.

The Priesthoods vary quite a bit and I doubt there is anything that specifically excludes women from being Witchunters (*) or the like but its something that may have evolved as part of the Empire's own culture.

The Wizards guilds again vary - depending on the city they are based in and the culture therin.

I think it would have been good to have a short discussion of women's roles in the world which could lead to more interesting roleplaying opportunities whilst not saying anything is totally forbidden - however I have not read the new book so can't say too much. On a related note - how does the new book handle the class divide which is just as present as the gender divide.

Women could take up male roles - especially in times of war or disaster but the class they were born into would have a big impact on it - and depending on what you wanted to do - you could have plenty of restrictions

(*) Witch actually being a genderless term IIRC?

Agreed re the old old style - although it often came back depending on the author - the Gotrek and Felix novels often referencing writers such Detlef Sierick

I reckon it is just there to make the game more appealing to women. I do not think it goes any deeper than that. There are both benevolent and cynical reasons to do that, but on the whole I am happy if it means more women feel comfortable playing the game.

Most girls into tabletop RPG's are not the SJW type. Tabletop RPG's have a male outlook inherent to them, one inherent to the different ways the two genders think.
A lot of rational equal opportunity feminists amongst them but fewer complaining hysterics. This isn't their scene and it is inevitably male dominated hobby group. I make no apologies for this. Go to a Games Workshop the customers are predominantly male, go to a dance studio the opposite is true. I was the only man in my Jazz dance class of thirty, and my local games club was about the same size and had one female regular. Games Workshop is no more 'sexist' because of its demographic than a Jazz dance studio.

The pandering isn't healthy or normal. Warhammer in any of its forms was never politically correct anyway, and dealt with the ugliness of life frontally. Some factions are unashamably sexist, Druchii in particular, but the fact that they are the elven fantasy nazi regime offers a lot of detachment. Besides drow trumped the Dark elf bikini warriors by having a matriachical society built on seduction. Games Workshop took a full step back from other dark elf depictions of the time.

I remember a conversation in my GW store regarding the design studio. About the turn of the century a management shakeup had some fresh blood in GW corporate, who wante to tone down the Dark Elves, Dark Dldar and Slaanesh factions. the managers part got their way with Dark Eldar the near nudity is more heavily male orientated. But the developers put their foot down on Daemonettes, Witch Elves and Dark Elf Sorceresses. GW isnt heavily into cheesecake, and a lot of games companies plainly are, yet the exceptions, none of which are actual human go almost all the way. In this they got it right. Yes the Dark Elves are a faction of fully clad male warriors with units of bikini warrioresses. But its who they are.
Other female models are very restrained and those who are armoured are armoured properly, not with the bare midriffs, halternecks, or low cut platemail so common to Privateer Press and various D&D miniatures.
Even the Lahmians who base their entire faction on feminine wiles do so while not dressing to skank. With some exception to Neferata, and she is basically not-Akasha and has her own dress code going on.

The artwork follows the same vein. Female witch hunters, yes there were some depicted, but it was never implied to be 50% of the cadre. Female wizards were common enough in the artwork.

Feminine heroic characters such as Eowyn, Brienne of Tarth and Arya Stark appeal to women because they have clearly not been given an artificial gender pass, but instead earned their place as real women are wont to do.

The whole idea of a diversity aware, equal opportunities Empire of Sigmar is an affront to both the lore and to women who understand the exception-to-the-rule mentality that accounts for women in better written heroic fantasy. This new product line makes the assumption insisted that they are snowflakes who cant handle a cruder world than that in which we live today. In a way, it is a backhanded insult.

 Da Boss wrote:
I reckon it is just there to make the game more appealing to women. I do not think it goes any deeper than that. There are both benevolent and cynical reasons to do that, but on the whole I am happy if it means more women feel comfortable playing the game.

But then, are they playing WHFRP at all? Warhammer is filled with "problematic" things, but if you eliminate them or change them then it no longer is Warhammer.

Consider - there are now plenty of people out there advocating that we should go in and edit classic works of literature to remove racist or misogynist or homophobic sentiments that were commonplace at the time the novels were written, exactly to "make people more comfortable" reading them. I wonder if you think that's a reasonable position to take? Not suggesting Warhammer is great literature of course, but the motivation is the same and the result is the same.

Surely the reasonable thing to do is include a passage at the beginning of the book - RPG or novel - that details the ways in which the setting deviates from modern social sensibilities, and then allow people to play/read or not as they choose. Not everything has to be for everybody, and should people want to play a vaguely Warhammer-ish setting without the things WHF contains they find troubling, Age of Sigmar exists and is getting its own RPG.

Sure, while I agree that products should be allowed to be catered to their target audiences, I think that this change indicates that WHFRP 4th ed is targeted to a wider audience than previous editions.

IMO, it is all about collecting money and not about being politically correct.

If Cubicle 7 find that their wide net is not bringing in enough fish I am sure they will change things up, including what bait is being used.

I do think my reply is a bit unfair though, as I do not state whether or not I like the idea of such changes.

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I reckon it is just there to make the game more appealing to women. I do not think it goes any deeper than that. There are both benevolent and cynical reasons to do that, but on the whole I am happy if it means more women feel comfortable playing the game.

But then, are they playing WHFRP at all? Warhammer is filled with "problematic" things, but if you eliminate them or change them then it no longer is Warhammer.

Consider - there are now plenty of people out there advocating that we should go in and edit classic works of literature to remove racist or misogynist or homophobic sentiments that were commonplace at the time the novels were written, exactly to "make people more comfortable" reading them. I wonder if you think that's a reasonable position to take? Not suggesting Warhammer is great literature of course, but the motivation is the same and the result is the same.

Surely the reasonable thing to do is include a passage at the beginning of the book - RPG or novel - that details the ways in which the setting deviates from modern social sensibilities, and then allow people to play/read or not as they choose. Not everything has to be for everybody, and should people want to play a vaguely Warhammer-ish setting without the things WHF contains they find troubling, Age of Sigmar exists and is getting its own RPG.

I am not okay with editing literature, no. That is silly. That would be like going back and changing old editions of WFRP. This is a new edition for a new era, and it is obviously angling for a more modern audience. I do not believe that the motivation and end result are the same, but I doubt we are going to agree. In one case the motivation is to totally erase the existence of prejudice even from the past, whereas in the other, the intent is to make a new product that appeals to as wide an audience as possible. You might feel that gender prejudice is so intrinsic to the Old World that it is no longer WFRP if it is not included, that is up to you. I personally would not see it that way, I see it as a minor accommodation for me to make with my fantasy to incorporate the fantasies of others in a game which is about sharing a fantasy world.

To my recollection, the Warhammer world was mostly quiet on the question of gender roles. Everything was pretty much assumed, and it is a very "male" universe. They have obviously decided that they might sell more books if they expanded the gender roles a little. I believe it is about profits but like I said, if more women are comfortable playing the game because of it that is a good thing.

Dungeons and Dragons used to have weird stat bonuses and magic powers for female characters based on their charisma stat. It had tables to roll on for the type of sexual partner you would encounter, female only. This stuff was part of the earliest editions and is looked back on fondly by some players. Luckily, you can still download those old versions and play them as they were. Modern Dungeons and Dragons did away with all of that, and now has a much more (but still not enough) gender balanced audience than it used to have. I think this is a very good thing. My current gaming group is 4 ladies and one gentleman and myself. If I told the ladies that they could not play certain classes because it did not fit the fantasy genre we were playing, I doubt they would have taken the plunge, as all of them were newbie roleplayers.

That's my take on it; WFRP 1st and 2nd editions had men and women with defined gender roles because of the historical periods they were emulating, not because it was really a deliberate decision. The setting works well enough, IMO with or without the gender imbalance. If you want to make it a feature of your campaign and explore gender politics and social roles, then there's plenty of material there. If you just want to wander round the forests of the Empire and get mugged by goblins, then everyone can play male or female road wardens and mercenaries with no issue.

The only time I remember gender politics making any impact in the setting was in Neil McIntosh's The Black Sail short story where the main character is a Bretonnian Lord's daughter who runs away to sea looking for the Slaaneshi cult who supplied the drugs her sister overdosed on. However, the "woman in a man's world" doesn't make much of an impact. There's also ...

11/12.

Could you clarify your argument Jim111, because it is difficult for me to understand.

Jim111 wrote:
IF it is a social construct then how come some people feel they were born in the wrong body and want to do gender reconstructive surgery, if gender is a social construct.

Sex =/= gender. The feeling of being born in the wrong body comes from a sex mismatch, and would likely exist regardless of what society thinks about it. Gender, by definition, is how society views people based on their perceived sex. That's why concepts of what it means to be a man or woman, what social roles are expected, etc, vary heavily between people and cultures. For example, in the cultures most dakka members are from a skirt is considered a feminine thing, unless you call it a kilt and it suddenly becomes a masculine thing. Pink is considered a "girl" color, except it used to be a male color (being the "young boy" shade of red/purple as used by royalty) and only became a thing for girls within the lifetime of people who are still around. We commonly use phrases like "be a man" with the underlying assumption that a "man" is based on cultural ideals about courage or honor or strength and merely having a Y chromosome is not sufficient. Computer programming used to be a job for women ("it's the secretary's job to make this machine work, I have Important Business Things to do"), until it gained in prestige and suddenly everyone was talking about the inherent superiority of men in the profession. Over and over again we see differences and changes in ideas about gender, the textbook definition of a social construct.

because right now everyone must be some mix of some different skin colors, be sexually confused, not hetero not white, which is forbidden to be, both things, and one must also be disabled somehow and if all these criteria are not fulfilled by each and every character in each and every tv show / movie / book / story of any kind, then one is not being “inclusive” and indeed worse than Hitler.

This is a lie. Please do not exaggerate the real situation to hyperbolic extremes that do not exist in reality, it's a very dishonest thing to do.

In the Warhammer world anyone can be anything yes, but that does not mean that every profession has an equal 50/50 split, as a player you can be any profession you like, however that does not mean that there is a 50/50 split in EVERYTHING.

Why shouldn't it be 50/50? Why should a completely fictional world, a world with magic and weird monsters and such, follow the same conventions as the real world of 2018? I mean, we're already accepting a complete lack of realism anywhere else, so why do you pick this one issue to insist on strict realism? Is there any reason besides the fact that the issue is important to your political beliefs, while the ridiculous and utterly unrealistic swords your character is armed with are not?

Also those who scream “inclusiveness” the most and loudest are actually the biggest bigots because they do not accept that most people are hetero and indeed just like Yodhrin these loud screamers believe that actually 100% of the population are sexually confused and want to do gender reconstructive surgery all day every day. And the loud screamers also believe that if you are not some type of non white skin color then you should not be represented.

Please stop lying. Nobody, outside of maybe an irrelevant fringe minority of social media whiners with single-digit readers, is saying this.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Yodhrin wrote:
The Empire is decidedly xenophobic in nature - its concept of itself is triumphalist and superior, viewing the other human nations with ill-disguised contempt of varying degrees, and even down at the level of the peasantry the residents of one village will view those from the next town over with suspicion, not to mention the views of the populace of one province will hold of inhabitants of the others. Yes, that's all made more intense by the fact that the stranger you welcome to your fire could actually be an 'orrible gribbly mutant or soul-eating witch, but even underlying that is the element of the Empire that's drawn from history.

Being awful and bigoted s about one thing doesn't mean that everything else will follow along modern lines. The Empire can still be xenophobic without being sexist, having no discrimination based on gender as long as you're a member of the Empire (and preferably the local village) but simultaneously having a KILL ON SIGHT policy towards outsiders (male or female).

The empire was already made "gender balanced" in the MMORPG: Warhammer Fantasy: Age of Reckoning.

Nobody had a problem with it back then. But they respected other fixed gender roles like Wich Elves... or Chaos Chosen(When you had actually female Chaos Chose in the lore but not female Knights of the Blazing Sun, but it is not a problem)

See, now you understand that crazy concept that people call 'forced diversity'. Yeah, I know, it's a stupid term. Not the one I'd use.

I call it "McDonaldizing", personally. But it's basically trying to make things as 'diverse and inclusive as possible', but to the extent where it seems less 'realistic' or believable and almost removes that little strand of relatability a setting has to the real world or real history. To some, it can cheapen it and make it feel like a watered-down Saturday Morning Cartoon version of a setting or concept.

In fiction, sometimes a degree of realism makes sense and sometimes just handwaving realism away is more fun.

One group may find the idea of female Samurai A-OK. One group may want their RPG to be more like a realistic feudal Japan and not have that. Some may want noble males to be the actual holders of power, with women behind the scenes pulling strings and acting as cunning strategists.

At the point where you're making black Samurai transwomen, some people are going to raise an eyebrow.

Should never mean you can't play what you wanna play, though- that could be the thing, that your character is the unusual and different thing.

Jim111 wrote:


Also those who scream “inclusiveness” the most and loudest are actually the biggest bigots because they do not accept that most people are hetero and indeed just like Yodhrin these loud screamers believe that actually 100% of the population are sexually confused and want to do gender reconstructive surgery all day every day. And the loud screamers also believe that if you are not some type of non white skin color then you should not be represented.
That is how things look right now, only time will tell what will happen in the future.

Yes. Some people, are unfortunately still hetero and cisgender. One day, all people will be truly enlightened and all become gay transgender catgirls.

The setting is supposed to "suck" for pretty much everyone but the filthy rich nobility.. so a bunch of racist, bigoted jackholes makes sense. peasants are supposed to be covered in poop. thats their job, poo may even be a uniform for them. Orcs are the most "progressive" race in that world. As for Eowyn, it wasnt so much she was a woman as she was the kings niece and specifically told to stay in edoras.

 Da Boss wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:

 Da Boss wrote:
I reckon it is just there to make the game more appealing to women. I do not think it goes any deeper than that. There are both benevolent and cynical reasons to do that, but on the whole I am happy if it means more women feel comfortable playing the game.

But then, are they playing WHFRP at all? Warhammer is filled with "problematic" things, but if you eliminate them or change them then it no longer is Warhammer.

Consider - there are now plenty of people out there advocating that we should go in and edit classic works of literature to remove racist or misogynist or homophobic sentiments that were commonplace at the time the novels were written, exactly to "make people more comfortable" reading them. I wonder if you think that's a reasonable position to take? Not suggesting Warhammer is great literature of course, but the motivation is the same and the result is the same.

Surely the reasonable thing to do is include a passage at the beginning of the book - RPG or novel - that details the ways in which the setting deviates from modern social sensibilities, and then allow people to play/read or not as they choose. Not everything has to be for everybody, and should people want to play a vaguely Warhammer-ish setting without the things WHF contains they find troubling, Age of Sigmar exists and is getting its own RPG.

I am not okay with editing literature, no. That is silly. That would be like going back and changing old editions of WFRP. This is a new edition for a new era, and it is obviously angling for a more modern audience. I do not believe that the motivation and end result are the same, but I doubt we are going to agree. In one case the motivation is to totally erase the existence of prejudice even from the past, whereas in the other, the intent is to make a new product that appeals to as wide an audience as possible. You might feel that gender prejudice is so intrinsic to the Old World that it is no longer WFRP if it is not included, that is up to you. I personally would not see it that way, I see it as a minor accommodation for me to make with my fantasy to incorporate the fantasies of others in a game which is about sharing a fantasy world.

In what way is issuing a new edition of a story with details edited to "angle for a more modern audience" different when it's a novel as opposed to an RPG? In both cases, you're taking an existing fiction, changing elements of it to better fit with modern social mores, and publishing that edited version as a new product. In both cases, the previous editions with the previous versions of those fictions continue to exist. The objection to the practice is not that the Book Police will go around burning all copies of the original version, the objection is that it's wrong to change an existing work to fit the political narrative of the day, that these fictions exist within a context that should not be stripped away, and that if people wish to create a version of a fiction that accounts for changing times or which acts as a criticism of existing fictions, they should create an original work or, at the very least, a radical reworking in a different medium.

If someone wishes to play in a fantasy setting with Warhammer trappings and a more modern and enlightened attitude to diversity, Age of Sigmar already exists.

And yes, I would argue gender prejudice is intrinsic to the Warhammer setting, just like all of the other horrible behaviours and attitudes that exist within the setting - I'd ask you, if gender prejudice isn't, why are any other kinds of prejudice? There are many things in Warhammer that could be considered offensive or merely distasteful enough to discourage this or that group or individual from taking part in a campaign, should they not all be removed on your logic?

To my recollection, the Warhammer world was mostly quiet on the question of gender roles. Everything was pretty much assumed, and it is a very "male" universe. They have obviously decided that they might sell more books if they expanded the gender roles a little. I believe it is about profits but like I said, if more women are comfortable playing the game because of it that is a good thing.

The Warhammer world is full of examples of defined gender roles, and it implies many more, because it draws from history and from folklore and mythology based on that history. When you arbitrarily declare that one aspect of the pastiche is now different without accounting for why it's different you diminish the whole - and no, "it's fantasy" is not explanation; by all human experience a society at the level of development and with the cultural background of somewhere like the Empire(or Bretonnia, or any of the human realms in the Old World) should contain strong though not absolute gender roles, institutional sexism, and generally be patriarchal in nature. The fictional human societies in Warhammer are explicitly intended to evoke the historical reality, so if you want to negate a part of that reality you have to at least make a token effort to explain why - why, given all of the similarities, is that one thing different? And why is that one thing being different not reflected in other, similar attitudes which remain based in the prejudicial modes of history?

I also think the "it will make women more comfortable so is good" line of argument is a complete red herring. The experience any given woman will have with WFRP will be every bit as dependent on the GM and other players in a gender-balanced version of the setting as it would be otherwise, or in any other setting. You could begin writing a new fantasy setting from complete scratch with the primary goal of crafting a setting explicitly intended to provide a welcoming and diverse society in which to adventure, and a GM with pervy attitudes could still quite happily make the experience uncomfortable. More than that though - why does everything have to be for everybody? Any given person could find any given aspect of any given setting to be distasteful, even to the point it makes them reluctant to interact with that setting, but the solution to that would be for your group to discuss the matter and choose a different setting to adventure in. Some settings are absurdly violent, some are filled with sex and drugs, some contain religious or racial persecution, and yes some include sexism - that could well mean that some people don't feel comfortable playing them, but that's not an argument that they should all be changed, nor that them being changed for that reason is positive.

It's been my experience that the best way to ensure women are comfortable playing in an RPG group is to ensure that neither the person running things nor any of the players are scumbags; when that was the case a few years ago when I was more frequently involved in more "public" games, there were always plenty of women(by the standards of the time) interested in WFRP games, because they liked WHF and evidently didn't feel any need to be pandered to in order to interact with it, only the knowledge that the people they'd be playing with weren't arseholes.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Yodhrin wrote:
The Empire is decidedly xenophobic in nature - its concept of itself is triumphalist and superior, viewing the other human nations with ill-disguised contempt of varying degrees, and even down at the level of the peasantry the residents of one village will view those from the next town over with suspicion, not to mention the views of the populace of one province will hold of inhabitants of the others. Yes, that's all made more intense by the fact that the stranger you welcome to your fire could actually be an 'orrible gribbly mutant or soul-eating witch, but even underlying that is the element of the Empire that's drawn from history.

Being awful and bigoted s about one thing doesn't mean that everything else will follow along modern lines. The Empire can still be xenophobic without being sexist, having no discrimination based on gender as long as you're a member of the Empire (and preferably the local village) but simultaneously having a KILL ON SIGHT policy towards outsiders (male or female).

But in order for that to be the case, you have to presume that the social conditions that led to patriarchy and gender oppression are entirely unrelated to and divorced from the social conditions that led to other kinds of ingrained institutional prejudice, and that's nonsense. Regressive attitudes tend to cluster because they require a similar mindset and outlook combined with the right similar circumstances - there's a reason that sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, religious bigots and so on tend to end up reasonably happy bedfellows in modern political movements. By tapping so deeply into our own history Warhammer becomes incredibly rich, but if you then decide to deviate from that history you have to explain how and why; when you add fantastical creatures, when you add magic, and when you add anachronistic elements, whether that's steam airships or gender quality in a society that by real life experience and academic theory wouldn't have it.

 Yodhrin wrote:


But in order for that to be the case, you have to presume that the social conditions that led to patriarchy and gender oppression are entirely unrelated to and divorced from the social conditions that led to other kinds of ingrained institutional prejudice, and that's nonsense. Regressive attitudes tend to cluster because they require a similar mindset and outlook combined with the right similar circumstances - there's a reason that sexists, xenophobes, homophobes, religious bigots and so on tend to end up reasonably happy bedfellows in modern political movements. By tapping so deeply into our own history Warhammer becomes incredibly rich, but if you then decide to deviate from that history you have to explain how and why; when you add fantastical creatures, when you add magic, and when you add anachronistic elements, whether that's steam airships or gender quality in a society that by real life experience and academic theory wouldn't have it.

This is just not true. The Roman Empire was very sexist, but they wheren't xenophobes or homophobes, nor racists. It only mattered that you where from the roman empire. Your skin colour or province of procedence was irrelevant.

The same happened in the medieval times before racism was expanded and made popular in the colonial era. Between the fall of the Roman Empire and America's discovery, your skin colour wasn't important. Your religion was. You had many examples of white muslism and converted in conquered iberian peninsulae, black people being rich and relevant in Venecia, etc...
If the man before you was of your same religion (Muslim, Jew or Catholic) then it was all good. If he was of another? It didn't mattered his skin colour. You would hate him.


Now, I won't discusse that Warhammer Fantasy wasn't sexist (I mean, in-universe) because it was. I was just explaining how historically, "Regressive attitudes" don't always come together.

Racism as we understand it today is more of a 20th century construct than a BCE thing. Religion and Empire were the primary divisors of the past.

That said, if we had Orcs and Dark Elves and Beastmen back then, then we would be likely be speciesist against them.

The Empire, or for that matter medieval Europeans do not conform not only to 21st century thinking but also to 21st century classifications of thinking.

It is an error to place the same value judgements on the earlier societies, let alone fictional societies based on past historical mindsets. In fact it is evidence of progressive indoctrination to try and do so.

One day soon the bubble will burst and the 'progressive' mindwash will be better understood for what it is. At that time those spouting the nonsense now will be scrabbling to distance themselves from it and claiming they were never this narrow minded.

text removed.

reds8n