The website and blog of author Kirsten M. Corby
If you’re interested in my work, you’ll like this video by the estimable Beau of the Fifth Column
This video comes to me today in a low place. I needed this. Encouragement. Support. Thank you, Beau.
It’s short, and it’s impactful. Do watch it. Fuel for the journey.
Okay, I’ve watched a bunch of Youtube videos and now feel ready to add my two bitcoins about the current Dungeons & Dragons uproar over the new Open Gaming License.
Seriously, though, I’m not unequipped to discuss this. I am an OG RPG gamer. I mean OHH GEE. I gamed with the original D&D woodgrain box. The box with chits of paper instead of polyhedral dice. I’ve been gaming since before there were ten-sided dice.
I went to a D&D tourney when I was in high school, and I was the only girl there.
I have also joined the fairly rarefied community of lady Dungeon Masters. So I do feel qualified to speak as a gamer, about gaming.
My viewpoint is that Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is engaged in a ham-fisted money grab, and understands absolutely nothing about the customer base that is the mainstay of their revenue. And seems to care less.
A quick recap if you’re not aware. Back around 2000, Wizards of the Coast published Third Edition D&D with an “open gaming license,” which declared the basic rules and stats of D&D to be open source, and keeping only named IP like Elminster, the Forgotten Realms, Waterdeep, Beholder, the purview of Wizards of the Coast. A harmonious vision, that created an active culture of third-party publishers making new worlds, monsters, classes, adventures for D&D, that succeeded for twenty years.
But during those twenty years, WOTC got bought out by game giant Hasbro. Who I suspect are the real villains in this story, because they speak in bad faith and care only about the bottom line.
WOTC/Hasbro wants to rescind the Open Gaming License (which was intended to be irrevocable) and replace it with a new, far more restrictive license that demands royalties, and contains an outrageous clause that says, you, third-party publisher, “own” your original content — but WOTC can use it and publish it whenever they want, at no cost and in perpetuity.
And this has the entire tabletop gaming community in an uproar. We don’t like seeing indie creators attacked. We don’t like being gaslit and disrespected like that.
I know this is all very, very inside baseball. But my husband hasn’t shut up about it for five days now, and neither has the Internet.
Wizards attempted to backtrack, too little too late, but their press releases have actual lies in them (this was just a draft license) and are not fooling anyone. The vapid legalese indicates to me that the suits over there have no idea who they are dealing with: to wit, fandom, a legion of obsessive, obstreperous nerds like myself. Some of whom are lawyers, or also work in the gaming industry.
The whole thing is, IMO, just a clumsy, tone-deaf attempt to wring more money out of the D&D brand. Wizards/Hasbro cares nothing for “the community” of gamers, the rights of artists and makers, putting out a quality product, or any of that. They see D&D as a cash cow from which they are trying to milk every drop. Charging creators. Raising prices for the fans. Undercutting other publishers. I understand they’re trying to corner the market on the “virtual table top” software as well.
This impression is heightened by an earlier incident in which WOTC also tried to “monetize” its other flagship brand, Magic: The Gathering, by selling an overhyped anniversary set of cards that they actually expected regular gamers to buy by the case in order to play. Screw the legendary game that created a whole new market sector, and WOTC’s bones in the industry. Screw the anniversary. Screw the fans.
Well, the fans are revolting, and doing so by canceling their subscriptions to D&D Beyond, which I guess is Wizard’s own virtual table top. (I don’t really know, I’m still a pen and paper gamer.) So many cancellations, it crashed the servers. That membership which, they were planning to hike to 30 dollars a month according to some reports. Damn,. even HBO doesn’t charge that much.
Leading third-party publisher Paizo struck back at WOTC by vowing to create a true, irrevocable open-source gaming system, which they call the ORC License. Which is cute, but I’ve already forgotten what it means. … ah. the Open RPG Creative License. To be shepherded by a non-profit organization. They have the means to do it, and support it, too. So a lot of other companies are jumping on board The hashtag is #OpenDnD.
Wizards of the Coast is straight killing the goose that lays the golden egg, here. It’s hard to believe even the Hasbro suits didn’t see the folly of threatening to take other people’s stuff, without license or fee, forever. It’s a means of forcing other companies out of business, is what it is.
The suits also forgot how engaged and activated subcultures are in the age of social media. This news went around the world instantly. And people responded instantly. Hasbro got caught with its pants down. Somehow they really didn’t think anyone would object to this vulgar display of hubris.
I agree with WOTC/Hasbro about one thing. There’s no reason Dungeons & Dragons couldn’t be a cultural juggernaut like the MCU or Star Trek. I mean, my God, they have forty years of adventures, campaigns, tie-in novels and more to draw from. D&D survived the Satanic Panic in the 1980s, and the nerds who were stuffed into lockers back then are now the titans of industry and culture. There’s no reason the whole country shouldn’t know what a Beholder is just like they know who Hawkeye is. The property has been sadly mishandled in that regard.
But man, this is NOT the way to go about it. Might I remind you an A-List D&D movie is coming down the pike in mere weeks. WEEKS.
Great move, WOTC, completely enrage and alienate your customer base, indeed your entire industry, RIGHT when you are launching the first of a hoped-for tentpole movie franchise. The Iron Man of D&D, as it were. GREAT MOVE.
Oh, and Hollywood just greenlighted a live-action D&D TV show, didn’t it?
If you want someone to wade into the legalese, or count the beans, you’ll find plenty on YouTube. It’s all over there.
From my viewpoint, this will be taught as a case study in business schools in how NOT to treat your customers OR your suppliers.
It’s too bad. I had hopes for that movie.
But take heart! All is not lost. D&D is not lost to you. Even if you’re poor, even if you live in the developing world.
This is what I told gamer friends who were anxious about Third Edition … and Fourth … and Fifth.
You don’t need any of that. No one can take D&D away from you. You don’t need Wizards. Or Hasbro. Or D&D Beyond, or any of it. What you need are secondhand copies of the core rulebooks from your favorite rules set , some PDF modules from DriveThruRPG, and off you go. Run a few of those and then design your own adventures. D&D lives in your head and your heart. Not in the books. Not in warehouses or cloud servers. You can game for the rest of your life and never give another penny to Wizards if you don’t want to. In the final analysis, D&D belongs to us. Not the suits.
I’ve always loved weird science. Since I was a little kid reading the TIME LIFE Mysteries of the Unexplained books at the public library. UFOs, Bigfoot, poltergeists, all of it. The Philadelphia Experiment. “Fortean phenomena.” Weird science. I love it! It fires my imagination.
I’ve been studying the UFO phenomenon my entire life.
So I have some thoughts about the Pentagon report on “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena” that dropped last week.
Much of the “UFO community” are infuriated at what they find to be weak tea, after 70 years of waiting.
But really, anyone who thought the report was going to include high-definition video of classic flying discs was letting their imagination run away with them.
If you read carefully, there are two major changes of policy in this report.
First, the report says, “UAP clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security.” [emphasis mine]
Since the Blue Book era onwards, the official position has been that UFOs/UAP represent no threat to national security.
Second, the report suggests the phenomenon requires actual scientific study to increase understanding.
The conclusion of the Condon Report back in the 1960s stated that there was no scientific value to studying the phenomenon. This gave the Air Force the excuse it wanted to shutter Project Blue Book.
Actually, three policy changes, now that I think of it — there are now formal procedures for the military to report UAPs.
Previously, doing so could end a pilot’s or a scientist’s career through ridicule and ostracization.
This represents a 180 degree turn from previous policy. For generations, the official government position was ridicule and obfuscation. “Swamp gas.”
Now, suddenly UAPs are a threat to national security requiring rigorous scientific study (and more funding.)
Why? What changed?
Mind, I don’t think it’s great that the phenomenon is suddenly being couched as a threat, a potential enemy.
But at least “the powers that be” are taking it seriously.
They’re spoon-feeding us information here. But they ARE feeding us. That is a huge change.
Here is the report, so you can read it yourself. It’s only nine pages. Including two appendixes.
Make of it what you will.
The first book I chose for the Tempest Bradford Challenge is The Left Hand of Darkness by the late, much lamented Ursula K. Le Guin. I read this book when I was in high school, and I wanted to see if I understood it better as a middle-aged adult.
I’m not posting spoiler warnings for a fifty-year-old book. One has to draw the line somewhere.
First of all, I’d say, no, I did not achieve a deeper understanding of this book on re-read. I think I got it well the first time: men and women are basically the same; humaity trumps gender. This is something I have always believed, and I daresay reading this book as a teenager probably influenced my thoughts on the subject. As well as my own life experience. I was already leaning that way anyway. Someone raised with more strict gender boundaries might find this book quite threatening.
This is a very serious book, seriously written by a serious author, about serious people doing serious things, with a serious theme. No humor in this book. I remembered most of the big set pieces, and some individual details, like Genly Ai, the Terran protagonist, calling the gender-neutral proprietor of his apartment building his “landlady,” because they were pudgy and gossipy. (That annoyed me.) I’d forgotten that Estraven, Genly’s native friend and guide, is killed at the end.
In brief, this book is about a diplomatic mission from Le Guin’s human space league, the Ekumen, to a world, Gethen, where the people, although of Hainish “ancient astronaut” human stock, still have a sexual estrus cycle with an unusual twist: when not in heat, the Gethenians are sexually neuter, with no visible sex organs and no sex drive. When they come into heat, or kemmer as they call it, once a month, they become either male or female, influenced by the development of their sex partner and random chance, with no way to control or anticipate which gender they will manifest. All people, therefore, are at times both male and female, and can both bear or sire children. The children one bears are considered closer than the ones you sire, and inherit property first. The Gethenians are scandalized by Genly’s permanent male sexuality; they call people who are stuck in one sex “perverts,” and consider them disabled at best, dangerous at worst.
The book doesn’t actually go into detail on the sexual rites and practices as much as you might expect. Written by a less wise author, this book could have become very prurient, even pornographic. In one scene, Genly is trapped in a snowstorm with Estraven, who is in kemmer, but they don’t have sex, even though it is supposed to be very painful and distressing for a Gethenian in heat not to engage in sex. This seems like a missed opportunity to me, upon re-read. It wouldn’t have to be explicit, but it could have illuminated human sexual relationships on Gethen in a whole other way.
This was a landamrk book when it was written, winning both the Hugo and the Nebula awards. It was part of the “New Wave” of “soft” or “anthropological” science fiction that developed in the 1960s, that rigorously examined social and cultural issues and transgressed stylistic and thematic boundaries of science fiction, as part of the whole counter-cultural movement back then. It is considered a classic of science fiction, and as far as I know, has been continuously in print since it was first published.
One thing did come to bother me over the course of the book. Le Guin chooses deliberately to refer to the Gethenians, genderless beings, as “he” throughout the book, writing that “he” is the most “neutral” of the pronouns, instead of creating or using a Gethenian gender-neutral pronoun, or switching the pronouns around, or saying “they,” or any other such scheme. But that is not the effect in the book as written. Because Genly, the narrator, is a man, he tends to perceive and write about the Gethenians as men, and the constant use of “he” reinforces this. The scene where Esatraven is in kemmer is the only time that Genly is forcefully reminded that Estraven, or any Gethenian, is as much a woman as a man. It undercuts Le Guin’s point, to me. I’m reminded of Ann Leckie’s much more recent book Ancillary Justice, wherein the default pronoun in the narrator’s language is “she,” and how completely disconcerting it is to see that in practice, everyone always referred to as “she,” and not know whether the character being referred to is male or female. (And how it drove many of the angry Rabid Puppy types right round the bend – especially when it won all the big sci-fi awards.)
But to be fair, I have to admit that Le Guin writing and thinking about this idea at all in 1969 was revolutionary, and Left Hand won many of those same awards in its time. It’s still a good book, and still has useful things to say. As classics do.
There’s also this quote from near the end of the book, that I found quite relevant to our time, and wanted to share:
… I had asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his voice last night, saying with all mildness, “I’d rather be in Karhide…” And I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises, and how so real a love can become, too often, so foolish and vile a bigotry. Where does it go wrong?
Where indeed? One might write a whole other science fiction book about that.
So I was hanging out at my friend Dennis’s and we were watching some old movie on TCM, something about the Boxer Rebellion in China I think, one of those crappy movies from before the era of political correctness (or even common sense) full of white people playing fake Asians. Yellowface. Ugh, that’s the worst. So we were talking about Asian themed films and Dennis asked us, “Did you see THE LAST SAMURAI?”
Yes, we’ve seen it (my husband and I, not the royal we here). It was a beautiful movie — every scene was perfectly composed and gorgeous. “But,” I said, “it was that same old story, the civilized white man goes and lives with the native people and absorbs their simple native wisdom and becomes their hero. DANCES WITH SAMURAI. God, why do we keep telling that story? The ancient Romans probably had stories about centurions going over the wall and becoming one with the Gauls. That story is decrepit! Why do we keep telling it?”
Well, I think I’ve figured it out. Maybe this was obvious to everyone and I was just being monumentally obtuse, but I think I figured it out, on Saturday night when I was watching another movie: EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS.
Yeah, Moses. Moses is the archetype of this story.
You know the story I’m talking about. It has shown up endlessly in big-budget Hollywood films in the last couple decades — most notably, DANCES WITH WOLVES and AVATAR, but also THE LAST SAMURAI and a horde of lesser imitators. I haven’t seen it, but people tell me Disney’s POCAHONTAS is the same story.
A disenchanted white man leaves civilization and goes into the wilderness, hoping to find .. something — peace or surcease or a way to forget his troubles. Sam Worthington in AVATAR is literally trying to leave his crippled body behind with a Na’vi avatar. Same idea though.
And in the wilderness, he discovers the native people, and becomes enamored of them. He lives among them and studies their ways, which are so much more authentic and meaningful than those of his own decadent civilization. He falls in love with a native woman – usually the chief’s daughter, of course. He becomes one of them, these noble savages. But more than that, the becomes the best of them, their leader, their prophet, because of the synthesis of his civilized sensibility with the humble wisdom of the natives. Toruk Makto. The chosen one. (Can you tell how fucking sick I am of this storyline?)
So, Moses. Think about it. Moses was a prince of Egypt, the most civilized, the greatest nation on earth at that time (and for thousands of years.) But he renounced his princedom and went to live with the desert nomads, the Hebrews, the slaves. The noble primitives. He lives as one of them, takes a wife from among them, has children that he raises as Hebrew. But, with this “Mighty Whitey” trope as they call it on TV Tropes, he is, as described, the best of them, the very Prophet of God.
And he leads his people against impossible odds into battle with their enemies, the Egyptians, who hold the Hebrews in slavery. This time it’s mostly a spiritual battle, with the plagues and all, but it’s still a battle. And wonder of wonders, he wins, and leads his people to the Promised Land.
Do you see it? It’s so obvious to me now, I can’t believe I never noticed it before.
So clearly, this is one of the root stories in Western civilization. No wonder we keep retelling it.
But in the modern telling, we have subverted this trope, and not necessarily in a good way. In the Moses story, the tale is really about the Hebrews; it is their origin story. Moses comes to deliver them. The slaves are freed from Egypt and given the Law and the covenant at Mount Sinai.
But in the modern American versions of this story, the people come to save the hero. The civilized man is purified and uplifted by his adoption by the natives. Kevin Costner escapes the trauma of the Civil War among the Lakota. Sam Worthington’s consciousness is actually transferred into a Na’vi body in AVATAR. The story is about his salvation, not the people’s. Kevin Costner can’t save the Lakota in DANCES WITH WOLVES. No one can. But they save him. Tom Cruise resolves his alcoholism and his PTSD while living with Japanese samurai — it”s he who is the Last Samurai, not Ken Watanabe or any, you know, actual Japanese person.
The protagonists of these movies undertake the Hero’s Journey into the “special world” of the native people, and they do the usual Hero’s Journey things, overcoming challenges, acquiring allies, facing their great ordeal. But at the end, they don’t go back to their “ordinary world” (Western culture) with the wisdom and the skills they have learned. No, instead they stay chilling with the native people and their required native honey in the Special World, having abandoned their home, and thus failing in the whole basic task of the Hero’s Journey.
It’s the same story as the Moses narrative, but the emphasis is changed. The emphasis is on the individual, not the people, on his personal salvation, not the benefit of the community.
So it becomes a tale of self-indulgence and white privilege, not heroic sacrifice, and that is probably why I dislike it so much. That people in Hollywood feel the need to compulsively retell this bastardized version of this story is not a good thing. I suppose you could just attribute it to laziness and sloppy storytelling, but I think it’s deeper than that. Obviously we feel the need to purge ourselves of the corruptions of modern, Western, industrialized society. And rightly so. But we’re doing it in these stories by co-opting the lifeways of indigenous, often oppressed people — even if they are imaginary ones, like the Na’vi in AVATAR. That is wrong, and it won’t give us what we need. No hero lives forever in his private Idaho. The hero has to come back, else the quest has failed.
I guess modern culture is what you get when the hero fails in his quest. That would explain a lot.
Atlantis Fallen 