A Response: An Open Letter to Erik Mona


Pathfinder Second Edition General Discussion

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^Yeah, I think Pathfinder always prided itself on being "edgy" and "real", which often meant "here's how a bunch of white people think slavery works, it's lawful neutral if you ignore it hard enough". And also, yeah, the fetishistic depiction of lots and lots of slavery.

I've already addressed everything you just said, metric, but thanks for insulting both us and the original blog post writer while also implying you understand racism better than they do.

This game is not a history book, and the freelancer is explicitly saying "we did not sign up to play Racism Simulator just so white people can feel Educated and Informed". If you want to talk about racism and slavery, do it on your own time. Don't demand Black people engage with it. What a Starbucks "start-conversations-about-racism" take.


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I like to run campaigns that take place in horrible places, to make heroes shine even brighter.

But even still, I run by all of the negative things that could appear in the campaign by my players, and if even one person is uncomfortable with something I will not include it, no matter how grim I'm trying to represent the world. I have my own things I'm not comfortable with, such as sexual assault.

So I think it's perfectly reasonable to make slavery an "opt in" for the consumer rather than "opt out".


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber
Kobold Catgirl wrote:
In response, Erik Mona has promised to greatly reduce the prevalence of slavery as a plot point. He has explicitly not called for a retcon, nor to stop acknowledging the history of slavery throughout the world, only to deemphasize it in future installments.

He didn't say deemphasized or reduce the prevalence he said completely removed:

"Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change."

To be clear I don't have an issue with this however I would have liked to have seen it resolved narratively. It wouldn't need to be an AP even just a one-page timeline of events would suffice. There are plenty of established plot threads in each country that condones slavery that could trigger its end.


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I think Eric's right. Going about it narratively doesn't work and it's not worth the trouble. Why walk through a self made field of landmines when you can instead just throw the mines away and make the game more welcoming in the process.


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nephandys wrote:
Kobold Catgirl wrote:
In response, Erik Mona has promised to greatly reduce the prevalence of slavery as a plot point. He has explicitly not called for a retcon, nor to stop acknowledging the history of slavery throughout the world, only to deemphasize it in future installments.

He didn't say deemphasized or reduce the prevalence he said completely removed:

"Going forward, we plan to remove slavery from our game and setting completely. We will not be writing adventures to tell the story of how this happened. We will not be introducing an in-world event to facilitate this change."

He's posted elsewhere to clarify that it's more "we aren't going to talk about it as much except in a historical context".

It's fair to advocate for an "end of slavery" AP or whatever, but can we please avoid alarmist rhetoric about retcons, erasure, or whatever Inqui is talking about now?

Salamileg wrote:

I like to run campaigns that take place in horrible places, to make heroes shine even brighter.

But even still, I run by all of the negative things that could appear in the campaign by my players, and if even one person is uncomfortable with something I will not include it, no matter how grim I'm trying to represent the world. I have my own things I'm not comfortable with, such as sexual assault.

So I think it's perfectly reasonable to make slavery an "opt in" for the consumer rather than "opt out".

finger_pointing_up.emoji finger_pointing_up.emoji finger_pointing_up.emoji finger_pointing_up.emoji finger_pointing_up.emoji

Literally all Paizo is doing is making slavery, like sexual assault, an "opt-in" topic.

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

Sigh. Maybe I should just leave this copied to my clipboard.

Sara Marie wrote:

Paizo.com is not going to be hosting discussions with people trying to justify or be an advocate (devil's or otherwise) for slavery. Unfortunately this has been how many discussion threads about slavery, including this one, have ended up going.

Slavery is something that has caused multigenerational damage to real, human, people. It has inflicted trauma on countless lives, directly and indirectly, and the repercussions and the racism it has fueled still reverberate across our society and people’s lives today. Human trafficking continues to perpetuate the injustices and cruelty of slavery to this day.

It’s part of our mission to encourage and support gaming environments where people feel welcome, included and safe. When a topic like slavery comes up and people try to justify it, it reads as trying to justify hundreds of years of pain, suffering, countless indignities, rape, and murder inflicted upon the lives of other humans. While one person might feel that they are discussing theory or abstract subjects, for too many people the subject of slavery is not some abstract concept, it is an active painful reminder that there are other humans who would try to excuse or justify this awful practice. Coming across this type of thread on our forums when simply trying to read about a roleplaying game causes harm to people in our gaming community and it is unacceptable.


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They're not wrong in that slavery has existed long before the colonial era and still exists today in numerous forms.

However, white supremacy-based slavery is the form of chattel slavery that still impacts the most people in the global west today, and that's incredibly important to this discussion.


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TwilightKnight wrote:
Quote:
Literally Erik Mona has come out and said, "Wow, yes, this is bad and we're doing away with it,"...
I just find it interesting that a couple of weeks ago, Erik was vilified for his involvement with some of the heinous actions that foisted Paizo's executive team into the public consciousness. When he denied any nefarious intentions he was ignored, called a liar, and had his feet held to the fire. Now, suddenly because he mentioned something that is inline with the progressive narrative he is suddenly taken at his word and supported. The selective reversal is astounding.

We're not actually reversing anything. We just think a lot of these current criticisms of him are stupid as hell.

Again, it's fair to want an "overthrow of slavery" narrative, as long as you consider why the freelancer and their friends might not want one to be mandatory to play through. But coming up with delusional paranoid fantasies for the sake of a big panic about Free Speech... well, it's very Jordan Peterson, wouldn't you say? ;)


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Pathfinder Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber

It's 100% reasonable to critique and be skeptical of a person's *actions*, and support a different set of actions they take at a later date. Especially if that second course of actions seem on some level to take into account issues levied against them in the past.

Edit:people are capable of change, and people are allowed to have complex and nuanced opinions of someone and their actions.


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nephandys wrote:
To be clear I don't have an issue with this however I would have liked to have seen it resolved narratively. It wouldn't need to be an AP even just a one-page timeline of events would suffice. There are plenty of established plot threads in each country that condones slavery that could trigger its end.

Something like that might have been more feasible if they'd done it during the soft-reset for second edition. Another big narrative change with what should really be massive reverberations throughout the world wouldn't sit well, I think. It would be still awkward and they'd probably have messed it up.

Consider that this is essentially what they did in Absalom and that's what the freelancer was calling Mona out for.

Getting rid of institutionalized slavery has never been quick and easy or without consequences. If you're going to focus on all of that, you might as well just keep the slavery in the setting. If you're going to handwave all the consequences away, you might as well just handwave the whole problem away.


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TwilightKnight wrote:
Quote:
Literally Erik Mona has come out and said, "Wow, yes, this is bad and we're doing away with it,"...
I just find it interesting that a couple of weeks ago, Erik was vilified for his involvement with some of the heinous actions that foisted Paizo's executive team into the public consciousness. When he denied any nefarious intentions he was ignored, called a liar, and had his feet held to the fire. Now, suddenly because he mentioned something that is inline with the progressive narrative he is suddenly taken at his word and supported. The selective reversal is astounding.

Because when people say and do bad things it is bad and when they say or do good things it is good? And everything in between?

Like. My complaints about Mona have never been that he's a mustache-twirling villain but rather that he has let his white maleness obstruct his ability to listen to non-white non-male voices, and that he has let his relative industry fame and leadership in a popular company go to his head in ways that allowed him to ignore labor issues with Paizo.

If he is learning and committed to changing the corporate direction, I am incredibly happy to support that. The other criticisms don't go away, though.


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Are people actually trying to say "slavery good"? Sounds like there's been some weird APs in the past where you're fighting abolishonists, and yeah, that's pretty bad, but in the context of clear villains like Cheliax, I could "advocate" slavery in the setting so I can curb stomp some priests of Asmodeus. But I guess they're still doing slavery but paizo just won't talk about it. Is that right?


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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Yeah, I read Mona's response largely as admitting that the current team of writers at Paizo are not really up to the task of writing the AP, the LO book or whatever would be necessary to properly address the problem that has been created with the way slavery (and specifically the Transatlantic slave trade) has been portrayed in setting. It is honest and putting the team together that could fix the past problems could be beyond what any potential team are capable of for a fix to the lore as a whole, and not just for your own table, which is what the current plan seems to be saying.

Paizo won't be the ones to "fix" that piece of lore, they are going to leave it for you to deal with at your table, with the caveat that slavery is evil in world and will not be presented as theme for future adventures.


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Saedar wrote:
TwilightKnight wrote:
Quote:
Literally Erik Mona has come out and said, "Wow, yes, this is bad and we're doing away with it,"...
I just find it interesting that a couple of weeks ago, Erik was vilified for his involvement with some of the heinous actions that foisted Paizo's executive team into the public consciousness. When he denied any nefarious intentions he was ignored, called a liar, and had his feet held to the fire. Now, suddenly because he mentioned something that is inline with the progressive narrative he is suddenly taken at his word and supported. The selective reversal is astounding.

Because when people say and do bad things it is bad and when they say or do good things it is good? And everything in between?

Like. My complaints about Mona have never been that he's a mustache-twirling villain but rather that he has let his white maleness obstruct his ability to listen to non-white non-male voices, and that he has let his relative industry fame and leadership in a popular company go to his head in ways that allowed him to ignore labor issues with Paizo.

If he is learning and committed to changing the corporate direction, I am incredibly happy to support that. The other criticisms don't go away, though.

Part of the reason I like the "let's just drop slavery" approach is that I don't trust Mona to pull off a "let's handle slavery better" approach. This version lowers the chances for him to screw it up again, as he admits to doing with the Absalom book.


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cw: sexual assault

Some people were saying it, yeah. Paizo has also got a history of making pro-slavery nations Neutral. But the issue here is more about making slavery an "opt-in" subject (thanks Salamileg for the term, it's very handy) because it appears to be a very un-fun topic for a number of Black gamers, understandably. This is a game people play for fun. There's a reason why Pathfinder doesn't have a big extended lore paragraph about female characters being sexually assaulted.

I suggest you read the original blog post if you're still confused about what the issue is!


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Been thinking about this one for a long time. All campaign settings that lean towards "10th grade history class but with magic and dragons and hot elves" are going to run afoul of this issue at some point, and I'm actually not convinced completely removing it from an existing setting is the right approach. I think the bigger issue is that slavery in game- especially takes on chattel slavery that America loves so much- has become a trope at this point, and that the time may have come for the entire paradigm to shift away from ttrpgs campaign setting basically being history class but cooler to something completely and totally different. What that will be I don't know. I'm still struggling with it in my own campaign setting. But we have done the evil slave based empire/overlord to death now. As well as (mostly western) World History w/Magic. It may be time to let it rest in peace and explore other options.


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Good for them deciding to remove slavery from their setting as something active.

For those who believe that they need a story reason for this to happen, good news: it actually already has! Absalom has a PFS scenario that abolished it, and Katapesh has a large portion of their slavers as the foes defeated by the PCs. With two major blows to the slave market in two of largest cities in the world, it stands to reason that the market collapsed shortly after.

There. Story reason taken care of.


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Ooh, good point. Not to mention Sargava no longer doing business with pirates and slavers after the uprising!


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Kobold Catgirl wrote:
Ooh, good point. Not to mention Sargava no longer doing business with pirates and slavers after the uprising!

indeed.

Slave bases economies are indeed just that- economies. Once there is no longer a market for the product, it crashes.

Whither black market economies, then? Well slavery isn't exactly a thing you can hide without a loooooot of help from the local government(See my earlier post). Someone trying to start it up all over again would be found out pretty quickly and it would be broken down again.


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As an aside, this second thread is completely redundant and I hate having discussions split across two fast-moving threads. why


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TheGoofyGE3K wrote:

Good for them deciding to remove slavery from their setting as something active.

For those who believe that they need a story reason for this to happen, good news: it actually already has! Absalom has a PFS scenario that abolished it, and Katapesh has a large portion of their slavers as the foes defeated by the PCs. With two major blows to the slave market in two of largest cities in the world, it stands to reason that the market collapsed shortly after.

There. Story reason taken care of.

excellent point. If the PCs keep winning, the world changes.

Sovereign Court Director of Community

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