It is not unusual in the 2020s to run across disclaimers like those in Harlem Unbound (2017) by Darker Hue Studios, or this one:įate of Cthulhu is a game that deals with many hard topics, including mental health, systemic abuses of power, and the deaths of huge portions of the human species.

Yet gaming has never been exclusively male, white, cisgender, or heterosexual-and as the hobby has expanded the gamers and game designers have only become more diverse, and the games have increasingly become aware of and confronted many of the prejudices that passed without question in earlier editions. It should come as no surprise that in this environment, with fiction from the 30s and 50s being interpreted for gaming for a 70s audience, a great deal of prejudice was effectively “baked in.” Lovecraft’s Mythos fiction, among many others. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Robert E. The players and designers of that period were typically white, heterosexual, cisgender males-reflecting in many ways the audience of fantasy and science fiction fans at the time-and D&D developed in the middle of a boom in paperback publishing that saw the mass market publication of J.

Roleplaying games as currently understood and popularized begin with the publication of the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set in 1974. product description for Strange Bedfellows on etsy

With the release of this zine I hope that Lovecraft is screaming and crying and spinning in his grave.

The Pornomicon by Logan Kowalsky