https://hexbear.net/comment/4713437

I'm so tired of the word "tankie" at this point

In response to: https://hexbear.net/comment/3656677

short sketch, thought it'd be funny idk lol

HROT, a boomer shooter set in a Soviet-era Czechoslovakia after some unspecified disaster, just released. I've seen some gameplay and read generally favorable reviews and quite like the Soviet industrial retro shooter aesthetic. Only thing that put me off is the (expected) litany of anticommunist reviews & general fan sentiment surrounding it. A slower, more Quake like shooter among the library of (very good!) fast paced boomer shooters is welcome.

It also has a funny horse in a gas mask! I thought it looked neat, has anybody played it or the demo?

TVTropes doing a lot of covering for western imperialists

Some Highlights -

China: the People's Republic of China. It's your usual garden-variety authoritarian state (though somewhat less so in the decades following the de facto abolition of communism by the Dengists in the 1980s), with its share of atrocities and bent on getting every one of its billion-plus people to agree with the government's policy. [...] China is a historically authoritarian state and was poor long before the Communists came into power, and given its historically ridiculously huge population, perhaps it shouldn't come as much of a surprise that China has little regard for the concept of "inalienable human rights".

Dengists BTFO :deng-stoned: (jk I love u all)

Vietnam: During the Vietnam War, North Vietnam was officially known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. It was, of course, a brutal and repressive dictatorship that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, banned and jailed all political opposition, and enacted state control of the economy to a far greater degree than even other Asian socialist states. The modern Vietnam is a lesser version. It's now known as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and while it's still among the more authoritarian countries in the world, it's nowhere near as brutal as it used to be (it's nowhere near as poor, either). Amusingly, it fits this trope in an another, positive way: ever since the 1986 economic reforms (much like what China was doing at the time, albeit to a lesser extent), Vietnam is no longer a socialist economy, despite many a Suspiciously Specific Denial asserting the contrary.

Venezuela: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. After he took power in 1999, socialist strongman Hugo Chávez chose the name as a nod to Simón Bolívar, hero of Venezuela's war for independence in the 1810s and 1820s. [...] the "Bolivarian Republic" was characterized by repression and dictatorship (plus complete dysfunction under Chávez's successor, Nicolás Maduro), its insistence that it endorses democracy to the contrary.

Canada is probably the best example of this trope inverted. While its current official name is simply Canada, its former official name (now rarely used, but still considered appropriate nowadays) is the sinister-sounding Dominion of Canada, yet the country is a relatively prosperous, stable democracy. The term dominion is a legacy of The British Empire, where it was used for colonies with a greater level of autonomy.

United Kingdom: Although not an authoritarian dictatorship, the UK's name, or at least, the "United" part of it is oftentimes merely nominal

TVTropes delenda est

It is available from the developers here:

massif-press.itch.io

The basic rules are available for free, or you can toss some support the devs’s way for the full version. Don’t worry, you can get a plenty of mileage out of the base game, and they’re not just paywalling all the cool stuff.

The game itself - You play elite mech pilots, the eponymous “Lancers”, under the galactic Union, a post-scarcity, post-capital body that spans hundreds of worlds. Outside the Union, however, still remain the remnants of fascism and unscrupulous capital, with various corporate states, cults, and fascist/imperial chauvinist holdouts claiming many systems outside its influence.

Lancer’s got mech combat, FALGSC, fighting unscrupulous space fascist corpro-states, fighting the corpro-states alongside striking miners, physically striking said corporate stooges with heavily modified mining mechs. What’s not to like?

If the idea of an RPG about revolutionaries in giant mechs taking the fight to slavers, corporations, and fascists with the use of physics defying armor and weaponry appeals to you, check it out.

(one of the writers also wrote kill six billion demons, which I’ve heard a lot of praise for but never read)

Lastly, I’ve included the foreword, which I found EXTREMELY refreshing for a tabletop game book:

“In this book there are some fraught, difficult, or other‐ wise uncomfortable themes and content discussed. Lancer takes place in a setting recovering from millennia of cruel anthrochauvinist rule – a fascist, imperial, Earth-first ideology that had little time, space, or care to acknowledge beings or perspect‐ ives that ran counter to their didactic tyranny.

We want to acknowledge that many phenomena and acts touched on in Lancer – slavery, exploitation, racism, directed hate, genocide, the stealing of indigenous land – are real phenomena, are ongoing acts of injustice and cruelty, and are not simply “fantasy" or “interesting devices” to use in a roleplaying game. Their inclusion in Lancer is by no means a flippant choice, intended to be read as endorsement, or idle thought.

We think it important also to acknowledge that both Tom and I are writing from the perspective of straight, cis, able-bodied men. When writing Lancer, we wanted to create a setting where humanity is – in the narrative present – at once in a state of utopia and working to affect it. We imagine that Union isn’t burdened by the same cultural definitions of gender that oppress and malign so many people who live under the umbrella of capitalism and empire and, as such, there is a wide spectrum of expression and identity in Union and among its constituent worlds.

At the risk of enacting further violence by depicting worlds and cultures where there are regressive or discriminatory stances on gender baked-in, we have decided not to codify in the rules how players may express themselves – please do note that this absence of canonical definition is absolutely not meant to be read as exclusion, but is meant instead to avoid flattening all possible stories into one “canon” definition of what it means to be gendered, transgender, nonbinary – to have a body in Lancer. We encourage you to play your characters how you see them, and consider them to be in-canon.

We hope that you create narratives and characters that stand against terrible abuses and prejudices. Lancer features no easy aliens to pass these transgressions upon, only other human beings; humanity alone are the architects of terrible cruelties, but we can also be the architects of better, more just futures and presents. [...]

We believe that ideas of liberation, of radical antifascism and anti-hate, can begin around the table with friends and end in the streets, at the ballot box, and in all of our hearts. Sometimes around the table with friends is the only place where liberation – where fighting back – can happen. This does not diminish the impact that it can have.

That’s why we made Lancer: to help people fight back, if nowhere else then around the table with friends.

In solidarity, Miguel Lopez and Tom Parkinson Morgan”