#RPG – Tales of Gor Caste Shirts, and B&D back in Stock!

Good news everyone! Not only have Teespring allowed the B&D t-shirt back, with a couple more adjustments, but we now also have caste shirts for players of Tales of Gor!

You can find these lovely vestments at our Teespring store and can hide your shame. They absolutely should not be torn, cut or otherwise altered to resemble slave rags or a ta-teera. Especially not the red one.

Head on over and pick yourself out something nice.

TEESPRING STORE

PS. If you’re a slightly attractive human being (or close approximation thereof) and would like a couple of free shirts and a small amount of money for modelling some of these, let me know.

Artist: Michael Manning

Both myself and the artist had a rough old couple of years working on Gor. If you feel like exploring the artist’s work (Caution, NSFW) and helping him out, here’s some links…

• MM Art
• Patreon
• Tumblr
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Fetlife
• Spidergarden (archive)

 

#RPG – RE: Diversity Trainers of Gor

There’s an interesting article on The History of BDSM blog about the Gor RPG. It’s mostly fair and well worth a read, but I want to pick up a few points here and there from it to reply to.

Gor is notorious for its strong emphasis not only on the world’s apparently universal chattel slavery, but the male-dominant/female-submissive philosophy that justifies it, endlessly reiterated in the books.  That’s what made me pause when I thought about Manning illustrating the book. Manning’s work, starting with the graphic novel The Spider Garden, has a strong bi/queer flair, running all over the map of sexuality from conventional, heteronormative pinups to “sacred androgynes”, cross-dressed men, and other, stranger types of sexuality. This also comes in a time when video games and related media like tabletop RPGs are under a lot of flak for #GamerGate. The games designer, James Desborough, reportedly has connections to #GamerGate and some other controversies. It got me wondering: how will Gor be adapted into this medium?

Manning is, first and foremost, a top-tier illustrator. I wanted to work with him for a variety of reasons. Firstly that, secondly because of his links with the BDSM/Kink community and – as such – his innate understanding of the project. Thirdly because I was previously involved (though not as project lead) in an attempt to bring his Spider Garden series to the roleplaying world. The final factor that tipped me over was his work in The Nibelungen, which was brilliant. One thing that didn’t enter into any decision-making was the ‘queer’ (it’s unclear what this term even means any more) content of his work – and why would it?

I think there’s a misunderstanding here of what #Gamergate is and in which direction the flak is going and why. Gamergate would be much more accepting of kink etc in games and so forth than their opposition, which is typically sex-negative, ‘Dinesian’ outlook, censorious and authoritarian. Gamergate has certainly been painted as some sort of reactionary, conservative movement but it really isn’t. It’s primarily about the egregious cronyism and corruption in games journalism, along with censorship – issues that everyone should be able to get behind, but the misreporting has, sadly, been effective.

It is unfortunate that the article writer has linked to some horrible slander and wilful disinformation by a biased ‘hater’, but I’ve answered their accusations before.

The image above was posted on the Postmortem blog with the caption, “See? It’s not ALL male-dom.” This does not contradict Gorean canon. There are male slaves and free females who take advantage of them, and I suppose you could squint a bit and envision M/m and F/f encounters just off stage. However, the Gor canon is overwhelmingly about maledom/femsub.

Yes it is and, as the game writer and a curator of sorts of the world – as I put together these books – I have a duty of care to the canon. However that doesn’t mean that such things aren’t hinted at elsewhere. There are certainly homosexual relationships hinted at and explicitly there is talk of male slaves for men. Femdom comes up repeatedly and while Tarl (the protaganist of the books) may cause a comeuppance in many of these instances it’s well established in the world.

I have to present the world in the game as it is presented within the books, and wouldn’t want to do otherwise. At the same time a game is different to a book. In games writing you’re creating a space in which people tell their own stories, so it’s important to give as broad a scope or as many possibilities as you can, within the scope of the themes etc of the established material.

I cannot, and would not, completely change and alter the Gorean world just to appeal to a handful of non-fans who likely wouldn’t buy it anyway.

On the other hand, an excerpt from the world book suggests male pleasure slaves, whether serving women or men, don’t really count for much:

“Male pleasure slaves are relatively rare as submissive men, silk slaves, do not often arouse mistresses and do not often appear on Gor. Nonetheless, some are found and some are even bred for, though even the most submissive male slave may ‘revert’ and turn upon his mistress. Men are also bought by other men and while Gorean society is largely not judgmental on sexuality some of the practices to produce male slaves for other men – especially from boyhood – are regarded with distaste.”

So much for inclusiveness.

I don’t quite see how ‘So much for inclusiveness’ follows from there. Male pleasure slaves are definitely present and these are the attitudes and problems with that described in the source material. While nothing is said about it, I suspect there’d be similar disdain in forcibly training young female slaves to serve gay mistresses too. A big part of what constitutes the Gorean philosophy is an acceptance of ‘nature’ and this seems to be the root of the disdain for forcing people against their innate sexuality. There’s absolutely nothing to stop you playing a gay free person, or a gay slave, or a slave forced into a homosexual relationship, or a gay slave forced into a heterosexual relationship. This just describes the norms of the fictional world.

Desborough gets into an awkward, “it wasn’t rape-rape” rationale for some of the sexuality in the books

Yeah, no, that’s not what I was actually saying at all. You can see that in the quoted passage back at the site. I was talking about the semantic meaning of the word in the context of Gor, which is more akin to a synonym for ‘fuck’ (with added implications of forcefulness, ruthlessness and passion). The Gorean world itself, in terms of sexuality, occupies a similar fantasy-space to Mills & Boon bodice rippers, 50 Shades of Grey, Conan (women seem to be helpless before his raw sexuality) or – to reverse the genders – the way men are helpless before the sexuality of Femme Fatales.

It does remain hard to understand why such a common and popular fantasy, which is after all just a fantasy, causes such a high degree of objection, even within communities that already practice consensual non-consent or even much more marginalised fantasies. Of course, though this shouldn’t need reiterating again… Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real and nobody in their right mind would suggest that indulging in a fantasy would mean you would necessarily want that in real life. Troops of people aren’t raiding old castles in search of monsters either.

One post says you can make the sexual encounters as detailed or as vague as you like, or have female warriors or male slaves. It makes sense from an economic perspective, in that a Gor RPG with the gender politics turned down might appeal to a larger audience.

Any game ultimately belongs to the people that play it. There’s no need for anyone to – necessarily – be restrained by canon (though canon incorporates far more of this kind of content than people give it credit for). It’s important – seemingly – to emphasise that to people while remaining true to canon in presentation.

Tabletop RPGs have an awkward history of gender and sexuality issues (inherited from their pulp adventure literary ancestors), especially as they were primarily marketed to heterosexual male adolescents. There are also some nasty outliers like the obscure FATAL. Now that the RPG culture has matured and diversified, they’re likely to avoid something based on Gor.

In my opinion TTRPGs have, rather, come under attack unfairly on these matters, as videogames are now. Gor, in particular online, has been massively popular with women and has retained popularity despite being forced into relative obscurity through implicit – sometimes explicit – censorship. For its time it was hugely progressive in terms of its exploration of kink in the relative mainstream, as was his book Imaginative Sex.

I don’t believe that this new prudishness and the censorious authoritarianism that comes with it is a sign of maturity or diversification. The ideas underlying that worrying trend are awfully homogeneous, and not at all diverse. Progress, to me, indicates liberalisation and tolerance, a diversity of ideas. Not what appears, from experience, to be a ‘great leap backwards’ into the attacks on RPGs from the religious right in the 1980s – albeit from a different source.

It seems likely that I’ll go to my grave not understanding why people want to police each other’s fantasies, fiction and kinks. Especially when it comes from people claiming to be progressive and open-minded.

The writer of the blog may be right in that many gamers don’t want to explore worlds of radically different ideas, not just Modern Views & Mores in a Tolkienesque Pastiche, but I hope enough do and that there are enough Gor fans out there willing to take a punt on a new experience. All to rarely in games do we see exploration of the full implications of differences in ideas or the social and other impacts of, say, magic. I think Gor is an exception to that and a big part of what makes it a truly different setting.

I still hold out hope.

Art is still trickling in, I hope to have more updates soon. Meanwhile, let’s make this post an AMA about approach, content, anything relating to the game that you’d like to know.

Chronicles of Gor – Sex, Gender, Race, Consent, Fantasy & Gor

FUND IT!

This is going to be a bit of an essay, in which I try to address – or at least talk about – some of the worries, concerns and objections to the very concept of this game that have been doing the rounds. So, ‘For god’s sake, strap yourselves in!’ – keeping your foot on the red pedal is optional.

Race & Gor

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

Despite being written in the 60s – up until today – Gor gets a lot of comparisons with the pulps, and with good reason. To the modern mind a great deal of the pulps were extremely sexist, racist and otherwise fit that dread phrase ‘problematic’. Certainly a lot of the pre WWII pulps contain a lot of racism. Robert E Howard’s assumptions about race are fairly explicit, HP Lovecraft’s even more so. Edgar Rice Burroughs was playing with racial perceptions in the early John Carter stories and Tarzan certainly plays around with the same topics. In writing my neo-pulp story collection Pulp Nova, I played around with some of the ideas and inverted some of the same expectations in the story ‘Wild’.

To a casual reader, Gor might – at first – seem racist. One sees references to ‘Red Savages’, ‘Red Hunters’, the Pani (ersatz Japanese) have a somewhat moustache-twirling cruelty to them but, not one that’s unjustified by history, and Bila Hiruma is referred to as the ‘great black Ubar’. Dig beneath this surface though and the books are surprisingly respectful, and even admiring, of the transplanted cultures that are found on Gor.

The hero of the stories, Tarl Cabot, ingratiates himself with the various cultures he encounters but never truly outshines them. It is often the secondary characters within those cultures that are the true heroes of the story, with Tarl as the observer to their genius, their sidekick or even their slave. The native American culture (Savages of Gor, Blood Brothers of Gor) is particularly interesting. A extremely militant and protective culture carrying the memory of mistreatment in the settling of America and organised, ruthlessly, to prevent the same happening to their lands on Gor.

Sex & Gender

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

The Gorean world is one of savage, might makes right, philosophy for the most part – though ‘might’ can take many forms from physical to intellectual or economic. It’s savage and cruel in many ways and a great deal of political and social power derives directly from the strength of one’s sword arm. As such it is a world of extremely stratified and defined gender roles with much of the political, and almost all the military power, residing with men.

Yes, men and women’s roles in society are – typically – very constrained but that’s a reflection of the wider (normal) Gorean society which is very stratified by caste as well as gender and by people ‘knowing their place and role’. That’s the very thing that makes defying those expectations and playing characters that defy, pervert or undermine those expectations (or embody them!) so interesting.

Since the criticism directed has been towards the roles available to women in the Gorean setting, I’ll direct this section towards that.

Tarl is an exceptional character, as the protagonist, and also an unreliable narrator coloured by his own experiences and betrayals. Still, he meets many women in his explorations of Gor and they’re not all helpless maidens or slaves – or at least they don’t start out that way.

• Right from the start, in Tarnsmen of Gor, Tarl encounters Talena, who is – at least in the first books – much his equal in terms of cunning. The daughter of Marlenus she not only throws Tarl from his tarn saddle but wins him as a free companion – as his equal – but also survives amongst the panther girls, regains her position in Ar and overthrows its government.
• In Outlaw of Gor there is a whole city, Tharna, run by women who – somehow – wrested control away from the normal male-dominated state of affairs. True they were overthrown, but women were the ones in power there, controlling and subjugating men (until the revolt).
• In most of the plots of the Kur, their agents are women – and often those of Earth – running schemes and plots upon which the fates of worlds rest.
• In Tribesmen of Gor, the bandit leader Tarna is a woman, and one who defies the normal gender constraints by wielding weapons and – by all accounts – being rather handy with the scimitar.
• In Hunters of Gor, Verna – leader of a band of panther girls – is shown to be an equal of Marlenus and a woman who cannot be tamed. The panther girls as a whole are a countercultural defiance of Gor’s natural order and quite ‘hardcore’, even using scarification and self-mutilation to defy Gorean standards fo beauty and to render themselves ‘worthless’ as slaves.
• By the time we get to Conspirators of Gor, we have the Lady Bina, once a mute grooming slave of the Kur, now – with Grendal in tow – potentially a major threat to Gor as a whole, with the ambition to rule the whole world.
• We see huntresses, physicians, leaders and – yes – slave girls, some of which ‘top from the bottom’ with as much control over their Masters as their masters are supposed to wield over them. We also see women – like Tarna – with seraglios full of male silk slaves, serving their whims.

Slavery

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

Gor contains slavery. This is not unusual for game settings. Slavery exists in many fiction settings and games, as well as existing throughout human history and – in some forms – still today. What is different and challenging about the Gorean setting is that slavery in this context is not seen as an unambiguous evil, but sometimes even as something… good, it also takes it to an extreme.

Slaves are not only taken on Gor, they are bred and it is an accepted part of the Gorean culture that some people are natural slaves and that that’s the state they belong in and are most fulfilled as. Within Gorean gender relations that is most often taken to be women and that is the message of the entire culture, with female slavery in particular being something simultaneously full of dread and titillation to Gorean free women.

Gor, BDSM, Consent, Roleplay & ‘Rape’

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

Gor exists in a space with some relation to the BDSM community. ‘Gorean slavery’ exists as a real kink, or style of kink at least, playing off some of the formalised slave movements, poses, recitations and behaviours played out in the novels.

The novels themselves are actually fairly coy, with very little in the way of graphic sexual activity being depicted. Most of it is simply hinted at or takes place ‘off screen’. The difference between them and, say, Conan, is that the sexual part is at least acknowledged rather than being simply implicit.

Something that is hugely important in the BDSM community is consent, even when the appearance of consent is absent (consensual non-consent, slave play or rape-play). It’s arguably more integral and up front in the BDSM community than it is in relation to any other aspect of sexuality in a way that’s only recently been brought to the fore elsewhere. This is even formalised in soft limits, hard limits and – perhaps most explicitly – in the practice of having safe words.

This is not entirely different to the social contracts we create around roleplaying, one form of fantasy play not being that different to another when you get down to it. We have rules to make it safe and it all operates on consent.

One last thing worth pointing out is the role of ‘rape’ in the Gorean novels. The word doesn’t quite carry the same connotation within Gorean society as it does to us, being more akin in meaning to the colloquial use. On Gor its meaning is more like ‘ravish’, to take with passion and strength and force. In a world where it is the considered wisdom of both free people and slaves that slaves wish to be slaves and where sexual fervour and freedom can lead to frenzies of lust, the context is also different.

Nobody is saying this is the state of the real world.

What I’m finding fascinating is the RPG people shaming the kinksters and the kinksters shaming the RPG people. Gor seems to exist at a Lagrange Point of contempt between two groups of people who really, really, aren’t all that dissimilar.

The Role of Fantasy

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

Fantasy gives us a space to engage in behaviours, to experience situations and to experiment within a safe space. For some reason, which continues to utterly befuddle me, this is considered fine when it comes to murder, warfare, horror, violence, torture etc, but is still considered – for many people – off limits when it comes to anything titillating or sexual and that seems to be spreading to other things as well. This isn’t really the place to get into that in detail.

uThere is a line between reality and fantasy and the vast and overwhelming majority of people nderstand and respect that line. You can slaughter a hundred bandits beneath your axe playing D&D and not think it too many, nor be held suspect (at least not since the 1980s) that it would make you a mass murderer. You can summon up fell demons from the warp and set them upon your enemies in Warhammer and nobody is going to think you’re a satanic cultist. You can read 50 Shades of Grey (I know, I know…) and nobody necessarily thinks you’re into everything that’s in that.

So why should a little titillation and fantastical gender relations be any different?

I don’t know.

Conclusion

Gor is a fantasy world that isn’t real.

The sexual aspect, even in the books, is background exoticism against the backdrop of which adventures, intrigue and exotic adventures take place. You can ramp it up or tone it down as you and your group prefer, but it is integral to the background. It is one of the most intriguing, difficult and different aspects to a game that there is. Do we not want to be challenged? To stretch our mental legs? Can we not enjoy things that are difficult? Imagine alternate moral systems and cultural norms? Is this not a big part of the deeper appeal of roleplaying games? If we’re only going to be playing in fantasy theme parks that reflect our modern sensibilities, with a thin veneer of magic, dragons or science fiction, then we’re selling ourselves short.

At least, that’s my opinion.

Nor do we have to approve of the Gorean culture. Tarl spends a great deal of time in the first few books having trouble adjusting, as does Jason in the novels that focus around him. Those men are, of course, of Earth, while those brought up within Gorean culture – male or female – are unlikely to have the same trouble or to be able to understand the moral quandries that those men went through.

My aim in providing the game book, and the world book, is to provide tools to play YOUR games and to make YOUR Gor. Whether you want to indulge your swords-and-sandals fantasies and lead strings of captured women (or men) from burning towns, or whether you want to lead a revolt of panther girls to raid the border towns and liberate the slaves, that’s entirely up to you. They’re all valid choices.

With any game, I think the best thing to do is to provide the tools and the context, and then to let people make their own stories.

Chronicles of Gor – RPG Crowdfunding

FUND IT!

GOREAN CHRONICLES

Despite great popularity, spanning nearly fifty years, the Gorean Cycle, by John Norman has existed without much greater recognition in the broader culture. It’s high time it got some of the recognition it deserved in the form of a tabletop role-playing game and a definitive guide to the world of Gor.With your help we will be producing:

• Chronicles of Gor: Gorean Roleplaying – A full tabletop role-playing game based in the Gorean world.
• World of Gor: The Gorean Scrolls – A world guide to Gor, either usable as a resource for playing Chronicles of Gor, or as a separate book celebrating and describing the world of Gor for fans who don’t want to role-play.

This project is being completed in partnership with Open Road Integrated Media:

E-book edition of Gor and all other John Norman titles are available in the United States via Open Road Integrated Media and the United Kingdom via Orion Gateway Editions. Print editions are available in the US via Amazon or in the UK at Amazon UK.

Me

I am James ‘Grim’ Desborough, I’ve been a fan of the Gorean Cycle for over 20 years and a professional role-playing game designer for 15 years. I also write science fiction, fantasy and erotica stories and have been featured in several anthologies as well as publishing my own work.

The Campaign

Gor deserves to be treated with the respect and affection that it’s thousands upon thousands of fans regard it with. The books are written, but to make it from words on a page to a proper book funding is needed to give the books the degree of presentation and polish they deserve.

What We’ll Achieve

Many different groups have done a fantastic job in creating Gorean worlds on IRC, WebChat pages and in Second Life but there has never been a definitive, common resource upon which every fan can draw or a set of role-playing rules that everyone could agree on or hold in common. With these two books we can provide a guide to the World of Gor and a common point of reference for a huge and sprawling community as well as bringing a wonderful fantasy world to a whole new group of fans.

What We Need & What You Get

To truly do the books justice we need a minimum of $5,000 USD, though $10,000 would be ideal. This will allow us to quite lavishly illustrate the books and extra money can provide additional art, layout and editing services to ensure that we end up with a pair of books as a lasting resource for both the role-playing and Gorean communities.

• We need $5,000 if the books are to be illustrated in a unified and defining manner by a single artist – who will be named later. I want to define Gor with art in the way Brom did for Dark Sun or Diterlizzi did for Planescape.
• What perks can we offer? At the moment, early access to electronic versions of the books (PDF) when ready and the opportunity to be immortalised in the pages of the book – in one way or another. Additional perks and stretch goals may be forthcoming as the campaign continues.
• If we don’t reach the goal, the contributed money will go towards artwork anyway, to do the best job possible.
• If we go over our goal the excess money will go to more art, layout, editing and to further compensating the contributors, helping to support writers, artists, layout designers and editors – all of whom often work on a shoestring budget.

Impact

Creating a Gorean roleplaying game and worldbook will create a resource for fans of Gor and role-players of all kinds for years to come, hopefully another fifty years to come. I am devoted to making this project a reality, having already spent eighteen months researching the books, cross-referencing, extracting information and writing both the guide and the game rules.

I have successfully completed two RPG projects previously, ImagiNation – an RPG about depression and mental illness – and Machinations of the Space Princess, a science fantasy ‘old school’ game.

You’ll be helping me make something great and I’m devoted to making it happen one way or another.

Risks & Challenges

There’s some risks and challenges to this project, not least of all because of the sexual content of the Gorean cycle and its perceived sexual politics. Let’s go through a few of them…

Sexual Content

Yes, Gor contains sexual content of a BDSM, D/S nature. Given that this is a huge part of the reason that it is so popular and that we live in a world where Fifty Shades of Grey can sell 100 million copies and be mainstream, I don’t see this being too much of an issue. Underneath all that Gor is a fantasy world in the Planetary Romance tradition of Edgar Rice Burrough’s ‘Barsoom’ and similar works. Sex is optional and need not be explicit, but it is part of what makes Gor so unique. To ignore it would be to do the books a disservice. The RPG book will contain advice on how to handle these complications and the illustrations should be able to avoid the problems that international censorship rules can sometimes cause.

Sexual Politics

Gor’s world is unashamedly (mostly) a patriarchal, male-dominated society. The current climate in SF&F with regard to games is quite heated about depictions of race, gender and sexuality and Gor is bound to set off some rancorous argument.

It’s a fantasy world. It’s not real.

Personal Issues

I suffer from depression, bouts of which can knock me out for some time. The project is already some six months behind my original, projected schedule but all the work that I really need to do is now complete. My health should not further affect the schedule.

Negative Publicity

As noted above, discussion over representation and sex/gender issues in games are a hot topic. The revelation that a Gorean RPG has been developed is bound to cause ripples, scorn, recriminations and many, many heated blog posts.

It’s all publicity, free publicity and hopefully these people will discover that the treatment in the book is not as terrible as they might have thought.

Existing Communities

There are many existing communities that role-play Gorean experiences and they have made their own decisions about cities, governments, laws, history, details and have played out their own story lines.

If working in gaming has taught me anything, it’s that fanboys are never happy and that they always have their own ideas.

Reviewing some of the material, art and other creations that these communities have come up with hugely inspiring and I have nothing but respect for the fan community that has kept the Gorean Cycle going.

Nothing I am doing is intended to override or replace what they have done, but to provide a common point of reference and something for them to use.

Other Ways You Can Help

Share! Tell people! I don’t have direct communications with the Gorean communities around the internet, on the forums or in Second Life and I’m not about to join them just to spam them about the game. Spread the word!

Ask questions! I’ll answer as best I can, as and when I can.

FUND IT!