Hey Chris,

Did you ever get a chance to look into this?

No rush

I’m writing an essay about the depictions of race and racial tensions in table RPGs.

“No Dinero” was the first RPG scenario that I encountered that made special mention of racial tensions as a key plot point, was where I learned the term gentrification. The Revelations cycle that “No Dinero” was a part of also prominently featured Islamist terrorist groups as a major plot feature… before 9/11.

Two lines in “No Dinero” that really got my attention, even when I was reading at age 15, was one of the minor story beats that if the player characters were vessels (bodies) that were identifiable as Caucasian, they would stick out in the predominately minority neighborhood. I’m was (and am) white, my group was universally white and male. We had picked white male vessels for our characters because it had never occurred to us to do otherwise.

The other storybeat was that several key human NPCs in the adventure had little interest in the War, except as it furthered the interests of the community they were invested in; the ultimate battle between good and simply not as pressing as the need to make sure the rent was paid and food was on the table.

That looking at the adventure, the presence white bodied interlopers, entities that were convinced that they knew what what was in the best interest of the community casts an interesting parallel between the War and race relations in America Add to that the metanarrative of demographics in the RPG hobby meant that predominantly white players would instinctively cast themselves as these interlopers.

So my questions are:

1. How much of that was intentional?

2. Where there experiences (that you feel comfortable sharing) that you drew upon writing that adventure?

3. Have you seen any general developments in how race/racism is handled in RPGs in the two and a half decades since?

Sure, what do you want to know?

‘There are a lot of disenfranchised lefties out there and no mainstream politician has made an attempt to get those votes in recent memory.’

Speaking from the dark timeline that is post 2016 America, that changed, this time around, but the presumptive Democratic nominee is the most milquetoast centrist imaginable.

Anyway, I found this post when I searched “In Nomine” on your website. I was hoping to ask your thoughts about an old adventure you wrote /way/ back in 1997: “No Dinero” for an In Nomine supplement, Heaven and Hell.