SPOILER WARNING: For the Red Star comic series (I'm guessing)
It is a logical inevitability that one will always underestimate their ability to be surprised. For example, you could be a person who read 548 rpg books over the past few years, was approaching the end of an epoch with their last few miscellaneous d20 books, saw that one of the remainder was The Red Star Campaign Setting (T.S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock), a licensed tie-in to a comic series you'd never heard of, which presumably found its way onto your bookshelf by accident (it's been known to happen to people like me, who will never not buy random rpgs at yard sales and consignment stores), and you may think "this is going to be boring and cheap, at best an experience geared towards a specialized audience that I am not part of, with no real reason to exist except to appeal to the fandom."
And then, you're going to read the book and find it complex and challenging, and maybe a little awesome, but in a way you're not entirely sure it's appropriate to make an rpg about and it's just going to completely suck you into its world and become . . . maybe not one of your favorite books, but certainly one that it'll be thrilling to blog about.
Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, this hypothetical was actually about me this whole time.
In order to understand what The Red Star Campaign Setting is, we must first define what it isn't. It is not an alternate history where a Soviet-style communist republic engages in a Cold War-style conflict with a USA-style capitalist republic, getting involved in an Afghanistan-style invasion before collapsing into a Russian Commonwealth-style kleptocracy and facing a Chechnya-style rebellion, all the while using sorcery, psychic powers, and absurd diesel-punk technology like city-sized flying battleships and transforming tanks.
And the reason it's not that is because the allegory is even more on the nose than I made it sound, to the degree that you can't really call it "alternate" history. It's the same history, but seen through a lens of comic-book-style nonsense. Also, not-Stalin is a deathless necromancer who plans to enslave the not-Soviet dead in spiritual gulags so he can harvest their Post Human Energy to become a god and the not-CIA are not so much trying to thwart this plan as convince their friendly dictators to recreate it on a smaller scale so the not-USA can use that same energy to develop advanced weapons in order to secure the nation's status as sole superpower and neo-colonialist center in a global capitalist empire.
Like I said. A little awesome.
But also, I can't help but wonder if I should enjoy it as much as I do.
I think it's probably okay to enjoy the Red Star comic. Just from what I gathered through NPC write-ups and references to canon events, and making a generous guess based on the nuanced, humanist rpg setting it inspired, it seems like a work of singular vision that has interesting, worthwhile things to say about the complexity of geopolitics, the role of heroic individuals in systems that are not worthy of them, and the way even the most hopeful of ideologies can curdle into horrors when subject to the cynical logic of power.
But as a world in which players are expected to improvise new comics-style narratives, I worry that maybe it's just a little bit too much fun.
For example, during the Great Patriotic War, the Aryan Nationalists of the Volksreich, under the leadership of the occult-savvy dictator, Krieger, created massive death factories to render captive populations into raw spiritual energy in order to sweep aside all existing life and create a new age where they alone would rule an empty Earth.
And that's fun. Or, at least, it's more fun than what actually happened. And I can't help wondering - is it actually allowed to be that particular kind of fun?
To be clear, I don't think this choice was made to be Nazi-apologist. In the backstory of the game, everyone who might even remotely be protagonist material is very much against the Volkreich, and no one has a good word to say about them even decades after the fact. It's a close allegory. The main victims of the death factories were vaguely-described "ethnic and religious minorities that couldn't effectively fight back."
But . . . you have something very much like Nazis, who started something very much like WW2, and perpetrated something very much like the Holocaust, yet you don't have anything that looks all that much like the Jews.
And I don't think the intent was erasure. I wasn't joking about how on-the-nose this setting was. If it exists in the real world, some version of it probably exists here (canonically, China = "The Lands of the Dragon" so Israel = something like "The Kingdom of the Covenant," probably). Because of that, I think the intent was to make the backstory for the game (and possibly the comic) a little less fucking grim.
I can't tell you this approach is definitively worse. It may be better. It could even be correct. You have something with the stakes and the spectacle of WW2, but which doesn't recapitulate the trauma of history's worst atrocity. And it's not technically erasing the victims, because this is an "alternate" history where the belligerents were the Volksreich, the Isle of Lions, Gallia, the Western Transnational Alliance from across the sea, and the United Republics of the Red Star (or U.R.R.S. for short).
Honestly, as a gentile, I think I prefer this approach. But also honestly, as a gentile, it's not my fucking call to make.
And this issue isn't confined to the backstory. This is a complex, sensitive setting that doesn't let anyone off the hook (especially the two Cold War superpower-equivalents), but it does make its depictions just a little less fraught. Safer. Replacing the most repulsive of the Cold War excesses with something that is technically worse, but in that exaggerated villain-core sort of way.
I think, for the purposes of this post, that I have to assume it is okay for them to do this. And operating under that assumption, the thing I appreciate most about this setting is how fair-minded it is. The U.R.R.S. is the protagonist faction, but it's not the heroic faction. This isn't an alt-history that presupposes the Internationalists (communist-equivalent) walked the walk. You're not playing the champions of a paradise of the proletariat, that stands in stark contrast to the exploitation of the Transnationalists (capitalist-equivalent).
The U.R.R.S is a tyrannical dictatorship, and a bad one, even without all that spirit world nonsense. It censors its artists. It sends people to labor camps in the polar tundra, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, and sometimes without even telling them what crimes they were accused of. Political officers of the Internationalist Party will assassinate politicians in broad daylight, if it seems like they're too receptive to liberal reforms.
It's a dystopia. You're playing the bad guys (or, at least, one faction of bad guys). But your player characters are neither depraved boogeymen nor paragons of the propagandized ideals of the state, existing in ironic contrast to a depraved system. Rather, the advice the setting chapter gives about the people of the U.R.R.S is very grounded, very human. It talks about the cultural trauma of the Great Patriotic War and the feudalism that came before it, about strategies for socially navigating a totalitarian society that are both practical and psychological, about the unspoken hypocrisies of the system, divisions of class and status that can never be escaped but can be mitigated by military service.
It all feels very real. Which is hardly surprising, because this book has this entire time been peaking over reality's shoulder and copying its homework. Plus, you can learn to summon a gun with your mind that shoots 10,000 ghost bullets per minute.
But the fair-mindedness isn't limited just to the protagonists. The enemies of the U.R.R.S. are treated in a similarly nuanced way. It would have been easy to exaggerate the Western Transnational Alliance (USA-equivalent) into something so grotesque the U.R.R.S. would seem heroic by comparison. It would even have been easy (especially for a game created in the USA) to make them the uncomplicated world police of American propaganda and just lean into the U.R.R.S.'s "evil empire" vibe.
But The Red Star Campaign Setting does neither. The W.T.A. is a fucking plague on the world, propping up dictators, immiserating the poor, putting its hands deep into the pockets of even its closest allies . . . and expecting to be thanked for its service, but it is also freer, less nakedly imperial, and better able to provide a high standard of living than its arch-rivals in the U.R.R.S.
It's not a particularly flattering depiction of my homeland, but it is undeniably, recognizably American (one alt-history quirk of the W.T.A. is that it so loves guns it never got around to outlawing dueling, which is . . . not something that was strictly necessary to make it a worthy antagonist, but is something I'm going to have to give a reluctant "touche.")
Although, its most impressive and daring bit of humanism might just be that it's a book written in 2004, that spends a lot of time covering the U.R.R.S.'s invasion of Al'lstaan (i.e. the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), without being noticeably Islamophobic.
I mean, there are a couple of "infidels" and "jihads" thrown around, but in context they feel very fair. Assuming the allegory is as on the nose as it was for WW2, you're going to leave this book with a better understanding of Afghanistan's grievances with both Russia and the West (or, at least, I feel like I did).
And this empathy is not just safely confined to things that happened in the 70s and 80s. The history section ends with the sort of perfect literary bookend that makes you think real history was written by a hack - the W.T.A., now sole global superpower in the wake of the U.R.R.S.'s collapse, is about to launch its own invasion of Al'lstaan and "to the government's chagrin, the questions have not stopped. What will happen next is not yet written."
That doesn't get any particular points from me, because it's the sort of ending I, as a writer, would gnaw my arm off to get a chance to use. However, there's a part a little before this, explaining the W.T.A.'s reaction to the Imperial City Bombing (the satire here is not subtle) - "A significant majority of their populace had so bought into their government's propaganda they could not even understand why other groups would wish them harm for any reason other than mere jealousy."
Damn.
No, not just damn. Damn . . . in 2004. That's genuine courage. It's genuine empathy. And it earns a lot of leeway from me re: the things I mentioned earlier, that made me nervous about this book's point of view.
It's so rare to see an rpg that does "shades of grey" really well. It's not an easy, cheerful "there were heroes on both sides." Nor an edgy, cynical "everyone's a villain." Rather, people do both good things and bad, because of systemic incentives and personal motives that are tragically understandable. . .
Except for Imbohl. That guy's just a dick.
So I guess you could say that, overall, I liked The Red Star Campaign Setting. Will that translate into me using it for a game? Maybe. And that's saying a lot for a book I don't even remember buying.
Ukss Contribution: I promise myself that I'm not going to start picking entries just to make my worldbuilding easier, but there's a thing where the U.R.R.S.'s sorcerous academies are teaching people to cast spells, but they call them "protocols" in a deliberate to make them seem less mystical. And it's such a neat dovetailing between the setting's fantasy elements and the real U.S.S.R.'s ideological approach to science. The fact that it fits well with my early-industrial-meets-fantasy setting is just a nice little bonus.
