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July 10th, 2007
01:43 pm - Caucasian Adventures
There was a recent Story Games thread, Caucasian Adventures! -- which sprang out as a take-off of supplements like D&D's Oriental Adventures, along with various other fantasy worlds that try to evoke the flavor of a culture without actually being accurate. The thread was launched by Daniel Solis' inspired cover illustration:
I didn't start the thread, but my main contribution was the gods, as follows:
So rather than try to write something up completely, here are some of my thoughts on Caucasian mythology. Now, it's important to remember that in reality, Caucasians aren't actually all one culture. Actually, they don't even speak the same language! Thus, "Caucasian" mythology will actually a mix of different sources. But I think to have playable PC clerics, we need to simplify.
One thing which not many people know is that the word "Caucasian" comes from the Caucasus mountains in Europe. This regions had a fascination for most of the Caucasians, and it was where one of their important gods, Prometheus, comes from.
So, let's take some prominent gods:
Prometheus - God of Progress
The god who brought fire to mankind and furthered technology. He can also take the form of an eagle, and that is used as a symbol for many of the Caucasians. As an eagle, he can throw arrows from his claws -- this is a symbol of the power of progress, and the Caucasians still use this symbol today.
The Mighty Thor - God of Strength
One of their popular gods, he wears a winged helmet and flies using a magic hammer. He is also known as "The Avenger", and his followers as "The Avengers".
Santa Claus - God of Wealth
He generally appears as a jovial fat man dressed in red, and he has a flying sleigh and a enormous bag full of valuable stuff. He lives in the frozen north of Caucasian, where he has armies of elven servants.
Venus - Goddess of Beauty
She is known by several names, including Aprodite ("ah pro dit") and Marilyn Monroe. She is also the goddess of the sea, and is often associated with beaches and the sea. She rides in a giant clamshell that can appear anywhere from the sea.
Jesus - God of the Sun
He is often pictured with a glowing light coming from him, and his holy day is "Sunday". Sometimes he is simply called the Sun God. He is closely associated with Santa Claus, and on his holy day his followers will dress in their most expensive clothes and gather to compare who has the finest.
I think that's sufficient for the moment. We need to give them their spell domains, I guess.
Now, before going too far in the comments, let me say that my wife is actually Caucasian, and I talked to her about this before posting even this draft -- cf. her comments. I don't have anything against Caucasians, and I'm trying to take into account the concerns of real Caucasians in here.
However, remember that this is a game. It's not supposed to be historically accurate. This is mythic Caucasia, not historical Europe or America. I just want to convey the feel of Caucasian culture in broad strokes.
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April 6th, 2007
01:39 am - What I Would Do With the Drow
This is another post following up on the previous post, "Regarding the Drow..." which looked at their background and racial connotations. In comments on that post, ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) eyebeams wrote:
What you have to ask yourself is whether or not your suggestion, if followed back in the 70s, would have been followed in such a way as to create anything as compelling, and if not, whether this loss of expression was a reasonable price to pay in order to avoid being embarrassed by cosplayers and assorted idiots 30 years down the road.
I might quibble about the assumption of loss of expression, but this is a reasonable question. I previously gave a hypothetical about what I would do if I was in charge of the D&D line now. Taken with a grain of salt that hindsight is 20/20, I can hypothesize about what it would be like if I was in charge 30 years ago. To reiterate my suggestion, I'm in favor of open dialogue concerning race. So presumably the drow would still be written as a concept, and probably after the first draft there would be first some internal feedback about what the racial connotations are. These would presumably include some views like eyebeams's and some views like mine.
Now, what would happen as a result of that? Well, I can't really tell how Gary Gygax as author would react to discussion of the racial implications. Perhaps he'd pull the whole module or excise the drow from it because I expressed that there were some racial connotations of all good elves being white-skinned except the evil ones who are black. I'd hope not, but it's hard for me to say.
But in order to continue the hypothetical, let's suppose that Gary died with Module G3 and its sequels half-finished, jumbles of notes to be filled in. By some twist, an adult version of me then took over and I had to complete it. I suspect the final product for Module G3 would stay more-or-less as-is, though I would likely add some depth to the two rival drow priestesses. Among the minor changes: I'd probably change the description calling her "strangely attractive" to simply say "attractive", and also comment on the appearance of her male attendants. I'd probably suggest that the illustrations look more like regular elves of unusual coloration rather than making them more curly-haired and swarthy.
The question is, where would I go from there?
Obviously, I would not approve the 1986 Keith Parkinson cover painting that eyebeams complained about. But that's what I wouldn't do, as opposed to what I would do.
The Dark Hollow Earth
As I see the popularity of the drow, I'd bring a team together to work on a Dark Hollow Earth sub-setting. Within the Dark Hollow Earth as I picture it, there is a dark sun which makes infravision like normal sight -- able to see miles rather than 60 feet. There are lush mushroom forests, bizarre rock formations, and other juxtapositions of cave features and outdoor landscape. I'd would have some sort of relatively common magic to give infravision to those who don't have it, with limitations.
Here, many of the underground races live lives quite different from those who live just under the surface. They have space to fortify and rich lands to till. There are a different set of gods. There are variants of the various races, that don't fit many of the alignment and patterns above-ground.
Case in point: the drow of the Hollow Earth. Free of Lolth's tyrranical influence, they are the guardians of the Hollow Earth's natural world in parallel to the surface elves. They are good-aligned, but still with many strange reversals. To them, the forces of nature are stone and metal and fungus rather than wood and leaves and sunshine. They are still matriarchal, with priestesses worshipping the new gods of the Hollow Earth.
I might also have "good" variants of certain races -- probably orcs and kobolds -- but it wouldn't be an exact reversal. Instead, the races would be mixed up. There would still be many of the same evil monsters like illithids and kuo toa, and perhaps there would be evil dwarves/duergar and evil human enclaves (obsessed with fire and light) -- but still the good deep gnomes (svirfneblin) and some good humans (though they are viewed with suspicion because of the predominantly evil human cultures).
The cultures for the various races would draw from a somewhat wider variety of sources than is typical in D&D -- though in an eclectic fashion. I'm picturing Germanic/Teutonic model for the evil dwarves, and perhaps the good drow take more from the Rus. The civilized orcs might have more of a more Middle-Eastern feel of the Holy Roman Empire. Maybe we'd have a city module of the capital and its urban/urbane orcs.
There would be an appendix with rules for playing all of the good races of the Hollow Earth as PCs. The dungeons of the Hollow Earth would connect up at some point with the dungeons of the surface. So while the continuation of the Giants module would clash with the evil drow -- we'd also have writers working on the Hollow Earth.
Assuming I otherwise fell into similar trends as a company leader, particularly as we moved into the post-Dragonlance era of novel tie-ins and metaplot in the late eighties, there'd be modules which mix the two and have good drow who are horrified at their evil cousins. Surely we'd have some plotline about "Drow Wars" and there would be problems and controversy.
Implications
So, the question is: What was the point of all this? Well, for me as the hypothetical head of the company, I'd first of all want to make money. It could be that the Hollow Earth line doesn't achieve the same popularity and thus I have to agree to reduce the release schedule for it. I could live with that.
I also, though, want to make products which I'm proud of. I would enjoy having the line there which shakes up some of the assumed thinking about race, and hopefully might invite some gamers to think a little more about race through the course of playing a fun game. Besides have debate within the company about race, I'd probably invite feedback from gamers which includes questions about ethnicity and how open they felt our products are and whether that matters to them.
I'm sure that some players would jump at playing the good drow, and other players would scream about how the option X means that drow monks are unbalanced, and so forth. I'm sure that there would be some white gamers who put on black make-up to dress as either good drow or evil drow. My hope would be that given the culture of more open feedback, that would generate some controversy and debate rather than either (1) being shut down, or (2) being ignored. I'd also like to think that perhaps compared to real-world history, maybe a few more gamers are aware of race and ethnicity issues -- possibly after taking part in our feedback.
As hypothetical head of this company, I'd naturally defend my company and livelihood. I'd point to the bunch of positive black-skinned characters and role-models we have as part of Hollow Earth and other lines. But I'd also open dialogue to the people who are complaining either way -- for and against white gamers wearing black drow make-up. Hopefully I'd win over some people and get some good press about it, balancing out some bad press as well.
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April 5th, 2007
10:49 am - Regarding the Drow...
So there were a number of responses to my last post, and I wanted to try to summarize and address some of the points brought up. The controversy as such seemed centered on the drow -- which indeed seem to be a sticky point in many similar discussions, presumably because of their popularity.
( Long post with pictures below )
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April 2nd, 2007
03:12 pm - Examples of and Approaches to Race in RPGs
There has been a fair bit of discussion regarding race and RPGs on Vincent Baker's new forum on "God, Sex, and RPGs" -- the eclectically-titled "I Would Knife-Fight A Man". I had posted first in the thread "Examples of Racism in RPGs" -- which broke down in controversy, but there were many follow-up threads, as seen in the forum category race & rpgs.
Via the IRIS Networks' Race and Ethnicity in Games sub-forum, I read an article on a Milwaukee newpaper site, "A new tone in gaming", about the third game in the Guild Wars series, "Guild Wars: Nightfall", which is set in a fantasy world inspired by North African culture. It was written by former TSR author Jeff Grubb (whose tabletop RPG credits include Marvel Superheroes, Buck Rogers, and D20 Modern).
Also via IRIS, I saw "Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet" by Lisa Nakamura.
Examples of Race Issues
As I said in the Knife-Fight thread, I have never experienced racism in a game in the blatant sense of someone explicitly denigrating me based on race. However, there have been times when I have been made to pause and think about race. I'll talk about two of them.
At AmberCon NorthWest '06, I played in a game called "Exponential". I was playing the only Asian in a group of American scientist PCs, and as it happened, I was also the only Asian player. My PC was a rabid anti-communist, but even so when the destruction of the world was threatened, he suggested that we (the U.S.) talk to the Chinese government to work with them rather than trying to fight them to wipe out a project of theirs. However, everyone else was insistent that the Chinese couldn't possibly be made to understand the danger. Now, this is mixed up with anti-communism attitudes, but the vigor did give me pause. There wasn't anything overt, but it made me think. cf. my ACNW07 report
Many years earlier, I was playing in a horror campaign set in Victorian London. I was playing a white police inspector who was racist and violent, and we encountered Fu Manchu as a villain. Here's the bit that gave me pause. Naturally, my PC Inspector Grimmond was all violently against Fu Manchu, and there was an old Chinese shopkeeper (NPC) whom we had encountered. Grimmond was convinced that he worked for Fu Manchu, and went to beat him up. Now, as it turned out, in retialation for his brutalizing the old man, Fu Manchu captured Grimmond and tortured him. He was rescued by the other PCs with his lower half thoroughly chewed up by rats. As far as we had seen in the game, Grimmond's assumption that all Chinamen worked for Fu Manchu was correct. However, the GM was quite upset at Grimmond's racist and violent behavior on the basis of that assumption. He was perfectly aware of the racist nature of the Fu Manchu stories and mocked it, but nevertheless in retrospect I think that race was an issue here.
I'll have to ponder about other cases.
Issues of Race in Game Systems/Settings
There was an IRIS thread about creating non-racist fantasy races/cultures which was interesting. As many people have noted in the past, fantasy settings often reify common racist thinking -- i.e. there are inherently barbaric and/or evil races like orcs; race is a very concrete effect on one's abilities and personality; often there are distinct cultures especially tied to race (i.e. dwarves are good at mining and stonework); and race is a discrete quality (i.e. there are elves and dwarves, with nothing in between).
The Knife-Fight thread broke down in particular over issues with the drow in D&D, and in particular of white gamers dressing up as black elves. I'm not completely settled on this issue, but it certainlyi gives me pause. I imagine someone unfamiliar with it seeing a person dressed up as a drow at a convention:
P1: Is that dude dressed up as a black guy?
P2: Er, no. He's dressed up as a black elf.
P1: Interesting. There are black elves?
P2: Well, sort of, but not really. There are black-skinned elves, but they're an evil race who live underground, and have a different culture.
P1: Oh.
On the opposing side, the drow don't match most stereotypes of Africans -- but I also don't think that it a coincidence that the only black-skinned elves are evil.
Approaches to Real Races (i.e. Africans, Asians, etc.)
Among real races, blatant discrimination or essentialism is rare. (i.e. There are no games which have a "black" race with +2 Strength and -2 Intelligence modifier.) Still, there are problematic approaches. Two common problems I've seen seen are:
(1) Having non-white races be Western stereotypes of them. In particular, even if generally positive the races are often exoticized -- i.e. portraying Japanese as all ninja and/or samurai, with larger-than-life drama over honor. If there are multiple races, then the one race will all be the same culture and beliefs.
(2) Having non-whites just be whites with changed skin -- such as writing a game with no mention of race and illustrations of primarily white heroes, but then adding a footnote that other races exist and are treated equally.
While in principle, it is possible for a game to explicitly focus on racism -- I think a good approach is to concentrate on making other races normal. That is, for non-white races to have diversity within themselves as well as a relatively ordinary populace. In the Vinland campaign, I made a point to contrast the different cultures. My game was set in 1392 of an alternate history where the Icelanders successfully settled in the Hudson Valley. I played up the contrast of the traditionally more peaceful Algonquian tribes with the encroaching Iroquoian tribes (who were unifying under Hiawatha) who were the enemy. While in principle this might have been viewed dimly by an Iroquoian-derived player, I think for my players it was a study in the clash of cultures.
Approaches to Fantasy Races
On both Knife-Fight and IRIS, there was discussion made of fantasy races like elves and dwarves. On Knife-Fight, Simon C. wrote: I think fantasy races are interesting because they're just that: a fantasy about race. They're what racists want race to be: permanent, unalterable, genetically distinct, with clear implications for who that person is. It's okay to think that orcs are stupid, because if that's the way your world works, all orcs are stupid.
The built-in mechanics of race are interesting in that way. I note that while there is slight acknowledgement of half-breeds (such as Human/Elf and Human/Orc), they are presumably infertile because there are no quarters or other mixtures.
My own fantasy games have generally been all-human rather than featuring much of fantasy races like elves and dwarves. Still, I do recall some breaking of race assumptions. I remember years ago I played in a GURPS Fantasy game which was set in a post-apocalyptic Europe where magic had returned and history was repeating itself -- so you had elves and dwarves amidst Imperial Rome and medieval France. I decided to play a Romanized elf -- Antonius Publius Eldarus -- who had completely rejected the backwards ways of his people and was passionately Roman, extolling the virtues of Roman civilization. He acknowledged that there were problems with slavery (among others), but claimed that in order for the lives of all to be improved, there needed to be institutions that rose above what isolated tribes could do for themselves.
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March 16th, 2007
03:45 pm - Racism in Games
So I have been discussing more about racism and similar issues in several forums. (cf. my previous post, On Orientalism)
I think this started with discussions of Spirit of the Century and its recently announced supplement New Horizons. cf. Bruce's "New Horizons" LJ tag for the news on this. Then there was a Story Games thread, Racism in artwork and other stuff -- which discussed Eric Poulton's steampunk Star Wars illustration of Jabba the Hutt. In a followup post, Stereotypes in Character Design, Eric politely said that he would rethink the illustration. Unfortunately, most of the commenters urged him to ignore this and keep the racist overtones, on the grounds that it was more true to the genre and/or "risqué". There was also a thread on the_tall_man's GameCraft forum, Dirty, Filthy Sexist Propaganda (reposted from LJ post), where he argued that a genre should not be changed unless it improves the story. I also discussed New Horizons in a thread on theRPGsite, Spirit of the Century: New Horizons, mostly talking with John Morrow.
Also, it's worth noting that there are two games fairly explicitly about race that I noted recently. The first is by Delbert Paul Jackson, who has published a series of adventures for the Savage Worlds system about the 1927 Mississippi flood - Untold Stories of the Great Flood. The second is Julia Ellingboe's Steal Away Jordan -- about playing slaves in the pre-war U.S. South.
Dealing With Historical Genres
The broad issue is that you have an existing, historical genre with a set of stereotypes -- particularly racist and/or sexist ones. The question is, how do you deal with this?
I think it should be pretty clear that just knowingly reproducing the racism and sexism of the original does not make the work an edgy commentary. If I re-make The Birth of a Nation, I can't simply say that I'm being true to my source material. I think it is possible to use racist imagary in a commentary, such as Spike Lee's Bamboozled (2000). However, simply reproducing the original doesn't do so. For example, in the Story Games thread, Jonathan Walton brought up Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, where he uses Fu Manchu as a villain - described as "Johnny Chinaman" on the cover of Vol 1, #6. Despite there being a worse villain than Fu Manchu, I don't think that this breaks the assumptions that go into the stereotype of Fu Manchu.
In my own games, I have generally stayed true to history but often broken with genre. I think it's important to distinguish this. There is an enormous difference between portraying history the way it was in which there was racism, and telling a racist story. Within 19th century history, opium was primarily an export from Britain forced on China by military might. However, the picture from the racist stories is of Chinese running decadent opium dens in London.
In my own games, I don't generally abandon the genre, but I do modify it. For example, my Vinland campaign was set in an alternate 1392 where the Icelandic colonies in the New World had prospered. Here I mixed the Icelandic sagas with American fictional tradition to include various tribes in the mix -- i.e. the Tappan, Manhattan, Mohican, and so forth. One of my key principles was emphasizing the contrast between the Algonquian tribes (who were considered more peaceful and friendly) and the Iroquoian tribes (who were considered more warlike and hostile). In doing so, I had simplified history to a degree, but I wanted in particular to avoid generalizations about a monolithic native culture without being confusing. This became an active part of the game, as they interacted with various of the Algonquian tribes and fought against incursions of the Iroquois.
My debate with John Morrow was over what I would like to see in something like the New Horizons supplement. What I would like to see is material for active use in the game -- i.e. fodder for pulp adventures, supporting NPCs, villains, etc. He was more interested in educational material about the prejudices and barriers of the time period. What I would hope for along those lines is pulp action like the originals. I'm not too familiar with the pulps, but I would picture something which keeps the two-fisted, action-oriented nature of the pulps. The heroes should be larger than life, and take on their foes like many of the originals -- I cited Wonder Woman, along with other less-known female heroes of the period, like C. L. Moore's "Jirel of Joiry", the pulp detectives Ethel King or Miss Boston, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, Captain Lucy and other aviators, and so forth. There are fewer examples of blacks or Asians as their own heroes, but there are sidekicks like the Green Hornet's helper Kato, the Shadow's friend Jericho, or Tom Swift's Eradicate Sampson. A twist would be making these sidekicks into heroes on their own.
In general, I prefer to focus on the positive. While there will be discrimination against PCs in my historical games, I don't tend to make that the point. So, for example, my last Spirit of the Century game has almost all female PCs, and drew strongly from the Western genre. However, unlike the Firefly episode "Heart of Gold" where the prostitutes were victims to be defended by Mal and his crew, in my scenario the PCs were powerful enforcers for the Companions Guild -- and were accorded respect and fear. There were complex sexual politics and I think it did show that women were not treated equally. cf. my post Prostitution in the 'Verse
I want play to be a fun game and thrilling adventure first, and I think that this itself helps break stereotypes of race and gender.
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December 20th, 2006
01:35 pm - On Orientalism
So, I've been responding to an RPGsite thread on Orientalism, which has brought out a lot of feelings on race for me. For most of my life, I was not very conscious about race issues. However, it has certainly bloomed on me.
The original post of the thread rejected the common charge of Orientalism within RPGs. Now, I haven't seen a lot of claims about Orientalism within RPGs, but the mention of it brought to my mind the Sahud within GURPS Fantasy. The following is a good chunk of the entry on Sahud, which is mostly unchanged between first and second edition.
Sahud is a peninsula at the very northern edge of the continent. Other lands know little of Sahud; even its name will be unknown in the far southern territories. To PCs it should be a land of exotic mystery and danger. ... The Earthmen dropped onto Sahud were from a totally different culture than those sent to southern lands. They were Japanese and Korean. But their numbers were few, and they had no nobles nor master craftsmen. They were peasants; they did nothing but farm the land in peaceful anarchy. Gradually, their descendants developed a complex social structure, based on the dimly-remembered tales of older days. They created a life of ritual-dominated trade and warfare that is almost incomprehensible to other folk. Clans have risen and fallen, but there have been no significant changes in overall Sahudese life for many hundreds of years. ... The keynote of Sahudese society is the constant maneuvering, between clans and between families within a clan, for honor and "face". Trade is a vital concern, but it is part of the larger game. The wise visitor will avoid political involvement whenever possible. The foolish visitor may seek to participate or even to control; if he seems to succeed, it will be due mostly to luck. ... As far as any PC will be able to tell, Sahudese law is almost totally random. It is usually connected with political maneuverings and "face." Courts are places of great pomp. Judgements can be almost instant, or can drag on for weeks. Decisions usually favor the Sahudese rather than strangers, but this seems to be because the Sahudese know the rules, rather than actual bias. One trader returned to tell how he'd been hauled into court on a charge of "improper haggling." The judge heard the testimony, fined the trader ten copper pieces, and ordered the prosecuting attorney executed . . . Pleas and bribes will sometimes be effective, and sometimes not. It is entirely up to the GM how to treat those embroiled in Sahudese law, but courtesy and cleverness should be rewarded.
Now, I had thought that the example would speak for itself, but there were a number of objections. To be fair, I pulled out this example because it was the case that stood out the worst to me in my RPG collection. I'm not making claims about any other cases at this point. My point was simply that Orientalism is a valid concept, and that it exists within gaming as well as elsewhere. I pointed out that there are a few stock answers in general to racism: - It's OK if there are also some negatively stereotyped white characters.
- It's OK if it is fiction rather than treated as fact.
- It's OK if it is just prejudices and misconceptions. The only real racists are those who hate and want to harm the other race.
- It's OK if the stereotypes are positive instead of negative.
Now, all of these may be true in a sense that it's likely worse to be one than the other. A black-face minstrel show with funny African-Americans is probably better than a book which claims to factually show that Africans are genetically programmed to violent crime. But that doesn't make the minstrel show valid.
As for (1), there are tons of undeniably racist works which have some evil white villains and even some positive minorities. The Birth of a Nation had some white villains as well as heroic black servants who helped out the Klansman in his struggle against the mulattos and freedmen. However, I don't think that excuses it.
As for (2), the set of racist fiction similarly gives plenty of counter-examples. Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu stories were over-the-top adventure stories which no one mistook for factual portrayal. But the stories themselves were still racist. They were specifically were about the Yellow Peril which threatened the white world. It's not that having a villain who is Chinese is inherently racist, but that the particular stereotypes were invented by a blatantly racist white author, who knew little about Asia except to dislike it.
With (3) and (4), I think that essentialism can be worse than hatred because it is more insidious. No, African-Americans don't generally like it when you praise how good they are at sports or their natural rhythm in dancing. (If you haven't seen Black People Love Us yet, I highly recommend it.) Similarly, Jews don't like it when you praise how good they are with money. And speaking as an Asian, I don't like it when people say how I must be good at math or ask me about martial arts.
Bringing up an actual play example, I think of my playing in a game called "Exponential" at AmberCon NorthWest (see my ACNW06 Report on Exponential). This was a modern-day sci-fi game, and I had picked an Asian character -- a scientist named Wei Chen who had immigrated from China as a young boy, and was a rabid anti-Communist and caustic personality. We were a secret task force within the U.S. government, and late in the game we found that to save the world from destabilizing post-human overthrow, we had to destroy sensitive information that had been bought by the Chinese secret service. Now, Chen was anti-communist, but he didn't think we could accomplish this on a practical level. I suppose he had some respect for the Chinese government as an efficient instrument of repression. He suggested that in this case, we should bring the Chinese government in on the deal. However, the other PCs were adamant that the Chinese couldn't be made to understand the danger of the situation. On the one hand, I can see that as a sensible response on several levels. However, it did give me pause, as I reflected that mine was the only Asian characer, and I was the only Asian player, and I was the only one who thought the Chinese would be smart enough to be trusted to help save themselves. I don't think it was intended that way, but it made me think about the situation in that light.
To turn this positive, I tried some suggestions when one poster asked about what to do to avoid racist caricatures. My thoughts: - In general, try to look for sources from the culture itself rather than outsiders. This is most blatant in the case of Fu Manchu, where the source is written by a blatantly racist author with no particular knowledge of China.
- If you use stereotypes, then break them in at least one prominent way. For a given character, pick something which doesn't fit.
- Particularly for modern or otherwise cosmopolitan settings, you can try to avoid stereotyping by randomizing. The idea is to come up with the basic concept of an NPC, then roll randomly for race/culture (and perhaps for gender as well).
- If you have other races, make at least two cultures and contrast them to avoid making the other race monocultural. For example, in my Vinland campaign, I deliberately contrasted the more aggressive Iroquoians as the other with the generally more peaceful Algonquians.
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