Warning: Politics will be discussed now, for the first and last time. Sorta.
Politics absolutely shouldn't be in RPGs. This began long ago, with the pronoun wars. And no, not the current insistence woke people have to wish their pronoun adhered to, which is of mild annoyance at worst.
This shouldn't be a controversial topic because we go to games to escape real world bullshit, some of which is just straight up politics. Currently the majority of the media (mainstream and even a lot of independant) is pitching a blue/red divide that isn't and shouldn't be there. They want that divide and people to get into those camps so they can't tell the actual war going on. Divide and conquer. And they have conquered. The rich people have effectively beaten the poor into submission in the USA and it will not be fixed anytime soon and especially not by one of the political parties that exist solely to prop up the narrative to keep neighbors fighting neighbors instead of realizing that Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and other private interests are looting the Treasury on a daily basis.
The current push for wokeness, diversity, inclusion, AKA political correctness exists solely to make there be a fight about it in every media, including RPGs. Other than a few notable exceptions, RPGs aren't racist or sexist (etc), and never have been. Generally in the past outsiders WERE the ones roleplaying, so they were the ones bullied and called names. Those in that predicament were less likely to bully and call names, and more likely to want to sail away to a fantasy world where people would look up to them as heroes. That's a lot of the draw of RPGs in the original years. Life sucks, RPGs are cool.
So there's a list out, compiled by someone I don't know and doesn't know me, but a few youtubers have talked about it:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RlX78Yw9lbUMk2QwAZdpwNRGAd4Xe69eFgnFymWz6M0/edit
Now, specifically there are a few people who vocally wanted to be on the RED list, I think that's silly considering it's the list with the anti-Semites and straight up white-supremacists on it, but to each their own. If you want to be categorized with those people, have at it hoss. I actually had some issues with the list because it's hypocritical. Yeah that's right I'm taking the side of the list in that I don't want politics in my games, but I personally don't want to see right wing politics in my games either, and I'm willing to give credit where it's due, some woke companies produce good games that don't overtly push politics:
Green Ronin (Blue Rose): Even the current edition doesn't have any preachy bullshit (not even a dumbass section on pronouns used). It's a paladins & princesses version of the Dragon Age RPG ruleset, it has relationship mechanics but there isn't even a place for Gender on the character sheet. Really, it's "gay" on reputation alone. I could see playing non-sexed D&D-like games with it.
Green Ronin (Mutants & Masterminds 2E): Mutants and Masterminds 2E doesn't really push anything other than superhero action. It was mostly written in the time between the last PC tsunami and the current one, so very little text was used to push political bullshit. While I own M&M3E there was a considerable drop in quality since they stopped having in-house authors and began crowdsourcing everything. This, and a lack of central oversight, pretty much ruined the DC Adventures game too (pretty much all the canon DC characters statblocks are borked when compared to one another).
Grim & Perilous Games (Zweihander): Zweihander was 99+% written with WFRP fans in mind, it only steered toward wokeness when twits got wind of the art having tits and cocks in it. Then he steered back the other way intending to get sales. It appears to not be working very well. I can't say anything about his other game, this one wasn't good enough for me to bother.
Judges Guild: The works of Judge's Guild speak for themselves, regardless of the persuasions of one of the owners/authors.
Stockholm Cartell (Mork Borg): While Mork Borg is a lightweight art book masquerading as an RPG and baby's first Metal RPG, it's not pushing any agenda (it arguably doesn't have enough words to)
Now, to speak to the heart of the matter:
It's tough to speak to my exact political leanings. I'm basically an independent populist (populism is primarily - almost entirely - left wing, so I'm left wing), who is specifically pro-bill of rights including freedom of speech, religion, press, guns, no unreasonable search, etc. Now this doesn't mean what either side thinks it means, I'm actually saying I am in favor of these things for every adult of sound mind and judgment. Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it (Thomas Jefferson). I also believe that on the discussion of most things, the one side who's position allows the other side to exist is generally the correct side of the argument. Anything else is authoritarian/right-wing at inception and prohibitively anti-freedom and therefore anti-American.
All forms of censorship, regardless of source, comes from an anti-constitutional right-wing perspective. And currently liberals, which is a fancy way of saying right-wing people who fancy themselves left-wingers (and true right-wing people fancy them this, too) AKA the Elite Left AKA the Bourgeoisie Left, AKA the Brunch Left AKA Shitlibs AKA "Cultural" Leftists AKA plain-old Democrats are the perpetrators of attempted censorship in nearly all media forms including movies, television, video games, comics, and now RPGs. Anyone who believes in the Constitution should be against this as hard as they are against making Christianity the US's official religion or as hard as they are for making the next constitutional amendment something that solidifies women's rights.
I like SOME of the games on the Red list, see above, but that's because they both don't push an agenda and are qualitatively good games. Like all other media, it's possible to be woke AND good, but a lot of products pushing wokeness aim to have it as a quick and easy replacement for quality. And wokeness can't replace quality, that's a pure and simple truth.
OTOH, there are also "green" games that suck. RPGPundit's stuff has never failed to be uninteresting, uninspiring drivel. Autarch doesn't design anything well either. For Gold and Glory is very lame, Labyrinth Lord sucks, Rolemaster blows, I've went on about Necrotic Gnome's garbage, Post Mortem looks amateurish in most of his publications, and as I've said before nuTSR was a fucking scam.
So, long and short, I agree with the list, but I also don't care about the list, because it doesn't discuss or exemplify quality.
UPDATE: I ran into this blog post detailing a sort of nefarious and sociopathic fascist manifesto for the NSR (I was looking into the term itself), which I found out I have been calling the Faux-SR, specifically the hyper-minimalist trash form itch.io. The top reads fine but the bottom reads like a discussion the German state would be making to German citizens about... Ok, I'll be nicer: it reads like a discussion the American state would be making to American citizens about watching their fellow citizen for communist or anarchist tendencies during the McCarthyism era. There is a misunderstanding on how rights work, and a misunderstanding of the term safety, and a misunderstanding, perhaps willfully, of how tolerance works or even what it is.
Let me say this in no uncertain terms, the NSR is not in the OSR, we are actually inclusive instead of pretending to be inclusive all the while trying to deplatform, defame, and police the thoughts of people we don't agree with the political opinions of. If you have the woke mind-virus, the NSR would love to have you... until they see you step one inch out of line, that line being wherever the accuser says it is, at which point they will drop you like a bad habit, attempt to dox you, attempt to end your career, and laugh while you have trouble feeding your children. They will laugh until it happens to them, of course.
The OSR ain't like that. Come as you are. Expect us as we are. Not everybody is nice, not everybody is an asshole, but at least the assholes aren't in charge and pretend to be nice, unlike the NSR.
