There's a not so thin line that seems to be getting thinner as the years go by. As anyone with a pulse and brain knows, the woke has taken over all forms of media including RPGs. They seek to replace quality with diversity because they can't create something that's both woke and good. There are ones of examples of good woke things, and thousands (millions?) of examples of complete shit that checks lots of DEI checkboxes and not one of them is marked "quality". Every action has an equal but opposite reaction. I highlighted that reaction in this post. So there are essentially shock jocks looking to substitute shock value for quality. In the end everyone loses.
And in the end, even staying on the line there's still simple trash that doesn't have an agenda (or it's fairly light on agenda but still sucks).
It's incredibly annoying to hunt down actually good product nowadays. Here's a few helpful shortcuts, some borrowed from my earlier post:
Guidelines to avoid Woke
Don't buy anything from Exalted Funeral
Avoid anything listing "Trigger Warnings", regardless of how cool that stuff sounds.
Don't buy from WotC. Ever.
Don't buy a short (<100 page) corebook produced after 2015.
Less than 256 pages is a red flag.
Don't buy any games featuring women as combat archetypes (classes, professions, careers, etc) in the art.
Don't buy any games featuring ugly/unappealing women in the art as example character types.
Don't buy any games featuring feminine men in the art as example character types.
Don't buy any D&D-derived fantasy games that replaced the word "race" with something else (species, ancestry, culture, calling, origin, whatever).
Don't buy any game (especially a rehash) that avoid the existence of prostitution and slavery as things that exist or can exist.
Don't buy any D&D-derived fantasy game that pretends Orcs are stand-ins for black people, or, and I hate I have to say this now, Mexicans.
Don't buy a game if there's a 'pronouns' space on the character sheet.
Guidelines to avoid anti-Woke
If it was produced after 2015 and includes female nipples in the art, that's a red flag.
If it is produced ever and uses most or all of the seven words you can't say on television, that's a red flag.
If it is produced ever and includes depictions of sex, that's a red flag.
If it is produced ever and includes depictions of the R word that rhymes with grape, don't buy it.
Guidelines to avoid Regular Shit, in no particular order
Don't buy a game if it employs "usage dice"
Don't buy a game if it's vocally a hack of some other system. Every game is a hack of another system, stating it out loud denotes a lack of confidence or ability, neither of which produces good games.
Don't buy a game that requires special dice to play it.
The following companies don't know how to produce a good game and never have: Cubicle 7, Free League, Modiphius.
For that matter, be very skeptical of Kickstarters and Indiegogos in general. Two words are the bare minimum: Manuscript complete.
Now red flags don't indicate that a product is fucked, but enough of them should push it to that category.
