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Do sex roles matter much in your campaign? For example, are fighter-type adventures mostly male? What about NPC soldiers and town guards?

What about marriage, romance, inheritances, all that? Being male or female as a PC makes a notable difference?

Does it vary a lot by culture?

Fantasy gender egalitarianism?

This stuff doesn't come up much because you are running monster-hunting, dungeon-bashing games?

My own campaign here on FoS has defaulted to:

It matters quite a bit in most societies. But adventurers are widely regarded as eccentrics or rascals, rarely respectable but still awfully useful to the elites. People don't expect burglars, backwoodsmen, tomb-robbers, leg-breakers, repo men, and magicians to necessarily conform to social norms. That's not to say egregious breeches of etiquette will be ignored.

Arranged marriages are pretty common in many cultures.

Town guards and soldiers are almost exclusively male. Political leaders are usually men, with some exceptions in aristocratic or monarchic domains. Most businessmen the party will deal with are men, but female NPCs may run businesses too. Varies by domain.

When in doubt, default to something you'd see in Hammer Films and Gothic lit, vaguely early 19th Century British stuff but not constrained by historical accuracy.


Demihumans and exotic human cultures may differ.

In Ravenloft I tend to toe more historically in terms of gender and race, but still erring on the side of equality.
It's a fantasy world that loosely mirrors our own, so it doesn't need to match our hang ups. Plus, as a means of fun escape, I don't need to bring the game down by representing outdated prejudices unless there's a good story reason to do so.

I try to include strong NPCs of both genders wherever possible, and mix up gender roles.

I go by region mostly but I rarely go as far as the actual thing. In Barovia for example, I pretend that "most women are treated like their husband's property" but it's not depicted in game. I say it, I don't show it. Frankly, it rarely comes into play except the individual damsel-in-distress or villainess. I don't go into detail on how the kitchen cook is treated by her husband the inn-keeper, or how the widow's dead husband was treating her because he fell ill and died.

For my (unfinished) QTR adventure (that hopefully you will see next year although I'm not sure), I have one of the evil ones being a woman that turned to evil in part because of frustration with the male-dominated society.

IMC gender inequality, and most other "issues", are something that is for story and NPC motivation, not something to hamper a PC, unless that PC has specifically wanted the role playing challenge of playing a character facing such issues.

That being said, the death of Duke Gundar was a major arc within my campaign, with Gundarak's daughter tax being a central facet of that, with the seized daughters being used as both food and breeding stock by the vampire elite. I think though, that such an extremely unequal state of affairs is so far removed from most peoples reality as to be generally inoffensive.

RE Arranged marriages: these haven't come up much in my Ravenloft game, but I think they can be very useful in setting up character backgrounds and story hooks.

Ditto inheritance laws/customs, dowries, marriage rituals, and all that.

Does one domain use primogeniture and another divide equally among all sons?

Do the people of one culture expect a substantial dowry?

Or does bride-price exist someplace?

Are boys and girls educated differently among the upper and middling classes? What about lower classes/the poor?


My version of the Ezran Church does not allow divorce(which nicely sets up some plots for wives murdering husbands, mad wives locked away in private asylums, and all that sort of Gothic stuff). I assume a dowry is a common custom across most of the Core, though details vary.

thekristhomas wrote:IMC gender inequality, and most other "issues", are something that is for story and NPC motivation, not something to hamper a PC, unless that PC has specifically wanted the role playing challenge of playing a character facing such issues.

That being said, the death of Duke Gundar was a major arc within my campaign, with Gundarak's daughter tax being a central facet of that, with the seized daughters being used as both food and breeding stock by the vampire elite. I think though, that such an extremely unequal state of affairs is so far removed from most peoples reality as to be generally inoffensive.

I like your take on Duke Gundar and the girl tax. It's fantastic villainy, an evil we can all agree is megabadwrong! Vampires kidnapping and feeding on/breeding with innocent girls. Time to smite. No political stuff from the real world need enter into the adventure to spoil the fun of the game (good, if players metagaming their RW ideas is a potential problem.)

If it wasn't mostly male town guards then it would be immersion breaking.

Take it from G.R.R Martin. He is fanatically socially liberal in every respect in the real world, but he does not compromise his precious books with his political ideology. Instead female warriors like Brienne of Tarth are clearly outliers. They are masculine females that clearly suffer for it.

tomokaicho wrote:If it wasn't mostly male town guards then it would be immersion breaking.

Take it from G.R.R Martin. He is fanatically socially liberal in every respect in the real world, but he does not compromise his precious books with his political ideology. Instead female warriors like Brienne of Tarth are clearly outliers. They are masculine females that clearly suffer for it.

I see two factors here:

1) mode of play/focus of story and adventures

2) details of setting culture

I think that 1 tends to determine the relative importance of 2.

If the game is focused on dungeon-crawls or wilderness exploration, the details of the economic , social, and legal systems of the world may be mostly irrelevant, or just add some fun background color. Maybe this stuff only comes up on occasion, when looking for hirelings, restocking in town and having a little side adventure with NPCs, a will to dispose of a PC's goods after death, and so on.

But if the game involves a lot of town adventures, politics, kingdom-building, intrigue, social interactions, etc. than the background details may become much more important. Some of this material could shape the story in powerful ways.

Sex roles matter a little bit, though I try to make it never a big deal. Every domain has a little bit of taste in how they do things, but overall I've always interpreted Ravenloft, and most fantasy game in general, to be very gender fluid. Male and female doesn't particularly matter for most classes or races. My dwarves tend to have the most gender bias (I based them on Persian and Muslim medieval culture as opposed to the Tolkien/Scots interpretation) and I let the Church of Ezra and the Lawgiver both be more masculine biased.

I also really like romance to be a part of my games. Love of parents, children, pets, and romantic love all play a part whenever I can. Even bad guys love.

Deewun wrote:Sex roles matter a little bit, though I try to make it never a big deal. Every domain has a little bit of taste in how they do things, but overall I've always interpreted Ravenloft, and most fantasy game in general, to be very gender fluid. Male and female doesn't particularly matter for most classes or races. My dwarves tend to have the most gender bias (I based them on Persian and Muslim medieval culture as opposed to the Tolkien/Scots interpretation) and I let the Church of Ezra and the Lawgiver both be more masculine biased.

I also really like romance to be a part of my games. Love of parents, children, pets, and romantic love all play a part whenever I can. Even bad guys love.

Persian/Medieval Islamic Dwarves sound like fun.

My take on Ezrans isn't too far from published materials, I think.

I've never really used the Lawgiver. But the party hasn't travelled to either Hazlan or Nova Vaasa.

ewan, I've played Domenica in your game and many other female pc's.

I don't think it matters what sex your pc is.

I have played MoTrD, in the years Lovecraft was born, and my pc was a lady Pinkerton/Doctor. In that game it did matter, but

eventually she did get accepted for her talents. I had a great time playing her btw.

steveflam wrote:ewan, I've played Domenica in your game and many other female pc's.

I don't think it matters what sex your pc is.

I have played MoTrD, in the years Lovecraft was born, and my pc was a lady Pinkerton/Doctor. In that game it did matter, but

eventually she did get accepted for her talents. I had a great time playing her btw.

Yeah, we've had plenty of female PCs over the years.

In D&D, I always assume that either sex and any of several species/races are pretty much open for player- characters, because that is the normal mode for the game.
Social background details vary in importance.

Now, if I ever get around to running Pendragon online, that will likely be all-male. All knights will be men, at any rate. This reflects the default in the game rules, which reflects the source material. I like it.
And of course all player-knights would be human.

I don't think that women necessarily need to occupy a lower space in the social hierarchy for the sake of realism. Just because society looked a certain way during our own Middle Ages/Enlightenment/Victorian Era doesn't mean that every possible society at the same technology level will behave in the same way.

For Ravenloft specifically, I would think that most domains reflect the unconcious attitudes of their Darklords. So in Barovia for example, women might be respected but not expected to exercise much actual agency because the relationship between Strahd and Tatiana is the template for gender relations there. In Nidila on the other hand, I would expect women hold their own quite well.

Alastor wrote:I don't think that women necessarily need to occupy a lower space in the social hierarchy for the sake of realism. Just because society looked a certain way during our own Middle Ages/Enlightenment/Victorian Era doesn't mean that every possible society at the same technology level will behave in the same way.

For Ravenloft specifically, I would think that most domains reflect the unconcious attitudes of their Darklords. So in Barovia for example, women might be respected but not expected to exercise much actual agency because the relationship between Strahd and Tatiana is the template for gender relations there. In Nidila on the other hand, I would expect women hold their own quite well.

Indeed.

Lower is not necessarily the best word to describe sex role differences, at any rate. Different is sometimes lower. Sometimes it's just different.

I like your idea about Darklords.