AFF & Good & Evil


The thing about Fighting Fantasy that helps it in a vs. TSR comparison is that it's poor and short. They can't pad anything, instead going the complete opposite and becoming bewilderingly brief and to the point. There's this and this  and they take you here and what do you do? From moment to moment it doesn't make much sense. They handed the writing over to a sweaty pile of authors and let them have at it, then made sense of it retroactively much like they'd go on to (well, kinda simultaneously) do with Warhammer 40k. And as we all know, 40k is the best setting ever made, so the system works.


All of us who play Advanced Fighting Fantasy are obliged to become one of the sweaty pile, to possess only cursory knowledge of what everything else in the setting is doing, and to worry about it later. It'll be stronger for it.



With that please consider Good and Evil. Titan is all about the conflict of good vs evil, with you being Good, if you're to believe everything people tell you as Mr. Protagonist. An initial reaction as a GM is to dismiss it as childish and cut it out, but that's against the sweaty writer code. Instead, look at the subtext: Titan (the book) is the foremost explainer of the situation, blaming certain gods for making evil races and us being justified in wiping them out. It describes places like Port Blacksand that apparently integrate evil and good races as being eeevil, it also describes instances of the good guys genociding orcs to take the habitable bits of Allansia and admits they went a bit far but oh well, good guys.

In one throw away paragraph the narrator of Titan admits to being from Salamonis, heart of Good and Humans and Civilisation. It's a small jump to start looking at Titan in a similar context as the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer. A biased work of history, something a Victorian gentleman scholar would put out. Something the players and not the gm needs to worry about.

Good and evil only exists in the context of the people talking about it. It is as objective and fabricated to the people of Titan as it is to us. The only real paradigmatic conflict is Law vs Chaos, duh.

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