Blue Rose (role-playing game)

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Blue Rose

Designer(s)	Jeremy Crawford, Dawn Elliot, Stephen Kenson, John Snead
Publisher(s)	Green Ronin Publishing
Publication date	2005
Genre(s)	Fantasy
System	True20

Blue Rose is a fantasy role-playing game published by Green Ronin Publishing in 2005. The game is described as being in the romantic fantasy genre — it is inspired by fantasy fiction such as that of Mercedes Lackey and Diane Duane as opposed to Robert E. Howard–style of swords and sorcery. In romantic fantasy the emphasis is on role-playing and character interaction rather than on combat. This makes for a more social game than is typical for fantasy RPGs. The game uses a lightened version of the D20 system, called True 20. Blue Rose won the Gen Con ENWorld Roleplaying Silver Medal for Best Rules in 2005. Green Ronin subsequently released True20 as a seperate system without a setting and genre neutral.

[edit] Setting

Blue Rose is set in a world called Aldea, and most campaigns center around the Kingdom of Aldis. Aldis is a monarchy whose ruler is chosen by divine intervention rather than inheritance. The current ruler is Queen Jaellin, who earned the throne when "the Golden Hart", a being that symbolizes rightful rulership, chose her over a rival contender. Blue Rose features extremes in the political ideologies depicted in its worlds, one realm distinctly good and the other two distinctly evil.

By fantasy standards Aldis supports a strongly progressive worldview. Feminism, environmentalism and acceptance of homosexual-transgender lifestyles are strongly implied to be objectively correct.The setting is clearly meant to be the sort of idealized state that players with such sensibilities would choose to defend. Conversely, the rival nations of Aldis are an evil kingdom of necromancers and a realm of intolerant and fanatically religious ultra-conservatives fashioned after an extreme version of Evangelical Fundamentalism.

Aldis is threatened by internal strife and external rivals, including a Mafia-like criminal organization known as The Silence. Among its notable details, sentient talking animals are everywhere in Aldis and a significant percentage of the population of Aldis is openly homosexual or bisexual.

[edit] Controversies

Upon initial release, Blue Rose was met with general approval and even some acclaim by the gaming hobby. The greatest attention was directed at the rules sytem, which was praised as a skillful slimming down of the comparitively more cumbersome D20 rules into a much simpler system. However, though it had its fans, the setting generally received only passing interest, and a very vocal minority decried it. The mildest complaints alleged the setting was too modern or politically correct in its attitudes for a fantasy setting, while the harshest critics accused the game of promoting a radically liberal agenda, or simply being adolescently moon-eyed and recklessly naive. In many online discussions, Blue Rose was derisively referred to as a "gay role-playing game", even though mention of the homosexual segment of Aldea's population only composes a very small fraction of the book, and does not have a substantial effect on play. Much of the backlash was likely the result of many readers' lack of familiararity with the game's inspirational influences, novels like The Mists of Avalon or Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen and other Heralds of Valdemar books. In part at least Green Ronin was responsible for creating the backlash that it suffered from, since from inception the game was designed not to appeal to traditional adolescent male gamers.

Even the sytem has its dtractors. Critics have pointed out that while the setting encourages violence as a solution less than most fantasy games, nonetheless the greater part of the rules govern combat, and there is no detailed social conflict resolution system.

Despite these issues, Blue Rose still debuted largely to acclaim. Two supplemental books have been published (in addition to the original core rulebook) and at least one more is currently in the development process. For those critics who praised the rules but disdained the setting, Green Ronin later released True 20 as an seperate game, free of any description of the world of Aldea.