House of Cards GM Log

IMC: The Role of Women

posted by Ginger at 01:16 PM, December 08, 2004 | Filed under : IMC , Player Characters , Traveller's Guide to Amber | Comments and Followups

Inspired by this comment of Arref’s on his own traditional Amber post:

How do you handle the women in Amber society? Do you burden female PCs with the bias that runs through the books? Do you slant the commoners’ gender expectations? Do you ask the Players not to play women?

As a female GM, this is something I have pretty strong feelings about. I’m old-skool enough to have not only read but owned Fantasy Wargaming, with its delightful take on how inferior women should be. I like playing female—I’ve played two cross characters in the last fifteen years—and I don’t like playing second-tier just because I’m female.

On the other hand, I’m well-aware of what I call “the Maggie Thatcher effect” (being the single woman in a sea of powerful men) and I think it’s genre-appropriate. On top of that, I like to stay in-period, and legal discrimination is appropriate, even if actual social effects aren’t what people think they are.

We’ll just omit a significant digression about what women really did during the middle ages and early modern period here. It would break the per-post character limit.

The way we’ve found to handle the status of women is two-fold. First, Arref is on the money when he says that female PCs shouldn’t be completely handicapped by being female. Give them the advantage of the double-standard. As Gerard said to Hannah:

Women did a lot of things while I was Regent, because they needed doing and women were here to do that. I don’t know how much of that will stick now that the army is home, but I’ve no problem with you doing what you think is needful. I don’t think most people will have a problem with a woman of the royal blood doing whatever she damn well pleases, short of behaving like a drunken doxy.

Second, make it a plot point. Restrictions on women are an injustice by modern standards. Do the PCs care enough to do anything about it? How much political and personal capital are they willing to spend to see it done? Who will help them and who will oppose them?

We’ve made a lot of irregular arrangements to keep the city going since the Sundering. Now that the army is returning home, everyone will want a sense of normalcy. I wouldn’t worry about upsetting the nobles and Court too much with these reforms, dear. I doubt they’ll have much lasting influence.

The status of women in Amber (and, by analogy, the status of men in Rebma) and what it will take to change it is a plot that I expect to go on through the entire campaign.

Follow up: the trackback URL for this entry is: http://www.whiterose.org/MT/mt-tb.cgi/4810

1 Comments

Brenda
Dec 8, 2004 6:50 PM

That's probably the biggest area where my character and I differ. Garrett was taught respect for women, but he also has VERY traditional (and chauvanistic) attitudes about them. It'll be up to Lilly to beat those out of him.

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