Seen on the interwebs today - Traveller as a furry universe

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Someone exploring a claim the Vargr and Aslan are furries -

I've never seen this claim before, but for some reason I find it immensely amusing. It went with a claim of a furry demographic in the Traveller fan base, which I've never heard before either. I'm tempted to post this on COTI and make up some popcorn.

 
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I've always found "alien" races such as these to be lazy, and passing a bit too close to "furry" for my taste. Just my two cents. But every old-school sci-fi rpg seems to have dog and cat races.

I think there's quite obviously a furry demographic in the hobby. Whether it's more or less than other segments of society, I can't say. But, in general, the less furry shit, the better, as far as I'm concerned. There are games that are good, or at least interesting, despite being furshit (Albedo, Justifiers), but as a rule, I'm just not down with it.

Especially when Hivers and K'kree are more truly "alien" and interesting, without (I hope) the weirdo sex stuff.
 
Yeah, I've heard this said before, and I mostly agree.
Since the last time this came up I've been trying to figure out why I have no issues with talking animals in fantasy games... puss in boots, princes turned into bears, gloranthan ducks... but never took to them in scifi. Maybe because I find them cute and charming in fantasy, but I don't want scfi to be cute or charming? Or something like the broo, or minotaurs, or WFRP's beastmen don't come off as 'furries' to me.

Somehow Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and 40K managed to largely avoid animal people (I don't count Chewbacca or the Ewoks as anthropomorphics). Not that Traveller had them to begin with either, being a tool kit with no setting.
 
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I don't hate on people who are into it but have to admit that personally I don't care at all for anthro races in my games. Oddly I wouldn't have a problem running a game where the player characters were actual animals.
 
I've always found "alien" races such as these to be lazy, and passing a bit too close to "furry" for my taste.
Yea, cat people and dog people are not that interesting and overdone. Traveller ads more depth than is usual for such things but it's still not that great. 2300 did a better job of alien aliens.
 
I don't hate on people who are into it but have to admit that personally I don't care at all for anthro races in my games. Oddly I wouldn't have a problem running a game where the player characters were actual animals.
I want to do a game sometime where all the pcs are monkeys in an indian city carving out new territory for themself from other monkeys while raiding houses and markets and trying to avoid the monkey catcher.
 
Yes. The hell is wrong with people?

Personally I'm grateful for those races as they serve as a litmus test
Furries are ridiculous but the panic of furries is also ridiculous. Is D&D a furry RPG because of Tabaxi and Shifters? Is Rifts a furry RPG because of Dog Boys?

I love the inclusion of Tabaxi and Shifters in d&d; they let me know which players to avoid when away from the gaming table.
 
I don't use the Third Imperium setting, but even in the abstract it doesn't bother me, as I like my Traveller pulpy. Bird-people, frog-people, rabbit-people... hell, bring on more anthro races, I'm fine with that.
 
I don't use the Third Imperium setting, but even in the abstract it doesn't bother me, as I like my Traveller pulpy. Bird-people, frog-people, rabbit-people... hell, bring on more anthro races, I'm fine with that.
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I'm always a bit bemused by the hostility. You can argue that hard sf aliens would be nothing like us, but we don't know it. Really, all we know, all we actually have evidence of are terrestrial life forms. So, really, dog people are harder sf than sentient blobs and silicon based bacterial plaques. Never the less, I generally make my animal people the result of genetic engineering.

There is the backlash against furry sexuality. I'm not sure how to approach that one. Really, as long as there's capacity for informed consent it's probably not bestiality.

As for Traveller, it has a nice mix of the generic and strange and Hivers are still just starfish with starfish for hands. There is much weirder stuff out there.
 
Furries are ridiculous but the panic of furries is also ridiculous. Is D&D a furry RPG because of Tabaxi and Shifters? Is Rifts a furry RPG because of Dog Boys?
I've found that since the Internet came along and gave people a place to anonymously display their kinks, there is a tendency for people go out of their way to instantly claim that anything that could be a kink is a kink. Anthropomorphic animals are something has been part of human culture for thousands of years. Pointing to any example of it as being "furry" is dumb, especially in RPGs where sapient species based on animals give players an easy hook into something that already has identifiable personality traits. If someone gives me a character and tells me its a dog person or a lion person, I can make a stab at it without needed to read a sourcebook.

On the other hand, I get why some people don't want the aliens to be more alien than that. That's a reasonable objection, even if I don't always agree. I just don't want to live in a world where Duck Tales can't exist without people snickering about furries.
 
I don't have any particular concerns or phobias about furries. They're a small segment of the population, and a small segment of the hobby. I've yet to encounter one in the wild. And I don't think they're taking over. In my mind, it's just that furry stuff is so intrinsically linked to paraphilia, and I just don't want that at my gaming table. I generally avoid sexuality in my games altogether, it's not what I'm looking for in a game. The closest I ever get is "fade to black amid the sultry opening notes of a smooth jazz tune". It's not that I'm just picking on furries, it's just not part of my gaming repertoire, nor do I wish it to be.

I'd gladly play in or run a game where someone played a Vargr, Aslan, or whatever else, as long as the focus wasn't on sex.

In any event, it's highly unlikely to come up for me IRL, so whatevs.



To be fair to Traveller, I don't get "furry" vibes from it, or the fanbase.

I still think dog and cat people are kind of lazy, from a writing standpoint, and I don't know why so many old school games have them. I guess the idea of anthropomorphic animals to me works in a game like Justifiers, or Gamma World. But, not so much in other settings. Just a matter of personal taste. And, furry stuff aside, Albedo is a neat game, and the comic on which it is based is great, character-driven stuff, with no icky bits.

Also, I'm old as shit, and probably kind of a fuddy-duddy. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot and done a lot. But I've ultimately come to the conclusion that, for me, kinky sex is like hard drugs: at 20, it's an experiment. At 40, it's a cry for help. YMMV.
 
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I don't use the Third Imperium setting, but even in the abstract it doesn't bother me, as I like my Traveller pulpy. Bird-people, frog-people, rabbit-people... hell, bring on more anthro races, I'm fine with that.

It's not the anthro races themselves that bug me so much as it is the people who want to bang/be banged by them. That's where I start side-eying muhfuggas.
 
Also, I think the vid in the OP is basically clickbait, which obviously worked because here I am talking about it.

I think it's probably a stretch to conflate every anthro alien with furries, and I've never seen any furry presence in Traveller fandom, personally.

Also it's kind of laughable when the dude says "Here, in the present..." then holds up a book that's over 20 years old, and says, "...if we keep putting art like this on our RPG books..."
 
Also, I think the vid in the OP is basically clickbait, which obviously worked because here I am talking about it.

I think it's probably a stretch to conflate every anthro alien with furries, and I've never seen any furry presence in Traveller fandom, personally.

Also it's kind of laughable when the dude says "Here, in the present..." then holds up a book that's over 20 years old, and says, "...if we keep putting art like this on our RPG books..."
I got two minutes into it, and there was no sign it was ever going to even mention the topic, so I stopped.
 
Hah. No, the Tines in A Fire Upon the Deep.
Tines aren't anthropomorphic. They don't even have hands.

People who draw anthropomorphic animals? Fine. People who draw erotic anthropomorphic animals? Please vacate the landmass. No, further. Keep going. I'll let you know when to stop.
 
Yeah for me I have no issues with anthropomorphic races. When I hear furries all I associate that with is people who are into the sexual portion of the concept. So furries as I have defined them is not something I'm into. Dog,cat,rat, elephant,etc people in an RPG is a non event.
 
I think it's probably a stretch to conflate every anthro alien with furries, and I've never seen any furry presence in Traveller fandom, personally.
Yeah, same here. I've never gotten a furry vibe from Vargr at all - they look like I imagine bioengineered bipedal wolves to look like, not canopomorphized humans -- and the only time I ever used Aslan was a group of psionic hedonists who studied Hiver manipulation techniques - they were known in-game as rakshasas . . .
 
The Kleibor from Star Ace are the best anthropomorphic animal race in any rpg because instead of trying to pretend it wasn't silly, Mark Acres just went with it.

"You know what this game needs? Hard-partying psionic polar bears who are fond of Hawaiian shirts!"
 
The whole animals as people was around in fantasy and sf long before it became a well-known but obviously minority kink due to the net. Brin's Uplift series is probably the best known but there was also Cordwainer Smith's underpeople, Simak's City, McCaffrey's Decision at Doona, John Crowley's rather brilliant Beasts and no doubt many more.

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Not to mention decades of comics and cartoons (and Tijuana Bibles can tell you there's nothing new about the furry kink).

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So I find the rush to associate every portrait of the idea as 'furry' rather annoying. I mean if Island of Dr. Moreau come out today people would be going on about it in those terms. Not that Wells or the great film version, Island of Lost Souls, backed away fron erotic themes.

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Sure the idea is kinda boring by now (although I'm sure a good writer could still make it sing), and more than a little silly, but I'm unsure why it has become such an obsession to hate on, there's all kinds of minority kink communities across the net so why is this particular one so worthy of disapprobation?

I guess because of the crossover with sf/fantasy fandom?

But I don't see people going on and on about Goreans, balloon fetishists or what-have-you. Like the West's obsession with tenacle porn in Japan it seems all out-of-proportion to either its prominence or signficance.

Tristram posted a good Down the Rabbit Hole video on the subject and history of furry fandom here once, it is well done

 
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Also, I'm old as shit, and probably kind of a fuddy-duddy. Don't get me wrong, I've seen a lot and done a lot. But I've ultimately come to the conclusion that, for me, kinky sex is like hard drugs: at 20, it's an experiment. At 40, it's a cry for help. YMMV.

Please tell me you didn't just call being 40 "old as shit".

To my recollection, I've only met one furry in all my years. This despite playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse (which I used to jokingly call "Furry Power Rangers") and Witchcraft (with its Basts) for a good while. That one person wasn't even someone I gamed with, and I don't know that they were a gamer. From my perspective, they were just that weirdo that's into other shit.

As for Traveller, I've mostly played in my own homebrew Traveller universes, which tend to be human only. But I've never really been put off by Vargr or Aslan. I guess having been a kid of the 80's, having dog people, cat people and sometimes even bird people is just a checkbox you mark off when making something that appeals to younger folk of the day.
 
Please tell me you didn't just call being 40 "old as shit".

To my recollection, I've only met one furry in all my years. This despite playing Werewolf: The Apocalypse (which I used to jokingly call "Furry Power Rangers") and Witchcraft (with its Basts) for a good while. That one person wasn't even someone I gamed with, and I don't know that they were a gamer. From my perspective, they were just that weirdo that's into other shit.

As for Traveller, I've mostly played in my own homebrew Traveller universes, which tend to be human only. But I've never really been put off by Vargr or Aslan. I guess having been a kid of the 80's, having dog people, cat people and sometimes even bird people is just a checkbox you mark off when making something that appeals to younger folk of the day.

Oh, I'm older than 40 haha
 
My initial impulse was that people were reacting to furry kink stuff but I think I'm wrong. I've got me a THESIS type thingie! So, in the sixties, science fiction was trying very hard to become a respectable adult genre with a bit more sex and less violence and more science and this is the period that gives us our ideas on "hard" science fiction. And there in lies the issue, especially when it comes to Traveller. In our culture, anthropomorphized animals are identified with children's books and visual media. The real impulse behind disliking furry aliens is that they are seen as childish. There are plenty of good reasons to use animal people and plenty of good reasons not to but there is a lurking fear of being seen as childish that also reflects on furry fandom as they are adults dressing up and pretending to be animal people.

As I noted before, the only life forms we have any actual evidence of are terrestrial ones so it is very reasonable to base aliens on them from a "hard science" point of view. Genetic modification could be motivated by a wide range of desires but even sexual fetishes point to a desire to create a recognizable under class of non-humans for any number of reasons that would also include expendable canon fodder, compliant workers, alternate social structures, specialized capabilities like a dog's sense of smell, or even better medical test subjects (in my own setting rats become sentient as a result of lab tinkering, their terrorist organization is called NIHM.) With surgery and biological constructs, animal traits might become fashionable, with cat ears and tails being purchased at the local tattoo and piercing joint. These might even have cultural significance or be tied to specific social roles, the police might all wear dog's heads and the judges rams, plaintiffs weasels, and priests bulls. An interesting notion for a baroque setting.

One other thing you often see is a backlash against digigrade feet as ridiculous or less functional and yet we've seen a number of walking robots use a very similar system in recent years.
 
Yeah, furries obviously existed long before Internet...:shade:
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Yeah for me I have no issues with anthropomorphic races. When I hear furries all I associate that with is people who are into the sexual portion of the concept. So furries as I have defined them is not something I'm into. Dog,cat,rat, elephant,etc people in an RPG is a non event.
That's honestly where I stand as well. Though I also like Hivers better. K'kree? I need no laughingstock in my games.
Yeah, I've heard this said before, and I mostly agree.
Since the last time this came up I've been trying to figure out why I have no issues with talking animals in fantasy games... puss in boots, princes turned into bears, gloranthan ducks... but never took to them in scifi. Maybe because I find them cute and charming in fantasy, but I don't want scfi to be cute or charming?
You just wait until they uplift them and the discussions about consent really begin:thumbsup:!
 
Seriously, aliens as anthro-animals have been around longer than "Furries" but not as long as people wanting to claim the traits of animals (primitive rituals in some cultures all tie to animal worship, or gods who have animal features.) It's literally built into the human race, for hundreds of thousands of years.

Hey, I like furry art/characters just fine as long as they're well done. Mind you, the Aslan are rip-offs of the Chanur, that were somewhat presaged by Cordwainer Smith's Ballad of Lost C'mell, and Norstrilia (novel), the first psychic ninja catgirl (ok, espionage cat-girl.)
We can track animal usage as people in Sci-fi back to at least the Island of Dr. Moreau. So, it's time to get over it gentlefolk. Really, it's been around forever, it will continue to be around.

Mind you, I prefer NOT except in some fiction to see them as a species regularly used. For example, I vastly prefer Star Frontier's Aliens to Traveller's (except the Hiver, the K'kree are kind of unplayable as written last I saw.) I /like/lion-themed people. But sheesh, even I like variety. Sadly, my current crop of characters seems to be heavily feline, but that was accidental as those games survived, while others did not..the recent death of several PBP/Online games.
 
Obviouosly furries have a lot more to their origin then just a kink.

"In my game you can play an Ulgahah - heres two pages detailing their society, background and mindset" - is obviously a lot harder to pick up and play then "Here's a canis, they're basically dog people."
 
Obviouosly furries have a lot more to their origin then just a kink.

I think I'm as kink-free as they come, and I guess some would call me a "furry" (I like art, I like fiction like the Moreau series) but a lot of it depends on "what art" (I don't do kink, and mostly save PG-13 stuff) and "what fiction? "

I'd rather have a well-developed race, of playable people than just "like a dog/cat/elephant with hands." For the Immortal Hack, as I'm calling it I'm borrowing a not as old D&D race for part of the setting--not likely in the core hack but a supplement who are cat-folk, but I'm seriously working on their cultures, heck, same with Orcs, Elves, and more, its a BIG project, and it all started because a friend wanted more information on Gem dragons...
 
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