Lazarus Long said:
I love the idea of player killing carrying rather heavy consequences. I was behind it, and even considering playing my first MMO game since Diablo 2, right up until the bit where the delusional, paranoid, misogynist assholes behind the witch burnings are right all along.
Kinda lost me there.
Well, the game seems to be going for a Lovecraftian vibe, which means having witches/servants of the dark powers around. By definition I get the impression that thw witches are probably going to be corrupt and evil as well.
That said, the situation in Salem was a land grab more than anything (I've been to Salem) and the "trials" are actually a number of seperate issues, and not all of the victims were women. 14 Women, 5 men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salem_witch_trials
At least as I remember it from when I visited Salem everyone involved including the victims were a bunch of douchebags once you cut out all the propaganda. These incidents played a key role in banning witch trials, because honestly, I think there were some serious doubts on whether there was any real religious fervor, as everyone involved had some kind of perfectly worldly stake in this.
That said, being a horror game, I fail to see why having horror elements in it is a big deal. Especially seeing as this game seems to be set well before the time of the Witch Trials, and the monsters are real.
Also while not popular with the new-age movement, I will say that while I doubt there being magic involved, a lot of the hype behind the witch hunts and the like was true. It's just that we like to put a very judgemental spin on things, and you also have the "New Age" movement which is harmless, and also has a vested interest in wanting hisorical re-inventionism.
The truth is that primitive people have some very nasty rituals, this includes primitive white people. For all of the "one with nature" celtic stuff, the bottom like is that you had tons of torture and murder being committed by pre-christian religions. Some of the sites are pretty disturbing, and once in a while they do shows on this kind of thing but few people put all the pieces together. As time went on, these beliefs never really disappeared, and you had people doing nasty things in secret because it was tradition. To a Christian anything not frm god is from Satan, so these people were Satanists even if they did not specifically worship the devil. Given that Christianity wrecked these cultures and drove them underground, these people trying to invoke their own religion against it probably didn't help matters (and the darker the magic, the nastier the requirements as well). This is of course to say nothing of actual, bona-fide Satanists, which of course themselves developed as a knee-jerk opposition to Christian domination. I think it was one of those "strange but true" real-life supernatural shows when I was a kid, but apparently there have been Satanic lairs uncovered in places like Paris. One of them had like hundreds of baby skulls set into the walls around the alter, and is probably the inspiration for tales that Satanists are still abducting and killing babies today. You look at some of that stuff and it's pretty easy to see where the whole school of "The Witch Hunters were right" dark-fantasy fiction comes from, especially when it's set decades, or centuries before things like what happened in Salem.
At any rate, if you like the game otherwise, I wouldn't freak out about that aspect of things. The point is simply there is another side to it, and it's a work of fantasy. I doubt the game is trying to say the Salem Witch Trials were actually justified, but as far as fantasy goes (people have used that as a horror story with real witches), why not? It's no worse than a movie some guys made about "what if George Washington was a seriel killer".
