Oooh, that sounds fantastic! I'll get in touch soon (sometime in September) once I'm ready for branding.
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Well, I would hope that it's fairly self-evident that the way, e.g., Robert E. Howard wrote about and portrayed Black people in his fiction (in the Conan stories and elsewhere) was pretty terrible, and unfortunately you don't need to dig all that deep to see it. Which is not to say you shouldn't read or enjoy Conan - Saunders certainly did both! - only that it's a notable flaw, and one he shared with a lot of his contemporaries and followers, including folks in the fantasy game hobby.
As far as where to start for alternative views, I began my own research for this with the Wikipedia article on Abyssinia and followed several rabbit holes from there, including some dives into the specific history and folklore of Ethiopia and Eritrea. But even more relevant is probably the work of the Sword and Soul writers, which I would take as a pretty clear picture from POC of how they'd like to see themselves depicted in adventure fiction. Imaro itself is a great read; if you want a sampler of what the field looks like more recently, there's an anthology called Griots (which I confess I haven't read yet, but comes highly recommended) that also got a follow-up volume a few years later, where you can find the work of the major voices in the genre. There's a lot out there, and it's very cool!
The link to hi-res logos on https://www.dieheart.net/the-black-hack-resources/ leads to an Access Denied folder on Google Docs. Is there an updated place to get logos for The Black Hack?
Hi Cats! Thank you so much for your kind words. Yeah, I was definitely feeling the pinch of the space limits by the time I got to the end of it, and resigned myself to doing the best I could with painting in broad strokes; there was also some additional detail in the encounter tables that I wound up cutting for the same reason. So it goes. Working within the limitations of the jam was a great challenge, though!
An expanded version sounds like a very cool idea, and I'll definitely put some thought into what that might look like, and maybe add it as a tier at some point. After I get some of these other projects off my plate, of course....















