Racial Holy War

This article covers a topic that, by its very nature, is a magnet for flamewars. Try not to get too assmad at what you're about to read.

This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

For those whose Klansman's Hoods are on backward (and also /pol/) also blatantly stolen imagery from the 1977 movie The Hills Have Eyes a much better piece of fiction.

"I don't know whether to give it to a scientist to examine or a priest to exorcise!"

– Nostalgia Critic (regarding the Garbage Pail Kids movie, but it works here too)

Saying that this game should be burned at the stake is an insult to firewood. Defecating on this game would be an insult to the fecal matter. Veterans of 1d4chan and /tg/ in general will notice that when we tend to review and, more commonly, openly make fun of shitty RPGs, we still tend to discuss what positive features they have, if any; for example, Ironclaw maybe sort of fail, but it works fine once the furries are removed from the setting. Conversely, you have settings that have few directly appreciable features, but are so eminently mockable that one can't help but get a chuckle out of it. Poison'd and references to Esophagus-fucking may be a great example of this phenomenon, though the ur-example and trope codifier remains FATAL, which for all of its hideously broken design, is a fucking singularity of humor that allows for borderline-infinite mockery (especially the second edition, where the racist/sexist jokes are toned down to reasonable levels). Anal circumference alone has led to countless lulz on /tg/ and beyond.

And then you have Racial Holy War, also known as RaHoWa, which has none of these redeeming features.

It is below contempt, even if you're not racially/ethnically sensitive or even approve of racism altogether. It is not an RPG you can really make fun of for laughs because of its complete idiocy - everything about it is just devoid of humor. It somehow manages to out-do FATAL as being the worst RPG made, because whilst FATAL may be completely defunct mechanically, FATAL at least can, like a shitty movie being MST3Ked, get a laugh out of someone for being that broken and having ideas that stupid and actually having all its necessary mechanics, even things that are so bad it goes below "so bad it's good" to "straight-up terrible" can be mocked for amusement. This thing doesn't even have that. Out-doing FATAL in badness is an achievement in and of itself, but RaHoWa takes it to the nth degree.

Putting it simply: RaHoWa is a White Supremacist RPG, an RPG that is made by - and for - the sort of people who cherry-picked the worst of Hitler's short-lived ideals and still buy into the whole concept of "Whites are the best because we're white and our god told us we are" (essentially adding God to the "Manifest Destiny" philosophy, even though it contradicts Biblical teachings). It's a ridiculous attempt to lionize this belief as a form of propaganda - in RPG format, of course - and as demonstrated below, it pretty much fails at even that. Its concept and setting are beyond /tg/'s ability to make ostensibly humorous via mockery. It is broken ruleset-wise - because of course it is - but the fact that it adds a dimension of glorifying a mindset that is all too happy to grab humanitarian ideals by their proverbial ankles and drag them, screaming, to the Lovecraftian depths is what pushes it over the pale.

Seriously, this game goes out the back end of cringe-territory and into the realm of shocked, solemn silence. FATAL, for all its many failings, has humour in its shock value; RaHoWa has none of that. It is in that EXACT location where it's legitimately unfun to play and offensive in a non-entertaining fashion - since it doesn't even have rules at all, impressively outdoing two of the worst RPGs ever to squarely sit in the bottom of the shit pile. It's almost too stupid to be offensive, almost too pathetic to hate, and too disgusting to pity.

Premise

The synopsis of RaHoWa is that in the not-so-distant future, the world is on the edge of collapse, and it's all the doing of the evil non-white races and their insidious Jewish masterminds, having reduced the superior white race to a downtrodden minority. Fortunately for the world (but not for our sanity), a team of brave White Warriors (read: The Players) emerges in the hopes of "cleansing the world of all the vermin" (yes, this is an actual quote from the game).

Throw in such great missions as "destroying a drug cartel run by awful latrinos," and you have a strong case for this being the only RPG in history that makes FATAL look slightly better by comparison; that's right. Yes, folks, the bar has once again been lowered with the force of a tactical nuke several tactical nukes every conceivable weapon that exists.

Mechanics

When you open with a premise of blind racial genocide on the premise of "muh racial superiority", the only direction you have to go is straight down, unless your game is saved by a relatively decent ruleset that can still be fun to use in some way, making it infamously memorable. Unfortunately for RaHoWa and fortunately for us, RaHoWa fails just as much at being an actual RPG. In fact, just classifying it as an RPG is a grave blasphemy to the legacy of the genre in general; even FATAL has a remotely functional dice system, inane and stupid as it is.

Character creation is a relatively boring affair, with a similar points-based attribute system to most RPGs - the problem is that what these attributes actually do is only mentioned in passing, if at all. From there, you choose a class and the skills of your choice, which include Clothesmaking (suggested uses for it include making swastika shirts), Video games, and Holy Books of Creativity, the latter of which involves "the study and enlightenment of the greatest books ever written - Nature’s Eternal Religion and The White Man’s Bible", which somehow manage to heal the White Warriors by "soothing and inspiring them". You can even heal yourself by giving yourself a speech!

For the combat part, you only have 3 generic weapons: a handgun, assault rifle, and shotgun. From here, you can pretty much see how downhill things go for combat: weapon selection is so god damn basic that there's no fun to be had in variety. But all this is nothing compared to the biggest problem of all that pretty much breaks the game in half - weapons themselves have no rules or stats, and there's not even a rule that explains how to calculate a player's base accuracy. This makes it essentially unplayable, as there is no way to tell whether or not your attacks hit an enemy. because of this you can only assume that your weapons are actually imaginary guns that you attempt to materialize by making gunshot sounds with your mouth and positioning your hands like you're holding a gun, which would explain more how you're unable to hit anything at all. While these specific issues were corrected in a later edition, it is by no means sufficient to salvage this noxious dumpster fire of a game.

Although the mental image of the last hope of the "White Empire" being completely incapable of fighting even the weakest enemies is certainly hilarious, it also makes it abundantly clear that the writers simply didn't care enough to even check if their game was complete before printing it out. One wonders if the authors involved with the creation of this game even played a single RPG before trying to make their own.

Enemies

As one last bit of flaming stupidity, the game takes pleasure in categorizing enemy NPCs into racial stereotypes and naming them with racial slurs, each with their own special attack. It isn't even good if taken as a joke; it is completely devoid of any comedic material for even the most ethnically offensive comedian to use. It also makes whites the weakest race in the game, since they are the only ones that don't get a special attack, with the only plausible excuse being that whites being a "master race" have no need for special attacks. The explanation for these special attacks also make it clear that the writer was more interested in pushing his racist worldviews than making the game playable.

• Niggers: "Smelly, stupid creatures" which can reduce PCs' accuracy via their body odor. Moreover, because of the aforementioned lack of any way to calculate accuracy, it's essentially devoid of function.
• Latrinos: "Lazy and criminal vermin" with the ability to strike first in combat. Also, yes, the book consistently calls them "Latrinos".
• Sand Niggers: "Scumbags" that have "declared the White Race as one of their many enemies in their 'Jihad' or holy war" which can try to blow themselves up to attack.
• Gooks: "Timid, annoying, slanty-eyed pieces of excrement that so desperately wish they were White" (never heard of Weeaboos, eh?) which can gain extra attacks in hand-to-hand combat from watching "fake martial arts movies", which makes you wonder how they would gain extra attacks if the movies are fake.
• Kikes: "The worst and most evil parasites that the world has ever seen" who can bribe the PCs with jewgold to skip their turn, courtesy of the power of "brain pollution". (Which, paradoxically, pretty much destroys the premise of the White Warriors as "superior" beings and more of them being hypocritical race traitors who sold their race for money, made even worse by the fact that you don't actually gain any money when this happens, implying that you were dumb enough to skip your turn on the mere promise of money. As we've said previously, these people have the fluff-writing skills that would make the likes of Matt Ward and C.S. Goto seem like Dan Abnett in comparison.)

Creator

Many neckbeards and fa/tg/irls may ask themselves: who the fuck created this mess?

The creator is a lesser-known (thank the Emperor) racist priest of an obscure white supremacist cult calling itself the "Creativity Movement", which just happens to have the idea of a "Racial Holy War" as a part of its doctrines, and even uses the same abbreviation of "RaHoWa" for it (hence the ranting about the Holy Book of Creativity, their equivalent of the Bible). Said priest is a "game" creator and lobotomy recipient (that's an insult to lobotomy patients, plus a lobotomy might make him smarter) known as Reverend Kenneth Molyneux. No, not that Molyneux or that Molyneux.

His "works", if you can even call it that, consist of RaHoWa, a shitty blog, and his hilariously exaggerated to the point of vomit-inducement white supremacy fapfic known as "White Empire", which features a Gary Stu self-insert, wannabe Punisher, and Tom-Cruise-in-Top-Gun-ripoff known as "John Granger". Granger neutron bombs simple African villages, wasting enormous resources to blow up a bunch of tribals in loincloths. Then he loses a friend to a Jewish suicide bomber(???), tries to avenge him by infiltrating an underground race-mixing disco, and fails spectacularly: even his Gary Stu insert fails to prevent more deaths and suddenly quits the intelligence agency he just was vetted and taken in a single mission. Then he joins the extermination of the Chinese in an Asian campaign and kills some Jewish nuclear combat engineers on the Asian side. The story then ends abruptly as the next generation of children go around LARP'ing King Arthur's knights and the world celebrates victory. And the capital city of the empire is... Klassengrad. Yes, as in Russian; the author is naming the city after Ben Klassen, who was a Ukrainian escapee from the mainly-Russian Red Terror. You know, someone who would not exactly be liked at all by 1940s Nazis, but we get ahead of ourselves here.

Oh, also men of the White Empire are vegan, eat fruits, raw vegetables and nuts, work out like fuck, admire each other's manly skills and muscles and assets, while women are in the back as childmakers. Make of that what you will.

The Creativity Movement

Molyneux's cult is, if anything, at least as bonkers as Molyneux himself. Founded by Ukrainian immigrant and former Florida state legislator Ben Klassen as the Church of the Creator (later the World Church of the Creator), it distinguished itself from the average hate group by disavowing Christianity as being invented by the Jews to oppress white people, and generally made a nuisance of itself in the small North Carolina town it established itself in. Following Klassen's suicide (to avoid a lawsuit brought on by the family of a black Gulf War veteran murdered by one of his followers) and several further lawsuits, the World Church of the Creator's new leader Matt Hale quickly got himself embroiled in a lawsuit with an actual church over the organization's name - which it lost.

In a stunning show of bad judgment, Hale then attempted to solicit the murder of the judge presiding over the lawsuit, only to be arrested when his chief of security was revealed to be an FBI informant, and sentenced to 40 years in the Florence, Colorado Supermax prison. Said prison is infamous for holding folks like the Unabomber, El Chapo Guzman terrorists of all creeds, inmates who escape repeatedly, mob bosses, drug lords, serial killers, prisoners who murdered in prison, pedo cult leaders and assorted other worst of the worst for whom the 23-hour solitary confinement every day seems to be too light of a sentence. The feds had been keeping a close eye on him ever since one of his top subordinates went on a racially-motivated shooting rampage in 1999, and linked the group to several other murders and attempted bombings.

You might be wondering what the details of this religion they invented for themselves might be. Well, it's basically "White people are the most creative race, which somehow means that the others don't deserve to live". Yes, that's literally it. No gods, no metaphysics, no myths, no nothing. And yet they have the nerve to try and pass this singular idea off as a fully-fledged religion.

So in Conclusion...

Racial Holy War is a perfect example of something so terribly awful it can't even be used as an example of how not to do something. If you desperately want to lose friends, there is no sure faster way than presenting this to them and going on about what a great idea you think it is. About the only good thing to come out of it is some horrible jokes that it's about as close as one can get to a Pen-and-Paper version of /pol/, and even that's debatable. While FATAL can at least be delivered to one's roleplay group as some sort of sadistic April Fools joke due to its inscrutable mechanics and depth of sexual depravity, Racial Holy War truly has no redeemable qualities whatsoever. Its only function is poorly written propaganda that ought to remain hidden somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle, with its unfunny racial stereotypes, broken mechanics and incomprehensible fluff accessible only by those too stupid to live.

TL;DR - A nutty game made by an equally unhinged hate group, it doesn't make sense as a game because it's designed to be recruitment material, and fails horribly at both.

External Links

• [1] A review of RaHoWa.
• PDF of Racial Holy War. Best played in between cross-burnings.
• [2] The author's shitty blog, for those of you with morbid curiosity.
• [3] The Southern Poverty Law Center's profile of the Creativity Movement, for those of you who wish to learn the group's sordid history in full.