If the players don’t find the material objectionable, then I think you don’t really have a troublesome element in the same way. (You might want to be careful where you talked about the campaign, but you don’t have a conflict between the players’ attitudes and the historical realities of the setting.)
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I’ve always found historical settings troubling for this and many other reasons. I’m not a historian; I cannot accurately render a historical setting. Any attempt I make is likely to be wrought with inconsistent historicity and fantasy- further making me liable, I feel, for any elements that are insensitive to modern cultural, ethical and moral standards.
That said, I’m very interested in how people have dealt with these issues and will be following along with this thread to better inform any future games I run.
Well, two things to say about that:
- Research! For example, when I ran Salle d’Armes, a 6-month mini campaign, I had the following reading list:
Behrens, C. B. A., Society, Government and the Enlightenment: The Experiences of Eighteenth-Century France and Prussia (Thames and Hudson, 1985)
Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century , translated by Siân Reynolds (Harper & Row, 1982).
Craveri, Benedetta, The Age of Conversation (New York Review of Books, 2005)
Ekelund, Robert B., Jr., and Tollison, Robert D., Politicized Economies: Monarchy, Monopoly, and Mercantilism (Texas A&M University Press, 1997)
Hardy, James D., Judicial Politics in the Old Regime: The Parlement of Paris during the Regency (Louisiana State University Press, 1967)
Le Roy Ladurie, Emmanuel, with the collaboration of Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV , translated by Arthur Goldhammer (University of Chicago Press, 2001)
Lewis, Gwynne, France 1715–1804: Power and the People (Pearson Education Limited, 2004)
Lewis, W. H., The Scandalous Regent (Andre Deutsch, 1961) [the single most useful book on the list!]
Lynn, John A., Giant of the Grand Siècle : The French Army, 1610–1715 (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
Vidal, Mary, Watteau’s Painted Conversations (Yale University Press, 1992)
I also read Wikipedia on the organizational structure of the French government (where legislative powers vested in the king or the regent, executive powers in the ministries, and judicial powers in the parlements).
[Let me add that this is why, when C and I started shopping for a new place to live, one of my requirements was access to a university library.]
- I’m not wholly an adherent of modern standards. There are some that I do hold; there are others where I prefer the values of one or another past era; there are others where I favor values that are not yet being lived by anywhere on Earth, though I may hope that someday they will be. I don’t consider a campaign an excuse to preach my own beliefs, but if my players sign up for a campaign in a setting that goes against contemporary beliefs, I expect them to cope.
(When I was in my early teens, I read a Heinlein novel whose epigraph was a quotation from Bernard Shaw: “Pardon him, Theodotus. He is a barbarian, and thinks the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.” That helped give me a taste for cultural estrangement, which is one of the things I seek out in books I read, and is also one of the things I try to offer my players.)
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Roleplaying oppression and power dynamics of any given nature (whether that’s roleplaying a slave owner from 1802 or a police officer right now) must be done with sensitivity, care, and the consent of everybody involved. I have been a victim of bigotry during role playing games because the correct care wasn’t taken by other people involved. I am going to assume it isn’t controversial to say “D&D races are a racist portrayal of races”, but to continue that; the way gender is assigned to them came up during our game. A friend of mine chimed in “How do you know it’s a male ork?” which was immediately met with a comment that was transphobic (in reply to a trans person, mind you).
If everybody consents to a world where certain bigotries are socially accepted in that world, or where certain types of people -be they people who are queer, black, mentally disabled- then for those players, that is fine. Those settings are inherently bigoted, but I enjoy the game Puerto Rico. It is racist. It glorifies colonialism. I can choose ignore that because I am not a victim of that form of oppression. It makes me uncomfortable, but to be completely real; mechanically it is real good. Heck, I consented to be a part of a world where there are certain races and classes that are oppressed and that’s just “The way things are”.
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As a white male in the US, I am unqualified to discuss racism, sexism or any other prejudice at any length; however, given the chance, I would certainly embrace the opportunity to play a game set in a realistic depiction of a historical setting that included an accurate representation of the societal injustices of the past as a way to explore the topic and further understand it.
That said, it absolutely requires consent of all parties and that would be a difficult discussion and question, for me, to pose at the outset of a game. I’m curious what thoughts people have about how to go about that, especially where one of the players may feel pressured to agreeing with something they are uncomfortable with.
When I ran my horror campaign about black people in 1930s New Orleans, it was one on a list of maybe a dozen possible campaigns that I circulated among my players. That list described the crucial points of the campaign, including the ethnicity of the player characters, the place and period, and the use of black folklore as a major source of supernatural horror content; no one was uninformed. Those who didn’t indicate that they were prepared to play didn’t become players in that campaign; in fact, all the players bid at least 2 points toward it (for N campaigns, I give prospective players 2N points, which means that 2 points is an average response, 1 is “just barely,” and 0 is “no way, no how”)—in fact I’m pretty sure that they all gave it at least 3 points. Players were free to fill out their prospectuses in complete privacy, so there was very little way for them to be pressured directly; and players who gave that campaign a low rating, or another campaign a higher one, ended up in the other campaign—in this case, either a campaign based on DC comics or one set in the world of Space 1889—so they weren’t indirectly pressured by “play this or nothing.”
I’m very hard core about individual consent, in the real world as well as in gaming, and that’s one reason I follow the (apparently somewhat unusual) approach of not having a fixed player group where everyone plays the same campaign, or sits out.
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Fixed player groups are mostly unusual because they’re a luxury, rather than because they’re not desirable for that and other reasons. Many people who don’t have a fixed player group would rather like to have one. 
What I have is only an impression; its main source is that I’ve described my approach, which precludes fixed groups, elsewhere, and had a lot of people react to it as unusual, and conversely, I’ve seen people talk about being prevented from running something they’d like to run because they have only a set group of players, and can’t run anything that doesn’t have the approval of that group. That’s given me the impression that fixed groups are the usual thing. So I’m surprised to see you seeming to say that they’re not common. Why do you think they’re not, and what do you think most people have instead? Or am I misunderstanding you?
In thinking about how I’d answer this, I realised that I can only recall two “pure historical” RPG sessions I’ve ever played in the past 38 years of gaming. I can’t think of any “pure modern” games. All the others were “historical/modern plus X”, where X can be Cthulhoid entities, vampires, orcs, wizards, superpowers, ghosts, alien invaders, Skynet, non-extinct dinosaurs, kaiju, dragons or whatever.
So all if those Historical plus X settings contain problematic material, and try to ignore it or justify it they immediately run into… Because. Dragons.
If your setting has dragons (or Cthulhu/vampires/orcs/etc) then it ain’t our world. So if the RPG writers or the GM have child brides or racism or misogyny or homophobia “because it was really like that in the Middle Ages”, then they are making a conscious choice to include that problematic topic.
If the aim of the game is to explore the problematic topic (like Roger’s all-female party in the 1930s game), then I’m okay with that.
If the problematic stuff is reduced to “flavour text” I’m not happy. For instance, a good friend of mine wanted to playtest a con game with a steampunks on Mars type setting. One of the pre-gens he offered me had a backstory which said she was an escaped concubine from Lord So-and-so’s harem. I told him I didn’t want to RP an ex-sex slave, especially in a light and pulpy setting. It was clear that the GM had never equated ‘escaped concubine’ with ‘rape victim’.
It also irks me when full scope of the real world downsides of the problematic issue is not addressed in the setting. For instance the child marriages. There’s a horrific/tearjerking bit in trauma surgeon David Nott’s War Doctor book, describing what happens when you impregnate young girls who do not have a pelvis big enough for a baby’s head to pass through it. He called it the most horrific experience a surgeon or mother-to-be will ever go through. Even with modern medical intervention, many of these girls die. So much for the necessary Heir to the Kingdom!
Or for older girls (early teens) there was a Channel 4 documentary about all the ones who were old enough to physically give birth, but didn’t have fully adult bodies. So the process damaged their uterus and/or bladder. They became incontinent for life and were shunned by their families and husbands. These girls get written out of the “but they did it in the Middle Ages” version of gaming and fantasy novels.
However, total erasure of the problematic stuff, can be even more problematic. I have vague memories of an RPG in which the Americas had no indigenous Native Americans. IIRC instead there were dragons and fantasy races. (I never saw a physical copy of the game, only an online ad for it). Pretending an entire raft of peoples and cultures just doesn’t exist is racism dialled up to 11!
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There’s a series of novels like that - Pat Wrede’s Frontier Magic series. (No sapient races in North America, but lots of magical monsters.) I’m quite sure it was not her intention to be racist (indeed, she may have wanted to tell a story about American pioneers while removing the conflict with the locals that would be very hard to write well now), but however good the intentions that’s what you get at the end.
I’d say there’s definitely a case for removing problematic content from historical settings if it negatively impacts a player’s enjoyment. Not in the sense of removing an entire race of people so they don’t have to feel guilty when they’re running about as a cowboy. Or white people uncomfortable with the fact that slavery was a thing that their ancestors participated in.
But if a player doesn’t want racism, sexism, homophobia, child abuse, etc in a game because it’s something they have to deal with in real life? I think to do otherwise and say “this game isn’t for you” is just as bad. To say to someone “it’s more important to have historically accurate bigotry in my game than to have you playing in it”. (Especially if that game has other ahistorical elements in it like magic, monsters, etc.)
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For a long time, many writers of Tolkienesque fantasy games said “there are no nonwhite people in the game art because there weren’t any in mediaeval Europe”. Now that we have all pointed out repeatedly that this was not the case (also not a lot of dragons in mediaeval Europe), they’ve started to shut up a bit.
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I actually found out about Romance of the Perilous Land because of the uproar from racist dickheads (particularly a former black metal musician) that it depicted non-white people in ancient Britain.
This isn’t erasure, though. Removing it from the society entirely is creating a fantasy setting, a world where we don’t have these issues.
Pretending it’s a historically accurate piece is the problem.