Line #18 TabletopGame/RacialHolyWar


1	[[quoteright:188:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rahowa.jpg]]
2	[[caption-width-right:188:Yes, they stole the cover from ''Film/TheHillsHaveEyes1977''.]]
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5	''Racial Holy War'', often referred to as ''[=RaHoWa=]'', is a tabletop game by Reverend Kenneth Molyneaux, a "priest" for a White Supremacist cult called the Church of the Creator, a.k.a. the Creativity Movement, whose content is exactly what you might expect from such a person. The setting is TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture, where society is on the verge of collapse thanks to the sinister Jewish Illuminati. White people have been reduced to a tiny, oppressed minority as other races' populations grow out of control. The players control a cell of "White Warriors" on a self-appointed mission to "cleanse the vermin" and "bring about a glorious White Empire."
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7	On top of its incredibly racist subject matter, ''[=RaHoWa=]'' is also infamous for its incomplete manual and gameplay mechanics that are muddled and half-baked at best and completely nonsensical at worst, requiring players to fill in the missing pieces. There is, for example, no way to calculate base accuracy with firearms, nor stats for weapons. This is not a small problem, as the game is centered around ranged combat, with only one class capable of melee without buying the skill separately. There's even two pages describing what weapon stats are and mean, and still none are provided until a correction was printed.
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9	Mechanically, a character starts with a hundred points to spread across eight attributes (max of 30) and a thousand credits for gear. There are eight classes (Gladiator, Leader, Soldier, Scholar, Sniper, Hero, Athlete and Medic) each providing a special bonus and a few stat bonuses, plus two skills. The player chooses two further skills. Each time the PC levels, they get 100 points that can be spent thus: 50 points to learn a new skill, 20 to level an old one (each skill has five levels, cannot raise by more than one at a time) 20 points to buff a base stat by 1 (almost worthless, each stat has a skill that raises it by more) 5 points can be spent to raise HP by 1, and points can be converted to in-game money at a 1:5 ratio, so 500 credits if you dump the whole level into cash.
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11	Other features include a punishing encumbrance mechanic and guns that also gain experience and level, gaining bonus damage and accuracy, as well as "gun speed" (initiative) bonuses. Then there's the "fun" of racist caricature enemies and suggested missions like assassinating celebrities or busting cartels.
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13	Compare with its literary equivalent, ''Literature/TheTurnerDiaries''. Also see its video game equivalent, ''VideoGame/EthnicCleansing''.
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15	!!Tropes:
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17	* AbsoluteXenophobe: The players, their allies, the writers, and probably the publishers, seeing as they want to wipe out Jews and non-white people
18	* AllAsiansKnowMartialArts: Asians get to attack multiple times in hand-to-hand combat as their racial power, due to [[IKnowMortalKombat watching "fake martial arts movies"]].
19	* AncientConspiracy: The Jewish Illuminati have manipulated the earth for sinister gains throughout history.
20	* TheCartel: The manual proposes "destroying a drug cartel run by awful latrinos" as an example gameplay scenario.
21	* CharacterCustomization: The stats and skills and classes are all bland and interchangeable, but the players are encouraged to write a character description as detailed as they can make.
22	* ChurchMilitant: The Arab class of enemies have "declared the White Race as one of their many enemies in their 'Jihad' or holy war". Which is [[{{Hypocrite}} quite rich]] considering the game's title and premise.
23	* CombatMedic: The Medic class, appropriately enough, is said to be skilled in the healing arts. Somewhat strangely, he does so not with medical skills or first aid kits, but by reading from the "Holy Books of Creativity", racist tracts which "soothe and inspire the soul."
24	* CoversAlwaysLie: Blatantly stolen from ''Film/TheHillsHaveEyes1977''; since it didn't erase certain parts of the poster, the cover accidentally ends up claiming that Rev. [[TyopOnTheCover Molynaeux]] directed ''Film/ANightmareOnElmStreet'' and ''Film/{{Scream}}'', that it's a DVD, and that Entertainment Weekly gave it a positive review, none of which is true. It's worth noting that the man on the cover is one of the mutants from the movie, played by Creator/MichaelBerryman, a genuinely disabled actor; you know, the kind that Nazis would have declared ''untermenschen'' and sent to the gas chambers.
25	* Fiction500: All Jews can bribe players for turn skips as much as they want, and will never run out of money. Of course, the bribed player doesn't ''get'' any money, so one has to assume the Jews are waving around Monopoly money and the players are falling for it.
26	* GameMaster: Is called the "Warmaster" in the rulebook. [[TabletopGame/Warhammer40000 No relation]] presumably.
27	* GreedyJew: Jews are rich enough to bribe players to skip their turn.
28	* HandWave: The manual explains that White Warriors fall for the {{Greedy Jew}}s' bribery due to "brain pollution".
29	* HyperactiveMetabolism: Eating food recovers your White Warrior's health. This can even be done in the middle of combat, during the same phase as the enemy's SpecialAttack.
30	* IKnowMortalKombat:
31	** Increasing the Video Games skill increases a character's Dexterity score.
32	** Asian enemies have obtained real martial art skills through watching movies.
33	* InsistentTerminology: The game manual never refers to minorities except in racial epithets. Except Latinos, who get the new one, "[[ToiletHumor latrino]]".
34	* MasterRace: The players are supposedly the last hope of the glorious white empire.
35	* MiddleEasternTerrorists: Middle Eastern enemies are said to be Islamic Jihadists, with their religious fanaticism pushing them to martyr themselves in a SuicideAttack.
36	* NoHonorAmongThieves: The players are there to massacre everyone who doesn't look like them... and will happily sell out their fellow warriors (skipping their turn) if it means getting their hands on some 'jewgold'.
37	* PersecutionFlip: The game's backstory is that white populations have been outnumbered by non-white people, leaving the "White Warriors" as an oppressed minority. The intended reading isn't to make a point about how much racial persecution sucks, but rather that those minorities should be wiped out to stop this scenario from happening in the first place.
38	* PointBuildSystem: The game has one of these, where levelling up gives a variety of points to improve skills as the player wishes.
39	* PoliticallyIncorrectHero: For a given value of "hero", considering that players play murderous white supremacists. The game ''tries'' to portray this virulent bigotry as a good thing.
40	* RightWingMilitiaFanatic: The player characters are gun-wielding neo-Nazis fighting to stop a government conspiracy to wipe out the white race.
41	* RousingSpeech: The Rouse skill allows you to give an inspiring monologue to ''yourself'', restoring health.
42	* SlidingScaleOfTurnRealism: Pretty far from the "realistic" end. Every turn involves a Rouse/inspire phase, followed by an intimidation phase to see if one side or another is frightened into fleeing, thus ending combat, though their defense drops to zero and the remaining party gets a free round to fire at their backs. Then special attacks are counted, then initiative decided and only then does anyone roll to hit.
43	* StrawCharacter: Every character in the game is either a one-dimensional murderous white supremacist (the [=PCs=] and their allies) or a one-dimensional offensive stereotype (everyone else). There are no named characters in the entire sourcebook.
44	* StrawmanNewsMedia: The news is all controlled by the Jews, don'tchaknow.
45	* SubParSupremacist: The game unintentionally depicts the race it's trying to build up as superior to all others as pathetic underdogs, by both being being a nearly stamped out minority, and [[WeaksauceWeakness easily falling victim]] to other races' traits like body odor and bribery.
46	* SuicideAttack: The special attack of the Arab class of enemies is [[ActionBomb blowing themselves up]]. ''Of course.''
47	* TyopOnTheCover: The cover image, on top of being plagiarized from ''Film/TheHillsHaveEyes1977'', misspells Kenneth Molyneaux's last name as "Molynaeux".
48	* ViceCity: While the setting is only lightly described, what little there is paints it as a world where non-white people engage in rampant violence and crime.
49	* WeaponizedStench: When fighting black people, their body odor has a chance to reduce your character's accuracy. Because the game is missing crucial rules, however, the values that are modified by this effect are unknown.

Context TabletopGame / RacialHolyWar