Gender Roles and Warhammer

[rycro]

I ran into an interesting dilemma while running a WFRP game. A source book I own clearly states that the physicians guild is male only. However, I have found almost no other examples of that kind of discrimination in the Empire. In fact, the entry for the knight career clearly states both men and women can become them, something that would be

Comments

[rycro]

A few additional thoughts (I couldn't bother with an edit). Firstly, I re-read the knight entry, and I was mistaken. It doesn't specifically state that both women and men can be knights. However, it doesn't specifically say women can't be knights, either. In fact, most of the career section of the main book are left gender neutral.

In the MMO, both men and women can be knights, which is significant because there are classes in that game which can only be of one gender, such as the dark elf sorceress.

In any Warhammer based novels I've read, most characters view the idea of a female warrior as absurd and against the natural order.

Should I just write this off as a symptom of too many authors with differing views?

[kittysunlover]

Well... I don't think I know enough about Warhammer to be very definitive, but it sounds like you might have a case of "too many cooks." Maybe as far as your games go you should hammer out whatever seems reasonable to you, regardless of whether it seems to agree with the other authors or not, and just let your players know what you're doing and why. ^^;

[thairian]

I was kinda wondering about that myself. In a medieval grimdark setting, it's natural to assume women are shit on by any institution above Wench Academy. But then there was that female Road Warden. I don't know much about them, but it feels like the sort of career when a female would be looked down on for choosing. So I assumed the Empire was so hardcore, they didn't need gender inequality to crush people's lives. But then that didn't mesh right with "the Boy."

So ultimately, I'd say that the Physician's Guild is full of pricks (literally). Naturally there will be other places women aren't always welcomed (sailors will almost always be sailors), but life is too shitty to have it be everywhere.