Racial Holy War, often referred to as RaHoWa, is a tabletop game by Reverend Molyneux, 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 a 20 Minutes into the Future society on the verge of collapse thanks to the sinister Jewish Illuminati and the growth of minorities to the point where Caucasians have become the hated and oppressed minority. The players control a cell of "White Warriors" on a self-appointed mission to "cleanse the vermin" and "bring about a glorious White Empire."
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.
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.
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.
Compare with its literary equivalent, The Turner Diaries. Also see its video game equivalent, Ethnic Cleansing.
Tropes:
- Absolute Xenophobe: The players, their allies, the writers, and probably the publishers, seeing as they want to wipe out Jews and non-white people
- All Asians Know Martial Arts: Asians get to attack multiple times in hand-to-hand combat as their racial power, due to watching "fake martial arts movies".
- Ancient Conspiracy: The Jewish Illuminati have manipulated the earth for sinister gains throughout history.
- Character Customization: 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.
- Church Militant: The Arab class of enemies have "declared the White Race as one of their many enemies in their 'Jihad' or holy war". Which is quite rich considering the game's title and premise.
- Combat Medic: The Medic class, appropriately enough. Somewhat stranger, he does so not with medical skills or first aid kits, but by reading from the "Holy Books of Creativity" which "soothe and inspire the soul." These being highly racist tracts.
- Covers Always Lie: Blatantly stolen from The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It's worth noting that the man on the cover is one of the mutants from the movie, played by a genuinely disabled actor; you know, the kind that Nazis would have declared untermenschen and sent to the gas chambers.
- Fiction 500: 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.
- Game Master: Is called the "Warmaster" in the rulebook. No relation presumably.
- Greedy Jew: Jews are rich enough to bribe players to skip their turn.
- Hand Wave: The manual explains that White Warriors fall for the Greedy Jews' bribery due to "brain pollution".
- I Know Mortal Kombat:
- Increasing the Video Games skill increases a character's Dexterity score.
- Asian enemies have obtained real martial art skills through watching movies.
- Insistent Terminology: The game never refers to minorities except in racial epithets. Except Latinos, who get the new one, "latrino".
- Master Race: The players are supposedly the last hope of the glorious white empire.
- No Honor Among Thieves: 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'.
- Point Build System: The game has one of these, where levelling up gives a variety of points to improve skills as the player wishes.
- Politically Incorrect Hero: For a given value of "hero", considering that players play murderous white supremacists.
- Right-Wing Militia Fanatic: The players fill this role in the game.
- Rousing Speech: The Rouse skill allows you to give an inspiring monologue to yourself.
- Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: 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.
- Straw Character: 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.
- Strawman News Media: The news is all controlled by the Jews, don'tchaknow.
- Sub-Par Supremacist: 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 easily falling victim to other races' traits like body odor and bribery.
- Suicide Attack: The special attack of the Arab class of enemies is blowing themselves up. Of course.
- Vice City: In so far as the setting is described, it's this.
- Weaponized Stench: 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.
