Do We Still Need "Oriental Adventures"?

Orientalism -- a wide-ranging term originally used to encompass depictions of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and East Asian cultures -- has gradually come to represent a more negative term. Should Dungeons & Dragons, known for two well-received books titled "Oriental Adventures," have another edition dedicated to "Eastern" cultures?

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[h=3]A Brief History of Orientalism[/h]For a time, orientalism was a term used by art historians and literary scholars to group "Eastern" cultures together. That changed in 1978 with Edward Said's Orientalism, which argued that treatment of these cultures conflated peoples, times, and places into a narrative of incident and adventure in an exotic land.

It's easy to see why this approach might appeal to role-playing games. Orientalism is one lens to view a non-European culture within the game's context. We previously discussed how "othering" can create a mishmash of cultures, and it can apply to orientalism as well. The challenge is in how to portray a culture with nuance, and often one large region isn't enough to do the topic justice. The concept even applies to the idea of the "East" and the "Orient," which turns all of the Asian regions into one mono-culture. Wikipedia explains the term in that context:

The imperial conquest of "non–white" countries was intellectually justified with the fetishization of the Eastern world, which was effected with cultural generalizations that divided the peoples of the world into the artificial, binary-relationship of "The Eastern World and The Western World", the dichotomy which identified, designated, and subordinated the peoples of the Orient as the Other—as the non–European Self.

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Game designers -- who were often admitted fans of Asian cultures -- sought to introduce a new kind of fantasy into traditional Western tropes. Viewed through a modern lens, their approach would likely be different today.
[h=3]The "Oriental" Books in D&D[/h]The original Oriental Adventures was published in 1985 by co-creator of D&D Gary Gygax, David "Zeb" Cook and François Marcela-Froideval. It introduced the ninja, kensai, wu-jen, and shukenja as well as new takes on the barbarian and monk. It was also the first supplement to introduce non-weapn proficiencies, the precursor to D&D's skill system. The book was well-received, and was envisioned by Gygax as an opportunity to reinvigorate the line -- ambitions which collapsed when he left the company. The book's hardcover had the following text printed on the back:

…The mysterious and exotic Orient, land of spices and warlords, has at last opened her gates to the West.

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Aaron Trammell provides a detailed analysis of how problematic this one line of text is. The sum of his argument:

Although Gary Gygax envisioned a campaign setting that brought a multicultural dimension to Dungeons & Dragons, the reality is that by lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Philippine, and “Southeast Asian” lore he and co-authors David “Zeb” Cook and Francois Marcela-Froideval actually developed a campaign setting that reinforced western culture’s already racist understanding of the “Orient.”

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The next edition would shift the setting from Kara-Tur (which was later sent in the Forgotten Realms) to Rokugan from the Legend of the Five Rings role-playing game.
[h=3]Controversy of the Five Rings[/h]James Wyatt wrote the revised Oriental Adventures for Third Edition D&D, published by Wizards of the Coast in 2001. It was updated to 3.5 in Dragon Magazine #318.

Legend of the Five Rings, a franchise that extends to card games, is itself not immune to controversy. Quintin Smith got enough comments on his review of the Legend of the Five Rings card game that he included an appendix that looked critically at chanting phrases "banzai!" at conventions and some of the game's art:

Now, I have no idea if this is right or wrong, but I do know that chanting in Japanese at an event exclusively attended by white men and women made me feel a tiny bit weird. My usual headcheck for this is “How would I feel if I brought a Japanese-English friend to the event?” and my answer is “Even more weird.” Personally, I found the game’s cover art to be a little more questionable. I think it’s fantastic to have a fantasy world that draws on Asian conventions instead of Western ones. But in a game that almost exclusively depicts Asian men and women, don’t then put white people on the cover! It’s such a lovely piece of art. I just wish she looked a little bit less like a cosplayer.

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Perhaps in response to this criticism, Fantasy Flight Games removed the "banzai" chant as a bullet point from its web site. The page also features several pictures of past tournament winners, which provides some context as to who was shouting the chant.
[h=3]Fifth Edition and Diversity[/h]By the time the Fifth Edition of D&D was published, the game's approach to diverse peoples had changed. Indigo Boock on GeekGirlCon explains how:

Diversity is strength. The strongest adventuring party is the most diverse adventuring party. Try thinking about it in terms of classes—you have your healers, fighters, and magic users. Same goes for diversity. Different outlooks on life create more mobility and openness for different situations. Jeremy also explained that it was crucial that the art also reflected diversity, as did Art Director Kate Erwin. With this, they tried to make sure that there was a 50/50 split of people who identify as male and people who identify as female in the illustrations.

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Trammell points out how these changes are reflected in the art of the core rule books:

First, there are illustrations: an East Asian warlock, a female samurai, an Arabian princess, an Arab warrior, and a Moor in battle, to name a few. Then, there are mechanics: the Monk persists as a class replete with a spiritual connection to another world via the “ki” mechanic. Scimitars and blowguns are commonly available as weapons, and elephants are available for purchase as mounts for only 200 gold. Although all of these mechanics are presented with an earnest multiculturalist ethic of appreciation, this ethic often surreptitiously produces a problematic and fictitious exotic, Oriental figure. At this point, given the embrace of multiculturalism by the franchise, it seems that the system is designed to embrace the construction of Orientalist fictional worlds where the Orient and Occident mix, mingle, and wage war.

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A good first step is to understand the nuances of a region by exploring more than one culture there. Sean "S.M." Hill's "The Journey to..." series is a great place to start, particularly "Romance of the Three Kingdoms."

D&D has come a long way, but it still has some work to do if it plans to reflect the diversity of its modern player base and their cultures...which is why it seems unlikely we'll get another Oriental Adventures title.

Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, communicator, and a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. You can follow him at Patreon.

 

[Celebrim]

Unfortunately, it is starting to get clearer that this whole thing is permeated with some sort of guilt from something in the real world, applied haphazardly.

Honestly, I don't really care. I don't think it likely that there is any one single motivation behind it. I'm not a big fan of blanket statements about groups period, and I am certainly not altogether on either side in this debate because neither side is altogether on my side. There are some things however I'm altogether against, and the idea that it's more important to treat people like members of some statistically derived average than it is to treat them like people is one of them.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Many people, especially many Indigenous Australians, would say that "mistreatment" continues (eg incarceration rates, child removal rates, mortality and morbidity, just to pick up on some fairly straightforward indicators).

But if we reverse the idea of "villains on both sides" to "well-intentioned people on both side", Inga Clendinnen's book Dancing With Strangers could be a starting point. It also shows that you don't have to be aiming to commit massacres to contribute to the deaths of many thousands of people, and cultural devastation.

The personal moral character of Arthur Phillip is of only modest relevance in assessing the significance and moral standing of the colonisation process.


I'm an Australian and I teach some aspects of the colonisation of Australia at a university level. I think any adventure that deals with colonisation (whether along British Australian or some other lines) has the potential to be tricky, just as would - say - an adventure that tried to deal with other sorts of wrongdoing whose meaning and consequences still resonate in contemporary life. (I'm hesitant to give examples, but I'm sure you can think of some.)

That's not a reason not to do it. It just means you have to recognise that what you do might be controversial.

There is a reason to try and avoid casual racism, and to avoid treating events that are of great significance to some people in a trivial or frivolous fashion. But while sincerity helps here, it's not self-validating. I know some people who are participants in various social liberation movements who love the X-Men. But I'm sure there are others out there who think the X-Men comics and movies trivialise their struggles.

One way to go wrong is to project yourself in some fashion onto the other person/culture/history/experience you're trying to describe and engage with. "Orientalism" is a type of projection. Framing "the Orient" as "exotic" is one manifstation of the projection.

There would be similar sorts of things to be avoided in your hypothetical Australia adventure. (Unfortunately the standard D&D mechanics may not make it easy to avoid them, because they are designed around certain technologies - eg the use of steel weapons and armour - as the norm. That's not an issue in itself, but it can make it hard to smoothly integrate alternative technologies into the gameworld. The monk's wisdom bonus to AC lives in the margins of this issue.)


This is part of the problem.

There is a difference between something being foreign and something being "exoticised" in the fashion discussed in the OP. Exoticisation, in this context, is a type of projection. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't be a "Western/Occidental view" of anything - it would just be an account of that thing.

It's the projection that makes it racist.

Word Police! Do you have a good substitute for the word "Oriental"?

I don't. Asian is no good because it is World specific, our World. Eastern is no good because it implies that the World creator puts the Oriental cultures in the Eastern end of the map or in the far east, but some people draw maps where those cultures are in some other part of the World other than the east. Now I don't mean to be derogatory, but you just robbed us of a very useful word by labeling it "bad" or "racist". I could use a sentence such as "Adventures in a fantasy setting about cultures similar to Asian countries on the planet Earth" instead of using a title such as "Oriental Adventures" but that's awkward, don't you agree. Now just because some people have certain stereotypes that are associated with the use of the word "Oriental" does that mean you get to take away that word from everyone else, so they have to form awkward sentences to describe what they mean instead of that useful word?

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Honestly, I don't really care. I don't think it likely that there is any one single motivation behind it. I'm not a big fan of blanket statements about groups period, and I am certainly not altogether on either side in this debate because neither side is altogether on my side. There are some things however I'm altogether against, and the idea that it's more important to treat people like members of some statistically derived average than it is to treat them like people is one of them.

That's not the point, the point is we're are getting robbed of a very useful word to describe Asian cultures that is not World-specific or Region Specific. You think if we use the term "Eastern Adventures" you are assuming that every D&D World is going to have such cultures in the Eastern portion of their world map. Last I checked, Australia is also in the Far East, but it is a western culture, not an Eastern Culture. The Word Oriental is more exact and it doesn't mean places like Australia or New Zealand, those aren't Oriental Cultures.

 

[Plageman]

There's an aspect of this discussion that makes me wonder about how much background we bring in.

As a French RPG GM and player my cultural background is very different from the one of my fellow German, UK, Italian, Spanish, US RPG player. And we share the Western stereotype. So imagine how exciting and different the Eastern typed class and background seems to me. Would they look 'exotic' to me ? You can bet. Do I mean that to be racist or disrespectful ? Certainly not.

 

[Eltab]

Oh yes I'm suuuure that's your concern. -clip-

The problem with mounting a moral 'high horse' the height of a California Redwood is, you are so far away from the people you look down on that you can't really see anything about them.

The stereotypes and insults you casually threw at me ... defy description.

 

[Eltab]

On some level I am starting to think the very fact we are discussing this suggests a bias against 'Western' culture and history.

Welcome to the club.

 

[Celebrim]

That's not the point...

It's certainly a point.

As far as the impoverishing of language goes, you've heard me use the word "newspeak" several times in this thread. I'm totally on board the fact that too often these debates revolve around someone describing something in terms of a very slippery word with no obvious meaning and coloring the debate in those terms, or else repurposing a word that did have a specific meaning to some other sort of meaning in order to shock and provoke rather than clarify. There are a ton of terms out there that are more or less useless because in the mouths of those that use them, they mean only what they want the word to mean in that situation. In other words, we are often having this argument:

"I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."

- Alice in Wonderland

The first person I blocked at EnWorld I blocked because they only ever engaged in Humpty Dumpty arguments, and always preferred slippery hard to define words often invented for the context over any sort of plain speaking. But this sort of problem is widespread, and occurs with all sorts of political words and politically correct words like "conservative", "liberal", "socialist", "capitalist", "fascist", "privilege", "identity", "rights" and so forth were the speaker will use the same word to mean both something and also the opposite of that thing, often in the same argument. Both sides do this, often with their own tribal version of the word and tribal sets of definitions. So sure, we are being robbed of all sorts of useful words all the time, often I think maliciously.

But in the case of "Orient" and "Oriental", I find your statements a little weird because "Orient" is mostly just a fancy word for "East". That's what it means, so it's not that different from using "Eastern". I do agree we don't have a better term, and I also think telling us that we can't use an umbrella term is stupid - especially from people who have no shame about saying things like "white male" or "colonized peoples". I sort of agree with you that it's a useful word because when people use the word "Orient" they tend to specifically think about the cultures of East Asia, and say not Australia, although honestly I'm not sure this is always helpful either. (Should we include or exclude Singapore, and if so why?) When people think of "Africa" they tend to first thing of "Sub-Saharan Africa", and that can be problematic. But then I also suspect that the word is the sort of word that will get bounced around to multiple meanings within the same argument, being redefined along the way to whatever reference is useful at the moment, and that process of robbing the word of utility began long before this discussion. I don't however think anyone is coming up with a better term, precisely because I don't think speaking more accurately or being understood more easily is the goal of inventing these slippery terms or redefining these terms.

All that is interesting to me, and I'd love if people stopped misusing language. Certainly the OP in both of these threads wildly misused the term "othering", and in doing so created much of the controversy that has plagued both of these threads. But I don't think it's the main problem here. I could deal with the slippery imprecise language if it wasn't being used for such a dastardly purpose.

 

[Eltab]

Sometimes, reading (and participating in) this discussion, I get the sensation I had when reading the original Frankenstein: the characters' emotions were front-and-center, but their thinking happened in between when you turn the page to begin a new chapter.

How much baggage is being loaded on a pair of words from Latin:
"Orient" - of / from the east
"Occident" - of / from the west

Did you know that Classical Arabic maps were drawn "upside down" to modern eyes? Their first cartographer had heard the phrase "the Nile flows down to the sea" and liked it, so he decided to orient his map in that manner: north was towards the bottom. West European tradition usually draws maps with north towards the top.
Which one is more / less moral than the other? Who can / should / can't / shouldn't draw their maps one way or the other? Or do morality questions not really apply to this subject?

 

[Aldeon]

My setting uses Dignity and ties it off against a word we don't have a complete English translation for that essentially means "fall from virtue" (Haitoku) and the major threat of the setting (mists raise your Haitoku, gets too high = transformed into a monster). We did realize that not everybody is going to want to engage in that though, so several race options are immune to the transformation (and thus don't really have to care about their Dignity). Want to be honorable? Great go for it. Don't care? Also great. Want to be the not-caring race and still be honorable, because of course? Also viable (and something I've GM'd over at least three times now).
The reason this concept is in my setting and why you see Honor systems in eastern fantasy is that eastern cultures (most notably Japan) have a stronger tendency towards shame rather than guilt. There's a solid wiki about the concept here. It notes that this is a widely criticized concept so keep that in mind, but it identifies some of the chief differences between traditionally western and eastern cultures in how psyches are shaped and communities treat one another.

I mean this is exactly what I mean when I say I don't like playing in asian-styled settings ran by palefaces. I understand the concept of shame vs guilt cultures and was already aware of it, I am just tired of it having it being a reason to include one of these types of houserules in the game. The existence of a cultural difference doesn't necessitate special rules in order to make a setting more "asian-y". It generates stereotypes because any cultural differences will be exaggerated to an unrealistic degree when in most cases it's a minor difference unless it's in the purview of nobles or clans. I hate it exactly because peckerwoods like you want to reinforce your understandings of our cultures and think that justifying it with some flimsy Anthropology-101 terminology means you're right.

 

[Afrodyte]

This could have been a really interesting discussion about how to approach portraying a mythic version of non-Western cultures in a respectful way, but predictably, that discussion got usurped by people who want to debate the merits of respectful yet mythic portrayals of non-Western cultures. There could have been some cool, fresh ideas for classes, monsters, mechanics, etc. brainstormed by insiders in those non-Western cultures that people outside those cultures would never have come up with on their own because they didn't spend a lifetime in those cultures.

We could have had something different, interesting and more meaningful than what we've had before, but that didn't happen because the same dominant perspectives and voices are unsatisfied with being dominant in real life. They have to be dominant in imagination too.

It makes me sad.