D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Mirtek]

Wow. You know, I'm just going to leave you to it, because all you're doing is ignoring everything I (and others) write, and repeating own wacky points as if they mattered.

Not ignoring, just disagreeing. That's how cultures develop over time. They see something from another culture, like it (maybe only because of missunderstanding it), adapt it (often in a bastardized version that may be insulting to the original culture) and that's it. And if their bastardized works for them they may even forget where they originally took it from a few decades down the line.

If your super important religious idol just happend to have the form of the perfect backscratcher my great-grantparents were always looking for but couldn't quite figure out how to engineer before they saw your relic, tough luck. You'll have to live with seeing me to using mine I bought from a 1€ store

The same way that we don't graft French naming conventions to classes - the names are typically simply straight up English language descriptors - fighting man, magic user, rogue/thief - and not really culturally specific (or only obliquely like paladins and druids which absolutely don't resemble their mythical roots - and various other elements of the game, pretending that French history and culture is the only one that matters because all European cultures are the same.

Actually that is what's done in 99% of the cases. Any typical medieval fantasy land is a mishmash of most European cultures smashed together, because "they're all the same"

 

[Hussar]

Actually that is what's done in 99% of the cases. Any typical medieval fantasy land is a mishmash of most European cultures smashed together, because "they're all the same"

No, it isn't. What you get is a variety of European cultures side by side, all being treated as equal. So, you have the "viking" people, the "germanic" people, the "french" people, the "celtic" people, the "roman" people, and so on and so forth. What you don't get are Vikings knights, for example. Or French Vikings. Or that Roman inspired culture but with Germanic names, living a nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Instead, you get a Roman inspired culture with Latin inspired names, living in architecture pulled straight from history.

 

[Umbran]

I'm not going to lie and say we don't find it extremely amusing that Americans will identify themselves with 200+ year distant ancestors, but equally, I don't think it's something we typically see as "wrong", just... odd.

Um.... There was bloody conflict between Irish and British in living memory. There was a referendum on Scottish independence in 2014, and threat of another as recently as this past September, if I recall correctly.

The Irish aren't "the Irish" and the Scots aren't "the Scots" - separate peoples from the British - because of connections from last month, or last decade. They are from a sense of identity going back centuries. Every human culture has this, and it doesn't go away when you have to move.

@billd91 is almost right - but the clinging to identity doesn't come from backlash. That identity hangs around even if you don't suffer any significant blacklash. Humans simply tend to take part of their identity from distant origins.

Which is a shame, because this is much of the soil that racism is rooted in.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, it isn't. What you get is a variety of European cultures side by side, all being treated as equal. So, you have the "viking" people, the "germanic" people, the "french" people, the "celtic" people, the "roman" people, and so on and so forth. What you don't get are Vikings knights, for example. Or French Vikings. Or that Roman inspired culture but with Germanic names, living a nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Instead, you get a Roman inspired culture with Latin inspired names, living in architecture pulled straight from history.

I've absolutely seen Nordic and Celtic cultures rolled together as a basis, and Roman and Greek ones have the same (far as that goes I've seen French and Italian ones rolled together).

 

[Mordhau]

I wonder what settings people are referring to when they talk about all these different Medieval European cultures treated respectfully anyway.

Forgotten Realms? Not really clearly based on anything much except a vague ren-faire style of surface detail probably closest to Tudor England* with a lot of American Western throne in. (In fact you could possibly argue that the western is the predominant influence).

(Edit: I always in particular feel the need to push back against the idea that the default D&D setting is 'medieval' not out of pedantry, but because I don't see how we can even be clear about what we are talking about by default setting if we are throwing around a word that is so completely misplaced that using it obscures meaning.)

 

[Justice and Rule]

I wonder what settings people are referring to when they talk about all these different Medieval European cultures treated respectfully anyway.

Forgotten Realms? Not really clearly based on anything much except a vague ren-faire style of surface detail probably closest to Tudor England* with a lot of American Western throne in. (In fact you could possibly argue that the western is the predominant influence).

(Edit: I always in particular feel the need to push back against the idea that the default D&D setting is 'medieval' not out of pedantry, but because I don't see how we can even be clear about what we are talking about by default setting if we are throwing around a word that is so completely misplaced that using it obscures meaning.)

I mean, comparatively speaking I think the idea is that most settings that use European inspirations tend to make them far more distinct than cultures off the European continent. Warhammer is a decent example, where you have distinct Western European cultures, and the further you get away from that the more generalized continents become. More than that, I think the bigger issue is that non-European cultures are often used haphazardly and in ways that are inconsistent with how we might do so with European cultures. Oriental Adventures was brought up previously as a good example, and the way most African expys are often mishmashes of disparate cultures rather than having distinctiveness that you might put into a Western-based fantasy. For example, the Dalelands are different than the Sword Coast which is different than Amn, right? But Chult... it's just kind of "Africa".

This is a good example of something that is easily fixable if you just take the time: the recent Golarion sourcebook on the Mwangi Expanse came out to rave reviews because it went out of its way to really show the Expanse as having a bunch of different interconnected but different cultures rather than just doing a generic monocultures.

 

[Mordhau]

I mean, comparatively speaking I think the idea is that most settings that use European inspirations tend to make them far more distinct than cultures off the European continent. Warhammer is a decent example, where you have distinct Western European cultures, and the further you get away from that the more generalized continents become. More than that, I think the bigger issue is that non-European cultures are often used haphazardly and in ways that are inconsistent with how we might do so with European cultures. Oriental Adventures was brought up previously as a good example, and the way most African expys are often mishmashes of disparate cultures rather than having distinctiveness that you might put into a Western-based fantasy. For example, the Dalelands are different than the Sword Coast which is different than Amn, right? But Chult... it's just kind of "Africa".

This is a good example of something that is easily fixable if you just take the time: the recent Golarion sourcebook on the Mwangi Expanse came out to rave reviews because it went out of its way to really show the Expanse as having a bunch of different interconnected but different cultures rather than just doing a generic monocultures.

But in the Forgotten Realms we have two Japans, Two Chinas, Two Tibets and we have Mongols that are clearly very strongly based on real world Mongols. In fact one of the problems with these is that they are too blatantly based on their origins. They use basically the same gods and the same mythology as the real cultures but just add fantasy elements onto the top.

So it's very mixed. I'm not arguing that role-playing games don't need to do better with their non western cultures, but I think we tend to overgeneralise about how they get it wrong.

 

[Justice and Rule]

But in the Forgotten Realms we have two Japans, Two Chinas, Two Tibets and we have Mongols that are clearly very strongly based on real world Mongols. In fact one of the problems with these is that they are too blatantly based on their origins. They use basically the same gods and the same mythology as the real cultures but just add fantasy elements onto the top.

So it's very mixed. I'm not arguing that role-playing games don't need to do better with their non western cultures, but I think we tend to overgeneralise about how they get it wrong.

I'm going to disagree about the original, because political bodies don't define cultures: yes, there is Shou Lung and T'u Lung, there's Wa and Kozakura. But culturally... there's really not much difference between them. All the cultural advice is generalized, from family structure to religion to daily life. Generalizing all Asian culture and saying "Well, this region has a shogun and samurai, and this one has an Emperor, and this one also has an Emperor but it's more corrupt" doesn't mean you have China and Japan. It means you a generic Asian culture with a few lenses to make their politics slightly distinct.

 

[Maxperson]

I mean, comparatively speaking I think the idea is that most settings that use European inspirations tend to make them far more distinct than cultures off the European continent. Warhammer is a decent example, where you have distinct Western European cultures, and the further you get away from that the more generalized continents become. More than that, I think the bigger issue is that non-European cultures are often used haphazardly and in ways that are inconsistent with how we might do so with European cultures. Oriental Adventures was brought up previously as a good example, and the way most African expys are often mishmashes of disparate cultures rather than having distinctiveness that you might put into a Western-based fantasy. For example, the Dalelands are different than the Sword Coast which is different than Amn, right? But Chult... it's just kind of "Africa".

Chult always felt more Amazon Jungle to me.

 

[Mordhau]

I'm going to disagree about the original, because political bodies don't define cultures: yes, there is Shou Lung and T'u Lung, there's Wa and Kozakura. But culturally... there's really not much difference between them. All the cultural advice is generalized, from family structure to religion to daily life. Generalizing all Asian culture and saying "Well, this region has a shogun and samurai, and this one has an Emperor, and this one also has an Emperor but it's more corrupt" doesn't mean you have China and Japan. It means you a generic Asian culture with a few lenses to make their politics slightly distinct.

As compared to....?

You mentioned Warhammer earlier. How are Tilea and Brettonia and and the Spanish place different other than via the indication that they are based on different historical European regions? Or all those setting that have 'here be vikings' in them. How much depth and research usually goes into presenting those vikings (and how often are Vikings placed alongside cultures that are historically from a much later period*).

Edit: I mean I agree that giving cultural advice for asia generally as a whole is wrong, and orientalist. But that doesn't mean that western settings are actually done any better or with any greater level of respect for or fidelity to their influence, just that they're less offensive, because they're not being presented as an exotic other.