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

[Justice and Rule]

Chult always felt more Amazon Jungle to me.

I mean, it always felt "generic jungle" to me, but given where it's at and the descriptions given, I feel like it's meant to be Fantasy Africa.

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*).

I feel like this is a bad argument to make. You can argue about how well they portray what they are imitating, but Bretonnia is absolutely different culturally than Tilea; we are comparing Italian City-States to pseudo-Arthurian myth by way of France. Estalia is a bit harder to argue because it's more of a blank slate, but Tilea's mercantile and more secular bent compared to the strident religiosity of the Empire is absolutely something unique and different. If we want to go further east, we get Kislev, which has a unique social structure given that it has two specific cultural groups that coexist within it. At this point, we start combining a lot of Eastern Europe together, but at the least we can argue that it is culturally distinctive.

Compare this to Kara-Tur, which gives the exact same advice on how all people work, no matter their nation. They share social structures, language, calendar, etc. There's no "China" or "Japan", there is just "Asian" with a Chinese Emperor or a Japanese Shogun. Like, if you want to tell me that Kislev is a bad attempt at fantasy Slavic cultures, I'd be willing to hear you out. But it's at least recognizably Slavic, unlike Kara-Tur in Oriental Adventures which is just homogenized East Asian stereotypes.

 

[Mordhau]

I mean, it always felt "generic jungle" to me, but given where it's at and the descriptions given, I feel like it's meant to be Fantasy Africa.



I feel like this is a bad argument to make. You can argue about how well they portray what they are imitating, but Bretonnia is absolutely different culturally than Tilea; we are comparing Italian City-States to pseudo-Arthurian myth by way of France. Estalia is a bit harder to argue because it's more of a blank slate, but Tilea's mercantile and more secular bent compared to the strident religiosity of the Empire is absolutely something unique and different. If we want to go further east, we get Kislev, which has a unique social structure given that it has two specific cultural groups that coexist within it. At this point, we start combining a lot of Eastern Europe together, but at the least we can argue that it is culturally distinctive.

Compare this to Kara-Tur, which gives the exact same advice on how all people work, no matter their nation. They share social structures, language, calendar, etc. There's no "China" or "Japan", there is just "Asian" with a Chinese Emperor or a Japanese Shogun. Like, if you want to tell me that Kislev is a bad attempt at fantasy Slavic cultures, I'd be willing to hear you out. But it's at least recognizably Slavic, unlike Kara-Tur in Oriental Adventures which is just homogenized East Asian stereotypes.

Well I remember that "Tabot" was recognisably Tibetan, while the Tuigan were very recognisably Mongolian.

The idea that all asian cultures are treated as completely indistinct is obviously not true. (It may be true for Oriental Adventures itself, I read it once years ago, and I didn't bother with it when looking over how Forgotten Realms presented the East a couple of years ago because there didn't seem any point. But one book doesn't establish a trend.)

My conclusion from the Kara Tur boxed Set and the Hordelands was definitely not that they were all intermingled and indistinct. They weren't done very well by any means*, but differences were clear.

*The Hordelands was the better of the two by some margin.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

How was it's gaming content? Was it a good sourcebook with solid content?

 

[Zardnaar]

More along the lines of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. According to his tribe's history the Spanish arrived and with the help of his people over through the Aztecs and later conquered all of their rival tribes the area. You could imagine that his tribe was called lackeys by the other tribes that they help conquer, but for them the view is always better from the top.

Same thing happened here. British turned up some of the Maori tribes allied them due to the brutality of other tribes.

There's an account of warriors hijacking a ship forcing the crw to sail to the Chatham Islands and essentially butchering the other tribe.

Spanish oppressed probably the majority but some tribes moved further up the totem pole and intermarried with the Spanish.

Similar thing happened in Iraq under Ottomans. Or the events of WW2 as well. Balkans in the 90's.

Pattern repeats in Africa and India.

If your empires to brutal you're one revolt or foreign intervention away from collapse.

 

[Justice and Rule]

How was it's gaming content? Was it a good sourcebook with solid content?

I mean, what do you think is implied by "rave reviews"?

 

[pemerton]

In another essay, I write about the general arc of the Black superhero in DC and Marvel from the 1960s to today

Are you the author of the Lifedeath essays I found linked to on that site? In which case, thank you. I just read them and they are very sensitive readings, in both their praise and their criticism, of some of the best moments of Claremont X-Men.

EDIT: To tie this back to the thread topic, I'm not aware of anything from TSR or WotC that approaches those comics in terms of its attempt to grapple with questions of identity and cultural power. (I think you are correct to say that the comics ultimately fail to grapple with questions of political and economic power.)

 

[Mirtek]

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.

The irish are "the irish" and the Scots are "the scots" because they have been continiously living in Ireland and Scotland for the past 200 years. Yes, to their eyes it goes away, not necessarily when YOU move, but when your children and grand children and great-grandchildren are born abroad. If some american whose ancestor left 200 years ago comes over and claim to be "irish" or "scottish" himself, it's just seen as amusing but nothing more.

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.

It's less with the very distinct culutres, but your typical europeanish knights&castles cutlure is always a mix of english, french and german aspects at the very least. Usually with some italian and spanish thrown in for good meassure.

to pseudo-Arthurian myth by way of France.

Which is already a mix of France and England. Also some minor German aspects in, even though the Imperium is meant to be the main fantasy Germany (and also contains a lot of stuff that's not really from the Holy Roman Empire)

 

[pemerton]

do you ever worry about using a context, then having other scholars apply it, and in doing so, you (and others) redefine a work that creates negative connotations about the creator? I guess I am asking, do you contact the creators to see what their thoughts are?

I can't speak for @el-remmen. But as a professional academic, whose job is critiquing the work of others and producing my own, I think that authors/creators ultimately have to suck up the interpretations that others put forward of their work. That's not to say that unprofessional behaviour is OK, but critiquing work for (eg) its implications about race and culture is not unprofessional. To give a single example - I'm a great admirer of the work of John Rawls and have devoted a lot of my career to engaging with this work; that doesn't stop me from saying that his relatively brief discussion of secession and the Civil War in his The Law of Peoples is deeply racist, because of the way Black people as members of the community of the South are apparently invisible to him.

 

[pemerton]

One of the main problems with Rome is that we really only have ruling-class opinions from Romans, but occasionally they, as people say today "tell on themselves" in their writing. For example, one Roman writer briefly mentions the legal requirement to massacre the slaves of anyone who got murdered by a slave of theirs, and this Roman writer is appalled, absolutely appalled that loads of working and middle class Romans (by his description) oppose this policy, and are really angry about it, and are protesting in the streets about it and making a nuisance of themselves! The implication seems to be they're too dumb to understand why this policy is needed.

Knowing humans, I suspect it's more like they didn't like it, and thought it was a bad thing. From this and other evidence, whilst I think total opposition to slavery was probably vanishingly rare in Rome, seeing it as a messed-up institution that primarily existed to benefit the rich (note that poor and middle class Romans were the ones most likely to be forced into debt slavery, of course) was probably fairly common. And even some other Roman writers seemed a bit irked by people mistreating slaves. Eventually Roman law slowly shifted to make mistreatment or murder of slaves more and more illegal.

I am a great admirer of Finley's Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology. To the best of my knowledge - which is neither expert nor completely uninformed - there was no abolitionist movement, or even ideology, in Rome. As I understand it, the goal of Spartacus's revolt was to achieve freedom, but not to abolish the institution of slavery.

 

[pemerton]

What you don't get are Vikings knights, for example.

Normans?