D&D 5E What should an official Indian subcontinent inspired setting have?

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I have no idea.

What does "not Hindu" even mean this context? I'm proposing the setting should be "Hindu+others", not "not Hindu" those seem like very different things.

Oh, I know. I am just saying that I am including Hindu with the other Big Three as religions that are followed by too many people to be able to fantasize in a way that will not offend a large number of people. I don't even like using the real world dead religions any more. I want my fantasy worlds to have fantasy religions.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

Even WHFRP ignores pogroms, feudal obligations, indentured servitude, and child marriage. It dodges serfdom because the main setting is the Empire, and serfs don't really exist in the Empire (they do in Bretonnia, which rarely gets much of a look-in in WHFRP setting material). It does have class immobility though I guess.

It's absolutely true that the "vast majority" ignore all of these things.

I mean, what's your definition of vast majority? 70%? 80%? 90%? If we do a survey of TT RPGs in Western-ish settings, I guarantee we can reach any of those thresholds. The sheer number of bland, generic Western-ish settings is just staggering. Even if we only look at "major" TT RPG settings we're going to reach a high-80% threshold easily. Generally even "edgy" RPGs ignore these particular things (try-hard edgy RPGs tend to have more on sexual violence or sex work or slavery rather than anything as prosaic as indentured servitude or feudal obligations).

So I think it would be right for a South Asian setting to ignore caste, for example, rather to centralize it as an "exotic" feature.

@Henadic Theologian - I totally reject any idea that I'm "making it political", that's laughable, my point is that it's already political, and pretending it isn't, is a very big problem and is the sort of problem that people in the West might want to blithely ignore in order to simplify their lives, but probably shouldn't.

As for "over-thinking it", that is one of the most hilariously American comments I've ever read. I know a little bit more about South Asia/the Indian subcontinent than most Americans because 10% of the population here is South Asian and thus it's a topic that matters here a lot more than in the US where it's just recently grown to over 1%. I'm not even going into depth! But right now real-world India is doing some Very Bad Things (that are wildly underreported in certain countries, I agree) to non-Hindu populations so any TT RPG that just coincidentally eliminates all non-Hindus from its version of "Fantasy South Asia" is not going to look great, frankly, and not going to be remembered fondly. I'm staying away from historical comparisons for a reason but maybe meditate on what those might be.

I'm not American!

 

[Henadic Theologian]

So we're cool with including elements from Hinduism, a religion with 800 million + adherents, but NOT from the relatively tiny Judaism, for instance? That's weird.

Not looking for inspiration from medieval Christianity and Islam contributes to the incoherence of the way religion is treated in D&D. There seems to be a desire to replicate medieval European and Middle Eastern societies but not going anywhere near the element that was the single unifying cultural aspect of the disparate societies. The result ends up being the weird cartoon-Renfair that is the Forgotten Realms.

There are elements from Judaism, Golems for example.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

So we're cool with including elements from Hinduism, a religion with 800 million + adherents, but NOT from the relatively tiny Judaism, for instance? That's weird.

Not looking for inspiration from medieval Christianity and Islam contributes to the incoherence of the way religion is treated in D&D. There seems to be a desire to replicate medieval European and Middle Eastern societies but not going anywhere near the element that was the single unifying cultural aspect of the disparate societies. The result ends up being the weird cartoon-Renfair that is the Forgotten Realms.

Well, I am mostly Atheist anyway, so anything I might say about real world fairy tales will probably just get censored here. A lot of posts here are probably already pushing that limit. But I am fine with separating advances in knowledge and technology and such from the religious belief side of things, as I like to believe they would have all still happened even if no religions existed at all, especially in a fantasy setting where magic is real.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

There are elements from Judaism, Golems for example.

Yes please explain to me how Golems are a integral part of Jewish theology. D&D has plenty of mythological creatures from Greek polytheism, but for some reason also wants to shove the actual gods in there, sometimes as-is, and sometimes as a basis for some sort of cod-polytheism

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Well, I am mostly Atheist anyway, so anything I might say about real world fairy tales will probably just get censored here. A lot of posts here are probably already pushing that limit. But I am fine with separating advances in knowledge and technology and such from the religious belief side of things, as I like to believe they would have all still happened even if no religions existed at all, especially in a fantasy setting where magic is real.

Religion is an integral part of culture and society and always has been. Even as an atheist you can't pretend otherwise. Separating the historical development of human society and culture from the development from religion is ultimately fallacious.

 

[Malmuria]

The setting I'm currently running a game in is called A Thousand Thousand Islands by Zedeck Siew and Mun Kao. It's Southeast Asian-inspired, but has a lot of South Asian elements, especially folklore. It's a good example, on several levels, of how to translate folklore into a dnd-vernacular (and probably not coincidentally is by Malaysian authors). (Questing Beast flip through)

Mr-Kr-Gr - A Thousand Thousand Islands

A river kingdom of haunted ruins, ruled by crocodiles.

athousandthousandislands.com

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Separating the historical development of human society and culture from the development from religion is ultimately fallacious.

You know what you really can't separate? The millions and millions of people who died in the name of Religion throughout human history. And sadly, at least in some game settings, that carries over into the metaplot.

 

[humble minion]

Not looking for inspiration from medieval Christianity and Islam contributes to the incoherence of the way religion is treated in D&D. There seems to be a desire to replicate medieval European and Middle Eastern societies but not going anywhere near the element that was the single unifying cultural aspect of the disparate societies. The result ends up being the weird cartoon-Renfair that is the Forgotten Realms.

Yeah, I'd agree with that partially.

There have been D&D settings which used Vaguely Christian-like Religions. 3e Ravenloft, for instance, leaned heavily into the church of Ezra as a Christianity substitute, I assume for the reason that they were heavily into emulating the Gothic horror genre and christianity tends to be right at the core of that. But it was kinda skin-deep. Ezra was the default religion in most (not all) places, and riffed off a lot of the themes, images etc of historical (mostly Renaissance and post-Renaissance) Christianity, but it didn't really inform and permeate society in the way that Christianity did in historical Europe. Like many D&D worlds, the gods and religions existed so there was somewhere for adventuring clerics to come from, not so much to propagate a belief system that was accepted and acted on broadly across society.

As for FR - I'd argue that FR society (such as it is, for such a diverse and disunited place) actually kinda makes a strange sort of sense given the number and nature of gods it has. It's a place where there's loads of gods, no god (or even any plausible alliance of gods) is powerful enough to have its worshippers dominate and force all the others out except at a very local level, there's certain powerful non-godly individuals that could plausibly challenge some of the weaker gods and even supplant them, and the widespread availability of high-level divination magic means that a sufficiently patient and determined diviner or researcher could, after asking enough questions, learn most of the truths about the power, nature secrets etc of the gods. It's a diverse, brawling, confused, redundant, non-hierarchical pantheon, and it leads to a society organised (or disorganised) in a similar manner. In most places in Faerun for instance, there's no concept of the Divine Right of Kings or the sacred obligations linking royalty, nobility, and peasantry in the great chain of being - because as soon as you start talking 'divine' or 'sacred' then the first question asked is 'according to which god?' And it might not cut much ice with your Chauntea-worshipping peasantry whether or not Tyr (or Bane, or Siamorphe, or whoever) has decreed that Family X has their divine blessing to rule. And so you get a nobility largely founded in power and tradition rather than religiously endorsed legitimacy, which conveniently for a D&D world, means that there can be a bit more social mobility and your peasant PC can end up moving into the nobility if they earn and/or seize a place there.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

So we're cool with including elements from Hinduism, a religion with 800 million + adherents, but NOT from the relatively tiny Judaism, for instance? That's weird.

Not looking for inspiration from medieval Christianity and Islam contributes to the incoherence of the way religion is treated in D&D. There seems to be a desire to replicate medieval European and Middle Eastern societies but not going anywhere near the element that was the single unifying cultural aspect of the disparate societies. The result ends up being the weird cartoon-Renfair that is the Forgotten Realms.

The Forgotten Realms takes most of it's Theological Influences mixing Neoplatonism and Gnostism theologies with Hinduism, most Christians influences are insolated to specific dieties, and church structures, skin deep combined with elements of thoughtforms.

Even D&D Angels have Neoplatonist, Gnostic, and Hindu influences.