The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
They did try to release D&D in Japan, BTW, with this enjoyable anime-ish live-action commercial (it was posted here). Not sure how it went--this was a few months ago. The wizard's robe looks kind of Asian, but the fighter's in European-style plate mail with a longsword, not o-yoroi armor with a katana.
I'm certainly down for an asian-themed campaign setting, but I'd rather it not be Kara-Tur. I enjoy Rokugan, but I prefer it in it's own roll-and-keep rule setting, not as D&D. Overall, I'd just rather they start from scratch and build a new pastiche setting that has as much in common with the real world as Greyhawk/FR has in common with Europe.
Same goes for an Americas setting, Africa & Arabic settings. especially if they are divorced from FR.
So... D&D is not remotely popular in Japan for several reasons.
1) They've got their own TTRPGs.
Popular with the nerdy crowd, they've got a variety of locally produced and published TTRPGs that suit them just fine. Sword World, for example, is one of the most popular TTRPGs there is, and wound up getting translated into Korean. It's currently on it's 5th edition, too! Their rulebooks tend to be more streamlined than even 5e, as well. And contain a number of "Scenarios" instead of long-format campaign books because...
2) They prefer one-shots.
A different lifestyle makes short and fun 'one night' games much more popular than longer format episodic games. This is due in part to the work culture in Japan, with people working various schedules at their jobs not having many 'sync up' nights. Sort of like Americans, but worse. A short scenario over a few beers is much preferred to playing a continued story you only get to be a part of for a few hours every month or two.
3) Living Space.
Japanese homes tend to be much more compact than Western homes. And having a sprawling collection of 8.5x11 books, maps, miniatures, and dice just isn't really reasonable for a lot of people. And having friends over for an evening's game is a fairly cramped affair as well. Which is why most TTRPG groups in Japan don't chill out in someone's house, but head out to gaming cafes and restaurants that cater to a fairly large group of people having a whole "Night Out" for hours on end. And pick up randos to join a session who might not be there next time.
4) Language Barrier.
Vastly less important than the above, since some basic English is taught to pretty much everyone in Japan, but it does exist. Localizations can help, but there's also the American push toward using a fairly colloquial English for explaining the rules even in the rulebooks that may not translate over really well.
5) Replays are -way- more popular.
Replays are books written about people's campaigns and games. Record of Lodoss War is probably the single most famous Replay in the western world. Some get turned into Manga, but a lot are simply presented in a straight written word format and include some of the at-the-table jokes and laughter. Some, like Record of Lodoss War and Chaos Dragon, even wind up being made into Anime movies or series.
6) Two companies basically control the market.
Kadokawa Futures Publishing and Group SNE basically control the TTRPG market in Japan, which is significantly smaller than it is in the West for reasons 2 and 3, mostly. Group SNE sort of paved the way for TTRPGs, but Kadokawa got most of the business in the end. There's not much room in the market for another contender... Though FEAR (Far East Amusement Research) is holding it's own fairly well.
7) One western game is fairly popular.
GURPS. They made a Sword World RPG module for GURPS and it's kinda popular. GURPS is as simple or complex as a group wants to make it, can be played with one or two small books at the table, and is great for one-shots and short-format gaming. Group SNE pretty much produces all the Japanese GURPS content and that's basically the main reason they're still in business next to the market giant Kadokawa.
While this is certainly a possible (I'd even say likely) factor, there's also another. What's the point of completely rewriting it? It will likely alienate at least some of the people who liked it before, while being a big risk of some kind of boneheaded maneuver or the like. Asian, Middle Eastern, and North African cultures have often been depicted very poorly in the West, without even dipping into the really, really bad stuff. "Orientalism" tends to make infantile, undeveloped caricatures that can be expressed in extremely simple terms, despite covering (at this point) billions of humans who belong to dozens of distinct cultures.
I think it would be cool if we could get settings and options for D&D that weren't founded on pseudo-medieval western societies. I'd love to add flavor to my own campaigns, but lack the resources to do anything significant.
I do empathize with authors though. You can take concepts from vastly different times and regions in D&D if they come from western mythology and nobody blinks an eye. Have a campaign where one day you're fighting the minotaur of Greek mythology and the next you're fighting some Celtic Fey and then it's Norse frost giants. It's okay to take these ideas and stories, throw them into a blender and call it D&D.
Have you heard of "punching down"? Usually, drawing on your own source culture(s) isn't punching down. Partly because...well, you know it at least a little. Norse and Greek and Celtic are known to us, because they're used in our stories today all the time. We know the nuances, or at least know to look for the nuances. We wouldn't depict a Roman Senator calling down Thor's wrath, nor a Celt praying to Hercules for strength, nor a Norseman swearing a vow on the river Styx. Unfortunately, a LOT of works inspired by Asia do basically that, blending thousands of years and millions of square miles into a single Frankensteinian mishmash.
Being completely on the outside looking in though, it's incredibly easy to punch down. Even when you don't mean to. Misinformation is everywhere, and many sources in English (or other non-Asian languages) are riddled with "Orientalism"--exoticizing and infantilizing Asian cultures. The twin faults of racist or fetishized depiction loom large here. Don't forget, people were still doing outright yellowface as recently as the late 70s (e.g. the Doctor Who serial The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which is a very fun story but pretty obviously flawed in how it depicts Chinese culture and, y'know, the White guy in makeup pretending to be Chinese.)
So, yes, it's generally okay (not always, but generally) to throw a lot of those things into the blender, because (a) here Norse/Greek/etc. culture predominates, making it harder to punch down; (b) most religions involved here are long dead, so being cavalier with them is less likely to hurt someone; and (c) it's easy for us to get sources, in our mother tongues, that can explain details and context about these things. But that doesn't mean you can't go wrong. Rick Riordan got a rude surprise when he learned that Modern Hellenism exists, and he (appropriately) apologized to them.
It's difficult to both use different cultures for inspiration without at the same time being insensitive. Try to do anything similar to what's been done with European mythology for other regions and times of the world and it's cultural appropriation. I wish there was a good way of doing this, my ideal would be books that take the same blender approach to other cultures and come up with something inspired by their stories without being offensive. I'm not sure it's possible. Maybe hire authors from, say, Japan to write a supplement book? I'd be interested.
The term for this is a "sensitivity reader/editor." Someone with expertise (and, hopefully, lived experience) to find bonehead errors and help fix them. And 9 times out of 10, if the story was worth telling to begin with, the insensitive errors will be easily fixed...IF you can see them and know why they're errors. Hence, get an expert. Nobody can know everything, and it's impossible to create a work of fiction that cannot ever hurt anyone at all--but that doesn't mean we shouldn't strive to do the best we can.
It does seem like there would still be touchy subjects of course. There are very few people who are still polytheistic in the west so I'm probably not going to offend anyone with my depiction of Odin and Thor, but a variation of Shinto or Buddhism? It could be quite easy to step on toes.
Precisely. Working with anything that is still practiced, especially if it is widely practiced, is tricky. Even Odin and Thor aren't as clear-cut as you might think--there are modern Heathen groups striving to reconstruct their ancestors' beliefs too. Yet we still get works like God of War: Ragnarok, which have a subversion (IMO a brilliant one) of the Ragnarok myth by depicting the Aesir as the villains of the tale, and Odin as a cruel, manipulative, megalomaniacal tyrant, and Loki (Kratos' son, aka Atreus) as a troubled but compassionate and heroic character.
For my own "work," if you can call "the game I run for my friends" work, I built off of ideas from Al-Qadim, actual books I had read from Islamic luminaries (especially those of the Golden Age of Islam), and advice from people with (literal and figurative) skin in the game, particularly a North African person with a deep (academic) interest in the history and ancient traditions of his ancestors. Something I have taken pains to illustrate is that the Safiqi priesthood, the primary religion of the region where most adventures have played out, is: (a) overwhelmingly made up of genuine, earnest believers striving to do good in a world that is often fraught and full of temptation, (b) diverse in their beliefs and goals, (c) still quite human, and thus liable to both profoundly high moral character and profound depravity, and (d) not clearly true or false, but necessarily subject to debate and each individual person having to decide for themselves what they believe.
There are certain parallels. For example, I took inspiration from the many diverse names of Allah, and adapted it into a supremely useful characteristic. That is, the One is understood to be infinite and transcendental, making it impossible for only one single depiction to truly capture Their fullness, even though They are (in a philosophical sense) "perfectly simple." This means the Safiqi come to gain understanding of the One by focusing on Their infinitely many "aspects" or "facets"....which provide a perfect excuse for how different Safiqi priests can have different Domains. Some revere the Soothing Flame, an aspect representing the healing, loving-kindness, and charity of the One; others revere the Unknown Knower, those who value both uncovering secrets and keeping things (themselves or knowledge) hidden. The one aspect almost everyone gives at least some attention to is the Great Architect (enough so that "the Great Architect" is sometimes used interchangably with "the One" in general), because the Great Architect represents the One as creator, sustainer, visionary, and law-giver; this makes the Great Architect something of a "first among equals." Some aspects have even been forgotten: the party has found evidence of some kind of "weaver" and some kind of agriculture-related aspect, both of which are unknown to modern-day adherents (though who knows what's kept in the secret archives?)
All that said...I don't have any Muslim players. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the only religious person in the group, and I'm Christian. However, by having listened to people who have actual, first-hand experience, and having read celebrated works written by luminaries of the time I want to evoke, and having worked with my players whenever anything comes up that doesn't sit right, I'm fairly sure I have done a decent job of making something that draws inspiration from a real religion, without making a gross parody of that religion. I certainly take the depiction seriously, and have included complications (heresies, the occasional corrupt or at least money-focused leader, etc.) and sincere expressions of faith from various characters. It is, as the rest of the world, what I call chiaroscuro: light-and-shadow, neither an unrelentingly bright thing where shadows are weak and easily banished, nor an oppressively dark thing where lights are feeble aberrations soon extinguished. There is good and bad, and ultimately the pragmatic and diplomatic approach tends to win out, because that's what succeeds the most.
One of the interesting things about Japanese CoC is that while the Mythos appeals to Japanese sensibilities (I suspect its the tentacles), a lot of scenarios are non-horror and even romantic in nature. The Japanese and Korean players appear to have embraced the power of CoC rules to give slice of life with a weird creepy twist
My memory is pretty fuzzy, but I vaguely recall reading somewhere that it's simply because CoC got a Japanese translation and a significant early distribution push over there before most other RPGs moved into the market. First mover advantage and all that.
One of the interesting things about Japanese CoC is that while the Mythos appeals to Japanese sensibilities (I suspect its the tenacles), a lot of scenarios are non-horror and even romantic in nature. The Japanese and Korean players appear to have embraced the power of rules to give slice of life with a weird creep twist
I've always wondered if it isn't, in part, because Shinto remains a relatively significant part of the cultural backdrop of Japan. There's a certain essential spiritualism, but one lacking in the complex rituals of Catholicism, that doesn't really have a match in Western cultures. With that, Cthulhu becomes less a horrifying reality secretly lying in wait to destroy us, but sorta-kinda something vaguely Daoist, the Unfathomable made manifest. If you're already comfortable with the universe being a little magical/spiritual, it pulls some of the oomph out of eldritch horror. (For my part, I mostly find Lovecraftian stories just gruesome, rather than feeling dread or fear, because I'm already committed to the idea that the only Thing which has absolute and eternal existence is Love.)
I think it would be cool if we could get settings and options for D&D that weren't founded on pseudo-medieval western societies. I'd love to add flavor to my own campaigns, but lack the resources to do anything significant.
I do empathize with authors though. You can take concepts from vastly different times and regions in D&D if they come from western mythology and nobody blinks an eye. Have a campaign where one day you're fighting the minotaur of Greek mythology and the next you're fighting some Celtic Fey and then it's Norse frost giants. It's okay to take these ideas and stories, throw them into a blender and call it D&D.
well DnD also freely uses Genie, Sphinx, Rakasha, Naga, Deva, Oni, Ki-rin, Roc, Manticore, Lamia and various other creatures of Asian origin too, not to mention the entire Monk class.
well DnD also freely uses Genie, Sphinx, Rakasha, Naga, Deva, Oni, Ki-rin, Roc, Manticore, Lamia and various other creatures of Asian origin too, not to mention the entire Monk class.
It does borrow a couple of things, after all some iconic D&D monsters like the bullette and rust monster were inspired by cheap toys from Hong Kong which were a rip-off of a popular Ultraman show. But there's a difference between borrowing something here and there (and the monk is more inspired by the old Kung Fu TV show than actual monks) and having an entire source book inspired by Asian lore.
But just take a look at how controversial "Asian" hobgoblins are. It's perfectly okay to have this image of a frost giant
Complete with the horned helmet that no self respecting Norse warrior would wear. Horned helmets were introduced for an opera by a set designer who thought they looked cool. Meanwhile the hobgoblin
is controversial because they resemble a Samurai warrior.
I would have never personally considered the hobgoblin image problematic, but I'm not the right person to ask. So I'm not saying people are wrong about the hobgoblin, I just think it's a complicated topic. It's also a risky endeavor, no matter whether or not they hire someone to review a publication I just don't see the potential profit outweighing the potential risk.
