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There are tonal issues in the adventure path. But it does say in the first adventure that all damage dealt by PCs can be taken as nonlethal unless stated otherwise. So there shouldn't be a problem with downed foes not being interrogatable unless the GM or PCs decided to make it that way.

That's being generous to the Sherlock Holmes estate. If the Sherlock Holmes stories that are still in copyright by Arthur Conan Doyle had never been written, people would still be writing stories about an older retired Sherlock Holmes, and a less emotionally crippled Sherlock Holmes. The...

Rolemaster has open-ended criticals. I've heard horror stories, because in a battle that the GM meant to be minor with some low-level bandits, whose attacks did no real damage, one of those bandit attacks went supercritical, doing enough damage to kill a PC outright, leading to the end of the...

Ravenloft? You mean the setting that started by being based off an English novel set in London and Transylvania? There's a bunch of sort of Slavic names usually combined with Germanic "von" but I don't see any real Slavic influence in Ravenloft. In fact, if we analyzed Ravenloft the same way...

Doesn't strike me as violent, savage, and uncivilized to me. Far East is not the same as Asia, and OA is not about all of Asia. It's about Eastern Asia; China, Korea, Japan, and Mongolia, as OA lists them. Where's the evidence? I agree that "oriental" is offensive. There's general agreement...

For one, if you loudly speak out about something at length, then yes, you need to do some research, especially if it's a historical work that needs to be seen in its historical context. For another, facts matter. As I keep saying, there's no reason we should treat arguments about Comeliness any...

A classic library and bookstore are purely complementary; one you can borrow books from, and the other you can buy books from. The limitations on each were purely pragmatic, space and printing costs. And it's not true that libraries are free public spaces; there are a lot of libraries available...

I don't see DM practice as relevant here. Gygax and TSR saw UA as the new base system, so they used it as the basis for OA.

There is a mountain in Nevada named after Jefferson Davis. I don't challenge anyone's right to get offended about that. But if someone starts to complain that it's part of a pattern of Confederate monuments in Union states, they're wrong; it was named after the Secretary of State in 1855, before...

They added a generic disclaimer to all their back catalog. You're specifically saying they don't know about the problems in their products and it would take too much work to figure out the problems. I don't know what I want, exactly, but tossing this disclaimer on all pre-5E works negates a lot...

So, if he had said he didn't see why a Wisdom stat needed to be included in OA at all, would you agree with him? I can certainly see arguments for including Wisdom in OA being Orientalist; it's the old stereotype of the wise old monks of the east. I see more of an argument for Wisdom being...

I don't disagree with the rest of what you wrote, but I have a problem here. Pulp stories have a huge problem with racism, which any modern adaptation has to worry about not copying. Darkest Africa and Yellow Peril are both big pulp themes that are basically racist, and the first has bad history...

They quote and then says That's pretty classic sexism right there, equating being feminized with a subordinate relationship. Western countries and places are often personified as female, like Lady Liberty and Europa. Again, we've established where comeliness comes from. But the assumption...

I don't think they should be removed, so I don't know why you're asking me this. Okay, but that means the disclaimer doesn't mean anything. Oh, look, you've found something you think is offensive; WotC has a universal disclaimer. It doesn't mean that WotC actually cares about the problem or is...

We hear complaints about Lovecraft and Westerns right now, and we see people casually replicating the problematic parts of Lovecraft and Westerns in modern works. You don't seem to understand why people would complain about those things and not generally about movies where the Spanish empire is...

If they let Oriental Adventures continue being published, then the next book they may be pure Yellow Peril. Slippery slopes are an actual thing, right? It's been discussed a bit. Why would you assume that that only a few of us have ever looked at it? A good number of us have been playing since...

It's biologically realistic, which makes it weaker as an allegory. It's not a simple reversal; surface elves have all the colors that they would normally have, from the pale arctic elves to the dark-skinned tropical elves. Moreover, there's a big cultural difference. Children of Yakub is a...

It's a bit of a muddle because most of it is your reading into what I wrote. For the second time, I'm going to repeat the context of what I wrote. Identifying monsters by skin color is problematic, and changing dark skinned monsters to having weird skin colors doesn't actually do as much as...

Because once you've set something up where humanoids are brown, changing them to greens and dark oranges doesn't do as much as you'd like. They still index the same racial groups the original game did. Oh, look they've changed the white people to the variety their diversity advisors told them...

Pulling '89 2nd Ed Player's Handbook, there are zero illustrations of black people in the book. Most of them look northern European, including a flying carpet scene on page 119. Page 70 has a darker protagonist, more Mediterranean, and page 7 has a slightly darker party member in Larry Elmore's...