D&D General Al-Qadim, Campaign Guide: Zakhara, and Cultural Sensitivity

[Guest 7034872]

But... why? It's not like the Faerunian Pantheon in the Sword Coast is representative of how Catholic Clergy worked in the Middle Ages. You can clearly have a setting with European Mediaeval aesthetic trappings without referring to the religion there, so why can't you have that in Al Qadim? It seems to me that you are looking at Middle Eastern cultures through an essentialist eye and arguing that anything that has Middle Eastern aesthetic trappings must involve Islamic religion and ideology at least to a certain extent. I don't see why.

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EDIT: I think my first example didn't work that well. Let me give another one: Let's say you design a setting based on Bakufu Japan. If you depicted that culture with absolutely no contact with outsiders, but failed to mention the reason (there being a xenophobic decree limiting all transport to and from the country), that would be Disneyification. But you're certainly free to imagine a setting with Bakufu Japan aesthetics where there is no Sakoku Edict and the people intermingle with others. I think the situation with requiring harems or slavery is no different than this.

I think this is exactly right. Al-Qadim is not depicting one culture; it's creating a fictional one out of a pastiche of some half-dozen Middle Eastern, Persian, South Asian, Arabic, and North African cultures. The whole thing truly is a hodgepodge and I don't see where it was ever meant to be otherwise. In that case, a setting author and/or DM has an awful lot of license to include or leave out all sorts of stuff, be it nasty or nice. As best I can tell, verisimilitude was never part of the plan with Al-Qadim.

 

[Ixal]

But... why? It's not like the Faerunian Pantheon in the Sword Coast is representative of how Catholic Clergy worked in the Middle Ages. You can clearly have a setting with European Mediaeval aesthetic trappings without referring to the religion there, so why can't you have that in Al Qadim? It seems to me that you are looking at Middle Eastern cultures through an essentialist eye and arguing that anything that has Middle Eastern aesthetic trappings must involve Islamic religion and ideology at least to a certain extent. I don't see why.

This is a different matter than disneyification and pruning less pleasant parts of a culture even though you'd expect them to be there. By which I mean, if they created a setting where there was obviously slavery, but then the story completely ignored the moral wrongness of slavery and treated them as "servants who are happy with their status and look they're treated so well!", that would be a Disneyified version of that culture. But if I'm just using aesthetic trappings, I think I should be able to imagine a society without any of the political institutions in the historic Middle East. It's not like places with European aesthetic trappings have to have serfs or arranged marriages at the age of 12, so why are we forcing this on another culture's representation?

EDIT: I think my first example didn't work that well. Let me give another one: Let's say you design a setting based on Bakufu Japan. If you depicted that culture with absolutely no contact with outsiders, but failed to mention the reason (there being a xenophobic decree limiting all transport to and from the country), that would be Disneyification. But you're certainly free to imagine a setting with Bakufu Japan aesthetics where there is no Sakoku Edict and the people intermingle with others. I think the situation with requiring harems or slavery is no different than this.

Why not?
I hope you agree that religion, especially in the past, had a huge influence on the lives of everyone and defined not only culture but also politics.

Also because of the colonial history most (all?) european cultures are labled as the oppressors and there is hardly any calls for the respectful representation of european cultures. Also many of them are "represented" already although very badly.

They certainly would also require a modern facelift with more cultural accuracy instead of being a trope collection and I commented more than once that I dislike the FRs kitchen sink approach with its nonsensical random placement of badly copied european countries on the map.

But the focus is currently on non-european cultures but that doesn't mean that european cultures do not deserve the same kind of respect.

 

[Ondath]

I think this is exactly right. Al-Qadim is not depicting one culture; it's creating a fictional one out of a pastiche of some half-dozen Middle Eastern, Persian, South Asian, Arabic, and North African cultures. The whole thing truly is a hodgepodge and I don't see where it was ever meant to be otherwise. In that case, a setting author and/or DM has an awful lot of license to include or leave out all sorts of stuff, be it nasty or nice. As best I can tell, verisimilitude was never part of the plan with Al-Qadim.

I'd also note that the way you use verisimilitude is one of many. There's certainly no need to have verisimilitude in the sense of things being exactly as they were in the historical Middle East. Of course, you have a duty of sensibility by making sure that the culture you're borrowing the aesthetic trappings from isn't just reduced to its caricatures (which was the problem with the earlier books), but that could also be seen as verisimilitude (in the sense of staying away from harmful stereotypes). Then there's third sense of verisimilitude, which is expecting that the setting will follow its own rules and logic. This is separate from verisimilitude in the sense of replicating the historical region, and I think this is where things get complicated. You're not obligated to put harems in your setting by any means, but if you did, I'd like it if the social and historical ramifications of such places were also put in.

 

[Blue Orange]

I think this is exactly right. Al-Qadim is not depicting one culture; it's creating a fictional one out of a pastiche of some half-dozen Middle Eastern, Persian, South Asian, Arabic, and North African cultures. The whole thing truly is a hodgepodge and I don't see where it was ever meant to be otherwise. In that case, a setting author and/or DM has an awful lot of license to include or leave out all sorts of stuff, be it nasty or nice. As best I can tell, verisimilitude was never part of the plan with Al-Qadim.

It was before a lot of the modern concerns with cultural appropriation and the like--I mean, baseline D&D is a hodgepodge of medieval European time points and nations, not to mention add-ons like (Chinese) kung fu monks that people thought were cool in the 70s (probably under the influence of Hong Kong action films). By the late 1970s Dragon magazine was including ninja and samurai classes. So the thought was, if we have fantasy Europe, why not fantasy Arabia or fantasy Japan?

(My opinion is that you can, though now that you can actually ask people from those countries, some of whom are D&D fans, you can do a better job. Gary Gygax in his small-town 1980s library couldn't do that.)

 

[Ondath]

Why not?

I have a very simple answer to that: We're ultimately playing a game (or writing fantasy fiction). If I'm playing in Al Qadim because I want to be a cool dude with a curved sword who withstands the heat of the desert with sheer coolness, I don't need grisly reminders about the state forcibly removing infidel children to make palace guards or getting slaves. I'm here to have fun, and this is why I'm playing in a fictional world with specific aesthetic trappings and not a historical recreation. There's no need to put those elements into the game if it won't affect my enjoyment in a meaningful way, which is also why we're not putting other needlessly grim details in the European Middle Ages to a setting with European trappings.

 

[Guest 7034872]

(My opinion is that you can, though now that you can actually ask people from those countries, some of whom are D&D fans, you can do a better job. Gary Gygax in his small-town 1980s library couldn't do that.)

That's exactly it: it's still a hodgepodge, but now we can make a much better hodgepodge because we have resources we didn't have prior to our hyperactive Digital Age.

But the focus is currently on non-european cultures but that doesn't mean that european cultures do not deserve the same kind of respect.

I do agree with this, certainly, because I will always defend even-handedness. Is there some setting in which you've seen ancient/dark/middle ages European cultures handled disrespectfully, though? I've haven't studied the question, so I can't say there are or there aren't.

 

[Ixal]

I have a very simple answer to that: We're ultimately playing a game (or writing fantasy fiction). If I'm playing in Al Qadim because I want to be a cool dude with a curved sword who withstands the heat of the desert with sheer coolness

Then the question is if this is really the level of respectfullnes people are demanding?
Because honestly this is about the same level as playing a nearly naked native american who silently moves through forests with a bow.
Middle eastern culture was far more than guys with curved sword in a desert. Many places this culture stretched to weren't even deserts.

 

[Umbran]

Why not?

Well, for one thing, many of the trappings under discussion are originally from pre-Islamic Middle-Eastern and Northern African cultures. A bunch of it comes from India, much of which isn't Islamic to this day. You don't have to put the stamp of the one religion on everything, when much of it predates or isn't directly connected to that religion.

 

[Ondath]

Then the question is if this is really the level of respectfullnes people are demanding?
Because honestly this is about the same level as playing a nearly naked native american who silently moves through forests with a bow.
Middle eastern culture was far more than guys with curved sword in a desert. Many places this culture stretched to weren't even deserts.

That was just an example off the top of my head. The point is: People play in certain settings because they like the aesthetic trappings. It doesn't mean they want 100% replications of the historical culture from which that aesthetic trapping came. If you're designing a setting, you have to decide the kind of sensitive topics your setting will have, and if you want to cover some of these, you can (and should) absolutely include different bits from that culture that touch on the topics you want to cover as faithfully as you can

• You want a story that deals with the horrors of slavery? Sure, then involve the idea in Islamic law that populations that resisted could be enslaved, then work from there to weave your narrative.
• Do you want to tell the story of someone from a disadvantaged group rising up in ranks thanks to palace intrigue? Absolutely involve the daily life at a harem to tell the story of the sultan's favourite rising up in ranks (it's basically Roxelena's story in real life!).

But these are things are not required in order to make that setting good. Whether you include these or not is a perfectly valid design choice, and your only commitment to verisimilitude is depicting the consequences of the ideas you decided to involve in the first place.

There was a thread somewhere here that talked about the feasibility of having a D&D setting that actually worked like real-life Mediaeval Europe. One GM who tried to run such a setting said that the players ultimately didn't like it, because the world was so alien and limiting to them in a way that made things unfun. So the GM didn't use that setting anymore.

Ultimately, this is a hobby we indulge in for fun. It's hardly surprising when people remove elements that are unfun, and I really don't think it's cultural misrepresentation when that happens.

 

[Ixal]

Well, for one thing, many of the trappings under discussion are originally from pre-Islamic Middle-Eastern and Northern African cultures. You don't have to put the stamp of the one religion on everything, when much of it predates that religion.

Is it? 1001 Nights was mentioned several times and that didn't exactly strike me as byzantine/roman or greek. Maybe Sassanid, I am not well versed with them.