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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadence" data-source="post: 8032288" data-attributes="member: 6701124">RE: Oriental Adventures vs. Occidental Adventures(!?)I haven't flipped through OA in quite a while. Reading your comment (and one of the lines in Gygax's OA preface), I was expecting the book to relate various things explicitly to specific real world cultures in a way that the rest of AD&D didn't (as opposed to being broadly about the Orient vs. broadly about Europe).While the names of the races, classes, and weapons are obviously from the real world, I didn't see any mention of how they matched particular nationalities or cultures from the real world after the preface and introduction. The "Korobokuru are a race of Oriental dwarves". The barbarians live in three generic territories, steppeland, forest, and jungle. The section on equipment talks about the exchange rate between "gajin world to Kara Tur and vice versa". We today, know, if nothing else via google, where the different weapons and classes originated. But someone reading the text isn't told where the Samurai or Wu Jen are based from in the real world. The weapons are just in a big list with no real world site of origin listed. Like the PhB does for Europe, it feels like a mish-mash of the entire region (more below). Similarly, in the "Overview of Kara-Tur" section it isn't stated which real world countries the Kara-Tur ones line up with, even if it's easy to guess in some cases. This feels similar to me to some things in Greyhawk or Faerun in those specific products. The difference being that Greyhawk and Faerun had their own books and weren't at the back of the PhB or MM.In the "Daily Life in Kara-Tur" section it does note:I'm not sure if this helps your how that impacts your argument. Kara-Tur seems clearly aiming to be a mishmash of the east like Greyhawk and Faerun (and the AD&D default) are a mishmash of the west - backing up a parallel between Oriental and Occidental.  But it also recognizes that clearly this one book is leaving things out by necessity and that DMs are advised to look deeper into the source material - does this indicate some cultural respect on the authors part?As for the pre-OA AD&D, it followed D&D which followed CHAINMAIL in relying on "medieval European history, and mythos, and myth most commonly available to the authors." (Gygax, OA Preface). In the PhB, two of the classes do have specifically noted real world connection. For the cleric, "[T]his class of character bears a certain resemblance to religious orders of knighthood of medieval times." and "Druids can be visualized as medieval cousins of what the ancient Celtic sect of Druids would have become had it survived the Roman conquest." OA doesn't give the origin of Samurai or language the weapon names are from, and the PhB doesn't tell us a Paladin was originally one of those serving Charlemagne (although, as judged by the show "Have Gun Will Travel", the term had wider usage) or where Fauchard or Guisarme come from. The DMG does explicitly give an example it claims makes it "easy to see how pointless it is to blindly plug in a set of 'birth tables' based on some form of hereditary quasi-European nobility". The paragraph on "Peasants, Serfs, and Slaves" and similar topics seem clearly based on Europe although it doesn't reference it specifically. I don't have a copy of the MM to check what it does.As you note, the setting of AD&D was clearly Europe by default. With only the Monk in the PhB and a table of corresponding Asian royal and noble titles (with Sultan, Padishah, Maharaja, Kha-Kahan, and Tarkhan at the top of the various lists) in the DMG, and a few monsters that seem to go beyond it. This generality feels to me like that's what they were aiming at with OA and the far east.Is a problem that the names in OA are too obviously tied to that part of the world? But is part of the reason that doesn't stand out in AD&D that England and the parts of Europe the English interacted with make up a big part of the stereotypical picture of medieval Europe? Is using the names Samurai and Ninja very different from using Druid and Paladin? Would it have helped if they had called Kensai "Weapon Saints" as a class name? Is calling a Katana a Katana different than calling a Fauchard a Fauchard (instead of a curved blade pole-arm)? I feel like I should look up how druid, paladin, long sword, broad sword, glaive, and fauchard are translated in modern Japanese RPGs, and how both those and the eastern weapons and class names are translated into something like French.It might not be perfect but I think labeling pre-OA AD&D as Occidental Adventures definitely makes some sense.----RE: Exoticism and AccuracyAs far as exoticism, it feels like Gygax expects that to go both ways in the preface:I'm not sure how it impacts the argument, but it feels worth noting that he also suggests removing the Monk from the base AD&D setting and putting it in the OA part of the world, because that's where it belongs.Cook in his introduction does talk about the Orient being mysterious and exciting - because one can explore and discover entirely different cultures. As far as reflecting them accurately:----RE: So what?OA is certainly a product of it's time (and let's face it, what has been a good time in America for the dominant culture to be sensitive to anyone else) and I would be great with slapping a label on it for just the name and back cover-blurb alone.   And I am great with respecting when people are disturbed by things that are in a book that I didn't realize were sensitive - that I didn't realize because I'm about as privileged as anyone can be. But when I go to look so I can understand, it's odd when there are multiple things that are supposed to be there that aren't. Are two-thirds of the argument Trammell's uses in "How Dungeon's and Dragon's Appropriated the Orient" (about comeliness and non-weapon proficiencies) that are used by others too, simply false given those mechanics' history. A history that isn't even hard to check? Is OA full of direct calls to the orient with a goal of exoticism, or is that mostly conveyed in the title and cover blurb? Were the authors negligent in not using sources and getting a culturally informed opinion, or did they use quite a few available sources, get more outside opinion, and display more cultural sensitivity than would be expected for the time (which, granted, wasn't much of an expectation)?Is there an actual argument that pulling the book down is somewhere close enough to the censorship/book-burning family that it should be done with caution (even though I've posted it is really freaking different than government censorship or book burning)? If there is, then how much needs to be on the pull it down side to justify doing so? Is there a line, or is it all just slippery slope-ism worry?I have a life devoid of microaggressions or let alone worrying about anything worse.  OA is a relatively unimportant book from four editions ago, that historians of the game would still presumably be able to get a copy of from WotC even if it was pulled down from sale.  And I'll assume slippery slopeism is as silly a concern as it's supposed to be.  If it seems unacceptable to continue having it available (with a #%!* better warning than the one they put on it and indiscriminately everything else), then the little bit of me that wants it out there for nostalgia doesn't particularly feel like much when weighed against another metaphorical weight on your and others' shoulders.</blockquote>

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