WotC Can we salvage Toril?

[Henadic Theologian]

If your looking to set your game in early Medieval Scandinavia, your going to have a hard time making the D&D fit that too. D&D sucks at emulating specific cultures. Could OA have pulled more from other Asian cultures? Sure. It was written in during of the Cold War in pre-Internet days by a bunch of guys in Wisconsin using correspondence from the people who lived in another country, plus whatever nuggets of myth or lore they could find. To say it's incomplete and wrong in places is a given, it's almost a surprise it manages to get right whatever it does gets right.

And I understand you don't want to talk about 3e OA, it doesn't fit the narrative of D&D as a culturally insensitive ogre (oni?) Who can't learn from it's mistakes 20 5f56 5y and produce a superior (but not **y6f5f) version.

Anyway, I'm going to assume unless you want to continue trying to convince me that a 30+ year product is why WotC can't be trusted to ever do an Asian-themed setting again, this conversation is over.

The funny thing is is WotC IS doing an Asia setting this year, Kamigawa and it's generally expected that it's a when not an if when Tarkir hits, so I don't think WotC shares the view that Kara Tur is untouchable as some in this thread do.

 

[Mecheon]

It was just factually incorrect to say Comeliness was created specifically to fetishize Asians.

I mean, if you were just a casual D&D fan who picked up that book and nothing else alongside it, its certainly an Odd Addition to have put in there. Like, I know we have our understanding of everything but, just imagine being a casual person at the time. It ain't a good look.

Also their other stuff is good, though my personal favourite is when they get to the Kara Tur parts proper and start cackling over the "Welcome to snake temple where every time you go for a walk you've a chance of being bitten by a snake" or the BEAR WRESTLING because that's where the true fun is

so I don't think WotC shares the view that Kara Tur is untouchable as some in this thread do.

I gotta be honest, I don't think Kara Tur is worth looking at. They've certainly tried some of it (Its showing in Candlekeep Mysteries for example) but, the "Here's a big source book with an update on All This Stuff" isn't a thing WotC have done at any point. Heck, Daniel (One of the folks from aformentioned Asians Represent's famous takedown of OA) brought back its mention in the Candlekeep book as just a "It exists" thing

Do we really need a massive FR sourcebook, flooded full of detail useless to everything except the mega-fans, or can we just go "Its been 100 years just do whatever you want here"? Ditching all that and coming up with something fresh, new, and less mired in stereotypes older than most of the new audience is probably the best, especially given how minor its impact on the game would be one way or the other.

 

[Scruffy nerf herder]

My mindset is that no matter what more splat books is good. Even lower quality splat books I love them all. However, that doesn't mean I turn them all over to the players, they never know if something is home brewed or not because I brew a lot as well.

So should Toril be salvaged? For me the answer is yes, 100%, I'd read and play and enjoy it. It's totally ancillary to me, concerns like "is it profitable for WOTC", etc., so long as I can vote with my pocket and keep supporting the kind of splat I want. And this is the kind that I'd want.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not just the constant changes, but that they seem to never get anywhere.
3rd edition had the Return of the Shades and the Silence of Lolth as big events, but then not much actually came from it in the end. I've got no ideas what the shades did once they were back, or if they are even acknowledged in 5th edition, and the Silence of Lolth ultimately didn't change anything.

The shades as in the lords of returned Netheril?

They had a really interesting (if a bit overly edgy and underdeveloped) new empire that was in a Cold War with Cormyr, Myth Drannor, The Dales, Evereska, and some others I think. They had made Sembia their vassal state, and restored the Anauroch Desert into the fertile land it was in the time of Ancient Netheril.

But that was in 4e, so they yeeted the two floating cities from the sky and said “the desert came back and the Netherese scattered or went immediately back to being Bedine or whatever.

 

[Smackpixi]

Ed Greenwood’s Borderlands thing on DMs guild has only sold between 1k and 2.5k copies. Which is not a lot. If it got the full professional editing and art treatment by WoTC and regular hard copy publishing, would it sell 1MM copies like other books merely cause it’s what’s being sold this spring? Hard to really tell what the demand is when completely different delivery.

 

[Mordhau]

No problem.

I am a fan of 1e OA, I thought it had the best martial arts systems throughout D&D editions.

I was really not a fan of the honor system in 1e OA but most of the rest I thought was overall very good stuff.

I had a bunch of the OA modules but never ran any of them. Mostly I knew of Kara Tur as the OA setting where a bunch of modules were set that fleshed out different regions, a series of regions that got placed in the East of Forgotten Realms, the Fantasy China Shou Lung was featured heavily in the early Hordes novel trilogy, and Shou Lung was a cool faction in Spelljammer. Kara Tur itself featured very lightly in the OA book itself, being fleshed out in the modules and then the setting boxed set later (which I only got long after my AD&D era).

The criticisms of OA that got under my skin were factually incorrect and making false inferences based on ignorance.

I watched a two and a half hour video (the first of a series of over 20) of two guys reviewing 1e OA in depth that went on for over an hour about how OA sexually fetishized and exoticized east Asians through the introduction of the comeliness mechanics and how it fed into the stereotypes of the sexy Dragon Lady and the unattractive Asian man. The fact that comeliness was developed specifically for OA and only applied to Asians was a big point.

1e comeliness mechanics were terrible and based on fairly terrible attractiveness tropes, but they factually were not designed to apply only to Asians and did not originate in 1e OA. They were reprinted from the earlier printed generic 1e AD&D Unearthed Arcana where they applied to all D&D characters, and the earlier printed 1e World of Greyhawk boxed set as a new god stat, and they originally showed up as a Dragon Magazine article.

It was just factually incorrect to say Comeliness was created specifically to fetishize Asians.

I did not watch the follow up videos.

I'd have a pretty low opinion of any critique carried out via the medium of Youtube videos.

 

[Henadic Theologian]

I find it odd folks are obsessesing over OA 1e, which was the setting neutral version of Kara Tur, when the actually revelent book is Kara Tur Campaign Setting, which is a less controversial name. When it comes to FR KTCS is the book that matters, OA 1e was just the prototype. Did the guys that review OA on YouTube, and apparently dropped misinformation, hopefully by simply ignorance of facts and not delbrate decisions, ever review KTCS?

 

[Mordhau]

My opinion of the Kara-Tur book when I read through it a year or so ago was that regardless of whether it's offensive or not, it just isn't very good.

 

[Mordhau]

If I had to do something with Kara-Tur, I'd play around with some of the basic stuff from the whole Hordelands idea.

It's been over a century, so maybe the Tuigan (pseudo Mongol) empire has survived in some form and it's at roughly the stage where it was under Kublai Khan, fragmenting but the Tuigan have basically established a dynasty in Shou Lung, (The Northern of the Two Chinas), and are planning to conquer the southern of the two Chinas, which I would rewrite to be more like the Southern Song which had been separate from Northern China, since the conquest of the North by an earlier group of horse-raiders.

There's quite a lot of advantages to this set-up. The Mongol empire led to a renaissance of silk road trade due to the peace they enforced, (Pax Mongolica) so this would see greater contact between Kara-Tur and the west; you'd have Red Wizards all over the place (as I said earlier in the thread if you look at the map Thay is closer to Shou Lung than it is to the Sword Coast. ) This also allows lot more cosmopolitanism. If people are travelling all over the place it's a lot easier to justify a range of characters. You also have lots of clear potential conflicts. The Tuigan in Shou Lung want to invade the southern China analogue, there may be a native uprising in Shou Lung against the Tuigan inspired by the later rise of the Ming Dynasty. While in the Hordelands, the potential for fragments of the old empire to descend into war is rife, and one of the warlords might decide he wants to reunite the old empire and start a war with his rivals. (Since Semphar is vaguely Persian I'd probably have a Tuigan style horde there inspired by Tamerlane's court in Samarkand).

I'm not sure exactly what I'd do about the two japans, but one of them badly needs to be going through some kind of encounter with an outside force. Given the hundred years since Maztica, you could have trade ships coming from Maztica with silver which would lay a foundation for introducing something like the Wokou. Although if the parallels with colonialism are two uncomfortable, it could be something entirely different. Seeing as Forgotten Realms doesn't really have an Indian analogue you could have an island further to the west broadly inspired by Chola India or something like that (or make up a new culture based off one of the non-human species), just enough of a foreign presence to shake up the stereoptyical Japan and make it something more interesting.

There's also two buddhist Tibets for some reason. I'd rewrite one of them to be more based off the pre-buddhist Tibetan empire that fought against the Tang dynasty.

That's just a starting point, without bringing in more overt fantastic elements, (much more integration of non-human species is needed to make it fit the Realms better) but I think at least that much would be laying better foundations.

 

[Mecheon]

Did the guys that review OA on YouTube, and apparently dropped misinformation, hopefully by simply ignorance of facts and not delbrate decisions, ever review KTCS?

Semi, they're going through it but the book's a bit boring so its still in progress. That's where the comedy that is bear wrestling comes from, along with a lot of other fun comments. Oh and like, several towns just being named after real life beer labels

 

[Henadic Theologian]

If I had to do something with Kara-Tur, I'd play around with some of the basic stuff from the whole Hordelands idea.

It's been over a century, so maybe the Tuigan (pseudo Mongol) empire has survived in some form and it's at roughly the stage where it was under Kublai Khan, fragmenting but the Tuigan have basically established a dynasty in Shou Lung, (The Northern of the Two Chinas), and are planning to conquer the southern of the two Chinas, which I would rewrite to be more like the Southern Song which had been separate from Northern China, since the conquest of the North by an earlier group of horse-raiders.

There's quite a lot of advantages to this set-up. The Mongol empire led to a renaissance of silk road trade due to the peace they enforced, (Pax Mongolica) so this would see greater contact between Kara-Tur and the west; you'd have Red Wizards all over the place (as I said earlier in the thread if you look at the map Thay is closer to Shou Lung than it is to the Sword Coast. ) This also allows lot more cosmopolitanism. If people are travelling all over the place it's a lot easier to justify a range of characters. You also have lots of clear potential conflicts. The Tuigan in Shou Lung want to invade the southern China analogue, there may be a native uprising in China against the Tuigan inspired by the later rise of the Ming Dynasty. While in the Hordelands, the potential for fragments of the old empire to descend into war is rife, and one of the warlords might decide he wants to reunite the old empire and start a war with his rivals. (Since Semphar is vaguely Persian I'd probably have a Tuigan style horde there inspired by Tamerlane's court in Samarkand).

I'm not sure exactly what I'd do about the two japans, but one of them badly needs to be going through some kind of encounter with an outside force. Given the hundred years since Maztica, you could have trade ships coming from Maztica with silver which would lay a foundation for introducing something like the Wokou. Although if the parallels with colonialism are two uncomfortable, it could be something entirely different. Seeing as Forgotten Realms doesn't really have an Indian analogue you could have an island further to the west broadly inspired by Chola India or something like that (or make up a new culture based off one of the non-human species), just enough of a foreign presence to shake up the stereoptyical Japan and make it something more interesting.

There's also two buddhist Tibets for some reason. I'd rewrite one of them to be more based off the pre-buddhist Tibetan empire that fought against the Tang dynasty.

That's just a starting point, without bringing in more overt fantastic elements, (much more integration of non-human species is needed to make it fit realms better) but I think at least that much would be laying better foundations.

Actually the Forgotten Realms does have fantasy India, in Faerun, a few nations in the Shining South, like Durpar. The Koung Kingdom hints at a possible Kara Tur India (or rather a Sri Lanka which the writers never got to).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The funny thing is is WotC IS doing an Asia setting this year, Kamigawa and it's generally expected that it's a when not an if when Tarkir hits, so I don't think WotC shares the view that Kara Tur is untouchable as some in this thread do.

I believe Kamigawa is Japan, not "Asia". Trying to lump the whole continent into a monoculture was where Kara-Tur went wrong in the first place. It's not impossible for WotC to revisit Kara-Tur, but it would be very different, possibly including the name.

 

[DEFCON 1]

WotC said from the very beginning they were only going to update parts of Faerun when they had a product that would make use of it. They weren't going to spend their time, money, and energy creating completely new information out of whole cloth for places like Turmish just on the off-chance there were a few players out there who felt like they wanted to read two pages worth of a modern Turmish almanac. Especially considering an even smaller percentage of those people would actually do anything with that information once they read it. The time of writing those world history books just for the sake of writing them has long gone.

So if that means anyone thinks the Realms can't be salvaged? Great! It gives even more of a reason for WotC to not have to re-write the entire campaign setting for those people (not that I think they were ever going to do that anyway.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The funny thing is is WotC IS doing an Asia setting this year, Kamigawa and it's generally expected that it's a when not an if when Tarkir hits, so I don't think WotC shares the view that Kara Tur is untouchable as some in this thread do.

Kamigawa and Kara-Tur are very, very different things in the details and execution.

Kara-Tur is pretty much exemplary of the laziest and least effective kind of "Asia-themed" setting, in which it's a big morass of poorly-researched takes on "Asian" in a bland and broad way, with a lot of stuff jammed together. It's not "hateful", but it's just... crap and representative of an unfortunate take on "Asian" culture that was once common.

Whereas Kamigawa is a fairly tight and specific thing, focused on Japanese culture and mythology (specifically) and with a cyberpunk theme.

It's a serious mistake to see them as similar. It is possible that WotC could redo Kara-Tur to be less, well, bad and lazy, but the question is, would it be worth it? Would it be more successful and popular than a Kamigawa setting-book? I suspect not, because Kamigawa could add a whole bunch of cyberpunk stuff to D&D for those who wanted it.

On Toril in general, I think there are really only two ways from the FR to go forwards from where it is:

1) The cautious option, where there is maybe a broader FR book than now in terms of the "core realms", but Maztica, Zakhara, Kara-Tur etc. are still not detailed in any meaningful way. This would probably be the safest thing to do, but even that isn't without risk, because people will ask questions about why they aren't covered. I'm not sure it would achieve much but I suspect it would be popular and it could update SCAG mechanical material to the DND2024 standard (Tieflings etc).

2) The "new edition, new FR" option. WotC have already expressed the opinion that they are not bound by previous canon, and honestly, they could go with a new FR book that was more "full-on", and "rebooted" Maztica, Zakhara, and Kara-Tur. Maztica must be rebooted to be used. You cannot light-touch retcon your way out of the what the original Maztica books did. That just has to go - I think if you did go retcon instead of just pretending it never happened, you'd want to say something which amounted to "Oh the 2E stuff was nonsense written by an invader", and go from there, not even using that material. Zakhara isn't in that bad a state, imho, so it could be more light-touch and just putting a solidly positive spin on it. Kara-Tur needs a rewrite for somewhat different reasons to Maztica. You'd need a pretty big book to be even mildly respectful of them though.

I suspect the first is a lot more likely than the second. If it wasn't for the multimedia strategy I'd kind of suspect they were going to move away from the FR generally, but given we have a movie, possibly one or more TV shows, BG3 (i.e. a pretty big-deal AAA CRPG), and likely other games on the way, likely landing in 2022 and 2023, so just before the 2024 new edition, I don't think a move away from the FR is terribly likely. I do think they're going to update it though. Especially as they have the excuse of the new edition.

As a total aside, on a certain level, the Moonshae Isles (i.e. The British Isles and Scandinavia - or rather just the "colourful" bits of those to a 1980s American eye) are almost as bad as Kara-Tur (not Maztica though, that's a whole other level of "yikes"). They're an example of a very similar cultural phenomenon (Celtomania instead of Orientalism), but they were at least done by people who have a background with those countries/cultures, and whilst kinda gross, at least can't really be said to be racist, just incredibly dumb (they're also more forgivable because they're a much smaller part of the world). If I was passing through I'd probably get rid of the word Ffolk though, esp. as it's a Germanic-derived word given a hilariously idiotic cod-Welsh spin (is there even a quasi-Germany in the FR btw? I actually can't think of one of the top of my head).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

WotC said from the very beginning they were only going to update parts of Faerun when they had a product that would make use of it.

They did, but I think expecting WotC to be bound by stuff they said in like 2014/2015 now, especially with DND2024 coming up, is pretty silly imho. They said a whole lot of things that they've since reversed on, including the pace of production of sourcebooks, which they made a whole song and dance about back then. Don't get me wrong - that doesn't mean they "definitely will" change their mind on that - but equally it's not really sensible to expect them to hold to it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

As a total aside, on a certain level, the Moonshae Isles (i.e. The British Isles and Scandinavia - or rather just the "colourful" bits of those to a 1980s American eye) are almost as bad as Kara-Tur (not Maztica though, that's a whole other level of "yikes"). They're an example of a very similar cultural phenomenon (Celtomania instead of Orientalism), but they were at least done by people who have a background with those countries/cultures, and whilst kinda gross, at least can't really be said to be racist, just incredibly dumb (they're also more forgivable because they're a much smaller part of the world). If I was passing through I'd probably get rid of the word Ffolk though, esp. as it's a Germanic-derived word given a hilariously idiotic cod-Welsh spin (is there even a quasi-Germany in the FR btw? I actually can't think of one of the top of my head).

The difference is, the British don't feel got at by the Americans, so we just shuffle embarrassedly, like watching a "British" character on an American sitcom.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The difference is, the British don't feel got at by the Americans, so we just shuffle embarrassedly, like watching a "British" character on an American sitcom.

There's some truth in this, plus Americans perceiving themselves to be of British Isles descent tended to be the people pushing Celtomania in the first place (that's part of why England isn't really on the Moonshaes, it's more like a weird mashup of Wales, Cornwall, Ireland, and Scotland, plus the Vikings for flavour - Cormyr is fairly England-adjacent though, back on the mainland - I'd argue it's more like "What if New England was medieval", but that's a separate discussion!). Also, frankly, no-one cares about the Moonshae Isles because Celtomania has been dead for, what, coming up on 30 years (after the late '80s, early '90s revival it got - which impacted games beyond D&D, note, WoD got a bit of it, for example), and they've never been presented well as an exciting place to adventure in.

I mean, that could change, oddly enough, with the whole "Goblins = Fey" deal. An expanded FR which was willing to just ride roughshod over old canon (which I'd be fine with, despite the groaning weight of FR products on the shelf behind me) could make Fey Goblinkind major players in the Moonshaes and generally shake the place up.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

is there even a quasi-Germany in the FR btw?

There's Sembia, which kinda looks like the German principalities era, with their merchant-princes and whatnot.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There's Sembia, which kinda looks like the German principalities era, with their merchant-princes and whatnot.

Given that the Sembians are usually portrayed as villains, it might be a good thing not many people have spotted that...

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Given that the Sembians are usually portrayed as villains, it might be a good thing not many people have spotted that...

yeah, the evil, shady-dealing, aggressively pro-merchant country messing the good France/England feudal kingdom full of noble knights and glorious kings is a little iffy.

Sembian are pretty much the evil-nazy-guy-with-fake-german-accent from Indiana Jones movies.

Was there ever a good guy that came from Sembia in FR lore?