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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nisarg" data-source="post: 1786922" data-attributes="member: 19893">Yes, very very very badly.I mean, its bad enough when they have Oriental Adventures, which butchers Japanese and Chinese culture, rams them together as only the culturally ignorant can, and releases that as its heavily stereotypical low-on-accuracy "oriental" setting.But Mahasarpa is a sourcebook for Oriental Adventures, so they actually take the "japanese/chinese" classes from Oriental Adventures and try to jam those into Indian culture!  It is the frankenstein monster of RPG settings; made from lots of disparate ill-fitting chunks and not very smart.For a real India-setting in D&D, they would have to do a number of things. First of all, you would HAVE to have the caste system. Whether players got to chose which caste they were in, or the DM chose, or it was determined randomly, that's fine.. but you'd have to have it. You couldn't have a sudra being a cleric, and a Kshastriya rogue would be pretty ill-fitting. Barbarian would only be really suitable to foreigners from the mountains, you'd practically have to have an "aristocrat" class, etc. etc.Next, you would have to have some kind of mechanic for Karma and the three Gunas.  For the Gunas you could do something similar to the Law/balance/chaos mechanics they had in Stormbringer, replacing alignment, only it would tamas/rajas/sattvas. These would all three be variable stats, and tied to Karma somehow, so that if you acted in unrighteous ways or against your caste, you would accumulate penalties.Then there would be the question of magic use... would the vedic temple priests get cleric spells? Krishna doesn't hold a high opinion of them in the Bhagavad Gita... maybe only Bhaktins should get cleric spells, as "miracles".  So what would Yogis be? Psionicists? Siddha Yogins/Tantrikas could be wizards.But in any of these cases if it was REALLY going to fit the setting, the magic system would have to be highly altered. For the Bhaktins, for example, you would practically have to set up some kind of prayer mechanic, rather than just let them pick and choose spells.What races would be available? Humans, obviously... maybe Rishis.. what about Avataras (then you'd be getting into an Exalted-style epic game, though)?  Monkeys from Sri Lanka?  Nagas and Rakshasas would be important obviously, but probably not PC races...There's a lot of stuff to consider.. maybe someday I'll take a crack at it...Nisarg</blockquote>

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