Because life is busy, it will, unfortunately, take me a while to find a time to run it, but now I will. Where appropriate, I will research music inspired by the cultures depicted within to play during the sessions. My wife loves to cook for games, and we'll aim to do meals inspired by those cultures...
I wanted to start with this because you are in for an absolute
treat. Each of the descriptions of the cultures in that book has a good focus on food to make the civilization come alive. The first adventure is entirely ABOUT a conflict at a food market. It made my group hungry more than once just hearing the descriptions in some scenes. I ran through that whole book, and I'd do it a second time if someone wanted to make food for the adventures.
This is the cover of GDQ1-7 Queen of the Spiders, 1986.
I like this because it demonstrates a truism about the fantasy genre that some folks really resist:
fantasy is always a reflection of the modern world.
Even the "historically accurate" flavor of fantasy, even granddaddy Tolkien, ESPECIALLY every pulpy sword-and-sorcery tale, all of them are products of the modern age, of particular generations' views on history and legend and myth and the nature of stories. Nothing is ever historically accurate in D&D, and no one actually wants that.
The big debate about ahistorical things in D&D isn't really about something being ahistorical, it's about something else. An aesthetic. A vibe. A set of tropes. Not history per se, but someone's idea of what "history" should look kind of look and feel like.
And of course different people whose childhoods have different contexts have different ideas about that history. The past isn't even the past, after all.
Maybe it's just the just the evolution of dungeonpunk. Maybe it's dungeonpop.
Not for nothing, I'd adore dungeonpop. Saw
K-Pop Demon Hunters not too long ago, and the idea of overcoming personal struggles while slaying monsters and being celebrities isn't super far off base of a typical D&D campaign (being famous heroes in the world is a pretty common D&D trope!).
Without context, nothing about the art says D&D to me. If it was talking about a section in Radiant Citadel, then I guess. Picture looks more like a Chinese-Lantern themed quinceañera to me though.
Context is: it's D&D Mardi Gras. Zinda is a kind of fantasy New Orleans, the March of Vice is a D&D Mardi Gras. The big hook of
Wages of Vice is "save D&D Mardi Gras." It's a dope vibe, and being beaten to 0 hp with a high heel by an addled performer in this specific encounter is a fun moment. I recall the climax of this adventure also being a great setpiece, an attempted assassination during a massive magical fantasy parade.
One of the reasons it's a dope vibe is because it is not something found a lot in D&D, but it fits very well.
But it's a fight modern fantasy has lost. Even something as "close" to realistic as Game of Thrones is horribly anachronistic in it's approach to costumes. And as fantasy has moved away from medievalism towards wider places and times, it's not surprising that more and more modernistic.
GoT is also a product of modernism. Jaded perspectives on political machinations and killing off idealism and such. Very "being idealistic is for children, this is a grown-up fantasy, with sex and blood!"
It's probably my biggest complaint with Radiant Citadel. Each of the settings is as far as I can say, way too much a direct lift of its real world inspiration, down to artistic choice. "Lived experience" does not mean I want African American authors to recreate 19th century antebellum southern US, or have two of the adventures by Latin American authors to have the same Spanish-esque colonisation in their fictional lands backstories. We seem to be going from "Zeb Cook is not qualified to write a fantasy Asia" to "Chinese American author can only write about a fantasy China and it must look and feel like the China that his grandmother grew up in"
One common intellectual fallacy that folks fall prey to is assuming that things that they are not familiar with are a monolith, while giving their own experience the benefit of nuance and context.
One of the strong points of Radiant Citadel is that its civilizations haven nuance and context. They are not monoliths. The Empire of Great Xing resonates with Imperial China vibes (definitely not something anyone's grandmother grew up in), but it doesn't claim to speak for all of China across all of time and space, just to kind of get at the feeling of an old empire, full of political machinations and spies and subterfuge, tests and forms and bureaucracy.
I have recently been lamenting how my go-to MMO, Final Fantasy XIV has utterly lost its visual coherence. People in plate armour run alongside with people wearing modern or cyberpunk clothes scrolling their smartphones.
I don' think the issue is anachronism per se, it is about having coherent visual language, and anachronisms are part of it. That being said, I think it is perfectly fine, and even preferable to have different settings and minisettings that have their own visual language, so in that sense I have no issue with the Radiant Citadel pictures. But I think D&D setting always have been pretty incoherent in this regard, and it seems to be getting worse. In Forgotten Realms, Exandria etc medieval and Victorian fashions are seen side by side, and there is no attempt to establish any sort of coherence. And this does not seem like an intentional choice like the more modern aspect are with Eberron or indeed like with some of these minisettings mentioned in this thread, it is more like the creators just grabbing one this from here and another there and mushing them together without any thought whether they form a coherent whole.
Coherence is a thing, but it's a bit of a canard in this case. Zinda is coherent. It's not necessarily like other D&D, but it is entirely coherent with itself.
Journeys is a book about traveling to distant lands, so "traditional" D&D characters are expected to be new to the setting and to stick out a bit. Part of its appeal is the idea that you're visiting these colorful and interesting locales during heightened moments and helping them out.
Zinda doesn't really fit in, like, the Forgotten Realms very easily, but that's part of why it's fun to visit Zinda in this adventure.
This post, and @Levistus's_Leviathan's, make a similar error...they assume that if someone is complaining about the new artwork they are ok with everything else (Ravenloft, Eberron, Ravnica) that has been published and therefore their position is incoherent. Basically, characterizing the complaints as if they are about this one specific thing and therefore silly and wrong rather than part of a more cohesive viewpoint.
For example, many people that dislike the new direction would also not be fans of other departures from the medieval. And I've talked about this point a few times, but imo the issue underlying the complaint is how easy it is to find games that fit your preference. If you meet some strangers and say "let's play d&d", what is everyone imagining? Is it at all similar?
The converse of a wider variety of games being possible is that the brand identity is less clearly defined. This is unavoidable.
You can respond to this tradeoff in many different ways--and obviously by keeping the brand identity narrow, you are going to make some people who may want to play d&d feel less interested. But I think it is important to note it is a real tradeoff, and people who feel frustrated as a result are not just upset because they are unreasonable people.
No one is saying that shoe-wielding dancers should take over as a common enemy type at every D&D table. Just that D&D can also include shoe-wielding dancers, in addition to all the other stuff it contains.
If one can't celebrate the diversity of what this game can be, if the appearance of shoe-wielding dancers makes one feel defensive, like they need to protect this game they love from nefarious influences that aren't pseudo-medieval European, then maybe that's worth examining and questioning.
