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"
Now this post actually has a point and I think there is something interesting worth discussing here. It’s something I have been thinking about recently.
One of the main criticisms of the original Oriental Adventures product I’ve heard is how it merged China, Korea, and Japan together into a single setting. Contributing to the orientalist conflation of East Asian cultures that is/has been common in the Western world. Chult in Tomb of Annihilation is basically just Darkest Africa with the odd Native American culture mixed in (Goblin totem poles and Aztec Yuan-ti). I also dislike the common Mayincatec trope, where all the Aztec, Maya, and for some reason Inca are merged into a single exotic other (which is for whatever reason often applied to reptile-people like Yuan-Ti or Argonians).
People want to see themselves or people that look like them represented in media. There are a lot of cultures and ethnic groups that are underrepresented in fantasy media, and when they are it’s often a strange mishmash of a variety of disparate groups that the writer often clearly didn’t know much about. The number one important thing about representing a culture is respect. Not turning a real world group of people into a caricature (or worse, a dehumanized caricature like Orcs of Thar) or merged into a hodgepodge of exotic nonsense.
This leads to something like Radiant Citadel, where most of the settings functions as a fantasy stand-in for a real historical time and place. Which, you know, solves the conflation and treating the culture with respect issues. But it doesn’t really create a new setting or culture. Just medieval China, Japan, Korea, or Persia with monsters and magic. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. The Riders of Rohan are just Anglo-Saxons on horseback, and they’re cool. There are very few historical times and places that wouldn’t be interesting locations for a D&D adventure and other ethnicities should be able to use their history and culture for inspiration in D&D games/books. But I also don’t think it’s as interesting as making something new.
There’s an empire in my setting called Androkratoria. My two main inspirations for it were medieval Rome (aka Byzantium) and China, as they had quite a few interesting similarities (bureaucratic governments, silk production, special military technology kept secret by the state, eunuchs, conflict with steppe nomads, persecuting the Manichaeans, etc). I prefer mixing and matching aspects of different empires, cultures, and religions that have some interesting and often not-immediately-apparent similarities. I think this works well because, you know, there’s not really a historical basis for westerners conflating China and Greece/Rome in the same they’ve conflated China, Korea, Japan, and other Asian peoples/countries.
That’s just my preferred method. Mixing and matching aspects of cultures that wouldn’t be obviously connected or weren’t conflated historically. China and Byzantium. Tibet and the Inca. Cahokia, Scythians, and Egypt. Venice, Carthage, and Tenochtitlan.
