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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1964457" data-attributes="member: 7240">I think you're really failing to comprehend how unified European has been for the past 2000 years. Many of the creatures for which diverse origins are described were available in bestiaries and encyclopedias read from present-day Ireland to Turkey. Many D&D monsters got their start in books like Pliny's Natural History and Strabo's Geography that were circulated from one end of Europe to the other starting anywhere from 100AD to 1100AD. You can read poems and commentaries paying tribute to Greek and Roman mythology written in 6th century Ireland or 9th century Germany. The names of Norse gods were known from Kiev to Ireland by 1100AD. Writings of Romans about British druids were preserved and studied in libraries and monasteries throughout the Roman world. In the first century BC, the Roman theologian Varro was attempting to theorize whether Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc. gods of the same thing were the same god. Not only was shared European culture and myth an actual reality; it was a self-conscious one. Europeans understood themselves to be a diverse group that was nonetheless a unity.  But that's not the case. Jews lived in European cities. They lived all over Europe. Many if not most Jews were Europeans. In 100AD, the largest single Jewish population centre in the world was Rome. But the real reason these things are not comparable is that the written record shows thousands of instances of European Christian citations of Jewish sources from the 4th century onwards and basically no European citations of Chinese sources until the 17th century. I'm not making an argument about geographical association here. I'm making an argument about what actually happened. Then if it is, it should act like it by providing more than one Oriental class in the core rules or more than 10 Oriental monsters in the Monster Manual. Again, I think you miss the point of what I am saying. I'm not saying D&D should be Eurocentric. What I'm saying is that if D&D wants to include Oriental things in its core rules, it should include enough material to support these things. D&D should either stick with European archetypes in its core rules and consign all Oriental material to a supplement or it should add enough Oriental material to the core rules that if people want to play Asian-style archetypes, they will not end up being totally out of place.</blockquote>

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