• NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.

D&D 5E Do you think we will get an Oriental Adventures setting for 5th edition?

I never see any conversation about "cultural appropriation" concerning Viking or Norse cultures. Or even Germanic or Greek culture and D&D is riddled with that. I wonder why?

D&D game designers are assumed to be of Germanic/Scandinavian descent? Does seem to be true of the majority of them! :lol:

Greek - personally I think we Western Europeans have been Culturally Appropriating
classical Greece for a couple thousand years now, the Romans started it and then the
Christians. The idea that Athens 500 BC and Iceland AD 2015 are both the same "Western
Civilisation" always seems a bit odd to me.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

Honestly, OA is one of the things we're hoping for most. Shugenja, Wu Jen and so on could be specialties of wizard or sorcerer and if use of the word Oriental is such a concern, they could say Adventures in the East or whatever.
 

Never.

They should never, ever, EEEEEVER print something called "Oriental Adventures" ever again.

Even printing a Kara-tur setting would be totally tasteless unless you just utterly revamped the whole thing and brought it back to the drawing board to approach it with a totally different mentality. It was filled with a ridiculous amount of racism and the unique people to the world were either boring or furries.

You can make a setting that has Asian-based influences-- even mixing Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. influences together. In fact, one should try to mix it! And mix it in enough of a balanced way where it becomes clear that there is no attempt to emulate one particular culture, but rather mixing elements of a number of them. If 95% of things in the setting are blatantly Japanese and you tried to use Japanese words to describe things, the 5% that isn't will come under scrutiny. But if it is clear from the start that there are a mix of inspired elements and clothing and names from all the cultures are common as a big mixing pot, then one needn't walk such a fine line.

But the idea behind it should not be "let' take the (perceived) differences between modern European and Middle Ages Asian cultures and exaggerate them 100 fold, then take rare examples from likely exaggerated stories and present them as the common way the world works." that way you can put your players and characters in an "alien", "foreign", "mystical", "backwards" world and expect them to uphold the lunacy incorporated in your warped view of how their society worked.

It is just distasteful.

Now, if you want to present a world where people use Chinese/Japanese versions of more or less the same stat weapons, where people dress more in robes and skirts than shirts and trousers, where one is more likely to encounter pandas and tigers than... bulls... where instead of dwarfs, elves, gnomes, goblins, ogres, etc., you have rakasha (whose stats don't remotely resemble standard D&D version), vanara, tengu, oni, dokkaebi, etc... And you similarly hand-wave middle ages feudal society and religion and all the restrictions it placed upon people and all the brutality involved in it in favor of a world offering more exploration and adventure....

You can even include that the lords have knights forming for them called "samurai" or that there are villages where people are trained to be combat Rogues called "Shinobi" and describe the temples as looking like Buddhist or Daoist or Shintoist ones including having pagodas and red gates and stone lion guardians.

Well, that's fine.

But don't call it "Oriental Adventures", because all "Oriental" means is "those weird, backwards, inferior people from the east" and it was applied to Russia and the Middle East when that was as far east as people thought about in Europe and later got placed on people further and further east as people became aware of them.

Don't include the word "east" either. Just call it whatever the land in the setting name is called.
 
Last edited:

Like some of the other commenters here, I feel that the only Kara-Tur update we will see for 5th edition will be via Unearthed Arcana. :(

A pity really, I want to see something/anything else beside more "Sword Coast only" material...
 

.

But the idea behind it should not be "let' take the (perceived) differences between modern European and Middle Ages Asian cultures and exaggerate them 100 fold, then take rare examples from likely exaggerated stories and present them as the common way the world works." that way you can put your players and characters in an "alien", "foreign", "mystical", "backwards" world and expect them to uphold the lunacy incorporated in your warped view of how their society worked.
but that's exactly how the European inspired parts are always done
 

Kara-Tur has previously dumped all of Asian myth into a giant pot and let it mix much like how the SC dumps most of western myth into a pot.

Actually, the opposite is true... Kara-Tur had direct analogues for various East and Southeast Asian nations and cultures It had two Chinas (Shou Lung and T'u Lung), Two Japans (Kozakura and Wa)—one modeled after the Sengoku era, the other modeled after the Edo period, a Korea (Koryo), Tibet (Tabot), Mongolia (the Plain of Horses), Southeast Asian lands (The Jungle Lands), and Indonesia (the Island Kingdoms).

Unlike other settings like Faerun, Greyhawk and Dragonlance, where there is no one-to-one historical equivalent for their countries, Kara-Tur took cultures wholecloth and then added fantasy elements. It would have been nice, if there was more intermixing to come up with different countries that had no direct analogues and instead had distinct cultures that took an "a little of this and a little of that" approach.
 

but that's exactly how the European inspired parts are always done

If that were the case, then everyone in Dungeons & Dragons would be part of the Catholic Church (or a renamed version of the same thing) and there would only be one god with anyone else who worshipped anything else being a demon worshipper. It would also actively suppress all attempts to advance sciences and destroy all artwork not commissioned by it and made to enrich its glory.
People would be wholly owned by the lords of the place they were born in and forbidden from traveling-- any "adventurers" would be outlaws with no safe havens, women would have no rights and be considered effectively property of their fathers-- they would also be killed if not virgins on their wedding night when the lord comes to have his way with her.
Knights would fight to the death in celebratory tournaments using lances and swords and otherwise spend their time questing for an ancient cup.
And there would be a constant plague wiping out most of the population.

Yeah.... nothing like that is remotely in the game. Instead the game is presented with a post-magna carta style of monarchy rule where people are effectively free or otherwise frontierlands in which there are no rulers, gender relations are presented favorable to modern sensibilities, the world is designed to be far more conducive to random adventuring than any feudal government ever was for its people, people don't fight to the death for entertainment because, again, modern sensibilities, and the world is filled with multiple gods who have similar power levels because... I really don't know why, but it couldn't be more counter to the single-religion dominated Europe that was intolerant to all others.

I mean, I suppose one could argue that the Barbarian, Druid and Paladin were based on some odd ideas... but, then again, Barbarian works perfectly well to represent a Nordic Berserker, Mongolian Raider, Native American Brave or Zulu Tribal Warrior... Druid works pretty well to represent any sort of nature priest, probably fitting anyone from one of the animist religions across the world. And Paladin in 5th edition has drained out a lot of the specifically Knight Templar Crusader elements and now pretty much works just as well as a Spartan Warrior, Persian Immortal or Samurai Duelist or any other warrior so dedicated to a lord or a cause causing their battle prowess to increase due to control of emotions.
 

Like some of the other commenters here, I feel that the only Kara-Tur update we will see for 5th edition will be via Unearthed Arcana. :(

A pity really, I want to see something/anything else beside more "Sword Coast only" material...

The more I think about it, the more I agree with this one. The PHB and DMG already contain the necessary information to reskin pretty much anything as Asian influenced, like all the stuff about Wuxia campaigns, Asian weapon renames, the "Honor" score, etc. The PHB even has pictures of very Asian influenced characters (check out the one for the Soldier background, basically a samurai). Could totally see new races and possible class archetypes as part of Unearthed Arcana. And Unearthed Arcana could probably get away with the "Oriental Adventures" moniker because it is already a throwback name itself =P.
 

Probably best to name it anything other than "Oriental Adventures". Not sure why some folks are hung up on that. It's just a name. The word "oriental" is offensive to some people. It's that simple. Sure you can argue all day about why it shouldn't be offensive to some people ("It's just another word for 'East'", "Asia would include India and Russia as well", "My friend is Chinese and he doesn't care").

I think you're missing the point of why "oriental" is offensive. Sure, it's just another word for "east", but the implication is that the Orient is east of the "real world", the "important world" where all of the normal cultures and monsters are. Asians, naturally, view Asia as the real world and many of them do not appreciate their cultures being treated as part of a theme park diversion from "normal" adventuring.

The same problem does not exist when you present a whole setting that draws from Asian cultures rather than European cultures, because the world in those settings is "the real world" where the important stuff happens, and if they occupy the same planet as the Western pastiches, the Western cultures become the strange foreigners. The problem with Kara-Tur is that, as part of the Realms, it doesn't have its own Elminsters and its own gods to contend with; it's still an appendix to Eurocentric Faerûn. One of the little details I've always appreciated about Spelljammer is the fact that the Shou were the major Torilian faction in Realmspace.
 


Into the Woods

Remove ads

Top