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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6704916" data-attributes="member: 6777454">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.</blockquote>

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