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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 6711686" data-attributes="member: 6777454">I was clearly speaking of the time period in which D&D is closest to the real world level of technology.During a time prior to the wide spread use of personal firearms, but after the wide-spread adoption of metal armor. When castles were still considered serious defensive structures and the laws of the land were feudalistic in nature. Back when you had the thing that Paladin is based on-- Crusading Knights out there waging a protracted war with the Muslims over control of the Middle East (and killing any pagans or jews or anything foreign they came across while doing so).If you are playing D&D during an equivalent of the pre-Christian Roman era or after the widespread use of firearms, I would wager a lot of your class balances get knocked way off by either the lack of heavy armor or martial weapons in the former or the fact that you have weapons so powerful that armor no longer affects the game.During that time there were literally laws in the books that being non-Christian or engaging in non-Christian practices or rituals was a crime punishable by death. They even happily put to death children who engaged in petty crimes. And you can be quite certain that any travelers from Mongolia or China were not Christian and were certainly engaging in non-Christian acts.One merely needs to look at some of the old wild and brutal laws put on the books throughout those middle ages or look at the records as to why people were executed to see these sorts of things.The fact that D&D decides to adopt many of the aesthetics of that particular era and presents their whole globes of their worlds as universally European yet in choosing to do so make no attempt to force any of the uglier aspects of the culture into their settings, deciding to clean the whole thing up and present it according to modern sensibilities with modern cultural standards and practices and modern levels of rationality....Means that if you are going to present a world that is supposed to be based on the cultures of Asia such as Kara-tur or that god awful abomination known as Rokugan that only the blissfully ignorant manage not to find sickeningly stupid, you should not be exaggerating all the aspects of the culture that are brutal, irrational, and otherwise offensive to modern sensibilities. Particularly when these are the exact same things you erased and cleaned out of your European setting.So when I see stupidity like "all disputes between people are settled with sword duels to the death and no one can ever refuse to fight an opponent no matter how vastly and obviously superior!" or "they kill themselves the moment they mildly fail at anything" or "they follow the commands of their lord to the letter without any free thought" when you don't have Paladins doing the same exact things even though they are just as true for European knight as Japanese knights....Or you strictly enforce gender roles in your Asia setting while hand-waving them in your European setting even though gender roles were just as strict in both places?Or you make a total caricature out of Asian religions still being practices while totally avoiding doing so with western religions still in practice in your settings by avoiding putting them in there at all?Or you have your Asian-inspired characters talk in weird pseudo-Confucian language while never having your European-inspired characters talk in Shakespearean or Nordic sonnets?You just are clearly not being even-handed about it.Honestly, there has been so little printed about Kara-tur in so very long, its probably not even a problem to keep using that name. Just remake the entire thing from the ground up. Treat the Asian elements in the setting as if they are just as normal as the European elements, don't try to focus on or exaggerate the foreignness-- just present a land where they happen to use Japanese/Korean/Chinese/Thai/Mongolian/Indian architecture, clothing styles, landscape, ships, animals, mythological creatures (those best suited for the role turned into peoples). Sensibly go ahead and put the jungle stuff in the south and the snowy stuff in the north (or vice versa if it is in the southern hemisphere), put the desert stuff somewhere sensible and the clearly islander stuff on some island chains, but otherwise suggest there is free travel from region to region and the peoples get all mixed up. Have the control of the government be just as loose as in Faerun and posit some lost ancient empires and hostile non-human peoples and such to make room for adventurers doing dungeon exploration and other adventures. Maybe take the most basic aesthetics from Buddhism and the bare bones of Daoism and Shintoism (even mixing them together and evening them out), but don't try to copy them in any deep or meaningful way and posit them as just fantasy religions that happen to share some aesthetic similarities. Confucianism can be forgotten to the extent Plato/Socrates and other greek scholars are absent from Faerun.And just call the setting "Forgotten Realms: Kara-tur Adventures"It may seem like a tight-rope to walk, but it can be boiled down to "Just how much did you care about what was French, German, Russian or English when you designed Faerun and took their aesthetics and cultures as your base before building on it? How much of the real world history and religion did you actually incorporate, how many real world figures did you stick into the history under pseudonyms and how much did you perfectly align each region with a very specific real world nation? Okay, now do the same for Kara-tur except how we are using a different list of countries."</blockquote>

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