I'm very aware of korpokkur, but, y'know, myths where a gnome-like being described as beautiful have a biiiiit of a stretch that they ended up as bow legged, scraggly bearded, noted-in-game-text as looked down on caricture of a race
「コロポックル」は、アイヌの伝承に登場する「蕗(ふき)の葉の下に住む人」の意味です。恥ずかしがり屋で、夜中にこっそり食べ物を置いていくような優しい心を持っている妖精、幸せを呼ぶ小人の神さまです。一度に爺、若、娘の全種類揃える方も多い、人気のシリーズです。アイヌ文化に触れられる施設【ウポポイ】がオープンし、郷土玩具が人気な昨今、木彫り民芸品もじわじわと人気に火が付いてきています！職人が愛情を込めて、手彫りで彫っているから一つ一つ微妙に表情が違い、素朴で温かな質感を感じられます。[商品詳細]■商品：コロポックル...
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I do not care about player stat regularity on this, I care about them out and about in the world. Given we're, once again, talking about a place in Faerun with its numerous locations where even Thri-kreen have their roaving bands, KT seems absolutely lacking given 'comfortable in human society' needs to be a thing. There should absolutely be non-human societies around given there are tons of non-human societies elsewhere. Humans shouldn't be the only societies. That alone makes the place not feel like its part of FR
If spirit folk are matter-of-factly members of human society, they aren't rare.
Korobokkuru are fairly rare, but hengeyokai don't seem to me. And you're ignoring lots of creatures like bakemono which are numerous and do have their own societies. They are a type of goblin. Simply lacking elves and typical dwarves does not mean the region can't fit into FR. There are plenty of people who are mostly clustered in one area. For instance, tabaxi are pretty rare in the Dalelands.
Hooves are not the defining feature of a kirin? The whole not being covered in scales alone thing is a clear sign this isn't one. I have a
mechanical robot kirin on my desk that turns into a cube and its clearly more kirin than that. That is clearly not a scaled, horned horse-like celestial being in the slightest, Its probably "Apply fu-creature template to horse" or something like that, given the lion mane and slightly horrifying teeth situation
Is a fu template creature a traditional Chinese folkloric monster?
I have never seen a fu dog or similar creature depicted with hooves.
So, maybe this samurai is riding some other kind of not real world magical creature. It's clearly not a horse or an elk, though.
Well, maybe we should just. Drop the racism entirely, go back to the original myth, and make 'em a gnome or halfling variant given we don't need to slap "Oh yeah its a dwarf but out east" on things any more like the most dull, bored reskinning ever?
Whether you they are gnomes or dwarves doesn't change too much about them. Or you could just say they were something else. I think they were described as dwarves because they are fairly tough, and because the writers wanted to be clear Western dwarves were not in the region, and the dwarfs there were disconnected from what most D&D players thought of as dwarves.
But conceptually, I would say they are more like gnomes.
The setting needs changes and given it was done in the 'being narrated by someone from the region' you can easily go "Yeah that person was wrong and lying, here's a better look", which also helps given OA's other many, many issues as brought up by other parties why just keeping it as-is is a terrible idea. The setting needs to be changed, especially in a day and age I can just, send a message to any number of folks in east Asia and get some recommendations on appropriate fantasy in ten seconds
Oh, it needs changes, for sure. For one thing, Kara-Tur looks suspiciously like a fantasy setting where the Japanese were successful in conquering Korea and northern China. Which, if you know a little history, is likely to rub some people the wrong way.
The main issue, IMO, is that Kara-Tur ignores a lot of the "creator myth" stuff surrounding humans, elves, dwarves, and so forth in FR. But that's a problem with FR, not Kara-Tur. FR is already a multi-dimensional setting, so having primordial "dwarven gods" and "elven gods" is already pretty weird.
The main world-building issue is that Kara-Tur doesn't seem to have the buffer regions that separate Chinese culture, and the northern and east Asian regions, from the West in the real world. I'm not aware of a FR Himalayas, or a FR "India" that is as populous, diverse, and powerful as real world India, or a FR Thailand, or Turkmen. Not that I would want to copy these nations exactly, but I think you want a smooth transition from FR-Europe to FR-Mediterranean to FR-Indo-Persia to FR-Eastern Asian regions.
Most of the existing FR regisions I would say are somewhat reminscent of those places are heavily exoticized. Again, it's not Kara-Tur I see as the problem, but a general lack of thoughtful world-building, and a lot of falling back on Orientalist tropes. FR has problems with "barbarian" tropes as well, but in general, is more dignified when it comes to obvious Europea parallels.
