how do you publish anything when you risk having to pull your books off the shelf? Why pull the books off the shelf at all? This has been raised before about books outside of D&D: Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice & Men. People asked that those books be pulled from libraries and schools. Is it right to do that? Is that how people want their society to function? Or maybe there should be a forward added to new prints of those books to put them into context? Chances are, the rules for what is PC today won't be PC tomorrow, so do we just get rid of all the content from the past or do we educate people about it and continue to release new, up to date material?
It would not be hard to edit a copy of the PDF of Oriental Adventures and add a forward and to add addendums in the book. They release erratas all the time to PDFs that do exactly that.
I'm actually curious how many high school English teachers - or Professors are actually taking part in this conversation. FWIW, I have an English degree, so the concept of taking books out of circulation because of content feels wrong to me.
I am a university professor but not of English. I am in a law school. Among other things I teach theoretical sociology. In that unit, among other works I teach Hobson's
The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation and Tamanaha's
General Jurisprudence of Law and Society.
I am not particularly concerned if WotC stops selling OA or does not. That's basically a commercial decision. I don't think OA is a work of race hatred. Nor do I think it is a valuable cultural artefact that needs to be available to everyone for posterity. In that way I don't think the comparison to important American novels really works.
What would be a pity, if it was to stop being published, is that it is the only AD&D rulebook to present a coherent conception of PCs as connected to place and people, and having recognisable human motivations, rather than as rootless wanderers looking around for dungeons and/or quest-givers.
a setting called something like Oriental Adventures is extremely unlikely to focus on any sort of focus or themes for the setting - it's just too big for anything approaching a single book to do justice to.
There's also nothing narrowing it down in terms of time either and that's also important. If we were to
just have Chinese adventures and to do at least some research by basing it on the four
Classic Chinese Novels, all four nominally set in China (Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey into the West, Water Margin, and Dreams of the Red Chamber) they are all arguably in different genres and the setting of each is about 500 years apart from its nearest neighbours. To put it into British terms that would be like trying to create a single setting out of the Arthurian myths, Shakespeare's Histories (ignoring the ancient ones), Jane Austen's novels, and Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens. And that's just
one of the countries covered by the term "Oriental Adventures".
What you describe in that second-last sentence is a reasonable approximation of trad D&D, or the Forgotten Realms.
I recognize removing elements of language that perpetuates or draws upon historically "-ist" and "-ism" based speech and thought is a good thing. I recognize ensuring an open vision of various aspects of the game to foster a more welcoming environment is absolutely a move in the right direction.
Specific to OA, I haven't, for the life of me, found any written words to remotely suggest "This is meant to be a representation of Culture X." I've seen plenty of words to the effect of 'these various things have their inspiration in/from and draw upon many ideas from Culture X'.
There are aspects of OA that are clearly derived from real-world history. "Shou Lung", which is OA's paradigm of a strong imperial China, has a centralised bureaucratic government strong enough to support paper money. It's two versions of Japan clearly correspond to periods in Japanese history around 1200-1400 and then 1600-1700 CE.
Then there is the more subtle consequence of the use of non-English and even non-European names. Calling a warrior a
knight in a North American FRPG is not seen as carrying any particularly heavy cultural baggage, beyond referring to a heavily armed and armoured mounted soldier who is probably in service to some noble or cause. Calling a warrior a
samurai in a North American FRPG is taken to be a call out to a distinct element of Japanese history and culture (I hesitate to call it a
social role given that samurai occupied different social roles at different times and places in Japan). Similar points can be made about
lord compared to
daimyo, or
thief or
racketeer compared to
yakuza, and even
longsword compared to
katana.
It is not terribly controversial, in a North American FRPG, to present a setting which runs together, in a more-or-less undifferentiated fashion, traditions and political practices of high mediaeval England, Italian city states, and a Syrian sect (the assassins, led by their "Old Man of the Mountain"). As this and the other thread show, it is more controversial to present a setting that runs together (say) Chinese ideas of unarmed warrior ascetics and Japanese ideas of monastic warriors.
the earliest D&D campaigns were less occupied in presenting cultural verisimilitude or even elements of culture outside of what was immediately necessary.
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That said, I don't think there's so much wrong with having an Asian-inspired pastiche so much as in how and by who it's done. D&D has a history of presenting "non-Western" cultures as not- versions of themselves with serial numbers poorly files off. This is evidenced in Kara-Tur's two Chinas, two Japans, Korea, etc. (sometimes even using historical names of said countries as the their fantasy names—see Wa and Koryo), Maztica, Mystara's various -not- countries, etc. It's always a view of "non-Western" cultures seen through the lens of Westerners that have little actual knowledge of those cultures (aside from what they could dig up from their local library) and consciously or subconsciously exotify and other those cultures. If a "non-Western" culture pastiche was created by or in concert by those from said culture or their inheritors that still remained respectful, I don't think you'd see a lot of complaints.
I don't think that
respectful is a helpful notion here. The issue is one of curation and cultural appropriation.
Eberron's core setting works because, although it is explicitly a kitchen sink setting, it has a single major thematic hook tying everything on Khorvaire together. The Last War, and the Mourning. Although it's called Eberron the real world RPG equivalent wouldn't so much be "Earth" or even "Europe" as "Europe, 1947". The war's over, but the cold war is beginning and the iron curtain is just coming down and you've one set tech base. There's a time, a place, and significant themes that are common to the setting even if they apply in different ways to different parts of that setting.
Some of the most profound impacts of WWII and the Cold War occurred outside of Europe. Korea, Vietnam, China, Malaysia and Indonesia are all obvious examples. East Africa and Southern Africa provide further examples. Does Eberron deal with them? Or it is a white-washed Cold War?
I ask because when it comes to racist presentations of theme and history omission and disregard can be important considerations.