Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8026291" data-attributes="member: 87792">The term Orient covers Turkey and Japan, and everything in between. France, Germany, and Italy all, as you say, have borders. There's about 5000 miles between Turkey and Japan.What this means is that in practice, even ignoring offensiveness, 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels" target="_blank">Classic Chinese Novels</a>, 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".Also that list above is very much centered on England; the only thing that has a significant Scottish point of view that springs to mind is MacBeth among Shakespeare's histories. This was entirely unintentional - but is the sort of thing that happens when you run over a setting incredibly fast as you have to for too much breadth and go into little depth.Oriental Adventures therefore does not and indeed can not work. The scope is far far too big to be claimed by a single book. And this means you have to either handle everything so trivially as to be simply annoying for anyone who cares about that place (and probably spread yourself thin enough to put your foot in it in lots of places) or cherry-pick so much that you leave just about everything that might be implied by the setting out.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.So no I wouldn't want to see Oriental Adventures back even if there were no sensitivity concerns. It's a flawed project from the beginning with too much scope.</blockquote>

Verification