D&D 5E Kara Tur vs Tarkir vs Kamigawa vs Plane of Mountains and Seas vs Ikoria

[Aldarc]

Interesting though I would like to see something like this by 'native' nationals. and in contexts. These guys are canooks.

They talk about this in the second video, namely the differences of power dynamics and the nature of being Asians in a Euro-American context. As for the rest, I'm not sure it's worth the effort discussing.

Plus more of the things they disliked were just some of the old game mechanics of D&D that evolved looong ago. ((the comeliness mechanic..hahah. And when ability score still forced what race/class you could choose. which is in legends where the MinMaxer peoples were born))

Sure, but Comeliness was a mechanic that Gygax was pushing, and it appears in OA. And part of the discussion is about how that comes across to them. They even say that this would be a terrible stat regardless of whether this was in a Far East or Western European fantasy book.

FYI, these are things that you could pick up from actively listening to what they were saying and not just looking for ways to say that they were wrong so you can go about your life pretending that there is nothing wrong with OA.

 

[Parmandur]

One of the people you completely dismissed as irrelevant is literally a freelancer that WotC has hired for cultural consulation.

Mere details...

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Sounds awfully boring. And why only outside or Europe? All "european inspired" areas are nothing but hash mash of hollywood caricature of completely different times and cultures

And that's good. Because history back then was boring and mundane as life is today. I do not need a true representation of the historical culture of medieval Germany. I want my generic 0815 europeaning nation that tramples all over the differences from Portugal to Poland and cherrypicks twisted interpretations from each of before throwing it all into a blender.

Also this whole discussion is from a very us-centric point of view, where was the ### storm when they released CoS with the Vistani? Oh, I forgot. This is an issue practically unknown in the US, just good ol' european thing

I mean, every Roma nerd I’ve ever known absolutely fracking despises that book, and most of them either have been or still are loud on social media about it, but okay.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You are not wrong, this is doable. But is it worth the effort? Maybe.

The 4e magazine stuff for Kara Tur was a bit better.

I miss the more casual layer of release from the magazines. Some of 4e’s best lore content was in the mags.

 

[humble minion]

Settings aside for a second (and just because this thread has had too much amiable unanimity and agreement so far ... ) it occurs to me that if we want a D&D sourcebook that tries to be a toolkit that covers the tropes of Asian-created fantasy fiction/tv (as well as fantasy based on Asian history, which is often a different thing), then one obvious character archetype it'd need to cover is the pet controller. And yeah, I know the mention of this sort of thing can get people projective vomiting and ranting about pokemon, but to my (admittedly very limited) understanding this character type appears in all sorts of anime, and it's a pretty commonplace thing in Chinese fantasy as well, especially the 'cultivation' genre. Not sure you can really ignore it.

(You can certainly argue that this stuff is disposable pop culture and should be ignored, but at the time of writing, so was Conan and a lot of the other pulp sword and sorcery stuff that is infused in the very DNA of D&D.)

I can't see a realistic way of shoehorning a pet-centric subclass into any of the existing classes (the ranger's animal companion is an afterthought rather than the central feature of the character), so to me that looks like a new base class...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I mean, every Roma nerd I’ve ever known absolutely fracking despises that book, and most of them either have been or still are loud on social media about it, but okay.

I don't know any Roma, nerd or otherwise, but the portrayal of the Vistani in CoS made me distinctly uncomfortable.

A major theme in the critique of the 3rd edition Eastern Adventures is a failure to learn from earlier mistakes, and that also applies to CoS and ToA.

 

[Demetrios1453]

The Moonshae Isles are pretty much "Celtopia", and not based on the British Isles as much as vague 1980s notions of "Celtic Identity", but there's a lot of other random nonsense going on as well (including pirates and vikings).

The Viking "nonsense" is due to the fact that, historically, the Vikings occupied huge swathes of Scotland and Ireland, including the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Western Isles, as well as founding many notable Irish cities such as Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick. Basically, they were going with a 9th - 11th century aesthetic when they added Vikings to the Moonshae mix...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The Viking "nonsense" is due to the fact that, historically, the Vikings occupied huge swathes of Scotland and Ireland, including the Shetlands, the Orkneys, and the Western Isles, as well as founding many notable Irish cities such as Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick. Basically, they were going with a 9th - 11th century aesthetic when they added Vikings to the Moonshae mix...

Dude, I'm British, and my family is from Scotland. I'm well aware of all this.

The Moonshae isles are celt-o-philic nonsense (I say that as much a "celt" as anyone, to be clear, as a Brit with Scots/Irish heritage) of the most ridiculous 1980s kind. The kind with big-henna-dyed-hair, wearing a white robe and a lot of crystal pedants and hanging out in a forest at 10 pm whilst claiming to be a "real druid". And you're lucky if they keep the robe on when the moon comes out. In Northern California or Massachusetts or wherever.

The Viking nonsense in the Moonshae isles remains exactly that. Nonsense. The whole thing is ridiculous and embarrassing, like so much celtomania stuff. Viking nonsense became bigger in the 1980s (as you may recall) so they threw that in there too, especially given the excuse.

And let's not even start on the pirates and stuff. Or how the whole thing basically vacuums in all of Scotland, parts of Scandinavia, and a horrifically romantic vision of Ireland (and arguably even Cornwall/Wales), and then adds even more ridiculous fantasy junk to the mix. Even as a kid, when I first encountered it, and decades before I heard the term "cultural appropriation", I was like "This seems kind of wrong/disrespectful/gross/tacky". And even if we throw out how ridiculous the celtomania is on a number of levels, it's still tacky in a way the rest of the FR can only aspire to be.

I mean the Ffolk. That word alone is structurally so grotesque, naively combining Germanic "volk" and it's derivatives with the Welsh double-f. Do they even know that just means you pronounce it folk, like you would with one f? Because it's in English, effectively. What a mess.

 

[Parmandur]

Dude, I'm British, and my family is from Scotland. I'm well aware of all this.

The Moonshae isles are celt-o-philic nonsense (I say that as much a "celt" as anyone, to be clear, as a Brit with Scots/Irish heritage) of the most ridiculous 1980s kind. The kind with big-henna-dyed-hair, wearing a white robe and a lot of crystal pedants and hanging out in a forest at 10 pm whilst claiming to be a "real druid". And you're lucky if they keep the robe on when the moon comes out. In Northern California or Massachusetts or wherever.

The Viking nonsense in the Moonshae isles remains exactly that. Nonsense. The whole thing is ridiculous and embarrassing, like so much celtomania stuff. Viking nonsense became bigger in the 1980s (as you may recall) so they threw that in there too, especially given the excuse.

And let's not even start on the pirates and stuff. Or how the whole thing basically vacuums in all of Scotland, parts of Scandinavia, and a horrifically romantic vision of Ireland (and arguably even Cornwall/Wales), and then adds even more ridiculous fantasy junk to the mix. Even as a kid, when I first encountered it, and decades before I heard the term "cultural appropriation", I was like "This seems kind of wrong/disrespectful/gross/tacky". And even if we throw out how ridiculous the celtomania is on a number of levels, it's still tacky in a way the rest of the FR can only aspire to be.

I mean the Ffolk. That word alone is structurally so grotesque, naively combining Germanic "volk" and it's derivatives with the Welsh double-f. Do they even know that just means you pronounce it folk, like you would with one f? Because it's in English, effectively. What a mess.

The ironic part is that this was from TSR UK, the final work as they were closing their doors.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The ironic part is that this was from TSR UK, the final work as they were closing their doors.

This is very interesting because there's kind of a pattern with Britain sourcebooks for US-made RPGs. They quite often do get written by British people, but they have a strong tendency, for whatever reason, to embrace ludicrous stereotypes (often decades out of date at the time they're written), indulge in celtomania that would make people think you were nuts outside of the most extreme New Age circles here, and center stuff on ideas of the UK that are utterly bizarre. CP2020 and several WoD sourcebooks come immediately to mind - oddly RIFTS of all things had a take so profoundly nuts that it worked. The WoD ones were really particularly sad because they were clearly written about the present-day of when they were published, but presented a UK that existed last 15+ years before, culturally. It's like, you could tell someone who was in their early 30s or a bit later, who was quite sure they were "still cool" had written them. I dread to think what kids today would like of a UK sourcebook I wrote!

However, it appears in this case that Moonshae (1987) was actually written by Douglas Niles, a Wisconsite, so it may have been published by TSR UK, but it is still an American take. He also wrote the Moonshae trilogy of novels, which were just even more ridiculous than the setting book (to be fair I did read them first, though).