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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 7973524" data-attributes="member: 5948">Regarding Kara-Tur though - I certainly recognise and understand that yep, it wholesale appropriates real-life cultures and is in many cases a bunch of white guys idea of what 'Asian fantasy is'.'But the thing is - there's been no significant Kara-Tur releases for something like 30 real-life years as far as I know, and there's 120+ years of Realms history in between.  Given the tendency of FR for wild retcons and upheavals etc, and the near-random introduction of new setting elements that were casually decided had been there all along, what a 'new' Kara-Tur might look like could be very different to the old one.  Places like Thay have changed or updated wildly in concept over the last couple of D&D editions after all, and the impact of things like the Spellplague and the Second Sundering on Kara-Tur have never really been delved into, as far as I know - and that could mean anything from an entire reconfiguration of the gods to new nations and continents showing up overnight.  There's plenty of scope for the place to be taken apart and put back together better.Is Kara-Tur 'salvageable', on a thematic level?  If WotC hired a bunch of Asian writers and dumped the whole Kara Tur back catalogue in their laps and said 'this is your playground now, update it so it works, trim off the sucky orientalist bits, advance the timeline 150 years, then we'll put it all out in a standalone setting book that only vaguely mentions the possible existence of the rest of FR somewhere off to the ill-defined west' - could they come up with something compelling and interesting?  Old-school FR fans could have their Kara-Tur sourcebook (and there's so little hard-and-fast Kara-Tur material from the past 30 years that continuity and realmslore shouldn't be a huge deal), and WotC could have their 5e 'Oriental Adventures' update.</blockquote>

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