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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9450542" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Because you don't actually understand what was wrong with the original products to begin with. Al-Qadim is the closest to being alright, but even it has some serious stumbles. There is nothing wrong--nothing inherently "problematic"--about writing a setting that is inspired by non-European cultures, mythologies, or histories. The guys who made Avatar: the Last Airbender, which is very clearly and intentionally drawing on Eastern cultures and ethnicities (the Fire Nation is fascist Imperial Japan; the Earth Kingdom is like Han Dynasty China; two of the three Water Tribes are almost explicitly Inuit peoples; and the Air Nomads are Tibetan Buddhists, alongside stuff like the Sun Warriors who are clearly Mesoamerican-like), yet both of them are middle-aged white dudes.The difference is that they did the work to make it respectful and serious. They hired legit actual experts on many different topics, including getting people who could actually write both modern and ancient Chinese so that written documents would, in fact, be written correctly; they had an on-staff martial arts expert, Sifu Kisu, to whom they dedicated an actual in-world character (Master Piandao); and they had folks actually critically analyze their work.In the 70s and 80s--hell, even in the 90s, albeit not quite as badly--foreign cultures were used exploitatively. It didn't matter what those people actually thought or did, what their histories or beliefs or practices actually were. It just mattered that it had the veneer of exoticism, of foreign-ness. Kara-Tur is, unfortunately, rife with Orientalist tropes and content. They were not "problematic" because they examined a culture other than the authors' own; they were inconsiderate (or, more commonly, outright disrespectful) because they treated those cultures like "exotic"/silly/strange caricatures to be pantomimed for a little while and then set aside.My frustration is that we have a self-perpetuating cycle. FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so...D&D fans pride themselves, almost to the point of hubris, on the fact that D&D is unlike video games or even most board games, by being allegedly open to the entire panoply of human imagination. Anything you can possibly conceive! But instead we grind endlessly on the same incredibly tired repetitive concepts, with the only meaningful variation in the past 50 years being the degree to which you ascribe to cynical realpolitik or idealistic monarchism.I want these other things to be shown off in the core books, to be actively engaged with in the DMG, to be published in core materials, because that's literally how we break this self-perpetuating cycle. We get people more interested in more diverse ideas by SHOWING them how to make use of more diverse ideas. And in the doing, we make not just D&D but TTRPGs in general richer, better, fuller--because they embrace more of what it means to be human...or something other than human.</blockquote>

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