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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GM Lent" data-source="post: 8237607" data-attributes="member: 6798775">I've been a big fan of supernatural gifts for ages; one of my first published pieces was an expansion of the Supernatural Gifts section form the Dungeon Master's Guide. And the system in Theros is pretty solid.But we steered away from focusing too much on specific religious tropes in the book, even moreso once Ahmed Aljabry was involved. We had a fine line to walk with representation, Orientalism, and other stereotypes, while remaining true to the AD&D design of the world and its society. The piety system from Theros seems like it might be a pretty good fit for Zakharans, but I don't really think the Supernatural Gifts are - such gifts imply the heavy involvement of gods in everyday life, and a distinctive feature of the 2nd Edition Al-Qadim material was its lack of divine presence. Zakhara was about the people's take on their gods, not a catalog of deities as high-level monsters to be challenged and hobnobbed with by PCs; a remarkably refreshing take for the early '90s, and one the Eberron setting also ran with in the mid 200s.Also, the last thing we needed to do was play up the people of a fantasy cultural mishmash, derived from European takes on Middle Eastern traditions and stories, as a bunch of religious wingnuts. And at the end of the day, we couldn't fit everything we wanted anyway. Some bits will appear soon in other books, but some stuff people will just need to add to campaigns on their own if they want it.</blockquote>

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