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Message: <blockquote data-quote="el-remmen" data-source="post: 8472003" data-attributes="member: 11">I am not a younger player (I turned 50 this year), but I want to tell you a story about buying Oriental Adventures "back in the day." I purchased it at the Compleat Strategist in Midtown Manhattan when it had recently come out. I was 15 years old. I took the subway back towards Brooklyn and was happily reading the book as we went southward.  However, the train I was on passed through a couple of stops in NY's China Town, where the car filled up with Asian folks. Suddenly, I felt very self-conscious of what I was reading, of the art on the front, the title, the images inside. I may not have had the language to describe what I was feeling or why I felt like I was doing something wrong - but I still knew something was off about this book and that actual Asian people might object to how their very diverse cultures were mashed together and represented. I put the book back in backpack. But part of me thinks that if I had not had that stark experience of reading about this version of "Asia" while literally surrounded by people from or descended from folks who were from there, I may never have had that gut feeling. I tell this story not because I am "ashamed" of having bought and used that book (and I still own that very copy), but because many of the concerns that seem "new" or "recent" to some segments of the population are not new at all. In some cases, people knew about them, felt some kind of way about them all along, in other cases, folks felt some kind of unnamable discomfort as they sensed the contradictions in how the dominant culture makes use of, consumes, and marginalizes other cultures. As a person of color, I was sensitive to these things even as I also participated in them.I still think that book has problems in how it presents its material and how it frames "the Orient" and refers to people as "Oriental" - but there is nothing wrong with playing in a fantasy world inspired by various Asian legends, history, folklore, and customs. To my mind, you can still use that book if you want (I might), but remaining cognizant of those problems and not assuming (as many did - as even I did, despite my discomfort) that this is somehow - by lieu of the writers' research and erudition - an authentic and proper way to find out about "Asian Culture" rather than a very western reduction of it to game material.The wild thing about Oriental Adventures to me, is that as a handbook of "another world" it actually emulates the works of "Orientalists," that is, Euro-American "experts" on the Middle East and Asia (of the 18th through 20th century) who studied and posited a very problematic "timeless essence" of the East that always frames it as Other and inferior to the West (while simultaneously posing a danger to the West's superior cultures). Those scholarly works, like Oriental Adventures, were essentially saying "This is what you need to understand Asia across time," while the core D&D books of the time (and definitely not now) were not expected to provide any actual insight into European history (except maybe when used as an excuse to not include non-European cultures in the game). The late great scholar Edward Said published the seminal work on criticizing "Orientalism" - if anyone is interested, though I know academic writing is not for everyone.</blockquote>

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