D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Grendel_Khan]

Speaking from a generic and uninterested viewpoint, it is always a bad thing when materials become less "available" to a person that might want to acquire them.

There are, of course, exceptions for things that weren't meant to be published, are illegal, or other such things.

In my opinion every "published" bit of material gains a value that cannot be diminished just be having existed. Making that product harder to acquire is a strictly negative change.

Note: This is speaking theoretically. In reality there are many factors in the real world that go into why or why not items are kept "in print".

Personally, I don't think it's all that useful to engage with this stuff from a purely rhetorical or generic standpoint, or worse, to see everything in terms of heuristics and slippery slopes. My point is that this book just seems to suck. So maybe no one should continue making any money off of it. Ain't no one cracking open GAZ10 in 2022 saying "Oh my, if you look past endless amounts of awful, caustic so-called jokes, there's some great stuff in here for my campaign!"

It'll still exist, and in enough places and quantities for someone truly interested to find it. Just stop profiting from it, even a little.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Are you talking about some obscure college teams a Brit like me won't likely have heard of (don't need to specify the teams) or something?

Because if so sure, maybe that is uncharitable, those aren't, AFAICT, huge businesses (outside of stuff like Notre Dame) and have a duty to their students and so on, so might take such things seriously (though you seem to suggest not yourself by saying "expedient" which implies a sort of mercenary aspect). But I absolutely was talking about NFL and MLB teams and their ilk, which are gigantic businesses, who absolutely DO NOT want to rebrand unless they really, really have to. They absolutely have done consultations as smoke screens for predetermined decisions before.

Just a cultural note for you...in many U.S. states, the highest paid public official is a college sports coach. College sports is BIG business.

 

[Voadam]

Personally, I don't think it's all that useful to engage with this stuff from a purely rhetorical or generic standpoint, or worse, to see everything in terms of heuristics and slippery slopes. My point is that this book just seems to suck. So maybe no one should continue making any money off of it. Ain't no one cracking open GAZ10 in 2022 saying "Oh my, if you look past endless amounts of awful, caustic so-called jokes, there's some great stuff in here for my campaign!"

It'll still exist, and in enough places and quantities for someone truly interested to find it. Just stop profiting from it, even a little.

If someone were running an Old School Essentials/Labyrinth Lord/Basic D&D campaign and wanted Humanoid racial classes to go along with the racial classes for Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings I would recommend today they check out Orcs of Thar to consider TSR's mechanical implementation of humanoid classes.

I would also let them know about the Mad Magazine style cultural humor though.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

Personally, I don't think it's all that useful to engage with this stuff from a purely rhetorical or generic standpoint, or worse, to see everything in terms of heuristics and slippery slopes. My point is that this book just seems to suck. So maybe no one should continue making any money off of it. Ain't no one cracking open GAZ10 in 2022 saying "Oh my, if you look past endless amounts of awful, caustic so-called jokes, there's some great stuff in here for my campaign!"

It'll still exist, and in enough places and quantities for someone truly interested to find it. Just stop profiting from it, even a little.

I value people having easy access to items of their interest VERY HIGH on the hierarchy of things that influence my opinions. It's not my place to tell someone else they shouldn't be allowed to buy something because it might offend someone else. Nobody elected us for that position.

 

[Hussar]

And yet above you used the example "what when everyone was French" (as opposed to everyone being English like in most RPGs) as for why Oriental Adventures are bad. Nothing about it being "bad, unfaithful French".
So what is it now? Does the use of Vikings also mean you have to use other European cultures as inspiration? Or is it ok to use only Vikings when done "respectfully"? Can you use a Japanese inspired culture in your fantasy setting without also having to add China, Tibet, Vietnam, Korea, many other cultures in SE Asia, especially when you delve into history?

Of course you can have a Japanese inspired culture in your fantasy setting without having to add China. That's not the issue.

What you don't get to do is have an obvious fantasy China and then graft Japanese inspired culture over top pretending that it's "all the same". The same way that we don't graft French naming conventions to classes - the names are typically simply straight up English language descriptors - fighting man, magic user, rogue/thief - and not really culturally specific (or only obliquely like paladins and druids which absolutely don't resemble their mythical roots - and various other elements of the game, pretending that French history and culture is the only one that matters because all European cultures are the same.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You are helping @Ruin Explorer's point, I think. Good or bad we tend to know a lot about the Romans (and the Greeks) in a context and as part of a larger well-examined (though still fragmentary) history. The history of the Aztecs, such as it is, is mostly tied up with European contact and decontextualized customs and rituals that make that context much harder to imagine for the average person who cares enough to think about the cultures of ancient civilizations (though Aztec is not really "ancient" since is existed 1000+ years after Roman).

In some respects the Aztecs suffer from the same problem as pre-Roman Britons; the people who moved in on them got to tell the story, and there isn't much neutral information to tell you how it actually was.

So, did the Aztecs and the Britons practice human sacrifice? Pretty near certainty, given other data. Was it as common as depicted? Ehhhh...

The best you can say is that their neighbors didn't seem to think too well of them, but even that's muddied.

 

[Yaarel]

I value people having easy access to items of their interest VERY HIGH on the hierarchy of things that influence my opinions. It's not my place to tell someone else they shouldn't be allowed to buy something because it might offend someone else. Nobody elected us for that position.

There is an optimization between maximizing freespeech and minimizing hatespeech.

 

[Zardnaar]

In some respects the Aztecs suffer from the same problem as pre-Roman Britons; the people who moved in on them got to tell the story, and there isn't much neutral information to tell you how it actually was.

So, did the Aztecs and the Britons practice human sacrifice? Pretty near certainty, given other data. Was it as common as depicted? Ehhhh...

The best you can say is that their neighbors didn't seem to think too well of them, but even that's muddied.

I think in the Aztecs and Mayas case there's only around 3 books that survived and archeology only goes so far. Think those books are religious in nature.

It would be like trying to reconstruct the events of the ancient world using three books of the bible.

 

[The Glen]

In some respects the Aztecs suffer from the same problem as pre-Roman Britons; the people who moved in on them got to tell the story, and there isn't much neutral information to tell you how it actually was.

So, did the Aztecs and the Britons practice human sacrifice? Pretty near certainty, given other data. Was it as common as depicted? Ehhhh...

The best you can say is that their neighbors didn't seem to think too well of them, but even that's muddied.

I worked on a book where one of the cultures was an allegory of the Aztecs. One of the artists that was providing background on the different bits of fantasy lore from the setting was highly critical of them to the point of we had to ask him why. Turns out that he was from a tribe in North Central Mexico and viewed the Spanish as liberators rather than conquerors.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think in the Aztecs and Mayas case there's only around 3 books that survived and archeology only goes so far. Think those books are religious in nature.

That pretty much is why its parallel to Briton. Best evidence was that the druids thought writing down religious material was sacrilegious. So you had, after the Roman incursion, slowly decaying word-of-mouth (and trying to extrapolate from slightly better preserved data from Ireland) and not much else.

Even now, trying to figure out what the hell went on after the Roman's left for about two centuries is fraught, because so little is written down; you have to do the best you can from archeology.