NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 8499875" data-attributes="member: 7635">I think that overstates just a little too much. Barovia is fantasy Transylvania as depicted in countless Dracula-related media. If someone asked me to describe Barovia, I could start out by saying, "well, it's basically Transylvania" and you would know exactly what I am referring to. Of course, what I see in Transylvania is moody Hollywood soundstages while what you see is decades of hurtful stereotypes of Roma and Slavic people. We will always see what part we want to, and one person's allusion is another person's stereotype. The issue, of course, is D&D (and media at large, but let's keep it to D&D) is full of those allusions and the accompanying stereotypes. Even the 2021 Ravenloft book keeps Barovia as Transylvania. Eberron has Xen'drik as "Dark continent Africa" complete with Drow "natives". Faerun is chock full of borrowed cultures like the Moonshaes, Multhorand or Chult. And Mystara was built of areas described as "fantasy Medieval <real world culture>" be that culture the Roman Empire, the Italian Mercantile City States, or the American First World nations. And countless settings have had fantasy analogies of East Asia, Arabia, Egypt, etc. from Greyhawk to Golarion. All of it can be considered "lazy" and quite a bit of it built on tropes and cliches considered "hurtful" or even "racist."It's one thing to condemn an easy target like Chief Sitting Drool, it's a much more complicated question of how you world-build without relying on those well-worn tropes we come back to so often?</blockquote>

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