D&D General The Rakshasa and Genie Problem

[Bedrockgames]

I mean, this is the nature of the market. I'd be more interested in what they were specifically critiquing more than anything, because I think this is one of those things where context matters and I'm guessing that some creators may not be as familiar with some cultures as they think. Again, being afraid of critiques is much different than being harassed, and none of this really comes close to "propaganda".

I am sure plenty aren't. And I am sure plenty of people, whether they are from a place or not, are also not as familiar with the history or cultural question as they might believe. That is a whole other issue. But I don't think it ought to be a requirement to have full or deep knowledge of a culture to borrow an aesthetic. There is certainly room for say for RPG books that authentically capture a particular culture. And if that is what the designer is going for, it pays to be receptive to people who know about that culture when you are getting feedback. I've done that myself when I needed to know something in greater detail. I think where we go wrong is this notion that it has to be this way, and if people raise concerns or criticisms, the thing needs to go away or be redone until it is in acceptable form. Not all works are going to be authentic deep dives into a culture, some are just fun pastiches or light emulations of schlocky genres.

My issue isn't with creators wanting to make a well researched, authentic game, that explores a culture accurately. That is fine. There is plenty of good in that. The problem is with placing all this stuff as the only priority, I think we are moving away from other ways to creatively engage culture in a fun way in the design landscape. What it feels like to me is we are developing almost like a priest class, that approves what is allowable.

Again, on the issue of criticism, harassment, and propaganda, I think we disagree. I am not sure how to bridge that disagreement. We are looking at the same hobby landscape and seeing two very different things. All I can do is tell you what this looks like to me. And to be clear I am not saying it is all propaganda. I am saying these things do seem to slide into propaganda for a particular ideology at times (and I don't think I am the only one sensing this).

 

[MonsterEnvy]

You're... halfway there. It's not necessarily bad that genies reflect back on Arab culture. This can be done well and without being problematic. The problem you have Efreets, who embody a bunch of terrible stereotypes of Arab culture. In this case, it's just particularly egregious.

But there are several types of Genie that are not evil and share the similar culture, and Efreets are evil in Arab culture.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I would say that this depiction is an iteration in the more long standing orientalist tradition in art, literature, and culture. To crudely summarize one of the insights of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), knowledge=power. In the 19th century (and earlier), European powers (he mainly analyzes the French, and to a lesser extent the British) developed an idiom for characterizing the "East," as a place that exotic, mysterious, and sensual but also autocratic, barbarous and unchanging. This had little to do with the actual complex reality of those cultures, but instead was a fantasy for European audiences, one used in part to motivate and justify colonialism.

I think part of the problem here is we are importing Said and Zinn wholesale into RPG design as guiding principles. I was a history major. I don't have an advanced degree, but I do have a BA in history, and I studied mostly the Mediterranean and my language was Arabic. So I had to read Said's Orientalism as part of my education. But I also had to read criticisms of Orientalism as well. Same with Zinn. Both have their critics. I think this is an overly academic topic for us to really be addressing here, and I am by no means the most well suited to addressing it. But I know enough about it, to understand that we shouldn't just be uncritically bringing these as measures of whether a game is morally okay. I remember Nikki Keddie for example had some very compelling criticisms of Said. I think especially when you get into ideas like decolonizing the arts, you start hitting an extreme that feels more akin to a cultural revolution than something that is genuinely going to help people who feel marginalized. And Zinn, who I am more familiar with, is I think an even bigger problem because he tended to simply accept the narrative of whoever had the least power in the dynamic in question. And you can see that mindset at work in many of these discussions. I understand his rational was that to that point, he felt those in power always had control of the narrative. But there is a sound argument to be made that his approach just reversed the problems and that he exaggerated how much primacy was given to the narrative of those in power (and to be clear I am not saying those in power didn't also have power over historical narrative, just that history changed a lot in that respect and it isn't so black and white by the time you get to A Peoples History).

Again, I think this is very complicated stuff to expect people to get into in order to design games or make art. And I think when that stuff leaves academia and finds its way onto gaming forums or twitter, it gets incredibly simplified and used as a bludgeon.

 

[Voadam]

As others have pointed out, the efreet are one type of genie,

Which is odd, because it was an explicit part of what I said.

with djinn being the other most common type. Chaotic Good djinn.

Yep. I too would definitely place Djinn second in prominence over Marid and Dao.

The most prominent Norse connection to D&D are fire and frost giants. Care to state your thoughts on that?

Sure.

I think Barbarians (berserker vikings) and Elves (light and dark) and Dwarves are more prominent, particularly as core heroic PC options, but opinions can vary on whether Tolkien derived elves and dwarves count or not. There is also the whole Norse Pantheon in the 5e PH.

If Giants as evil Frost Giant and Fire Giant monsters were considered the predominant Scandinavian representation in Core D&D it could be taken as linking evil monsters with Scandinavians and one could imagine a Scandinavian feeling demonized.

In WFRP for example the Norscans are explicitly demonically warped Chaos worshipping berserker barbarians. People could feel that is fine or that demonizing them is problematic.

Just as I think D&D's use of genies is generally fine I think the WFRP treatment is also generally fine, but I can see a basis for someone to feel differently than me.

Now wait a second, Core D&D isn't a setting. It's explicitly supposed to colored an contextualized by the settings you named.

Not quite.

There are core baseline assumptions like the races and classes and monsters from the Monster Manual.

You can core do D&D in a points of light D&D setting without setting it in a bigger context.

It is perfectly reasonable to talk about the context of the assumptions of the three core rulebooks where there are Barbarians and Dwarves and Paladins and Frost Giants and Efreeti.

If you want the Core D&D game to have a default setting like Golarion, that can be done. But don't criticize D&D for it's lack of nuance when you've just named several examples of nuance.

Like 3e with Greyhawk officially, or 4e with the World Axis Cosmology and points of light, and as some argue is the case with 5e and FR (I don't).

I don't feel a need for a 5e core setting, but I also feel fine examining things from the perspective of the defaults of the 3 core books.

 

[guachi]

The idea of running an adventure based on 1,001 Arabian Nights has allure in the fact the tales are so enchanting and far removed from the lives of the players who experience it. I doubt anyone who read it is going to claim to have a degree in Ancient Middle Eastern History though.

I've read Alf Layl wa-Layl (1,001 Nights) in Arabic and I don't claim to have a degree in Ancient ME History. That being said, I'm an Arabic linguist by trade and I and my D&D-playing coworkers (Persian or Arabic linguists) think Al-Qadim is pretty cool and when I showed my gaming inclined Arabic co-worker Al-Qadim for his opinion he also thought it was pretty cool. He was shocked there would be a positive Arab culture portrayal that was released in the early '90s.

 

[TheSword]

This is an interesting topic. I'll preface by saying that I would not advocate for removing these creatures from the game. I am currently playing a genie warlock, so that would be quite hypocritical of me. But, per the request of the OP, just want to try to add to the discussion. Also forgive me if what I say below is well known.

Here is the 5e Djinn:
View attachment 149707

I would say that this depiction is an iteration in the more long standing orientalist tradition in art, literature, and culture. To crudely summarize one of the insights of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), knowledge=power. In the 19th century (and earlier), European powers (he mainly analyzes the French, and to a lesser extent the British) developed an idiom for characterizing the "East," as a place that exotic, mysterious, and sensual but also autocratic, barbarous and unchanging. This had little to do with the actual complex reality of those cultures, but instead was a fantasy for European audiences, one used in part to motivate and justify colonialism.

The 1001 Nights played no small part in defining qualities of the "East" for generations of European children. Various translators took considerable liberty in adapting the stories and adding in stories, including famously Antoine Galland's inclusion of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp.

Everyone needs someone to provide a window into a different world and as a child with little access to travel, one way to look through this window is to read stories. Sure it’s tinted by the authors own viewpoints but let’s be honest 1001 nights had the full gamut of bravery, guile, deceit and stupidity amongst its cast, without favour or judgement. It was as genial a viewpoint (and probably more so) as most of the Greek myths or Anglo Saxon stories.

I would even suggest that the 1001 Nights--as a product of European orientalism--was foundational for the fantasy genre. It was certainly a childhood favorite of innumerable Western authors (including, of course, the Brontes, rpg-players avant la lettre).

This is where it gets tricky for all of us interested in fantasy gaming. The harm, arguably, of orientalism-as-fantasy is that it was taken as reality. Historically, for many in the West, the Eastern woman was a figure like Scherezade, ruled by a despotic tyrant and in need of saving (i.e. colonial intervention).

Where was the colonial intervention? I thought Scheherazade was saved by her own inventiveness… if anything it’s an inditement of rampant misogyny.

Perhaps, but it's also the case that many facets of orientalism--the East as a place of irrational violence in need of saving--still motivate contemporary politics and culture, and to disastrous effect. So you can put a Djinn in your game of course, but it might be a worthwhile exercise to query the cultural baggage that you also might be (inadvertently ) including as you do so. It's also worthwhile to be self-reflexive about why you find these tropes and figures so exciting.

One of the criticisms made of orientalism is fetishization of the east as exotic and alluring. Noteworthy as several of the criticism of the original Oriental Adventures by Asians Represent related to the portrayal of characters in that book in the same way.

At some point… the word exotic and by extension exoticism became sexualised and fetishized. Probably in relation to nude dancers with tassels in dingy clubs. Or outrageous liberties taken by colonial authorities. That may indeed be a pernicious outcome that has afflicted the western worlds relationship with the countries viewed as oriental. I would resist the urge to view the Western interest in the wider world in these seedy terms though. Particularly since in rpgs we stepped away from fantasy game depictions of chain mail bikinis and alluring semi-naked women in diaphanous see through gowns to sell fantasy books to predominantly young men. That just isn’t our hobby any more.

The original meaning of the word exotic meant mysteriously different and serves to explain our interest in parts foreign. Which as someone lucky enough to travel abroad and not be bound to hotel resorts still applies. The more unique or different to your own culture the more mysterious and by extension intriguing. I don’t think it is any surprise that the unknown is exciting. Particularly in this case when it brings up memories of our youth and the excellent stories in Scheherazade’s tales . It’s the same reason that people are enamored with martial arts, samurai, and ninjas, vikings, knights, dinosaurs and let’s be honest fantasy in general. Not many people play rpgs in a real world analogue of their home town with no fantastical elements at all.

When you remove this unwholesome element (that isn’t really present or relevant in our world of gaming any more) we are left with the sense of wonder and mystery that fantasy games thrive on. To be honest, it comes from the same root cause that makes me want to explore a castle in North Wales, or the Gardens of Versailles, or temples on the Nile, or a coral reef in the Red Sea, or climb a mountain to reach Machu Picchu.

It’s something to be admired and encouraged. Not ashamed of

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Efreeti are focused on for the same reason 90% of the Monster Manual is evil aligned: PCs NEED VILLIANS. The game is focused on challenges. Noble Djinn doesn't make good villains, like how metallic dragons aren't as used as chromatics are. How many guides to Hell/the Abyss are there compared to guides to Mount Celestia? How many Demon Lords can you name vs. the Celestial Host?

I think this is another area where 5E maybe could take a note from 4E. That edition frequently injected into the lore reasons why normally good (or at least normally non-antagonistic) creatures could sometimes end up as enemies.

For djinn, The Plane Below: Secrets of the Elemental Chaos established that the djinn joined in a war against the gods because they feared the gods would take away their powers. The djinn chose the losing side, and as punishment they were imprisoned within mundane objects. Over the years more and more djinn have escaped captivity and banded together to rebuild their civilization, but the gods have stripped them of their mightiest magic as well. Some djinn believe that if the mythical First City of the djinn were to be found then they could regain their former power and free all of the still-imprisoned djinn.

One very powerful djinn who managed to escape imprisonment, Sirrajadt, is presented in that book as a villain. He believes the djinn will never regain their former glory and scoffs at those who seek the First City as delusional. Instead, Sirrajadt is building a djinn army to exact vengeance against both followers of the gods and the efreeti, finding and freeing bound djinn only to indoctrinate them into his army.

Since the art for the 5E djinn was shown earlier, here's some of the art for the 4E djinn, with Sirrajadt himself being the last one.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Basically, if a world doesn't have a fantasy-counterpart culture for the group that's folklore/mythology inspired the D&D monster, should we divorce the cultural context from the monsters to avoid them becoming the stand-ins for those people, or would it just be best to not include them in the world in the first place if they would become those stand-ins due to the lack of having another cultural stand-in in the same world?

I think that most important rule of D&D is "Don't be a jerk." It's a social activity with current or potential friends as much as it is a game.

When looking at, say, rashashas and coatls, they have a particular place in the stories and myths of the cultures that they came from. I certainly encourage reading stories from and about those cultures, they're quite engaging! Should you do so, you then have the opportunity to look at the game interpretation of those creatures as represented by their stats and see if it is a faithful enough representation. If so, good. If not, make changes.

It is important to note here that what we are discussing are monstrous creatures. These aren't humans that might reinforce objectionable stereotypes (the Vistani) or another culture that's been insensitively coded as a monstrous humanoid (hobgoblins as Mongols). These are mythical creatures that have a non-human physique and a substantially supernatural aspect to their being. If you wanted to place the nation of Vendhya in that tropical region over there, fine! This gives you an opportunity to think about why this collection of supernatural beings adopted some of their dress and perhaps culture.

I don't believe that simply having a monster from a different culture is insulting or problematic. You are also (presumably) not writing something for publication. Don't use the culture's monster as representitive of the culture itself, and you're fine. If someone from that culture tells you there is a problem, listen of course. Otherwise I think you should be good.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Efreeti are focused on for the same reason 90% of the Monster Manual is evil aligned: PCs NEED VILLIANS. The game is focused on challenges. Noble Djinn doesn't make good villains, like how metallic dragons aren't as used as chromatics are. How many guides to Hell/the Abyss are there compared to guides to Mount Celestia? How many Demon Lords can you name vs. the Celestial Host?

That really doesn't change the fact that they're every bad Arab trope out there. They can still be bad and have an Arabic bent, but then again maybe making them not be every harmful stereotype that has come before?

No one is saying "Don't use villains". It's "Don't make your villains fall into racist tropes".

Oh, and thanks for confirming no one cares when it's a European culture being demonized.

I mean, yeah, few people care about a European culture being demonized by people of European descent. I'm sorry to say that there is a double standard as to when people use their own culture compared to when they borrow it from others.

But there are several types of Genie that are not evil and share the similar culture, and Efreets are evil in Arab culture.

Again, just because they are evil doesn't mean we should fall back on really bad Arab tropes.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

That particular point I made was responding to another poster who made a claim about such things. But I understood your point that you didn't object to borrowing from mythologies. And my criticism of your position is that it still is adding more rules onto how people can creatively engage these things (the idea that if you borrow from a culture but there isn't an analog in the setting that is bad because the monster then serves as a stand in for the culture itself).

Okay. But that's not what my position is. My position is that there is a discussion to be had about what the better kind of treatment of these creatures would be, not making rules for how people can include them in their games. I was solely speaking for me, not trying to impose any sort of moral ruleset on anyone else.

If you don't like that I'm asking questions for my own benefit . . . I seriously do not understand wtf your position is. Because right now it seems like "don't have this discussion" and "you're overreacting, snowflake" (I admit that these are hyperbole, but that's how it's coming across).

Again, if you don't think this thread's discussion is important, you're more that welcome to just not participate in it. Create your own thread about how you don't think threads like this are important. I don't care. However, I do care when that discussion comes into this thread and starts contaminating the discussion that I asked for.

I think the way we are now engaging in this exercise of combing over all the content, finding issues (in this case having a monster with cutlural aesthetics when that culture doesn't exist in the setting), especially when it seems to be framed in a way that takes a moral position about it, that it can be called overreaction.

So . . . my act of thinking about this was an overreaction to you. I'm sorry that I committed some misdeed in the act of thinking about something that came across as iffy to me and creating a discussion around it. In your mind, I crossed a line by the mere act of thinking about something you don't want me to think about and that the discussion should be silenced because of that. From what I can tell, your position is "you overreacted by thinking about this, so I don't think this thread should exist, and will talk about how I don't think it will exist to try and make sure that the discussion asked for in the OP doesn't happen". Care to correct me on that? Because that's really how you're coming across right now to multiple people.

Oh, and I'm sorry, but you again mischaracterized my position. My OP and subsequent posts took no moral positions and made no stances as to what other people should or shouldn't do in their own worlds. It was solely about what I should do in my own worlds/campaigns.

I think the people that are actually overreacting are the ones objecting to having a discussion about a topic they're misrepresenting.

This point I am unclear on. The premise of the thread seemed to be that if there is an official setting that has a monster, and that monster seems culturally specific, but the culture in question isn't in the setting, that this is a problem because the monster then serves as a stand-in for that culture: and the logical conclusion of that argument would appear to be that D&D shouldn't have such monsters in such settings. Am I incorrect? At the very least it seems to be another layer of consideration that designers need to weigh when making games (and if so, my issue there is we have already created so many considerations it is beginning to feel like you need a degree in media studies or cultural studies to even consider designer RPG content). Perhaps I am viewing this throughs he lens of the orc thread we just had and that is coloring my perception so if you meant something else I am certainly interested in being corrected.

Yes, actually, you are. That was just one of the options I listed in the OP as a way to solve the dilemma I was facing. That's not my position. I was just pointing out that that is a valid position to take on this issue. It's not the one that I subscribe to (as I stated in the OP, I haven't made up my mind yet), and this discussion was meant to talk about the merits and faults of all of the possible options in this dilemma I'm facing.

And, yes, I do believe you and quite a few other posters have/are taking this thread in the wrong way due to recent threads, namely the Orc-based ones. This thread is not about offense, it's not about racism, it's not about changing how any of the books or official settings are written, and it's not about any sense of moral superiority/rules that people should have to adhere to. I really have no idea where you guys are coming up with this nonsense.