D&D General The Rakshasa and Genie Problem

[Lyxen]

Thank you for these. I never read Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. I'll try to get my hands on a copy ASAP.
As for Warhammer, I did play it a bit but I much more prefered the 40K dystopian universe. I played the Space Hulks boardgame with friends and it was a blast. The RPG aspect of these games were not really my cup of tea but it was an interesting read in the 80's though I never read the 2nd edition.

I realise the reference was not included, my extracts came from a much longer post here:

 

[Vaalingrade]

Never really thought about it because the monster never appealed to me, but I did notice how weird it was that the context of these evil jackholes is the only place that the title 'rajah' appears.

Genies have always been a lazy scrape off the surface of the source material. Bottle. Three Wishes. Twisted Wishes. Done.

Meanwhile, original genies have a much deeper and interesting lore that is heavily influenced by their Islamic roots to the point that seldom does one show up without giving their thoughts on God and tradition.

These are just basic and clear things. It's not 'looking for problems', it's just 'looking'.

 

[Irlo]

Let me tell you a story, in the 80s I fell in love with the indian pantheon presented in the 1st edition Deities and Demigods, in particular following a reading of Lord of Light by Zelazny. So I did a bit of digging and found the ramayana, which I read and absolutely loved, and created a complete campaign based on my understanding of it, with Ravana as the BBEG and his hordes of Rakshasas of various kinds as nefarious villains (and since then rakshasas are amongst my favourite villains). My players loved it, and we still speak about it today (in particular as to how the PCs invoked Agni, burning butter and all that).

You did the work to put the D&D monsters into a wider cultural context, and it paid off. That's pretty much the opposite of the problem encountered described in the original post, about creatures bearing out-of-context cultural trappings. That sounds like an awesome game.

 

[Irlo]

For now I don’t think Wotc will take the path of cleaning the MM of all cultural references.
Maybe they will be forced to in the future, expectations are changing rapidly on the subject.

WOTC is not going to be forced to do anything.

 

[Krachek]

WOTC is not going to be forced to do anything.

They do it for the Vistani,
so I can speculate that any solid case going to legal charges, will force Wotc to move.
I don’t know the details and reasons that make Wotc move for the Vistani but they clearly move.
if not legal charge, any trend that inflate on social media can be enough.

 

[Irlo]

They do it for the Vistani,
so I can speculate that any solid case going to legal charges, will force Wotc to move.

<deleted> I'm disengaging to avoid derailing the thread.

 

[Cadence]

Never really thought about it because the monster never appealed to me, but I did notice how weird it was that the context of these evil jackholes is the only place that the title 'rajah' appears.

I remember middle school me liking that the 1e DMG had titles from around the world in the section on designing one's own campaign. (Click for bigger image).

 

[Argyle King]

Well...

D&D did the Rick & Morty set not long ago.

Maybe djinn could be replaced with Mr. Meeseeks.

 

[Remathilis]

So, this is an issue that I've been thinking about lately, which I first thought of in light of some recent threads of similar topic, and I'm not sure what the solution is. It's pretty unique to D&D, but can come from any fantasy work that borrows its creatures from a lot of different cultures, folklore, and mythologies. The problem that I noticed is in a lot of D&D worlds, especially ones that don't have Fantasy Counterpart Cultures of the cultures that the creatures were borrowed from in the first place, tend to basically evolve into those Fantasy Counterpart Cultures. And this can be a problem, and I think one of the most apparent examples is actually from Eberron: the Carrion Tribes of the Demon Wastes, which are largely populated by Rakshasa.

I think you are looking at this from the wrong direction.

Eberron wanted to do something different with fiends and celestials in 3.5 rather than use the classic Demon/Devil/Blood War model that existed in almost every D&D product at that time. As such, they opted to use Native Outsiders (a strange contradictory subgroup of monsters, see also living construct) of which there were only two in the 3.5 MM: Coutals, and Raksasha. So, they tried to make of them important to Eberron's story tying the raksasha's to imprisoned fiends below the earth and the couatls to the Silver Flame. That is really the only reason they got prominent placement in Eberron.

Are the Raksasha's of Eberron Asian-coded? A little. Their titles are, and some of their dress style is, but it doesn't really reflect the culture the raksasha actually have. (To wit: the 3.5 Eberron book also has a hobgoblin in full samurai armor and an orc in conical hat standing in a rice field, and neither orcs nor goblins in Eberron are Asian analogs). The Carrion tribes are your archetypal barbarians who also worship fiends, and the only art around them is in nowhere India-inspired. They look like classic barbarians closer to the Uthgardt than anything Indian.

Of course, Eberron is one of the few settings that lacks classic "fantasy X" areas to represent Africa, Asian, the Middle East, etc. Eberron does have people of color, but they are so integrated that they lack unique cultures and instead are members of the culture of the nation they were born into. (Jaela Daran, the leader of the Church of the Silver Flame and Thrane, is canonically black).

The problem here is we're at a catch-22. Eberron lacks an Asia analog area, so does that mean it cannot use Asian-inspired elements in its dress or art? Are classically Asian monsters not applicable? Can Raksasha's or genies exist but without the cultural garb of their ancestry (I just imagined a bunch of raksasha's wearing polos and khakis...) Is the same true of the overtly Norse-inspired dress of frost giants or the Grecco-inspired clothing of the medusa? And if so, how do you promote diversity in your art if doing so will be appropriation of the style?

 

[Hriston]

I'm not a member of a Middle Eastern culture, nor am I a follower of Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism, so I'm not sure what value my contribution can have to this discussion. I speak from a position of white-male-living-in-the-United-States-of-America privilege, but since I recently had the experience of introducing a rakshasa NPC into my game due to it having been the result of a random encounter roll, I'll share how I handled it.

First, I took the monster stat block and any notable descriptive text from the 5th Ed. MM as definitive of the monster in-game. I also consulted the AD&D 1E MM which generally gives me a better idea of a monster's niche and expected behaviors. I also looked up a Wikipedia article to give me some idea of just what a rakshasa is in terms of its cultural and folkloric origins.

I then assimilated this information into my understanding of the game-world, i.e. that this is a shapeshifting divine being originating from the Nine Hells that has incarnated on the Material Plane for the purpose of seeking dominion over others. My immediate point of comparison was to Sauron when he disguised himself as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts, and I had him present himself to the party in human form as a wealthy philanthropist and travelling merchant.

Because I like to randomize pretty much everything, I looked up a rakshasa name generator on fantasynamegenerators.com which generated a pseudo-Sanskrit sounding name for the character: Yundur. I used this name because, although I've used medieval European names for most if not all of the actually human NPCs I've introduced so far, I felt that his name having an apparently different cultural origin would signal to the players something of the unusual nature of this creature who otherwise appeared human, describing himself as having recently arrived from a foreign land. Because, as far as I'm aware, Yundur is not an actual South Asian name but is only somewhat evocative of a "fantasy South Asia", I felt it adequately skirted the line of cultural appropriation, so hopefully I didn't cause any injury or offense by using it or by posting about it here.