D&D General The Rakshasa and Genie Problem

[Helldritch]

I'm all for talking about and reconsidering previously published products.

But I agree with Lyxen (and probably everyone else) that we don't need to start talking about purging all materials of anything related to culture.

And so do I. But a question was asked. It deserve an answer don't you think?

 

[Helldritch]

If I don't like or feel comfortable with halflings, I just wouldn't use them. It's DMing 101.

If the question is "this makes me uncomfortable, what should I do?" The answer is pretty simple. Whatever makes you comfortable. Replace, ignore and never use, put them in polos and khakis, whatever. I worry when the question becomes "This makes me uncomfortable, what should we do?" That is the harder question to answer and its been the one asked repeatedly for a lot of different things.

And to be honest, I'm reaching the point where my tolerance for nuance is being stretched. So I opted for the most radical position to solve the problem. So nuke the raksasha in Eberron. Add a dozen new continents full of people with appropriate cultures. If things are wrong, break them and start over. But just fix the problem.

I understand your answer a lot more then. You will find a sympathetic ear in me. It may just be that I have a bit more patience for these...

 

[Justice and Rule]

I hear you about retreads, and would never expect WorC to do anything more interesting. I just don't want it to get any worse.

See, I don't have that worry. To me, the retreads are basically the nadir. It's hard to get worse than that. Trying new stuff will at least give me more variety. I know that people complain about how little fluff was given for the 4E MMs, but some of the sparse fluff is just way more interesting. Cyclopes are way, way more interesting as the middle-managers of evil Feywild Formorians than what they are in 5E.

the reason these ideas get push back is because they have an impact on the culture of the hobby and what is permissible creatively. You see this in how word approaches certain topics now but also in what gets called out in games online (and that has an effect of what is creatively permissible).

I disagree. Talking about if something is problematic is good because it helps us understand how to integrate things respectfully rather than just tossing them in for the sake of exoticism. You talk about what is "creatively permissible", but I think it's more about creating an awareness of bad tropes and how to avoid them. In effect, it's not about creativity but quality and how to improve it.

 

[Alzrius]

Sometimes though I think we fetishized ‘authentic’. Authenticity can be good.

It absolutely can be, but (speaking solely to my own experiences) authenticity is often presented as the antithesis of pastiche, which is the primary vector of presentation for most campaign settings that I'm aware of.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I disagree. Talking about if something is problematic is good because it helps us understand how to integrate things respectfully rather than just tossing them in for the sake of exoticism. You talk about what is "creatively permissible", but I think it's more about creating an awareness of bad tropes and how to avoid them. In effect, it's not about creativity but quality and how to improve it.

I think our positions are not really reconcilesbke, which is part of the issue perhaps. I understand this is your belief about the result, but just as you believe it leads to better quality, I believe it stifles creativity, leads to less interesting and fun content, and doesn’t really do anything to fix the problems it is purporting to address (I don’t think changing media is going to fix societal ills, and I think attempts to do so, very quickly can slip into propaganda and move us away from engaging in layered and interesting art). I also think the awareness you describe really just raised the bar to entry: people either need an advanced degree or need to have been deeply invested in a long conversation about tropes to make art, to design games. I just don’t think this is a healthy mindset (either on the creative end, nor on the receptive end as an audience; with the latter, I think it leads to very simplified consumption that ignores layers of meaning and stops at the most obvious superficial potential meaning of something).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So let's take it back to the OPs premise: raksashas exist in Eberron. Raksashas are Indian-coded due to their rw origin. There is no India analog in Eberron. How do you fix this?

One of the suggestions is that if the setting lacks a stand in for a particular culture, the monsters from that culture shouldn't be included. I've seen similar arguments about things like monks or samurai as well. Eberron, lacking analogs for real world cultures, shouldn't use those elements. I suggest if that's going to be the case, then break it up by culture so that it becomes part of the package deal. You want Chinese elements in your game? Get the China supplement. It's been researched and written by experts in Chinese culture and is faithful to the source material and respectful to the culture.

And my suggestion is, if that particular aspect bothers you, do some research on Indian and Chinese cultures, and find ways to make those elements make sense, or find ways to represent those cultures more effectively in-setting.

This doesn't have to be hard. I don't know Eberron very well, but from what little I already knew or can find:

• The Dhakaani Empire could easily have had significant influences from various historical Indian Subcontinent cultures, such as the Mughal Empire, or the Chola Empire, which spawned from a dynasty that--no joke--lasted over a thousand years. That would fit in extremely well with the Dhakaani, who ruled what is now called Khorvaire for several thousand years. The Rakshasa could have adapted to that culture as part of their efforts to awaken their overlords, and to them, the three or four centuries that the new nations of Khorvaire have been around is nothing.
• The dragonborn of Q'barra and Argonessen prove it is possible to expand the world with new elements by finding appropriate places for them. Keith Baker, the creator of Eberron, even seems to have been pretty enthusiastic about incorporating Dragonborn into the setting--to the point that, if they were building Eberron today, he'd consider making them a dragonmarked race. Perhaps they are the ones who have the samurai and other such things, traditions they had for thousands of years before the Dhakaani drove the early dragonborn out of Khorvaire. They continue to uphold the true source of the traditions behind said fighting styles and armor types.

Far from perfect, to be sure, and you'd want to do some work to be sure things fit together properly. But surely better than trying to just rip the Rakshasa out entirely, and thus having to rewrite major parts of the setting? Good-faith efforts have got to be better than flippantly ignoring the issue and better than cutting everything up into perfectly segregated, non-interacting pieces, "how dare you try to run an Arabian Nights setting without the Official Arabian Nights Book (Coming 202X!)"

It just seems both reductive and counter-productive to take "this is kinda iffy, lifting aesthetics and behaviors from real or historical cultures without any real basis or merit in it" and thus conclude "burn it all down, slice everything up into its own neat little totally separated non-interacting boxes."

 

[jmartkdr2]

I dunno if I entirely agree with that. I think they fit more into either the Greek daimon or Roman genius loci concepts. That is, genies bound to objects are real dang close to the idea of the "spirit of a place," just swapping "place" for "object." And daimones, to the ancient Greeks, were...spirits of any kind, regardless of their nature; what we call "demons" today would have been called kakodaimones then, specifically evil spirits, to be contrasted against agathodaimones, overtly good spirits.

So you could quite easily shift them in the direction of Greco-Roman stuff instead. Particularly since you could leverage the tale of Pandora's urn for the idea of powers (evil and good) being trapped inside vessels of various kinds. Perhaps call them "pandorians" or the like.

Classically, djinn aren't always bound to an object or place. Shahrazad uses that a couple times (they aren't entirely different form daimon) but other myths have them quite free.

There's a lot to draw from, if one is so inclined.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Classically, djinn aren't always bound to an object or place. Shahrazad uses that a couple times (they aren't entirely different form daimon) but other myths have them quite free.

There's a lot to draw from, if one is so inclined.

Sounds like an even better fit than I'd thought. I'd been under the impression that "free" genies were extremely rare. Guess I need to read more of the Thousand and One Nights again!

 

[Justice and Rule]

I think our positions are not really reconcilesbke, which is part of the issue perhaps. I understand this is your belief about the result, but just as you believe it leads to better quality, I believe it stifles creativity, leads to less interesting and fun content,

I don't know how thinking about things stifles or leads to a less creative project. Typically speaking I think it leads to less lazy stuff because it forces you to actually think about what you are doing rather than just tossing things in that look cool.

and doesn’t really do anything to fix the problems it is purporting to address (I don’t think changing media is going to fix societal ills, and I think attempts to do so, very quickly can slip into propaganda and move us away from engaging in layered and interesting art).

Yeah, uh, this is nonsense? No one thinks that doing this is going to fix racism, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't think critically about what we take from other cultures. Like, what propaganda would be made? Who would be making it?

I also think the awareness you describe really just raised the bar to entry: people either need an advanced degree or need to have been deeply invested in a long conversation about tropes to make art, to design games. I just don’t think this is a healthy mindset (either on the creative end, nor on the receptive end as an audience; with the latter, I think it leads to very simplified consumption that ignores layers of meaning and stops at the most obvious superficial potential meaning of something).

It's not about having long conversations all the time because you don't always need to. But in the case of randomly cribbing things from other cultures, then yes, you probably should think about what you are doing. You talk about gatekeeping, but shoddy inclusion and racially-charged language are far greater gatekeepers because they actively make minority members of our community feel uncomfortable or unwelcome. This whole thing comes off less about not wanting to have a conversation and simply wanting to ignore that D&D has problems.

 

[Remathilis]

The Dhakaani Empire could easily have had significant influences from various historical Indian Subcontinent cultures, such as the Mughal Empire, or the Chola Empire, which spawned from a dynasty that--no joke--lasted over a thousand years. That would fit in extremely well with the Dhakaani, who ruled what is now called Khorvaire for several thousand years. The Rakshasa could have adapted to that culture as part of their efforts to awaken their overlords, and to them, the three or four centuries that the new nations of Khorvaire have been around is nothing.

So two problems.

The Dhakanni Empire are goblinoids. All of them. What you're doing is giving goblins an Indian culture is a big no no. Humans wouldn't make it to Khovaire until after Dhakanni's fall fighting the Daelkyr.

Raksashas ruled Khorvaire earlier than that, during the Age of Fiends until they were banished by the Coutals and bound by the Silver Flame. Goblins were still beating each other over the head with sticks culturally when this happened, and it's only the fall of the Raksasha that allows the Dhakanni to rise.

So your suggestion works if we're willing to completely rewrite Eberron's history. Which going by WotC's stance on cannon is potentially a valid option. But at that point you might as well add a new continent for as much disturbance as it's going to cause.

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8507540, member: 6790260] It just seems both reductive and counter-productive to take "this is kinda iffy, lifting aesthetics and behaviors from real or historical cultures without any real basis or merit in it" and thus conclude "burn it all down, slice everything up into its own neat little totally separated non-interacting boxes."[/QUOTE]

The crux if the issue is raksasha are Indian and thus tied to that culture. If that bothers you, you either remove raksashas from non-Indian settings or add India to the settings that have raksashas. I fail to see why this is controversial after all the criticism about appropriating things like samurai or phylacteries into the game.