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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Levistus's_Leviathan" data-source="post: 8506376" data-attributes="member: 7023887">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. D&D "borrowed" Rakshasa from Hindu and Buddhist mythologies (they're quite different from D&D Rakshasa), which have been major religions in India and surrounding areas for millennia. And I have no problem with borrowing monsters from other cultures. Giants, Dwarves, and Elves come from Norse Mythology, Satyrs, Nymphs, Minotaurs, Harpies, and Centaurs come from Greek Mythology, Fomorians, most Fey, and Banshee come from Celtic Mythology, Griffons and Sphynxes come from Egyptian Mythology, and I could go on and on. Borrowing monsters, fantasy races, and other aspects of other culture's mythologies and folklore is not the problem. The problem is when the monsters become stand-ins for those peoples in the fantasy worlds. I've mostly noticed this happen to Rakshasa and Genies, but I'm sure it's also happened to other creatures. And on some level, it makes sense that the creatures that came from other cultures would have the same base culture, especially if they're fairly similar to humanoids. The mythologies and folklore that they came from would probably treat fantasy people as their base culture when writing about them. But there's also examples that don't follow this at all (the Courts of the Feywild don't tend to have Irish stereotypes with them from what I've noticed, Dwarves aren't Vikings, etc), so it clearly isn't a rule. D&D Rakshasas could easily just be another anthropomorphic animal character race (well, maybe then they'd be called Rakasta) while Genies could just be magic people that are trapped in bottles/lamps. They don't necessarily have to have the same culture (or a stereotyped version of it) as the culture they were drawn from. I honestly don't know which is better, which is why I'm creating this thread. For me it feels uncomfortable to have Rakshasa and Genies be fantasy-counterpart Middle-Eastern/Indian people, but I also don't know if just taking the monsters out of their cultural context is cultural appropriation. Is it better to just not use the creatures if you don't have a Fantasy-Counterpart in your world of that culture in the first place? Maybe it would be better to just keep them in Al-Qadim and similar areas of certain D&D worlds instead of having them assumed to exist in most D&D worlds (Eberron, for example)? I honestly do not know the answer, and all of these answers seem a bit uncomfortable to me (at least at the moment). Does anyone have any suggestions or thoughts? (I don't want to mark this thread as a (+) thread, because debating the different options and discussing which would be best is the point of this thread, but I do want to keep the spirit. Please, don't threadcrap or troll. Please be sincere in your questioning and not adverse to the base premise. If you don't think these kinds of discussions are necessary or important, just don't participate.)</blockquote>

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