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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 8506435" data-attributes="member: 463">With the genies, they have such a rich and complex variety of types, morals etc that I don't have a problem with them tending to have Middle Eastern type cultures - efreet, dao, marids, jann & djinn cover a huge range.I haven't seen Rakshasa 'represent Indian culture' but they tend to come from the world's India-analogue area. I normally pair Rakshasa (evil) with Deva (good), as in the 4e cosmology. In Golarion the Rakshasa are clearly from the India area. In my version of Primeval Thule they are actually from future-Mars, and don't really have a strongly Indian culture I'd say.I can't say I've seen these strongly supernatural creatures "represent the culture" in a fantasy setting. I'm trying to think of an example where this might be the case - Hobgoblins are sometimes depicted with east-Asian type arms and armour but their culture isn't presented as analogous to any east-Asian culture, it tends to draw if anything on Roman Empire militaristic tropes.Edit: What I have seen fairly often are fantasy human cultures that are clearly based on real world human cultures, with some designated Good and some Evil. I just got the Mystara Atruaghin Clans book from 1991 and it's very noticeable how eg the Plains Indians analogue tribe are designated 'Good' while the Aztec analogue tribe are designated 'Evil'. The Mystara books in general had a lot of this kind of cultural stereotyping, eg the Germanic-named Hattians of south Thyatis are generally Evil, and their Storm Soldiers are clear Nazi analogues. The Mongolian-analogue Ethengar Khanate gets a more sympathetic treatment, perhaps surprisingly. The Known World/Mystara line really bought into the current views of 1980s America, so eg with Ylaruam (Arabia) the Sunni analogue Preceptors are the good guys and the Shia analogue Kin faction are the bad guys, while out west the evil Master of the Desert Nomads is depicted as Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini.</blockquote>

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