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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 8506663" data-attributes="member: 6787503">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.</blockquote>

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