Worldwide Europe - Are People Doing This?

[Sound of Azure]

Genshou,

Just a few questions.

Will you be developing your setting with a "whole world" approach? That is, will you develop the world as a whole-continents, nations, cultures?
Other that "Oriental" and "Occidental/Europe", will there be other regions in your world? How will they relate?
If so, you have quite a task determining the interaction between them all!

Personally, I don't mind some mixing, as long as they suit the flavour of the setting. The classes can be adjested to suit any culture, though that can be annoying at times.

 

[Mercule]

I do it because I happen to really like pseudo-Euro historical feeling. I understand that Japan, etc. have a lot to offer. I just don't want to lose the European feel. Nor do I want to run a "whole earth" game.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

A lot of my dislike of Oriental influence in my gaming is a result of rampant katana/ninja/samurai fanboyism in my formative years.

 

[Hussar]

Some differences between "East" and "West" also cause hidden concerns that aren't immediately obvious. For instance, in DnD, it's very common practice for PCs to kill bad guys, then loot their corpses. This isn't exactly honorable behavior among medieval Europeans, but it was done. This was not done in Japan. Repeated interactions with the dead causes spiritual tainting (or something along those lines), so unless a Japanese-equivalent adventurer is an eta, they will not do this. If they're a peasant adventurer rather than a samurai they will still not loot the dead. Oriental Adventures discusses this, but it assumes that everyone in the adventure is Oriental.

Pardon? The primary reason for seppuku was because the winning armies would violate the dead. Cut off your head and parade it through the streets. In truth, violating the dead was something that was very commonly done in feudal Japan.

 

[Captain NeMo]

Personally, I find Oriental flavour a bit boring. An African or Polynesian inspired campaign setting would be awesome, though.

 

[Metus]

If they're a peasant adventurer rather than a samurai they will still not loot the dead.

I think this is just blatantly untrue. Peasants DID loot the bodies of the dead, especially when they thought they could get away with it. Yes, there were the Shinto precepts, but the main reason they wouldn't was because they didn't want to get the samurai all riled up. Even taking into account the rules of Shintoism, many peasants were the burakumin, or untouchables, who would have absolutely no problems about being tainted by looting the dead.

For an example in fiction, look at the film Seven Samurai. Towards the end the samurai realize the peasants of the village had been looting dead bodies, which outrages all of them except for Kikuchiyo, who is actually a peasant himself. He gets angry and explains it's a way of life and survival for peasants.

Anyways, long story short, peasants did loot bodies.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Well, I can make mistakes. Fortunately I'm not designing samurai classes And since two people smashed the anti-looting stereotype, I'm happy to see yet another stereotype slaughtered.

Pardon? The primary reason for seppuku was because the winning armies would violate the dead. Cut off your head and parade it through the streets. In truth, violating the dead was something that was very commonly done in feudal Japan.

You mean the bundori trophy? But that's not really looting, is it?

 

[Barak]

I don'[t really see how seppuku prevented it, anyway.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

When I create a new setting for a campaign, one of the first things I decide is if it will be more analogical of fusional in nature.

My last campaign was roughly based on the european colonization of north america in the Regency timeframe. So monks and polytheism got the boot, clerics are based in denominational monotheism, paladins are an amalgam of the frontier's circuit riding judge and preacher, Druidism is a dead religion, and bards survive as a Mason-like secret society. The natives of the land are rooted in amerindian history and folklore.

The one I'm currently developing (for when our Eberron campaign wraps up) will be more fusional in nature, mostly due to the hook of having only small races available as PCs. For example, the culture of the gnomes combines elements of pharonic egypt and feudal japan. Gnome samurai in kemetic motif armor.

With the published settings I mostly see Forgotten Realms as an analogical setting with scattered fusional elements, and Eberron as a fusional setting with trace analogical elements.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

In a homebrew setting I've kicked around on my LiveJournal, I contemplated solving the "problem" quite simply: the region loosely inspired by Merovingian-Carolingian France abuts the region loosely inspired by Umayyad Spain (we're nice and geographically accurate so far), but then both regions would in turn border upon a nation loosely inspired by China during the period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

There's no reason that nations based on cultures that are wildly separated in the real world can't be neighbours in a fantasy world, as long as you're taking very loose inspiration from history when creating these countries and not pretending that you can drop China right down next to France and Muslim Spain and have there be no appreciable blending of ideas.

I tend to agree that the monk doesn't fit very well in a Greyhawk-styled pseudo-medieval setting; I just thank all of the creative minds who worked on settings like Dark Sun, Spelljammer, Planescape, and Eberron that we're not restricted to that narrow mold.