What If: "Occidental Adventures"?

[Ashtagon]

The early RPG offerings that were intended to cover East Asia, such as TSR's Oriental Adventures and early editions of Lot5R, suffered from what is known in academic circles as orientalism - an idea that East Asia must be depicted as strange and exotic in order to be interesting, and that western European culture by contrast is the default "generic" fantasy.

Suppose from the start, East Asia had been seen as the default fantasy setting, and depicted sensibly (that is, reasonably faithful to one or both of their history and legends, and covering China and Japan reasonably completely while acknowledging the existence of the rest of the region).

And then suppose some game designer wanted to write up a book for European (ie Occidental) cultures, but seen through that same "orientalism" lens. What might those products have looked like? What races and classes might we have seen?

[thelastorphan]

To be perfectly honest I feel like DnD is already that
A simplified distilling of mostly Northern Europe and British styled fantasy. Ignoring alot of other areas of Europe except in settings that have since been very fleshed out.

[HouseRules]

Double Standard.

People in the West prefer Western over Occidental. Yet they prefer Occidental over Eastern.

[awa]

To be perfectly honest I feel like DnD is already that
A simplified distilling of mostly Northern Europe and British styled fantasy. Ignoring alot of other areas of Europe except in settings that have since been very fleshed out.

I agree for the most part, barbarians are already a mismatch of Germanic tribe and viking.
Their are several variations on knights in different classes.

The only thing i think would be that to make d&d more western focused you would not need to add anything new but you might need to take away. Martial arts monks, certain weapon choices, monsters based on other cultures.

Now that said their is an aspect of this i as an American would be unable to comment on and that is we know what our theme-park version of western Europe is but what would a foreigners theme park version be.

to clarify my thoughts through an example
I remember hearing years ago a thing about japan now i dont remember the source so take it with a grain of salt. They like cowboys at the time but while in the USA they are seen as a symbol of rugged individualism in japan they were a symbol of cooperation. The point is people can perceive a thing differently so if japan tried to make an rpg about western Europe what aspects of Europe would they choose to focus on what stereotypes would they believe defined the time or region.

Okay having said that it occurred to me japan might be a bad example they have been so exposed to western fantasy tropes that the pool might be tainted so to speak.

[Ashtagon]

Double Standard.

People in the West prefer Western over Occidental. Yet they prefer Occidental over Eastern.

Funny that. Because people from Chinese prefer to be called East Asians to being called orientals (nb. word used here for academic discussion; I would not normally calla Chinese person that). Which makes "Occidental Adventures" a rather fitting mirror title for this purpose.

Note that this thread isn't meant to be about making D&D more western-focused. It's about what might D&D look like if the "western" supplement were a caricature of Europe rather than something that aims for genericity.

[HouseRules]

Funny that. Because people from Chinese prefer to be called East Asians to being called orientals (nb. word used here for academic discussion; I would not normally calla Chinese person that). Which makes "Occidental Adventures" a rather fitting mirror title for this purpose.

Note that this thread isn't meant to be about making D&D more western-focused. It's about what might D&D look like if the "western" supplement were a caricature of Europe rather than something that aims for genericity.

Chinese have a preference for exotic language. Occidental and Oriental are from Latin and is considered more exotic than Western and Eastern.

[Ashtagon]

My guesses...

The campaign setting would focus on the mighty Empire of Daqin (Romans). Daqin is nominally an empire, but has a complex bureaucracy of elected officials and representatives from Rome sent out to reside in the colonies. It's mighty navy is in the early stages of exploring the wider world, and high level play may see the vice-consul of Hispania sponsor the PCs on an expedition across the western ocean. To the north, the anarchic Karolin Sengoku is a mish-mash of tiny fiefdoms that swear loyalty (or sometimes, "swear loyalty") through a chain of command that ultimately leads to an emperor, who has very little effective power.

Clerics would have abilities that play up their political power. Gone is the ban on sharp weapons that early edition D&D had. Instead, their magic gets more powerful as the audience grows (the Roman gods like to be seen to be doing stuff). Call it +1 CL and save DC for 10 audience, +2 for 30+, +3 for 100+, +4 for 300+, +5 for 1000+, and so on.

Rogues would be required to be evil, and probably restricted as an NPC class.

I may sketch out more ideas for this later. Feel free to add to this outline or revise details if you think it could be improved.

[ExLibrisMortis]

As a Westerner (from the Netherlands), this is really hard to answer. For one, I'm not terribly well-versed in Eastern depictions of Western culture, and for two, I don't know any Japanese people. I know there are some theme park versions/recreations of Western buildings (i.e. Huis ten Bosch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huis_Ten_Bosch_(theme_park)) in Japan), but looking at those, all I can say is they're cleaner and newer than the real thing. Doesn't really help me understand what the Japanese might make of our culture. And that's just Japan, there's this much *spreads arms* more of Asia that I am even more clueless about.

For my part, I tend to think of Japan (and this is a flanderization, I understand that) as being very traditional, very formal, and very, well, call it "committed to their art". As in: the sushi chef who massages his squid for an hour to make it tender. By hand. If we flip that around, you might think that us Dutch are informal (or impolite), free with (or disrespectful towards) tradition, and relaxed (or unmotivated) towards work. But interestingly, flipping doesn't work on cultural perceptions. You might easily find two groups that consider one another excessively fussy about formality (and also rude, at the same time).

So I guess that I have to conclude that while I'm intrigued by the the question, I'm not the person to ask. Sorry about that :smalltongue:.

[Knaight]

{Scrubbed}

[Celestia]

Yeah, the image of Medieval Europe depicted in generic fantasy world is just as historically inaccurate and fabricated. In fact, I'd even say it's more inaccurate as the people who design worlds based on foreign cultures at least put forth a token effort of legitimate research, even if the final result is laughably wrong. Worlds based on Europe, though, tend to just be derived from other fantasy in an incestuous mess of corruption and misinformation.

[awa]

{Scrubbed}

[Ashtagon]

{Scrubbed}

[HouseRules]

Fantasy always prefer the obsolete (no active member) religion.

[awa]

{Scrubbed}

[Ashtagon]

were not allowed to discuss pre-Christian religion specifically either

Forum precedent seems to suggest that talking about Zeus, Thor, Jupiter, et alii is acceptable.

(self-reported in case I am wrong)

[noob]

Monks that crafts wine and learn to heal people instead of punching people to death.
6 different classes of paladins and knights.

[liquidformat]

{Scrubbed}

[Dimers]

It'd lean a bit "Points Of Light" -- a benighted world where people live in fear, cowering in the ruins of the Old Empire until great (and somewhat barbaric) heroes save them.

It'd also be fairly heavy in fey. There are TONS of stories in the various Euro cultures about fey. Especially river spirits, since there are lots of rivers in Europe. There are so many rivers that I bet a foreign culture inventing a game would make up weird magics and professions and laws/crimes and mythology revolving around the river in everybody's back yard.

Haruspication would be the primary form of divination. And it might be considered nonmagical.

[Ashtagon]

Monks that crafts wine and learn to heal people instead of punching people to death.


And then you get some zhainan who wants to play a Buckfast monk:smallbiggrin:

[Roland St. Jude]

Sheriff: Stop referencing real world religion (of any era). The mentions upthread are already over the line.

[Prime32]

There's a Japanese parody RPG called "Geisha Girl with Katana", which presents itself as a US-made Oriental Adventures style system.

Actually, Geisha Girl with Katana is a meta RPG. That is not "RPG that misunderstood Japan". The real intention is RPG who plays "Foreign RPG player who misunderstood Japan to play RPG that misunderstood Japan". In other words, GGwK was RPG becoming "foreign RPG player". And if you think that the PC "Foreigner RPG player" is playing RPG called GGwK, the play becomes very interesting.
So, with GGwK, "I will play Ninja Boy" is not to have tasted only half of the fun.
The first thing to do is: "My name is Greg, I love Japan, I'm pretty watching Japanese movies, Kurosawa is good." "Yes, I like show / kosugi I guess he is a typical Japanese, "Yes, I would like to go to Japan and wear that beautiful national costume, you know, someone like the Euran is wearing it" If you start with doing dubious foreigners and showing knowledge about doubtful (highly prejudiced) Japan, fun will be 100% fetched.
From what I can gather... There are three ability scores: Skill, Zen and Technology. All classes are gender-locked (though there are two ninja classes with different restrictions on which bright primary colours they can wear). Samurai are salesmen and accountants serving under a Shogun-CEO, who can be promoted to Ronin if they're particularly skilled with the sword. There are rules for bowing to your opponent, committing seppuku, and challenging your enemies to a karaoke contest. You must roll your dice into "one of those bowls that Japanese people wear on their head while travelling", or failing that a salad bowl - if one of the dice falls out then you fumble, which always occurs in exactly the same way (determined for each character at the start of the campaign). There's a table of Japanese names that includes entries like "Nintendo", "Hirohito" and "Lee", and a deliberately-bad pronunciation guide.

[Roland St. Jude]

Forum precedent seems to suggest that talking about Zeus, Thor, Jupiter, et alii is acceptable.

(self-reported in case I am wrong)Sheriff: That is incorrect. The dividing line is real world or fictional. Real world religion of any era is out of bounds here. Fictional religions or fictional versions of religions (OotS or AD&D 2e Thor is fine; real world Thor is not).

[Thealtruistorc]

The thing about creating an inverted orientalism sentiment is that it ignores the power dynamic inherent to how orientalism originated in the first place. The grand-scale fetishization/dehumanization of Asia/Asians in the west doesn’t really have a parallel because no eastern culture or nation has ever asserted the same sort of imperial dominion over any western people.

That said, if you want to see interesting interpretations of European folklore and faith by Asian and Asian-American authors, I strongly recommend Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga and Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints series. Either could be a fantastic basis for a campaign or world.

[Duke of Urrel]

i think the closest we can get to authentically "occidental" fantasies all come from Japan. Think of the movies STEAMBOY and KIKI'S DELIVERY SERVICE. They both take place in fantastical, strangely generic "European" places.

[Rynjin]

The thing about creating an inverted orientalism sentiment is that it ignores the power dynamic inherent to how orientalism originated in the first place. The grand-scale fetishization/dehumanization of Asia/Asians in the west doesn’t really have a parallel because no eastern culture or nation has ever asserted the same sort of imperial dominion over any western people.

That said, if you want to see interesting interpretations of European folklore and faith by Asian and Asian-American authors, I strongly recommend Kentaro Miura’s Berserk manga and Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints series. Either could be a fantastic basis for a campaign or world.

See also: Makoto Yukimura's Vinland Saga. There's an anime coming out some time this year. It's a (somewhat) more grounded take than Berserk (haven't read the other one) but it is definitely an interesting take on one of the great Scandinavian Epics.

[Thurbane]

To be perfectly honest I feel like DnD is already that

Agreed. Right from Basic/1E, D&D is a mishmash of pseudo-Medieval Eurpoean sources.

It draws from history and folklore from Britian, France, Gemany, Russia and a host of others.

Druids and Bards have Celtic inspiration; Paladins, French; Barbarians, Norse etc.

[HouseRules]

Isn't the goal trying to remove the Southern and Eastern European aspect to focus more on the Western European?

Too many people consider Greco-Roman to be exotic, so some people want to remove those aspects.

Lord of the Rings did exactly that.

[Karl Aegis]

Wild West cowboys with sunglasses and over-sized four barrel guns and nuns smoking cigars while riding motorcycles would be staples.

[SimonMoon6]

I imagine a setting where all of Western culture and fantasy is all just merged together, as if it all is part of the same culture.

Like imagine a world where creatures of Greek mythology (centaurs, satyrs, gorgons such as Medusa, etc) are able to exist side by side with creatures of Western European legends (leprechauns, elves, orcs, winged humanoids from {scrubbed in advance}, red-skinned horned humanoids from {also pre-scrubbed just in case}, etc.), along with all sorts of things, like creatures from Slavic legends... or creatures from Middle-Eastern legends alongside creatures from 19th century science fiction, grouped together into a single category of things.

And then because we can't actually use {pre-scrubbed in advance}, we then instead use {also pre-scrubbed} but with all the affectations of the {pre-scrubbed just in case} that we couldn't use, to make it feel more like the {pre-scrubbed for fear of moderator retribution} that everyone is familiar with, even though it has nothing to do with the actual subject in question... like basing an entire warrior class on the ideology and methodology of the real world {scrubbed again} even though those ideologies and methodologies have nothing to do with the world that is being made.

In other words, the world would be D&D.

[ben-zayb]

To be perfectly honest I feel like DnD is already that
A simplified distilling of mostly Northern Europe and British styled fantasy. Ignoring alot of other areas of Europe except in settings that have since been very fleshed out.This.

Toril already had the occidental fantasy mishmash in Faerun cultures being inspired by "Old World" civilizations, which are mostly European.

[Ellrin]

I mean, Final Fantasy was based on AD&D, but I think the pre-FF6 games (and FF9) are probably a pretty good representation of Japanese concepts of Western fantasy.

[Khedrac]

As many people have said, one answer is "D&D" but there others - it depends how specific one wants to be.

There are quite a few cultures that have existed in Western Europe that people exclusive associate with Western Europe and so could be written up for an Occidental Adventures handbok/game. The could be thrown into the same melting-pot, or they could be separated out and handled seperately. They also didn't all co-exist.

Culture 1: Celtic/Gaul. This could be done similar to the Asterix the Gaul books, or it could be based more on Welsh and Irish legends (or a mixture thereof). It probably comes down to whether you want the culture to be up against an invading empire.

Culture 2: Chivalry. This could be the court of King Arthur of Britain (i.e. the game Pendragon) or it could be the court of Charlemagne (which is more realistic for a Chivalry setting - Arthur was a real person but pre-dated chivalric knights). I am confident that there were other historical centres that would support a Chivalric campaign, but my history is too poor to know of them.

Culture 3: Vikings. Need I say more - and Viking sourcebooks exist for a lot of games. They are also a culture that works well to drop in and visit a game set in a different environment - they really were great travellers and explorers, both as settlers and traders as well as the traditional raiders (consider their explorers reach North America, their traders crossed Russia - "rus" = "rowers", the country is actually named for them - and their warriors ended up as the guards of the emperor of Constantinople).

You can even write up all of these cultures and set them in different parts of the same map at the same time, no need to blend them.

Any more for the pot?

[Ellrin]

Sorry, don’t mean to nitpick, but when someone makes an assertion like “King Arthur existed,” I feel like I ought to say something.

While there are several figures that have been proposed as historical inspirations for King Arthur, there is no single historical figure who actually comes close to matching even the earliest accounts of Arthur. So while its possible he was based on one or more of real people, the historicity of Arthur, based on what we currently know of the period, is basically nil.

[Khedrac]

Sorry, don’t mean to nitpick, but when someone makes an assertion like “King Arthur existed,” I feel like I ought to say something.

While there are several figures that have been proposed as historical inspirations for King Arthur, there is no single historical figure who actually comes close to matching even the earliest accounts of Arthur. So while its possible he was based on one or more of real people, the historicity of Arthur, based on what we currently know of the period, is basically nil.
Yes and no. I agree that no-one matches the stories, but the near contemporary historian Gildas refered to Arthur as a "rebel king" so we know that there was a King Arthur, even if we know virtually nothing about Arthur because Gildas didn't write much more.

The worrying one is that they think they may have found archeological evidence for Robin Hood who was thought to be totally mythical.

[Dimers]

Wild West cowboys with sunglasses and over-sized four barrel guns and nuns smoking cigars while riding motorcycles would be staples.

I like the way you think.


The worrying one is that they think they may have found archeological evidence for Robin Hood who was thought to be totally mythical.

Speaking of which, Robin Hood is another good Euro element. There are at least a couple Chinese classics with a band-of-good-outlaws scenario. I think Robin Hood would be a natural extension. The fact that he'd team up with an oread, a centaur, a svartalfar priest and a gladiator, well, that's fantasy mishmash for you.

[Knaight]

Speaking of which, Robin Hood is another good Euro element. There are at least a couple Chinese classics with a band-of-good-outlaws scenario. I think Robin Hood would be a natural extension. The fact that he'd team up with an oread, a centaur, a svartalfar priest and a gladiator, well, that's fantasy mishmash for you.

I could definitely see Robin Hood, vaguely european character straight out of Water Margin as a thing. Sherwood Forrest, Liangshang Marsh, tomayto tomahto. That sort of thing would probably happen a lot really, understanding through analogy to the familiar that causes the familiar to creep in more than it probably should is about as standard as it gets.

If anyone else here is familiar with Diana: Warrior Princess it has a whole section on how to apply the failures of pop history to modernity to deliberately twist it, which would apply just as well for a second pass to a historically inspired setting.

[thorr-kan]

I could definitely see Robin Hood, vaguely european character straight out of Water Margin as a thing. Sherwood Forrest, Liangshang Marsh, tomayto tomahto. That sort of thing would probably happen a lot really, understanding through analogy to the familiar that causes the familiar to creep in more than it probably should is about as standard as it gets.

If anyone else here is familiar with Diana: Warrior Princess it has a whole section on how to apply the failures of pop history to modernity to deliberately twist it, which would apply just as well for a second pass to a historically inspired setting.
Don't you mean...Elvis, the Legendary Journeys?

Nah, Diana was first.

And it's good advice. That whole section is goo reading.