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    Default Opinions on Kara-Tur

    So I wanted to ask from any old school RPG players, amateur historians, and maybe someone who may have know it from Asians Represent's "Critical Read" (while they do bring up issues, they do seems to lack AD&D DM contexts or tend to go side-track, or kinda harsh but doesn't seem to bring up historical analogue...like forgetting Imperial Censors are based on Ming-era Jinyiwei, or quick to assume that it as "western white saviours" while ignoring having mechanics for local characters but mostly due to also reading Swords of Daimyo where the "optional" first adventure for "exporting western fantasy characters" is going to fantasy Japan and enter the most convulated prologue for samurai RP instead of trading outposts).
    In my honest opinion, even ignoring their critiques, the setting is kinda old and not standing up to time now that Avatar kinda set the high-bar for Asian-esque fantasy along it being too historical analogue, too low fantasy (yeah, DnD at the time was Greymouser, Conan, and Dying Earth era human-heavy heroic fantasy, but it feels too off once it was stuck with more magical Forgotten Realms), and the "Evil China, Good China, Totalitarian Japan, and Chaotic Japan" to be somewhat annoying (at least why Evil and divided China wasn't steam rolled by Good and orderly China and two Japans doesn't seem to share the same history...somehow).
    Any thoughts?
    Last edited by t209; 2021-03-08 at 04:50 PM.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Decades ago I bought Kara-Tur materials (circa 1989) because I grew up on jianghu and jidaigeki, and wanted to a run a D&D game that could get a bit of that feel going--plus the Mahabharata, but that don't matter 'cause turned out there's no India equivalent--and it was really disappointing how flat and uninteresting the setting was. Kara-Tur was boring and it unreasonably low fantasy given it's the other 3/4s of continent that contains Faerun. It, like Maztica and that wretched 2e guide to the Hordelands, was for some reason historically simulationist in a way that neither incorporates the magic level and feel of the Realms nor borrows from any of the fantasy literature or myths of the regions sampled, instead being a plodding top-down accounting of expy nations that manages to resemble a Britannica encyclopedia entry more than a compelling setting in which there's things for adventurers to do.

    I can remember feeling vexed that, at minimum Pearl Buck's version of The Water Margin was available, as was Waley's Monkey...and you could literally just take materials in those two books and make a great "Chinese" setting that would fit in the Forgotten Realms. I didn't understand why they put no effort into sampling...anything. And, while I don't think the authors were trying to be jerks, the emphasis on "honor," etiquette, and rigid social order did come across as simplistic and thus really vexing for someone who loves both the historic and literary granularity of those concepts. I'd call it low effort, but they clearly put effort into stuff that was just...dumbed down versions of poorly-described features that 80s Americans associated with different countries like overly formal language and court etiquette.

    The joke is that it was so disappointing my very first world-building project was trying to rewrite the setting into something more interesting, meaning there's a direct line from there to me handing here, contributing mostly to the world building forum.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2021-03-08 at 09:44 PM.

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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    Decades ago I bought Kara-Tur materials (circa 1989) because I grew up on jianghu and jidaigeki, and wanted to a run a D&D game that could get a bit of that feel going--plus the Mahabharata, but that don't matter 'cause turned out there's no India equivalent--and it was really disappointing how flat and uninteresting the setting was. Kara-Tur was boring and it unreasonably low fantasy given it's the other 3/4s of continent that contains Faerun. It, like Maztica and that wretched 2e guide to the Hordelands, was for some reason historically simulationist in a way that neither incorporates the magic level and feel of the Realms nor borrows from any of the fantasy literature or myths of the regions sampled, instead being a plodding top-down accounting of expy nations that manages to resemble a Britannica encyclopedia entry more than a compelling setting in which there's things for adventurers to do.
    Yeah, Forgotten Realms was later addition, used to be Standalone with Sword of the Daimyo's "optional" prologue (export instead of trading post or maybe emissaries, tedious prologue that require level 5 or 6 to SURVIVE, or never thought of native-to-foreignor ratio aside from "DM's discretion") essentially being a blank land map as a starting area.
    Definitely not Greyhawk since the map is west-ocean facing than east-ocean facing.
    Spoiler: Greyhawk Map
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    Spoiler: Kara Tur Map, 1e/AD&D era
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    Also I kinda dislike the world building of Here is two versions of China and Japan that only act as themeatic idea to what your campaign want to be and based on Star Trek's "singular culture based on single aspect and idea".
    Last edited by t209; 2021-03-08 at 10:25 PM.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Imagine...fantasy ASIA *spooky fingers*
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Elves View Post
    Imagine...fantasy ASIA *spooky fingers*
    Well, Legend of Five Rings and Avatar kinda had those and a whole lot better and raised a rather high-bar for fantasy Asia.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    It, like Maztica and that wretched 2e guide to the Hordelands, was for some reason historically simulationist in a way that neither incorporates the magic level and feel of the Realms nor borrows from any of the fantasy literature or myths of the regions sampled, instead being a plodding top-down accounting of expy nations that manages to resemble a Britannica encyclopedia entry more than a compelling setting in which there's things for adventurers to do.
    It's important to remember that the amount of information available to the audience with regard to foreign historical locales was much, much lower in the 1980s than it is now. This is pre-Wikipedia, pre-internet, and pre-the explosion of scholarly publications those enabled. The average player, seeking to learn about historical China, was limited to whatever was available in their local libraries, which was basically encyclopedia entries and a handful of general histories. Awareness the texts like Water Margin even existed was limited, and actually reading one of the translations meant either having access to a quality university library (which applies to basically no one who actually worked for TSR), or fishing through a long list of mail-order catalogues. For comparison, it's worth noting that White-Wolf felt compelled to introduce 'wikifacts' style information in many of their books about locations in what was nominally the modern world, well into the early 2000s.

    The various non-European D&D setting zones were produced in a very lazy fashion with limited effort in an attempt to capitalize on demand. They're historically simulationist because the authors barely grasped the actual history they were working with and because they had absolutely no idea how to adapt D&D's magical system to a completely different context, so they minimized it. Maztica, Kara-Tur, and the Hordelands are all unbelievably low in magic compared to even their 1e/2e FR contemporaries. In 1990 I suspect there were probably more named casters just in Thay than in all three areas put together.

    Quote Originally Posted by t209
    Well, Legend of Five Rings and Avatar kinda had those and a whole lot better and raised a rather high-bar for fantasy Asia.
    L5R was initially released in 1995. That's fully 10 years after the initial release of Kara-Tur in the 1e Oriental Adventures book. Avatar: the Last Airbender (which is a kids show, not a game and isn't anything like and apple-to-apples comparison), didn't premier until 2005, another ten years further on.

    Overall, the demand for an actual Asian-inspired setting remains fairly low. L5R and a small number of niche games are able to handle basically all of it. Demand for characters with 'anime-style' abilities is much higher, of course, but that doesn't require anything like a fantasy Asia setting and can instead be handled by things like the Monk class or the very existence of Exalted (sigh).
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    Yeah, Forgotten Realms was later addition, used to be Standalone with Sword of the Daimyo's "optional" prologue (export instead of trading post or maybe emissaries, tedious prologue that require level 5 or 6 to SURVIVE, or never thought of native-to-foreignor ratio aside from "DM's discretion") essentially being a blank land map as a starting area.
    Definitely not Greyhawk since the map is west-ocean facing than east-ocean facing.
    Spoiler: Greyhawk Map
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    Maybe I'm remembering my dates wrong, but the book I got was structured as people from Kara-Tur writing to Elminster to explain their nations. It was...well, I got a lot of use out of the map from that book.

    I don't think I would have liked the material standing on its own any better, though.

    All the mechanical bits and cultural bits were uninspired. Like, nothing cool was sampled but also none of the bespoke stuff was interesting.

    The two Chinas and two Japans...was strange, but I could recognize that they were trying to do both regions in two different time periods in the setting. Sengoku and Edo bakufu Japan; Warring States versus pseudo-Ming Forbidden City...it made a sort of sense but was lamely executed (in keeping with that...well, they kind of tried and did some reading? thing).

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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    Maybe I'm remembering my dates wrong, but the book I got was structured as people from Kara-Tur writing to Elminster to explain their nations. It was...well, I got a lot of use out of the map from that book.
    Well, Oriental Adventures started off as its own book while Kara Tur Eastern Realms--the book you go--was an attempt to integrate it into Forgotten Realms while adding more countries (mostly copy-paste since Korean pop culture wasn't availible, so basically Silla and other two kingdoms).
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    It feels like something tacked on to give 1e Oriental Adventures a place to live. Which is terrible, because OA was fun as heck to play in its own right.

    Zhakara on the other hand was absolutely amazing. At least as inspiring as The emirates of Ylarum, but not squashed into fantasy culture kitchen sink land, so it could be given far better breadth and depth.

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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    It feels like something tacked on to give 1e Oriental Adventures a place to live. Which is terrible, because OA was fun as heck to play in its own right.
    So how can you describe a seission or campaign from it?
    Also maybe how do you supplement it, or at least if you want to try "anime-style storyline" (mostly Ninja Scrolls or Usagi)?
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    It feels like something tacked on to give 1e Oriental Adventures a place to live. Which is terrible, because OA was fun as heck to play in its own right.
    Really? I've heard OA described as written by someone who watched an episode of Monkey and decided to build a campaign setting out of it.

    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    Also maybe how do you supplement it, or at least if you want to try "anime-style storyline" (mostly Ninja Scrolls or Usagi)?
    Reading up on it, the 4 main countries listed (not-Sengoku Japan, not-Edo Japan, not-Ming China, not-Warring States China) are very different in terms of outlook and cultural sensibilities.

    Not-Sengoku and not-Warring States would be far more pragmatic as benefits countries at war.

    Not-Edo would be your typical historical Japan that you'd think of.

    Not-Ming China would be the sort of setting you'd see in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, although that raises a separate issue of jianghu, where there's essentially an entirely separate sub-society of martial artists and the like, that follows their own rules and code of ethics. Some times they intersect with the 'real' world (a famous general in the real world might also be a person of some standing in world of jianghu), but they generally they remain separate.

    There's also various cultural elements that are either semi-shared throughout all the countries (Confucianism) or ones that look similar but are very different (samurai honour and Chinese 'face' for example).

    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    at least why Evil and divided China wasn't steam rolled by Good and orderly China and two Japans doesn't seem to share the same history...somehow).
    I can't say for the Japans, but the China is quite easy - not-Warring States China is very good at fighting (they've had plenty of practice) and are more than willing to temporarily unify against a common enemy (not-Ming China for example), while not-Ming China is spending most of its resources on maintaining its control over its populace - one of the elements of the world of jianghu is that the central government is weak.
    Last edited by Brother Oni; 2021-03-09 at 08:46 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    So how can you describe a seission or campaign from it?
    Also maybe how do you supplement it, or at least if you want to try "anime-style storyline" (mostly Ninja Scrolls or Usagi)?
    Quote Originally Posted by Brother Oni View Post
    Really? I've heard OA described as written by someone who watched an episode of Monkey and decided to build a campaign setting out of it.
    More like a cross between AD&D, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and the worst 80s ninja flick you can think of. It was glorious! As a teenager.

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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Here's the thing - it's a universal truth that, provided you personally are even mildly interested in a historical area, enough so that you at least download a few ebooks on the topic, you are usually a better expert on it that the person who wrote a random splatbook.

    There just aren't that many people writing published TTRPG books, and most of them are interested in maybe a specific subgenre of fantasy and not dig that much deeper, because if you do, the rabbit hole is infinitely deep. That means that once you get a task of writing a, say, Snegoku Jidai Japan analogue, you get maybe a few weeks of research, and you're starting worse than from scratch, because you've seen the movies. That results in settings that have the skin of a given country, but are still effectively renaissance France underneath at worst, and some pretty shallow recreations of original countries at best.

    Add to that that the cost of good books on these topics is staggering (there's a facisimile and translation of Codex Wallerstein I'd like to have, but not for 1000+ dollars), and you get quality of research that is what it is. Basically, if you have any depth of knowledge about a given historical setting, you're probably better off worldbuilding it yourself.

    As for the mighty whitey trope, it's sort of an unavoidable (unless you are willing to make your PCs side characters in a story, which... not a great idea, usually) concession to immersion. Unless your group just so happens to be full of samurai re-enactors, you will have players that have no understanding of a culture they are supposed to interact with. Sure, you always have the option of explaining things to them as you go, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and brings the story to a grinding halt because of exposition. If you have an outsider, him not knowing how stuff works is natural - and such an outsider will come from what is the generic setting for the game, which is renaissance France.

    As for Kara-tur specifically, it's not exceptional, really. It's a product of its time and its limitations, and isn't terribly interesting, except as a "this is the average thing" case for early TTRPG attempts at going outside of their comfort zones.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Given how much Asian culture is accessible to the typical American consumer today, it's probably incomprehensible the extent to which Asia was mostly terra incognita for Americans even a generation ago.

    I was reading a novel published in the early 90s recently, and the author felt he needed to stop and explain what a "ninja" was.

    Overall, OA wasn't supposed to accurately represent any particular Asian culture any more than the FR is supposed to represent medieval Europe, and an OA Samurai has about as much in common with his real-world historical counterparts as a Paladin has in common with Charlemagne's knights.
    Last edited by Slipjig; 2021-03-09 at 01:00 PM.

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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Slipjig View Post
    Given how much Asian culture is accessible to the typical American consumer today, it's probably incomprehensible the extent to which Asia was mostly terra incognita for Americans even a generation ago.

    I was reading a novel published in the early 90s recently, and the author felt he needed to stop and explain what a "ninja" was.

    Overall, OA wasn't supposed to accurately represent any particular Asian culture any more than the FR is supposed to represent medieval Europe, and an OA Samurai has about as much in common with his real-world historical counterparts as a Paladin has in common with Charlemagne's knights.
    I can agree, but the thing is that even by limitations, it does feel Too mundane or have issue with fear or diverting too much from “historical analogue” yet trying to implement magic, not accounting outside influence.
    With Faerun, it was already made with enough familiarity to make it standout and obscure its analogue well enough.
    On its own, at least since exposure is Kung Fu and Shambara with “one eyed men leading blind men” nature due to only Asian expert being David Cook, it kinda work; but got into problems once you stick it to Forgotten Realms that even Greenwood complain about it.
    But maybe as you said, anime not being proliferated even ignoring “Calling Onigiri as donuts” dubs (even 90’s Sailor Moon had those).
    Also for 5E, really need an overhaul since people are going to be Naruto, Tanjiro, or Shonen protagonists (also Non-Humans at that) in a setting where those are either non existent or not available to writers at the time (save for homebrew) and the monasteries of Shou-Lung/not!China and even Tabot seems to be Japanese Monks than Shaolin (like armed retinues, and armor) and latter having Ikko Ikki (break away militant monks) elements.
    Last edited by t209; 2021-09-28 at 09:10 AM.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    Well, Legend of Five Rings and Avatar kinda had those and a whole lot better and raised a rather high-bar for fantasy Asia.
    I'd say that those two went very different directions, but still came up with a better view.

    Legend of the Five rings seems to lean very heavily into being a fantasy Japan, with fewer aspects from any other part of Asia. It was more concentrated on a single nation, and so showed it with a bit more nuance... while the Houses tended to be stereotypes, there was room within them, and there were enough different stereotypes that you got a range of characters. Kara-Tur didn't have enough detail anywhere to do this, and broad strokes cover over things like that.

    Avatar is heavily pan-Asian, but it also presented some very distinct cultural blends, creating unique cultures out of elements of others. It's not the Kara-Tur "This is just like our limited conception of Edo Japan, but isn't called Edo Japan"; Kara-tur nations are expys for real-world historical cultures, not amalgams inspired from several sources.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    A Wutai region in a standard european fantasy setting is an enduring trope for a reason, people like having characters that have backstory reasons to make use of that aesthetic.

    About Kara-Tur specifically, I don't know much - though I doubt a region originally conceived of decades ago holds up to modern scrutiny. I'm slightly more familiar with Golarion's Tian Xia / Dragon Empires, though even that I think is comfortable resting on well-worn tropes than being particularly nuanced.
    Quote Originally Posted by The Giant View Post
    But really, the important lesson here is this: Rather than making assumptions that don't fit with the text and then complaining about the text being wrong, why not just choose different assumptions that DO fit with the text?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Hall View Post
    Legend of the Five rings seems to lean very heavily into being a fantasy Japan, with fewer aspects from any other part of Asia. It was more concentrated on a single nation, and so showed it with a bit more nuance... while the Houses tended to be stereotypes, there was room within them, and there were enough different stereotypes that you got a range of characters. Kara-Tur didn't have enough detail anywhere to do this, and broad strokes cover over things like that.
    Of all East Asian nations for an English-speaking author to emulate in a fantasy setting, Japan is almost certainly the easiest one. For geographic and ethnographic reasons its simply less complicated than a similarly sized state like Korea, and for historical reasons English-speaking scholars got better access to Japanese materials at an earlier date (and apparently had an easier time translating them for linguistic reasons, many extremely important Chinese histories, like the Shi Ji, are still not fully available in English), so popular works on Japanese history in culture written in English became available earlier and are more abundant. Japan also, unlike many other East Asian states, went through a distinct feudal period where there was a lot of broad structural overlap between structural elements.
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    Default Re: Opinions on Kara-Tur

    Quote Originally Posted by Slipjig View Post
    Given how much Asian culture is accessible to the typical American consumer today, it's probably incomprehensible the extent to which Asia was mostly terra incognita for Americans even a generation ago.

    As someone who was travelling between the two continents in the 80s and 90s...no. No, Asia was not terra incognita. In my experience Americans had very precise, entirely inaccurate and self-serving, impressions of who the Japanese and Chinese were.

    Overall, OA wasn't supposed to accurately represent any particular Asian culture any more than the FR is supposed to represent medieval Europe,
    Also...no. Kara-Tur is not it's own thing with a creative direction orthogonal to its core references, it's an incredibly shallow gloss of D&D onto reference materials where you can see the tracing.

    Kara Tur actually does try to portray specific Asian cultures by creating barely-masked parallel cultural institutions and histories, and bowdlerized versions of real things. I mean, the map really tells the story of how little effort is being put into differentiating this setting from its referents. And the part that weirded me out then...and weirds me out now...is that given a choice between maintaining a consistent house style--here is the Asian genre sector stocked with the familiar classes and high fantasy tropes that make D&D D&D, just as other regions are genre sectors but have been altered to accept the same cross section of adventurer classses, and the same post-Tolkien racial spectrum represented, and the same post-Vance magic that is universalized and references no actual culture--they instead choose to remove the house style precisely because adherence to Orientalist tropes meant there couldn't be high fantasy in the same mode.

    Faerun is a rat king of tacked-on playsets evoking different genres and fictional settings and... I don't love it, but rarely is it explicit that region A is real world-region X and that's pretty good even if some of the writing is cringe (Mulhorand is wasted; Chult is based on tropes I hate). Nor does it attempt to contextualize itself relative to its referents by created Pig Latin versions of real things. Faerun is vaguely analogue Europe but is not dominated by the Batholick Church and people don't obsess over the philosophers Arisbotle and Blato.

    (Yes Volo exists and he is The Worst, so he's the exception that demonstrates the rule)

    If Kara-Tur wasn't supposed be accurate, it failed because the palette swaps were obvious. If it wasn't supposed to be referential, then it failed because it was mostly pre-existing "Oriental" tropes. It literally would be a better setting if even less research was done, a couple of core images were chosen to establish feel--Shaw Brothers plus standard D&D hijinks, "Sword of Doom" but also wizards--and the locations and history were whole-cloth fiction. Time and print space was used adding emphases that only made sense if one was using Orientalism as the reference point--the cockamamie version of honor, the constant yammering about etiquette--resulting in a duller setting.

    and an OA Samurai has about as much in common with his real-world historical counterparts as a Paladin has in common with Charlemagne's knights.
    A D&D Paladin is a metonym for a general idea for holy warrior. It's an interesting language choice...Chanson de Roland is a deep cut reference but I guess bogatyr was on the wrong side of the Bosphorous...but the core mechanical thing it does is an idea found in folklore and fiction worldwide. It is a convenient generality and over time has become more customizable.

    A D&D Samurai is a Fighter whose options are limited by real world cultural impressions such that it resembles one narrow band--samurai as read by Americans who take Tsunetomo, Nitobe, and the Japanese dictatorship that started WW2 as authoritative sources. It is not a convenient generality nor does it express a common archetype: the two ironies of the Samurai class are (1) it's way easier to just do multi-class fighter to create a samurai that matches of the many, many iconic characters that inspire people; (2) the hyper-specific character built on oaths of loyalty and a special weapon represented strongly resembles a Paladin, mechanically, give or take the mirabilia.

    This kind of distinction without a difference is actually a running theme in OA and Kara-tur design. Sohei, wu jen, shugenja--they don't have any interesting hooks that set them apart; as reader you are informed they different than the normal classes but it doesn't show through in what they can do or they role they're described as having.
    Last edited by Yanagi; 2021-03-20 at 11:39 AM.

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    Yeah, I can agree to the above.
    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    As someone who was travelling between the two continents in the 80s and 90s...no. No, Asia was not terra incognita. In my experience Americans had very precise, entirely inaccurate and self-serving, impressions of who the Japanese and Chinese were.
    I think he meant by “cool things” standard, but yeah even by Shaw Brothers standard...they kinda made Fantasy China into Japanese tone (Sohei and Japanese terminology).
    Also maybe Sing-Song girl, aside from exotic women, kinda feel like “wearing a tuxedo in medieval fantasy” (also clothings being Manchu rule clothings but the art tend to lean towards Non Manchu fashion) and kinda ignore musical fighters (to be honest, the only one I can think is Kung Fu hustle, but I do remember music based or scholarly fighters).
    Also contradictory tone like Shou make bad swords and therefore don’t use it and use Nunchuks, butterfly swords (knife thingies or misinterpreted version of hook sword) and horsehair spear...and showing art using Jian and Halberd.
    I think Zeb Cook, the main writer of OA and Kara Tur (not sure about Pondsmith yet since he maybe Freelance and not sure how much Cook had authority at the time), did admit that he did left out Chinese part since capitalizing on ninjas and samurais and kinda feel bad in Jade Dragon intro. Maybe being only asianophile of TSR with a reluctant Gygax might have do as well.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    A D&D Samurai is a Fighter whose options are limited by real world cultural impressions such that it resembles one narrow band--samurai as read by Americans who take Tsunetomo, Nitobe, and the Japanese dictatorship that started WW2 as authoritative sources. It is not a convenient generality nor does it express a common archetype: the two ironies of the Samurai class are (1) it's way easier to just do multi-class fighter to create a samurai that matches of the many, many iconic characters that inspire people;
    The devs probably thought it wouldn't make sense to allow humans in OA to multi-class when only non-humans could do that in the rest of D&D. And they'd have been right.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Martin Greywolf View Post
    As for the mighty whitey trope, it's sort of an unavoidable (unless you are willing to make your PCs side characters in a story, which... not a great idea, usually) concession to immersion. Unless your group just so happens to be full of samurai re-enactors, you will have players that have no understanding of a culture they are supposed to interact with. Sure, you always have the option of explaining things to them as you go, but that takes a hell of a lot of time and brings the story to a grinding halt because of exposition. If you have an outsider, him not knowing how stuff works is natural - and such an outsider will come from what is the generic setting for the game, which is renaissance France.
    Yeah, but Sword of the Daimyo’s “optional prologue” seems to be rather tedious even by ADnD character fatality standards or amount of obstructions even before starting an adventure.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Yanagi View Post
    As someone who was travelling between the two continents in the 80s and 90s...no. No, Asia was not terra incognita. In my experience Americans had very precise, entirely inaccurate and self-serving, impressions of who the Japanese and Chinese were.
    That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about how accessible was the information on historical Japan and China, information of the grade you're likely to see in a good schoolbook or a good popular history book. And that was very much a terra incognita deal.

    As an example, Osprey publishing is in business of making books about historical war topics. Generally speaking, while they aren't academia grade, their information is good and gear presented is accurate. They also published a book on Ninja that has the ninja in the typical theater all-black costumes, shows us many shapes of shuriken (except the one that was actually used, that being the building material one) and doesn't have firearms listed as a ninja weapon - it was published in 2003. That's the level of accessible research that was available to people who weren't willing to shill out a lot of cash for books or go do their own library research. Or contact a historian, who at this point may well not even use his email, so you better get used to waiting for letters or make phone calls.

    Today? You can literally find more accurate YouTube videos on ninja than that book was.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Martin Greywolf View Post
    As an example, Osprey publishing is in business of making books about historical war topics. Generally speaking, while they aren't academia grade, their information is good and gear presented is accurate. They also published a book on Ninja that has the ninja in the typical theater all-black costumes, shows us many shapes of shuriken (except the one that was actually used, that being the building material one) and doesn't have firearms listed as a ninja weapon - it was published in 2003.
    In Osprey and author Stephen Turnbull's defense the actual text of that book is rather more restrained than the color plates and emphasizes more than once that there's a whole lot of BS about the ninja, including in Japanese language sources, and the full story will probably never be known. The accuracy level of the other books in that series of Japanese feudal warriors (Samurai, Ashigaru, and Sohei) are more reasonable.

    Osprey is actually a good example of how things changed over time. Their very long-running series periodically revisited popular topics. For example, they published two different books about the Mongols, one from 1980 and one from 2003, both written by Turnbull, and the differences are substantial. There was just dramatically more material, and more translation power, available.

    That's the level of accessible research that was available to people who weren't willing to shill out a lot of cash for books or go do their own library research. Or contact a historian, who at this point may well not even use his email, so you better get used to waiting for letters or make phone calls.
    I'd add that prior to the internet, and especially pre-Amazon, it was extremely difficult to get a hold of academic level publications even if you had the cash. Today, you can just go on amazon and order say, The Cambridge History of Japan ($80 dollars per volume, 4 volumes in total, though you probably could build a game setting around only 1 or 2), but in 1988, when it was published for the first time (3 years after Oriental Adventures came out btw) that only way to get your hands on it was to write an actual letter to the Cambridge University Press with a check for the ridiculously inflated price they were charging, which meant that you had to actually know the books existed in the first place.


    Of course D&D was never built based on scholarship, it was based on other people's fantasy, but there was very little Asian fantasy available in the US in the 1980s either. It's worth remembering that the VCR did not become a commonplace household item until the mid-1980s, prior to which importing things like anime or kung-fu movies from Japan and China was essentially impossible for the average consumer. Even in the late 1990s importing foreign TV shows was still extremely cumbersome because of the limited capacity of VHS tapes and the high-costs associated with imports. Text too simply was far less available because translations took an immense amount of effort. Yes there were translations of the all time classics that were considered of academic import, but otherwise, it was basically an empty zone. Meanwhile, Tor Books managed to get The Three-Body Problem translated in 2014, less than ten years after it was originally published.
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    From what I've read (in the game books and about the game from outside), L5R wasn't trying to give an accurate historical Japan or Asia setting, it was trying to emulate the modern mythos of "ye olde samurai Japan" as constructed in Meiji and subsequent Japanese internal propaganda, post-WW2 Japanese fiction, and western fiction. It doubles down on the "death before dishonor", "death before disobedience", stifling and steep caste system, intense emphasis on etiquette and courtly values, etc aspects that were retroactively emphasized long after the samurai class were critical on the battlefield. It doubles down on the myth of "superior Japanese steel". Etc.

    And I guess that would explain why it's about as historical as "medieval knights in shining plate armor" or "the American west of gunslingers at high noon and wandering cowboy heroes".

    As for Oriental Adventures... even the name reflects the different time in which it was written.
    Last edited by Max_Killjoy; 2021-03-10 at 09:20 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    I'd add that prior to the internet, and especially pre-Amazon, it was extremely difficult to get a hold of academic level publications even if you had the cash. Today, you can just go on amazon and order say, The Cambridge History of Japan ($80 dollars per volume, 4 volumes in total, though you probably could build a game setting around only 1 or 2), but in 1988, when it was published for the first time (3 years after Oriental Adventures came out btw) that only way to get your hands on it was to write an actual letter to the Cambridge University Press with a check for the ridiculously inflated price they were charging, which meant that you had to actually know the books existed in the first place.
    Good point when looking at works written before the mid-90s -- research was simply harder then unless one wanted to invest a lot more time and money.
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    Lack of historically accurate information was not and even is not an issue. D&D has almost never* been about historically accuracy in their expy settings. They're about pop-culture and having fun a setting based on that.

    If anything, having accurate historical information would have made anything Oriental Adventure or otherwise historical-society based setting less fun to play, more boring.

    If Kara Tur fell down, and it sounds like it did for some folks, increasing accuracy isn't the way to make it more interesting. It sure wasn't what made Zhakara awesome. It was setting that appealed to the pop culture tropes, while having a wide variety of exciting lands to explore (politically and geographically) and lots of fantastical stuff going on.

    *exception was attempted for the 2e green softbound historical series

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    Lack of historically accurate information was not and even is not an issue. D&D has almost never* been about historically accuracy in their expy settings. They're about pop-culture and having fun a setting based on that.

    If anything, having accurate historical information would have made anything Oriental Adventure or otherwise historical-society based setting less fun to play, more boring.

    If Kara Tur fell down, and it sounds like it did for some folks, increasing accuracy isn't the way to make it more interesting. It sure wasn't what made Zhakara awesome. It was setting that appealed to the pop culture tropes, while having a wide variety of exciting lands to explore (politically and geographically) and lots of fantastical stuff going on.

    *exception was attempted for the 2e green softbound historical series
    Yeah, the thing is Kara Tur’s updating need to stand up to Avatar and Legend of Five Rings.
    I get the idea but kinda feel that they kinda have conflicting idea of whether to make it more accurate (being to copy paste-y) or more pop culture (at least making their China more Japanese looking, like Sohei as in armed retinues).
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    Quote Originally Posted by t209 View Post
    Yeah, the thing is Kara Tur’s updating need to stand up to Avatar and Legend of Five Rings.
    I get the idea but kinda feel that they kinda have conflicting idea of whether to make it more accurate (being to copy paste-y) or more pop culture (at least making their China more Japanese looking, like Sohei as in armed retinues).
    I don't know about Avatar, but WotCs 3e take on L5R had about the same 'these classes are cool' factor that TSR's 1e Oriental Adventures did. The worldbuilding didn't appeal very much though, except for the variation it applied to some classes.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    I don't know about Avatar, but WotCs 3e take on L5R had about the same 'these classes are cool' factor that TSR's 1e Oriental Adventures did. The worldbuilding didn't appeal very much though, except for the variation it applied to some classes.
    A bit more fleshed out mechanics I can agree.
    Still kinda ironic that TSR only had Kung Fu weapons and Chu No Ku except Chinese armor--at least "pretty pictures for reference"--but has one (at least Brigantine art look Northern Chinese) in Japanese-focused setting (excluding Yobanjin--at least wiki stating them having Chinese vest--or Dragon Clan's not!Chinese forebears).
    Maybe it might have been made for Kara Tur update before they switched to L5R at somepoint.
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