Opinions on Kara-Tur

[LibraryOgre]

The reason is both have far more extremely high level NPCs than it is reasonable for the population and adventuring to support. Getting to level 10 in either is hard, on the order of one in a million of the population. Getting to level 20/36 should be one in ten billion or more, in other words on the entire planet.

I have to wonder if there's not plateaus. Like, if you make it to 3rd level, you have a pretty good chance of making it to 7th. Then, if you make it to 9th, lots of that cadre make it to 13th and, while few make it from 13th to 20th, those that do make it to 20th have a really good chance of making it to 36th, or whatever, eventually.

[Tanarii]

I have to wonder if there's not plateaus. Like, if you make it to 3rd level, you have a pretty good chance of making it to 7th. Then, if you make it to 9th, lots of that cadre make it to 13th and, while few make it from 13th to 20th, those that do make it to 20th have a really good chance of making it to 36th, or whatever, eventually.

Might be, most likely after name level. But remember, the requirement to gain XP is to adventure and gain loot. And that's inherently a risky behavior, encouraging stopping once you're wealthy enough.

If you figure 1/10 the population is Fighting Men (with maybe 1/10th or less of that Cleric, Thief, or Magic-User), and 3/4 of them die or retire before hitting the next level, 1 in 2.5 million make it to 10th level. If you assume far less are PC classed among the pop but a better survival/continuation rate it still works out to very rare. Most module & campaign demographics have way too many high levels.

[Mechalich]

I have to wonder if there's not plateaus. Like, if you make it to 3rd level, you have a pretty good chance of making it to 7th. Then, if you make it to 9th, lots of that cadre make it to 13th and, while few make it from 13th to 20th, those that do make it to 20th have a really good chance of making it to 36th, or whatever, eventually.

The minute Raise Dead comes online, permanent character mortality absolutely plummets. That's the really big plateau, and the various means to evade death and/or adventure with greatly reduced risk - such as always hiding behind Project Image - only increase as level advances further. One of things FR gets right about its worldbuilding is also one of its more infuriating traits: high level characters almost never die.

[Tanarii]

The minute Raise Dead comes online, permanent character mortality absolutely plummets.

Not in AD&D. You need a cleric high enough level to cast it, you need the body, you need the money, and most importantly you need to pass a system shock check, lose a point of Con ... and after all that still decide to go back to adventuring to keep gaining XP instead of retiring like a sane person.

PCs are special because they're stupid enough to keep doing that until they are perma-dead.

[JoeJ]

You can have a large geographic divide that's not impassable though, like the Mediterranean or the South China Sea, and have wildly different cultures spread around it in very different environmental conditions. The tricky part, in such a circumstance, is preserving the cultural diversity of the initial state against homogenizing forces after the barriers to accessibility fall. In the case of a sea that's usually a major innovation in shipbuilding technology.

In a fantasy world you could produce some kind of artificial barrier to cultural exchange and trade and then drop that barrier shortly prior to the campaign, thereby creating a window in the timeline with widely divergent cultures that the characters can move through. For example, in the not!Mediterranean example, perhaps sea travel was nigh impossible for centuries because the sea was infested by a hyper-aggressive Sahuagin Empire. That Empire got destroyed for some reason and now people are spreading throughout the sea again.

Within something like the Mediterranean basin you don't need to a barrier to sea travel to justify having a situation as varied as Egyptians at one end and Celtic tribes at the other, with Greeks, Etruscans, and Carthaginians in between.

[t209]

Within something like the Mediterranean basin you don't need to a barrier to sea travel to justify having a situation as varied as Egyptians at one end and Celtic tribes at the other, with Greeks, Etruscans, and Carthaginians in between.

Agreed on that.
In fact, I was thinking "Forgotten Realms or DnD's Sicily" since those area--at least Norman era--have Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Russian-Vikings, and French-Vikings yet no place in fantasy Arabia (then again Zakhara might be one-shot fantasy, so maybe homebrew slotta). Also Souther Italy since they were part of Kingdom of Sicily.
Not sure if Calimshan or Chault had those since they have Euro-Arab mix populace and architectures.

[Max_Killjoy]

Within something like the Mediterranean basin you don't need to a barrier to sea travel to justify having a situation as varied as Egyptians at one end and Celtic tribes at the other, with Greeks, Etruscans, and Carthaginians in between.

It's not a matter of having different cultures spread out across a region, it's a matter of having wildly mis-matched cultures packed right on top of each other, radically different without any real explanation as to how or why.

[awa]

The huns and Germanic tribes were pretty different than the Romans and they were right next to each other.
People are complicated and that applies to culture as well

[Tanarii]

The huns and Germanic tribes were pretty different than the Romans and they were right next to each other.
People are complicated and that applies to culture as well

Not for 1000 years they weren't. Not to mention that the Roman Empire was huge at its zenith, it expanded to be right next to everyone at some point or another.

The Known World has notVikings next to notArabs next to notRomans next to notfeudal-Europeans next to 2 different notVenetian-merchant-traders. With the notRomans including notJapanese and notPacific-Islanders.

Forgotten Realms isn't quite that bad except around the Sea of Fallen Stars.

[awa]

d&d is inherently inconsistent in that regards because none of those societies looked anything similar to how they started after a 1000 years. A thousand years is a long time, a lot of societies simply don't last that long period.

[Satinavian]

Different cultures near each other work better than different technology levels near each other. There should still be a lot of bleeding though, especially if there is enough contact to establish some commonly understood language.

[Yanagi]

Which brings to mind the question: If the cultural kitchen sink approach of Faerun and Golarion doesn't work, how do you make a world with iconically distinct cultures while constraining them into the geographical region players will tend to interact with? Or are those mutually exclusive, and you cannot have widely divergent cultures in close proximity without a continental or oceanic gap?

Well, is a kitchen sink really about distinct culture or about distinct play environments?

Sociological storytelling is always available as an option when writing materials, but generally the point of a setting is about application-to-gameplay, which emphasizes the short-and-sharp detail that are relevant to doing an adventure in a place: expectations about monsters, weapons, and maybe some architecture. I tend to lean on anthropology when I do world building or help others, and I can talk about social geography and subsistence methods and inter-generational communication of worldview, but mostly players want an inn with a tavern that posts jobs that involve stabbing something in a ruin.

I ask because while I'd say Faerun is a kitchen sink, it's a kitchen sink because it has both a Quartermain Jungle Adventure Land playset and an Arabian Nights Desert Land playset just off of the Tolkien-Lieber Anachronistically Pluralistic Basic European Zone (Elven Ruins in Walking Distance!). At the same time, all the stuff from different times and places stacked in the same environment is because each region is informed not by the attempt to create continuity, but by a collage of themes that match novels and stories rather than places; aesthetic images that look good as splash art; and anticipation that players would want a high degree of character customization.

And the thing is...I can criticize specific choices in assembling the kitchen sink, and despise the genre conceits and occasional ethnocentrism that underlie bits of the kitchen sink, but I can't hate the idea because it makes no more sense for that much space to be uniform in its challenges or adventuring potential. As a piece of sociological world building, Faerun is actually kind of sparse--a map cut into modern nations with modern national identities but absent the patina of pre-existing regional identities, migrants that retain culture, culture interposed by invasion that becomes normalized, etc.

[Which is basically why I view Kara-Tur as lose-lose, bad writing. As described it's not very interesting to adventure in because it's "story" is barely-masked history from its expy sources, so all the important stuff is about social structures and institutions that don't mix with adventuring...but at the same time the sociological detail isn't even interesting because it's less-detailed versions of real stuff, let alone "fantastic" in keeping with high magic and many playable critters.

When I tried to fix Kara-Tur what I ended up doing was making it into a kitchen sink in the sense of many-playsets--different regions having different feels and themes--but also a kitchen sink in the sociological sense--in that I took the flat generic cultures and tried to give them more detail and more internal variation such that it seemed like a more natural distribution of commonly-held values imposed top-down by institutions and regional conditions that bottom-up created different perspectives and worldview.]

[LibraryOgre]

Might be, most likely after name level. But remember, the requirement to gain XP is to adventure and gain loot. And that's inherently a risky behavior, encouraging stopping once you're wealthy enough.

Depends on the edition, doesn't it? I mean, if you've got Rules Cyclopedia, then you can gain a fair degree of XP by spending time as a lord, to say nothing of defeating the occasional orc band.

[Willie the Duck]

d&d is inherently inconsistent in that regards because none of those societies looked anything similar to how they started after a 1000 years. A thousand years is a long time, a lot of societies simply don't last that long period.

D&D (and fantasy in general, usually) is inherently inconsistent for many reasons, not least of which being what (I believe, so this is all IMO) the average gamer wants. They want to play in the Court of Charlemagne or Agincourt or some specific (or non-specific) era of Japan or Chinese Dynasty or whatnot -- but with dragons and goblins and beholders, despite that the existence of dragons and goblins and beholders would mean that those places wouldn't have existed as they did. Usually there is some kind of accommodation for the grand differences (a lot of extra ballista on castle walls to defend against the multitudes of flying monsters, some kind of precaution against disguise self/doppelganger infiltrators in the courts of higher nobles, etc.), but rarely a thorough backwards look at what would have lead to said situation.

The Known World has notVikings next to notArabs next to notRomans next to notfeudal-Europeans next to 2 different notVenetian-merchant-traders. With the notRomans including notJapanese and notPacific-Islanders.

Forgotten Realms isn't quite that bad except around the Sea of Fallen Stars.

Known World tends to wear its whole 'we wanted to write a gazetteer about a Viking culture, and that was a spot on the map not-yet-defined. The end.'-ness on its sleeve a bit more than FR. However, I think they both work by the same logic of someone wanted to build such and such a culture first, and figured out how it dealt with its neighbors second (when at all).

[Tanarii]

Known World tends to wear its whole 'we wanted to write a gazetteer about a Viking culture, and that was a spot on the map not-yet-defined. The end.'-ness on its sleeve a bit more than FR. However, I think they both work by the same logic of someone wanted to build such and such a culture first, and figured out how it dealt with its neighbors second (when at all).

What country/culture was where was on The Known World map in X1 six years before the gazetteers started to come out. It was part and parcel of the Expert Set. They knew what and where most of them were going to be, very very roughly, long before any of them were written. (Shadow Elves would be the exception.)

But agreed, how they interacted with each other was developed as they went along. With some of it being set in previous Gaz abut a different country by a different writer, just because it came first. Usually the new writer stuck with the established lore and expanded on it, sometimes they revised it.

[Lapak]

The minute Raise Dead comes online, permanent character mortality absolutely plummets. That's the really big plateau, and the various means to evade death and/or adventure with greatly reduced risk - such as always hiding behind Project Image - only increase as level advances further. One of things FR gets right about its worldbuilding is also one of its more infuriating traits: high level characters almost never die.

Sort of, but most of those methods were substantially less powerful in AD&D (Project Image requires line-of-sight, for example, and ends if the image moves out of the relatively short range) and there was a much bigger issue with the tyranny of random numbers. The upside of high-level AD&D play was that saves were set values, not based on the caster level; the downside is that saves were set values, not based on the caster level. A high-level adventurer is going to face a lot of save-or-dies and run face-first into the law of averages sooner or later, and face enemies who are both powerful and thorough enough to destroy them utterly/Trap the Soul/Imprison or some other such thing that takes you out of circulation for good. Especially when you're talking about individual people rather than full adventuring parties; PCs are protected by both their tendency to wander in 24/7/365 permanent groups and their plot-centeredness. That's something that's under-represented in NPC calculations, honestly; most actual people living in the world do not hang out with even their best friends literally all the time.

[Willie the Duck]

What country/culture was where was on The Known World map in X1 six years before the gazetteers started to come out. It was part and parcel of the Expert Set. They knew what and where most of them were going to be, very very roughly, long before any of them were written. (Shadow Elves would be the exception.)

But agreed, how they interacted with each other was developed as they went along. With some of it being set in previous Gaz abut a different country by a different writer, just because it came first. Usually the new writer stuck with the established lore and expanded on it, sometimes they revised it.

Okay, yes. I wasn't intending to be literal with the gazetteer reference. The point was that they wanted cultures, X, Y, and Z and placed them on the map, not carefully thought about how each culture would evolve if they did so next to the proto-state of the other nearby cultures, such that each would end up looking like they did at default start date. IMO, game settings are, most often, a large group of planet-of-hats, and deliberately so.

[SunsetWaraxe]

I think Kara-Tur is best left in the past. If you want Fantasy Asia, it would be far easier to just create a new setting whole cloth than to rehabilitate such an aged and problematic setting.

[t209]

I think Kara-Tur is best left in the past. If you want Fantasy Asia, it would be far easier to just create a new setting whole cloth than to rehabilitate such an aged and problematic setting.

Yeah, but these questions keep coming to mind.
- Western Fantasy is still reductive and blend different culture? (which I tend to go with "because it has some commonality--at least Western Europe except Italy due to castle, knights, feudalism, connections. and religion being shared by the region despite different practices")
- What about Avatar and Legend of Five Rings? (This gets me since I never get cringe from Avatar and L5R but with Kara-Tur)?
Also maybe being inside a moth ball for four editions, put in Forgotten Realms because it was popular (even if Greyhawk and Mystara were popular and fit more since they are analog heavy and use same theme), and having little to no updates (except for Malatra RPGA campaign that shifted from copy-paste Vietnam to "aliens, bird people, and magic, Oh my.", Spelljammer,and few articles; nothing serious updates aside as "this is where your Samurai and ninja came from"). Plus I think they meta-migrated to Faerun even with the lore stated that not!Asian cultures being filtered into not!Europe.

[Max_Killjoy]

Yeah, but these questions keep coming to mind.
- Western Fantasy is still reductive and blend different culture? (which I tend to go with "because it has some commonality--at least Western Europe except Italy due to castle, knights, feudalism, connections. and religion being shared by the region despite different practices")
- What about Avatar and Legend of Five Rings? (This gets me since I never get cringe from Avatar and L5R but with Kara-Tur)?
Also maybe being inside a moth ball for four editions, put in Forgotten Realms because it was popular (even if Greyhawk and Mystara were popular and fit more since they are analog heavy and use same theme), and having little to no updates (except for Malatra RPGA campaign that shifted from copy-paste Vietnam to "aliens, bird people, and magic, Oh my.", Spelljammer,and few articles; nothing serious updates aside as "this is where your Samurai and ninja came from"). Plus I think they meta-migrated to Faerun even with the lore stated that not!Asian cultures being filtered into not!Europe.

You'll get plenty of cringe from me for L5R, as explained earlier.

Anything I said about samurai or other mythical retro-constructed "warrior elite" cultures, applies to L5R. L5R even encodes "their steel was better" and other myths right into the rules.

[Mechalich]

You'll get plenty of cringe from me for L5R, as explained earlier.

Anything I said about samurai or other mythical retro-constructed "warrior elite" cultures, applies to L5R. L5R even encodes "their steel was better" and other myths right into the rules.

Beyond any historical accuracy issues, L5R's policy of 'card-game first' means that the setting history wrapped itself in absolute knots and quickly became utterly impenetrable to anyone not deeply committed to it. The publication history of the setting is a game burrowing ever deeper into its own very specific niche. This is one of several reasons why WotC trying to link it to a 3e 'Oriental Adventures' when they briefly owned the property didn't work and was quickly dropped. Even as East Asian inspired fantasy has grown massively more popular in the US over time, L5R's popularity has declined.

This gets me since I never get cringe from Avatar

Avatar the Last Airbender is a lovable kids show. It's very well-made, has a genuinely great visual style for the combat animations, and managed to get the martial arts flavoring right. However, it's overall worldbuilding is very limited (and in many cases played for jokes, like the whole combo-animals bit) and the world ran into its limits in a very big way the moment it tried to age up from 'loveable kids show' to 'passionate teen drama' in Legend of Korra, a show that received all-kinds of pushback.

There are a whole lot of techniques available and passes given to properties aimed at the under-12 demographic. That's fine, shows targeted at children should be targeted appropriately, but elementary school students are not a significant TTRPG demographic (and should not be, very view school-age children have the mental maturity to properly differentiate between 'player' and 'character').


On a slightly different note, many RPGs (and other sorts of games) face a strange pressure in that there's actually not a lot of desire for Fantasy-Asia, there's desire to play Asian inspired fantasy characters in Fantasy Europe. People want to play samurai, ninja, and Kung-Fu masters in the West rather than bothering with actually going to the source. This is very clear in the superhero genre, which includes all sorts of characters with supposedly East Asian martial arts training (including the OG himself, Batman) while being firmly Western-based characters. Exactly why this happens is no doubt some sort of complex sociological phenomenon - one that it should be noted seems to be universal, as many East Asian origin properties low to include Western-origin characters and fighting styles - but its definitely a thing.

[Beleriphon]

Agreed on that.
In fact, I was thinking "Forgotten Realms or DnD's Sicily" since those area--at least Norman era--have Arabs, Greeks, Italians, Russian-Vikings, and French-Vikings yet no place in fantasy Arabia (then again Zakhara might be one-shot fantasy, so maybe homebrew slotta). Also Souther Italy since they were part of Kingdom of Sicily.
Not sure if Calimshan or Chault had those since they have Euro-Arab mix populace and architectures.

Calisham is more less FR Baghdad. Zakhara is Arabian Nights writ large, and Chult is basically sub-Saharan Africa trough the lens of Heart of Darkness.

[t209]

Calisham is more less FR Baghdad. Zakhara is Arabian Nights writ large, and Chult is basically sub-Saharan Africa trough the lens of Heart of Darkness.

Well, Chult has a port city with mix of not Arabs and not Europeans that seems to be Constantinople but with dinosaurs and Wakanda. At least a coliseum for chariot racing—even joking suggested making rival teams as Blues and Greens—next to a palace and Hagia Sophia looking building but ruled by a council than an Emperor.
Maybe not Calimshan, but “Arabs in Europe” seems to fit Sicily (at least Emirate of Sicily or early Norman rule era).
That or Tethyr where population are ethnically mixed due to being migrated, conquered, and reconquered by various cultures.

[Beleriphon]

Well, Chult has a port city with mix of not Arabs and not Europeans that seems to be Constantinople but with dinosaurs and Wakanda. At least a coliseum for chariot racing—even joking suggested making rival teams as Blues and Greens—next to a palace and Hagia Sophia looking building but ruled by a council than an Emperor.
Maybe not Calimshan, but “Arabs in Europe” seems to fit Sicily (at least Emirate of Sicily or early Norman rule era).
That or Tethyr where population are ethnically mixed due to being migrated, conquered, and reconquered by various cultures.

Arabs in Europe would be the al-Andalusia, or pre-Reconquesta Spain since the region was taken over by North African Marinid dynasty, which I think think fits Tethyr nicely.

For Calisham you might want to look to Morocco as well. That might be a better fit, specifically Tangier or Casablanca.

[Vrock Bait]

I’m not as old as a lot of people here, but I generally range from not really liking Kara-Tur to not having an opinion on it. Western fantasy settings have mage nations, warrior nations, priest nations, etc, but a lot of “foreign” settings like Kara-Tur just have totally-not-Japan and totally-not-China. And these settings always generally lump local groups like Yuezhi and Qiang into big boring lumps of “totally-not-Mongols.” I get they’re not as well known in the West, but barbarians tribes are a huge component of Chinese history and have wildly different flavors.

So usually I just end up tracking the name down for one or two of the setting’s locations and shoving in a ton of barbarian tribes who have more difference than “we worship a different animal” or just balkanizing the heck out of everything so I can play Warring States/Three Kingdoms/Sixteen Kingdoms/what-have-you. That way I can have some imagination in making countries, not just fake version of real cultures.

ETA: I know technically there already is a Warring States, but part of what I enjoy about Chinese history is that there’s generally a greater empire everyone wants to restore. It’s different ideas of what China should be fighting it out on the battlefield. The Warring States in Kara-Tur are bland.

[Telwar]

My only exposure to Kara-Tur was the Horde trilogy, so I can't say how good or bad the setting was.

Doing a new version that's an equivalent fantasy kitchen sink to Faerun is going to run into the problem that WotC isn't doing detailed settings any more; we've gotten one release per setting since 4e.

Couple that with the need to spend a lot of time on the setting such to minimize social media roasting, and I suspect that the most we'll see is someone doing a Kickstarter for "Kara-tuur" that over promises and underdelivers.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Telwar
...WotC isn't doing detailed settings any more....

I haven't paid much attention to WotC in quite a while now. Do you mean they're not putting out detailed setting supplements? And if not, why not?

[Willie the Duck]

I haven't paid much attention to WotC in quite a while now. Do you mean they're not putting out detailed setting supplements? And if not, why not?

Well, thus far with 5e we've had exactly one campaign sourcebook for Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Wildemount, one of the MtG settings, the Aquisitions Incorporated land, and various adventures set in specific locations (Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Barovia), but no other campaign sourcebooks (much less sub-region books like AD&D's Volo's Guide to the North, or 3e's The Western Marches or whatever). Supposedly we are getting some setting books this year, but those too will probably be one-and-done affairs.

As to why, the prevailing wisdom is that multiple settings just split the buying base, and lots of books set in the same setting just caused diminished returns (plenty of people bought the D&D books, many of those bought the original FRCS, some more bought the next few setting books within the FR, a few people kept collecting once you got to the 10th or 12th book, and so on). Exactly how true that is is anyone's guess.

[Telwar]

Well, thus far with 5e we've had exactly one campaign sourcebook for Forgotten Realms, Eberron, Wildemount, one of the MtG settings, the Aquisitions Incorporated land, and various adventures set in specific locations (Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate, Barovia), but no other campaign sourcebooks (much less sub-region books like AD&D's Volo's Guide to the North, or 3e's The Western Marches or whatever). Supposedly we are getting some setting books this year, but those too will probably be one-and-done affairs.

To expand on this, for 3e Eberron and Forgotten Realms had *many* books published; I count 13 3e Eberron books on my shelf and 15 FR, without knowing those were the only ones. I don't remember if Greyhawk got anything, I vaguely remember a Gazetteer but that's it; checking on DMs guild I see the Living Greyhawk journal, and I presume there was more stuff in Dragon (which is where 3e Dark Sun wound up).

Whereas with 4e, FR, Eberron, and Dark Sun had two books each published by WotC, though FR got a Neverwinter-specific setting book, so that makes 3. Presumably they had good data on their sales numbers, so I can see why they reduced the overall number of books released for settings, since people weren't using those directly.

As to why, the prevailing wisdom is that multiple settings just split the buying base, and lots of books set in the same setting just caused diminished returns (plenty of people bought the D&D books, many of those bought the original FRCS, some more bought the next few setting books within the FR, a few people kept collecting once you got to the 10th or 12th book, and so on). Exactly how true that is is anyone's guess.

For me, at least, I'd love to see Birthright levels of support, with one major box, four regional releases, and a dozen or so individual realm supplements. That's what I'd like to see again, and I'm well aware I'm not likely going to see it again.

On the one hand, we can easily mine the previous setting materials from previous editions, and to be fair, at least a certain element of the customer base enjoys the hell out of conversion. But on the other hand, for anything brand new, we're not going to see anything beyond the one hardcover book, and that bothers me.

I think, in their "nobody's going to use stuff for a setting they don't like," they also discounted the idea of DMs borrowing from existing settings for their own or porting things over into another setting.

Digital publishing would negate the TSR problem of vast quantities of unsold product, and proper writing could make supplemental materials edition-agnostic*, but they'd still have to pay someone to write that, or at least open settings up for that level of support, and I don't think they will do that at this point.

* - which has its own issue of pigeonholing classes for ones that are almost always in print. But that's an edition thing.

[t209]

Some thoughts.
Do you notice that there are discrepancies between (miniscule) art and writings?
Like saying that Mandarins and aristocrats wore conical hats in texts, yet the art show them wearing Sokka/Judge Bao Zheng pointy hat but with no flaps (even the Koryo, which is interesting that they use three kingdoms but with faux Chinese, instead of Joseon and Gats). Either a. Realized that it would look like coolie caricature or B. Copy pasting (of typewriter equivalent) text books that described clothings but no art.
Same with “Shou use Kung Fu and martial art weapons (nunchucks, or anything from 36th Chamber)” but art have them using swords, spears, and halberds.
At least in Shou Lung part, which is interesting since Pondsmith of Cyberpunk wrote this (assuming how much is he writing or how much is Cook—the coordinator—had more role in lore). This is not explaining having Tu Lung be written by another writer instead of delegating to Shou Lung, which Tu Lung wouldn’t be needed since Shou Lung already had many interesting plot hooks there.