Orientalist Fantasy Settings

K · Post by K » Thu May 02, 2019 10:05 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Name checking actual religions and peoples' actual gods is, I think, kind of fucked up. Doing the monster manual treatment to monsters is not.

Dominions has straight up Gandharvas and that's fine. But the Shiva analog is called "The Destroyer" and not literally named Shiva and the entire Bandar Log faction is not called "Hinduism" at any point. And that's fine. That's all the serial number filing you need to do in order to avoid the first hurdle of being blatantly disrespectful to other peoples.

-Username17

Here is a short wiki article on the ancient clans of Lanka. Please note the monster names that correspond to actual clans of ancient Sri Lankan people, many who are just castes of peasants and not even historically bad people. Did you know that the Raksha were just rice growers and not illusion-demons with animal heads?

That's the kind of fuck-up you have in store for you when you use words in other languages. You think you have a mythical beast and you actually end up with an ancient racial slur of one culture for another.

Certainly, most people don't give a fuck about ancient Sri Lanka, but is it worth perpetuating any real-world racism at all just because you want the historical traction? How is that really different from using the racist stuff about blacks in a Civil War supernatural game?

How much and what kind of racism is acceptable? I'd say "zero" is a good start, and it needs to begin with racist stuff like racial ability modifiers and entend forward with various types of blood libel in the monster manual.

JigokuBosatsu · Post by **JigokuBosatsu** » Fri May 03, 2019 2:18 am

Well, that just confuses things as "Lanka" in the context of the Sanskrit epics is functionally Atlantis. Not that that makes what you're saying wrong, K, just that it's a good illustration of how many turtles of fucked up there are on the way down.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri May 03, 2019 3:30 am

Start with what you like and then build from there.

1500's Asian piracy is what I like, I'll go build a setting for that

Everyone hates Memoires of a Geisha because the book was published against the wishes of the woman in questions, and heavily embellishes and in some places outright lies about her life and the customs of geisha in general. The depiction is also skewed negative because the move/book wanted to be sordid.

Memoirs did well in Japan due to Zhang Ziyi being a popular actress who had already starred in Chinese films that did well and Japanese art film.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Fri May 03, 2019 3:31 am

I feel like taking the stance of total aversion is very close to erasure, which is itself problematic. If the content is good, and you put in some actual effort (someone mentioned sensitivity readers), you should be safe.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 03, 2019 6:02 am

virgil wrote:I feel like taking the stance of total aversion is very close to erasure, which is itself problematic. If the content is good, and you put in some actual effort (someone mentioned sensitivity readers), you should be safe.

Very much this. If you say "I'm willing to use French and German words for Giants, but I'm not willing to use Japanese and Korean words for Giants" that is essentially cultural erasure. Whatever your intentions, that's exclusionary.

Now K is correct that many of the magical creatures in folk stories have the origins in tall tales about foreigners or metaphors for ancient wars between peoples. Much of South Asia is divided into Garuda peoples and Naga peoples, and many of the stories about Garudas fighting Nagas are metaphors for those conflicts. The royal emblem of Thailand is a Garuda and the Cambodian royal family traced its lineage to a Naga and this is entirely related to tories about Garudas fighting Nagas.

But you know what? The Sidhe are a metaphor for the pre-Celtic tribes of Ireland that the Celts performed genocide upon. The Alfar are a metaphor for northern European tribes that Germanic tribes performed genocide upon. The Centaurs are a metaphor for horse tribes that the Ancient Greeks murder-stabbed. And so on and so on. Turns out that ancient history is full of awful, and much of the fantasy source material is related to ancient crimes because ancient history is full of crimes.

But that's not what the word means today. When you put a "Naga" in a story, you're talking about a magic talking snake, not about a group of humans. Even though there are factually still people who identify as Naga peoples today and one of them was my roommate during part of medical school. There's still a place called Nagaland in India. And it's OK to use Naga (the snakes) in fantasy stories.

We wouldn't gain anything by calling Centaurs "Horsatons" or something. It wouldn't be more respectful to the long dead horse tribes of Eastern Europe. And it wouldn't be more respectful to the Thai people to not call your bird people "Garudas." Actual Thai people are totally fine with Garudas being used as monsters. See: the existence of Paksa wayu.

-Username17

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Fri May 03, 2019 11:01 am

As long as you avoid anything that links a certain' 'thing' to a certain people's you're probably fine. As a kid on up to my earlier years of adulthood I didn't know anything about myths relating to Garudo despite having interacted with plenty of media involving unfamiliar mythologies like that.

I think what coding you use can actually be more harmful. I'm still only just learning about coding in media ( one of those I knew what it was but didn't know there was a word/study of it type situations. Look at and subscribe to Lindsey Ellis on YouTube she does good work) but I find the Navi from Avatar much more problematic than a generic magic snake monster called a Naga. Until my mid 20s I never was curious about the actual folklore on things like the Naga, Garudo, or Oni and I don't think most consumers are either. Without the coding there's not much chance people would even associate these creatures with any particular existing peoples which I think is what you want to avoid doing with your 'actual' monsters.

It might be my bias speaking though because my problem with how certain cultures in media are portrayed usually don't involve the use of particular names. My concerns are afrocentric and so the whole mythos connection is outside of my life experience anyway. I'm more familiar with simple things like how 'gamers' are real upset that Jax ended slavery his ending in MK 11.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Fri May 03, 2019 11:39 am

The idea of "coding" is iffy as hell and often comes as reverse stereotyping. A prime example is Cora Harper from Mass Effect: Andromeda, who people complained was "queercoded" and "queerbaited" because she's a strong independent woman with short hair, and having those traits is "code" for being a butch lesbian.

shinimasu · Post by **shinimasu** » Fri May 03, 2019 4:19 pm

Coding is honestly just getting into some of the nuance of symbolic language, it's experiencing the growing pains of any newly minted academic term in that people don't really know what it means in a non-academic context yet.

Anyone with a basic level understanding of how symbols function can avoid sloppy coding, it's not hard. It's essentially a language comprised entirely of homophones. Just like how you don't know if Bass refers to the fish or the instrument until it's put in the context of a sentence, you don't know what "red" or "short hair" means until you put it in the context of the larger image. And like with anything occasionally you get people who don't speak the language trying to offer their two cents on what it's saying and that's how you get buzzfeed articles.

OgreBattle · Post by **OgreBattle** » Fri May 03, 2019 6:17 pm

So what do you guys want to play as and do in oriental adventures

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri May 03, 2019 7:51 pm

Coding is an important concept, but yes people often misunderstand it and also use the concept in bad faith to make "leap of faith" arguments.

At it's core, "coding" is an inductive argument. That means that any discussion of coding will have conclusions which are not deductively valid. That doesn't mean they are wrong, but it means that you need to afford charity to the discusser in order to get wherever they are going with their argument.

So Jim Crow from the original Dumbo. He's obviously coded for a black man. Because, fucking obviously. Now, he isn't literally a black man, because he's a cartoon bird whose voice actor was white. But he's a jive talking character that is literally named Jim Fucking Crow. It's super fucked up, and has been super fucked up the whole time.

But the fact that Jim Crow from Dumbo is coded for a black man doesn't mean everything is coded for something. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. You can play the "two traits alike and one trait different" game all you want if you want to manufacture offense. The point is not to insulate yourself from manufactured offense, because you literally cannot do that. The point is to avoid making things like Jim Crow that would reasonably be expected to cause offense. And a good way to do that is to avoid using real people, real religions, real gods, and so on.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sat May 04, 2019 12:32 am

The only safe bet is to avoid real EVERYTHING. I mean, people talk about how the Klingons are maybe the Russians in WWII, but they don't say it very loudly because almost nothing matches, most notably their name not matching an identifiable real culture. As the franchise evolved and more stories were told, fewer and fewer people talked about space Russians.

The Vulcans are space elves and no one gives a fuck. They became iconic because cool stories were told that involved them, so any boost they would have gained from being called Aelves or something has been matched already by the cool Vulcan stories in pretty short order. It only took a few and then they had as much traction as elves.

The elements that make something feel Asian come down to a style of hero and villain (warrior as samurai, rogue as ninja, spellcaster as Taoist sorcerer or animist shaman), materials used for clothing, weapons, buildings (jade, wood, silk, paper, etc), a particular kind of relationship to the spirit world and Heaven and Hell, themes like bureaucracy, empire, and caste, and the list of elements goes on and on.

So you take those themes and write original things with it, trusting that the bump you would get from using Asian words is not unrecoverable by other means.

Now, the fear of using original things comes down to the problem that maybe you won't have cool stories to make people care about them. I remember that Earthdawn has obsidian men and pixies and lizard guys, but I can't tell you anything about them because there were no cool stories featuring those. That is a real risk.

But I can tell you a lot about The Wheel of Time shit and all the Asian influences in that, even though the special swords are not called katana and the spellcasters are not called wu jen.

Dean · Post by **Dean** » Sat May 04, 2019 12:44 am

This armchair generaling on how one needs to make a perfectly moral product has very little connection to reality. Everyone here has played some mix of WoD and Shadowrun and CoC and L5R. No one, not one person refused to play those games for the reasons we're pretending would be deal breakers here. WoD has incest and child rape and had close to 0% representation for people of color for 95% of it's run. Shadowrun's take on Native American religion is poorly researched and presented in a hodge podge by a room of exclusively white creators. CoC is literally Lovecraft so where to begin there.

The last true and productive thing that was said is to make whatever product you want in good faith and then when you fuck something up just say mea culpa and tell people you'll strive to do better. No one is boycotting a product because of what Naga means or because the Tiger clan shows that the designers have no knowledge of the Edo period. No one cares. We live in an era of actual blood and soil facism vying for global domination, no one here is refusing to play the new Rokugan because you heard it's designers did a poor job of representing Thai myth.

Asian fantasy written by a white writer is going to be somewhat culturally appropriative, so just deal with that. There's no way to square that circle to Tumblr's satisfaction. After accepting that your only job is to do your best and try to make a decent game people would actually enjoy playing and then just be down to fix things you fuck up.

K · Post by K » Sat May 04, 2019 3:29 am

Dean wrote:This armchair generaling on how one needs to make a perfectly moral product has very little connection to reality. Everyone here has played some mix of WoD and Shadowrun and CoC and L5R. No one, not one person refused to play those games for the reasons we're pretending would be deal breakers here. WoD has incest and child rape and had close to 0% representation for people of color for 95% of it's run. Shadowrun's take on Native American religion is poorly researched and presented in a hodge podge by a room of exclusively white creators. CoC is literally Lovecraft so where to begin there.

The last true and productive thing that was said is to make whatever product you want in good faith and then when you fuck something up just say mea culpa and tell people you'll strive to do better. No one is boycotting a product because of what Naga means or because the Tiger clan shows that the designers have no knowledge of the Edo period. No one cares. We live in an era of actual blood and soil facism vying for global domination, no one here is refusing to play the new Rokugan because you heard it's designers did a poor job of representing Thai myth.

Asian fantasy written by a white writer is going to be somewhat culturally appropriative, so just deal with that. There's no way to square that circle to Tumblr's satisfaction. After accepting that your only job is to do your best and try to make a decent game people would actually enjoy playing and then just be down to fix things you fuck up.

It's worse than that: no one is talking about playing these games at all.

Sure, grognards will pick up a copy for nostalgia's sake, but we are looking at a few thousand copies sold, not the millions of copies that RPG games sold in the past. The RPGs you mentioned are a snapshot of sets of assumptions old enough to have kids in college, and only the historically minded seemed interested in buying them.

The only question on the table now is how to make a game that new people will play in some numbers, and adjusting to today's moral norms seems a pretty good starting point.

Wiseman · Post by **Wiseman** » Sat May 04, 2019 4:05 am

The problem with that is:

So what do you guys want to play as and do in oriental adventures

Play youkai monster girls. I made an oriental setting for my gaming group, drawing inspiration mostly from Touhou, Inuyasha, and Avatar. Mostly did races, with a bunch of stuff either made up my self, taken from here, or elsewhere. I do have a map somewhere also...

https://www.tapatalk.com/groups/rpplace/races-t57.html

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sat May 04, 2019 5:42 am

OgreBattle wrote:So what do you guys want to play as and do in oriental adventures

Play as:
Shrine maidens and kunoichi.

Do:
Shrine maidens and kunoichi

(Also, playing as mystic martial artists, fire-obsessed tacticians, tengu (in the Dead or Alive "Naughty Tengu Princess" style), snake-people merchants (but they're also kunoichi or samurai or something), trickster kitsune with a multitude of big floofy tails. And doing fancy tea ceremonies and/or Anything Goes Martial Arts _____.)

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 04, 2019 6:28 am

Yeah, not only are made-up words a drag on the learning curve, but literally no one gives a shit that Supernatural tv show uses Okami or Rakshasa and call them that. There is literally zero backlash against D&D for calling walking dead "Zombies" or "Ghouls" as cultural appropriation of Haitian or Arabic cultures. Collecting tales is simply not an issue.

Indeed, if anyone was going to be upset that you were doing cultural appropriation of the Malay people, having Penggalan and then calling it some made up bullshit would be as likely or more to raise their ire than just having Penanggalan and calling them that. D&D already has Penanggalan and has since the fucking Fiend Folio, and no one minds.

You'll note however that D&D has quietly walked back the Aperusa and the Vistani. Because it turns out that a racist depiction of Romany people still offends people even when you give it a made up name. Because racist caricatures hurt real people in the real world, and campfire story monsters aren't real.

OgreBattle wrote:So what do you guys want to play as and do in oriental adventures

Obviously that's going to vary a lot between different people. Personally, the thing that most attracts me to Orientalist Fantasy is the idea of the bureaucracy. That we can run around doing sword and sandals stuff, but the winner gets a reasonably coherent civilization with tax revenues and roads and stuff.

After slaying the dragon I don't especially want my character to spend the next dozen years homesteading a log cabin. I'd sort of like there to be a palace with available concubines available.

Very often, European fantasy is basically Viking raids versus villages that have no particular access to a larger society. And when Euro-fantasy gets more advanced socially, it also progresses militarily into being pirates firing cannons at each other. Orientalist Fantasy can smoothly deliver "sword and sorcery" and "urbane civilization" at the same time.

-Username17

K · Post by K » Sat May 04, 2019 7:35 am

Made-up words require brain space, but I don't think any balked at "heron-marked sword" for "katana" in Wheel of Time at all.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Sat May 04, 2019 7:58 am

Wait the heron swords were meant to be katanas?

Seriously, I never picked that up when reading the first three books of Wheel of Long. Which speaks to how past a certain point, failure to use existing cultural terms is not sensitivity but erasure.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 04, 2019 8:08 am

The people who make replica swords from literature seem to think that Heron Marked Swords look like this:

Heron Marked Sword

Which is not really a katana, and more like an infantry sabre. Which means that yes, to the extent that Heron-Marked Swords were influenced by Katanas, that's more similar to erasure than to respect.

Especially since other specific weapons of Europeans such as halberds and long bows are afforded their proper names.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat May 04, 2019 11:16 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Very often, European fantasy is basically Viking raids versus villages that have no particular access to a larger society. And when Euro-fantasy gets more advanced socially, it also progresses militarily into being pirates firing cannons at each other. Orientalist Fantasy can smoothly deliver "sword and sorcery" and "urbane civilization" at the same time.

-Username17

I think it's more of an issue with game design than genre design. Western fantasy RPG still lives in the shadow of D&D and many, many design decisions are being made in the framework of having D&D adventures even at high levels, with you, the king, personally riding out to stab the problem of the day. The paradigm shift from level 1 face-stabber to level 10 mafia boss isn't happening. Godbound, a relatively modern RPG where you play aspiring gods with powers like "mindcontrol an army" or "perform the work of a thousand craftsmen in a single day" is a fucking OSR and exists entirely in the mindset of these gods going out to stab the problem personally.

Quite frankly I can't even think of an RPG other than Ars Magica that at least tries to do something with the existence of society.

K · Post by K » Sat May 04, 2019 3:26 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:The people who make replica swords from literature seem to think that Heron Marked Swords look like this:

Heron Marked Sword

Which is not really a katana, and more like an infantry sabre. Which means that yes, to the extent that Heron-Marked Swords were influenced by Katanas, that's more similar to erasure than to respect.

Especially since other specific weapons of Europeans such as halberds and long bows are afforded their proper names.

-Username17

Not to threadjack, but I like this version.

I think various swordmakers couldn't believe that WoT was straight ripping off katanas.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat May 04, 2019 4:26 pm

Longes wrote:Quite frankly I can't even think of an RPG other than Ars Magica that at least tries to do something with the existence of society.

Well, quite trivially you have games like Vampire and Shadowrun, and even back in the 70s you had games like Traveler and Call of Cthulhu. The general consensus of game design has been that if you are designing a game that takes place in the present or future, you have an assumption of an interactable society; and that if you are designing a game that is sword and sorcery, that you have an assumption of a distant and largely powerless society.

And this extends right up to games that are designed by the same team. Shadowrun has people using cred sticks and having tube passes and using etiquette skills to get access to goods and services. Earthdawn has people fighting nameless horrors in ancient ruins whose names have been forgotten by history. Vampire: the Masquerade has people's interaction with society as so central to the core conceit that it is literally the name of the actual game and the central metaphor by which most of the text on the character sheet is defined. Exalted has society as a dispensable window dressing that is intended to be largely ignored.

The core issue is that in actual medieval Europe, the role of the bureaucracy was played largely by the church. And people don't really like roleplaying church politics much for various reasons. Most fantasy settings actually dispense with having "the church" at all, and have a bunch of gods that have their own temples and act more like guilds than an ecclesiarchical state.

But it's this difference that draws me personally to Orientalist fantasy. The idea that while you still become king by slaying the dragon and marrying the princess, that being king comes with ministers bureaucrats and shit who actually implement policies you declare. It's still fundamentally sword and sorcery fantasy, but it's actually much more familiar to the modern eye than European style vassalage. You have ministers who have mandates and budgets and portfolios and shit even though people are swinging swords at each other.

-Username17

Foxwarrior · Post by **Foxwarrior** » Sat May 04, 2019 4:53 pm

K wrote: Not to threadjack, but I like this version.

I think various swordmakers couldn't believe that WoT was straight ripping off katanas.

Huh, my casual google indicates that that might be the only sword replica Robert Jordan personally approved. Just goes to show that you're not threadjacking at all, and in fact are making a good point about how not using the right words for things makes people whitewash them in their minds.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Sat May 04, 2019 5:48 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:
Longes wrote:Quite frankly I can't even think of an RPG other than Ars Magica that at least tries to do something with the existence of society.
Well, quite trivially you have games like Vampire and Shadowrun, and even back in the 70s you had games like Traveler and Call of Cthulhu. The general consensus of game design has been that if you are designing a game that takes place in the present or future, you have an assumption of an interactable society; and that if you are designing a game that is sword and sorcery, that you have an assumption of a distant and largely powerless society.

And this extends right up to games that are designed by the same team. Shadowrun has people using cred sticks and having tube passes and using etiquette skills to get access to goods and services. Earthdawn has people fighting nameless horrors in ancient ruins whose names have been forgotten by history. Vampire: the Masquerade has people's interaction with society as so central to the core conceit that it is literally the name of the actual game and the central metaphor by which most of the text on the character sheet is defined. Exalted has society as a dispensable window dressing that is intended to be largely ignored.

The core issue is that in actual medieval Europe, the role of the bureaucracy was played largely by the church. And people don't really like roleplaying church politics much for various reasons. Most fantasy settings actually dispense with having "the church" at all, and have a bunch of gods that have their own temples and act more like guilds than an ecclesiarchical state.

But it's this difference that draws me personally to Orientalist fantasy. The idea that while you still become king by slaying the dragon and marrying the princess, that being king comes with ministers bureaucrats and shit who actually implement policies you declare. It's still fundamentally sword and sorcery fantasy, but it's actually much more familiar to the modern eye than European style vassalage. You have ministers who have mandates and budgets and portfolios and shit even though people are swinging swords at each other.

-Username17

I don't think VtM and Shadowrun fit. The interactions with society in those games are about as deep as in D&D. Shadowrun doesn't spend any page space on achieving goals by giving bribes to the mayor's aide, or on ruling a gang, or on impact your crimes can have. There are dungeons-arcologies you raid for fat loot and there's the rest of Seattle where you buy new gear. The height of institutionalized power you can aspire to - being a crime boss, has to be DYIed in terms of mechanics, and is actually exactly like being a petty king in D&D. Except you don't even get your own field of cabbage.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat May 04, 2019 8:28 pm

The point Frank is making is not about society being a mechanically supported means of achieving your goals (although I anticipate he would agree that it would be a good thing to also have that), but about society being a form of treasure that you can acquire by storming dungeons and etc. That it's nice to have a bureaucracy who implements your policies for the same reason that it's nice to have a fancy mansion in the middle of Waterdeep. It doesn't make any mechanical difference, it's just treasure.