What do folks want out of an "Oriental Adventure"?

[Leress]

You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.

Buddhism != race

[Prak]

True, but poor representations of Buddhism tend to run into a lot of problems with racism. The assumption, say, that all asians are Buddhists would be racist.

[OgreBattle]

Court stuff... What I need though is rules for all the elaborate gift giving and letter writing and subtle snobbishness of samurai courts.

unless someone comes up with a good enough Logistics & Dragons system to make Three Kingdoms more interesting than a Pendragon reskin.

In other words I'm asking for a fucking lot of actual thought and work from them.

So what I'm looking for is a fully integrated part of the setting.

Seems like people expect 'more' out of an Eastern setting than a 'generic tolkien western fantasy', with societies (and social mechanics) that make sense given the availability of magic/technology and so on while with a western 'generic' setting forgotten realms nobody really thinks about how 'raise dead' affects politics.

Most of the Western public seems to want an East Asian setup that invokes China and Japan, and maybe Korea and the Mongols as well. Exposure to Anime and Wuxia is high, while interest in, say, Southeast Asian fantasy environments is very much lower.

Instead of blurring it all together, maybe distinct sections on ancient China, Japan, Korea, Mongolia/central asian steppe cutures, Viet Nam/southeast asia, Himalayan nations,

I want a number of fantasy cultures from my East Asian themed fantasy, and I want them to draw heavily from different East Asian cultures. Basically the minimum I want is Tarkir's Khanates

Tarkir did better than Kamigawa right? Though I figure that's in part to the cards being better overall. So people want to see representation of different East Asian countries/cultures, but what exactly do they expect as iconic of those cultures?

Steppes of northern China/Mongolia: ?
Riverlands of southern China/Vietnam: ?
Mountains of Himelayas: ?
Islands of Japan: ?
Peninsula of Korea: ?
Tropics & islands of Southeast Asia: ?

I figure through the 20th century it was more 'play up stereotypes', but maybe the 21st century audience wants a feeling of authenticity, at least you guys respond that you want to avoid dumb stereotypes.

Going towards China, I'd probably want to see shit along the lines of Journey West

Inuyasha, Also rat-people.

Um... if you let me play a kind of unsavory crow-dude swordsman

*Touhou*

How would you want these 'demihumans' integrated into a campaign setting? Something like D&D where being a tengu or monkey man is powered down from their mytholigical inspiration into 'LA+0' compared to humans as elves and dwarves are? Or something more like say After Sundown where the supernatural have an edge over 'average humans', and only humans with a supernatural nature of their own can compare?

----

You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.

Well, this actual Buddhist thinks that Tenra Bansho Zero does a great job with portraying three broad archtypes of Buddhism and esoteric Taoism found in East Asia (mainly Japan/Korea/China). The three main sects of Buddhism in Tenra also disagree on what happens when one dies, with one believing "nothing", one believes "you go to paradise if you recite this sutra", and one saying "you reincarnate based on karma", which I think allows for more setting flexibility than how D&D goes "btw the afterlife is strictly explained with no vagueness or mysteries and at a high enough level you can open a door to heaven or hell and raise the dead".

I'm pretty sure TBZ takes inspiration from Masamune Shirow's manga Orion which is a sci-fantasy setting where karma is a force of existence that can be manipulated with technology, so you may want to check that out. Eric Wujik's work on Mystic China and Rifts China also does a good job of portraying "Kungfu movie Buddhism/Taoism".

[Username17]

Tarkir did better than Kamigawa right?

Yes. Kamigawa is a famously poor selling set, while Khans of Tarkir is a famously well selling set. Some of that is obvious set power: Kamigawa is full of trash cards and aside from a few broken cards made little impact, while Khans is a power house whose wedge factions continue to dominate tournaments well into the next block. And some of that is how nicely they played with other cards: Kamigawa has a lot of keywords like Arcane that only do anything in reference to cards inside the block, while Khans special cards actually work fine with cards mixed in from other sets.

But a big part of it is theme. Tarkir simply has a much more engaging set of factions and cultures and much better and deeper world building. Apparently WotC got a lot of Kamigawa complaints along the lines of "What the fuck is going on?!" while a lot of the Tarkir complaints they got were more "Why can't we have more stories and cards about the Khanates?!"

-Username17

[Mistborn]

WotC got a lot of Kamigawa complaints along the lines of "What the fuck is going on?!"

You don't say

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, Kamigawa was like someone had changed Grant Morrison's medication and shot his editor. It was a nominally cool concept that played with Shinto animism and a war between humans and spirits, but it's really hard to wrap your head around getting into a fight with next Tuesday because it was recruited by your top step who was offended when you stubbed your toe on it again.

[Prak]

Um... if you let me play a kind of unsavory crow-dude swordsman

How would you want these 'demihumans' integrated into a campaign setting? Something like D&D where being a tengu or monkey man is powered down from their mytholigical inspiration into 'LA+0' compared to humans as elves and dwarves are? Or something more like say After Sundown where the supernatural have an edge over 'average humans', and only humans with a supernatural nature of their own can compare?

Well, I think it depends on the system and what it's trying to do. If we're talking D&D In Asia, then I'd be cool with a LA 0 youkai races and short paragon classes. But if we're talking something more like AS where people are allowed to start with about half a dozen supernatural powers and non-supernatural characters are spellcasting miko and demon samurai and I know next to nothing about non-japanese asian fantasy tropes, that'd be cool too.

----

You know, I'd love to see a write up of Buddhism for D&D or similar done by an actual Buddhist. To avoid the casual racism stuff.

Well, this actual Buddhist thinks that Tenra Bansho Zero does a great job with portraying three broad archtypes of Buddhism and esoteric Taoism found in East Asia (mainly Japan/Korea/China). The three main sects of Buddhism in Tenra also disagree on what happens when one dies, with one believing "nothing", one believes "you go to paradise if you recite this sutra", and one saying "you reincarnate based on karma", which I think allows for more setting flexibility than how D&D goes "btw the afterlife is strictly explained with no vagueness or mysteries and at a high enough level you can open a door to heaven or hell and raise the dead".

I'm pretty sure TBZ takes inspiration from Masamune Shirow's manga Orion which is a sci-fantasy setting where karma is a force of existence that can be manipulated with technology, so you may want to check that out. Eric Wujik's work on Mystic China and Rifts China also does a good job of portraying "Kungfu movie Buddhism/Taoism".

Cool, good to know. I was mostly subtly poking Jigoku to write something, but I couldn't remember if he'd mentioned being Buddhist here before, so I didn't want to mention that explicitly.

Edit: also, I actually really liked Kamigawa, but I also was into the weird spirit illustrations. Weeaboo Magics was also the last thing I wanted from "Fantasy Asian Magic World," unlike a lot of the players at that time, so I'm sure that was part of why I liked one of the worst selling Magic sets.

[Mechalich]

Seems like people expect 'more' out of an Eastern setting than a 'generic tolkien western fantasy', with societies (and social mechanics) that make sense given the availability of magic/technology and so on while with a western 'generic' setting forgotten realms nobody really thinks about how 'raise dead' affects politics.

I think that has something to do with the presence/absence of assumptions.

Most generic, and even fairly non-generic, western fantasy settings don't really integrate their magic very effectively in terms of how it should effect the culture and the politics, in part because everyone just assumes that the world should feel like a fairly low-magic Tolkien-esque or Game of Thrones-esque pseudo-feudal world and they're willing to ignore pretty much everything to preserve the themes they want.

In part they do this because even a single high-powered mass-deployed magical power can thoroughly destabilize everything and require you to throw out tons of assumptions about how the universe is supposed to work. WoT for example threw mass teleportation around, and to the credit of the authors it bent the setting in massive ways. That was okay in the context of the novels because the present setting was coming to an end and long term stability was not a concern, whereas in most TTRPG settings it has to be stable over the long term (and if your setting includes long-lived races like elves it has to be stable over the incredibly long term).

Non-Western settings are less familiar to the audience, so I think they question the basic assumptions more, simply because they lack a pre-conceived notion of how the setting is supposed to work and what themes its needs to have in order to allow to tell its particular type of stories.

[Kaelik]

If your "Eastern Setting" is called Oriental it is shit, if your "Eastern Setting" is incompatible with the rest of the game but doesn't provide all the material of a setting, IE, all the gods, all the planes, all the monsters, then it is shit.

[hyzmarca]

Kung-fu monkeys.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Kung-fu monkeys.

Are incredibly catchy theme songs packaged with that?

[FatR]

No, it isn't challenging, it's pretty trivial actually. And that is because historical reality can go take a hike, we're dealing with heroic fantasy here.

Samurai and Knights are simply two different full-BaB classes with different fighting styles and different superpowers at high level.

Neither concept is remotely worthy of being a class in DnD in the first place.

Also, if you write fantasy Samurai as not deeply mechanically inferior to fantasy Europeans, you are clearly a racist, as evidenced by buying into ridiculous racial superiority stereotypes invented by Japanese as a form of denial, after they figured out that their state-of-art swords and armor are distinctly worse than European mass-produced ones (denial did not prevent them from starting copying everything they could, primarily guns and parts of armor, like mad).

Speaking of the original question... What I want from Oriental Adventures is a setting more based on history than on the most ridiculous stereotypes the authors could find. Rokugan is fine by me, as every country in 7th Sea/5 Rings is a pile of ridiculous stereotypes and that's the charm. But attempts to blindly copy Rokugan, rather than doing, I don't know, the most cursory research (so that you would know, for example, that the idea of Mandate of Heaven was a phylosophical justification of violent usurpers, pretty much proclaiming anybody who could take and hold the throne automatically righteous because of his success; and not a stricter Chinese version of the divine right of European kings, as, for example, Pathfinder's latest Oriental Adventure Path would like you to believe) got rather old in my opinion.

whereas in most TTRPG settings it has to be stable over the long term (and if your setting includes long-lived races like elves it has to be stable over the incredibly long term).

I challenge this assumption. It exists only because writers are human and have other things to do than to fill every century of their setting's history with events, so if they are stupid they will have millenia of nothing happening, and if they are not stupid, they will have millenia of "shit happened, but conquests and civil strife of countries long gone are not relevant enough to here and now to be described in detail". When your history is clearly cyclical, as it is in actual DnD settings, you can have millions of years of it, and it will only impact the current pseudo-medieval landscape through the density of dungeons left by previous civilizations that fell to magical apocalypses or internal decay and barbarian assaults.

Besides, placing your default game starting time right on the cusp of the next period of troubles and chaos, and reshaping of the world is just common sense.

For that matter, clear cycles of history, where secrets of magic and other cool powers are learned and used to conquer the world, and then gradually lost as magic users grow corrupt and unworthy of their precedessors, and forgotten for a time, after everything collapses, and this repeats again and again, are a perfect fit for a quasi-Chinese setting.

[Mechalich]

I challenge this assumption. It exists only because writers are human and have other things to do than to fill every century of their setting's history with events, so if they are stupid they will have millenia of nothing happening, and if they are not stupid, they will have millenia of "shit happened, but conquests and civil strife of countries long gone are not relevant enough to here and now to be described in detail". When your history is clearly cyclical, as it is in actual DnD settings, you can have millions of years of it, and it will only impact the current pseudo-medieval landscape through the density of dungeons left by previous civilizations that fell to magical apocalypses or internal decay and barbarian assaults.

I did not mean stable politically, but stable in terms of magic, technology, and powers - the kinds of things that delineate the mechanics of your setting. Settings where everything is changing due to 'magic coming back' or some such are unstable, and a lot of the fluff you might produce is immediately invalidated by the ongoing fluctuations. Or you have to write the setting such that it only exists in a certain limited time window before it implodes - which players generally dislike. Ex. Exalted has this problem in both ways.

And long-lived species act as a break on the pace of change, because in order for them to still exist conditions can only have changed so much over the course of their lifespan. So if you have a 4000 year old dragon (common in D&D settings) and things are business as usual for that dragon (also common) then the world hasn't changed that much in ways a dragon would care about in the past 4000 years. There are exceptions of course, such as Dark Sun, and many settings hedge this problem by presenting the long-lived species as 'in decline.'

I agree you want to place your world either on the cusp of or actually during some period of upheaval, which is one of the reasons Three Kingdoms settings are so popular, but you also have to avoid 'you must stop the demon god before date X or the world ends' setting boundaries - those work fine for novels but not so well for RPGs (even in video games, people hate time limit mechanics that don't allow you to complete all possible sidequests before you go off to fight the final boss)

[JigokuBosatsu]

Prak, you summoned me?

IRL Buddhist cleric here. I don't think it would be hard to do a Crystal Dragon Buddhism writeup. I had a halfassed one that didn't get beyond the Moleskine stage, though I did play a serial-numbers-filed-off Ikkyu in a PF game over on In The Trenches.

Not sure what the demand would be, though, other than Prak's boundless enthusiasm. I suppose if there was a concerted effort to make a full "Oriental Adventures" setting I'd be glad to contribute.

[hyzmarca]

Kung-fu monkeys.

Are incredibly catchy theme songs packaged with that?

I'd hope so.

[Prak]

Prak, you summoned me?

IRL Buddhist cleric here. I don't think it would be hard to do a Crystal Dragon Buddhism writeup. I had a halfassed one that didn't get beyond the Moleskine stage, though I did play a serial-numbers-filed-off Ikkyu in a PF game over on In The Trenches.

Not sure what the demand would be, though, other than Prak's boundless enthusiasm. I suppose if there was a concerted effort to make a full "Oriental Adventures" setting I'd be glad to contribute.

I think there'd be some demand. I know that there are non-christians who get kind of annoyed at D&D religions' overuse of christian tropes when they want to play a religious character (*raises hand*), and aren't Buddhists a rather sizable proportion of religious people?

Also, I know sort of want to write some kind of Tome of Chi or something.

[JonSetanta]

Watch any Jet Li movie.

All of that stuff. Running on air, punching faster than sound, wrecking demons...

But then again, westerners call that "magic" and it gets relegated to the mages.

In The Sorcerer and the White Snake Jet Li's monk-like character does some fantastic things all without being inherently "magical".
He's a monk, but acts like a D&D cleric Buddhist priest in action.

[Pixels]

... aren't Buddhists a rather sizable proportion of religious people?

7% of the world population as of 2010. They are never going to crack the top 3, but there are enough Buddhists that they get their own label on the pie chart.

[Prak]

Looks like they were the fourth largest affiliated group (fifth largest group if you consider "unaffiliated" a valid religious identity in a survey on religious groups...). So I stand by my supposition. If you wrote a Tome of The East that covered Buddhism and Hinduism in D&D land you'd be going for gamers who are in the third and fourth largest affilitated religious groups.

[Chamomile]

Looks like they were the fourth largest affiliated group (fifth largest group if you consider "unaffiliated" a valid religious identity in a survey on religious groups...). So I stand by my supposition. If you wrote a Tome of The East that covered Buddhism and Hinduism in D&D land you'd be going for gamers who are in the third and fourth largest affilitated religious groups.

Global population doesn't matter, because your book isn't getting translated into Cantonese. What matters is the population that speaks the languages your book is actually in, which is probably going to be just English. That takes about 80% of Hindus and 50% of Buddhists and Muslims and about 30% of Christians out of your market immediately. If your target audience is people who actually have the same religion as what you're depicting, then your target audience is probably not big enough to justify having a book at all. And then on the other end there's the fact that someone doesn't actually have to be a Buddhist personally to know enough about Buddhism to notice when your Crystal Dragon Buddha is really just Crystal Dragon Jesus with gong noises and not a philosophically distinct person.

The reason you do research into foreign cultures when writing books about non-standard settings is not because you expect even a significant minority of your readers to actually be from the relevant cultures, but because 1500 years of Buddhist history, legend, and philosophy is going to provide more fodder to flesh out your setting while also setting it apart from psuedo-European settings (including both competitor RPGs and your own psuedo-European continent, if you've got one) than six months of wild extrapolation from anime and kung fu movies ever will.

[fbmf]

Watch any Jet Li movie.

All of that stuff. Running on air, punching faster than sound, wrecking demons...

But then again, westerners call that "magic" and it gets relegated to the mages.

In The Sorcerer and the White Snake Jet Li's monk-like character does some fantastic things all without being inherently "magical".
He's a monk, but acts like a D&D cleric Buddhist priest in action.

Lethal Weapon 4 would make for a shitty OA adventure setting.

Game On,
fbmf

[JigokuBosatsu]

Watch any Jet Li movie.

All of that stuff. Running on air, punching faster than sound, wrecking demons...

But then again, westerners call that "magic" and it gets relegated to the mages.

In The Sorcerer and the White Snake Jet Li's monk-like character does some fantastic things all without being inherently "magical".
He's a monk, but acts like a D&D cleric Buddhist priest in action.

Lethal Weapon 4 would make for a shitty OA adventure setting.

Game On,
fbmf

But The One would make a great one!

[Username17]

The One is a Feng Shui game. Like, almost exactly.

And now we are all sad once again that Feng Shui 2 was lazy shovelware.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

Lethal Weapon 4 would make for a shitty OA adventure setting.

Game On,
fbmf

Correction: Any Jet Li movie with kung fu, usually made in China, in which he plays a monk.

[Prak]

Looks like they were the fourth largest affiliated group (fifth largest group if you consider "unaffiliated" a valid religious identity in a survey on religious groups...). So I stand by my supposition. If you wrote a Tome of The East that covered Buddhism and Hinduism in D&D land you'd be going for gamers who are in the third and fourth largest affilitated religious groups.

Global population doesn't matter, because your book isn't getting translated into Cantonese. What matters is the population that speaks the languages your book is actually in, which is probably going to be just English. That takes about 80% of Hindus and 50% of Buddhists and Muslims and about 30% of Christians out of your market immediately. If your target audience is people who actually have the same religion as what you're depicting, then your target audience is probably not big enough to justify having a book at all. And then on the other end there's the fact that someone doesn't actually have to be a Buddhist personally to know enough about Buddhism to notice when your Crystal Dragon Buddha is really just Crystal Dragon Jesus with gong noises and not a philosophically distinct person.

The reason you do research into foreign cultures when writing books about non-standard settings is not because you expect even a significant minority of your readers to actually be from the relevant cultures, but because 1500 years of Buddhist history, legend, and philosophy is going to provide more fodder to flesh out your setting while also setting it apart from psuedo-European settings (including both competitor RPGs and your own psuedo-European continent, if you've got one) than six months of wild extrapolation from anime and kung fu movies ever will.

Even if we look at just the US, Buddhism is either on par with Islam or just behind Hinduism.

But I take you point. Appealing to someone's special snowflakism (whether religion or music-and-fashioned-defined-subculture) is a good way to capture people who are already gamers, but most people aren't going to say "Oh boy! This game accurately represents my religion! Let me learn how to play rpgs!"