I'm writing this from the (un)lovely destination city of Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico. Yes, I'm aware of the irony of the name. Needless to say, work has continued to interfere drastically with my personal life. I'm going to be here through Monday quite late. There's a decent chance I'll take Tuesday off, just because I'm going to be exhausted after all of that. Anyway, my gaming prospects have been terrible the last few months, and my blogging and vlogging prospects aren't even good. I was reminded last night that I was into SWTOR again briefly before this work crap started happening, as well as a ton of personal crap, and I just have not had a personal life at all for at least four months now, and maybe more. Depending on how you count it, up to 8 months, although it wasn't non-stop through all of that. I'm feeling really burned out on the job right now, and not at all charitable towards it or my local leadership in particular.
Be that as it may, being stuck in a dumpy, hot, industrial Mexican desert town without a car means that even when I am free from the excruciating work drama that I have to deal with, I don't have much else to do other than go out to eat, and even then, only to places that I can reach on foot. I anticipate spending a fair number of hours this coming weekend in my hotel room with the books that I brought, for instance. I brought a novel that I'd like to finish; I'm about 60% through it and the pagecount is a modest low 300s, if I remember, Prisoner of the Horned Helmet, probably most famous for sporting a great Frank Frazetta image of the Death Dealer character with his ax raised chopping a bunch of zombies or ghouls or something. It's actually my personal favorite Death Bringer image, even moreso than the original more famous one. It's part of a series of four novels all featuring the same character, and all featuring different cover arts by Frazetta, but none of them the original iconic Death Dealer image. Author is James Silke. It's worth checking out. Pretty fun stuff.
I also brought the Golarion setting book, back from the Chronicles line, before Pathfinder 1e had even launched. I haven't started that one yet, though. Instead, I started the 3e Oriental Adventures book. It was curious; in the introduction, it said that the original Oriental Adventures book had come out sixteen years previously, which seemed like a long time when this newer one came out. But it's been twenty five years since this one came out; quite a bit longer than the gap between the first and second versions.
I seriously doubt that there will be another one. The worst people in gaming have decided that even making an Oriental Adventures book is racist. This is absurd, author of the 3e version James Wyatt is clearly a huge fanboy of both Japanese stuff, anime, manga, etc. and Chinese history and probably fantasy cinema, and has translated that love for the culture into the product. He wasn't racist, and the fact that the whole idea is being treated as racist is exactly a clear demonstration of why "racism" is nothing more than a hoax, shakedown racket, and attempt to bully white people. Oriental people can call Americans racist for "appropriating" their culture exactly when they stop 1) wearing western clothing, 2) posting from a computer, 3) in English, 4) from America. Until then, they're liars, bad faith con artists, hypocrites and scumbags. What's almost worse is the white guys who pile on. This comment is linked in the Wikipedia article on the book: "Although Gary Gygax envisioned a campaign setting that brought a multicultural dimension to Dungeons & Dragons, the reality is that by lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Philippine, and 'Southeast Asian' lore he and co-authors David 'Zeb' Cook and Francois Marcela-Froideval actually developed a campaign setting that reinforced western culture's already racist understanding of the 'Orient.'"
ORLY? So, lumping together Chinese, Japanese, Dirty Knees and Look at These is racist, but it's totally OK to lump together ancient Rome, the Franks, the Vikings, the Celts, Medieval Merry Olde England, and anything else vaguely "Occidental?" Only Orientalism is racist? That's exactly the kind of incoherent and dishonest nonsense that this kind of fake, virtue-signaling criticism amounts to. As I said, racism is a hoax, shakedown racket, and reasonably successful (to date, but not for long) bullying tactic against white people. Nothing more. Only the spiteful, envious, hateful and dysfunctional can call you racist with a straight face, with the exception of either the con artists themselves, or the suckered victims of the con.
WotC apparently now think's it's OK to do something like Radiant Citadel, but only if you have "ethnic" authors working on it. No idea if they only think it's OK if ethnic players play it or not, but in spite of all of their propaganda to the opposite, by far the vast majority of players remain, and always will be, white males. The myth that Millennial D&D players are a vast multi-ethnic, sexually ambiguous sludge is just a myth. I'm sure it's more true than it was in the 80s, but it's not nearly as true as we're led to believe. Every poll, every survey, every look at convention attendance, i.e., every proxy except WotC's own carefully curated and not-to-be-trusted data makes this quite clear, even if they have to all be seen as proxies for the data rather than simply "the data."
In D&D and closely related D&D adjacent games (i.e., Pathfinder, which is a slightly house-ruled version of d20 D&D) there are basically three main Oriental adventures (lower case) settings. Kara-tur is the setting for the 1e AD&D Oriental adventures, and it was originally meant to be stand alone, although there were vague hints of it maybe being part of Oerik (Greyhawk.) That never really materialized, and by the time it was actually made explicit, it had been removed to Forgotten Realms, where many people assume that it's always been. This is largely because it had very little development prior to the boxed set in 1988 that was explicitly a FR product. I suppose in that sense, it's fair to call it a Forgotten Realms sub-setting; although not originally envisioned as such, in reality it never got any serious development until it "joined" the Forgotten Realms. But as the historical note on this product says, it actually didn't really "agree" with the FR; it was just bolted on because it was commercially easier to do so.
Fans of the Forgotten Realms may be surprised to learn that the world didn't originally use real-world cultures as the inspiration for its countries. One of Ed Greenwood's long-time players says that his setting was inspired by "Cities and farming regions he'd visited, yes, and the 'flavours' of them he wanted to evoke, but real-world countries or peoples or cultures no."
This changed when other authors began adding their own settings to Greenwood's world, because unlike Greenwood they often used real-world cultures as a touchstone. Technically, this practice started with the Celtic-influenced culture of the Moonshae Islands, but Kara-Tur was the first big expansion in this direction. Greenwood also notes that the real-world correlations extend beyond the major additions to the world to also include "recastings of my largely-offstage kingdoms like Unther and Mulhorand to more closely resemble real-world historical (or 'Hollywood historical') settings."
Greenwood disagrees with the results, saying that "the too-close-to-our-real-world additions like Maztica, the Hordelands, and Kara-Tur were a mistake in style". He thought that they "[pulled] gamers out of roleplaying into disputes about historical details, for one thing".
Seeing the various Oriental adventures products as "Hollywood Orient" is entirely appropriate, and actually kind of cool. I think that the more it tried to show off how multicultural the author was by adding esoteric details that normal people didn't normally care much about, the weaker the products got, honestly. In any case, in spite of it's tenuous and belated connection to Forgotten Realms, Kara-tur is probably best seen as its own setting in its own right, and the connection can only be invoked if you really want to for some reason.
The 3e Oriental adventures used Rokugan as its featured campaign setting. Rokugan was actually created by a completely different company, Alderac Entertainment Group, but WotC bought and relatively briefly owned the game, licensing the ability to make products for it back to AEG. Because Oriental Adventures 3e came out during the relatively brief window in which WotC owned the IP, they used it as the new default sample setting for the game, without any presupposed connections to Greyhawk, FR, or anything else. AEG also published their own d20 version of the setting. Which I bought used and for relatively cheap many years ago in the mid 00s, but I have never read very much of (which is why I pulled this ahead in my reading schedule; I feel like I should re-read Oriental Adventures before reading Rokugan.) It's not part of my WotC read-through, but as a prominent 3pp product during the heyday of d20 publishing, it counts more or less. If Kara-Tur was mostly Medieval Japan, but in a Chinese like geography, Rokugan was even moreso. While I'm always happy to borrow from anything, I felt like the smug "look at me and my multicultural knowledge" vibe from Rokugan as a campaign setting was always kind of off-putting, and I never loved it or had much interest in using it as is; merely in borrowing from it. That said, the 3e Oriental Adventures book had plenty of material that was explicitly disallowed from Rokugan, so it was only meant to be a sample setting, not the sum total of what you'd do with the book.
Pathfinder, of course, has Dragon Empires, or the Tian Xia continent, which is its own version of Oriental Adventures. Like every region of Golarion, they're all connected and explicitly on the same world, but they're also meant to be used much more modularly, with each setting allowing for exploration of particular themes or aesthetics and not really meant to cross over into a different campaign set in a different region. The Dragon Empires Gazetteer is the first real setting book, written by three white guys, and it was followed up in 2e with the Tian Xia World Guide and Tian Xia Character Guide written by about three dozen ethnic ambiguous people. I'm not even kidding. Look up the credits for it. I might be understating; I didn't bother counting.
Anyway, I don't care nearly as much about 2e; 1e was already overly woke for my tastes, but the Dragon Empires clearly draw from the same well as Kara-Tur and Rokugan in being "Hollywood fantasy Asia". If you're into that kind of thing, and there always are a few nerdy people with a real Yellow Fever problem, then they're pretty good settings, I suppose, but again, I'm probably more interested in looting them of interesting elements for a more western Medieval fantasy inspired setting. And some of the races, classes, and monsters (often with a more Occidental name) are pretty cool as is. I'll note that the 3e Oriental Adventures never really got a real upgrade to 3.5. There was a Dragon Magazine article that officially did so, although not completely, and then a lot of the classes and whatnot ended up popping up in other supplements. The wu jen alternate Oriental "wizard", for example, appeared in Complete Arcane. Shugenja and (kinda) the shaman were in Complete Divine, ninja in Complete Adventurer and samurai in Complete Warrior. Most of the races and classes got either direct ports into Pathfinder 1e, or close analogs as well. Plenty of the monsters showed up here and there as well, in addition to the spells.
I'll be honest with you, though, if you wanted an exotic alt.D&D, I think building it around the Expanded Psionics Handbook and Complete Psionic replacing all magic, and the races from the XPH, would have been more interesting than building it around Asia. Even if maybe you used some Asian influence here and there with it. Maybe even starting with something like Eberron's Sarlona, but getting rid of the oppressive empire which actually makes adventuring much harder, and adding a bit more weird wahoo from the XPH is a more interesting "Oriental adventures", to me at least, than any of the actual Oriental adventures.
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