Last night I queued up one of those super long music mixes from YouTube based on the search relaxing Asian themed music, or something like that, and read the last 40 or so pages of 3e's Oriental Adventures, which I'd been reading for a little while now. I'm not really, nor have I ever been, a fan of Orientalism, chinoiserie, yellow fever, or whatever else you may want to call it. Sure, sure, during the 80s, I thought video games about ninjas and martial arts like Shinobi or Double Dragon were pretty cool, and I played a lot of Street Fighter in the 90s. I remember thinking that I wanted to get around to watching Michael Dudikoff's American Ninja movies, although I never did, and now I have to imagine that they'd feel laughably bad and dated after a good 40 years of time has passed and the fad that led to them seeming like a good idea is long gone. The original AD&D Oriental Adventures came out the same year as American Ninja, and I have to think that the fad of ... whatever you want to call it is part of that same movement. (Orientalism seems like it would be right, but actually mostly refers to fascination with Western Asia, i.e., it's more Arabian Nights than Far East. Chinoiserie is usually meant to refer specifically to China, whereas the fad in the 80s was much more focused explicitly on Japan. Japanophilia works, I suppose, and to some degree weeb or wapanese. I'll stick with using chinoiserie and Orientalism, imperfect though the terms clearly are.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah. I've never been all that interested in the Far East, any more than I am any other exotic non-Western corner of the world. Sure, I'd like to visit, site-see, etc. and there are some elements of their folklore and culture that could easily be adaptable to fantasy gaming, but I'm a Westerner, and fantasy as a genre is heavily rooted in Western civilization (even in the far east, reference D&D players' older obsession with pointing towards Record of the Lodoss War, or even most of the the Zelda games) and I'm neither tired of fantasy rooted in my home civilization nor very tempted by exotica for its own sake. In fact, as time has gone on and its clear that Western civilization has come under sustained attack by our very own globalist, post-Western soi-disant leaders, I've instead become more entrenched into promoting my own civilization, and am even less likely to show much interest in Oriental Adventures than I was when I bought it, mostly just because I had money, I was still young, I was still excited about 3e, and I was always looking for options—not because I ever thought that I'd actually spend time or effort seriously playing in an Oriental Adventures campaign, nor that I'd ever consider running one. But I thought, if nothing else some alternate races, classes, prestige classes, spells, feats or monsters from that book would almost certainly be welcome, and mostly that's still true, even though I no longer care too much about most of those concepts, or the mechanical framework of 3e at all, anymore, for that matter.
I do have two additional Orientalist products from more or less that era; both d20 books published by Alderac Entertainment Group, the original publishers of the Rokugan campaign setting that Wizards of the Coast used as the "sample" or default setting of this newer Oriental Adventures book; one is Creatures of Rokugan, which I bought because, hey, it was a monster book, and I can always use more monsters (although I also have a lot of 3pp d20 monster books that I read once, put on the shelf and never looked at again, this one included) and the Rokugan campaign setting, which I got new as a door prize at a local gaming convention in Chicago that I drove out to a couple of times in the early 00s. In spite of the fact that I've owned that book for over 20 years (although the copy was new, it wasn't a "new" product when I got it) I've never read more than a few pages of it. I've paged through it, and I looked specifically at the classes for it, like the ninja and courtier, etc. but I've never read it much otherwise. Which is kind of weird; if there's a type of product that I tend to be interested in in D&D, it's not really all that much new mechanics (other than monsters, and to a lesser degree, alternative magic systems, races and classes) but settings. This should have been exactly right up my alley as a new setting, that I got for free and have had for a good twenty years or even more... but never have read.
Better late than never; one of the reasons I pulled Oriental Adventures earlier into the line was so that I would be prepared to read Rokugan honestly, so now I'll do that relatively shortly... after I read a few other physical game books that are in front of the line of it first, like Pathfinder Campaign Setting and Heroes of Horror and maybe either the Draconomicon and Monster Manual III. Midnight and maybe DragonStar would be the only campaign settings (3pp) that I'd also make an attempt to read this year. But Golarion and other "Western" settings are the ones that I'm really most interested in (I know Golarion is, in reality, multiple settings stitched together, including it's own version of Oriental Adventures in the form of the Dragon Empires Gazetteer and the related adventure paths and other modules (Jade Regent, Season of Ghosts) but it's just a little dabble for variety, not the focus of Golarion. And with the development of my own settings, which I always prefer anyway, I only like reading other settings because I'm a fan of world-building for its own sake, and seeing what other people do is always interesting. I may utilize some of that stuff, for inspiration at least, a little bit, for my psionic Empire of the Mind-Wizards world-building exercise... which I haven't done anything with.
I keep asking the AI image generators to create an all psionic D&D party though, to see what I'll get. Not that I expect my setting development to look like that, but here they are anyway; or at least the latest.
One of the things that impressed me in spite of myself about Oriental Adventures is that it pretty casually posited a darker, lower magic setting than the default. Rokugan and it's ShadowLands enemy is actually relatively dark. Most of the magic using classes are replaced with the shugenja, which is kind of a wizard/cleric hybrid, I guess, but lower power and definitely less common in the setting overall, and subject to numerous social limitations.
The book also made a point of talking very explicitly about limiting options to create a campaign setting, rather than the "throw it all in" approach that has become commonplace since this was published. The idea that you can actually tell your players no is one that seems to have been lost in official eyes.
