"Oriental"/Japanese Play-Aids: What Should They Try to Do?

[oakesspalding]

Now and then people talk about TSR's Oriental Adventures or it's earlier and later rivals such as Lee Gold's Land of the Rising Sun, GURPS Japan, Runequest Land of the Samurai or Legend of the Five Rings. There's also an OSR Swords & Wizardry White-Box effort called Ruins & Ronin.

I'm not so much interested in which attempts people like or don't like but the more general question of what such efforts are or should be trying to accomplish.

In my view, from the point of view of setting an OD&D- or even AD&D-like campaign in medieval Japan, all the standard attempts fail (except perhaps for Ruins & Ronin). Now, of course, except for Oriental Adventures, none of them set out to do that. But Oriental Adventures is often criticized for not going far enough in their direction. It's not authentic enough (so goes the argument) or it's an awkward mix of the authentic and inauthentic (with both Chinese and Japanese stuff weirdly glommed together, among other things), etc.

But I take the opposite point of view. I think it fails partly because it goes too far in that direction. Including too much irrelevant period detail in the mechanics so as to bog down what makes D&D fun.

(It fails for other reasons as well . It has the same problems of all the late AD&D efforts - too many fiddly classes, etc. But that's another issue.)

Or to put it another way, OD&D (and AD&D) is NOT a realistic simulation of medieval Europe, nor even a fantastic medieval Europe. OD&D (and AD&D) succeeded in large part because it was a mash-up of influences, a mash-up that avoided the enticing and seductive (but in the end boring - from the point of view of play) stuff like social rank, etc.

If you want that, that's fine, but in that case you probably want to play Chivalry & Sorcery or its Japanese-themed counterpart Land of the Rising Sun. Or if you you want a simpler OSR effort, you could try RPG Pundit's Lion & Dragon.

But could you make a Japanese Myth themed OD&D - what OD&D would have been if it had featured Japanese myths and legends instead of the pseudo-medieval mash-up that we got?

I think Ruins & Ronin was a good try, but with respect to an attempt I admire, it seems to me a bit thin.

So can you do it? Or would focusing on just one culture - a quasi-historical medieval Japan - doom the project from the beginning?

[oakesspalding]

Or let me come at it another way.

One assumes that the first thing to do in such an attempt is to load up on the Japanese names. So you start out with Samurai, and then convert magic-users to Shukenja and thieves to Yakuza or Ninjas and all the rest. And then you have Korobokuro and Hengeyokai instead of Dwarves and Elves, and the Katana and Yumi instead of the longsword and bow, and so on.

That might make for an "authentic" vibe that seems cool at first, but does it end up (at its worst) being largely distracting name-dropping?

When I wrote Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, I wanted it to have a vaguely "Persian" or "Middle-Eastern" flavor. I first experimented with (and later dropped) having "authentic" Persian names for weapons and such. Doing so ended up seeming too limiting and jarring to me. So I went with more generic terms, hoping that the "flavor" would emerge more subtly or organically.

I'm not saying I perfectly succeeded but such was my aim...

Could one try the same thing but with a medieval Japanese vibe? And, just as importantly, would that be something anyone would be interested in reading or playing? Or should the myths and legends of Japan be relegated to only appearing in crunchy "authentic" period efforts?

[foster1941]

IMO the entire concept of a "Japanese" or "Oriental" D&D supplement is an anachronism and should be done away with. D&D has incorporated a wide array of real-world cultural elements (including Asian-derived stuff like ki-rin and golden dragons and oni (i.e. ogre magi) and rakshasa) indiscriminately into its fantasy stew all the way back to the beginning, and that's the way it should be. Should more weird monsters from Asian folklore and mythology be added to D&D's rosters? Absolutely! Should they be limited to only appearing in historically-accurate surroundings and manner? Absolutely not! D&D is a game about John Carter, Frodo, and Elric riding around on a flying carpet battling Universal's entire roster of monsters, Greek mythology's greatest hits, and a bunch of things based on random plastic toys, and then chucking the treasure into a Portable Hole from a Road Runner cartoon. Cultural authenticity should be about the last thing on anyone's mind.

Is Asian-flavored and derived stuff under-represented (but not entirely absent) in early D&D, probably because Gary Gygax either wasn't as familiar with it or wasn't as interested by it as he was by western stuff? Unquestionably. Did Gary in the 80s compound the error by claiming that Asian-themed stuff should be segregated into its own version of the game? Unfortunately, yes. Are we stuck with those bad decisions and unable to correct them now that we know better? Heck no! Bring on weird nightmarish stuff out of Asian folklore and pop culture! Bring on wuxia-flavored special combat maneuvers! Let your players call their thief and assassin characters ninja and describe their swords as katanas if they wants to! D&D will be stronger and richer and more interesting for it!

[oakesspalding]

I think one model for what I was trying to get at is Mazes & Minotaurs.

The idea is what if Gygax had set OD&D in faux ancient Greece instead of faux medieval Europe. My impression is that the game is at least in small part a spoof. It's written in a lighthearted way - 'Know your nymph!" - and even has fake news reports that imply the alternative universe of its premise.

But it also works.

And the thing is, it's very obviously an ancient Greek setting but WITHOUT ancient Greek names for classes or weapons, etc. Everything is still on the surface generic but the sum total is Greek.

The download is free, and there are also supplements including one with a Norse setting - Vikings & Valkyries. I highly recommend it, for a fun read if nothing else.

I don't want to barge into Piper's question for foster1941. But I think EPT works in part because it's invented. You have strange names and rich backgrounds but that nevertheless fit the framework of OD&D (whose template it uses). You're immersed in this alien world, not bludgeoned over the head with "see how authentic this is." And it's believable in a way that being "authentic" while at the same time NOT being authentic - you're in Edo era Japan but magic is real - cannot quite be. If that makes sense.

[Zenopus]

Mar 12, 2018 18:48:53 GMT -6 foster1941 said:

IMO the entire concept of a "Japanese" or "Oriental" D&D supplement is an anachronism and should be done away with. D&D has incorporated a wide array of real-world cultural elements ... Let your players call their thief and assassin characters ninja and describe their swords as katanas if they wants to! D&D will be stronger and richer and more interesting for it!

You see some of this in the early Dragons after the Samurai class was introduced (in issue #3) and people started adding them to their standard D&D parties. I'm thinking of stuff like the weird and humorous "Interview with a Rust Monster" that I read in Best of Dragon but was originally in Dragon #14. Here's the description of the party:

There were five of them. There were two fighter types, the first one wearing shiney new armor and carrying a rusty, nicked battleaxe that looked like it had come from somebody’s trash heap. The other was a real skinny dude carrying a sack with a bent sword sticking out of it. Between these two a magicer and a samurai were carrying the second biggest shield I had ever seen with another samurai on it

So two samurai in an otherwise regular D&D party. And that bent sword is actually the

Sword of Toshio, looks like an ordinary sword, bent and worn from use, which has been discarded. But in the hands of a samuri it takes on its true appearance as a katana of great power. Extremely lawful. Intelligence of 12, Ego of 3. Has a special purpose. Named for its first owner, Toshio Kubiyashi

You didn't see as much of this mixing after the AD&D rulebooks came out, except for the monk class.

[llenlleawg]

I think you are right re: the problems with OA, viz. that it leans too far in the direction of "authenticity", forgetting that (A)D&D isn't remotely, to borrow the language of RPGPundit, "Medieval authentic".

That said, I disagree about the importance of naming conventions. Why? Because one of the reasons people can "feel" the mash-up that is D&D to be in some sense Medieval is through its names. You have castles with moats and a portcullis, you have crossbows and silver crosses and chain mail, there are druids and wizards and paladins, the monsters are straight out the Medieval legends (themselves a mash-up of Classical and Celtic and Germanic lore), except of course when they are pulp-inspired or pure inventions. The art of the original books (I think especially of Sutherland's work) always depicted the PCs in clearly Medieval/Arthurian (in the sense of Mallory or 19th century Romantic revival) clothes, armor, and weapons. So, it "feels" Medieval, in a broad sense, however "inauthentic" it may be.

So, I would say that the mistake is in thinking you need a new ruleset, rather than a few changes in naming conventions, some extra monsters (although most could be ported as is), a few Asian-flavored magic items, etc. Indeed, for something vaguely Asian feeling (as Asian as D&D is the Medieval West), you just need to rename the cleric. Call him a sohei or yamabushi and you're golden! (The idea of armored religious figures, some of whom were believed to have mystical powers, actually makes the cleric class, as written, much easier for pseudo-Medieval Asia, even if the spells themselves are almost all straight from the Bible and saints' lives). If you must have demi-humans, again it's easy enough. Just call the elves "kami" (no worse than calling the elves "elves" after all), reskin the half-elf as the Vanara (borrowed from India, sure, but the Chinese legend of Sun Wukong was also popular in Japan, and besides, D&D is always a mash-up), etc.

What I'm getting at is that you only need enough "authenticity" to evoke, not to simulate. This will vary from table to table, to be sure, based on the interests and knowledge of the players, but we should never underestimate how must a little change of flavor text can alter the whole feel of play.

[tetramorph]

Good points here.

I do not think anything about the rules really needs to change.

You might add some monsters, treasures and spells.

But most of it is behind the screen stuff. Then use the language and names to the degree the players are familiar with it and want to.

A resource that “game-I-fied” Chinese and Japanese mythology,legend and lore would be really helpful (like an oriental Gods and Demigods).

So to me, it is about setting and not rules. So something to help with setting, behind the screen, would do the trick for me.

[oakesspalding]

Here's a list I came up with of "medieval Japanese" weapons without the distracting (to me) Japanese names.

I guess I have two other problems with Japanese names: 1) In my world, all humans speak common, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to make an exception here and have "Japanese-Common" names. 2) Aside from that, if you were from a "medieval Japanese" world, you wouldn't "think" of the names as foreign. "Ono" MEANS axe, "kanabo" MEANS spiked club, "otsuchi" MEANS war-mallet and so on. And this (I think) is even reflected in the Kanji characters for them.

I guess it's a question of taste. Do you need the Japanese names for the flavor, or do they just end up being distracting?

I did make an exception for "Samurai," obviously. It's just too iconic to leave out.

(The number on the left is weapon-class or length)

Samurai Weapons:

1 Dagger
2 Axe
3 Hooked Sword
4 Short Sword
5 Sword
6 Great Sword
7 War Mallet
8 Spiked Club
9 Staff
10 Women's Spear
11 Spear
12 Flail

Other Melee Weapons:

1 Baton
1 War Fan
1 Policeman's Pick
5 Sickle
5 Battle Pipe
5 "Fire-Axe"
10 "Farmer's Hoe"
10 "Fisherman's Oar"
10 Man-Catcher
10/1 Chain
15/1 Chain & Sickle
20/1 Ring & Dagger

Missile Weapons:

Dagger
Spear
Blowgun
Throwing Star
Blinding Egg
Bow
Matchlock-Pistol
Fire-Arrow Gun
Grenade

[foster1941]

Mar 12, 2018 19:27:27 GMT -6 Piper said:

Have you ever played Empire of the Petal Throne or one of its derivatives, foster1941 ? I'm curious. If so, what did you think of it, if you don't mind my asking.

Because I have, and I must say it was quite fun and nothing like D&D beyond the base rules the milieu was woven around. Playing in a campaign strongly flavored by the mythos and cultural mores of a different civilization can be an immersive experience.

Why limit yourself? Personally, I don't see any absolutes in this situation at all. D&D is only limited by your imagination, the game itself can take you anywhere you can conceive!

This question feels like a non-sequiter. It seems to say that I'm advocating not including non-western cultural elements in D&D, which is the exact opposite of what I was saying. It's very cool to me that Prof. Barker took his extensive knowledge of Indian culture and language and, effectively, integrated it into D&D in a manner (at least as far as I can tell) completely unburdened by concerns with historical or cultural "accuracy" - he's not trying to represent authentic Indian culture or mythology in Tekumel (in the way that, as I understand, something like RPGPundit's Arrows of Indra tries to) but was rather using elements of those cultures as the baseline for an extrapoltaed fictional culture of his own creation. And that's exactly how I feel other Asian (and non-western generally) cultures should be integrated into D&D, not as touristy Epcot recreations of those cultures in D&D world but as full-partner elements in the fictional fantasy stew. There used to be a tendency in the west to view Asian cultures as "exotic" and "other" but the time for that has long passed - I'm confident most kids in the U.S. nowadays are more familiar with and feel more natural affinity for the style and tropes of Japanese and Chinese folklore and mythology - mostly by way of anime and video games - than they do for the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain, and the idea that such cultural elements should be treated as "exotic" and "different" rather than an integral part of fantasy feels at best quaint and old-fashioned (and at worst, well, you know...).

[foster1941]

Mar 13, 2018 10:31:11 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

Here's a list I came up with of "medieval Japanese" weapons without the distracting (to me) Japanese names.[SNIP]

For the most part I agree with this - an axe is an axe and there's no need to use the Japanese word for axe when it's functionally the same as any other axe. That said, there are some Japanese (and Chinese, Indian, and other Asian) weapons that are sufficiently different from their western counterparts, and commonly referred to even in the west by their original-language names, that it makes more sense to me to use those names than to use some genericized name and then have to explain to players what you mean - if you have to explain that a "woman's spear" is a naginata, then you should just call it a naginata.

Part of it also depends on how granular your weapon categorizations are: in an OD&D context where you've got generic "sword" and "pole arm" then it makes sense to fold most Asian variants into the existing categories, but in an AD&D (or, for that matter, Swords & Spells) context when weapon categories become much more detailed and granular, then it starts making sense to differentiate a katana from a scimitar or long sword, a naginata from a glaive, throwing stars from darts, and so on.

[llenlleawg]

oakesspalding I tend to agree with you for the most part re: weapons, but I think for a slightly different reason than the one you presented. The worry isn't so much what the in-game people sound like to one another. The challenge is for the players. There are two extremes here, and I suspect most people of good will land somewhere in between. One extreme is to "translate" everything, including saying "knight" rather than "samurai", since both words MEAN servant/one who is in service. One would also have "ogres" and "trolls" rather than "oni", "long swords" rather than "katanas", and so on. At some point, one would wonder what's the point in saying that this is a pseudo-Japanese-flavored campaign when, for all intents and purposes, it could just as easily be a pseudo-Medieval-flavored one. That is, the players need at least some linguistic "hooks" to get into the feel of the thing (e.g. samurai, katana, ninja, etc.).

At the other extreme, nearly everything is given a Japanese/Chinese/whatever name. The problem here is, as I think oakes was trying to note (if I understood him correctly), the players become too alienated from the setting, and things that would be perfectly ordinary (and indeed, whose Japanese names turn out to be perfectly ordinary) become instead "exotic", obscuring the setting rather than inviting people into it. After all, there's a reason that most popular settings stick to many of the standard tropes—they are familiar and allow the players to engage the game more directly, rather than trying to master a strange lexicon with classes, monsters, money, social customs, weather patterns, etc. so outside their experience or basic cultural reference points that it's likely not worth the effort.

[oakesspalding]

Mar 13, 2018 11:20:18 GMT -6 foster1941 said:

...there are some Japanese (and Chinese, Indian, and other Asian) weapons that are sufficiently different from their western counterparts, and commonly referred to even in the west by their original-language names, that it makes more sense to me to use those names than to use some genericized name and then have to explain to players what you mean - if you have to explain that a "woman's spear" is a naginata, then you should just call it a naginata.

Part of it also depends on how granular your weapon categorizations are: in an OD&D context where you've got generic "sword" and "pole arm" then it makes sense to fold most Asian variants into the existing categories, but in an AD&D (or, for that matter, Swords & Spells) context when weapon categories become much more detailed and granular, then it starts making sense to differentiate a katana from a scimitar or long sword, a naginata from a glaive, throwing stars from darts, and so on.

Yes, I think that's exactly right. And the more I think about it, the more it seems obvious to me that including "peasant" weapons and "police" weapons is to go down the AD&D obscure weapon proliferation route, which I don't want to do.

And to partially defend my first-try of "women's spear," as well as to respond to llenlleawg , I guess it just offends my sense of symmetry to render some names into Japanese but others not (the exception being Samurai). How about just "pole arm" then, as long as it is understood that these are perhaps a bit lighter and shorter than military-class pole-arms? (This is why they were a weapon of choice both for Samurai off the battlefield and women of the aristocracy). And, in my understanding, "spears" in Japanese fighting were often more like lances. You don't even have to explain - you can just shuffle around the weapon classes a bit.

But to also respond to llenleawg, I think you can simulate the flavor of a different culture without the different names. I'm not saying it's easy, but you can do it. It was a silly first try, but I think a weapons list with Blowgun, Blinding Egg and Throwing Star sets a clearly different tone than one with Short Bow, Long Bow and Crossbow.

Mar 13, 2018 10:59:36 GMT -6 foster1941 said:

And that's exactly how I feel other Asian (and non-western generally) cultures should be integrated into D&D, not as touristy Epcot recreations of those cultures in D&D world but as full-partner elements in the fictional fantasy stew. There used to be a tendency in the west to view Asian cultures as "exotic" and "other" but the time for that has long passed - I'm confident most kids in the U.S. nowadays are more familiar with and feel more natural affinity for the style and tropes of Japanese and Chinese folklore and mythology - mostly by way of anime and video games - than they do for the Matter of France and the Matter of Britain, and the idea that such cultural elements should be treated as "exotic" and "different" rather than an integral part of fantasy feels at best quaint and old-fashioned...

I completely get what you're saying, of course, but forgive me if I would also flip that on its head. I think EVERYTHING in OD&D should be exotic and different. We all experienced that feeling of awe, delight and mystery when we first started playing, and then some of it inevitably wore off when we became more familiar with things. To take another stab at what I've been trying to say (mostly badly) in the last few posts, my issue with some of the "Japanese" settings is either that they claim or imply to be exotic when in reality they end up at least partly just being or seeming unpronounceable/overly complicated/pretentious/boring (from an OD&D perspective) or that, rather than being exotic, they end up being, for lack of a better word, cartoony. Ninja's (to most people now in the West, and perhaps in the East as well) aren't mysterious and sinister anymore, they're just silly video-gamey tropes. That's not exactly the poor Ninjas fault, of course, but still.

And do not misunderstand. I'm not trying to diss the Medieval Japanese play-aids or settings. Land of the Rising Sun, for example, is brilliant in its way, just as Chivalry & Sorcery is brilliant, but in my view, it doesn't offer as much as you might think for a D&D referee.

[foster1941]

Mar 13, 2018 12:27:13 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

I completely get what you're saying, of course, but forgive me if I would also flip that on its head. I think EVERYTHING in OD&D should be exotic and different. We all experienced that feeling of awe, delight and mystery when we first started playing, and then some of it inevitably wore off when we became more familiar with things. To take another stab at what I've been trying to say (mostly badly) in the last few posts, my issue with some of the "Japanese" settings is either that they claim or imply to be exotic when in reality they end up at least partly just being or seeming unpronounceable/overly complicated/pretentious/boring (from an OD&D perspective) or that, rather than being exotic, they end up being, for lack of a better word, cartoony. Ninja's (to most people now in the West, and perhaps in the East as well) aren't mysterious and sinister anymore, they're just silly video-gamey tropes. That's not exactly the poor Ninjas fault, of course, but still.

I totally get it, and agree. That's one of the reasons Zeb Cook's Oriental Adventures was so disappointing in its day and is doubly so nowadays. Gary Gygax made familiar elements of (mostly) western mythology and folklore seem different and exotic (and fun and exciting) by mixing them up and pulling obscure things out of old bestiaries (like iron bull gorgons) and adding tons of his own creations, and putting all of it in his own created world. Tolkien did the same thing; so did Greg Stafford. M.A.R. Barker did it one better by starting with a baseline that was already unfamiliar to most of his assumed audience. By contrast, Zeb Cook didn't really do any of that - instead he just presented a reasonably faithful (but also pretty shallow and cursory) take on real world Asian cultures and kind of awkwardly shoe-horned them into the AD&D rules system. What should have been just the starting point became the whole package.

And do not misunderstand. I'm not trying to diss the Medieval Japanese play-aids or settings. Land of the Rising Sun, for example, is brilliant in its way, just as Chivalry & Sorcery is brilliant, but in my view, it doesn't offer as much as you might think for a D&D referee.

Me either. I'm not first-hand familiar with either Chivalry and Sorcery or Land of the Rising Sun, but I do know Bushido, which is similarly historically-minded and narrowly focused. I really like it, and it seems like it would be a great choice if you wanted to play a campaign that closely modeled the chanbara samurai movies of Kurosawa, Inagaki, etc. I would compare it to something like Pendragon, which does the same thing for a campaign based narrowly and specifically on the Matter of Britain, or even, for that matter, Boot Hill. Playing those games, getting deep into that specific genre, can be a lot of fun, but at least to me it's a very different experience from D&D, which has (or at least can have) a much broader scope, and is much more amenable to pure fantasy rather than narrowly and accurately recreating one specific thing.

[Deleted]

People WAY overthink this. Back in the day, our motto was "make up some s*** you think will be fun."

Pedantry kills fun.

[oakesspalding]

Mar 13, 2018 13:01:25 GMT -6 foster1941 said:

...but I do know Bushido, which is similarly historically-minded and narrowly focused. I really like it, and it seems like it would be a great choice if you wanted to play a campaign that closely modeled the chanbara samurai movies of Kurosawa, Inagaki, etc. I would compare it to something like Pendragon, which does the same thing for a campaign based narrowly and specifically on the Matter of Britain, or even, for that matter, Boot Hill. Playing those games, getting deep into that specific genre, can be a lot of fun, but at least to me it's a very different experience from D&D, which has (or at least can have) a much broader scope, and is much more amenable to pure fantasy rather than narrowly and accurately recreating one specific thing.

Oh, yeah. I totally forgot to mention Bushido, which is what got me into this whole jag in the first place.

Interestingly, the author of Land of the Rising Sun, which is very detailed and complicated, and features all sorts of non-OD&Dish "mundane" professions and such, was also the founder of (and I think still puts out, after 40 years) the iconic OD&D fanzine Alarums & Excursions.

[Deleted]

"What CAN they try to do" is NOT the same as "What SHOULD they try to do."

The distinction is vital.

[oakesspalding]

Yeah, you just said exactly that on that other thread. Are you going to go around to another five threads and cap them off, too? To be honest, I have no idea what point you're trying to make now, nor do I really care. Learn some manners.

[peterlind]

A couple of things I would like to see in response to the OP:

1. Characters having essentially the same rules and guidelines regardless of culture, with the difference being mainly cultural flavor, style, etc. IMO, for example, OD&D being expressly for "medieval miniatures", seems to place a high value on wearing armor as a form of fighting defense. A fighter in full platemail will have the highest AC. So is the European fighter superior to all fighters? I think not -- so what do fighters of other cultures do to compensate for living in a different climate?

2. I would like to see reasons/motives for characters from the East to go West, or characters from the West, to go East. From a fighter's standpoint, what kinds of fighting techniques can be learned in the West, or in the East, if a character travels out there, finds a willing teacher, spends the gold and time, etc.

[oakesspalding]

Mar 15, 2018 17:43:22 GMT -6 peterlind said:

A couple of things I would like to see in response to the OP:

1. Characters having essentially the same rules and guidelines regardless of culture, with the difference being mainly cultural flavor, style, etc. IMO, for example, OD&D being expressly for "medieval miniatures", seems to place a high value on wearing armor as a form of fighting defense. A fighter in full platemail will have the highest AC. So is the European fighter superior to all fighters? I think not -- so what do fighters of other cultures do to compensate for living in a different climate?

2. I would like to see reasons/motives for characters from the East to go West, or characters from the West, to go East. From a fighter's standpoint, what kinds of fighting techniques can be learned in the West, or in the East, if a character travels out there, finds a willing teacher, spends the gold and time, etc.

I could say a few things on the armor thing, Peter, but I couldn't tell who you were directing the question at. And I've done a lot of talking recently.

[Vile Traveller]

I am also of the opinion that D&D is best served by using real cultures as a springboard for the imagination. No model can be 100% accurate unless it becomes the thing it's trying to model, so trying to create an authentic cultural experience in a game is just a question of degree. Added to this, there is no way such an experience can be created by someone outside that culture, no matter how immersed they are. I have been living in the Orient for almost 2 decades and I know I don't really get "it" - as we all know the Orient is many things, but then, there is no such thing as a medieval "Europe", either. You can't get a native of the culture to give an outsider an authentic experience, either, because the former doesn't have the latter's cultural experience to be able to translate one into the other.

So, just see what floats your boat - standard D&D with medusae, or full-on Mazes & Minotaurs. 😁

[Starbeard]

I agree with everyone.

D&D was never meant to be an exercise in historical authenticity, and even flaunts it in several places. Nevertheless, it reflects the main historical interests of its creators, and there is no doubt that there is plenty of room for coming up with other interpretations.

Nomenclature is a similar paradox. On the one hand it isn't important and can even get in the way of a good time. In my L5R games, I became so seriously frustrated with the endless streams of bad Japanese masquerading as "We meant to do it that way because this is fantasy" that I just started using English for everything. When the players physically can't pronounce or remember the words, or have to have their definitions explained every session, it just defeats the whole purpose. The more anime-minded complained at first, but ironically, as I kept casually saying things like "castle" instead of "shiro" I found everyone getting into the setting way more when they were using their own language, especially the one who weren't really into samurai or wuxia. Words that are now common enough in English to be included in the dictionary don't have to change of course, like katana, naginata, origami, geisha and samurai—but even then you can still say sword, halberd,* paper doll, courtesan and noble retainer, and it doesn't detract from the setting at all, in fact I think it adds to the immersion because it doesn't sound like it's being translated, it sounds like it's being described.

That said, it's clear that names are significant in D&D, just as they are in life. People can experience melancholy over whether the level titles are appropriately applied, or whether a thief should be called a rogue. And it seems everyone goes through a phase where they try to give everything in their setting a special name within the setting, as a way of breathing life into the place.


As an aside, I think Oriental Adventures drew the short straw and got a reputation it didn't rightly deserve. I never read it until a few years ago, always having gone to Legend of the 5 Rings and for my fantasy Oriental games, despite not really liking the way the L5R setting is written at all. By contrast, OA is incredibly well researched and evocative, drawing on some very clever systems to reflect certain little historical realities in a fantastical game setting. These days L5R comes across to me as a teen's bleeding heartbreaker, while OA comes across as a Asian history nerd's labour of love.


*As for naginata, I think naginata is a standard enough word that anyone wanting to play samurais would know what it is. I would also indiscriminately call it a pole arm, a glaive, and especially a halberd since 'naginata' and 'halberd' literally mean the same thing: 'long mowing hatchet'.

[oakesspalding]

I'm fairly well educated, well-read, enjoy history and learning about different cultures, and own 50 or so Japanese and Chinese DVDs. But I didn't know what a naginata was. Then again my attention span and memory are weird on some things.

By the way, one odd thing about Oriental Adventures that I (amazingly) only just noticed: It has almost no pictures. Take a look. It's really quite strange.

[Starbeard]

Mar 19, 2018 16:16:50 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

I'm fairly well educated, well-read, enjoy history and learning about different cultures, and own 50 or so Japanese and Chinese DVDs. But I didn't know what a naginata was. Then again my attention span and memory are weird on some things.

By the way, one odd thing about Oriental Adventures that I (amazingly) only just noticed: It has almost no pictures. Take a look. It's really quite strange.

Hah, touché! I guess that's true: if you learn from someone else then you learn what they know, but if you learn independently then things you know will seem obscure to the other person and vice versa. I'm the same way with many topics. I'm always surprised at the "gaps" in my own knowledge, even regarding things that I'm really interested in.

Maybe I only thought it was fairly standard because of the Japanese comics and cartoons popular at the time, and back then I did kendo, and there's a branch of kendo that uses bamboo naginatas. And when two people at the table know what one is, and the others can see a picture of a big glaive in the rulebook weapon spread, then it falls into the group vocabulary pretty easily. It helps that the word rolls off the tongue pretty easily in English.

[foster1941]

Mar 19, 2018 16:16:50 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

By the way, one odd thing about Oriental Adventures that I (amazingly) only just noticed: It has almost no pictures. Take a look. It's really quite strange.

If you know the sordid history of that book's creation, that's not surprising. The book was written and produced extremely quickly by Zeb Cook and Mike Breault because TSR had already pre-sold it to Random House as part of their plan to get out of debt (alongside other high-profile releases Unearthed Arcana and Temple of Elemental Evil) so it had to be released on-time, but (at least as Mike Breault describes it) the manuscript by Francois Froideval that Gary gave them to work from was nowhere near sufficient, so they had to essentially completely recreate the book from near-scratch at something very close to the last minute (and, apparently, had to do most of it on nights and weekends because they also had other "regular" duties at TSR they had to attend to). Given that, it's no wonder there's so little art, that the tables are minimally formatted, that even the text changes size from section to section - they literally didn't have time to do anything else and still meet the release deadline.

I think just about everyone agrees that Oriental Adventures is a disappointment and not really up to the standards of the other AD&D books, but when you know the story about how it was produced, it's hard not to cut it at least a bit of extra slack.

[Starbeard]

Mar 19, 2018 17:25:37 GMT -6 foster1941 said:

Mar 19, 2018 16:16:50 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

By the way, one odd thing about Oriental Adventures that I (amazingly) only just noticed: It has almost no pictures. Take a look. It's really quite strange.

If you know the sordid history of that book's creation, that's not surprising. The book was written and produced extremely quickly by Zeb Cook and Mike Breault because TSR had already pre-sold it to Random House as part of their plan to get out of debt (alongside other high-profile releases Unearthed Arcana and Temple of Elemental Evil) so it had to be released on-time, but (at least as Mike Breault describes it) the manuscript by Francois Froideval that Gary gave them to work from was nowhere near sufficient, so they had to essentially completely recreate the book from near-scratch at something very close to the last minute (and, apparently, had to do most of it on nights and weekends because they also had other "regular" duties at TSR they had to attend to). Given that, it's no wonder there's so little art, that the tables are minimally formatted, that even the text changes size from section to section - they literally didn't have time to do anything else and still meet the release deadline.

I think just about everyone agrees that Oriental Adventures is a disappointment and not really up to the standards of the other AD&D books, but when you know the story about how it was produced, it's hard not to cut it at least a bit of extra slack.

Yeah the books are a bit of a mess. The weird thing for me was that as I read through it, it gave me the same sense of unbridled urgency and spontaneity that the early TSR books have. When I was younger I might have flubbed it off as poor quality, but now I found it sparking my imagination for games with Han Chinese civil service examinations and Kamakura era shogunates. Granted, not all of the book is equally inspiring, but I can forgive that.

[oakesspalding]

I hope some of you have seen the Flying Swordsmen RPG. It's a Chinese Wuxia quasi-OD&D clone by Lord Gwydion (aka Dennis Laffey) of What a Horrible Night to Have a Curse. And it's free in PDF. I haven't played it but it looks great - "Oriental Adventures" done right.

He's recently put together a "Japanese" RPG, Chanbara, which is $10/$20 on DriveThruRPG.

[Todd]

For myself, it would be all about the flavor and fluff. I don’t think you need to change anything mechanically for fighting men as samurai or for their particular weaponry nor for ninjas as thieves. The heavily stratified caste systems, the rules and ceremonies, traditions and mores— that’s what sets it apart.

[xerxez]

Mar 13, 2018 7:56:05 GMT -6 tetramorph said:

Good points here.

I do not think anything about the rules really needs to change.

You might add some monsters, treasures and spells.

But most of it is behind the screen stuff. Then use the language and names to the degree the players are familiar with it and want to.

A resource that “game-I-fied” Chinese and Japanese mythology,legend and lore would be really helpful (like an oriental Gods and Demigods).

So to me, it is about setting and not rules. So something to help with setting, behind the screen, would do the trick for me.

Bushido (F.G.U.) does that very adequately Tetramorph.

[oakesspalding]

Does anyone here know Japanese?

I'm interested in how the Japanese think of the sense of their own words.

For example, to a Japanese speaker, does "Tengu" MEAN to them, heavenly dog? Or are they far enough removed from the idiomatic interpretation of the Kanji so that it means goblin or spirit or whatever?

Does what I asked make sense?

[Starbeard]

Apr 11, 2018 9:39:24 GMT -6 oakesspalding said:

Does anyone here know Japanese?

I'm interested in how the Japanese think of the sense of their own words.

For example, to a Japanese speaker, does "Tengu" MEAN to them, heavenly dog? Or are they far enough removed from the idiomatic interpretation of the Kanji so that it means goblin or spirit or whatever?

Does what I asked make sense?

Yeah, that makes sense. I think it lies somewhere in between, in a way that we'll probably never quite understand coming from our own language family. Many of the Asian languages have a fundamentally different understanding of how written language works, and how naming conventions work. (for what it's worth, I studied Japanese pretty diligently as my second language all through high school and about half of college, but haven't used it in over a decade and wouldn't even call myself negligibly fluent now—I can only read/write if I have loads of time and a big dictionary).

To compare it to our own compound cliche words like newspaper, however, nobody, or Johnson, I think a Japanese speaker might hear Tengu similarly: not as 'Heavenly Dog', but as 'Heavendog', except perhaps there might be a bit more recognition of the individual parts than we're used to (I doubt any of us actually hear the literal definition of 'no + body' when we say 'nobody', for example).

But even then, the 'dog' part comes from a kanji that has multiple meanings, which include dog, guard/watcher/sentinel, spy, and wasteful. So maybe they'd actually hear it as something like 'Heavenwatcher' instead. To confuse it even more, this particular kanji for dog is pretty old fashioned, and in most uses a much simpler kanji for 'dog' would be used. So in this case, maybe even if it's being interpreted as 'dog', it may actually be interpreted as 'guard/sentinel' with the understanding that it's also an old fashioned word for dog, because that's what dogs do—in the same way we might call a fork a utensil or silverware when we're feeling snooty or (ironically) trying to be precise, or when an army calls a tank division the 'cavalry'.

And on top of all that, there's the problem of oral vs written communication: many words in Japanese use borrowed Chinese symbols that no longer (or never did) carry the same meaning as the word they represent, because they were selected only for their sound rather than their meaning. Or, like in the case of tengu, the two symbols each have a 'meaning' pronunciation which comes from the original Japanese words for those nouns (ama-inu), and a 'sounding' pronunciation which comes from how the characters were actually pronounced in their own Chinese language (ten-gu). So a vague English parallel to that might be the difference between calling it a Heavendog or Skydog, and forming a word out of Greek or Latin roots like Ouraskula or Caelocanis. Or, television vs farsight.

The cliched name issue is something that comes up in personal names a lot, and essentially poses the same question as whether the Native American tribes felt like they were tapping into their inner hippies by naming people Slow, He-who-yawns and Running-deer. For example, the Japanese surname Tanaka is actually a cluster of different surnames that all sound the same, but use different characters and are thus different names, with different histories: 'Central Rice Field', 'Many Relationships', 'Low Ridge', and so on—but are all of these understood now to be distinct names with different meanings, or do they see them as our Sean/Seán/Shawn/Shaun/Shon? You know, 'My name is Tanaka—oh, I spell it this way.'

I grew up around a huge Vietnamese community, where it is fairly common to name girls after flowers. The tradition was carried over to their English names, so at school I knew plenty of girls named Hyacinth, Chrysanthemum, Violet, Tulip, Rose, Daisy, Amaryllis—all which to me sounded antiquated and Victorian, but didn't really evoke any literal images of those flowers. But when I run into a girl named Rainbow, I can't get past the fact that it's a fake name—because it's not a name, it's a word. I don't think most of the Asian languages make that distinction between names and words quite so rigidly.