I think I understand, and it makes sense. When I pursued a university degree in medieval European history, I used to tease my colleagues that when they said “medieval” it meant really only France and England. The problem is the construction of the medieval. I had one instructor who specialized in medieval Italy, and he had a similar complaint. I think that you can feel rightly that you are not included in discussions of the generic quality of the “eurofantasy” (or any similar concept about generic European Medieval anything), just as medieval Spain or Egypt or Bulgaria, for example, are not included. You are right that they are not thinking of your country, for the most part, unless they want an idea of “merchant princes.” But it is all caricature anyway.
That’s it in a nutshell. The idea that it represents something that it really doesn’t. What would you include in to make generic fantasy more in-line with your experiences?
I can’t remember the last time I saw group of people discussing something on the internet in such a polite, educated manner. 
There are lots of things I’d like to include, so this list is probably incomplete, but it’s a start:
- More city-states with democracy-like government. They were the spine of the Italian Middle Age and I feel like the make for an interesting setting (power struggle, political alignments and such).
- Two higher powers fighting each other (I had been thinking about making an alignment-like system for this, but with Guelph and Gibelline replacing Law and Chaos). Again, this would open up to interesting power dynamics, having the alignments be a political stance with immediate, real world consequences.
- More focus on mercenary companies (while I don’t like the system and the setting, which turned out too baroque, Brancalonia does a good job at this, turning the party into a mercenary company, with the GM at its head).
- A different approach to religion. While I like the more pagan feeling of most fantasy religion systems, I feel that settings which use a lot of saint-like creatures hit “closer to home”. A nice example is Sebastian De Castell’s Greatcoats series (in general, it feels more “eurofantasy” than most of what is branded eurofantasy nowadays, because it takes from all Europe).
- More religious institutions. We had (and still have) lots of monasteries from different orders, each one doing its own thing. Most fantasy settings just have temples with clerics inside.
- More cultural fragmentation, both between races/species and inside them. Here, you might have needed to learn a new language every day you spent walking in the same direction and we came from the same culture. I imagine that, if you replicate the same system across different species you are going to get even more differentiation. Like Orks from the South prefer swords and speak a language with strong Gnomish influence, while Orks from the North use axes and have strong Dwarfish influence (but Northern Dwarves have some Elvish influence of their own, as opposed to their Western cousins who speak with a pronounced Halfling accent…).
This obviously applies to Italy, but I think it won’t really work for a Spaniard or from somebody from Eastern Europe.
I read someplace that this was the original intention behind Law and Chaos. In war games, certain units were restricted to certain political allegiances (e.g. French vs English). The same mechanic was translated to fantasy games via cosmic alignments, I’m sure because they were broadly applicable and required less in-world politics.
So this would be even more old-school! Beautiful!
What are you thoughts on Coins and Scrolls mercenary developments? There are quite a few interesting posts under the tag
I wrote about the origins of good vs evil and law vs chaos in role-playing games here.
My focus was on how alignment doesn’t fit with dungeon treasure-hunt adventures.
But, yes, alignment arose from wargames, to describe factions. It meant simply which side you were on in a war.
I’m entirely new here, and just read through this whole chain.
This is a fascinating discussion. I think at this point it’s a given that the tropes of D&D are rooted in a kind of pseudo-euro-medievalism that’s really more a mish-mash of Americanised views of European myth (as thekernelinyellow pointed out).
My question is whether this might also have influenced play-loops, and whether creating non-McEuro D&D also might need to interrogate the play-loops of civilisation->wilderness->loot dungeon->civilisation that seem to me to be the default in OSR-style play (caveating that of course every group has variance in how they play)
I’ve been thinking hard about what Asian D&D looks like, especially Asian D&D during the Colonial period (eg, Carnatic Wars, China’s 20th-c. Warlord period, Meiji restoration).
thekernerlinyellow suggested a greater focus on city-states, regional difference and mercenary companies; for me it would probably involve play around a powerful but decaying central authority, with the presence of multiple foreign factions seizing local advantage.
My question is, what other ways are there to make alternatives to ‘eurofantasy’ (as inaccurate as the term is), which don’t involve reductive palette swaps where you just call all the orcs ‘oni’ and give them clubs?
You are the author of this, correct?
I’d love to hear how you think that fits in to the discussion here.
Yup, that’s me! I literally just posted that yesterday, so these ideas are still very half-formed.
I have a nascent thought that’s struggling to hatch about how D&D’s ‘McEuro’ trappings aren’t just about cultural referents, but also a certain way of looking at the world. Culture and representation is part of it, but if we were to (for a crude example) swap out pale-skinned blue-eyed elves for Malay forest-spirits and changed all the villages to kampungs, D&D would still play in ways that feel…foreign? Or at least distinctly un-asian for me. Like a party of D&D adventurers going around and completing quests would still feel different from Chinese wuxia, or South-East Asian hero-myths.
I guess I’m just wondering how to make D&D feel more like home.
One idea I had was a stronger grounding in communities and regions, rather than independent adventurers going from town to town. This is your home region, and here are the industries your grandfathers and your fathers worked in. This other place is run by a rival princeling, and there’s centuries of rivalry between your people and his, and this is also why you can never go to village X. Kinship ties matter. Money still matters, but after every dungeon-raid the party has to ask: how does this affect the people I have kinship-ties with?
Er. I typed out all that and realised I never actually discussed my blog post.
My post is similar to thekernelinyellow’s great list about how to make D&D more grounded in their national history: ground it in specific social contexts, tie the PCs to local conditions, pivot away from the D&D trope of young adventuring parties going out into wilderness to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make something of themselves.
In my specific case, I want to take the chaos of Colonial-era India / China / Japan as that starting frame and have that as a backdrop that informs a game.
Hi, Skeletonboi!
I don’t know if these bits will help:
There were serious attempts to make Japanese fantasy games back in the early days of RPGs. Bushido came out in 1979 and Land of the Rising Sun in 1980. I’m not very familiar with them, but Bushido used Japanese terms for certain stats. I’m sure it would get a mixed reception today for the predictable tug-of-war over cultural appropriation vs cultural appreciation. Anyway, you might find something of value to you there. The impulse to get “authentic” difference is strong. Even Chivalry & Sorcery (1977) was an attempt to get the “medieval authentic.” Kinship ties mattered, etc. It was a flop because it was too complex, but it is a nice demonstration of players having an impulse like yours early on in the history of the hobby.
The problem with breaking the generic quality of fantasy, in my view, rests in the problem that the participants in the game share a limited set of unspoken tropes in common. It’s work to teach your players how to imagine a non-generic world.
This is a fascinating post. Thanks for sharing it! I think you’re spot on about the assumptions of generic fantasy colouring how people experience D&D. I also think you’re right that about gaming groups sharing a common set of tropes it’s hard to work around. (I’m curious what your thoughts are about modern OSR products like Yoon-Suin that seem pretty popular. My suspicion is that, for all the Tibetan/Central-Asian flavour, it’s relying partially on knowledge of Hollow Earth / Agartha sword and sorcery tropes for its appeal.) Maybe it’s impossible to ask a US gaming group to imagine an alien, Eastern setting without it becoming ‘Oriental’ and exotic.
I’m writing and thinking from a very particular niche: I’ve grown up and lived most of my life in South-East Asia. The influence of Western culture and D&D is a huge here: my friends grew up on the Lord of the Rings, Warcraft, D&D etc. The reason why this project is personal for me is I’m wondering how to unpack latent tropes that Asian audiences might know but aren’t used to seeing in fantasy-fiction.
It’s trickier than it sounds! I’ve spent so long in the milieu of, as you call it, generic fantasy that I feel a bit like I’m tentatively excavating tropes. Zedeck Siew’s Lorn Song of the Bachelor was fascinating for that reason: it felt very, very familiar in all the tropes it used. It’s just that I’d never seen these particular tropes applied to D&D, in this way.
I know Skerples made a post saying how he’d never try running Lorn Song because he wouldn’t be able to represent that world authentically. I’m wondering if this is just an insurmountable cultural barrier.
Skeletonboi, I wish you luck on your project. Given your background, you probably know better than most of the worlds’ role-playing gamers about the latent, unspoken tropes of your audience. Whatever you do will be a contribution.
I think that most gamers in any country rely on stereotypes and commonly understood tropes to imagine fantasy versions of any country, even their own.
As for Yoon-Suin, I never read it. My impression, based on the limited page sample I saw and reviews is that it’s based on Burma and maybe Bangaledesh with some other stuff thrown in. OSR gamers say “creative,” which is their way of saying it’s good.
Basically, my view is that non-generic settings require a lot of effort, and that is why generic prevails. So then we ask “What are the sources of the generic?” And I think the answer is a common pool of references. And what are those? They change with generations. It used to be (in the '70s, when this mess began) swords & sorcery fiction, pulp action, monster movies, comic books, and stuff like. Now video game content, anime, and superhero movies are more typical of the generic. People know Lord of the Rings through the movies, not the books, but Tolkien remains relevant. Anyway, I’m sure you understand my point. Mass culture and mass media determine what is generic.
If you can tap mass culture from SE Asia that your audience also knows, you are likely to succeed. I think that this is the case regardless of the system you use, but if you use the most generic system (D&D), you’ll cast the net even wider.
I think the power of generic fantasy is so strong that even players dropped into, say, Yoon-Suin are likely to remake it according to the tropes they know best.
I think it’s not insurmountable, but it definitely hard. I’d say it requires an effort both on the author’s part (to add the information - or at least pointers to it - to fill the “cultural gap”) and on the group’s part (to fill said gap).
Thank you! I have to say, this is another reason why I love the DIY aesthetic of the OSR, because of conversations like this. I appreciate your thoughts! Practically speaking, to a large degree most of the RPG audience here is playing 5E (and that won’t change for the forseeable future), but I’ll be happy to have made something of my own.
It’s true: that buy-in is tricky. I’m also aware that it’s most often the GM who is far more enthused about putting in the extra work, rather than many players who just want a place to unwind and relax with friends and throw dice. It’s a separate topic, but it’s also why I’ve been leaning more and more towards collaborative creation, rather than bespoke whole worlds.
Actually, would you make a separate topic about this? It’s super interesting to think about what collaborative creation looks outside of storytelling games.
There’s at least one (PBTA?) game where the secret door check actually creates the secret door, which is interesting.
The game Donjon (2002) also comes to mind.