What eurofantasy is about

General
#41

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.

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#42

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.

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#43

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.

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#44

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).

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#45

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.

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#46

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.

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#47

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.

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Collaborative Creation in OSR
#48

The game Donjon (2002) also comes to mind.