The Culture: There's A Reason 1e's Oriental Adventures Did Not Hold Up

This retrospective on Kara-Tur went where you expect.

Muh Racisms. Muh Appropriations. BORING!

These Tourists deserve less.

No, there's valid reasons to nock Oriental Adventures: The reliance on classic Bullshido and other pre-Internet martial arts fabulation for its substance.

We are not talking about any serious attempt to turn a pile of history, legend, and a canon of literature into the source material for an expansion to The Only Game That Matters; for all its (many) faults, Legend of the Five Rings did attempt to do that. We are talking about grabbing all the bullshit of the Ninja Craze, mixing it with Sonny Chiba films as related in a drunk-and-high haze by some Soup Aisle sadsack (that would be Ashida Kim, by the way), and then written in a coke-fueled frenzy with a background of Every Kung Fu Cinema Hachet Job Ever running on a loop on a TV from a second hand shop.

Of course it worked--80s Ninja Craze, yo--but it aged like milk.

It aged like milk because, in order to hold up over time, it had to withstand reconsideration with the emergence of post-Cold War access to information and that includes entertainment media; this is what we saw when L5R--again, flawed as that is--arrived as that property did what OA should have done but didn't.

China, Korea, Japan: These are NOT interchangable cogs. They cannot be swapped with each other, nor with the other great empires and kingdoms of the East, anymore than we tolerate England being hot-swappable with France or Spain despite all of them having knights, chain (or plate), and a shared relgion--even a shared church for a time--and so on.

When your product is informed not by myth, history, or an Appendix N literary canon but by Black Belt Magazine and similar bullshit filtered through half-remembered bad movies, you're going to get a crap product that's going to wear out fast when the zeitgeist shifts. The rise of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship did as much to destroy these fake-and-gay fantasies as the rise of Historical European Martial Arts.

(You can bet that Mazteca gets the same treatment, and has the same problem.)

You can't sucker the population like you could in the 1980s on this stuff anymore; the basis for the false belief got demolished on Pay Per View, and backed up by the change in Eastern action films, comics, and television.

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On this day next month, I hit another birthday. I mention this now as a courtesy; if--this is not, never has been, nor shall ever be, expected of you--you like, and you can spare it, head over to this page where I've updated things for this year.

As some of this stuff needs lead-time to ensure it arrives on time, I am saying so now to ensure that this happens.