Ki, Qi, and the Force     

I should start this post by stating that I am not of Asian descent.  And my formal studies about Asia are limited to the realm of philosophy.  So while I could talk about Buddhism and Confucianism without mixing the two up, that's about the extent of my expertise.  What should I do if I want to create a campaign setting that is a fantasy version of Asia?  Well, if I am a game designer, and I'm writing material for publication, I need expertise that I don't have.  Ideally, I should hire someone to help me out!  At the very least, I should pay someone as a consultant to look over my material before I publish it.

But suppose I'm thinking about this from a gamemaster perspective, not a game designer perspective.  As a gamemaster, I don't have a budget for creating my game.  And I may not know anyone with expertise in Asian history.  Here are four ways I could approach creating a Setting Component that might incorporate Ki Energy abilities.

Inspiration Without Context

In my setting, I want to have fighters who have mystical abilities based on some sort of life energy force.  My warriors will be ascetic in nature: they will meditate, they will dispense mysterious wisdom, and they will generally be above "worldly" desires.  They will have strange powers that derive from their connection and understanding of this energy.  And they will also be super-cool martial arts style fighters.  What I will end up with is something like Star Wars.

Star Wars was clearly influenced by the same concepts that the D&D monk was.  The difference is that Star Wars has removed almost all trace of Asian culture from those concepts.  I'd be using the same tropes, the wizened master, the ronin, etc., but I'd be using them through a Western lens.  To me, this is the least compelling of the approaches to creating Setting Components.  At its best, it is bland.  At its worst, it is white-washing.  In Star Wars, for example, having a character with the name Qui-Gon Jinn who is portrayed as a white dude is not just lazy, it's appropriative.  Creating a setting by picking the bits of Asian culture we like, while ignoring the context is much the same thing.  (This is not, btw, to say that I don't like Star Wars.  I actually like it a lot!  But I am aware of the problematic bits.)

Game Design by TV Tropes

TV Tropes has a handy page on ki manipulation that covers all the bases as far as how that trope is used in popular Western culture.  If you make a Setting Component based off of the information here, pretty much everyone will recognize instantly what you are going for.  This is largely the approach that Pathfinder has taken with respect to its game world design.  In its attempt to make a game world that is approachable by a mainstream, Western audience, it makes liberal use of tropes and stereotypes.  It is very clearly, and painfully, written for white people.  And if you use TV Tropes to write your game world, that is the result you will get.

In some ways, this approach is actually worse than the one above.  Because while the above method attempts to erase the culture that it is borrowing from, using tropes will have the result of leaning in to negative stereotypes.  It's also all been done before.  Your generic fantasy Asia will essentially be every other generic fantasy Asia.  So while this approach is probably the easiest one to implement, I would have to recommend against it.  Again, I play a lot of settings that use this approach (Golarion, the Forgotten Realms, etc.).  I can enjoy those settings, but at the same time realize that they are problematic, and try to improve on them in my own games.

Borrowing Wholesale

Suppose I have come to the conclusion that I need some expertise.  I decide that I will find someone else's fantasy Asia, and use that to build my campaign world.  To be sure that I have good source material, and not something that just duplicates the approaches above, I'll look for an Asian writer or creator.  This approach can have mixed success.

To give an example, let's use the most well-known source of Ki energy in popular culture:  Dragon Ball.  TV Tropes refers to it as a "trope codifier."  It contains all you need to create a template of Ki energy in all its forms.  It is popular enough to be recognized by your audience, but specific enough to have more flavor than a "vanilla" setting.  It's created by folks in Japan, based on manga by Akira Toriyama, one of the most well respected manga artists around.  So your fantasy Asia should be pretty authentic and respectful, yeah?  Well, sadly no.

Asia is not a single culture and there is a huge difference between Japan and China.  Stereotypes of China in Japan are just as prevalent, if not more so, as they are in the U.S.  The Dragon Ball series was, in its first incarnation, loosely based on Journey to the West, a classic Chinese novel.  So it is not any more likely to be a great example of a fantasy Asia as anything created by Western writers.  [standard disclaimer, yes, Dragon Ball is cool, despite being problematic, see above :)]

Doing the Research as an Amateur

This is the most difficult, the most time consuming, the most likely to fail spectacularly, and ultimately, the most rewarding of the four approaches.  No, I'm not an expert.  But part of why I play roleplaying games is to learn something.  D&D has taught me a lot of things, and learning about new cultures is fun!  So maybe the best approach is to sit down and try to learn about another culture myself, taking inspiration directly from the source, and then using that to create my fantasy world.  I'm not about to try to learn Chinese, so I'll have to rely on translations.  And I don't know a lot of Chinese history, so maybe I'll miss a lot of the context.  But I could certainly do a lot worse than to sit down with my own annotated translation of something like Journey to the West, and see how it inspires me!

Inevitably, I will make mistakes.  My own exposure to tropes and negative stereotypes is bound to trip me up.  And if someone points out mistakes to me, I'll be happy to correct them!  But my games will end up being a lot richer and more complex the more time I put into them.

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Martial Artists and Monks     

You wouldn't expect, looking at how the monk character class is portrayed in recent editions, that it was one of the original classes, but it was!  A lot of original D&D players may not necessarily remember the monk, until you mention the Master of Flowers, and then you might hear: "oh yeah!  That class that nobody actually played!"  Master of Flowers was the designation for the highest level of monk.  But monks were woefully poor choices as an early D&D class.  Some might argue that monks have never really been a popular class, in all of their incarnations.  Some monks were clerical spell casters, some were martial artists, some were sort of fantasy superheroes, but monks have had a hard time finding a place in D&D.

Part of this, of course, is due to D&D's default "European" setting.  Player characters are assumed to be from a feudal kingdom, generally one with at least one huge trade metropolis, medieval style guilds, and soldiers armed with metal armor and weapons as far as the eye can see.  The economics of such societies is often woefully inadequate, especially with adventurers coming out of the dungeon with thousands of gold pieces upon which they never seem to pay any taxes.  But the flavor is European.

Non-European settings are often treated by D&D as places where adventures may happen, but the adventurers themselves are not local.  This theme has extended throughout the history of D&D, so that since classic adventures such as the Desert of Desolation up to more modern adventures such as the Mummy's Mask, the heroes are always assumed to be European-style folks traveling to a distant land of mystery.  Moreover, the stereotypes and tropes used to represent non-European settings are often problematically racist.

Oriental Adventures

Yes, the name is terrible, and I make no apologies for it.  Oriental Adventures was fantasy Asia from an entirely Western perspective.  As far as I know, no Asian writers of any sort had credits in the book.  This book was Asian culture as viewed through the lens of martial arts movies.  And the monk class has the same general origin.

Oriental Adventures was dropped after Third Edition, and this was probably a good idea.  It probably should have been dropped earlier, in favor of a more authentic setting.  But I suspect that it had nothing to do with a desire for authenticity, and had more to do with a shift in what Western popular culture thought about Asia.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Asian fantasy adventures (as seen by the West) were based on Hong Kong movies, Japanese video games, and samurai/ninja in comic books.  The basic tropes were established:  a secret order of monks in the mountains who teach mystical martial arts, a loyal samurai who has lost honor and must wander as a ronin, massive numbers of ninja who melt out of the shadows and attack without mercy.  But in the 1990s, these were entirely supplanted by a new genre: anime.  Well, the Japanese video games weren't supplanted, they just quickly followed along with the anime trend.

Monks were drawn from Chinese historical martial arts movies, and Western books that were inspired by the same.  And the stories told in many of those movies fit in nicely with the medieval era swords and sorcery of early D&D.  But anime was another thing entirely.  Yes, there were sometimes martial arts, but the context was generally very far from standard Western fantasy.  It was a further bridge, and it was one that the creators of D&D did not want to cross.  So the monk remained the same, and continues to be a strange niche class: only remaining in the D&D setting due to having always been there.

Does D&D Have to Be Western?

What Oriental Adventures attempted to prove was that the archetypes of fighters and wizards, clerics and rogues, could transcend a Western setting.  Other settings did the same for the Middle East (Al-Qadim) and Africa (Nyambe) among others, all written (however well-meaningly) by Westerners.  But what I think these settings ended up proving was that D&D was not flexible enough to translate to a non-Western setting, at least not the way it was being written.  Because in order to accommodate these new settings, they required new, specific rules at every level.

Let's suppose that our story goal is to be able to tell stories in a non-Western culture.  Of the classes as they are written now, some will be perfectly adequate to the task (the fighter) and some will not (the druid).  The component rules can help a lot with that.  Instead of making up a new character class, we can tweak an existing one to fit better within our new campaign world.  If Armored Fighters simply aren't a feature, we can remove that component and replace it with something more fitting.  The system can be setting agnostic.  But the components, perhaps, should not be.  In the same way that Heritage can be designed around a culture specific to the campaign world, and Domain Components can be designed around a specific religion, a component can also bring a particular setting to life.

In the case of the monk, it seems clear that this Setting Component has to do with the use of ki as the source of some of the monk's abilities.  We already know that the monk has the Agile component.  We can see the likelihood of a Martial Artist component to encompass Flurry of Blows and increased damage with Unarmed Combat.  The religious avocation that the monk is named for is a tertiary component at best.  So that leaves the ki powers as a likely secondary component that is specific to a campaign world.  It can be taken by the monk or other classes for a campaign set in the world where ki powers are a thing.  It can also be swapped out for something else to make the monk class fit better in a setting where ki powers are not a thing.

Next post:  More on ki powers and setting components!

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