Reply To: D&D officially turning Forgotten Realms sights away from Euro inspired campaigns

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@koraski I think most diversity drives are done so companies can be seen to be doing something, certainly the ones that cause all the outrage.  The reason I believe that is that they’re usually so poorly handled.  If, as a business, you do something that pisses off a load of existing customers in an attempt to widen your market you probably did it wrong.  But that’s how we keep seeing, time and again, large companies in the entertainment industry (particularly in Video Games and Film) handling things.  Generally speaking, I think by forcing diversity changes through that annoy fans you will, at best, break even in terms of gaining as many customers as you lose but probably lose more than you gain.’  Im not really against inclusion in games but really that comes from the people playing the game not the game itself.  I certainly don’t support sweeping and suddenly changes within a particular game or game franchise to support “diversity” because I think existing fans, the ones who make these things successful enough to actually be able to afford to muck about with things like “diversity and inclusion” (and trust me, this isn’t something small businesses can afford to mess with), should be respected and valued.  I like to think that GW are currently handling this situation quite well.  There’s been massive calls for them to provide better representation of ethnicity and gender for years.  They have been quite vague and non-committal with some of their answers, with very little other than “yeah, it’s probably going to happen”.  Slowly and mostly without fanfare (Sisters of Battle aside) it is changing.  They’re starting to produce more female miniatures, there is a wider range of skin tones on their models.  And they haven’t made a song and dance about it, they just put them out there. There’s some lines that I am unsure whether GW will ever cross (female Space Marines for example) but for the most part they’re doing their best to keep their fans happy while at the same time they’re changing with the times so to speak. Wizards of the Coast typically takes the exact opposite approach and just says “we’re doing this, if you don’t like it we don’t want your business” and so they frequently find themselves embroiled in needless controversy and I don’t think it’s a surprise that MtG is in a bit of a state of decline at the moment (although I don’t think that this is the ONLY reason, it’s certainly a contributing factor).

@mecha82 the original post was slightly political as it did reference diversity and inclusion as a possible motive for reintroducing certain parts of the Forgotten Realms world, so we’re not as far off topic as one might think.

As for the settings themselves, the Kar-Tur setting was never particularly well defined and there’s never been a great deal of support for it.  I certainly don’t remember there being anything available for it throughout the AD&D 2nd and D&D 3.0/3.5 edition periods which is most of the 90’s and early 00’s.  Looking at the Forgotten Realms wiki site, there was one source book in the mid ’80s so writing a new one now they probably have a fair amount of creative freedom; as long as they don’t change the geography they can probably do whatever they want.

Al Qadim was a little more fleshed out because it was essentially a separate campaign setting. Other than being unique as an Arabian Nights setting, I don’t remember it being particularly ground breaking. It is for Arabian Nights what Forgotten Realms is for Medieval fantasy – an easy way in. It has all the things you might expect from such a setting; flying carpets, genies, scimitars and lots of sand. But I think it’s been so long now since Al Qadim was in print, and so much has happened in Forgotten Realms as a setting, they probably still have a lot of creative licence. It’s pretty much fallen out of public view for so long that they can almost reboot it anyway they like. One thing that it didn’t ever really focus on, and something I would definitely expect to be absent from any new setting, is some of the more conservative attitudes of the present day middle east. It paints a much more positive picture, more akin to what we might like to envisage the Islamic world was like at its peak, the Islamic Golden Age, when it was at forefront of science and philosophy. It’s true that the more negative aspects of Muslim culture that seen to so often be at the forefront in the news were, without any doubt, present in medieval Muslim world, they weren’t in Al Qadim – I would expect the new Zakhara source book(s) to have a more western, egalitarian slant to their societies. This is very much in keeping with the way Faerun is presented and in keeping with the general presentation of D&D settings in general. This is why, as someone has pointed out, Dark Sun is probably a little too “spicy” for today’s more delicate audiences so either don’t expect to see it any time soon or expect any future offering to come with either a trigger warning or be so Watered down as to be unrecognisable as Dark Sun.