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gaming and plurals
Jan. 23rd, 2012 11:58 amNow here is something weird and minor which I've been thinking about.
The feudal meets frontier feel of west African kingdoms would really lend itself well to D&D as we know it. D&D starts out with pseudo-Europe, and has touched on pseudo-Arabia and pseudo-East Asia, so - now that 19th century prejudices are fading faster - there's really no reason not to do pseudo-Africa. Since D&D default is a lot more about Tolkien and WoW than about late medieval Europe, I wonder whether you could actually quickly give American gamers enough rooting in how west African river-kingdoms worked, enough that they could comfortably play with the tropes.
I really think it could be cool to have a Yorubaland focus, so character's associations with the orixa would be traits connected to them at character creation. My blind spot here is that I'm really shorting Ethiopia and Eritrea, history and culture which I know shockingly little about but I think doing this would be a nice counterbalance to being a little too focused on kwaZulu. I seriously would love to see witches done up with riding hyenas and blacksmithing as a focus, because I think hyenas are cool.
Where it gets into languages as well as assumptions; we're used to seeing Africa as a monolithic place which means linguistics would be this clumsy kludge. Part of the homogenization of Europe into genero-fantasy means similar stuff has happened with European and Asian language in games, but I don't pick up on it as obviously. It makes me wince, but the English pattern of adding -s to everything as a plural really does seem to be the best way to deal with really diverse multicultural areas. So you'd talk about ikanyambas, kishis, or nandis the same culturally-indiscriminate way as we are used to talking about gorgons, vodyanois, and chimeras. It's like saying "katanas" or "ninjas" - it makes me wince to do that, but it's got a distinct use.
The feudal meets frontier feel of west African kingdoms would really lend itself well to D&D as we know it. D&D starts out with pseudo-Europe, and has touched on pseudo-Arabia and pseudo-East Asia, so - now that 19th century prejudices are fading faster - there's really no reason not to do pseudo-Africa. Since D&D default is a lot more about Tolkien and WoW than about late medieval Europe, I wonder whether you could actually quickly give American gamers enough rooting in how west African river-kingdoms worked, enough that they could comfortably play with the tropes.
I really think it could be cool to have a Yorubaland focus, so character's associations with the orixa would be traits connected to them at character creation. My blind spot here is that I'm really shorting Ethiopia and Eritrea, history and culture which I know shockingly little about but I think doing this would be a nice counterbalance to being a little too focused on kwaZulu. I seriously would love to see witches done up with riding hyenas and blacksmithing as a focus, because I think hyenas are cool.
Where it gets into languages as well as assumptions; we're used to seeing Africa as a monolithic place which means linguistics would be this clumsy kludge. Part of the homogenization of Europe into genero-fantasy means similar stuff has happened with European and Asian language in games, but I don't pick up on it as obviously. It makes me wince, but the English pattern of adding -s to everything as a plural really does seem to be the best way to deal with really diverse multicultural areas. So you'd talk about ikanyambas, kishis, or nandis the same culturally-indiscriminate way as we are used to talking about gorgons, vodyanois, and chimeras. It's like saying "katanas" or "ninjas" - it makes me wince to do that, but it's got a distinct use.