Why is Oriental Adventures so bad?

[Tholianweb]

I don't claim to know if Gary or FMF had ever read them, but I would bet a hefty sum of money that Zeb Cook hasn't (or at least, hadn't at the time the OA was written).

I would not know if any of the aforementioned read the book or Francois for that matter since it was his manuscript. Gary must have thought it was good since he tried to put his name to the book and got caught (wag the finger a little at the naughty guy)...

[blackprinceofmuncie]

Gary must have thought it was good since he tried to put his name to the book and got caught (wag the finger a little at the naughty guy)...

Do not bring up topics from locked threads.

[bbarsh]

I never had any interest in running an OA-based campaign. I will just say that it is not in my comfort zone and at my best, I am not sure it would have even been playable. Why try and reinvent the wheel when I had a perfectly good campaign setting already. I guess, I just never wanted to work that hard.
All that said, I like the idea of dropping in an asian-based villain adventure or organization to plague the PCs. I don't really want all the culture baggage, just the novelty or mysteriousnous. I want ease of use. In this case, simpler is better. I don't think OA delivered that. When Howard dropped and asian villain or foe in his short stories, he gave little to no real cultural background. Why? Because its boring. Leave it up to the reader's imagination. That is where OA totally fails. Everything is laid out and, well, boring.

[francisca]

I share some of the same sentiment others have expressed here, in that I don't think the add-on non-weapon stuff adds much to the game, and the added complexity/book-keeping isn't worth it.

I'm not a big fan of east asian mythology/culture to begin with, so there isn't much appeal for the classes, weapons, etc..., no matter how well or poorly they are presented.

I can certainly understand that many gamers enjoy this stuff, and see the appeal to a publisher to provide such works, I'm just not the target audience in this case.

[Ghul]

During my time working for Mr. Gygax, I developed an Yggsburgh expansion supplement called The Outs: Rivermen's Town, a suburb of the Free Town of Yggsburgh that includes an Asian-themed population known as the Sungkinese. Gary used this culture in other post-D&D publications. Gary worked with me on how this culture arrived at The East Mark, their religion, and other pertinent details, but he mostly left me to my own devices. I believe the supplement rounded out at about 52,000 words, nearly half of the content dedicated to this culture. Unfortunately, the ms. sleeps in my hard drive never to awaken. I digress. Anyway, during that time, Gary and I talked about OA several times, through email and face to face. Having read some of his Q&A posts on the topic, I'm familiar with Zeb's opinions regarding OA. Notwithstanding, I know Gary believed Francois had turned in a superior ms. that was ultimately disregarded. A year or so before Gary passed, he had spoken with Francois again, and there was talk of taking the original ms. and putting it in print.

[Benoist]

Notwithstanding, I know Gary believed Francois had turned in a superior ms. that was ultimately disregarded. A year or so before Gary passed, he had spoken with Francois again, and there was talk of taking the original ms. and putting it in print.

Oh wow... that makes me so sad. I would have loved to see something like this happen. When you see what FMF initiated for French gaming with the magazine Jeux & Stratégie which later became Casus Belli, and when you consider the fiction he created via the Chroniques de la Lune Noire (Chronicles of the Black Moon, a series of comics whose hero, Wismerhill, was one of FMF's characters at Gary's table , with a LOT of AD&D flair injected into it), I can only wonder at the awesome what could have come from such a turn of events...

[JRT]

The Sungkinese comes from Lejendary Adventures and Learth. The Chinese Mythological Pantheon was named Sungkinese. (I'm familiar with them a lot since that manuscripts been in "development hell" for over 10 years).

Odhanan's correct about Francois' contribution to gaming--he's definately a big name over there. I suspect if things didn't progress as they did at TSR, we American's might have seen more from him.

[T. Foster]

Didn't FMF also run an ultra-high-level AD&D campaign where the character levels were in the 20s-30s and monsters like the tarrasque (FMF's contribution to the MM2, based on a French myth) were the standard? IIRC gary mentioned playing in one of these games using Mordenkainen, who was considered "low level" compared to everything else that was going on. Would've been neat to see more of that stuff make it into print as well (instead of the "high-level" adventures we did get from post-Gary TSR, which is to say the execrable Bloodstone Pass series).

[Benoist]

Didn't FMF also run an ultra-high-level AD&D campaign where the character levels were in the 20s-30s and monsters like the tarrasque (FMF's contribution to the MM2, based on a French myth) were the standard? IIRC gary mentioned playing in one of these games using Mordenkainen, who was considered "low level" compared to everything else that was going on. Would've been neat to see more of that stuff make it into print as well (instead of the "high-level" adventures we did get from post-Gary TSR, which is to say the execrable Bloodstone Pass series).

I didn't know about that game, but that does sound completely possible. Where did you get that account from? The Chroniques de la Lune Noire have a VERY HIGH AD&D level feel to them, with adventurers followed by entire armies, taking over fiefs, meeting super-powerful seers, Wismerhill being something of an elf Fighter/Magic User with Psionics powers, followed by a Succubus lover/henchman and a very large group of "PCs", and so on, so forth. So that game you're talking about might be part of the inspiration where all that stuff came from. There's also "Gros Bill", which is a spoof comics character that regularly appeared in the pages of Casus Belli and made it as a common RPG term in French which basically means "munchkin" and was based on a real guy in Gary's games who would just hack and slash and pile up unbelievable amounts of treasure. Apparently, asking Gary himself, the guy was real.

[T. Foster]

Where did you get that account from?

Assorted Gygax Q&A, at ENWorld most likely.

[Benoist]

It's really hard to find drawings of the original Casus Belli Gros Bill.

I found a derivative though, from Kroc le Bô, which was another D&D parody in Casus Belli:



Girl: "Here, hubby! 5 Experience points!"
Ranger 130th Level: "WHERE?"
Ranger 130th Level: "Me See, Me Kill!*"

* Intelligence: 2.

LOL And here's a Wandering Monster (Monstre Errant) in the same comic:

[Benoist]

Oh found one of the real Gros Bill. That's a full page art piece from Casus Belli that details the "anatomy of the Gros Bill," with all the equipment and all that: follow the link.

[Benoist]

Now, all that stuff I'm showing was EXTREMELY popular with gamers in France by the end of the 1980s. This is basically a big part of what made the reputation of AD&D as a mindless game of monster killing and treasure hunting back in those days. Now, couple that with the fact that, by that time, FMF had quit the magazine and went on to other ventures in his life, and that games like Call of Cthulhu and other types of historically more correct (Premières Légendes, Légendes de la Table Ronde, Légendes Celtiques, Hurlements) or traditionally fantasists (Rêve de Dragons, Hurlements) or parodic (Paranoia, In Nomine Satanis Magna Veritas) were WIDELY popular in the writing staff in those days and you see how the Gaming culture was gradually changing, which in turn would set up the scene for games like Vampire the Masquerade, Nephilim and others to explode in popularity in the 1990s.

Now, I know this is completely off topic, but I know some of you are very interested in this aspect of the evolving gaming cultures in Europe, and how that made the whole picture evolve down the years, so there it is. A little piece of gaming history right here.

[ThirstyStirge]

I've only flipped through OA, and have not had the chance to play it. Since I'm more acquainted with Ancient China than Japan, I gravitated toward the RPG called Qin, which seems to be strongly Chinese-oriented and appears to have been nicely researched.

[Stonegiant]

Ruins and Ronins has a nice easy flowing feel to it and meshes well with the rest of OD&D/S&W. One thing is that with any game about cultures other than your own the rules have to convey the atmosphere of the culture even when they are cliche. OA just added more rules, classes, weapons & armor, and poorly described monsters to the system but none of these did anything to convey or enhance the cultural feel of the game/supplement. RP brings up an interesting point that OA might have done better if it had been a East meets West supplement rather than an East exclusive.