Sunday, September 12, 2021

Arabian Nights at the Gaming Table: Arabian Adventures



After the middling reaction (at best) to the Emirates of Ylaruam, TSR took their Arabian Nights interest into 2nd Edition AD&D with the first product of the Al-Qadim line, Arabian Adventures. The book makes it clear: Unlike GAZ2, this time we're going full-blown fantastic adventures, leaving the real-world comparisons to a minimum. Genies, sorcerers, desert scions with secret noble bloodlines...oh, yeah. Bring it all on. We even get the introductory scene from the Arabian Nights stories, with King Shahryar and Scheherazade and the start of the tales (not the Richard Burton version, of course; TSR was very much a PG company at this time).

After the introductory story, we are told that this book is about stories Scheherazade might have told if she'd gone on for another thousand nights. And there will be a fantastic setting filled with those magical wonders, with lots of fun stuff to explore, fight, and steal. Because the only difference between a hero and a grave-robber is whether or not the character is a PC, right?

They do pay some small homage to the historical Arabic Empire and culture, although there is no monotheistic religion here; even in a fantasy Arabia, TSR wasn't going to do 'Fantasy Islam,' especially in the wake of the first Gulf War (Arabian Adventures came out in 1992, one year after the first Iraq invasion). The Arabian Nights themselves, obviously, are a major influence, but not only in their literary form; Hollywood movies and North American perceptions of the Arabian Nights are also going to factor heavily. Sounds like a fun place to adventure to me.

So, Chapter 1 is an overview of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, where this fantasy Arabia is located. It's officially set in the Forgotten Realms (because everything had to be about the Realms in the early 1990s), but it doesn't have to be there. It's placed south of the main FR setting, Faerun, and west of the Kara-Tur, the land of the Oriental Adventures setting, so you can have a whole Marco Polo thing going on if you really want.

Needless to say, Zakhara's primary terrain feature is...desert. Two of them, in fact: The High Desert and the Haunted Lands. It's not all desert, of course; there's lush jungle to the northeast, and coastal lowlands where the cities are across the southern parts of the land. Lots of islands, too. Because you can't do Sinbad without lots of islands. Most of these islands are in the Crowded Sea, which is the sea to the south. On the north coast are the Corsair Domains, where lots of pirates hang out. Because if there aren't any pirates, what's the point of being on the water in the first place?

Arabian Adventures took a very different view on race in D&D; tolerance is the name of the game, and everyone in Zakhara gets along regardless of their race. So, elves and dwarves hang out at the bazaar, gnomes and half-orcs swap humorous stories at the coffee houses, and ogres give halflings piggyback rides on religious holidays. The reason for this is that everyone is so enlightened thanks to the amazing laws produced by the Loregiver (a woman who takes Mohammed's place in history), which convinced everyone to hold hands and sing Kumbaya across the desert. Okay, then. However, racial level limits and class restrictions still apply, so your half-orc isn't going to be a mighty sorcerer no matter how pious he might be. That wouldn't happen until 3rd edition eight years later.

Instead, culture in Zakhara is cut across two basic lines: the Al-Badia, or nomads, who hang out in the deserts, and the Al-Hadhar, who live in the cities and villages of the Land of Fate. The Al-Badia hold the city-dwellers in contempt as soft, money-grubbing effete snobs; the Al-Hadhar consider the nomads to be smelly, uncivilized, and poor. They don't go to war with each other; that would be uncivilized, after all. They just don't hang out at the pub on Sundays.

Honor gets a big writeup, because it's pretty darn important in this setting. I find it interesting that both the Oriental and Arabian Adventures books put an emphasis on honor, to the point where an OA character whose honor score drops below zero is literally removed from the game with their character sheet torn up. Meanwhile, the standard medieval fantasy setting that is generic D&D, complete with knights in shining armor, hardly ever mentions the word. Now, I realize that D&D's pulp roots focused more on barbarians and rugged individualist adventurers rather than Camelot and Roland, but still. Honor mattered in Europe, too.

Still, in today's touchy cultural setting, the honor section of AA isn't going to sit well with too many people; there's a section on honor killings and how people who dishonor their families will be killed by their own family members, and everyone's fine with it. Yeah, that hasn't aged very well.

Let's move on to family instead. Assuming your character doesn't give your family a reason to murder you in cold blood, family bonds are important. Families will consist of children, parents, grandparents, even great-grandparents if they're still around. Now, that could get awkward as you get back a few generations and end up with eight sets of great-grandparents, but things get simplified as married women end up as part of their husband's families. Cousins, uncles and aunts are still a thing, but families are maintained on the male side.

Next up is 'purity.' Coming from a traditional Catholic perspective, the Zakharan idea of purity doesn't quite square. Right in the first paragraph, polygamy is justified as the man being legally married to his entire harem. Divorce is totally fine, and nobody seems to care about it. I particularly like the last two sentences: "The fact that a sheikh or king is married to a particular woman for only few weeks or even days implies no impropriety for him or for her. Long or short, a marriage is sacred in the Land of Fate."

I'm not really sure that a Britney Spears-style marriage would count as 'sacred.' Maybe that's just me.

This is where the Islamic influence comes in; women don't touch other men in case they become 'violently tempted' by their charms. Even flirting is considered a sin. And yes, the burqa makes an appearance, although it isn't actually named. And women tend to spend a lot of time in the house, be it a tent or a palace, so as to avoid the risk of impurity. I doubt that too many gamers followed these rules. I certainly wouldn't want to play in a group that did.

Hospitality and piety are the next concepts; the Bond of Salt is discussed (as it was in GAZ2), wherein if you take salt in someone's home, you're considered a guest. And while the religion in question isn't Islam (being polytheistic), there is still a lot of the Islamic mindset going on (as we saw above). Mind you, the Arabian Nights stories were the same, so it's not surprising.

The last part of this chapter is a brief discussion of Fate (personified as a female being who is superior to the gods and goddesses of the realm) and the Loregiver, the woman who in ancient times gave the Law that got everyone to be nice to each other. it's been five centuries since the Laws were discovered, and they were just so darn awesome that everyone agreed to follow them.

So, that's the introduction and first chapter of the book. There's lots more to come, of course; it's a 160-page book, and we're just hitting page 20. This should keep me busy, assuming I remember to post more than once every other week.

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