Why Reskinning Oriental Adventure Was A Good Thing

 I long while back in the mist of times I ran a crazy 5e game set in the Oriental Adventure setting. So how did I do that since it’s not exactly supported by WotC. (Now there are some resources people have created). First we replaced Oriental Adventure for the setting, the feel, I then reskinned various 5e races to their equivalent OA races. I banned elves, halflings, western dwarves, and more as OA gives alternate cool PC ideas. Further I felt the addition of Western Folklore would ruin the vibe I was going for, this was a case of reskin, rename, replace, reimagine but limit options to create the story in a focused way. I kept Dragonborn but all dragons instantly became Asian in style in the game regardless of color. Such handwaves are necessary to create the feel from the DMs descriptions or pictures we show. I watched more than a few old Kung Fu films, the really crazy stuff from the 1970s. I renamed the village to a classic Kung Fu film movie village. I reassigned everything and everyone in the published 5e adventure to OA type creatures and culture. Watching the films as a resource of knowledge allowed me to begin to understand classic Chinese characters, and stereotypes of such characters. I went with the idea Asian Cultures dominate this world, thus Western Society and folklore is not even a thing. I picked classes I could reskin, tweak a bit and represent easily enough. I didn’t worry about game balance or creating changes for every level. I worried about cool ideas from a different cultural perspective and did not attempt to insert too much modern America sensibilities into that. Since everyone were fans of those crazy old Kung Fu movies they completely expected cultural norms to be deferent, certain biases of NPCs to exist, certain stereotypes to exist as well based on films by Chinese for Chinese from that great Gonzo film period of Emperors, Monks, Drunken Masters, Animal Spirit People, Demons, and more.

Anyway in a nut shell that’s how I did it, I looked at what TSR had done and d20 WotC then converted to 5e in the spirit of those crazy films.

It worked great, the play group had fun. Someday I may revisit our little experiment and present more detail. The main point of this post is to encourage you as a GM to say Yes to crazy ideas like playing in the setting your players want. Don’t worry about the nay sayers just do it folks! It is absolutely worth it to experiment, play settings others have irrational biased fits over in their ignorance, and change things for the pure joy of creativity and fun.

Stay Calm And Keep On Playing.

Play the games you want, don’t let others not even at your table bully your table into creative oblivion and joyless existence. 

Have fun folks.