New Spotify Playlist: DnD Eastern

Here's another new Spotify playlist to fill your RPG session audio needs: DnD Eastern! If you have a martial arts dojo, a cherry blossom festival, or a pagoda dungeon, the typical fantasy playlists just aren't going to cut it. This playlist was made with those East Asian "inspired" regions and encounters in mind. Still, "East Asia" isn't a monolith, and there are wildly different genres musical traditions at play depending on which cultures you're borrowing from. If you care enough about the exact cultural flavor you're applying to a given adventure, I highly recommend putting on a more focused playlist: "traditional koto," "traditional guzheng" or "traditional gamelan" might do the trick.

Instead, for this playlist, I tried to get a sampling of a lot of different East Asian music styles, focusing primarily on Chinese and Japanese cinematic and game music, but dipping into some world fusion and also traditional recordings as well. This should fill a variety of niches in a campaign. 

In one of my campaigns, wood elves are currently thriving on a pseudo-Japanese island, replete with temples and shrines, halls of study for various art forms, and a thriving martial arts scene. I tried to be self-aware enough to avoid cobbling together offensive stereotypes, and ultimately I ended up incorporating as many of my own weird lore details as those borrowed from Japanese culture (a lake full of booze, a silent tavern, and a museum soirée to name a few). It IS possible to borrow influence from world cultures other than your own respectfully and creatively. If you have doubts, questions, or concerns about cultural appropriation in TTRPGs (and music, for that matter), let's chat about it in the comments! It's something I care a lot about, and there's not always an easy answer.

In either case, I've added this to the master Spotify Playlist post, so if you haven't dug around there yet, go give it a look!