I think one of the reasons D&D has historically struggled breaking with a really Eurocentric model is that it doesn’t really believe in cultural differences just alignment ones so most of the porting is using “title equivalents” and having heroes still be PMCs/Knights

Like just starting with: knights are the product of several extremely weird feudal systems plus a romanticized literary tradition in the DNA of mainstream fantasy (similar to cowboys). But for all the grail quest mysticism and code of arm in literature: knights aren’t romantic?

So knights were specialized heavy cavalry that were really useful for warfare for a period of time (without acknowledging changes in warfare while the role crystallized). They’re also “nobility” because they have the capital to maintain horses, armed men, etc. and pay tithe

Knights were also protected against most conventional arms by heavy armor (costly) until they weren’t (crossbow and pike tactics at the latest). But if something is symbolic and you save it for a rout and have a literary saint tradition for them they stick around, kinda redundant

They’re like cowboys in that they were a really big part of the USAian mythos but their function as isolated law representative was emphasized over “Indian killer,” “bounty hunter” and “hired muscle.” Narcos are a lot more like modern cowboys and not as positively fetishized

Samurai, as specialty retained military units with special legal status, obviously look like a corollary when you zoom out but the differences of culture and situation and the role of church and state are very different—also anthropology’s fetish for Japanese orientalism matters

Like D&D is set in a era made up of cities with nominally appointee or elected officials with unclear duties, specialist mercantile production and a huge arms and agrarian based economy and a confusing trade system with smugglers and slavery but laws around that are unclear

It’s weirdly a sort of gestalt of quasi European Middle Ages/Renaissance, the myths of the United States frontier and like the disenchantment/last war era feelings of Tolkien with a lot of existential threats with centralized enough decision making you can cut the head off

TSR explicitly was against games wherein players encounter corrupt institutions—its a lot of the nostalgia for a simpler time I’d say is overt in Hickman which replaced the account wargaming rules plus strong excitement about role exploration—D&D wants a ‘Europe’ without baggage

In D&D you never are a specialized soldier betraying your country’s colonial projects—if OA had taken on something like the colonization of Manchuria, the abuses of Korea by Imperial Japan or the Imperial pursuit of a Japanese monostate it would look a lot different

In the same way the quasi Europe of D&D doesn’t have a Schism of 1054, or millenarian peasant movements or poaching conflicts over “private” wild spaces owned by royalty or conflicts over Jews or much to say about the replacement birth rate vs peasant deaths via monster attacks

All the mining is suspiciously the same while I’m at it? Prices are only adjusted urban vs rural and food is more expensive in rural rather than urban areas which maybe would be an interesting food politics if someone wanted to make a module about export food economics & famine