How Dungeons and Dragons Appropriated the Orient

In 1985 the “official” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons supplement Oriental Adventures was released to critical and commercial success. It is clear that Oriental Adventures revels in what cultural theorist Edward Said refers to as orientalism—away of reducing the complexity of eastern culture to a set of problematically racist and sexist stereotypes. This essay explores how orientalism was schematized as a set of game rules in Dungeons & Dragons and argues that we can observe how the affiliated racist and sexist attitudes are articulated within the game’s procedural logic.