Valachan and real world counterpart

[Ail]

Hi all,

for a long time, Valachan has been one of the domains I most disliked in Ravenloft, along with Hazlan and Vechor (to mention only the Core). But one of these days, reading Von Kharkov's history again, I realised that his domain could be likened to some real world south-african country and this would redeem it in my eyes, for I do miss some negro-african inspired domain. It's not the Wildlands exactly, nor the tropical beliefs of Souragne. It's more like the wide open savannah, the zulu dances, the savage warriors battling for survival in the desert sun and against the dangerous predators.
Von Kharkov's name does not suggest this at all, so I may be wide off my mark. Also, I've usually cared so little about Valachan that I really don't know what is the general feel of the land, but could this fit? Could Valachan's inhabitants be mostly physical negroes like those of Bantu or Zulu ethnies?

As an afterthought, if I came to use Valachan in that way, I'd name Von Kharkov rather Van something....

Ail

Thanks all.

[Fido]

Giving him a Van X name could make him some kind of Dutch settler or something. That wóuld be quite nice...

[Ail]

Giving him a Van X name could make him some kind of Dutch settler or something. That wóuld be quite nice...

That was the idea

[ScS of the Fraternity]

Just a heads up, Ail, but be careful which words you use.
I don't know how it goes in Europe, but in North America (where most of our members are from), the N_ word was abandoned for its racist, derogaotry connotations.
I certainly don't detect any racism, and there are certainly more offensive words than that - but in the interest of sensitivity, I would ask you to edit your post.
Beside which, clarity is always key.
When you mean African, just say African. Its not as if your talking about Australian aboriginees, or people from the Carribean.

PS : did you just get a new avatar?

[Jasper]

Just a heads up, Ail, but be careful which words you use.
I don't know how it goes in Europe, but in North America (where most of our members are from), the N_ word was abandoned for its racist, derogaotry connotations.
I certainly don't detect any racism, and there are certainly more offensive words than that - but in the interest of sensitivity, I would ask you to edit your post.
Beside which, clarity is always key.
When you mean African, just say African. Its not as if your talking about Australian aboriginees, or people from the Carribean.

PS : did you just get a new avatar?

As Ali is from Portugal I bealeve it was purely inocent. Negro, while degrading into the derogitive term, is merely the word Black in Portuguese.
When he says negro-african he means the areas populated by the dark skinned peoples (IE The Black Africa) as opposed to the light skined areas such as Egypt and Arabia.



Now my 2.4 cents is that Valchan would do best as a land between Sri Raji and the wildlands. The placement would reflect the Barons curse- To one side is the hight of civilization. Large cities, schools, theater. Ravenlofts verson of the hight of the British colonial era to tempt the Barons human side. On the other is the deepest darkest primordial jungle. All the dark howls and warm winds carrying the invitings scents to enflame his animal side.

[Scipion_Emilien]

Look at the authors comments in this site about gaz4, you ll see that Valachan was inspire by the australian colonisation and has some south America inspiration too.

Personnally I found Valachan a great domain with the exterior baron that try to get power from another culture of people interesting and a challenge worth it for players without them having strong lvl. Im rather curious why people doesn't like him.

[The Giamarga]

About the Von/Van thing, there were also lots of German colonists in either africa or australia afaik.

I once wanted to delve into Von Kharkovs backstory too and try to reconstruct something from his Forgotten Realms roots. The wizard who transformed him was a Thayan right? I'm not sure what Realmian human racial stock Kharkov's description suggests... I'll see if i can dig up my notes.

PS: Here's a link to the author's comments in the Parlor

[Ivana_Boritsi]

Me personally, I like the portrayal of Valachan in Guide to the Mists. Especially Baron Von Kharkov's appearance.

[Samael Hands of Stone]

Just a heads up, Ail, but be careful which words you use.
I don't know how it goes in Europe, but in North America (where most of our members are from), the N_ word was abandoned for its racist, derogaotry connotations.
I certainly don't detect any racism, and there are certainly more offensive words than that - but in the interest of sensitivity, I would ask you to edit your post.
Beside which, clarity is always key.
When you mean African, just say African. Its not as if your talking about Australian aboriginees, or people from the Carribean.

PS : did you just get a new avatar?

Ummm, hate to perpetuate here boys and girls but I thought you might want to know that there's actually nothing derogatory about the word 'negro', in fact it is thought by some members of the black community as a term of empowerment and liberation from the other not-so-empowering N-word that we are all familiar with. Then again, I can certainly understand the attention to detail as a moderator, and therefore I do see the importance of pointing this out. Well done sir.

But, like Levar Burton says, don't take my word for it:

Definitions of negro on the Web:

* Black: a person with dark skin who comes from Africa (or whose ancestors came from Africa)
* relating to or characteristic of or being a member of the traditional racial division of mankind having brown to black pigmentation and tightly curled hair
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

* Negro means the color black in both Spanish and Portuguese languages, being derived from the Latin word niger of the same meaning.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negro

* The term used to refer to blacks of African origin. Related to the Spanish word for black, Negro, and the term used to describe African races, Negroid, Negro was in common use into the 1960s. The Black power and Black pride movements popularized the preferred term Afro-American during the late 1960s (Malcolm X had objected to Martin Luther King, Jr.'s use of the term Negro, proposing instead Afro- American). "African-American" emerged later, as did Native-American, Asian-American, etc.
pbsvideodb.pbs.org/resources/civilwar/primary/glossry.html



PS Valachan rocks

[Gemathustra]

Ummm, hate to perpetuate here boys and girls but I thought you might want to know that there's actually nothing derogatory about the word 'negro', in fact it is thought by some members of the black community as a term of empowerment and liberation from the other not-so-empowering N-word that we are all familiar with. Then again, I can certainly understand the attention to detail as a moderator, and therefore I do see the importance of pointing this out. Well done sir.

Do note that the use of the term "negro" evolved into a rather derogatory term in the United States back in the 19th Century.
While, yes, it is true that the derogatory form of "negro" has been revitalized among various members of the African American community as something of a pet-term or play-insult, many prefer that it only be used only within the African American community, and some are still hypersensitive of its use outside the African American community.
In one case, a man in Washington DC was overheard using the word "niggardly," a term meaning "miserly," and was promptly sued by the eavesdropper.
In other words, the staff of this establishment do not want to be sued.

[Dion of the Fraternity]

Getting back to the topic...

I realised that his domain could be likened to some real world south-african country

Valachan's rough real-world equivalent is (geographically and ethnically) pre-Gold Rush California, (linguistically) Scandinavia. It's personally a very interesting mix-up, of sorts.

[Ail]

Just a heads up, Ail, but be careful which words you use.
I don't know how it goes in Europe, but in North America (where most of our members are from), the N_ word was abandoned for its racist, derogaotry connotations.
I certainly don't detect any racism, and there are certainly more offensive words than that - but in the interest of sensitivity, I would ask you to edit your post.
Beside which, clarity is always key.
When you mean African, just say African. Its not as if your talking about Australian aboriginees, or people from the Carribean.

PS : did you just get a new avatar?

Well, please, since I began all this let me just say my defense. I am not aware of the subtleties of the words in the American world. As an international user of the language, I was aware of the word 'nigger' and understood that should be derrogatory because it seems a corruption of 'negro', but that's all. In Portugal, there was a bit more of senstivity about that a few years ago, but 'Negro' was the preferred word as opposed to 'Preto'. 'Preto' is actually the most common word for the colour 'black' and also the most common for the race, but since 'negro' is a more erudite word for the colour, coming from Latin and all, it came to be thought of as 'kindlier' to the race, although that notion should be disturning. I had a black friend indeed who simply thought the same of both: they're merely descriptive, and should not be thought of as something else. I am also called 'white', merely another colour description.
Now, given this background, I chose 'negro' in opposition to 'black' because I thought that, like here in Portugal, it would sound less harming to some people, though the very notion of one of those terms being possibly offensive is worrying in itself, so it would probably even be more harmful if I had added a note saying 'the word Negro here is used without any derogatory meaning'.

Now, why do I make the distinction? Indeed, as was pointed down here, there are many different racial stocks in Africa, and I am really interested in the Black Africa, from the tropical (rainforest) area southwards. North Africa is mostly Berbere, Arabian and probably other races I don't know. There are races in the Namibia desert (to the south of the rain forest) that are lighter skinned and much slimmer than the Bantu ethnic stock. And I was pinpointing a very specific flavour: the races that gave origin to the Afro-American communitites, the ones that historically were exploited in slavery. Not by any condescence or feel of reparation or some 'completeness in Ravenloft-zeal' (I'm totally against the idea that wants to have representatives of all communities and sexual tendencies in every film, for instance) but because I think there is much potential in the primitive magic and purity of myths of those peoples, in the fear of the jungle (you know, the Wildlands don't have human settlers ), and at the same time in the astounding beauty of the open wide savannah, the magnificent sunsets, the vastness of the landscape humbling the human kind. At the same time, you've got survival in a different environment than Vorostokov. The jungles of Sri Raji, on the other hand, are too lush for this, they do not have the same feel at all, they're claustrophobic and oppulent.

I agree this Valachan could be in the Verdurous Lands, but I wouldn't like it because I did not (and do not) want to mix it with the South-Asian flavour. It's something else entirely.

Ail

P.S.: Well, yes, I got a new Avatar.... You see, that guy is called Alexi, and I am Alex, and I also don't like monstrous or clearly evil avatars. I wanted to choose something that could somehow relate to me, and a name was probably the best link. Oh, I'm also fond of Celtic mythology too... That helped a bit...

[ScS of the Fraternity]

Bah!

Here I was, afraid someone might see one word and think we might be a racist board, and now I have revealed a much worse problem!
We're all a bunch of intellectual, over-educated liberals!
Oh, the shame, the shame of it all!
And just a note about the "niggardly" story - I don't know about an eavesdropping lawsuit, but I do know that the executive was fired for his remakrs, and later successfuly sued for wrongful termination.


In any case, I agree that Valachan should not be out in the Verdurous Lands. There's ntohing really tropical about it.
I would say, however, that I wasn't too happy about the Gaz's interpretation of Valachan.
I always had the idea that Valachan was supposed to be the "plain" domain - a place that has little flavour, but succintly demonstrated what a domain and a darklord were supposed to be like. I assumed that valachan was the place where you could dump the PCs for a battle against the Lord of the domain and actually let them win without frigging up the whole system.

[Undead Cabbage]

Here I was, afraid someone might see one word and think we might be a racist board, and now I have revealed a much worse problem!
We're all a bunch of intellectual, over-educated liberals!

Of course we are, what is this, an ebberon forum?

[Samael Hands of Stone]

Here I was, afraid someone might see one word and think we might be a racist board, and now I have revealed a much worse problem!
We're all a bunch of intellectual, over-educated liberals!

Of course we are, what is this, an ebberon forum?

lol

Valachan, while not a domain I have ever adventured in or used in my campaigns does have some interesting characteristics to it. I always saw it as kind of a early Dutch settlement (maybe South Africa) with an added element of that movie with John Travolta White Man's Burden (a segragation-reversal story). The one thing that always threw me off was the physical description of the average Valachani, dark skin with straight hair (weird). It can work suppose.