Editing Kara-Tur (section)

===Forced Low Fantasy===
Let's be honest; anyone with eyes can see that TSR was kind of obsessed with [[Low Fantasy]]. But the so-called "[[Ethnic Fantasy]]" got it worst, with Kara-Tur setting the precedent for basically taking it to the extent of making the setting Historical Fiction in a paper hat. Kara-Tur, despite being based on Chinese/Japanese/Korean fantasy, is incredibly low-magic; the presence of the [[Spirit Folk]], [[Korobokuru]] and [[Hengeyokai]] is treated as something mysterious and wonderful, a pool that lengthens the bather's lifespan to a century is a whispered-about miracle, and the most powerful defense of the Forbidden City is that it has an aura that dispels levitation.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. [[Low Fantasy]] has its fans, and just because it's "Oriental" Fantasy doesn't mean it ''has'' to look like Inuyasha or Naruto (even if it would have been nice to have the ''option'' for that kind of [[wuxia]] campaign)... but the problem is, Kara-Tur isn't an isolated setting. Not even literally. It's supposed to be part of the motherfucking '''[[Forgotten Realms]]'''... y'know, TSR's official [[Heroic Fantasy]]/High Magic setting? As in, the world where non-humans races are regularly interacting with humans, potions of longevity are pretty well-established, and even average mansions tend to be outfitted with stuff like scrying-blockers, invisibility blockers and astral wards? Even when it was written for human-centric and sword-and-sorcery-themed [[Greyhawk]], Kara-Tur would have seemed kind of out of place thematically, but as literally the eastern half of the same continent as the Sword Coast and the Dalelands, it just looks ridiculous.

To give TSR credit for it, they did  learn from the mistakes of Kara-Tur and [[The Horde]]. [[Maztica]], the only other [[Ethnic Fantasy]] subsetting of the Realms, actually made the ineffectualness of local magic a plotpoint, as it literally justified a small Amnish fleet kicking the ass of the not-[[Aztec]]s. And [[Al-Qadim]], on the other hand, just said "screw that shit" and made itself as magical as the rest of the Realms, justifying its unusual ''flavors'' of local magic as "[[genie]]s are everywhere, and they are ''dicks''".