D20 Arabia - D&D in Saudi Arabia

by Omar published 2019/02/19 11:32:00 GMT-8, last modified 2022-11-12T08:45:35-08:00
RPGs and nerd culture in Saudi Arabia

Just found out that a new board game cafe that includes weekly D&D. They are the first of their kind in my city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. They provide fully instructive games to any new players and are trying to popularise Dungeons & Dragons in Saudi Arabia. I tried to get into an introductory game just to see what they're like, but they're fully booked, unfortunately. They have a twitter that is very passionate about D&D and they were announcing that they plan on hosting a LARP fully in Arabic.

Jeddah is no stranger to nerd culture. Some of my oldest memories as a kid include Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, and Beyblade tournaments. Anime was one of the biggest forms of entertainment. captain Tsubasa named captain Majid over here was one of the biggest cultural moments of my youth. UFO Robot Grendizer was one of the most popular reruns during the 80s. Cartoon channels had mostly western cartoons (Tom and Jerry, Felix the cat, looney tunes) and a lot of anime (Case Closed was particularly popular; called Detective Conan in the Middle East).

Below are the twitter and website for an Arabian group that is dedicated to promoting D&D in the Middle East.

https://twitter.com/d20arabia?lang=en

d20arabia.com

About the Author

Omar is a member of the RPG Research staff in the role of research assistant.

He has been with RPG Research since August 2018. He is volunteer number 32 of more than 55 RPG Research volunteers worldwide.

He resides in Saudi Arabia but travels frequently around world.

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Hawke Robinson
Hawke Robinson says:
Feb 26, 2019 09:39 AM
Some resources on Arabic LARP in Palestine:
About with video: http://www.baitbyout.org/?f[…]3cNT51u-mxz8JhgKk99xI11tXxw

And their LARP Manual in Arabic: http://www.baitbyout.org/wp[…]qTkhqoSWIrFYmvpu6s5eCo-pEJA
Daniel Aguiar
Daniel Aguiar says:
Feb 28, 2019 04:26 PM
I've watched the video on Bait Byout and must say I am impressed! The fact that an organisation with 50 volunteers can accomplish that makes me really hopeful for the future of the project. I'm also impressed with the themes they were addressing through LARP, some which I would be very reticent to even allude to in a game, how do they manage to keep things civil?

The dynamics portrayed reminded me a lot about my theatre course, with the physical and team-building activities therein, as well as the Leadership course I took in Stanford. I still need to distil my experience there in a blogpost of my own. It's interesting to see the trend of participatory, experiential learning take off in its various forms.