African, Arabic, Chinese, other cultural settings and legend

[Surgo]

All the talk (and disgust) about Nyambe: African Adventures made me a bit interested. Are there currently settings, published or semi-published, that fall outside the standard, done-to-death "medieval Europe" (it might not be that way, but you know what I mean) or pseudo-Japanese-influenced setting? I've heard of Al Qadim, but I don't know how faithful this is to 'real' Arabic legends/mythology.*

It seems to me that there's a real dearth of settings outside of the genre I mentoned above, and that there's great potential for some really awesome stuff in the legends and mythologies of places that we're actively ignoring, like the ones mentioned in the topic's title and many more.

* To speak of an "Arabic" mythology is probably a misnomer anyway as there surely are arrays of individual mythologies from various Arabic countries anyway, that region is quite large. The stuff you'll find in the Bible falls under the aegis of Arabic legends, for instance.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's worth reading the old Larry Niven/Steven Barnes 'Dream Park' novels if you can find them. The first one uses New Guinea 'cargo cult' mythology, the second one uses Inuit mythology, and the third one uses Voodoo (chiefly Haitian with African elements); each in an RPG context.

[Username17]

Al Qadim is just a part of the Forgotten Realms where people dress like arabs. It seemed a lot cooler to me when I was 13 than when I go back and look at it now. Maztica is even more dumb.

But that's as may be. The basic answer to your question is that essentially all D&D settings are basically a combination of Tolkien and Ninja Scroll with or without some of the serial numbers having been rubbed off so that one or more group wears name badges which insist that they are from a different culture.

If you want other settings, really different settings, you need to go outside D&D altogether. Hell, even Planescape has basic Tolkien-Euro-Stylings on everything even though it's nominally an infinite worlds setting.

I mean you have just plain weird stuff like Tékumel. Empire of the Petal Throne is in fact not based on Tolkienian stuff. It has the problem of being written as early 70s fantasy, which means that it has secret relic space ships from long ago and shit - like the old X modules for D&D. I honestly haven't checked the 2005 Guardians of Order version.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

A Mike Mignola/Neil Gaiman setting would be interesting.

10% brutal combat/SoD abuse, 80% talk, 10% stand around looking cool. Or thinking you look cool (stupid, stupid Dream... heh)

[Bigode]

But Frank, what'd you mention as a genuinely non-euro(/nipo/sino)centric game, after all? I don't recall any, and know there's none in the Brazilian market*.

*: except for a lovely piece of political satire. Unfortunately, it of course isn't as satirical as it should.

[Crissa]

Yano, eliminating Modern, European, and Asian game settings kinda eliminates 90% of the gaming population.

Just because I grew up with Native American stories doesn't mean I have a clue how to make them into roleplaying games worth playing. And I figure that goes for the majority of gamers, so... That leaves precious few who'd write about something 'else'.

-Crissa

[Surgo]

That explains why barely anything is written, but it would hardly eliminate the gaming population. As with anything else the idea is that you can pick up the setting book/article, read it, and understand the setting. Just like any other setting.

Of course, you're absolutely correct about there being few writers for that. Hence why it seems like an awfully unexplored area with a lot of potential.

[Prak]

I think there's one other reason why there's a serious lack of non-euro/tolkein rpgs...

the ever present concern of being not-pc...

I remember reading an editorial in dragon from one of the creators of Al Quadim worrying about calling it that, and worrying about whether or not he'd piss off the arabs.

even though 30 years later they're all pissed off at one thing or another anyway...

[Crissa]

Yes, well, they're not much for remembering their own mythology. Strict Islamic adherence forbids representations of fictional people or making art that has faces or figures in it.

Which is a serious bummer.

Other religions and cultures have taboos that lead to the same problem.

-Crissa

[Prak]

well, islamic myth isn't the arab world I'd want to play in anyway, I'd much rather play in pre-islamic arabia. They can keep muhammed faceless and threaten danish cartoonists, I want my djnn and desert demons.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I want to do a game in a setting geographically and architecturally inspired by the Arabian Peninsula. Plantations of date palms, onion-domed mosques and palaces, lots of camels. I'll focusing on the Red Sea coast near my Mecca stand-in.

But I'm not sure how closely I should stick to modelling actual Islam. I know I want spirits of smokeless fire to be a thing, but I want a range of more primitive flame elementals in addition to Jinn. It'd probably also be a good idea to make society more egalitarian.

Any advice on particular time periods to draw inspiration from, or general cultural changes that would be good for the game?

[Harshax]

Al Qadim was kind of radical in its time in a lot of ways and you can see where the game was constrained by the sacred cows of D&D. It definitely owed much of its inspiration to Hollywood movies, but there was definitely a shit ton of not racism to be found in the game.

There were still elves and dwarves and gnomes and halflings, but there wasn't inherent racism against the humanoid races. You could encounter goblins and gnolls in cities and they weren't inherently evil. I dropped all the standard races and replaced them with magic-crafter goblins, nomadic hyena-like gnolls, ogres. There were more but that was a long time ago.

Al Qadim had two dominate monocultures. The nomads and the urban population. They were dependent on one another, but had distinctly different value systems. Not being part of those cultures or recognizing the pantheon made you an outsider or monster.

It's been a while, but religion was handled quite differently then any other D&D product before it. The game tried to create a sudo pre-muslim polytheism. Clerics were defined by their personal relationship to the pantheon(s), so you were either an Ethoist, a Moralist, or a Fundamentalist. I forget the mechanical differences.

The magic system was a little wacked. So much effort to divide spells by elemental influence instead of the traditional schools, but if Water spells don't include some kind of healing your dichotomy isn't going to fly with me. Then again, you could play the sha'ir which was an awesome magic-user kit with a pet djinni that fetched spells from other planes at your behest. It was harder to get a divine spell, but it was possible. Eventually you could enslave major djinn, planar travel, or even request an audience with the grand vizier in the City of Brass. It was a difficult and weak class compared to a mage with a full complement of spells, so you had to be tricksy which was a major thematic element of the kit.

There were rules for making clockwork harryhausen automata too.

[mean_liar]

If I have the time, I create a list of setting must-haves, then use that to frame a system's cosmology, then foundational creation story, then theological interpretations, then cultural interpretations. The process usually affords a solid principles-first approach to settings that's abstract enough to generate new things but undergirded enough to be constrained into predictable bounds.

You want an egalitarian society and fire elementals. Okay, that probably means prominent heroes/gods divorced from orthodox gender norms, and a land where an all-powerful god created all living things and a collection of spirits to watch over them.

I think you don't need a large amount of legwork like I spelled out in the initial paragraph. Start from a historic period's Islam, read some Wikipedia, and pick out some high points. Gender-swap about half of the names you run across and really boil things down to whatever you read that grabs you.

I think that historical modeling leads to fun games. Wikipedia and its external references and links are a great resource for campaigns; I think the best advice is to not only distill out whatever you think are high points, but to actively resist the idea that things have to conform to history. Making up "just so" stories that hit whatever historical adjustments you want (like egalitarianism/gender-swapping) as well as incorporate the high points you've picked out (tribal allegiance in the face of religious calls for peace and unanimity as a plot point and six other Big Ideas) is sufficient; no need to keep going back to the well of history for more detail when you can probably link stuff together on your own well enough to keep an RPG interesting.

[OgreBattle]

How to implement a Far East setting:

-Talk about honor a lot
-Ritual suicide is a thing
-Some NPC (or PC even) is descended from a dragon
-Have a scene where you walk through a bamboo grove and then when the fight occurs describe a blade cutting the bamboo behind its target that just dodged


How to implement a Middle East setting:
-Scimitars
-Genies
-At least one plot hook involving a greedy merchant
-A scene where you are glad to find an oasis after almost dying in the desert

[Stahlseele]

Depends on what time period you want to play in.
South America with the Aztecs and others has such a rich culturual background that you'd be pretty hard pressed to not find something awesome in there, if you are not playing in modern times.

Egypt is classically boring, but at least people usually have more of an inkling about that than about south america . .

North America with the native americans and their folklore of their spirits, the different tribes etc. would also make for such a rich environment, but people are unlikely to want to play the other side in cowboys and indians i guess?

How about Greece for example? It probably has the "best known" mythology.

Germanic/northern Europe with the Wikings and their Pantheon of Gods and mythological Monsters and Trolls and Dorfs is closer to what most people expect Fantasy to be like i guess, but it is not just knights and castles and shit.

What about Rome? Join the Legion, see exotic places and try to conquer them!

Scotland, Ireland and Britain?
Before the Romans that is?

[Sarandosil]

well, islamic myth isn't the arab world I'd want to play in anyway, I'd much rather play in pre-islamic arabia. They can keep muhammed faceless and threaten danish cartoonists, I want my djnn and desert demons.

That's not pre-Islamic. Not exclusively anyway, Jinn are mentioned in the Quran and are a part of totally mainstream Islam pretty much everywhere.

Yano, eliminating Modern, European, and Asian game settings kinda eliminates 90% of the gaming population.

Just because I grew up with Native American stories doesn't mean I have a clue how to make them into roleplaying games worth playing. And I figure that goes for the majority of gamers, so... That leaves precious few who'd write about something 'else'.

-Crissa

I feel the same way about Islamic mythology. It seems ripe for picking ideas out of, but I've never had much motivation to do so, aside from the occasional influence, nor do I know would to do that in any not crappy way.

---------

As an aside, I've never read Al-Qadim. But for years I read it as though that was a short I in the name, meaning something like "the approaching." The approaching what? That was a name that was intriguing. Then I found out it was supposed to be Al-Qadeem, which means something like the ancient, and then the setting suddenly sounded a million times more boring.

[Sarandosil]

Apparently this is an ancient thread resurrected, great

[Prak]

Yeah, I get the feeling that Islam is the monotheistic religion with the strongest ties to it's polytheistic origin, possibly because it was more of "Ok you fuckers, the moon god has told me to stop worshipping everyone else because he's the one true god, and I'm his chosen profit, so get on board or get dying," than "Ok, so there's new god who talked to me while I was out in the desert dying of dehydration. He totally saved me, guys! We should worship him."

[Kaelik]

Yeah, I get the feeling that Islam is the monotheistic religion with the strongest ties to it's polytheistic origin, possibly because it was more of "Ok you fuckers, the moon god has told me to stop worshipping everyone else because he's the one true god, and I'm his chosen profit, so get on board or get dying," than "Ok, so there's new god who talked to me while I was out in the desert dying of dehydration. He totally saved me, guys! We should worship him."

Except for that is exactly the fucking origin of Judaism and thus Christianity.

You might be confusing time wince origin with actual origin.

[Mistborn]

Prak just f.y.i the whole "Muslims actually worship the moon god" thing is a meme associated batshit insane Christians like Jack Chick, so tread carefully with that.

[Prak]

Fair on both counts. I learned the moon god origin thing in a class on religion and mythology. Which is not to say it's actually correct, but I tend to forget it's also a thing batshit christians say.

Edit: I also just fucking flatout forgot that Judaism was started by one of the like 13 tribes saying to the others "Hey, our dude is totes legit. Worship him." Because I'm an idiot.

[souran]

Islam is a mashup of 7th century arabian peninsula folk religion with a greatest hits versions of (7th century) judiasm and christianity. It was helped along by being a not the religion of the peoples who had previously been in the Roman empire as even 2 centuries after the collapse of the western empire Rome was not popular with on the peninsula. In many ways Islam is like a 5 century old version of Mormonism.

[zugschef]

What's essential for understanding Islam, is that it's a practical religion. One of its intents was regulating everyday lives. The coran is among other things a code of law. There's stuff about regulating property boundaries, etc.

[silva]

Sorcerers of Ur-Turuk kickstarter is up now. The game setting seems based on persian myths and legends:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/20 ... f-ur-turuk

[Starmaker]

What's essential for understanding Islam, is that it's a practical religion. One of its intents was regulating everyday lives. The coran is among other things a code of law. There's stuff about regulating property boundaries, etc.

[insert obligatory insult] All non-newage religions intend to regulate everyday lives of at least their adherents and frequently of everyone else. It's just that historical accident and geopolitical peculiarities made it so that many current theocracies happen to be Islamic. The reason why a convicted rapist in the US has to go to secular prison and doesn't have the option to pay $300 and marry the victim isn't because rape laws are not in the Bible (they are), it's because the US is not a theocracy (yet).