Robofrance 29

Lately I have been doing some reading in the history and culture of the Northwest Native Americans (Mostly Western Washington up to Alaska), and in the process integrating some bits into my DCCRPG campaign. The Tlingit culture and surrounding cultures make for an interesting 'ecosystem' setting.

Quote from: Madprofessor;955377Anyway, Pete Nash's "Rome" Monograph for BRP is recommended, especially if you are not a historian.  It is densely packed with useful historical info useful for gaming in ancient Rome, and it is pretty system neutral.  If you are a historian of the ancient world (many of whom are gamers), it might be a bit redundant, but it is still a great read.

Thanks for the recommendation, the African adventure sounds awesome.

I think it would be cool to adapt Orson Scott Card's Mormon fantasy version of pre-contact North America in books like Seventh Son and Red Prophet in the Tales of Alvin Maker series.

Quote from: Voros;955450I think it would be cool to adapt Orson Scott Card's Mormon fantasy version of pre-contact North America in books like Seventh Son and Red Prophet in the Tales of Alvin Maker series.

They could fight the Xenu aliens from Scientology

Quote from: DavetheLost;954442Vulmea is right. A post-Contact Americas played as Post Apocalypse setting would be something new and different, but it might be hard to find players.

I'm planning something like this.

Colonial Brazil, january 1641: Portugal just got independent from the Habsburg-controlled Spain (Iberian Union went from 1580, after King Sebastian of Portugal disappeared during the battle of Alcácer-Quibir in Morocco, to 1640, with the rise of the Brigantine dinasty). The portuguese-controlled lands (Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Porto Seguro) depends on sugarcane plantations. Lots of petty noble landholders and bureaucrats. Also some crypto-jews and outlaws.

The Dutch controlled a vast area in the Brazilian northeast, with Maurisstadt as capital. Lots of jews, artists and artisans around.

The african kingdom of Palmares was a rising power in the northeastern hinterlands (in 1670 there were 50 thousand runaway slaves in Palmares). Smaller settlements of runaway slaves existed pretty much everywhere, but not for long.

In the southeastern uplands (around what is São Paulo city today) there were numerous villages largely inhabited by people of mixed portuguese-Tupi descent (whom I'll probably call brasilianos), nominally catholic but tupi-speaking (ah, the Jesuits!), who raised cattle, raided native tribes for slaves, and explored the brazilian central plateau looking for gold and diamonds, and who kinda despised the "european portuguese" (whom they call Emboabas, the feathered-feet, because they wore boots).

And, of course, there were still native people around: the Tupis all along the coastline, the Guaranis in southern Brazil and Paraguay (who were strongly influenced by the Jesuitic missions), and the Jê-speaking hunter-gatherers in the drier hinterlands.



Then, all of a sudden, the ships from the Old World stopped arriving. Chaos ensues. Technology is slowly being lost, as Portugal have put heavy restrictions on manufacture in its colonies. Plantations are abandoned, as there is nowhere to send its products.

Right now I'm trying to decide how long after the loss of contact I'll set up the beginning of the campaign, and how the political and economical landscape will look like. Also, trying to decide which kind of adventures I could present to the players. I'm inclined to go heavy on politicking: the portuguese trying to assert their power over the brasilianos and african former slaves, with the help of some Tupi tribes (with whom they made several alliances since the first contact) and maybe the Dutch. But who knows whether the Dutch would go along with this, or rather seek the alliance of Palmares, or even the Brasilianos, to strike down the portuguese?

Also, it will feature low-level magic and mythology.

(Actually, there was this brazilian RPG, "O Desafio dos Bandeirantes", published around 1991 or 92, with a fairly similar premise. The system was terrible, though)

Quote from: SapaInca;955464(Actually, there was this brazilian RPG, "O Desafio dos Bandeirantes", published around 1991 or 92, with a fairly similar premise. The system was terrible, though)

It does have good setting and background information, if I remember correctly - I used it as a resource for my Flashing Blades campaign a few years back.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955506It does have good setting and background information, if I remember correctly - I used it as a resource for my Flashing Blades campaign a few years back.

Yes; even though it was not strictly historical, the feeling of the setting was pretty close to what was going on in south america in the 17th century.

Quote from: Tristram Evans;955460They could fight the Xenu aliens from Scientology

I think we may have a hit idea there.

Quote from: Black Vulmea;955402Yes and no. Sure, Bolivia isn't the United States, but Butch and Sundance still find banks to rob. I think it's the blend of exotic and familiar that would make 'Wild West Australia' appealing.

Another idea for a setting is Central America and the Caribbean during the 19th century: filibusters, Knights of the Golden Circle, banana republics, generally taking over tropical countries for fun and profit.

Now I wonder what is the topic that made the Knights of the Golden Circle to start a filibuster in a banana republic and how it will help them to take over, but it's bound to be a fun scenario;)!

Quote from: Tristram Evans;954592Ancient Babylon or Summeria, even heavily fantasized, seems like an era nearly untouched by RPGs and rife with possibilities.



God kings passing on programmable knowledge of civilization to the populace. The Ziggurat of Ur. Lu-Gals (Giant-man military kings). Lagash and the 62 Lamentation Priests. Apsu, the reverse-world beneath the primordial sea that gave birth to Tiamat. Marduk, slayer of the Old Gods. Erishkigal, chaos queen of the underworld. Anunnaki space-gods.

I was just about to say "something Mesopotamian". AFAIK, Puerta de Istar is like that, but it's only available in Spanish.

Quote from: Premier;955984I was just about to say "something Mesopotamian". AFAIK, Puerta de Istar is like that, but it's only available in Spanish.

There is a LULU title I just bought called Blood and Bronze set in a mythological Mesopotamia. It's pretty minimal in both rules and setting, but I'm a sucker for anything in the ancient world.  And didn't Necromancer games have a d20 Mesopotamia supplement that was supposed to be pretty good?

Quote from: Madprofessor;955987There is a LULU title I just bought called Blood and Bronze set in a mythological Mesopotamia. It's pretty minimal in both rules and setting, but I'm a sucker for anything in the ancient world.  And didn't Necromancer games have a d20 Mesopotamia supplement that was supposed to be pretty good?

A couple of years ago I bought Necromancer's Ancient Kingdoms: Mesopotamia on the strength of that reputation, and *loathed* it. Here's the review I posted on DTRPG:

QuoteQuite the disappointment. I'd heard good things about this as a setting, but it's only 1/4th poorly-edited setting material, with its game rules not power-balanced anywhere near where a sensible or typical 3.5 campaign would be (in my view). One canonically bad edit: the map doesn't contain half the cities described, and half the cities on the map aren't described. Two regions are given random encounter tables - but why? Again, one of them isn't even labeled on the map, although its general vicinity is alluded to in the text. Why those regions and not any of the many others? The book is heinously inconsistent; in just three paragraphs about the legal systems of Mesopotamia it manages to completely contradict itself. Editing matters!

The remaining 3/4ths is an adventure which at least tries to lay out a sandbox. It fails for classical 3e statblock bloat reasons. For example, the nominal homebase gets one page of description. The faction most commonly met there, who presumably will be the source of most social interactions, still has more space allocated to statblocks and combat statistics than description and hooks. The next faction, the Brotherhood of Kalab, gets three pages: half a page of art, a third of a page of description, a quarter-page of adventure hooks, and 2 pages of detailed combat statistics.

Any setting influenced by the real world that doesn't provide a bibliography or suggested readings loses a star in my book, dropping this from POOR to outright BAD. They allude to so many things in their setting, but leave me to start from scratch when I want to better understand the history to bring them into my campaign.

I meant to reply to this days ago but I fell down a rabbit hole when I started looking up the Mongol Invasion of Rus' partly because I have a big binder with my family history which goes back the settlement of Kievan Rus by the Varangian Prince Oleg of Novgorod. The rabbit hole went deep, even looking up things like how Old Norse loanwords got into the Russian language because the Kievans originally spoke an Eastern Dialect of Old Norse before they were nativized into speakers of Old East Slavic. The main suggestion here though isn't the Viking Proto Ukrainians but the Mongol Empire and the Expansion thereof in the 13th century. Yes I was reminded of this thread from Pundit's recent Break article.

The Expansion Period covers almost the entire 13th Century so you have a good amount of leeway to work with. Still, the Invasion of Rus would make for some good authentic gaming, and the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223 might be a good place to start.

Quote from: Krimson;956539Still, the Invasion of Rus would make for some good authentic gaming, and the Battle of the Kalka River in 1223 might be a good place to start.

One of my two favorite scenes in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible is the siege of Kazan, so you could also approach this from the other direction, with the Russians pushing back Tatars, Nogais &c in the 16th century.