Quote from: Naburimannu on Today at 03:36:39 AMGreat question! I really think of Sinbad as a more swords-and-sandals, Ancient theme.

Orlando Furioso probably has more in common with the French/English stylings than you're looking for, but it's what comes to mind for Medieval - although written in the early sixteenth century - and https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/nfb5co/italian_osr_appendix_n/ might be a relevant Reddit thread, suggesting https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/307020/lo-scrigno-d-avorio.

I'm not super-keen on Historica Arcanum products, but https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metismediarpg/historica-arcanum-era-of-the-crusades-5e does Cairo & Jerusalem. Off the top of my head their other projects are later-period?

The Sinbad stories are set in the 9th century, inspired by naval exploration of that time. That's early medieval - two hundred years before the First Crusade. In the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad movies, he is clearly Islamic with occasional invoking of Allah. And yeah, to S'mon's point - he's mostly sailing around the Arabia and the Indian Ocean, not in the Mediterranean. Fair point.

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Mainstream D&D is centered on England and Tolkien - but pulls in lots of English, Irish, Germanic, and Nordic mythology with a smattering of others. Oriental Adventures mixes together Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and a bit of others.

I'm imagining something that's similarly broad and eclectic but centered in the Mediterranean and Arabia. There was a ton of travel and trade - and exchange of stories - around this region, so I feel like there's a lot of potential for a broad fantasy setting like mainstream D&D or Oriental Adventures, rather than historical or semi-historical in a specific country.

The medieval period was very much centered on the Mediterranean. You don't have Europe without the  Mediterranean and that includes Northern Africa and the Western part of the Middle East.

Even Tolkien had the Numenoreans. Maybe they were supposed to be Phoenicians, but they seemed somewhat Arab like to me, especially the Black ones.

Arabian Sea, yeah, that was different.

There is a very good OSR Arabian-ish book, The Thousand Year Sandglass. It's a self contained setting, literally in a sandglass, and very well done.