Ethno-Fantasy Setting (Ramble Warning)

[Brimshack]

Notes Toward a Campaign Setting or Two:

Okay, so I've been interested in working concepts from non-standard cultural backgrounds into fantasy gaming for some time. Roughly speaking, I am talking about Native American, African, Polynesian, Aboriginal peoples, and a range of peoples outside the usual European and Asian themes that I see most often used in gaming. I'm not going to attempt a precise definition of these peoples, because that would be an academic exercise and a rather futile one at that. And when I say that I want to incorporate concepts derived from them into fantasy gaming, I mean that I want to develop fairly specific game variations of concepts derived from such cultures. So, instead of simply generating American Indian warriors, I want to field Suicide Warriors, Contraries, etc. Instead of simply African Witchdoctors, I want to produce Leopardskin Chiefs or other comparable institutions. I'm also looking to do similar things with monsters. The goal behind this stuff, for me anyway, is NOT historical accuracy. The character types I am looking to generate need bear no closer relationship to the ethnohistorical realities than the Paladin class did to the knights of old or Gandolf mages to the folk magic ideas that preceded them. What I want to produce is character and monster types that evoke a sense of these options in a compelling way, not necessarily something that would pass muster in a history text.

I realize a few others have done this, and I am particularly impressed by the stuff Atlas Games did with Africa and North America. Certainly there are some good war games that set up rules for American Indians, and there are a smattering of games that seem to show at least some influence from sundry non-western (and non Asian) cultures. In Fantasy settings it seems that the concepts haven't been popular enough to justify extended development, or the influence has been kept very indirect. All in all, I don't see much going that direction, and I have been dancing around the subject myself for a bit. We've created several minis that would be good for such a setting, but until the publication of ETC at Crunch-Waffle we haven't made a serious effort to put the game concepts in play. That's what I'm focusing on NOW. I can generate specific fantasy concepts (a class here, a monster there) fairly easily, and so can others. I think a lot of these things are pretty damned interesting in their own right. The problem as I see it is setting; that looks like the place where has typically come crashing down. The question is how do you generate a compelling setting that includes the types, one that players will want to come back to game after game.

If a setting is purely in Africa, Polynesia, Native North America, etc., then the average gamer is going to have a limited set of ideas about what to do in that setting. Of course some people will be exceptionally interested in such places, and those familiar with any of them will naturally have lots of ideas, but most gamers simply won't jump into a nich setting, and if they do, they won't stay there long. On the other hand, most people don't imagine a Hula Dancer next to a Gandolf mage, so a mixed genre seems to weird people out a bit. So, I think this is one of the biggest stumbling blocks for my ambition here: The problem of how to produce a plausible setting that invites players to use such concepts while giving them enough familiar territory to generate in-game fantasy for an extended duration.

I have two general approaches to this:

The first was suggested by my co-author on ETC, Martin Penneck. He suggested a kind of twilight zone world in which all sorts of people from the real world get thrown together in a fantasy land whether all their myths and legends come alive. That's what we used for ETC, and we'll see how it is received. The setting is described in a piecemeal style with all the different characters having a different take on the nature of the world and what to do about life in it. If you read the narrative sections of that game you'll see that we never did decide on the nature of the Twilight World. It's up for grabs, and the characters are quite confused about it themselves, but it does have all the different peoples I imagined (or at least we can in principle fit them in there). The setting is surreal to begin with so the focus of the setting has been on the characters themselves. Now it's currently a Skirmish Game, but it could as easily be an RPG. So, there is potential to develop the character themes much further and even build our little Roshomon effect into an interesting metaplot wherein cosmologies compete to become cosmogonies, so to speak, and the Twilight World will become at the conclusion of a campaign just what the winning faction(s) believed it to be in the first place. My hope is that the surreal nature of this world will offset questions about the plausibility of putting a Lakota warrior beside a Samurai and attacking both of them with an Orc. If it seems weird, it's supposed to. I like it; we'll see if anyone else does.

Option 2: This is what I've typically done with my D&D campaigns. I assume a world that contains your basic LOtR RPG type themes, and all the rest of the peoples in the known world as well. There is an equivalent to Polynesian Islands, to North Americ, to Africa, etc. Timelines of cultural development are fudged to create the most interesting options I can come up with. Then we simply take magic and use that as the basis for early travel. So, extended contact between different peoples happens much earlier. Throw in a political incentive for exploitation, and colonialism happens much earlier than it did in the real world. So, we're off and running. More an more, I conceive this world in terms of a setting for travel campaigns. Characters may start in familiar territory, and players may roll up any standard d20 fair they like. The exotic cultures are then found in far away places. A Polynesian Island then becomes an encounter for European style characters. Of course the same setting can be played in reverse (as an encounter with a possibly threatening foreign invader), but the main point is that a campaign need not take place entirely within the context of one single exotic setting. This way players can get a taste of such settings without dealing with the prospect of an entire campaign in a world that doesn't strike their mythical cords, so to speak. ...and it isn't lost on me that exploration is one of those cords, a big one. The advantage here I think is that it provides a plausible way of getting LOtR fantasy into the exotic spaces I want to take it. The Half Orc Barbarian straight out of the Players Handbook CAN show up in the American Southwest, and he can even fight a Skinwalker. It's no weirder than Frodo fighting the spider, and players can have time to adjust to the novel settings from the standpoint of their common assumptions about fantasy RPGs. This should be as plausible as any other fantasy theme, and odd characters can be picked up here and there along the way. That's my thinking at the moment.

Has anyone else experimented with such settings, either in home brew or in published settings? How did you approach it? How did the players react? And did they go for the exotic stuff, or did they tend to gravitate towards standard themes? Have you been able to maintain interest, or did it flag after awhile? Thoughts?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

Here's an older thread of mine that you might find interesting: [Runequest: Slayers] Skulls, blood, other body fluids.

One part of your post that surprised me was the notion to grab all sorts of different cultures and throw them all together, and then add the business about their myths becoming real. It struck me as artificial, and in some ways, as an avoidance. Why not simply utilize a setting which slightly abstracts a given culture of interest via fantasy elements, without uprooting it? A good example might be the AD&D2 Arabian Nights, which despite its horrifically bad adventure scenarios, was one of the finest presentations of setting as such in role-playing history. Others include The Riddle of Steel and Conspiracy of Shadows, both of which present fantastic, only-slightly scrubbed versions of central and northern Europe during the late stages of the Polish Empire. (The latter mainly feature white European characters, but the point I'm making is the nature of the presentation of the setting; they're not generically white in a Disney or D&D fantasy sense.)

For literary inspirations, I suggest the original three novels of the Earthsea trilogy, in which the protagonist is effectively a Native American, in which most of the cultures, are based on Polynesian and African people, with the exception being the piratical and rather vicious white barbarians. (The recent film/TV version is not relevant regarding the issues we're talking about.)

Best, Ron

[Monkeys]

My game Age of Fable (www.ageoffable.net) might be similar to what you're talking about. The main city looks more like 19th century Cairo than anything else, and the characters often blend cultures eg one of the important NPC's has a medieval Welsh name but looks Native American, you can play a character who looks Native American but has an Ancient Greek sounding name, the accepted currency is cowrie shells, which is more like Africa or the South Pacific, and so on.

Of course in fantasy 'cultures' usually means surface things like names and appearance, the societies are mostly either un-defined or invented without reference to real history.

[Brimshack]

Thanks for the replies guys. I realize the OP didn't give much direction as far as what I wanted, so I appreciate your willingness to respond to a wandering rant.

You know it's funny I reada the Earthsea Trilogy when I was in Junior High and I either didn't get all the imlications or I forgot them by now. I remember loving the series, but my interest in cultural information formed long after that, so I missed the possible lesson.

You're right Ron that our mash-up of cultures is quite artificial, but I also think the notion of conflict over cosmology has potential, not the least of reasons being that such themes are often part of rituals to begin with. In a Navajo ceremony, for example, the world is literally reconstructed around the patient, and the singer is quite literally recreating the world through the ceremonial itself. So, it may be that the interesting angle here would be the creation of thematic elements that vary from faction to faction. It might be that what I need to do is to construct something specific (and in keeping with relevant themes) which has to happen for any given faction to make its vision work. Right now, that's merely a hint in the text, but before we go killing trees wit a print version, I could easily flesh this out quite a bit. Now as long as it's a skirmish game that won't play out much in a session, but if we develop it into an RPG, then there is real potential to make some of this stuff relevant to a plot line.

But of course that's just one way that we've approached it. The exploration and colonization angle which we intend to use for our D20 material would leave each culture in its own setting, and I have been thinking the thing to do there is to try to distill the major mythemes and cultural motifs for different regions into something that can be used to generate a storyline unique to each sub-setting. If the hero-confronts-dragon-saves-girl-and-becomes-a-prince is worth a few thousand instances at the game table, then each of the cultures from other settings ought to have themes similar to that. Each ought to have a few potential storylines that would spark the imagination if presented in rich detail.

One of the ones I am most interested in lately is the notion of finding the witch (or the skinwalker). This is common enough in a lot of small scale cultures. For this to work, it's important that there be an element of random disasters in a game, because the actual witch motif in most of these cultures isn't about the evil looking woman in an obvious witch hat casting a spell with obvious effects on you from 30' away. What make the threat of a witch so compelling in most cultures is the constant presence of random accidents. Your crops failed and your son is sick. Termites are eating at the hogan wall. Why? Of course there are natural causes, but what, or who, caused them to seek you out, and why now? Maybe it's your neighbor who has always been jealous of your sheepherd, or maybe it's Auntie Yazzie, who never really did like you and she's still mad about that one time... Oh, and the woman across the way; she is so jealous of your son. You can tell, she just hates you. Maybe it's her... Of course you can play something like that out in a Euro- setting too, but I think it's one that works well, particularly in a number of African or Native American settings.

Other possibilities: Dreamtime connections and Walkabouts. Fear of starvation and/or cannibalism (Windigos, and Cannibalism is a huge theme in Polynesian stories), connections to spirit keepers of the game in Algonquine stories. The prospects of defending a hunting territory (from both mundane competition and supernatural threats).

And of course themes associated with contact and colonization are pretty rich. Lots of potential to exploit those themes as well.