Arcadia having rough equivalents for the Inca, Mayan, and Aztec empires, as well as Amazon cities or the great legends of El Dorado would be awesome. The same can be said for the various North American native tribes. Think of the conflicts that could have happened if all three of the Central/South American empires had remained and fought for control over the continent. Shaman archetypes, Eagle Knights, animated jade effigies, and so on. Perhaps a leftover city of Azlanti nature that didn't degenerate, but survived as a matriarchy led by priestess of Shelyn or the Peacock Serpent.
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I believe an Inca/Maya people will be part of Arcadia, once they do campaign books on this continent. I also believe the Native American like cultures will pop up.I don't think there's any plans for a sourcebook on Arcadia.
Mike
Have we ever indicated anywhere that there wouldn't be a book on Arcadia?
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It's sad that a lot of North Americans don't know a lot about the The Mississippian culture and the settlements that flourished.
From wiki
"Middle Mississippian cultures, especially the Cahokia polity located near East St. Louis, Illinois, was very influential on neighboring societies. High status artifacts, including stone statuary and elite pottery associated with Cahokia, have been found far outside of the Middle Mississippian area. These items, especially the pottery, were also copied by local artists.
Cahokia: The largest and most complex Mississippian site and the largest Pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico, Cahokia is considered to have been the most influential of the Mississippian culture centers.
Angel Mounds: A chiefdom in southern Indiana near Evansville. It is thought by some archaeologists that the Late Mississippian Caborn-Welborn culture developed from the Angel Phase people around 1400 CE and lasted to around 1700 CE.[8]
Kincaid Site: A major Mississippian mound center in southern Illinois across the Ohio River from Paducah, Kentucky.
Moundville: Ranked with Cahokia as one of the two most important sites at the core of the Mississippian culture,[9] located near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
The Parkin Site: The type site for the "Parkin phase", an expression of Late Mississippian culture, believed by many archaeologists to be the province of Casqui visited by Hernando de Soto in 1542.[10]
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It's sad that a lot of people lump "Indians" into one monolithic culture, really.
One of the Aztec tribal elders I knew passed away this morning, and that brief window that I had into the ceremonies was not long enough. :\
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Have we ever indicated anywhere that there wouldn't be a book on Arcadia?I believe an Inca/Maya people will be part of Arcadia, once they do campaign books on this continent. I also believe the Native American like cultures will pop up.I don't think there's any plans for a sourcebook on Arcadia.
Mike
I asked Erik at PaizoCon in 2011. Granted that was a LONG time ago.
Mike
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I've gone through playing the vast majority of the Golarion human ethnicities - a Vudran witch, Tian-Shu, Tian-Min... And since I live in Texas and half my family is Hispanic, I started to wonder what the analogue is in Golarion.Of course pure-play Mexican would be over on Arcadia to use the RL analogy, but there's no Hispanic-flavored invaders there to make that happen with the Arcadians in the first place.
And of course on Golarion things aren't always one to one - like Cheliax is part Italy, part England in turn - but in general they pretty heavily link to RL ethnicities (Keleshites, Tien, Vudrans, etc.) I'm not really sure who I would go to at all for a Spanish type feel. I don't see anyone with Spanish type names or flavor. Ideas?
I'm returning to the message boards with Sargava and the Mwangi Expanse in mind: I've been corresponding privately with friends about a new campaign and am using this thread as an entry point to share my thoughts on decolonial gaming with the Paizo community.
Ernest Mueller's question raises a host of questions for me. I think he wants to learn about a region that is analogous to Mexico, but I have no idea what region of the country, or what moment in its history interests him.
Rather that speculate about Arcadia, as many other posters did, I'll highlight two comments and then elaborate why I think they might fit the bill.
Sargava, maybe? It's on the wrong side of the Arcadian Ocean, but Sargava has jungles, pyramids, and was colonized by the "Spanish". The art in the ISWG is also very evocative of pre-columbian Mayan and Aztec civilization.
Nobody mentioned the Shoanti. I feel they warrant a mention because they're like the native americans in a way, so they'd be good if you wanted to make an aztec or mayan something or other. If you want something more spanish, I'd go Taldan because they've often been compared to Spain.
Both of these suggestions seem responsive to me. The first because it's Golarion's most obvious colony, and as Southeast Jerome notes, its indigenous Mwangi populations offer a rich analogue to various indigenous Amerindian nations. What's missing in the analogy, at least in the Saragava: The Lost Colony sourcebook, is mestizaje.
México is a highly internally diverse country, with a number of substantially different indigenous peoples, but one thing that arguably distinguishes it from many other Latin American countries is the prevalence of mestizaje -- the mixing of so many different peoples, cultures, traditions, etc.
In contrast, the Sargava sourcebook did not develop this idea, but instead seemed to promote an unfortunate (IMO) binary between the Chelaxian colonists and the Mwangi natives ...
Nevertheless, a DM interested in the subject could certainly develop mestizaje (or creolization) in Sargava, the Shackles, etc., and this could produce an ethnic analogy that might satisfy Ernest Mueller, and others who share his concerns. For those interested, TritonOne started a thread in 2013 related to this notion.
For similar reasons, magnumCPA's suggestion of the Shoanti might serve although here the focus seems to be on indigenousness -- rather than racially / culturally mixed peoples. (Korvosa might be a better analogue, as it's a colony with a power elite that identify with the old empire but are looked down upon, much like the historical antipathy of the peninsulares (people born in Spain) against those born in "the New World.")
I'll conclude by asking Ernest Mueller, or others who expressed similar interests, to detail further what interests them. (Draco Bahamut probably did this most in naming, "The Amazon, the Sertão, the Pampas, the huge caves of Chapada Diamantina, the Saci, the Cuca, the "mule-without head", so many places and monsters. But none of it is in Golarion.")
The problem is that Mexico only came into being as a colony in 1521 and an independent nation in 1810, while the Golarion setting seems to be in an era analogous to the Middle Ages or Renaissance period. The people we know today as Mexicans didn't exist back then.
So, to create "Mexico" in Golarion, one would either make an anachronistic nation (much the way Andoran is an anachronistic analogue of 18th-c. USA) or depict it as a fledgling colony of a powerful Inner Sea (i.e. European) nation. The teasers about Chelish colonies in Arcadia make it sound like Paizo has decided on the latter approach.
But neither option seems very satisfying to me.
I, for one, feel that retreading the same path as Earth history took, with conquistadors outright crushing the native population in just a few years is sad and uninspiring. On the other hand, ignoring the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs seems a little too rosy and dull, even convenient. Anyway, would there even be a Mexico as we know it without the Spanish conquistadors? That history, no matter how cruel, has created Central America.
In any case, I'm interested to see how an Arcadia book would handle it should Paizo ever print one.
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I think, if I was going to try to make a "Mexico" in Golarion, I'd do it in Arcadia, but in the reverse situation that it was in the real world. Andoran and Cheliax have tried and failed to establish colonies on Arcadia, but that doesn't mean they left their mark. Women and children may have been taken as slaves, or refugees dying of starvation or plague might have retreated to native populations for aid and been integrated.
Suppose that for some Aztec-like province or population in Arcadia, the culture was brutal and malicious, and a growing antinational settlement was on the rise. In the same way Americans have used native american icons to represent their dissent against the British in the American Revolution, these rebels may have co-opted the bits of Inner Sea culture and paraphenalia that survived the failed colonies to create their own identity, separate from the ruling class but stil blended with native Arcadian beliefs and fashions. In the aftermath of such a rebellion, if these rebels were victorious, it could create a society with a lot of parallels to old Mexico, in both culture and troubles.
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México is a highly internally diverse country, with a number of substantially different indigenous peoples, but one thing that arguably distinguishes it from many other Latin American countries is the prevalence of mestizaje -- the mixing of so many different peoples, cultures, traditions, etc.
This quote hits the nail on the head for me, and brings up an interesting point. Because we have two entire races that are built on the fact that they are neither one parent nor the other. If there were Half-Orc or Half-Elf enclaves that prided themselves on their fusion of both parent cultures, and added their own cultural innovations on top of it, THAT would be a strong contender for a Mestizo analogue, without having to emphasize the ideas of conquest and occupation.
We see a little of this in Trunau, and hopefully it will get explored a bit more as the AP continues. Edit: Although, admittedly, the themes of conquest and occupation are there in Trunau, so perhaps it isn't as good of an example as I was initially thinking.
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The problem is that Mexico only came into being as a colony in 1521 and an independent nation in 1810, while the Golarion setting seems to be in an era analogous to the Middle Ages or Renaissance period. The people we know today as Mexicans didn't exist back then.
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I, for one, feel that retreading the same path as Earth history took, with conquistadors outright crushing the native population in just a few years is sad and uninspiring. On the other hand, ignoring the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs seems a little too rosy and dull, even convenient. Anyway, would there even be a Mexico as we know it without the Spanish conquistadors? That history, no matter how cruel, has created Central America.
I agree with both these points. To find close analogues to 20th/21st century Latin American nations, one needs to identify peoples of Golarion whom were colonized by a sea-spanning empire for a couple-few centuries before establishing their independence by blending the cultures of the indigenous and colonial peoples.
Also, when Paizo broaches Arcadia (hopefully in a couple of years!), it would do well to avoid replicating Earth's history (or TSR's Maztica setting), and it should similarly not simply invert Earth's history. (Like numerous other posters, I trust Paizo's designers not to commit such errors but instead to chart their own course, building carefully on what they've already established.)
Considering Sargava, I wish the sourcebook chronology provided some account for its early colonial conflict. Maybe I missed it, but the author and his editors seem to have avoided issues of "discovery" and "conquest" by giving the early centuries of Sargava short-shrift, focusing instead on the past century, with increasingly greater focus on the last forty years or so.
Because we have two entire races that are built on the fact that they are neither one parent nor the other. If there were Half-Orc or Half-Elf enclaves that prided themselves on their fusion of both parent cultures, and added their own cultural innovations on top of it, THAT would be a strong contender for a Mestizo analogue, without having to emphasize the ideas of conquest and occupation.
We see a little of this in Trunau, and hopefully it will get explored a bit more as the AP continues. Edit: Although, admittedly, the themes of conquest and occupation are there in Trunau, so perhaps it isn't as good of an example as I was initially thinking.
Good point although I think that conquest, occupation, and racial admixture enhances the analogy.
Finally, at the risk of stating the obvious, for a more recent analogue to México, we should look for intriguing border relations -- where the more civilized / developed metropole relies on the labor of the relatively under-developed (and historically exploited) nation.
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In addition to Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, there are two human ethnicities (Chelaxians and Taldans) that are described as a mix of Azlanti with some other human ethnicity -- and those two ethnicities basically dominate Avistan. So Golarion has no shortage of mixed race cultures.
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I suppose it's possible to say the Arcadians today are a mix of two cultures: the original Arcadian natives and old Azlanti colonists. Would that work?
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Only if you presume that the Azlanti colonists survived.
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I think, if I was going to try to make a "Mexico" in Golarion, I'd do it in Arcadia, but in the reverse situation that it was in the real world.
....
Suppose that for some Aztec-like province or population in Arcadia, the culture was brutal and malicious, and a growing antinational settlement was on the rise. In the same way Americans have used native american icons to represent their dissent against the British in the American Revolution, these rebels may have co-opted the bits of Inner Sea culture and paraphenalia that survived the failed colonies to create their own identity, separate from the ruling class but stil blended with native Arcadian beliefs and fashions. In the aftermath of such a rebellion, if these rebels were victorious, it could create a society with a lot of parallels to old Mexico, in both culture and troubles.
I needed to reflect on this suggestion. After doing so, I think that Sargava presents the best existing location to realize its vision because of the almost 600 years of its colonization, which featured ongoing trade with a colonizing empire.
Partially, I prefer this "solution" because I'm unwilling to hold my breath to see what Paizo does with Arcadia. Erik Mona stated above that it's not in Paizo's plans for this year or the next, so 2017 is the earliest that Arcadia *might* receive additional treatment. Thus, rather than "wait and see," I'd prefer to develop Sargava's "creolization." YMMV.
In addition to Half-Elves and Half-Orcs, there are two human ethnicities (Chelaxians and Taldans) that are described as a mix of Azlanti with some other human ethnicity -- and those two ethnicities basically dominate Avistan. So Golarion has no shortage of mixed race cultures.
I suppose it's possible to say the Arcadians today are a mix of two cultures: the original Arcadian natives and old Azlanti colonists. Would that work?
These ideas are interesting in reminding us that Azlant was (one of) the first colonial (human) powers in the Inner Sea region. But their reign was so long ago that I don't think they serve adequately to construct a Mexican analogy: the scale of millennia dwarfs the 523-year period that provides the horizon for "Mexicans" (if you go as far back as 1492).
Again, this is why I would want more information from the OP, or others interested in the subject, as to what kinds of details interest them for a setting inspired by Latin America.
For myself, I'm focusing on the Mwangi Expanse, Sargava, the Shackles, and the Sodden Lands, etc. -- imagining adventures around piracy, slavery, abolition, anti-colonialism, Ghol-Gan ruins, etc.
I may pick up Serpent's Skull and will definitely review Skull & Shackles. I'm also awaiting the new Freeport book and the old Nyambe book, as I look forward to learning how they treated their subjects. (I've never read either.) As I make my decisions, I'll be sure to share them in another thread and link to it here.
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Only if you presume that the Azlanti colonists survived.Or intermarried and their descendents survived.
To quote one of the men at the human genome project, commenting on the lineage of any number of individuals or groups: "When the lights were out, everybody was sleeping with everybody else."
In the adventures set in Mwangi and Sargava, Paizo has been pretty careful to only very rarely make the native dark skinned humans the villains. Even the cannibals were white guys. I totally get why they are doing that, but it might be a really limiting factor to a plot set in a pre-columbian setting if you don't have any native humans who are bad guys.
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In the adventures set in Mwangi and Sargava, Paizo has been pretty careful to only very rarely make the native dark skinned humans the villains. Even the cannibals were white guys. I totally get why they are doing that, but it might be a really limiting factor to a plot set in a pre-columbian setting if you don't have any native humans who are bad guys.
I feel like it would be a missed opportunity for there not to be some Aztec analogues sacrificing people by the hundreds and thousands to appease the Outer Gods / Great Old Ones.
As for the Mwangi, there's a whole ethnicity of demon-worshippers and cannibals (the Bekyar), so I'm not too concerned about Paizo tip-toeing around and making non-whites into 'noble savages' and all the bad people lily-white.
I feel like it would be a missed opportunity for there not to be some Aztec analogues sacrificing people by the hundreds and thousands to appease the Outer Gods / Great Old Ones.
What if I told you...that accounts of American Indian cannibalism and human sacrifice are either greatly exaggerated or outright fabrications?
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I feel like it would be a missed opportunity for there not to be some Aztec analogues sacrificing people by the hundreds and thousands to appease the Outer Gods / Great Old Ones.What if I told you...that accounts of American Indian cannibalism and human sacrifice are either greatly exaggerated or outright fabrications?
I've never even heard of cannibalism, actually.
As for sacrifice, the largest of the six skull racks in Tenochtitlan has been downgraded from having been estimated to hold 136,000 skulls to a paltry 60,000 skulls, but it does sound like the Aztecs still did a fair bit of human sacrifice.
Even if the numbers are downgraded to 'never happened,' it won't have any relevance to a Golarion culture based off of pop culture notions, any more than Godzilla and Ghidrah never existing prevents us from having monster kaiju in the game.
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AS a Mexican I can tell you that the mesoamerican did in fact made human sacrifice, from small bloodletting to "cut his heart out in the same time you take to cross yourself", passing on the ritual combat sacrifice, into an integral part of their culture.
No myth about that.
About the cannibalism... Yes, sometimes... Ask Geronimo de Aguilar or François l'Olonnais.
AS a Mexican I can tell you that the mesoamerican did in fact made human sacrifice, from small bloodletting to "cut his heart out in the same time you take to cross yourself", passing on the ritual combat sacrifice, into an integral part of their culture.
No myth about that.
About the cannibalism... Yes, sometimes... Ask Geronimo de Aguilar or François l'Olonnais.
Sorry, I meant to say that the human sacrifice was greatly exaggerated and the cannibalism, at least among Caribs, was outright fabricated.
Columbus started that myth, purportedly from a second-hand account from an Indian he "talked" to though he couldn't understand the language. Peter Hulme and others have said that cannibalism didn't exist as a practice in the Caribbean any more than it existed in Europe.
Set, if you want to split hairs, the Bandu Bekyar according to the Sargava: the Lost Colony, do human sacrifices, which is not technically cannibalism, maybe you have some other source.
In Serpent''s Skull, the cannibals you actually come in contact with are descendent of survivors of a shipwreck who are white guys from the north. Think, 'Lord of the Flies."
Jade Regent got around making non-whites villains by having most of the evil Minkai actually be Oni in disguise. Although it does interestingly enough have some evil Inuits up by the north pole and more white cannibals.
Only 60,000 skulls! Those slackers, they didn't make the quota.
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Set, if you want to split hairs, the Bandu Bekyar according to the Sargava: the Lost Colony, do human sacrifices, which is not technically cannibalism, maybe you have some other source.
They worship a few demon lords, IIRC, including Angazahn (sp?) and Zura, one of whom encourages cannibalism (or, more specifically, eating of humans, since many of his worshippers aren't human, and so it wouldn't be 'cannibalism' for them to 'feast on men like livestock') and the other of which is explicitly the demon lord *of* cannibalism (and vampirism).
So, even if they don't have long pig on the menu for casual dining, it seems likely that many of them practice cannibalism during religious observances.
Anywho, tangent. I wasn't aware of any significant cannibalistic tendencies among south/central American societies, nor do I feel like it's a particularly interesting vein to tap in developing Golarion analogues to same (since it's something already covered in the Mwangi expanse, to an extent, and the fantasy setting is *hardly* lacking for critters, some of them humanoid, that want to eat humans anyway...). :)
What might be interesting would be for the sort of methodical mass sacrifices suggested by sites like Tenochtitlan have an actual purpose in analogous Golarion cultures, such as to fuel incredibly powerful magical workings, or to propitiate the Great Old Ones (and perhaps be, unknown to people on the other side of Golarion, protecting the whole planet from the baleful attentions of figures like Azathoth! Horrified 'civilized' visitors from Taldor might attempt to 'stop this savage atrocity' only to find out that they've disrupted rituals meant to keep certain slumbering Things sated and asleep, causing them to awaken and go all apocalyptic-y). And now I've just spoiled someone for Cabin in the Woods. :)
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Maztica was a standard TSR boxed set case.
"Here's this great and robust world covering an entire two continents but focused on this Aztec culture that we're putting out here and with a trio of stories to validate it, and then we're going to completely ignore it in later canon except for the occasional reference so Ed Greenwood doesn't get too mad with us.
American Indians and PC's? Ugh, sorry, aren't covering that."
==Aerlyinth
Arcadia needs a clean break from "humans, humans, everywhere". Why not a lizardfolk Empire, a theocracy of sentient tyrannosaurs or any number of other possibilities instead of " oh, look, more humans / [insert PC race here] ".
If there's a time to take a step into an alien culture that isn't dead set on turning everyone into slime-covered meat snacks (aboleths) or slave labor meat snacks (serpentfolk) but has their own distinct culture, Arcadia is the place.
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I think a neutral aztec/maya/Amazonian lizardfolk culture might make a lot of sense actually. Great Plains centaur culture, Puebloan oread culture or Incan sylph culture.
The existence of native humans doesn't need to exclude other races, any more than the existence of native humans in the Inner Sea region excludes Kyonin.
Arcadia needs a clean break from "humans, humans, everywhere". Why not a lizardfolk Empire, a theocracy of sentient tyrannosaurs or any number of other possibilities instead of " oh, look, more humans / [insert PC race here] ".
If there's a time to take a step into an alien culture that isn't dead set on turning everyone into slime-covered meat snacks (aboleths) or slave labor meat snacks (serpentfolk) but has their own distinct culture, Arcadia is the place.
I'd really not do that with an area that's already been set up as the Americas analogue.
I believe the little info we do have on it already talks about the native humans, as well as a few non human possibilities.
Native humans on the coastal region at one tiny end where the Ulfen went. ;)
Arcadia's a BIG place, afterall.
Why do people have such a low opinion of the Maztica campaign setting in the Forgotten Realms world? It seems that it successfully synthesized Meso-American culture. Does Meso-American myth not fit well in a high fantasy setting?
I don't know much about the setting itself but for starters, I really dislike the name 'Maztika'. It's just ugly.
Please make Skinwalkers and Lycanthropes one of the main empires of Arcadia. I actually prefer an Arcadia where all native 'Arcadian' peoples, are Skinwalkers.
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I'm not sure what you're saying, Aelryinth. Do you mean to say that what was wrong with Maztica was that we didn't get more of it?
I'm saying the reason that it went nowhere is because it got no support from TSR.
It was one of a great many boxed sets they put out, that they then either didn't support or immediately invalidated with events in the Realms.
But, hey, they finally told us where Balduran died, and that wood elves keep killing all those settlers from across the oceans...and that the most elite mercenary company in the Forgotten Realms is dumb enough to put all their priests on one ship AND don't have the power to save it from a storm.
Yeah. But meeting Hiawatha of the FR? Not gonna happen.
And what did they do with 4e? Swiped in an entirely new continent or two as Abeir finally came back to Toril. Convenient place to put your dragonbloods, and suddenly one green dragon is enough to subjugate a continent.
==Aelryinth
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As far as Arcadia, I think there should be more of a focus on adapting the woefully under represented (or misrepresented) cultures than to do weird things with it. They seem to have taken the same approach with Tian Xia, and I'm fine with that.
The reason why Avistan isn't as strongly analogous to Europe is probably because that ground is so well trodden. Europe and european analogs show up everywhere. When cultures don't (like pre-colonial Americas), they deserve to be represented.
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They don't have to hog the entire continent, as they have with Avistan.
I want to clarify that I do want some weird stuff in Arcadia. I just think that creating faithful analogs to Native American cultures should be priority.
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I want to clarify that I do want some weird stuff in Arcadia. I just think that creating faithful analogs to Native American cultures should be priority.
There's faithful analogs and then there's cultural appropriation, and there's an awfully fine line and grey area between the two.
I suppose it's possible to say the Arcadians today are a mix of two cultures: the original Arcadian natives and old Azlanti colonists. Would that work?
Since Arcadia has not yet been detailed, the local ethnicities should certainly include at least one type of "purebred" native along with various mixtures with Azlanti and other foreign ethnicities. If there is only one purebred native ethnicity, it should be at least as internally diverse as the Mwangi of Garund.
I want to clarify that I do want some weird stuff in Arcadia. I just think that creating faithful analogs to Native American cultures should be priority.There's faithful analogs and then there's cultural appropriation, and there's an awfully fine line and grey area between the two.
I do think it's in pretty good hands, though. You guys have handled everything really well so far.
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All I know is regardless of how a Mexico equivalent is handled, it needs all the spanish monsters to go with it!
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My own preference for setting, at least gamewise is:
Either throw out every analog and go completely novel with everything, and don't have any fantasy counterpart cultures/nations/etc (which means no Faux Europe).
Or if you are going to have a Faux Europe, go full out and include some version of Asia, Africa, The Americas, etc.
Otherwise, it gets really weird, doing a combination of the two.
Now by all means include weird fantasy/ideas in there mixed with the analogs, I just don't feel comfortable with turning all the Mayans into Lizardfolk, or the Iroquois into Wood Elves or something.
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A minor problem with portraying Native Americans is that while they are definitely classical barbarians (i.e. don't have a written language for the most part), they do NOT have the Barbarian-style backstory of rage-happy, battle-crazed warriors. The great warriors of the NA's are mostly awesome rangers with the resulting spiritual component from spellcasting and stuff.
Makes for a very different cultural standard when your great heroes are all rangers. Although rangers with FE: Humans are naturally devastating opponents against humans...
==Aelryinth