Coyote Toledo's page

The Iroquois and a lot of the Lakes nations had the variously named Flying Heads of the Forest, which were generally just called the flying heads.

False Face societies were often engaged in psychological warfare against them, which is all kinds of wonderful.

Odraude, I did a fast run through of the B3 and came up with:

Adlets (well, more Inuit but)
Hodag (more US than native, and fake, but regionally yes)
Kamadan
Pukwudgis
Sasquatch
Tetzlwyrm?
Tzitzimitl

The rest seemed very Slavic, Japanese or Polynesian.

I went fast, probably missed something.

Baba Yaga stole the name Jadwiga from a woman who was King of Poland.

King is not a typo!

Either way, What Lurks At Midnight is right, you probably can't get closer than the Jadwiga.

In my mind I've been calling Pharasma 'Skeleton Woman' and otherwise leaving her alone, short of putting in a Skeletonway society, maybe even a Dance.

While I wasn't going to use the word Manitou, I had four Great Manitou (gods) unique to Arcadia (a creation/thunder god who had gone away eons ago, Micomi the Trickster -Coyote/Iktomi blend, Growing Woman who represents change and progress, and a earth serpent ravager.) Then the Great Mysteries, who were some of the more Golarion/universal gods, renamed but little changed, like Pharasma.

The rest were (to be renamed) Manitou gods, with any newer gods from afar thought of as Mysteries.

In a special category are the Three Sisters, maize, squash, and beans. They're worshipped mostly together, and pretty much by the majority of cultures and populations.

The Thunderbirds and their war with the water serpent entities was going to tie in with the creator-who-left concept. This is a phenomena in many beliefs, the Great Spirit withdrawing and leaving the work to his prodigies, only to also recall them after the world could move without their interference. And also the sub theme of his prodigy doing a rather chaotic job of it...

A quick note - if you're looking for a more generic name for Coyote, I was using Mica (the Coyote). Which means the same thing, but is at least a bit obfuscated.

I'd also drop Charm and go with Fire, he is almost always an unlikely Promethean figure, and any resultant charm is prone to being more meta than tangible. :)

I've always been a bit confused by the Strix. They're so dang ancient, very likely major players in Azlanti times. I've never been sure if the Cheliax band are the only ones left, and whether the Syrinx have any control over them.

Playing with them has kinda felt like it was mucking with an unrevealed story.

I know the language entry for Syrinx puts them in Arcadia. I always have to wonder if someone didn't get confused with the Greek nymph namesake (Syrinx, who was from... yes, Arcadia.) I have put thought into the Strix actually being the Arcadian proginator culture (brought low by Syrinx), since we do know they were long pre-Earthfall and were frequently displayed in relics along the Azlanti and ancient elves.

Brings to mind Syrinx/Aboleth correlations...

I do agree that the Strix look like the best Tengu-style candidate, however.

Four other races. Hmmm.

I don't know how I possibly missed that! Bestiary 3. Damn.

They even got the undead-spawning part right. Someone deserves a pat on the back!

Nunnehi, hm...

Yunwi Tsunsdi is sort of pronounced 'nhuyneyi', sounds like a partial match. Cherokee little people. One clan of them wore white and travelled the world, it was used as an altered fable down the line to 'explain' how the Cherokee knew about Jesus' crucifixion.

So many little peoples. Even hairy toes.

I see where everyone's going with the new PC race concept. I was always on the fence, and I did assume that the core races tended to pop up everywhere. And I still quite like having lost sky quest dwarves who hit the surface thousands of years late, full native wild elves.... but there's a lot of humanoids that can fill in any gaps.

Just not Sasquatch. They really would like to be left alone, please.

Hi.

The Inner Sea guide is the place to start, it also provides a nice overview of the world, and goes into nation-level detail on the Darklands.

Easy answer!

There is so much room in an imaginary world for any content. I for one would be terribly disappointed to find Arcadia used as a monster vault or aberration breeding ground.

It kinda has to be about Native Americans, Aztecs, Incas, etc. it's both expected and wanted!

Of course there would be huge swaths of non-humans, too. So many great monsters from available myths, I think I'm easily hitting Bestiary size, although my laziness leaves vast gulfs of stat blocks.

Here's native creatures that've already been detailed in existing books:

Sasquatch
Wendigo
Syrinx
Thunderbird
Chupacabra
Adlet

I was floored when they put in adlets, they've been a long time favorite. Between them and the Wendigo, the north can get brutal.

I've still been trying to get my head around the Syrinx.

Stonecoats make an excellent quasi-human race, almost a were-elemental thing going on there. Same for Thunderers - a good-aligned werelemental (tm)?

There are a staggering amount of pest and goblinoid choices from legend. Pukwudgi, I'm looking at you and your Quill Shield (small half-troll, half-goblin, half-porcupine, bad at maths.)

The petroglyph idea is wonderful. Check out the Piasa Bird, I have a rebel nation in the river regions that uses it as an inspiration, and it's waiting in its "drawing form" for the right time to emerge.

There are a lot of giants and ogres to choose from. Lots. I made a race out of a cave giant/demon's offspring, the Saya, who combine malevolence with earnest civility and politeness. Their Empire fills a big chunk of the Not-the-Pacific northwest. Their half-human offspring, the A'Saya, are being spec'd out as a PC race to fill in the half-Orc gap (distended faces, sharpened teeth, red hair, and really likes the outfit you chose to wear today, did you get your hair cut?).

I like the Saya because everything they do feels like they're setting you up. And they are! But it's nice to feel appreciated. They are the sort of monster that cleans up its lair if they hear adventurers are coming to kill them, because it's a sty and they'd be humiliated to have someone see it like this.

Oh, the as-yet-unnamed werepackrats. These good-aligned creatures practice gift economy across the desert areas. Basically they steal precious items and leave behind an equivalent valued (usually higher valued) 'trade' in its place. It is absolutely alien to them that this could upset anyone.

Lots and lots of undead. Chindi and Atshen are favorites. For lycanthropy, you have some great werewolf variants (off the top of my head, Rugaru? I think), although wereotters of various types seem just as numerous. And a wide variety of underwater panthers, because that's what PCs have unknowingly wanted to face all along: aquatic cats.

Dragons? Yup. What strikes me as notable is that the dragon-like creatures seem to fall into both the Euro-style and the Asian-style. Gaasyendietha just feels like a celestial dragon to me.

There's so much goodness.

Absolutely better to take the Sargava route from Eleder through the Shackles, around the Eye. The Jenivere used to do it regularly until that little mishap at the Shiv.

I had many issues, but in short, it was making them so vastly underpowered compared to the invaders. Why they neutered their "magic" and put level caps on human spell casters (!!!) will always mystify me.

It had an infuriating ring of "Euro magic is also the greatest magic" vibe. Really pushed my buttons.

Apparently I am a firm believer in the equality of magic. :)

What I'd prefer is the same - a high fantasy America without any colonies.

I think we have to be realistic, however, and accept a hybrid. I envision cultural impact from the colonies to be present in the immediate region and a decreasing factor the further 'inland' you get.

Preserving a cultural vacuum in a world with Greater Teleport just doesn't pan out - I have to assume that while little is known about Arcadia, that "little" has been known for a long time. I've also considered a Western-coast Tien colony, or even putting an Arcadian colony in the Dragon Kingdoms, or slipping a mesoarcanian one into Southern Garund.

I haven't really put my mind to the Southern parts yet. I'm probably still traumatized by Matzica. I think there's some interesting things in there re: Azlanti interaction, progenitor culture, aboleths vs couatl sort of backstory.

We're definitely already post-Columbian. Five thousand years of Valenhall, much less the other colonies, have already burned that bridge.

I'm afraid my mind can't treat an outpost that is there for five thousand years as a 'small isolated' thing. I mean, let's face it... Valenhall has been around for more than TWENTY times the lifespan of the United States. And apparently all the lords of the Ulfen end up coming here, along with their virtual army of mythic-level Outsiders... no, I can't just pretend that's a lonely forgotten outpost in the woods with a new coat of paint slapped on every few centuries. I don't have it in me!

The entire 'they were masters of plantlife' stereotype we are so amazingly adept at propagating is something I would very much like to avoid. Did your average Arcadian "peasant" have insights into the medicinal properties of plants that wouldn't be available to a properly trained level 1 alchemist from Cheliax? No. Would a healer who put max ranks in Knowledge (Nature), regardless of his point of origin, be your best bet?

Of course.

Saying "they were at one with nature" is a fallacy, and I also believe it is fundamentally harmful.

The 'masters of plants' trope obfuscates the equality of racial subtypes. Just as Mwangi aren't given a +2 to jumping, you don't want to go down the "and this racial stock of humans has these superpowers" route, IMHO. If you want your Arcadian PC to be plant-savvy, you spend the points and get the skill.

I'll give you an anti-stereotype to work with: we know that Native Americans, with no 'true' writing system, had no comprehension of higher mathematics, right?

The Cayuga Nation game of Dish uses 6 peach stones with differently colored sides. Scoring is dependent upon the amount of one side vs the other showing on a toss.

The (pre-Columbian) scores they assigned for each permutation of results map exactly to a modern probability table.

There are countless examples of higher mathematical applications to real world issues from both North and from South America, from crop rotation to extremely advanced semaphore communication. And yet when we think of Native Americans, we don't pause and say "they were at one with mathematics."

It's a thorny process, appropriating real cultures for our casual gaming. Best to tread a little more carefully, and you definitely want to question every preconception you have.

This is a prototype map, mostly just showing Northern Arcadia from the gulf cut up to the edges of the Crown of the World.

I like.

On metallurgy? Looking at the ISWG map, however inaccurate it may be, one thing leaps out at me: the whole continent is pocked with large, round lakes.

Natural formations... or the craters of outlying meteorite strikes from Earthfall? If the latter, that says "LOTS OF EASILY ACCESSIBLE METEORIC IRON" in...

Honestly I missed that entirely. I even called them the Moon Lakes. Maybe it was subconscious! Either way, absolutely.

I used the ISWG map to get a baseline, then spread it out some, tacked on a few 'unknown' island masses, and leaned pretty heavily on cartographer error to get a little more room to work with. The lakes were almost excessive, but I kept most of them in. Lakes are fun.

The southwest cultures are definitely impacted by the mammoth land-cutting lake you can see in the Golarion-level map. I was treating that as a catastrophe result, linking it in with the eastern gulf - leaving a long gulch river to connect them with severely height-disparate sides. The trade hub Cliffrise came out of that feature, a gateway to the central/South continent, where trade goods are either hauled up and down the cliff to waiting river barges by ropes, or levitated by various arcane casters who congregate at Cliffrise's famous wizard school.

I've become a little obsessive about it all, which is always helpful.

My weakness is detail, so have an overdone and poorly formatted What's For Lunch chart for Northern Arcadia!

d100 General (all regions)
1-2 Baked squash
3-4 Roasted maize
5-6 Fried beans
7-8 Poached eggs
9-10 Batter bread
11-12 Bean soup
13-14 Black bean cakes
15-16 Flat cakes
17-18 Fry bread
19-20 Game stew
21-22 Hominy soup
23-24 Honey baked squash
25-26 Jerky stew
27-28 Leaf bread
29-30 Maize griddle cakes
31-32 Maize pudding
33-34 Maple syrup candy
35-36 Pemmican
37-38 Pepper pot soup
39-40 Pine nut soup
41-42 Pumpkin soup
43-44 Rabbit stew
45-46 Sisters succotash
47-48 Squaw cake
49-50 Wild greens and flowers salad
51-52 Wild rice cakes
53-90 Regional Food
91-92 Southeastern Food
93-94 Northeastern Food
95-96 Central Food
97-98 Southwestern Food
99-00 Northwestern Food

d100 Central Region Foods
1-5 Broiled sunchoke
6-10 Broiled trout
11-15 Buffalo and berry soup
16-20 Buffalo jerky
21-25 Buffalo medicine sausage
26-30 Cattail pollen flapjacks
31-35 Chokecherry pudding
36-40 Ember-roasted buffalo
41-45 Fork-tail fried yeast bread
46-50 Fried deer liver
51-55 Fried frog's legs
56-60 Green grouse stew
61-65 High Plains pemmican
66-70 Maizemeal pemmican
71-75 Roast prairie chicken
76-80 Sauteed mushrooms and onions
81-85 Serviceberry cake
86-90 Stuffed sugar pumpkin
91-95 Turnip and maize soup
96-00 Venison mincemeat pie

d100 Northeast Region Foods
1-5 Cider-basted goose
6-10 Clam chowder
11-15 Clambake
16-20 Codfish balls
21-25 Cranberry pudding
26-30 Cranberry-maple sauce
31-35 Duck with wild rice and mushrooms
36-40 Fivepath fish soup
41-45 Hazelnut cakes
46-50 Honey-basted turkey
51-55 Maple maize balls
56-60 Maple molasses baked beans
61-65 Maple sugar fish
66-70 Maple-vinegar venison racks
71-75 Sauteed morels
76-80 Sunchoke soup
81-85 Sunflower seed soup
86-90 Watercress salad
91-95 Wild rice and eggs
96-00 Wild strawberry bread

d100 Northwest Region Foods
1-5 Acorn griddle cakes
6-10 Boiled seagull eggs
11-15 Boiled seaweed
16-20 Cedar salmon bake
21-25 Crab-stuffed halibut
26-30 Cranberry jelly
31-35 Deer steak
36-40 Elk stew with acorn dumplings
41-45 Grilled goose
46-50 Honey-ginger baked tule
51-55 Huckleberry fritters
56-60 Huckleberry-glaze duck
61-65 Oyster-hazelnut soup
66-70 Oyster-potato cakes
71-75 Raspberries and honey
76-80 Raspberry acorn pudding
81-85 Rose hip tea
86-90 Salmon cakes
91-95 Salmon chowder
96-00 Steamed fiddleheads

d100 Southeast Region Foods
1-5 Acorn biscuits
6-10 Blackberry cobbler
11-15 Blue grape dumplings
16-20 Carrot bread
21-25 Fried tomato pones
26-30 Grape-stuffed fish
31-35 Green cob jelly
36-40 Hashed hominy
41-45 Hickory nuts
46-50 Huckleberry-honey cake
51-55 Maize fritters
56-60 Molasses bread pudding
61-65 Peanut soup
66-70 Pecan soup
71-75 Persimmon pudding
76-80 Red and green mixit
81-85 Sassafras chicken stew
86-90 Sassafras crawfish stew
91-95 Spiced sunchokes
96-00 Sweet potato cakes

d100 Southwest Region Foods
1-5 Adobe bread
6-10 Bighorn lamb stew
11-15 Blue maize griddle cakes
16-20 Cactus and eggs
21-25 Cactus fruit jelly
26-30 Cactus salad
31-35 Carrot hash
36-40 Chili fritter
41-45 Dried maize soup
46-50 Fried squash blossoms
51-55 Garbanzo soup
56-60 Maize stew with blue dumplings
61-65 Posole (Hominy chili stew)
66-70 Pumpkin candy
71-75 Pumpkin-pine nut bread
76-80 Refried pinto beans
81-85 Spitsweet fruit pie
86-90 Stuffed sweet peppers
91-95 Tortilla soup
96-00 Wild sage bread

Here are the major roadblocks I felt merited attention:

Horses. This isn't Earth, and as has been pointed out, the Ulfen have had a fort here for five, thousand, years.

So horses: Arcadia has them. It has cavaliers and paladin mounts and a long legend that goes along with their reemergence, involving (naturally) a trickster culture hero. And trade is far beyond what might be expected, thanks to the return of horses.

Disease. Arcadia has clerics, so that is not the devastating tragedy it would have been.

Metallurgy. A bit of cheat, a bit of RAW. Low level magic weapons are slightly more common, bypassing fragility. A lot of masterwork, and a fair bit more metal than otherwise expected (dwarves, Ulfen). Druids do a brisk trade in wood shaping and hardening, and the Shee/elves know of rare hardwoods that equate with metal plating.

Those 5000 Years of Vikings: this one hurts. It just feels like someone didn't really study their own timeline, but It Is What It Is. So I had to reverse the joke.

The 'Skraeling' are a barbaric tribe looked down upon by everyone for weakness and depravity. They, and a never ending band of monstrous humanoids have been locked in battle with the Invaders for millennia. The region itself is cursed, blurring time and stoking aggression. All civilized people avoid the entire nation, pitying those trapped within. If your average Arcadian knew that the Linnorn Kings were shipping more of their people in to this day they would be positively horrified.

I'm afraid I don't have the best interests of the Aldorians and Chelish conquistadors in mind, either. Their stories are easier, but their lives might get a bit difficult.

I've been quietly working on an Arcadian gazetteer, no plans on where I'm going with it, but I've been working on similar North American fantasy projects for decades.

The key is absolute diversity in cultures and peoples, in my opinion. I've written out way too many cultures for anyone to ever use, been trying to pare them down to something more manageable.

My Arcadia is very Golarion, I kept Arcadian variants of elves, gnomes, rare dwarves -- they map quite easily to continental legends.

Quick samples of three key nations:

Fivepath League
Council-United Powerhouse of the Moon Lakes
Alignment: N
Capital: Longhouse
Notable Settlements: Southtrade, Centerfire, Sapling Gate (Eastgate), Flint Gate (Westgate), Lakehome, Far Trail's End
Ruler: Grand Council; High Sachem Pesawut (LN female Dineh oracle 11)
Government: Fledgling Democracy
Major Races: Dineh-Sioqwi (also Dineh-Wakalgan, Dineh-Athapask, Shee (Elves), Nirumbee (Gnomes), Half-Shee, Halflings
Languages: Sioqwi, Trade
Religion: Great Manitou, Three Sisters, Handsomeway (LG)
Resources: Fish, maize, beans, squash, gift economy, deer, tobacco, berries

=====

Deepening Woods
Hidden Nation of the Arcadian Elves
Alignment: CG
Capital: Sugarmaple Grove
Notable Settlements: Small elven groves spread through the Deepening Woods, Beechtree
Ruler: Sachem Behind the Aspen (LG male Arcadian Elf fighter 14)
Government: Chiefdom
Major Races: Elves (some Half-Elves, Gnomes)
Languages: Elvish, Trade, Sioqwi
Religion: Elvish
Resources: Rare woods, carvings, art, berries, spices, knowledge, arcana

=====

Ilinassi
Great River Empire in Decline
Alignment: LE
Capital: Sun Bluff City
Notable Settlements: Ikoma, Red Bend City, Misiqa, Dyanda, Risewatch, Troubled Hill, Nasayii, Talaqsa, Northwar City
Ruler: Grand Sun Sachem Imisquatcha (LE male Dineh-Tanozic aristocrat 13)
Government: Totalitarian Religious Empire
Major Races: Dineh-Tanozic, Nimerigar (Dwarf) advisors
Languages: Tanozic, Trade
Religion: Sun Worship, diabloism, Three Sisters
Resources: Arcana, knowledge, metalworks, armaments, shipment, South Arcadia trade, agriculture, alchemy