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Just thinking about Jatembe (being a magic-user of colour) suggested Ged (Sparrowhawk), who also is one.
Azlant doesn't have any canonical surviving settlements, but it strikes me that a blending of Azlanti, Mwangi, and Arcadian cultures could exist there, and there could be a very low key college/society of magic, with a philosophical outlook, in the islands.
There is also this, which I haven't seen, yet...
There is also Who Fears Death, which I also enjoyed and could make for a great source of ideas, and the Nyambe setting. I think an entirely Mwangi campaign would be pretty awesome. But the connection between Jatembe and Azlant is, I think, uncertain, and I could also explore that.
Thoughts?
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There might be some connections to wrangle out of the post-Earthfall days in the "Savith" territories, but I'm afraid most of that is inland.
Looking at it from an aesthetics-first point of view, I'd be tempted to go futher south in Garund, especially if Dehrukani(whose nature seems in line with Jatembe's legacy) is on the coast. Because if any place on Golarion is going to look like a Roger Dean painting, that's probably it. :)
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Interesting. Dehrukani is kind of paradisical. I like the moral and ethical dimension of magic and its use, and it could make a very interesting homeland for a philosophy of magic as a CG creative/teaching tool, but there would have to be conflict as well.
Holomog apparently dates back to the time of Azlant and hence would have influences, almost certainly... Also, Amazons!
Nurvatchta is fascinating. It isn't clear if the were-arachnids are good or evil from the scant info we have.
There is a tendency for greater magic and weirdness as one goes south from the equator, and Nex and Geb are on the equator, which suggests they might almost be normal from an Inner Sea perspective, at least in comparison.
Hmm. An anthropological fantasy game? No good/evil, just permutations of humanity and unhumanity?
As an amateur fantasy cartographer, I find the idea of Earthsea-as-Azlant utterly brilliant.
I personally prefer Eberron's Xendrik over Nyambe: the latter is definitely more an Africa/South America derivation (and thus probably more 'realistic'), but Xendrik is just chock full of fantasy goodness (and blends well with nearly every fantasy world).
Making the Azlant 'black' is a bit extreme - my thoughts are for something more neutral, like the race from Pirates of Darkwater (one of my all-time favorite cartoons!). The people had dark (olive) skin tones, but also had light hair, almost elven (half-elven?) eyes, etc - in fact, the guy in the setting guide looks like he could fit right into that world (but he needs a tan... must be a mage...)
Come to think of it, Pirates of Darwater would also make an excellent fit in the Azlant region (Darwater and all!)
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If Azlant is a human homeland of sort we would expect a certain brown coloration to be the standard. It's also near the equator. Hence, the people there would naturally tend to be fairly melanistic.
However, as the pathfinderwiki puts it, Azlanti
"skin tones ranged from olive to pale white."
This is very odd, unless they were relatively recent colonists of the region. Or perhaps... the axial tilt of Golarion was different before Earthfall?
If Azlant is a human homeland of sort we would expect a certain brown coloration to be the standard. It's also near the equator. Hence, the people there would naturally tend to be fairly melanistic.
However, as the pathfinderwiki puts it, Azlanti
"skin tones ranged from olive to pale white."
This is very odd, unless they were relatively recent colonists of the region. Or perhaps... the axial tilt of Golarion was different before Earthfall?
Or aboleths tampered with azlanti genome.
Also, is Azlant actually homeland of humanity? I thought that aboleth took existing early humans from elsewhere (presumably Garund) and settled them on Azlant, making various experiments on them and accelerating their technological and magical development which lead to creation of first human civilization.
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Contributor
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If Azlant is a human homeland of sort we would expect a certain brown coloration to be the standard. It's also near the equator. Hence, the people there would naturally tend to be fairly melanistic.
However, as the pathfinderwiki puts it, Azlanti
"skin tones ranged from olive to pale white."
This is very odd, unless they were relatively recent colonists of the region. Or perhaps... the axial tilt of Golarion was different before Earthfall?
Or aboleths tampered with azlanti genome.
Also, is Azlant actually homeland of humanity? I thought that aboleth took existing early humans from elsewhere (presumably Garund) and settled them on Azlant, making various experiments on them and accelerating their technological and magical development which lead to creation of first human civilization.
Hmm. Interesting. Humanity doesn't - so far as I know - have a homeland per se - but Azlant's where the first civilized culture ('cept maybe Vudra) came from.
Why would the aboleths breed humans that can't go outside and take the noon sun in their area? To keep them underground/inside?
So they build cities? Hmm.
Why aren't the Mwangi peoples lighter if they mingled with the Azlanti? Were the Azlanti racists? The latter, sadly, would be really convenient for Aboleth genetic research. Endogamy only = controlled breeding stock.
I assume that the Azlanti were the native ethnic group for Azlanti continent. Aboleth tinkered with Azlanti civilization, but it seems evident they didn't create humanity. Since it seems likely there were already native populations in Avistan, Arcadia, Garund, and Casmaron.
I don't necessarily see any issue with olive-skinned Azlanti. I feel like at least some artwork I have seen for them given them a similar skin color as that possessed by Native Americans, who certainly inhabit equatorial regions.
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See, olive skin isn't actually characteristic of equatorial peoples who've been there for a substantial period. It's kind of a part-way change.
Apparently, if Native Americans migrated south towards the equator from Asia 15,000 years ago, that's not enough time to develop truly dark skin. The opposite change dark to light (i.e., Europeans and Asians from African) took place over 120-65,000 years ago. The native Australians arrived in c.-70,000 and are more closely related to Europeans than Africans, so people match the sun's rays with darker skin in at least that amount of time, and probably less (the Melanasians arrived c.-40,000). If the Azlanti are in fact indigenous to their region, they'd have dark skin. If they were transplanted or migrated there on the scale of 5-20,000 years ago then their colour would make sense. The fact that they have very pale skin - paler than the Avistani standard - is the part that's odd.
Now, Azlant perished c.-5293, Azlant was at its height in -6530 AR, and we are in 4713 AR, they probably were settled there/mutated into paleskin freaks sometime around -10,000, then maybe the lack of colour is explained.
Basically, if they were actual natives of the continent, resident for at least 40,000 years, they should be dark-skinned. As residents of the equator, they'd have all sorts of problems with folate levels unless they stayed indoors during the middle of the day. Since "indoors" isn't likely to exist prior to c.-10,000 AR, we can see the problem. Hence = migrants/transplants makes sense.
I think.
Why aren't the Mwangi peoples lighter if they mingled with the Azlanti? Were the Azlanti racists? The latter, sadly, would be really convenient for Aboleth genetic research. Endogamy only = controlled breeding stock.
Even if high-melanin, dark skinned Mwangi folk mingled with low-melanin pale skinned Azlanti the environmental conditions favored darkening of their descendants skins. Also, descendants of such pairings would continue to mingle with much more numerous Mwangi.
After two hundred years darker skin and dark hair reigns supreme. After 10 thousand years descendants of early Azlanti/Mwangi pairings will be indistinguishable from a pure-blooded Mwangi.
Well to be honest timescales for things in Golarion are kind of wonky...I don't think Paizo considered this aspect of things when inventing Golarion :)
Consider this: The stereotypical wizard is pale, because he is a introverted bookworm who spends all his time studying and experimenting and never sees the light of day. In nearly every setting, its the mages that are getting around the most, even traveling to other worlds.
Now lets compare this with some RW facts - in the Victorian (and medieval) era, pale skin was considered very attractive - so much so, people actually powdered their skin to appear much lighter (and ghoulish, IMO). When we see medieval art, its usually of royalty/nobility (or wealthy merchants when they started to appear), and of course, they would all have the lovely pale skin tones (perhaps even further exaggerated by the artist). This gives us the misconception that medieval European peoples were very light-skinned, but the truth is, the average peasant or whatever probably spent all of their daylight hours outside, toiling heavily in the sun. They probably had rugged, well-tanned (and heavily aged) skin, but we just never see them pictured that way. I call this 'the Jesus phenomena' (because he is THE prime example of of someone completely misrepresented in art).
Also, compare this to Egyptians, who rarely had real beards, but are always depicted with them in art (the actually wore false ones... weird, I know). Once again, we become victims of our own false preconceptions do to the limited amount of physical representations we get to view.
So, my point is, the Azlanti we see depicted are probably how the current peoples of the Inner sea region imagine them to be, due to their very limited recollections of them, and whatever few they may have come into contact with very early on (I can't imagine Azlanti ambassadors/plantation owners/etc looking like 'common drudges' - they would be well-perfumed and perhaps powdered representatives of what would have been considered 'majestic Azlanti'). Other folks never get to see the down-trodden side of their society - the people with the leathery skin and bent backs.
So we are seeing the 'ideal', not the unwashed masses.
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All these people have white (or Asian) skin tones. Personally, I'm not trying to overturn canon, only suggest that the Azlanti ruling caste - as depicted in PF so far - is very white or at most Mediterranean in skin tone. The expected skin tone is either African or Melanesian. Not in any way "olive," "tan," or swarthy. Like this.
In world, there ought to be a reason for this. Light skin doesn't stick around for tens of thousands of years: there are very good reasons why evolution favours dark skin in regions with enough sunlight- namely folate levels. Without enough folate - which is stripped away by heavy sunlight if you are white, women can't bear healthy, surviving children. That's why pregnant white women are advised to wear hats in the noon sun.
The process of becoming dark-skinned without intermarriage with darker neighbors seems to take 4-60,000 years of natural selection. Hence, the Azlanti, I suspect, are not native in the long term to their continent, and may have used magic and inbreeding to preserve their pale appearance.
Yeah, I'm thinking on this a little too much. I suspect the real world reason has something to do with the depictions of the pop cultural Atlanteans as white. After all, the "Aryans" were supposed to come from Atlantis in Blavatsky's theories, an idea that became the pseudohistoric Thule in Germany.
This sounds like a fun idea. I don't think you have to worry about race too much. Earthsea, afterall, included people of all colors and was a pretty big area. Ged the hero was often described as "bronze". I imagince him being similar to native americans, Indians or polinesians. But there are also "black" people in the outer reaches of earthsea and "white" people in the north and east. I think if you put race aside earthsea works thematically with azlant and garund or perhaps move earthsea to east of garund so you can have a Vrdran influence.
Perhaps the aboleths put a perpetual cloud cover up, to make it more comfortable when they went ashore?
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Perhaps the aboleths put a perpetual cloud cover up, to make it more comfortable when they went ashore?
Well, I think Aboleths, seriously, would have encouraged cities, and sewer systems, and canals, and hierarchical systems of government, all the better to get their tentacles closer to control of humans...
I'm really lovin' on the idea that they had constant cloud cover... Azlant would have been a dreary place (like London, lol).
Perhaps they had something akin to the Eye of Abendego going on all the time, but on a much lesser scale. I could definitely see the Aboleths doing something like that (they would feel more comfortable in the perpetually damp atmosphere). That could explain the Azlanti pale complexions, and pissed-off facial expressions (having constantly wet socks will really ruin someone's attitude).