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Lord Il Palazzo
2012-12-20, 05:41 PM
There's a strong chance that my current game will soon find the player visiting the City of Brass in the Elemental Plane of Fire. I'd like to give it fluff besides the default pseudo-Arabian deal that so often comes with anything genie related, but I'm stuck for inspiration.

What real world cultures present or historic have you used as models for fantasy cultures and settings in your games?

Talentless
2012-12-20, 06:17 PM
My personal favorite is an Aztec Empire Analog, except with Dwarves as the upper class priesthood.

Really startled my players when they found out the Dwarves in the world are very xenophobic racists greatly taken to sacrificing and eating the hearts of any Humanoid that is taller than they are. :smallbiggrin:

Malimar
2012-12-20, 06:37 PM
My world has an unapologetic wutai (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Wutai), and a different culture based firmly on ancient Rome. They're boring and overdone, I don't particularly recommend them.

(The others are somewhat less directly ripoffs of individual Earth cultures, though perhaps equally clichéd -- a steampunk dwarf+gnome society, a tree-huggy elf society, a rich mercantile city-state, and a lawless hive of scum and villainy.)

Were I designing new additions to my canon, I would probably consider an Uberwald (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Uberwald) or a Qurac (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Qurac).

CaptainLhurgoyf
2012-12-20, 08:22 PM
Me being a history geek, I like to go for a setting grounded in history, so I like Fantasy Counterpart Cultures because they give me something to work off of and get a sense of what a given area is like. A lot of times, I find drawing on real history and finding stuff I like to be more fun than making up a culture from scratch. Cultures in my setting have been pretty much defined by the principle of "take a real-world civilisation or two and change things up about them." I take some aesthetic elements, maybe a bit of the governmental structure, and draw on the language for names and terms, but then I usually throw in a few twists to make things interesting so the players don't feel like they could get the same thing out of reading a history book than playing my games. As such, my fantasy Celts are ancestor-worshippers, my fantasy Slavs and post-Viking Scandinavians inhabit a matriarchal magocracy ruled by a wizard-queen, and my fantasy Arabs have a caste system in which genies are the rulers, genasi are the priests and officials, and humans are the commoners.

Another trick I use to keep my cultures fresh is by drawing on sources that don't get used as much as others. The dominant political power in my world is basically the Carolingian Empire with Renaissance technology, my desert-dwellers, while being primarily Arab-inspired, have some Hebrew influence to them, and while I do have a bygone-decadent-empire-that-fell-and-left-ancient-ruins-everywhere, it has as many Egyptian trappings as it does Roman. In fact, my setting's equivalent of Asia was deliberately designed to avoid drawing on Japanese influence, so it's primarily based on Tang Dynasty China mixed with Vedic and Mauryan India. This even extends to my take on religion - I avoided Catholic trappings, and instead used Eastern Orthodox ones, so I have temples with colourful onion domes staffed by priests in klobuks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klobuk).

Finally, I've found that one way to put a unique spin on races in your setting is to take inspiration from different cultures. For instance, orcs in my setting are styled after the Central Asian nomadic civilizations like the Mongols and Tatars, so they have a strong equestrian tradition and an economy based on herding and raiding. Case in point - Tolkien actually wrote his dwarves as the Middle-Earth equivalent of Jews; the idea of them being miniature Vikings came later (and I'm taking more after Tolkien's original portrayal than that idea.)

Lord Il Palazzo
2012-12-21, 12:17 PM
Thanks for your replies. I wish I had as much historical knowledge as Cap since the mix and match approace sounds really cool.

For my efreet, I'm thinking I'll borrow/shamelessly steal Talentless's Aztec Empire idea since it seems like a good fit in a lot of ways. The various other races of the plane could be fluffed as paying tribute but not being directly governed by the efreet and the culture of slavery plays well established fluff for the City of Brass. Slaves as a form of tribute could explain members of other races (fire giants, salamanders, jann, etc.) being pressed into service of the efreet in the City for more varied encounters and the like and the hostile surroundings (especially for the uninitiated) make a nice parallel to the hostile jungles of the Aztec Empire.

Any other interesting ideas or stories from your own games?

Yora
2012-12-21, 07:52 PM
You get cool results when you mix elements from completely unrelated cultures. In Warcraft, night elves take elements from Scandinavia and Japan. And Rohan in Lord of the Rings is not unlike Viking Mongols.

Make Greek Aztecs, Roman Maori, or Chinese Gauls.

Morph Bark
2012-12-21, 08:34 PM
You get cool results when you mix elements from completely unrelated cultures. In Warcraft, night elves take elements from Scandinavia and Japan. And Rohan in Lord of the Rings is not unlike Viking Mongols.

Make Greek Aztecs, Roman Maori, or Chinese Gauls.

The latter two sound like interesting concepts. That'd fit right alongside my Mexican-Japanese gnomes.

Ravens_cry
2012-12-21, 08:59 PM
I like to mix them up and use foreign languages for naming conventions.
For example, an orc culture once combined the elements of prairie and steppe cultures, but has now been pushed by an expansionist empire to territories that are geographically like the maritime regions of Canada ,and they now live in mostly towns built into the sides of the cliffs. They are famous for being expert fishermen and sailors in all weathers by necessity, fish forming a large part of the local diet. However, they still keep up, in modified form, some of their old traditions when they were a plains people, when they herded massive half-wild oxen from the backs of flightless hippogryphs. The language used for naming conventions? Badly pronounced welsh with a guttural accent.
It just really fit the wild sea flavour I was going for.
The expansionist empire is Victorian England meets Ancient Rome, and uses a lot of Latin spoken in a posh accent.

navar100
2012-12-21, 09:44 PM
Try Asian Indian
Go Bollywood

TheThan
2012-12-22, 09:46 PM
I like messing around with dwarves:
I did roaring 20s era mobster dwarves. Think dwarves in pinstriped suits * invokes images of ZZ top.
Arabic desert dwarves that rode massive lizards (not that kinda lizard) into battle, think giant Iguanas.
Lets see, did the classic mining/smithing dwarves, only they really are the best smiths in the setting (yes even better than the elves).
I know I did some more, can’t quite recall.
Oh I did south seas (Maori I guess) barbarian gnomes, known for eating people and as great trapsmiths.

Fhaolan
2012-12-23, 03:31 AM
In my campaign world; the former Elven Empire is pseudo-Aztec, the Gnoll Empire that replaced it is psuedo-Imperial Roman. The Dwarven Anarchy is pseudo-Hebrew, the Goblins are psuedo-Polynesian, the Orc tribes are pseudo-Highland Scots. The Centaurs are Charlemagne-like France. The various Human kingdoms are Germanic, and the former Giant (read Ogre) civilization was pseudo-East Indian. There was also some *long* extinct civilizations: the Lizardmen were vaguely Oriental, the Sahaugrin were vaguely Zulu, the Thi-Kreen were vaguely Australian Aboriginal.

I use a lot of vaguely, and psuedo in those terms, because the cultures are just stealing bits and pieces from those ones. Mostly art and architecture, and some basic political organization. Although those cultures were the primary inspiration for the fantasy cultures, there's a lot that I just made up to 'fill in the blanks' and give the races a more fantastic feel.