Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Mesoamerica as a game setting

Everyone these days are fairly familiar with "the fantasy rpg setting" as it commonly is presented. More often than not it is based on European pre-industrial societies. Sometimes it's more medieval and sometimes it's more Victorian renaissance with primitive steam engines. For some reason inspiration from other cultures are few and far between.

Glorantha is kind of famous for being a rich setting, and also for being hard to "get". One reason it is so rich is the inspiration from ancient Roman, Greek, Persian, Indian and other non-European milieus. For D&D we have seen Maztica and The Horde and some source books for 2nd ed about different historical eras.

Since I've just finished reading Charles C. Mann excellent book 1491, I've begun to think it would be seriously cool to do a small contained setting influenced my Mesoamerican cultures. It's weird enough to give a sense of fantasy in itself and not too far out. Apart from Maztica, which I don't know much about I think this is virgin territory. It would be fun to hear of anything like it, or about Maztica for that matter. Research time!