european fantasy cultures and how to fit them

[deaddmwalking]

Having been playing for a long time, it is my experience that players respond better to a prompt.

Saying 'make whatever you want' creates option paralysis for some players. It's also much easier for players to make characters that really aren't compatible in the world.

If the world is completely undefined, one player may try to create a character from the last surviving civilization on the brink of collapse, while another wants to play a character that is part of a multi-ethnic integrated society with established trade networks across the planet.

Barring portals and being in a different world (which CAN also be disempowering because you're disregarding the character backstory) those aren't really going to work together.

Knowing that there's a culture that is fighting a last desperate battle against the Hellblight and that there's a mercantile Empire in the Center Sea PROBABLY gives both players what they want while ensuring that they're compatible.

There can still be a lot of blank spaces and undefined areas. When someone says 'I want to be Jaguar Clan' you can look at the map and decide that the space between 'Lion Clans' and 'Lost Amazon' probably would be an appropriate place for them and work out relationships with the player to those groups... Or maybe you agree that they belong closer to the 'Aztec Serpents' and don't have a connection to the Lion Clans (at least, not that anyone remembers) and you have a different take that the player likes better.

[Chamomile]

A bunch of these fantasy locations have extra space for you to draw a dot and write in "here there be russian tieflings".

Sure. You can also just rewrite existing content. No one in the game with the aasimar Russian guy cares that Icewind Dale is apparently now Russian-themed. There was a joke made that Icewind Dale is more like Canada, so the Russian demon-hunter should be saying "sorry" every time he hits something with his axe. Some people don't even check what's in the setting, but say "sure, sounds good" when I tell them there's a matching region on the map.

But also there are some people who feel alarmingly limited by what's written in the books. I kind of wonder if this comes from experience with terrible GMs or what. I don't know for sure if any of these players have considered a character concept and then backed out when they realized there was no appropriate place for it on the map, but it seems in line with people who feel like they can't refluff classes.

Which brings us to the second point...

On the other hand, the payoff for your kitchen sink map is huge, because your average player can riff off one or two of the 50 concepts on your map.

I must have some weird way of repelling average players, then, because basically no one ever does this. They come up with a character concept, fit it into an appropriate culture if one exists, or rewrite or invent one if it doesn't. Most players don't even seem to notice that their accent doesn't match their alleged nation of origin or whatever.

[Username17]

Having been playing for a long time, it is my experience that players respond better to a prompt.

That's reasonable. Further, I accept this anecdote because it jives with the extensive body of research on Improv going back fifty fucking years and being extensively corroborated in public settings and being successfully reproduced over and over again in class rooms and live television. Chamomile's anecdote I do not accept because it contradicts that extensive body.

But honestly, I strongly suspect that Chamomile is being obtuse and simply not recognizing the prompts that players are responding to. Obviously players construct characters with references to tropes and clichés and obviously those components are inspired by and referenced to elements already established in the campaign space. How could they not be? If Chamomile feels like people around him are presenting wholly original material, he's obviously wrong. No material is wholly original. At best, he is failing to detect the connections and leaps of logic that the people around him are making.


-Username17

[OgreBattle]

What makes something 'feel European (or specific part like vikings)' is a part of my wondering on this.

[Chamomile]

I'm pretty sure the guy playing the Russian aasimar demon-hunter didn't make up Russia.

[tussock]

OgreBattle, things feel European because the art has white people in chain and plate in it, riding horses and wielding strait swords with a plain cross guard that look a bit like the holy cross (that is why medieval European swords looked like that, and no one else's ever did).

Like, real medieval Europe is a shit show. It's unremittingly awful. They fought wars against the horrors of science and maths and medicine and religious tolerance, and they won most of them. They fucking well banned geometry for centuries, and as a result their boats and buildings were all ass and kept sinking or collapsing, or both. Their response to plagues was often to gather everyone together for fasting and prayer, which is why whole towns just ceased to exist. They used silver mines for money and kept running out of it buying pepper corns and silk from China, resulting in regular economic collapse with mass starvation and whole cities vanishing from maps.

No one wants any of that in a game, even Warhammer's epic grimdark never really goes properly medieval. D&D has dragons that don't hurt that much. So they just use white guys in chain and plate, and merlin with his hat. They don't even use proper medieval clothing, which was also awful, it's all 18th century stuff these days.

[JigokuBosatsu]

https://www.deviantart.com/eotbeholder/ ... -245738593

As someone with a literal Tiger-Headed Opium Nightmare tattooed on my forearm, this map always gives me a delicious chuckle.

[Username17]

What makes something 'feel European (or specific part like vikings)' is a part of my wondering on this.

Things are European because they use clichés that are pointers to European cultures. They could be Germanic sounding names, or French sounding foods, or descriptions of European houses or fucking whatever.

The key is that no matter how in-depth you write your setting, the setting will necessarily be incomplete. There will be blank space, and that blank space will be filled in dynamically during play by the players. This follows the rules of improv, meaning that new offers build upon old offers.

The initial signifier that you're "basically in Europe" could be anything. It could be that you call one of the characters "Helga" instead of "Yuriko." It could be that you call a big sword a "Zweihander" instead of a "No-Dachi." It could be that you describe a food as "Bratwurst" instead of "Yakitori." All of these suggest that your fantasy region is "basically Germany" and not "basically Japan" which in turn means that players can be free to add any other "German Stuff" to the story and have that count as "enlarging" rather than "rejecting."

-Username17

[Whipstitch]

wrong tab

[hyzmarca]

What makes something 'feel European (or specific part like vikings)' is a part of my wondering on this.

Things are European because they use clichés that are pointers to European cultures. They could be Germanic sounding names, or French sounding foods, or descriptions of European houses or fucking whatever.

The key is that no matter how in-depth you write your setting, the setting will necessarily be incomplete. There will be blank space, and that blank space will be filled in dynamically during play by the players. This follows the rules of improv, meaning that new offers build upon old offers.

The initial signifier that you're "basically in Europe" could be anything. It could be that you call one of the characters "Helga" instead of "Yuriko." It could be that you call a big sword a "Zweihander" instead of a "No-Dachi." It could be that you describe a food as "Bratwurst" instead of "Yakitori." All of these suggest that your fantasy region is "basically Germany" and not "basically Japan" which in turn means that players can be free to add any other "German Stuff" to the story and have that count as "enlarging" rather than "rejecting."

-Username17

For creating interesting fantasy cultures, I think it's perfectly reasonable to have people eat German food while using Japanese swords and worshiping Zulu gods. Cultural mash-ups can work quite well. Like ninjas who eat New York style pizza and are turtles.

[Chamomile]

Frank, you need to stop pretending you know how improv acting works. It is very obvious you have just now encountered this subject beyond dim awareness that it exists and do not have even a cursory understanding of how it works, otherwise you would know that Alice saying "I left my zweihander at home" and Bob saying "here, borrow my katana" is a perfectly good improvised exchange that includes accepting an offer, and that in any case neither of them involve a list of anything, because scanning a list of options to select one is inherently not improvisational. The goal of improv acting is to provide a scene for an audience without a specific script in advance, and while obviously that happens in D&D, equally obviously there are things we do while playing D&D that are not that. Building characters is one of them.

[Username17]

I'm going to do everyone a favor and stop pretending that Chamomile has anything to add to this discussion even through refutation. We can all just accept that prompts serve a purpose and move the fuck on. And he can just not accept that, and we can still move the fuck on.

So out of the standard dnd settings does any particular one do it well? I’m familiar with Drizzt land but didn’t think much of what the real life equivalent of icewind Dale was.

In making one’s own European fantasy setting what are the main cultures to get down?

Something Arthurian, something gothic, maybe have muskets or not

The question of whether to have muskets or plate armor or whatever is one of overall technology level. In general, most fantasy settings settle in for "18th century but no gunpowder" but there's nothing stopping you from having gunpowder or picking an earlier or later date.

The key to European cultures and settings is that for them to appear in a fantasy adventure setting and add value, they have to create or imply clichés that help build adventures or characters. And often those clichés can be used for more than one culture.

So for example: you want the village full of fearful superstitious villagers who lock their doors at night and fear the vampires or werewolves or both who prowl the nearby moors. That's a good place to have adventures where the people who know vital clues are suspicious and it's a good place for Van Helsing type characters to be from. But that trope can be invoked with Scots, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians, or Slavs.

Example two: you want icy tundras with Vikings who wear Viking hats. It has the chieftain's daughter who you have to arm wrestle for her literal hand in marriage. And it's a good place for Berserkers to be from, which is a popular character archetype. Those could be Norse (or some successor culture like Danish or Icelandic) of course, but you could also have them be Finish or Estonian or Lithuanian.

It's also perfectly permissible to mix and match. The humans of Innistrad in Magic the Gathering have Germanic and Slavic and French traits. Ludevic and Sorin Markov are coded Slavic, while Gisela and the Ulvenwald are coded German. And of course, the Cathars are French and their tricorne hats are coded French as well.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Given that the assertion you're refusing to actually argue in defense of is one that you have, until now, defended exclusively by way of pointing to a long history of improv acting that contradicts your assertions even if it did apply to the topic of discussion, which it does not, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the reason why you're refusing to further defend a point despite your long history of bulldogging conversations for a dozen pages or longer is probably because you are fully aware that any attempt to engage with a subject you have fucked up so thoroughly will only make it more obvious how underinformed you are.

Like, seriously, Frank broke this off after a total of five posts of disagreement, spread out over less than a page of conversation. That's such record-breaking rapidity for giving up on the opportunity to yell at someone that I can't imagine him giving any more clear a concession.

Also, hyzmarca's objection was to the notion that having European elements inherently excludes having Japanese elements, which you asserted when you said that introducing a character as Yujiko immediately after another was introduced as Helga would be rejecting a prompt. Talking about how you can blend European cultures doesn't actually address that at all.

[DrPraetor]

In a kitchen sink setting, you want at least enough flavors of white people to have all the PHB classes in your fantasy Europe. Combining the Wizard and Cleric, but that's another thread, at the minimum:
[*] Assassins and Thieves need to be from decadent city-states. These are preferably not-Italian because obviously, but can be not-Hanseatic or not-Bavarian for example, or even not-Arabian but if you have to explain why you're setting isn't racist you've already lost the argument.
[*] Bards traveling the countryside can easily be not-Norse or not-Celtic, but they can be not-Italian city types as well if you just declare that the commedia dell'Arte gives you magic powers.
[*] You need some scholastic hierarchy to provide cloth-wearers, which can be in cities but can also be abbeys or towers in the countryside, and any flavor of white people can have those. Not-Greeks may may provide useful trappings here. Their magic powers can be religious in nature but that's a whole other thread.
[*] You need monasteries of people with blatantly magical unarmed combat. Greek-fu is not real, so you can make them anything.
[*] Soldiers - with or without a Ranger's wilderness skills - can be any flavor of white people.
[*] You want Knights - some of whom may also be magic, this is a matter of taste - and that requires some feudal aristocracy: not-French, not-German and not-Slavic all work equally well.
[*] You want places outside the domain of the feudal aristocracy, to provide savage warriors (Barbarians) as well as savage spell-casters (Druids.) Not-Norse is the standard, but Conan the Cimmerian is actually Celtic and not-Slavs, not-Hungarians and not-Balts also work fine.

The tyranny of choice is very real, and kitchen sink settings are not always better. If you aren't going kitchen-sink, you want fewer prompts, so that people will not be overwhelmed with choices. If you are going this route, you probably want to challenge or disregard some common tropes. All the character classes might be different gamish of fighter-wizard, for example.

So, you could have a not-Finnish setting because that's exotic enough but, unless you're Swedish, you're not worried about being cultural insensitive to Finns (note: Russians do not know what cultural insensitivity is, and thus cannot worry about it). You have:
[*] Smiths, who make and have magical gear,
[*] Shamans, who have magical music,
[*] Rogues, who have luck-magic including cheating death,
[*] Avengers, who get both berserking and emo black magic,
[*] Warlocks, who change shape and toss illusions around.

And everyone is not-Finnish.

[Username17]

In a kitchen sink setting, you want at least enough flavors of white people to have all the PHB classes in your fantasy Europe.

Very much this. An important point though is that your European fantasy kitchen sink cultures are going to want to present at least two classes each. But remember that every meaningfully different flavor of cloth wearer counts, so that doesn't get things down as much as you'd think.

It's also important to remember that the "feel" of your European fantasy cultures is wildly different depending on how you exemplify them with character classes. You might want to have some kind of Saxon/Celtic/French/Whatever "Arthurian" culture - but different presentations of the Arthurian myth are pretty different. If you present Paladins and Bards that's a different feel than if you present Fighters and Druids. The latter is a more "Keira Knightley in blue paint" kind of Arthurian.

European history is about two thousand years long even if we confine ourselves to the periods we might reasonably expect to borrow from for a fantasy adventure cooperative storytelling game. When we decide to borrow some French stuff, we might be grabbing some Asterix and Obelix Gaulishness, or we might be grabbing some Joan d'Arc French crusaders, or we might be doing some Sun King decadence, or we might be doing some revolutionary republicanism. Those are all legit, and separated by a few hundred years. And the elements of French (or whatever) culture we choose to call out sets the tone for what kind of elements people will expect to and want to add to fill in the blank spaces we leave behind.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

In a kitchen sink setting, you want at least enough flavors of white people to have all the PHB classes in your fantasy Europe.

I am very confident that the number of necessary flavors for these purposes is one, on account of players reliably ignore class/culture connections, as well as literally anything else associated with class. They will pick the place of origin that matches their class and paste whatever cultural affiliation on top of it they feel like playing, with absolutely no regard for whether it makes sense with the prompt. If you strongly associate Bards with pseudo-Italian city states, characters playing Norse skalds players will claim to be from those cities with torturous backstories as to how they got there rather than just saying that this particular guy with the Bard class isn't from the stereotypical Bard origin city, and if you tell them that your campaign is no outsiders, Finns only, final destination, they will ask you if they can use your Smith class to play a samurai.

The average player is the guy who looks at a map, sees that the primary wizard faction controls the towns of Sormont, Moonglow, and Valence, populated principally by humans, halflings, and in the latter case dragonborn, and decides that his French-accented gnome fits in best with them, because he is a wizard. They're the guy who, seeing that same wizard faction having an "abduct the common people for the greater good of arcane understanding" philosophy sharing the setting with anti-feudal populist revolutionaries, decide that their wizard who fights for the interests of the poor and common people through a network of criminal spies should obviously be part of the wizard faction, because he is a wizard. They're the guy who, in the same setting, decides that his soldier with a dark past who's trying to find redemption fighting for the common people should of course be affiliated with the authoritarian law-and-order faction, because he is a Fighter, and the authoritarians are knights. They're the guy who, looking at a map covered in names like "Majestic City" and "Clanesse," decide to play a samurai named Yamato, a Russian-accented dwarf cleric (completely unrelated to the guy playing the Russian aasimar in the Forgotten Realms game), and most commonly of all, American-accented characters of ambiguous place of origin whose only significant history is explaining how they got their class features.

Given a total of five prompts, three of which had clear class associations, fully one hundred percent of players and backers chose either to ignore all of them or to associate their character with the prompt that matched their class, because it matched their class, even if it contradicted their character's stated motives or cultural affiliation. The two factions without clear class associations received zero characters who were affiliated with or members of them and the one person who backed $100 to have their character added as one of their allies never sent in their survey to tell me who that character actually was. One of the factions without clear class associations is explicitly stated to be a faction of war orphans, easily the most common backstory element across every group I've run the game for, and yet it is infinitely less popular to be directly incorporated into someone's backstory compared to the knight faction, the wizard faction, and the ranger faction. The vampire faction is by far the most popular one for people to try and join partway through, but nobody wants to start there, because there isn't a vampire class. The ranger faction is overwhelmingly popular in actual play once players have interacted with all of them, but not particularly more popular than the wizard or knight factions at chargen - despite the fact that players gravitate towards the ranger faction in play precisely because of their "let's not have a war" ideology that is written straight into their introduction.

When you associate particular classes to particular setting elements, people associate their character with the setting element that matches their class, and ignore everything entangled with that decision. They don't care if your wizard culture is English, French, or German, it's the wizard culture, which means their Romanian-accented vampire-themed necromancer is a member. If you're lucky, they'll notice that this requires a convoluted backstory and supply one.

[jt]

In a kitchen sink setting, you want at least enough flavors of white people to have all the PHB classes in your fantasy Europe.

This is a great list but the requirements described are more a political situation than a culture. There needs to be a city so it can have crime and schools. There needs to be an uncivilized fringe so you can have barbarians, and also because you want monsters to come from somewhere. You may want a feudal area between them, but a "knight" class is a rare thing and rarely interacts with the feudal system anyway; a better reason for it to exist is because castles are neat.

That can all pretty easily fit within one culture. There's some feudal place, it has an important city, and there's a frontier where the feudal system's reach ends.

In the real world that frontier would be another culture that the feudal one wasn't acknowledging, or in the middle of conquering. But this is fantasy and if you don't want that you can have areas that have never been settled because they're full of manticores.

[brized]

From Googling "constraints in creativity":

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067925/how ... e-creative

https://medium.com/stanford-d-school/wa ... 28a988a635

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/3147732.pdf

http://www.iso-cel.com/fichiers_site/a5 ... tivite.pdf

[Username17]

That can all pretty easily fit within one culture.

So fucking what?

The point of a kitchen sink setting is that it is a kitchen sink setting. You do not ask how minimalist you can make your kitchen sink setting, because even asking how you can minimalize the setting is missing the entire fucking point of the exercise. The question is how much you can fit in, not how much you can take away.

The fact that you could tell an entirely reasonable cooperative fantasy story using only the culture and legends of the Kashub people from between 1350 and 1375 isn't the point. It's not even on the same mailing list as the point. The point is you're playing a fucking kitchen sink game and you're trying to convey as much information with as little text as possible by having things be islands of meaning with as little overlap as possible.

You could have everything be a variation on the same culture, but that would be a base betrayal of the entire concept of playing kitchen sink fantasy in the first place. You not-Italians eat stuffed pasta and your not-Slavs eat stuffed cabbage and that means you can imply a whole lot of stuff with relatively little actual text. You can kind of guess what's on the table because of the appropriate ethnic stereotypes. That's economical storytelling. It's a different kind of economy than worrying about the conceptual space of completely made-up fantasy people. We don't worry about the conceptual space of kitchen sink fantasy because the conceptual space is white space. The Giff are "Basically British from the Imperial Period" and so you don't have fill in details about food and musical tastes and clothing and shit - you can just fill in British Imperial stereotypes into all the white space as needed.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

One of the dangers of minalism is that your "exclusive" stuff starts getting progressively less exclusive. The hallmark for this was probably Vampire: the Masquerade, where there were only X number of disciplines but 13+ clans and bloodlines. While you could theoretically give each clan/bloodline a unique set of disciplines without too much overlap, in practice you didn't want to do this (because some disciplines were worthless, and some were supposed to be "exclusive" to a given clan). But the number of bloodlines/clans proliferated faster than disciplines, even as the devs finally started reorganizing and reducing the redundant discipline load - so you ended up with like 6-7 clans bloodlines with Necromancy, and even more with some flavor of blood sorcery, which greatly reduced the monopoly on blood magic which was Clan Tremere's initial stick. By making that one of their defining features and then diluting that very premise, the setting took a hit.

[Chamomile]

The point of a kitchen sink setting is that it is a kitchen sink setting.

Golly, do you think the utility of having a kitchen sink setting might be in dispute and thus not valid as something that can be assumed without argument? 'Cause it turns out that few players remember their own backstory, let alone each other's, most are nothing more than an excuse justifying how they got their class features, and the story that matters is the one that happens at the table.

[Whipstitch]

Cause it turns out that few players remember their own backstory, let alone each other's

Settings are in many ways defined by what is typical for NPCs, not by what is typical for player characters. Hell, that players won't read your convoluted homebrew is often why GMs resort to having all the barbarians wear kilts and woad while wandering the highlands--figuring out that you're dealing with the Not Scots ain't much, but it's a lot better than nothing and you can do it even if you didn't do your pre-game homework. And while it may gall people that player characters all have predictably unpredictable backstories, that ultimately doesn't say very much about the setting. After all, a full adventuring party may seriously just be 3 dudes and a fucking mule. That they all have different accents doesn't necessarily say much about broader society, and that's fine.

[Chamomile]

Settings are in many ways defined by what is typical for NPCs, not by what is typical for player characters. Hell, that players won't read your convoluted homebrew is often why GMs resort to having all the barbarians wear kilts and woad while wandering the highlands--figuring out that you're dealing with the Not Scots ain't much, but it's a lot better than nothing and you can do it even if you didn't do your pre-game homework. And while it may gall people that player characters all have predictably unpredictable backstories, that ultimately doesn't say very much about the setting. After all, a full adventuring party may seriously just be 3 dudes and a fucking mule. That they all have different accents doesn't necessarily say much about broader society, and that's fine.

Sure, but the point I'm making is that all of this happens GM-side, and that this remains true no matter how dead simple and cliché-ridden your setting is. There is no amount of required effort low enough that it will convince your players to read and care about a list of prompts. You can make that happen, but you can't do it by lowering the barrier to entry. You also have to either bribe or coerce your players into noticing. And it's not unreasonable for a GM working for free to have "incorporate one of these prompts into your backstory" as a prerequisite for playing the game at all. GMing is hard and it's fine to expect your players to put forth a significantly smaller amount of effort in order to facilitate actually interacting with a setting, which is something a lot of GMs enjoy.

But the point here is that players who actually want to read your setting fluff - no matter how easy it is to digest - are extremely rare, and you won't get a group full of them unless you specifically vet for players like that. Players will create whatever characters they feel like, which means this:

On the other hand, the payoff for your kitchen sink map is huge, because your average player can riff off one or two of the 50 concepts on your map.

This is completely false. The average payoff for your kitchen sink map is null, because your average player won't riff off of anything. Having 50 concepts on the map only makes that problem worse, because even if each one takes all of 1-2 lines to establish, that's still ~75 lines of setting fluff. Assuming you've got line breaks between entries (you should), that's multiple pages of setting fluff. Most players will read that if you insist, but maybe 10-20% will do it just because it's there to read.

[Username17]

One of the dangers of minalism is that your "exclusive" stuff starts getting progressively less exclusive. The hallmark for this was probably Vampire: the Masquerade, where there were only X number of disciplines but 13+ clans and bloodlines. While you could theoretically give each clan/bloodline a unique set of disciplines without too much overlap, in practice you didn't want to do this (because some disciplines were worthless, and some were supposed to be "exclusive" to a given clan). But the number of bloodlines/clans proliferated faster than disciplines, even as the devs finally started reorganizing and reducing the redundant discipline load - so you ended up with like 6-7 clans bloodlines with Necromancy, and even more with some flavor of blood sorcery, which greatly reduced the monopoly on blood magic which was Clan Tremere's initial stick. By making that one of their defining features and then diluting that very premise, the setting took a hit.

Vampire isn't a kitchen sink setting, and indeed helps underline the difficulties of a non-kitchen sink approach. Vampire asks that we care and know things about the different groups in a persistent fashion, which means that it has profoundly limited conceptual space to work with. We can intelligently have a discussion about whether there are too many bloodlines (there are) or whether the Toreador are a bad use of conceptual space (they are). Vampire's conceptual space problems are so profound that it needs to be hard-rebooted if it's to continue at all. It's been generally understood by Vampire's own fanbase that Vampire needed a reboot for over twenty years, and when it got a reboot in nWoD the complaint wasn't that a reboot had happened, but that the reboot actually offered was bad.

On the flip side, Forgotten Realms can just muddle about with however many races of Goblin and however many barbarian peoples and Earth historical knock-off peoples and the actual pantheon of gods from Conan in there for no reason. When the clowns who made 4th edition D&D did a reductionist FR reboot, the fanbase was justifiably pissed because as a kitchen sink setting such a thing was never necessary. You were never expected to know anything about Sossal or Ulgarth, so removing them from the map helps nothing.

Reductionism has its place, and there are times you want a setting where people can remember all the types of monster or wizard. And then we have discussions of what are good and bad uses of conceptual space. Vampire is certainly a great exhibit in truly terrible uses of conceptual space. But if you want to get your kitchen sink on, you can also do that. There are more leads than you will use in your actual story, but each lead is a pointer to white space that you can fill in with clichés and that's pretty good for a certain kind of spontaneous storytelling.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Being able to expand aimlessly and indefinitely is certainly a strong selling point for settings that expect multiple different authors to continue working on them for several decades.