• The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!

I so want to use this in a campaign

Hussar

Hussar

Legend
Just tooling around at BiblioOdyssey, and saw The Dresden Codex which is believed to be the oldest existing book from the Americas. From the blog:

The Dresden Codex (named for the city where it is housed) is a fig bark paper manuscript in concertina style, produced around the beginning of the 13th century (a contentious point). The seventy-four pages are sewn together producing an eleven foot long document which was originally folded up between protective wooden covers bearing engraved jaguars. As the most complete of the few remaining Maya manuscripts, it is a comprehensive source for Maya calendar and astronomy systems and an aid to glyph interpretation in the wider iconography of the Maya culture.
Click to expand...

Take a look at the images (they're a bit big to link here). I WANNA use this in a game. Very cool.
 

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Hussar

Hussar

Legend
I'll admit my history is not as good as it should be, but, really, you'll never find a time when the Mayans (and the Aztecs) were particularly close in technology simply because the Mayans had no horses. I've read that, for example, Aztec pottery and glasswares were roughly equal to European levels at the time, because glass doesn't need horses.

But no horses stunts development in so many ways. Agriculture being the HUGE disadvantage. But, in most other ways as well. I don't think that, say, having the Vikings sailing south along the coast would have had much of a different result. Sure, no gunpowder, but, you still have iron weapons and armor. Crossbows and cavalry would still spell disaster for the Mayans IMO.
 


Moon_Goddess

Moon_Goddess

Have I really been on this site for over 20 years!
I highly recommend you check out Jared Diamond's [ame="http://www.amazon.com/Guns-Germs-Steel-Fates-Societies/dp/0393061310/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266248178&sr=8-1"]Guns Germs and Steel[/ame]

It's not just horses, it's livestock in general the americas didn't have it, thus they didn't live directly with large mammals. Living with animals is what created diseases, and also created immunities. At no point in history after ~12,000 BC could the american stood up to the Europeans diseases.

There's alot more in the book too, discussing how the same food will grow in China as will grow in france, but Mayans didn't have much east to west to go, they had to spread north south and that requires changing crops..

All in all a good read and quickly shows you how, the whole worlds history is largely a result of geography rather than culture.
 


C

cignus_pfaccari

First Post
El Mahdi said:
Yeah, I completely forgot about the impact of disease on the New World. Even 200 or 300 years wouldn't have made a difference. Too bad there's no evidence or information about Viking interaction with the New World. I wonder if they transmitted anything to the locals, or whether they even interacted with locals.

:hmm:
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There was a Viking coin found in a native trash heap, it'd had a hole drilled in it to apparently be worn on a leather cord.

The only possible significant difference I can imagine from earlier contact is that the natives would've had more time to recover from the various diseases the Europeans brought.

Brad
 

K

Kafen

First Post
El Mahdi said:
Yeah, I completely forgot about the impact of disease on the New World. Even 200 or 300 years wouldn't have made a difference. Too bad there's no evidence or information about Viking interaction with the New World. I wonder if they transmitted anything to the locals, or whether they even interacted with locals.

:hmm:
Click to expand...

The Black Death would have been active with the huge population centers of the city states in South America there to feed on.

Malaria would be deadlier than anything in recorded history due to the lack of medicines in Europe at that time.

I would place bets on neither side winning with the pockets of people rebuilding enough to ward off the Europeans with the horses they gather from the dead.

Just a WAG...
 



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