African Adventures

[Celebrim]

[MENTION=10869]In fact our massive campaign was picked up 800 years later after the initial heroes were turned to stone. Heroes from another time found them and converted them back to flesh. It was great b/c I got to show how the culture had changed.

The impressive thing about Egypt is that the end of the last native dynasty when Ptolemy took over the country following the conquest of Alexander the Great is still closer to the present day than it was to the founding of the monarchy. And during that whole time, it had a written history. So, 800 years could go by in Egypt, and things would have changed, but they wouldn't have. Egypt was around long enough that it had three dark ages and three golden ages while the rest of the world was just getting warmed up and learning to write.

But just to show how mixed up this can get when dealing with a fantasy world my 'Egypt' isn't even in my 'Africa', but in my 'South America', and my 'Carthage' isn't really in either one, but located north of my 'Byzantine' which is in my 'Africa' (which is south of 'Asia' and not 'Europe').

 

[Shades of Eternity]

http://fantasynamegenerators.com/west-african-town-names.php#.Vr5iKvIrKM8

I found this when I realized I need a completely fictitious name for my sandbox city.

Enjoy.

 

[Connorsrpg]

[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION]. You sound like you love your history. Me too, but trying to keep it out of this discussion. I am after statements like the one you provided on you own campaign. That sounds good and 'mixed-up', like what I am getting at.

As stated, my Kodo mini-setting smashes cultures together that never came into contact in the 'real world'. On our Kage campaign world, our 'Africa' hangs off the bottom of a continent that is 'America' in the west and 'Arabia' in the east. It is also connected you our 'Europe' by an archipelago.

Wondering if others have included African-influenced material in different ways or small parts of their games. All of these sources and history bits people are posting - I want to know if and how you have USED them in games.

 

[Voadam]

Finally ran an adventure in the deepest Nyambe portion of my world. I used the Crucible of Chaos module from Paizo which for the adaptation to my world had ancient African super magic elves, flying ape warriors, cannibal dinosaur riding lizardfolk, hippos and a magical giant river crocodile. For the other side of the screen we had amazon PCs, great white hunter and colonial priest PCs, and a witch doctor PC. It was a great pulp Africa atmosphere that everybody embraced and ran with and had fun with.

 

[Connorsrpg]

[MENTION=2209]Voadam[/MENTION]. Sounds fun. Thanks for sharing.

 

[pemerton]

Has anyone used some African-influenced ideas in their games?

Yes. As someone mentioned upthread, Hepmonaland in Greyhawk is easily treated as (pseudo-)Africa, and some of the action in the game included Hepmonaland, and people from Hepmonaland but living in other parts of the world. The tropes were pretty standard: black people; town names like "Mbaku"; etc. The themes (some of which were injected by the players, some of which are present in the TSR materials) were relatively modern: colonisation, slavery etc.

What are you hoping to get out of African-influenced ideas in your game?

 

[Starfox]

I've been using Sergava (from Golarion) as an area in Hepmonaland (Greyhawk), and in my Skull & Shackles game, that was a part of the backdrop. I also played the River into Darkness adventure, which is a brew-up of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Hepmonaland is also the original home of the "Aztec" Olman of Greyhawk, and some of that entered into the Savage Tide adventure path.

But I've not really added any "African" elements of my own.

 

[David Howery]

Yes. As someone mentioned upthread, Hepmonaland in Greyhawk is easily treated as (pseudo-)Africa, and some of the action in the game included Hepmonaland, and people from Hepmonaland but living in other parts of the world. The tropes were pretty standard: black people; town names like "Mbaku"; etc. The themes (some of which were injected by the players, some of which are present in the TSR materials) were relatively modern: colonisation, slavery etc.

I did this way way back in 1E days... drew up an extended map of Hepmonaland and made it a pulp fantasy version of Africa. I did some research and added some kingdoms based on real African ones (some of which were richer than anything up in the Flanaess), and a couple of 'trading ports' on the north coast for adventurers from the north to base for operations. Not incredibly accurate, I suppose, but nothing insulting either...

 

[Starfox]

I wasn't the GM, but as a player I have some pretty bad memories of the Isle of the Ape scenario for 1E, being ambushed by seemingly rather civilized black people, but these people were absolutely unwilling to communicate in any non-violent way.

Isle of the Ape had a strong similarity to the Isle of Dread, but since I never actually read the scenario, I am not sure if they are identical. In Pazio's version of the Isle of Dread, from the Savage tide in Dungeon magazine, there were some natives that seemed more African-inspired (Tuov-like in Greyhawk terms), with others more Aztech-like (Olman), but it was never truly spelled out.

 

[Tonguez]

By 'Africa', I'm going to assume you mean 'sub-Saharan Africa', which is what most people think of when they think 'Africa'.'.

3) Unlike say the Celtic, Egypt, Norse, Greek, or Hindu cultures, the African cultures didn't produce an easily accessible body of heroic myth literature that can be used to draw inspiration. Rather, most of it is either Animistic or Animism in an transition to polytheism, probably equivalent to pre-Homeric Greek myth with equivalent disorganization and is really hard to use or find works in English on, even if you went to a good college library. Worse, you don't get a lot of resonance in the average American group as even the African Americans aren't actually part of African culture. I have first hand experience with Carribean culture, and that's a step closer, but any influence that might have on my stories (Anansi tales, for example) tends to get indistinguishable from Aesop, Brother's Grimm, or Jungle Book influences. To the extent that I want to bring Animistic pre-polytheistic influences into my world, North American culture and myth is just a lot more accessible in terms of what you can find in a library and in terms of resonance with the average American player.

Thats not true, the Epic of Sundiata Keita (first Mansa of Mali) has had western translations since the 1800s. From Rwanda comes the Epic of Ryangombe (whose mother was a were-lion). You have the Magician and the Sultans Son from Tanzania and there are copies of the Timbuktu Chronicles which give extensive material on Medieval Mali and the Sudan region.

There is a huge body of heroic myth coming from Africa, animism doesnt preclude extensive myth especially when the griots specifically had the role of recorded oral histories.

The issue of resonance is why I advocate for use of the Sudan/Sahel regions of Africa rather than further south. The medieval period and islamification of the region has made it a bit more familiar, especially when you consider the scholastic history of Timbukutu, with direct parallels to North African and even Andalusian cultural norms. Gaming in the Sahel acts as a bridge between the more familar tropes of Al-Qadim and the less familiar cultures of Sub-Saharan Africa