American Indians Colonize the Old world in 1250 BC

[MNblockhead]

Yes. Well, go ask Monte Cook if he should have ignored such warnings. He did a poorly researched depiction of Native American cultures in The Strange, back a couple of years ago, and it led to significant headaches.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2465-Monte-Cook-Games-Thunder-Plains-A-Petition

So, sure, go ahead. Make the same mistakes others made. Don't learn from what others have already done. See how that works out for you.

I was under the impression that the OP was discussing this idea for the purposes of the home game. While I agree that you should be cognizant of perpetuating offensive stereotypes, there is much more leeway in a home game where you should have a good understanding of your player's sensibilities and where any offense is more easily and amicably addressed.

If, however, the OP is planning on publishing this, then, yes. You are walking into a minefield. It is hard enough to create fantasy races that don't offend someone.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I'm not sure they would still have tribes if they were as technically advanced as Columbus. What tribe did Columbus belong to? The minute someone says the word "tribe" I imagine someone wearing animal skins, face paint, and feathers and moccasins. Columbus didn't wear those things, I'm not sure the hypothetical Indians would be wearing them either. The best example of what they might be like is if you can imagine this, Edgar Rice Burrows, "Red Martians", they were basically humanoid enough for John Carter to fall in love with one of them Deja Thoris.

Deja Thoris was basically very much like an American Indian, it is interesting that John Carter has an encounter with a real Indian, that tried to kill him, right before he teleported to Mars. The Red Martians he described as looking very much like American Indians, only they built cities carried swords and pistols and operated machinery, this might be something like the Indians in the setting I'm talking about here. They certainly do have swords and pistols, not your typical image of a stereotypical Indian now is it! You have to get that idea out of your head, these are not those Indians, they don't live in teepees any more.

It's like... with every word you type you're somehow digging yourself deeper in multiple holes simultaneously. The phenomenon is... remarkable. I'm prepared in principle to have a good vigorous discussion about the extent to which the accusation of cultural appropriation can apply to historical fiction and whether that's even a bad thing, but the more you say the more I'm convinced that no, the naysayers are right, you specifically should not do this.

 

[Sadras]

No, not at all, the potential is always there, except some subjects are more fraught with peril than others. Already it has been seen here with the Hollywood representation of all of the Native Americans as Great Plains nomads, to the actual reality that most people were farmers or fishers that lived in towns, and where there were even cities, such as at Cahokia.

Given recent posts by the OP, the main focus is not so much the culture but role reversal. I'm not sure which Amero-Indian culture he envisions to be the dominant one in his game.

What did Europeans worship 2250 years ago? Most Europeans were not monotheistic at that time, they worshipped all sorts of gods and goddesses, including those of the Greeks and Romans. Also none of them would be speaking modern English.

I'm not sure why this is important. It really depends how you want to define paganism - i.e. from a modern outlook or the outlook from the view of the Indians. Also a language barrier would mean no common would exist which from that angle might make things somewhat interesting along the social pillar.

Basically it is a role reversal.

It is a bit of a role reversal, and Much of Europe, Asia, and Africa can be considered wilderness areas by the American Indian standards. Lots of tall trees in Europe, and a lot of wildlife, animals that are very similar to those of North America, and those horses really are game changers, many would be brought back to North American in wooden ships.

Which side are the PCs on?
To me the most interesting concepts about this is the language barrier, perhaps an element of political in-fighting amongst the Indians which the Africans and Europeans could explore to gain an advantage and the various cultures encountered on the 2 continents, but otherwise as a setting premise it doesn't grab me.

Again I ask why Indians? If they are completely divorced from Indians in teepees, sacrifices and everything we supposedly know about them, all you have is a technological monotheistic people colonising a lesser advanced cultures. The idea falls flat and uninteresting.

They worship the Earth mother yet they want to cut down masses of trees for agrarian and shipping purposes? How do they appease her, with blood sacrifices of their enemies?

For me the what-if scenarios would rather see the Spanish conquistadors land in the Americas to find the mysterious Amero-Indian cultures defending their homelands with supernatural abilities (shamanistic, spirit, dark rituals - depending on the culture). Now you would have technology vs dark magic, civilisation vs brutality (depending on which side you were on), perhaps bring in a crisis in faith on the European side as they struggle to understand what/who they were up against....as information about these savages reaches the bastions of the dominant Christian churches.

Yes. Well, go ask Monte Cook if he should have ignored such warnings. He did a poorly researched depiction of Native American cultures in The Strange, back a couple of years ago, and it led to significant headaches.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2465-Monte-Cook-Games-Thunder-Plains-A-Petition

So, sure, go ahead. Make the same mistakes others made. Don't learn from what others have already done. See how that works out for you.

No need to please everyone for your home game and even if it isn't your home game you cannot please everyone.

Look at BBC's Troy Fall of a City bastardisation of history/culture continues and you have proponents and detractors on both sides.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Empire is not exactly a unique phenomenon, though. People have been imperializing all over the world for as long as there has been agriculture to sustain it. Even during the brief window we have on pre-Columbian cultures as Europeans made contact with them, there were at least two unambiguous centralized, neighbor-conquering, tribute-taking empires in the Americas. To be sure, there were also lots more cultures that weren't empires. Imperialism is, by its intrinsic nature, a minority cultural strategy. But - again, assuming the wild premise of an industrial revolution in the Americas by 1250 BC - it's hardly implausible that at least one of the cultures in this timeline started playing the paint-the-whole-map-my-color game.

Well not exactly an industrial revolution, there are no steamships and factories in the New World, it is still largely agricultural, and they have advancements in gunpowder weapons, sailing ships, and navigation. The Indians have black smiths, gunsmiths, sword smiths, the technology is of the late renaissance. Gunpowder weapons are still crude, the Indians have muzzle loaders that require the gunpowder charge and lead bullet to be rammed up the muzzle, and this slows down the rate of fire, also muskets aren't very accurate, so the Indians have developed formation tactics to fire mass volleys, and they have ranks, so that while one rank crouches to load their muskets another rank steps forward in front of them to fire their muskets, Now just image what Egyptians on their chariots are going to do in reaction to these tactics. The Indians won't have any mounted warriors, so most of their soldiers are going to be infantry.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

I was under the impression that the OP was discussing this idea for the purposes of the home game. While I agree that you should be cognizant of perpetuating offensive stereotypes, there is much more leeway in a home game where you should have a good understanding of your player's sensibilities and where any offense is more easily and amicably addressed.

If, however, the OP is planning on publishing this, then, yes. You are walking into a minefield. It is hard enough to create fantasy races that don't offend someone.

Most such cultures wouldn't have survived 2250 years of technological progress, most of the languages that existed back then would have changed so as to be unrecognizable to most of the Indian tribes we know of today. Do you know of any culture or nation in Europe that survived 2250 of history? Are there any Romans, or Babylonians, or Egyptians? One might say the Greeks have survived, but they aren't the dominant culture in Europe, and the language the Greeks speak today is not the same language spoken by the Greeks during the Trojan War, I don't think Indians would be any different, so a lot of their new culture would be made up. These aren't the nature oriented savages that you are so familiar with. The Indians have learned new tactics in warfighting and have forgotten old ones.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

It's like... with every word you type you're somehow digging yourself deeper in multiple holes simultaneously. The phenomenon is... remarkable. I'm prepared in principle to have a good vigorous discussion about the extent to which the accusation of cultural appropriation can apply to historical fiction and whether that's even a bad thing, but the more you say the more I'm convinced that no, the naysayers are right, you specifically should not do this.

So you are saying that the Indians would find it insulting to suggest that they could ever have a more technologically advanced society on their own? Perhaps you should explain yourself! Why would it be an insult to suggest native Americans could invent Muskets, and that they would not always stay primitive?

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Yes. Well, go ask Monte Cook if he should have ignored such warnings. He did a poorly researched depiction of Native American cultures in The Strange, back a couple of years ago, and it led to significant headaches.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?2465-Monte-Cook-Games-Thunder-Plains-A-Petition

So, sure, go ahead. Make the same mistakes others made. Don't learn from what others have already done. See how that works out for you.

I don't think he is publishing this.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

Given recent posts by the OP, the main focus is not so much the culture but role reversal. I'm not sure which Amero-Indian culture he envisions to be the dominant one in his game.

I don't understand why you think it would have to be a culture that existed in 1450 AD, it would be similar to expecting that one of the cultures that existed at the time of Alexander the Great would be the dominant one today. The United States of America didn't exist at the time of Alexander the Great and nobody back then would have predicted that a nation from a continent which hadn't been discovered yet would have been the dominant one.

I'm not sure why this is important. It really depends how you want to define paganism - i.e. from a modern outlook or the outlook from the view of the Indians. Also a language barrier would mean no common would exist which from that angle might make things somewhat interesting along the social pillar.

Lets just say that the Indians are a little more scientific in their outlook, yes I know that sounds strange, but people do change over two and a quarter millennia. Indians haven't abandoned religion all together, but their religion now is more philosophical rather than nature-oriented.

Which side are the PCs on?
To me the most interesting concepts about this is the language barrier, perhaps an element of political in-fighting amongst the Indians which the Africans and Europeans could explore to gain an advantage and the various cultures encountered on the 2 continents, but otherwise as a setting premise it doesn't grab me.

They can be on whatever side they choose, neither side is entirely good or entirely bad, The Indians think they are doing a good thing by bringing these primitive savage Old Worlders into the light, and they don't always understand why some of them are so hostile to all the improvements to their daily living that they bring. The Indians see all this wilderness area in Europe and plentiful game, and they imagine chopping down the trees and building farms, and some of the hunter gatherers in Europe don't like Indians clearing their hunting grounds and fencing them in.

Again I ask why Indians? If they are completely divorced from Indians in teepees, sacrifices and everything we supposedly know about them, all you have is a technological monotheistic people colonising a lesser advanced cultures. The idea falls flat and uninteresting.

So I guess you've never read stories about Daniel Boone or Davy Crockett, or about people colonizing the frontier and having to fight savages to protect their families. I guess you don't like Westerns either, the basic idea is that of two cultures in conflict, one culture has learned one way of living while the other pursues a different way which comes in conflict with the first. The reason "why Indians" is because they are physically isolated from the rest of the World and so they can have a different technological level from the rest of the World, and it creates an interesting conflict between these two cultures when they finally do meet. I do think the Egyptians are tough bastards and are not likely to be as easily swept aside just because the Indians have gunpowder weapons.

They worship the Earth mother yet they want to cut down masses of trees for agrarian and shipping purposes? How do they appease her, with blood sacrifices of their enemies?

Religion has changed in two and a quarter millennia, we don't worship Roman or Greek deities anymore either, maybe a few still do, but they are in the minority.

For me the what-if scenarios would rather see the Spanish conquistadors land in the Americas to find the mysterious Amero-Indian cultures defending their homelands with supernatural abilities (shamanistic, spirit, dark rituals - depending on the culture). Now you would have technology vs dark magic, civilisation vs brutality (depending on which side you were on), perhaps bring in a crisis in faith on the European side as they struggle to understand what/who they were up against....as information about these savages reaches the bastions of the dominant Christian churches.

That is the thing, the Spanish Conquistadors were human beings, not devils, they had a technological advantage over the Indians and they used it, because they wanted to enrich themselves, they Aztecs if they had that technological advantage would have used it too, if the technological advantage were reversed then their roles would be reversed as well. We know how the history between the Conquistadors and the Indians played out, that is all in our history books, and if you play in such a setting, there is a historic inevitability to it, if you reverse the roles, we just don't know what's going to happen, as that history hasn't been written yet - that is what makes it interesting. In a role playing game, the PCs are the ones who make history, what they do is important. In a purely historical setting, they are reduced to bit players working on some minor plot in the background, but here they can take center stage. The Indians aren't guaranteed to succeed, the natives aren't guaranteed to fail. The moment you introduce elements of fantasy, you have to decide which elements, and also whether gods are real and which gods. Are the PCs going to make history or are the Gods going to step in an interfere?

No need to please everyone for your home game and even if it isn't your home game you cannot please everyone.

Look at BBC's Troy Fall of a City bastardisation of history/culture continues and you have proponents and detractors on both sides.

We have limited knowledge of the Fall of Troy, and some point they have to make things up to fill in the gaps.

 

[Thomas Bowman]

I don't think he is publishing this.

I have enough trouble just being creative, rather than going into the ins and outs of publishing. All the legal stuff puts a crimp on one's imagination. Trying to earn money doing this is something I have no experience in.
My hope is that someone will find this discussion interesting and may run with it. There was a novel written recently in a series call Arcane America, it posits that in 1759 Halley's comet exploded and that caused the New World to be isolated from the Old, and Benjamin Franklin became a wizard when he found out that the laws of science and magic have changed, and he sends Lewis and Clark one an expedition to seek a passage to the Pacific to see if there is another way to Europe, since the route over the Atlantic is blocked. Similar subjects were discussed in this forum and some author might have gotten some ideas from that discussion, that is the hope here as well.

 

[Sadras]

I don't understand why you think it would have to be a culture that existed in 1450 AD, it would be similar to expecting that one of the cultures that existed at the time of Alexander the Great would be the dominant one today. The United States of America didn't exist at the time of Alexander the Great and nobody back then would have predicted that a nation from a continent which hadn't been discovered yet would have been the dominant one.

It doesn't, but just like during Alexander's time, not all the Greek city-states joined him. There were still a lot of cultural politics going on. You could have the the entire Amero-Indians unite, but that doesn't seem all too realistic.

Lets just say that the Indians are a little more scientific in their outlook, yes I know that sounds strange, but people do change over two and a quarter millennia. Indians haven't abandoned religion all together, but their religion now is more philosophical rather than nature-oriented.

Maybe, I might have missed where you have given any indication how long you expected this Indian culture to have existed. I only remember the date they invade Europe and Africa.

We know how the history between the Conquistadors and the Indians played out, that is all in our history books, and if you play in such a setting, there is a historic inevitability to it, if you reverse the roles, we just don't know what's going to happen, as that history hasn't been written yet - that is what makes it interesting. In a role playing game, the PCs are the ones who make history, what they do is important. In a purely historical setting, they are reduced to bit players working on some minor plot in the background, but here they can take center stage. The Indians aren't guaranteed to succeed, the natives aren't guaranteed to fail. The moment you introduce elements of fantasy, you have to decide which elements, and also whether gods are real and which gods. Are the PCs going to make history or are the Gods going to step in an interfere?

Okay, so the interest to you in this role reversal, is more that because this has not been explored in RL history (this way), the conclusion is unwritten and therefore has merit in being played out. How do you players feel about the premise?

We have limited knowledge of the Fall of Troy, and some point they have to make things up to fill in the gaps.

I'm not sure filling in the gaps is the main issue the detractors have with that show.