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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9784385" data-attributes="member: 58172">This fantasy Hellenist Egypt looks gorgeous.When handling reallife cultural heritage, I would choose between two approaches. 1, a deep dive into mythological accuracy. 2, a loose playful fantasy drawing inspiration from ancient texts and archeological contexts, while also adding and modifying creatively.1, is much academic work, requires cultural sensitivity doublechecks, and one oneself must be immersively, intimately, knowledgeable about ancient Egypt.2, is art.2 might be more helpful for a fantasy roleplaying game. If modifying creatively, I would avoid reallife names. For example, if vaguely associating the city of Alexandria, maybe instead call the fantasy version of it, Xander, Ksandra, Lex, or perhaps a more obscure allusion. This variant name does two things: nods to the reallife inspiration that celebrates reallife Egyptian heritage, and signals the fantasy version is nonidentical, thus freeing up space to take liberties and poetic licenses with "Xander" for the sake of the needs of the game. Similarly, when referring to Egyptian-esque deities, employ variant names.It is ok for the allusions to be transparent. One can simply say that Xander plays with features and concepts that directly or indirectly relate to ancient Alexandria.Much of the scientific insights that we credit the Greeks for, such as alchemy, and many other sciences from mathematics to zoology, originate from Egypt and spread among the mutual multinational philosophical inquiries of Hellenism. Alchemy ultimately relates to Egyptian technologies for creating artificial gems, because the gems that exhibited the correct colors were more magically valuable than any mineral rarity. For a fantasy Egypt, I would go with an advanced magitech society, informed by a mysticism of highly symbolic deities, that represent aspects of the processes of existence.A fascinating aspect of ancient Egypt was it had no money. Gold is the "flesh" of the deities, and too holy for ordinary persons to touch. Only the family of pharaoh and of the priests would actually handle gold. Instead, everything was measured in terms of how much something would be worth in gold. Then a sophisticating bartering system, resembling modern credit cards, would keep precise track of how much individuals still owed each other when exchanging goods and services. For common purchases, bread baked into standard-size cones shapes would be used as money, and eaten when hungry. The system worked so well, Egypt continued to avoid using coins well into the Roman Period, except for international transactions relating to trade and tribute.</blockquote>

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