D&D 5E Help me design Fantasy Americas D&D (+)

[Dannyalcatraz]

horses were in the Americas before the last ice age maybe make it so they just never died off?

True.

...but MOAS!

 

[Imaculata]

I would mix in some old west influences. D&D with good old trusty six shooters and dusty towns, locomotives, saloons.

Pretty much what Wild Arms 3 did.

 

[Mind of tempest]

True.

...but MOAS!

why not both?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

why not both?

Personal choice. Probably varies tribe by tribe if they’re both still around. probab wouldn’t coexist in the same tribe.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Personal choice. Probably varies tribe by tribe if they’re both still around. probab wouldn’t coexist in the same tribe.

moas are scouts and riders as they are harder to armour up so they are all light cavalry but faster, better in brush/ heavy forrest and more mobile, the house being more versatile like the human of d&d ground mounts.

 

[Ixal]

Ideally, we could go with a colonial-era technology level, but without the trope of the ''new world'' to explore and conquer. One of the main draw of the Americas is their large territories. Its pretty easy to have a bunch of peoples on the main land while still having a lot of wilderness to explore.

Isn't the "large territories to explore" in itself part of the new world trope?

Also, I think "Americas" is a too broad definition. America is huge with vastly different cultures and myths, even when you just limit it to for example North America and leave out the Middle and South.
It would be akin to mixing Iclandic and Southern India myths. Which D&D arguably does, but I think this level of generalization will draw some criticism.

 

[Islayre d'Argolh]

The current thought exercise is more to try to see what would it be like if D&D was designed, say, by an European women with a taste for American history in an attic somewhere in Denmark instead of an American man with a taste for European history in a basement somewhere in the American midwest

See, I'm a french-canadian guy of both scots settlers and first-nation descent, and sometime I find funny that most of my time playing pretend history is set in a fantasy version of the old world with only few things taken from our actual fictions.

Especially when so many D&D-ism are way more ''wild-west with swords'' than actual European medieval society.

Sorry for the "subject crashing" but i'm a french game designer and one of the modules of my OSR D&D-esque game "Coureurs d'Orages" is precisely a "western fantasy" module.

Half of the module (the gazeteer of the West Marches) is free to dowmload here (direct link)

Maybe it can be useful to you.
Sorry again, especially for english-only readers

 

[Bupp]

I wrote En5ider #98, and featured creatures from American folklore. Stats for agropelter, jackalope, puckwudgie and the wampus cat.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/monstrous-6670920

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Isn't the "large territories to explore" in itself part of the new world trope?

I must say, even today with all our cars, GPS and good maps, the wilds of the Americas are huuuge. Just here in Québec, we have a barely occupied wild territory nearly the size of France! So even if the land is inhabited does not mean that it is tamed. I see that more of an American trope than a ''new world colonies trope'', myself.

In such a game, distances themselves are an ''enemy''.

 

[billd91]

Because the natives would have a viable alternative to European horses, the conquering of the Americas would probably take a different trajectory.

Not just horses, but significant amounts of domesticated livestock in general. Then either the indigenous nations would have had the chance to develop immunities to diseases similar to the Europeans or transmitted back similarly depopulating epidemics that would have equalized some of the terms of the contact.