Please recommend good Slavic themed RPG products

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

As it says on the tin, "Please recommend good Slavic themed RPG products."

I am aware of the Dancing Hut of Baba Yaga module by Lisa Smedman - I've got it and it is pretty good. I am also aware of Slavic themed elements to some of the locations in the Pathfinder setting.

What else is there out there, which is also good?

 

[prosfilaes]

GURPS Russia is a pretty standard choice; I recall it being a good historical sourcebook on the subject. I don't get the impression it's what you want, but GURPS WWII: Red Tide is also a Slavic historical book.

Searching LibraryThing for Russian,RPG (Tagmash: RPG, Russia | LibraryThing ) turns up Mythic Russia for Heroquest, Ussura for 7th Sea, Mystic Russia for Rifts, The Dragon and the Bear for Ars Magica, and something called RUS: Fantasy Roleplaying for Mythic Russia.
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[Dannyalcatraz]

Technically not strictly Slavic, there is D20 Red Star campaign setting.

There would also be something in the RIFTS line of products.

 

[ComradeGnull]

The Dragon and the Bear- the Ars Magica supplement that [MENTION=40166]prosfilaes[/MENTION] mentioned- is nice if you're looking for something set in the Middle Ages. It's from an older edition of Ars Magica, so it may be a little harder to locate but I think the publisher is pretty good about making things available as PDFs. It's good but quite historically oriented- given the era, a lot of familiar things about Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Siberia) are either non-existent or not significant parts of the setting yet. IIRC, the book is set just before the Timurid invasion when most of the Kieven Rus end up as tributaries of the Mongols, and the book treats the two eras semi-separately. Probably the most historically rooted of the RPG books about Russia/Eastern Europe that I've seen.

There were two Slavic-theme WFRP books: Something Rotten in Kislev for 1e and Realm of the Ice Queen for 2e. The 1e book has some information about Slavic belief in spirits, but it's comparable to what you could get in a less gamey form from any basic book or article on Slavic mythology.

Realm of the Ice Queen was a bit better- it includes a lot of Russian/Slavic/Steppe Nomad themes careers and the Ice Magic and Hag Magic magic systems. Also includes info on the cities, culture, etc. The proximity to the Chaos Wastes adds a bit of a-historical sources of weirdness and monsters, but the book on the whole gives a nice starting point for setting up an Ivan the Terrible/Great era quasi-Russian campaign setting.

The Slavic Pathfinder setting is, I think, more rooted in sort of Gothic horror than historic Russia. Think Ravenloft or mythic Romania more than Russia.

There are lots of good historical sources, but what you'll want depends a lot on what era you want to play in. Quality & quantity of historical material also declines precipitously as you get farther from the modern era unless you read Russian. Best candidates for a gaming setting to me would be:

Kievan Rus era: Middle Ages, multiple small city state kingdoms, lots of barbarians nipping at the borders, staggeringly high levels of isolation from the surrounding world, kind of a mythic age for Russia with knight-errant heroes (the bogatyr) riding around the country slaying giants and dragons.

Mongol invasion: isolated kingdoms being gobbled up one by one by an invading superpower and having to decide whether to fight or throw in their lot with the invaders)

Ivan IV/Time of Trouble Era: new prominence in the world, prolonged war with neighbors, a powerful visionary leader who is borderline paranoid and whose absence plunges the kingdom into near civil war and confusion, firearms and cannon are becoming more common (Ivan IV organized the Streltsy, a hereditary class of musketeers, during this era).

If you're interested in a slightly more modern setting, the Peter the Great/Catherine the Great eras and the turn of the century/pre-WWI eras have a lot of possibilities.

 

[Serendipity]

It's my understanding that, despite the name, the Midgard setting is pretty heavily influenced by Slavic (as opposed to Russian) mythology.

 

[johnsemlak]

The Dragon and the Bear, for Ars Magica, already mentioned.

GURPS Russia for Gurps 3e, also already mentioned, is a very good general product, covering all genres of RPGs (as is the way with Gurps) and has suggestions for superhero gaming, fantasy, historical, etc. It has value as a reference even if you don't play Gurps. I'm not sure how it works with the current Gurps edition.

For 3rd edition D&D, there's a lot of material.

Check out, if you can find them, products by Monkey God Enterprises and in particular by Michael Trescia (sp?) He's sort of a slavic RPG specialist. He wrote a couple of modules: Tsar Rising and the Dancing Hut, and a sourcebook called Frost and Fur, a decent 3.5 sourcebook for 'colder' realms and has material for Slavic, Nordic, and Indigenous cultures. It has several classes such as the Vedma, Koldun, Cossack. The Monkeygod sourcebooks were set in a Russia-inspired setting called Torassia, but there was never a sourcebook for that setting. I think the books may all be on RPGnow on PDF.

The same author wrote a Russia-inspired country for the Iron Kingdoms Campaign setting.

Frostburn, from WotC for 3.5 has some select slavic related material in the monsters and spells sections as I remember but is mostly pretty vanilla.

As already mentioned, there's Baba Yaga's Dancing Hut, written for 2e. And of course there's the mention of the Dancing Hut in the 'Artifacts and Relics' section of the 1e DMG, on sale now .

 

[prosfilaes]

GURPS Russia for Gurps 3e, also already mentioned, is a very good general product, covering all genres of RPGs (as is the way with Gurps) and has suggestions for superhero gaming, fantasy, historical, etc. It has value as a reference even if you don't play Gurps. I'm not sure how it works with the current Gurps edition.

GURPS 3->4 is probably about 3.5 -> Pathfinder. Simple characters can port over with just a change in the number of character points; more complex stuff may require digging around in the book to find equivalents, but if it's behind the DM screen, the 3rd Ed stuff can frequently be copied over and called good.

 

[johnsemlak]

Rus: Fantasy Role-playing is a relatively obscure Ausralian RPGS product

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

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[grodog]

Rus: Fantasy Role-playing is a relatively obscure Ausralian RPGS product

It's also not very good, all-in-all. You're better off buying a book of Russian folklore (like my old prof, Linda Ivantis' @ [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Russian-Folk-Belief-Linda-Ivanits/dp/0873328892/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1342909290&sr=8-1&keywords=linda+ivanits]Amazon.com: Russian Folk Belief (9780873328890): Linda J. Ivanits, Linda J. Ivantis, Sophie Schiller: Books[/ame] ) than trying to track down Rus.