Kichwas
Half-breed
Shadowrun was cool in the 80s and 90s but suffered some severe problems with it's portrayal of Indigenous populations. I remember thinking back during 1E that for the populations they listed, every girl on the rez I knew would have ben having 10-20 babies starting more or less right then as I was in high school... and for all future generations getting knocked up by age 14 or so at the latest, with quintuplets... (whereas the White girls I was hanging out with would all have to be infertile).
The cultural stuff looked... OK. But I didn't know enough to really tell.
When it got to Mexico... it was funny they used the name Aztlan because that's a real aspiration of the most radical ends of 60s/70s Chicano movement that the US declared a terrorist goal as it's about the idea of making Mexico whole again.
But then making it a dragon led corporate thing stylized after the Aztecs seemed to be written all for 'cool' factor and without any sense of awareness of Mexican identity.
Like if I, as a Chicano / Asian / Indigenous mix wrote a book about 'Fantasy Sci Fi Italy' - it'd be that 'weirdly off'. I'd get all the cool and probably have a cringe level number of espresso and pizza jokes. But actual Europeans would feel like "who T.F. wrote this junk," whereas my fellow US-ians wouldn't know better and just play it. And then if I wrote that there were suddenly 1-billian Sicilians who all decided to start speaking Greek and only a handful of mainland Italians left despite it only being a half century later folks would just do the math and come back with WTF...
So Shadowrun wore out on me very fast.
Then I read somewhere that they scrubbed all the Indigenous stuff. Which was basically the entire setting. So what's left is just bland Cyberpunk with Elves.
These days, if I want the cyberpunk genre, but with fantasy and mythology, there's Otherscape.
Otherscape is written by people who do some actual research, and so far one of, if not both setting books have been written by authors who live in and are from the respective cities covered (Cairo yes, Tokyo I think has an author who loves there), so when they update for futurism, they at least start grounded. And no weird population flipping. Also instead of elves and orcs and other Tolkien things - it uses region specific mythology. The idea that mythology is manifesting into the world for some reason.
That said Otherscape's PBtA-like but tag based game engine is probably too different for most people.
The cultural stuff looked... OK. But I didn't know enough to really tell.
When it got to Mexico... it was funny they used the name Aztlan because that's a real aspiration of the most radical ends of 60s/70s Chicano movement that the US declared a terrorist goal as it's about the idea of making Mexico whole again.
But then making it a dragon led corporate thing stylized after the Aztecs seemed to be written all for 'cool' factor and without any sense of awareness of Mexican identity.
Like if I, as a Chicano / Asian / Indigenous mix wrote a book about 'Fantasy Sci Fi Italy' - it'd be that 'weirdly off'. I'd get all the cool and probably have a cringe level number of espresso and pizza jokes. But actual Europeans would feel like "who T.F. wrote this junk," whereas my fellow US-ians wouldn't know better and just play it. And then if I wrote that there were suddenly 1-billian Sicilians who all decided to start speaking Greek and only a handful of mainland Italians left despite it only being a half century later folks would just do the math and come back with WTF...
So Shadowrun wore out on me very fast.
Then I read somewhere that they scrubbed all the Indigenous stuff. Which was basically the entire setting. So what's left is just bland Cyberpunk with Elves.
These days, if I want the cyberpunk genre, but with fantasy and mythology, there's Otherscape.
Otherscape is written by people who do some actual research, and so far one of, if not both setting books have been written by authors who live in and are from the respective cities covered (Cairo yes, Tokyo I think has an author who loves there), so when they update for futurism, they at least start grounded. And no weird population flipping. Also instead of elves and orcs and other Tolkien things - it uses region specific mythology. The idea that mythology is manifesting into the world for some reason.
That said Otherscape's PBtA-like but tag based game engine is probably too different for most people.
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