Your opinion on basing fantasy countries on real world ones

[MGibster]

So what is your opinion on this? Do you prefer to have familiar historic inspired countries in your setting or do you like to have more fantastic countries or at least countries that heavily deviate from their historic base?

I typically start by basing the nations/kingdoms in my games based on real life analogs. It's a nice shortcut to creating a solid foundation for a setting because I already have a decent idea for how the government works, how people dress, how they behave, etc., etc. But at the same time, I'm not beholden to the original setting and have no worries about getting it right. My not-Germany isn't Germany so I have no problem if my Bavarians are Dwarves who love beer & sausage while my Rhineland-Palatinate dwarves all all mysterious and nobody understand them.

 

[MGibster]

Oh, and one key advantage is that by basing a kingdom on something analogous to real life, the players can just jump right into the adventure without having to spend time doing homework about the setting.

 

[eyeheartawk]

My not-Germany isn't Germany so I have no problem if my Bavarians are Dwarves who love beer & sausage while my Rhineland-Palatinate dwarves all all mysterious and nobody understand them.

Speaking as someone who has been to Bavaria and lived in the Palatinate, this checks out.

 

[Deset Gled]

In a fantasy, sometimes fantasy things resemble real things. Fundamentally, it's really not a big deal. It just kind of is, the same way magic is, or my lower back pain isn't.

 

[GuyBoy]

It might even be impossible not to import aspects of real countries, at least in terms of their history, into RPGs.
What I mean by this is that history-shapes-culture-shapes history, and this is further enhanced by media sources, from the books and TV of the 1970s RPG pioneers to the vastly complex media of today. This can’t help to “push” our thinking when designing a fantasy world, and I’d argue that one just can’t do it in complete isolation.
The key, I guess, is to ensure it’s done respectfully.
Poorer examples obviously included the Oriental Adventures of the 1980s and the Vistani, but things have improved a lot since then. Golarion didn’t strike me as negative, though I thought it was a bit clumsy in just dropping in “real world” historical cultures.
On a personal level, I love the Sins of the Scorpion Age setting, developed on these very pages by @Steampunkette ; sure, there are recognisable nods to Sumeria (in particular), Khazars, Mycenaean Greece and others, but unique twists develop these into a great setting.

We’ve come a long way from the Hyborian Age of cultural appropriation for fantasy ( he writes from his home in northwest Aquilonia!)

 

[Baron Opal II]

Allow for contradictions because societies and cultures are not monoliths.

This is one of the hardest things to learn or remember. At least for me. And, it involves trust as the players might think you made an error at first. But with time they see a richer picture of the setting.

 

[Tun Kai Poh]

It also depends whether we're talking about making a setting for my home game or for the public. I once created a mining planet set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe where the main local culture was based on the Empire of Abyssinia, for a campaign using a hack of Blades in the Dark (the Blades of the Inquisition fan hack) because I thought it would be interesting to use a non-Western culture as a basis, especially Abyssinia being less widely represented. For my home game, it worked.

But I wouldn't publish it (even with rewrites) because I'm not of Ethiopian or Eritrean descent, it's not my story to tell, and I don't think the basic concept would be in any way sensitive to Ethiopians and Eritreans (making Abyssinian analogues into part of the absurdly fanatical, violent and dystopian Warhammer 40,000 Imperium isn't doing a less represented culture a favour). And that's even before we consider that the planet was named after a province that is currently embroiled in civil war...I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I wonder what a fantasy version of New Jersey would be like?

I could make a rival adventuring party based of The Jersey Shore cast!

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Basing a fantasy kingdom on a real country or culture is not a problem, even if it is an evil fantasy kingdom, but as we have seen from all the past issues in Orc discussions, do not base anything fantasy purely on an actual race/ethnicity.

 

[Blue Orange]

It's tricky, right? It's hard to make a culture ex nihilo, and you usually wind up basing it on something, even unconsciously (every time I tried to make a fantasy city I kept making square city blocks with neighborhoods separated by socioeconomic class, and then I realized...gosh, I'm from New York, aren't I?). Greyhawk looks an awful lot like the Upper Midwest. Even looking at settings that tried hard to be exotic, Tekumel mashes up India, Arabia, Egypt, and Mesoamerica, and most of us aren't as creative as M.A.R. Barker. Talislanta had analogs for a lot of the cultures, though they had purely fantastic stuff like cultures that live in clouds.

I think, unlike publication where you have to theoretically worry about the whole world, if it's just for your group you have a much smaller group of people to worry about. I would never try to market a supplement in the current environment. (I mean, people obviously do, but I would personally be chicken.)