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So a little while in the Mythras & The Wild West thread I lamented there not being an RPG based on pre-contact North America...
...and apparently there's a KS running for just such an RPG setting at the moment ...soooorta?
That was how it was pitched in the article I read that made me aware of it's existence (which I'm not going to share because it was glossed over with a thick veneer of politics,)
Looking into it, turns out the eponymous Coyote & Crow RPG is appaently not a pre-contact setting, but instead an alternate history SciFi? setting where the Continent was never settled by Europeans.
The art was a bit underwhelming, but the subect matter was intresting enough for me to look closer at it. Not a lot of description of game mechanics to really go by, unfortunately, no quickstart or Introductory PDf or anything of that sort.
But the character sheet example did give me pause. It certainly doesn't feel like a game designed from a Native American worldview - not when you have a skill like "Skulduggery"? What? Why would a no-contact civilization use an archaic English term?
The sample pages also, um, apparently state that non-native players shouldn't "attempt to mimic native culture", which, uh, kinda defeats the purpose of a role-playing game?
But the campaign does seem to be doing quite successfully, at around .9 million in pledges at the time of this post.
This thread just got me curious - is there any RPGs about Native Americans, pre-contact? Fantasy or not? I mean, I know of a few Aztec games, but I don't think I've ever encountered a game where you play a tribesman (or woman) in a pre-Colombus North America
Can’t say I’ve come across any personally. This list on Board Game Geek has mostly ‘inspired by’ or ‘fantasy analogue to’ style games. Just a couple sounded like they might be close enough to qualify.
Not even a GURPS book (other than a Conan one) - seems like an obvious omission!
I mean, unlike most ancient cultures, you do at least have still-practiced cultures and living descendants that could write it or at least consult on it.
It just seems strange to me that it's never been done.
I thought there was a supplement to Colonial Gothic that focused on playing Native Americans, but I am not finding it. It wouldn't be pre-contact, though. The same company (Rogue Games, Inc) has spin off set earlier during the contact period called, The Journey to Norumbega, but it is still from the perspective of the Europeans.
I haven't seen any good ones. The ones I have encountered tend to be focused on generalities and (sometimes) very basic beliefs in magic and spirits, most of which aren't particularly accurate or are framed in terms outside of the context of the groups that held them. None of them have gone into any real depth. I would love to find one, though.
It wouldn't be that difficult to make one. The biggest issue would be blowback from people who take it upon themselves to be offended on behalf of other people. I doubt that a well-researched one that didn't rely on Western book/movie/myth tropes would bother many actual Native Americans.
There’s the game I think Toadmaster was referring to. It’s Totems of the Dead and is basically Hyborian-Age-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off North and Meso America.
GURPS: Aztecs isn’t the type of Native Americans you’re looking for.
The problem with Pre-Contact is, we did far too good a job at annihilating native cultures. In some cases, what we know of tribal practices, especially spiritual practices, is like Wicca or Asatru, almost certainly invention and pieced together fragments. Also Pre-Contact would include before the reintroduction of the horse to the continent, and centuries of horse culture would make knowledge of what specific tribes were like before the horse damn hard to pin down.
That’s all before you get into the Tetsubo-like issue.
There's some South-America in the mix as well, Amazonian and Andean IIRC. What bugs me about the otherwise fun-looking setting is the inclusion of Chinese, Vikings and IIRC Atlanteans... That and I don't like Savage Worlds much.
That is all very true. We can take a good guess at the basic mechanics of living that pre-contact tribal groups had, based on archaeological discoveries, the landscape they lived in, nearby groups that survived, etc., but even that involves a lot of guesswork. Cultural details from pre-contact groups that were killed off can't really be reconstructed, and (as you said) our knowledge of spiritual practices is scanty or altogether missing.
I spent years in cultural anthropology grad school sharing an office with archaeologists. There is an unfortunate tendency for educated guesswork to become "known facts" once it reaches the public. Some archaeologists end up doing that in an effort to simplify and summarize things. Some get so entranced with their pet theory (or so eager for ongoing funding) that they tout is as almost-fact. Sometimes non-archaeologists read archaeological papers and books and draw unfounded conclusions from them. The fact of that matter is that the only thing we really know about tribal groups who died out or were killed centuries ago is what can be deduced from their remains and the objects that were left behind, which only goes so far.
Native American groups that are still around today don't necessarily know all that much about their ancestors, either. Cultures change over time, and old stories and myths tend to focus more on teaching lessons and providing moral examples, rather than recording facts. Stories change over time, too, sometimes more rapidly than people imagine.
If I were to write a supplement where you played pre-contact Native Americans, I would probably avoid using the names of real tribes, whether they still exist or not. I would focus more on presenting various potential lifestyles, cultural traits, technologies, etc., and encourage the GM to build original tribes using that information. I might provide a few examples, such as a generic tribe that was nomadic and lived in the plains, or something like that, to give some examples. We know enough about Native Americans (and similar groups, elsewhere) to present the building blocks of making a fictional tribe that could have realistically existed, even though they didn't.
What is the Tetsubo-like issue?
I honestly didn't know that we knew so little, TBH. It's kind of saddening. I guess I just always assumed that better records had been kept, or that surviving peoples at least had the foresight of historical recordings.
Pre-contact Native American groups used petroglyphs, pictographs, pictograms, ideographs, glyphs, logographs, "quipu" (Incan knotted strings that kept records), pictures, and various other proto-writing systems. The meanings of most of them are poorly understood.
There is one exception, though. The Mayans used a logograph/glyph system that we can kinda-sort read today, mostly. I took a Mayan glyph class as an undergrad anthropology student that was pretty interesting. The Mayan codices (made of bark paper) were similar to books, and there were a lot of them that supposedly went back hundreds of years. Unfortunately, the Spanish destroyed most of them in the 1500s. Only four have survived to this day. They tend to revolve around information related to astrology, calendars, almanacs, agriculture, religious ceremonies, deities, divination, prophecies, and other such things. Those are the types of things the rulers and priests thought were worth recording. That is why we know a lot more about Mayan culture than most other pre-contact native groups.
Note that the translation of all these various symbols, including most of the Mayan stuff, was largely done by people of European descent, generally in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Some of the Spanish priests in the 1500s had the indigenous people translate some of it for them, but the bulk of the work on Native American writing and symbols was done long after they were still being used by the descendants of those peoples. Native Americans of the 19th century might be able to identify various pictograms and such, but they didn't have anything in the way of extensive historical records that they were keeping and reading. Most of the groups in the Americas (top to bottom) were primarily oral-history based, and a ton of that was lost in the various mass killings, relocations, and programs to "re-educate" Native American children.
The things that the Spanish and other European conquerors recorded about Native American groups are full of biases and inaccuracies, and tend to focus on the things that priests and the occasional individual thought were important to write down. You can derive some information from that, but a lot of it - if not most of it - is out of cultural context.
I figured it was something like that. It Tetsubo a reference to a game? You can send me a private message if it isn't appropriate to post here. I'm just curious.
...and apparently there's a KS running for just such an RPG setting at the moment ...soooorta?
That was how it was pitched in the article I read that made me aware of it's existence (which I'm not going to share because it was glossed over with a thick veneer of politics,)
Looking into it, turns out the eponymous Coyote & Crow RPG is appaently not a pre-contact setting, but instead an alternate history SciFi? setting where the Continent was never settled by Europeans.
The art was a bit underwhelming, but the subect matter was intresting enough for me to look closer at it. Not a lot of description of game mechanics to really go by, unfortunately, no quickstart or Introductory PDf or anything of that sort.
But the character sheet example did give me pause. It certainly doesn't feel like a game designed from a Native American worldview - not when you have a skill like "Skulduggery"? What? Why would a no-contact civilization use an archaic English term?
The sample pages also, um, apparently state that non-native players shouldn't "attempt to mimic native culture", which, uh, kinda defeats the purpose of a role-playing game?
But the campaign does seem to be doing quite successfully, at around .9 million in pledges at the time of this post.