I wonder when DF will do non-European fantasy

[Phantasm]

Originally Posted by Humabout

Well, firstly, there are no details for Town aside from it being Town and you buy/sell stuff there. Want DF-arabia? Call Town al-somethingia. Arabia is a desert; want DF arabia dungeon? Make it sandy and hot. Df has no culture so that is a moot point. Your DF Arabia book now consists of two sentences. That's probably another reason there aee no DF "culture" books.

Originally Posted by evileeyore

Your DF and my DF are radically different beasts.

DF1: Adventurers has this to say about cultures:

Originally Posted by Dungeon Fantasy 1: Adventurers, p. 3

Be warned that Dungeon Fantasy: Adventurers shamelessly cuts corners and makes assumptions. It’s a guide to making two-dimensional “heroes” from a non-culture, and pillages history and fantasy novels at random for powerful equipment and mythology.

Emphasis mine.

Nowhere in any of the DF books that I've read does it say anything about culture. In fact, perusing the lists in DF1, Chapter 2, Delver's Cheat Sheet, a lot of social traits - Status, Rank, Duty, etc. - are missing. Cultural Familiarity is listed, yes, but nowhere in any book can I see a listing of cultures, especially not one that says, "this is the default".

Is there a medieval European-esque bias to what is written? I have not detected one from an objective standpoint, so I am of the opinion that it might be people projecting their own biases onto the writing. It is true that plenty of our standard fantasy tropes and races have origins in ancient Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Norse sources, but the inclusion of such things as Elves, Dwarves, Ogres, Trolls, Minotaurs, Centaurs, Satyrs, and Pixies does not automatically mean "European". I could probably run a Mongolian-based DF game with Elves, Trolls, and Centaurs and still have it have that Mongolian feel.

[Phil Masters]

Sorry, but it is actually possible to walk a line that gives you something that's very clearly "dungeon fantasy", or near as damnit, while also providing a large dose of cultural flavour and a strong specific aesthetic. Things like Al-Qadim and Nyambe existed for precisely this reason, and were not entirely unsuccessful.

Refusing to admit that there's any kind of cultural flavouring to a dungeon fantasy game just reduces the whole thing to an abstract wargame; the characters just become playing pieces. Even computer games have progressed beyond that.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by b-dog

I would love a Middle Eastern setting like GURPS Arabian Nights that would also include older cultures and faiths like those in Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. Islam would be the law of the land but there would be all sorts of monsters and cults from the ancient cultures.

Um 1001 Arabian Nights is set in the Sasanian Empire before the rise of Islam. Sassanid Zoroastrianism was the religion of the elites. The irony the setting more Persian than Arabian.

[Phil Masters]

Actually, it's "set" all over the place - China, North Africa, the Indian Ocean... The vaguely assumed default location for about half the stories is early medieval Iraq. All depicted with about as much realism as a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, mind you. (And Zoroastrians tend to be depicted as moustache-twirling bad guys.) It's a collection of popular stories that developed in medieval Syria and evolved in late medieval Cairo. The Persian (and Indian, and Yemeni...) roots are buried pretty deep.

Oh, and it features a couple of dungeon expeditions.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Actually, it's "set" all over the place - China, North Africa, the Indian Ocean... The vaguely assumed default location for about half the stories is early medieval Iraq. All depicted with about as much realism as a Saturday morning kids' cartoon, mind you. It's a collection of popular stories that developed in medieval Syria and evolved in late medieval Cairo. The Persian (and Indian, and Yemeni...) roots are buried pretty deep.

Oh, and it features a couple of dungeon expeditions.

However all the versions centre around Shahryar, whom the narrator calls a "Sasanian king" and his new bride Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter who beings telling the king a story and not finishing that night the intince the king not to execute her the next day as was his custom, and keeping it up for 1001 nights.

Originally Posted by Phil Master

The vaguely assumed default location for about half the stories is early medieval Iraq.

Aka Persia. long before it even though of itself as Iraq.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Aka Persia. long before it even though of itself as Iraq.

Persia is Iran, not Iraq. Iraq is more Babylonia.

[roguebfl]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Persia is Iran, not Iraq.

opps yes. However the Sasanian Empire did control Iraq of the time however the Elites were Persian/

[Phil Masters]

Originally Posted by roguebfl

However all the versions centre around Shahryar, whom the narrator calls a "Sasanian king" and his new bride Scheherazade, the vizier's daughter who beings telling the king a story and not finishing that night the intince the king not to execute her the next day as was his custom, and keeping it up for 1001 nights.

The framing story uses a couple of Persian names. It then gets largely forgotten as most of the stories gallop off into the Gold Age of Haroun al-Rashid. Don't ask how a possibly pre-Islamic Persian lady is telling stories set in the Islamic era; the chronology of the Nights is notoriously shot to Iblis and occasionally circular.

Originally Posted by roguebfl

Aka Persia. long before it even though of itself as Iraq.

Ye gods. Just try telling people in Baghdad - in 750 AD or today - that they're Persians. They've spent large parts of the last thousand years avoiding being Persian with large amounts of lethal force.

And the "Baghdad" elements of the Nights are usually set in the court of Haroun al-Rashid, largely because that's seen as an Arab golden age. The one ethnic Persian character regularly appearing in those scenes is Jaffar the Vizier. Other overtly Persian characters may well be eeevil Magian fire-worshippers, who are mostly there to try to set fire to the hero before getting skewered. (A particularly gross slander on Zoroastrians, of course.)

Let's not worry about all the stories that are explicitly set in Cairo.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Far too often I see people who think "Dungeon Fantasy is the only fantasy",

Right? DF won't give you the tool to run Xanth, Game of Thrones, or Lord of the Rings. To say "I want a DF supplement that gives my game a deeper exploration into Elven linguistics" or "I want a DF supplement that allows for courtly intrigue" misses the point of what DF is trying to do.

The point of the DF line is to remove those bits that aren't relevant to killing monsters and taking their stuff. You are always free to add those bits back in, course, to water down the killing monsters and taking their stuff with other bits, but the books you'll use won't be DF books. They'll still work with DF, of course, becaue it's all GURPS.

Originally Posted by b-dog

What is wrong with wanting some aesthetic books? For me, I really enjoy interesting details and touches. Not everything has to be about gaming mechanics.

What exactly would it do? Would it contain any rules? Would it just contain art and setting description? We have books that are nothing but art and setting descriptions (plus some tips on how to run them). An example might be GURPS Banestorm. It doesn't have the "DF" label, but it doesn't need one, anymore than GURPS Martial Arts or GURPS Magic need the DF label.

GURPS is more than DF. It has many branches, all of which are mutually compatible. When you want to move away from killing monsters and taking their stuff, get a non-DF book and use it in your DF game. I swear to you, it'll work fine.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Phil Masters

Sorry, but it is actually possible to walk a line that gives you something that's very clearly "dungeon fantasy", or near as damnit, while also providing a large dose of cultural flavour and a strong specific aesthetic. Things like Al-Qadim and Nyambe existed for precisely this reason, and were not entirely unsuccessful.

Refusing to admit that there's any kind of cultural flavouring to a dungeon fantasy game just reduces the whole thing to an abstract wargame; the characters just become playing pieces. Even computer games have progressed beyond that.

Let's take your word for that for a moment. What would it look like? What purpose does setting provide in a DF adventure? Typically, window dressing, but what windows is it dressing? It typically adjusts the race/class choices, the monster options, the descriptions of the dungeons, and the descriptions of the towns.

For example, GURPS DF Japan would have samurai (Knights, possibly with some variation) and Ninjas and their "Wizards" would have a different spell-set than the vanilla DF set. Monsters might be oni and kitsune (which could also be a race option) and kappas, etc. The towns might have tea houses and delicate geisha who serve the mightly heroes. Alright. And GURPS DF Arabia might have swashbucklers and thieves and wizards with, yet again, a different spell-set, and the monsters might be djinn and ghoula and manticores and sphinxes. The towns might be desert bazaars featuring dancing girls who hide their smiles behind veils. Both might have unique adventures, depending on their nature.

But we already have GURPS Japan and GURPS Arabia. Both of those already alter the magic system appropriately, and they have suggested templates. These are 3e templates, but it's not exactly difficult to use those to pick/adjust the existing DF templates. They both have monsters and discussions of what localities would look like. Why are these not good enough? Why does a whole book need to be made with the DF label slapped on it?

Still, we're asked for something new. Alright, a detailed "fantasy" setting: Not GURPS Japan, but a Japanese-esque fantasy setting.

But why are we making this exclusively for DF? Why not expand some of the setting, touch on the social stuff, discuss lingusitics and... make it available for all GURPS groups to use? You can have a section discussing how best to use it in DF, but why would it have to be uniquely DF? Gun-Fu isn't unique to Action, but it'll work fine in my Action game (and I suspect it was written with Action in mind). The Ritual Path Magic supplement was certainly written for Monster Hunters, but it's not exclusive to Monster Hunters.

So why do we want an exclusively-DF oriented setting? And, more specifically, an exclusively-DF oriented setting using a niche setting. You don't want Greyhawk, you want Nyambe.

Settings already sell poorly. A DF-only setting would only sell to the subset of GURPS that is interested in settings and DF. A DF-only Nyambe would only sell to that subset that is interested in GURPS DF settings about Africa. While a GURPS Nyambe might, at least, sell to people not interested in DF but interested in African settings.

I'm sure you could make it, but I don't see the point of making a request thread for what would amount to a labor of love. And I say this as someone who makes pretty extensive settings. Most of the time I tell people about them, even when asked, most people just smile and nod their heads, because my setting work isn't useful for their campaign. And I think that's the core of why DF stays away from setting material, by and large, because you have more than enough material to build your own campaign. There's the entire GURPS line to let you do that, and your setting needs are likely to be more specific than what DF can provide.

You can do it yourself, if you feel you really need a specific setting that doesn't just grow naturally out of the campaign, as usually happens in these games. If people really, really preferred not to do this, wouldn't we expect the setting books to outsell (or at least sell apace with) the mechanics books? But the opposite is true.