I wonder when DF will do non-European fantasy

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

So if someone was to write Dungeon Fantasy Monsters: Monsters of the Orient/the Amazon/the Andes/the Himalayas/the Congo/Mongolia/Polynesia/India/the Middle East/Australia/etc, yeah, I'd snap those up in a heartbeat.

If going that route, I'd prefer a general purpose line with titles like GURPS Creature Compendium: Monsters of the Orient with a "realistic" write up, plus alternate stats to make it suitable for Dungeon Fantasy and Monster Hunters. I don't know how much difference lacking the Dungeon Fantasy brand might hurt sales, but I know what would be the most use to me.

[b-dog]

I really liked the adventure Mirror of the Fire Demon but one thing I can say is that if it were to have more non-European culture then maybe it might have some Middle Eastern monsters instead of orcs. The setting seems exotic and interesting but orcs are sort of the opposite of exotic. Are there any Arabian or Middle Eastern versions of orcs? Maybe jackalmen or hyenamen? Or some other race?

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by b-dog

Are there any Arabian or Middle Eastern versions of orcs?

I don't know of any.

Maybe jackalmen or hyenamen? Or some other race?

That's very ancient Egyption & very cool. Like they had in Scorpion King.

[Tinman]

Originally Posted by RyanW

If going that route, I'd prefer a general purpose line with titles like GURPS Creature Compendium: Monsters of the Orient with a "realistic" write up, plus alternate stats to make it suitable for Dungeon Fantasy and Monster Hunters. I don't know how much difference lacking the Dungeon Fantasy brand might hurt sales, but I know what would be the most use to me.

That could be very cool. It's like Ghostdancer's Tripple Threat blog posts.
A creature is written up in 3 versions, Standard, Dungeon Fantasy & Monster Hunters.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by b-dog

Maybe jackalmen or hyenamen? Or some other race?

Northeastern Africa and the Arabian peninsula have got your back with were hyenas (with a far eastern style twist in some places that make the creature a hyena that takes on human form rather than the reverse), but nothing similar in humanoid fashion that I can think of unless you want to pull a Mummy 2 as mentioned above and make a mortal creature that resembles the god Set. They come by many local names and are known to eat people and/or drink blood, and to hold a particular malevolence towards lovers in some regions.

Middle Eastern fantasy doesn't really do humanoid cannon fodder besides what you might see as distressingly-familiar Ghouls and Goblins; most humanoid things that aren't human from those stories, particularly ones that show up in the Quran, are bad news to mess around with such as Jinn unless you're some kind of genius, specially-favored by the divine, or preferably both. Animated skeletons, as depicted in the Sinbad movies, are of course, appropriate anywhere, and there's always the Humans with ill intent option.

Arabian legend also gives us the Nasnas (or Xunguruuf in Somali folklore), which resembles a human bisected halfway up the middle lengthwise, which hops about on its one leg with great agility and can either kill you with a touch or turn you into one of their own depending on version. Though, if I was doing this I'd have them turn people into two of their own by splitting up the middle, because it makes more sense, really, and hey, interesting force multiplier if they get into a crowd or have time to set up.

[mhd]

Originally Posted by b-dog

Are there any Arabian or Middle Eastern versions of orcs?

Are there European versions of them? They're pretty much a fantasy trope, not something out of earlier myth & legends, at least in their current horde form. I think I remember some illustrations in the hobbit where the "goblins" looked distinctly cliche-mongol, going by arms & armor, and it's not like the middle east didn't consider them as boogeyman, either.

Sadly there's not that much contemporary middle eastern fantasy that I'm aware of, but the somewhat recent "Throne of the Crescent Moons" had "ghuls" as a big part of its mythology.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by b-dog

Are there any Arabian or Middle Eastern versions of orcs? Maybe jackalmen or hyenamen? Or some other race?

There's not even a European equivalent to orcs. The closest I can think of, off the top of my head, are Jotun. Orcs are pretty Tolkienish.

That said, the Jewish "Se'irim," or he-goats, or goat-men, or "shaggy ones" or "devil", might qualify, though I've not yet tracked down where they came from or what purpose they served, or if other cultures bought into them. They seem to be a threat, but not an enormously powerful one. Thus, goat-men might be an option.

As for the djinn, I've done a lot of homework on them, and they're probably best thought of as "Arabian fae." They can be very powerful, but sometimes a guy tossing away an apricot pit will accidentally kill one. They're often shapeshifters, they often "sneak to heaven and eavesdrop on angels," they live in ruins and hide treasure, thus they know where treasure can be found. They're free-willed too. Djinn can convert to faiths (like Islam or Christianity). I read a story about an islamic "saint" who turned out to be a djinn. In Islam, "the devil" is not a fallen angel, but a powerful djinni, and where Europeans talk about demons, Arabians would talk about djinn. For example, some stories say that the djinn can possess you, or that you need a particular talisman to protect you from a djinn's evil eye, or that a particular djinn might take your children or make them sick.

So djinn are kinda complicated, as are most monsters. The trick, as with all monster compendiums, is to pick a direction and go with it. Which is one of the problems with this sort of thing in DF. The point of Nyambe was to introduce unfamiliar African concepts to a Western RPG audience. But the point of Oriental Adventures was to give rules for the whacky 80s tropes we had about ninjas and samurai and kung fu. The latter is better for the sense of familiarity, but the former is better for the sense of the exotic.

And once you've decided, you just pick a direction for a particular thing and go. For the djinn, there are a million stories from all the various lands. How people approach the djinn is as different as how various European countries thought of witches or demons. The classic, western Arabian Nights/Jolly-blue-wish-granter djinn is as legitimate as the psychotic, shapeshifting murderer from Red Sands, at least when it comes to DF.

[scc]

I thought that orcs DID come from the middle east?

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

There's not even a European equivalent to orcs.

Well, there isn't a fantasy equivalent to orcs. Various enemy human groups were seen as the equivalent...

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Well, there isn't a fantasy equivalent to orcs. Various enemy human groups were seen as the equivalent...

Well, the point is this: DF isn't really very grounded in real-world myth. It's more grounded in popular culture and... whatever Gygax could get his hands on. I mean, there's certainly some myth in the original Monster Manual. I seem to remember there being things like the chimera and the cyclops in there, certainly dryads and such, but they also grabbed Tolkien and made up stuff whole-cloth (the lich, modrons, which I'm pretty sure were just an excuse for Gygax using his dice as minis).

So, for my money, you just grab some stuff and make it into a cool monster and not worry too much about its actual origins. The game for hewing closely to true source material and giving your monster a ton of backstory that the players need to figure out is called "Monster Hunters" not "Dungeon Fantasy."