So /tg/ i've noticed that there really is a lack of material for /tg/ related Native American lore, art & games as well as generally a lack of American (North/Central/South) mythology that permeates a lot of modern fantasy. And normally when it does it's mingled with the Anglo-american/european influence
I'm building up a folder for a game i'm going to be running regarding an several tribes along the Mississippi & an apocalyptic event as well as another game regarding trade wars along the Rio Grande. So far all i can find /tg/ related are a few Mayan & Aztec CYOA's & splats
Perhaps its better to imagine the thread as Native American Fantasy. Or a fantasy setting where the Europeans never arrived or did much further down the line.
That & admittedly i love the idea of stone weapons & tools being high quality gear while actual iron tools would be the stuff of legends.
>>44774291
The only monsters that come to mind that have actually appeared in fantasies & gaming are probably thunderbirds & Windingos. Then again i'll admit to know knowing much about native american myths or monsters.
The inuit have a few cool creatures. But you can always count on people who live in an area of purpetual harshness & misery to come up with some cool shit.
Qalupalik hang out near the water wearing baby carrying parka & steal away children who stray away from home or gather too near to open water without escort.
>>44774459
then again that's the much more bangable monstergirl-ish version. Here the other interpretation that seems pretty common.
in my opinion much more spook & my wallpaper
It might seem obvious, but Skinwalkers should be a thing.
Twisting the legend just enough to serve your needs would help to make them more than just shape-shifters.
>>44774489
>>44774459
Shame most of their monsters are just X mixed with Y. Though Akhluts are cool in a radical 90's way. Half wolf half orca's. Let's not get into the whole werewolf people thing
>>44774291
For missisippi you're probably gonna want to read up a bit on Chickasaw legends & the like. They've got straight up cannablistic ogres called Lofa
Water panthers could be a problem along the riverside. Though they're a great lakes thing i'm sure your players aren't gonna check your referrences.
Depending how far back you want to go you could always have some ice age hold overs. Or just have them, it's your game after all.
>>44774775
Water panther you say?
>>44774614
Most of the greek monsters are X mixed with Y, no one bitches about that.
>>44774678
Don't forget the Choctaw.
>>44774291
Ehdrigor is a game that may interest you. I never played it but heard that it's full of shit like that.
>>44774823
I'm making a mesoamerican setting and the northern steppes are dotted with oligocene animals such as sabretooth tigers, paraceratherium and daeodons. The local human cultures have even tamed some of the largest ones as beasts of war.
>>44775034
>and I can't give a fuck anymore!
Get you read:
http://straitsofanian.blogspot.ca/
Swords in the Mighty Cedars
Don't remember the others.
>>44774291
Oral traditions are really bad at, you know, surviving.
>>44774338
>where Europeans arrived much further down the line
So what, the same Native American setting without horses?
>>44774979
>Aztecs was a peaceful culture
>They had a civilize empire running smoothly before them Spaniards showed up
>They was good boys
>They was going to priest school to learn to sacrifice virgins
>they dindu nuffin
>>44778445
Who ever said they were peaceful? Most of the Native American and tribes and the various kingdoms and empires were just as violent as anyone else in the world. War was so endemic that they invented a kind of ritualized war called a Flower War that would just go on continuously.
If you're looking for cool armor, go no further than the Tlingit and other neighbouring tribes like the Haida, Tmishian, and the Aleuts.
>>44779201
I see you're behind on your dank memes.
heh, nothing personell kid.
>>44774291
There's actually a really neat native american mythology based rpg being made... I lost track of it though. It's about people finding ways to fight back the nightmare beasts from the depths of the world using all kinds of methods, not necessarily violence, and also involving a really fluid sense of time.
>>44774614
somebody hasn't read nearly enough native american mythology. They got some trippy stuff mixed into there.
The Naagloshii are pretty terrifying. Spirits from before light, that depending on the version either possessed human medicine-men and turned them evil, or were creatures of vast power that could take on any form they wished.
Lake monsters, like Nessie, have been said to exist in lore as well.
Also keep in mind that they are polytheistic religions and that the gods regularly visited mankind. My favorite is Coyote, a trickster god that tended to fuck up whenever he was actually trying to help.
>>44774614
An Orca Wolf is pretty fucking terrifying.
>>44779476
Oh no I'm aware dindu nuffin is a meme, your post was just bad.
>>44774291
Just head over to x and read the myriad of skinwalker tales.
>>44778340
Many thanks. This stuff is rad as hell
>>44774291
>>44779484
http://council-of-fools.com/blog/?page_id=15
Found it! It's really a neat little setting.
>>44774291
You know how the Aztecs/Mexica/Triple Alliance sacrificed kids to Tlaloc to bring rain? Their reasoning was that the sacrifices were making Tlaloc cry and the rain was his tears.
The Quechua peoples of the Inca empire considered mummies to be intermediaries between the spirit world and the mortal world. Additionally, the dead continued to own all property they had owned in life, and the produce or goods gathered by his subordinates. This was a big motivation for Inca imperialism since the current Inca didn't inherit his predecessor's holdings. They also believed that if you burnt a corpse you destroyed the dead person's soul.
Years after the Spanish Conquest of Peru, an Inca guide showed an English explorer a beach of mummies. The guide told him that they were the Indians who committed suicide to protest the Spanish take over; they are actually pre-Inca mummies. Such revisions of past history to reflect or comment on current realities seem quite common among the Indigenous of South America.
>>44783719
>Such revisions of past history to reflect or comment on current realities seem quite common among the Indigenous of South America.
it's sadly a common story in most of North America, not the least because so much was LOST during the small pox pandemic. 90% population drop is going to put a dent in your oral memory, especially when you have zealous foreignors destroying any actual texts they can. Not sure that happened as much in North America, but the Spanish sure as hell did destroy a lot of mesoamerican records as I recall.
>>44775015
Note that the upper half of the figure is actually a particularly baroque headdress, and if you look closely you can sort of see her nose poking out from under the diamond shaped eye holes.
Although the ornamentation is all but hallucinogenic in it's ornateness and seemingly unbelievably complex, this is not a far cry, or any really, from the ceremonial and just plain kingly garments worn by the highest ranking people in the society.
I also like the fact that the color is pretty nicely preserved on that one. It gives a further sense of how vivid and rich the decoration of truly important things were.
>>44779747
Oh, there are lots of fun things in native Myths.
Lake spirits range from creepy to "Oh god it's killing everyone!" and there is a pretty good range of variously troubling critters, including little people and what are basically giants, either in multiples or singular cases.(Like how Baba Yaga is a witch or evil spirit, but there is one of her)
>>44779318
>>44779341
>>44779424
>>44779449
Holy shit, that is fucking rad
>>44779318
>Haida
YOU MUST CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL TOTEM POLES
>>44784063
It happened ALOT in north america. They had bounties on medicine men and for a while it was illegal for a native family to keep their kids who got sent to boarding schools to teach them proper christian ways. Texts were routinely banned and destroyed. Almost all of my tribes oral history is gone but we made a habit of taking over, assimilating, then chucking out offshoots who had a version of that history so about 70 years ago when the cultural identity died we took the northern most tribe who we were close to and adopted their more intact history as our own. Sorry for the rant but its a terrible crime that anything close to this and that mummy thing happen at all.
Interestingly this does mean most tribes covet their history and you'll almost never find a true representation of it in book form thats not either missing key info or full of filler which is again causing a cultural identity death in the modern era. This can most easily be seen in the skinwalker. Those stories on /x/ are nowhere near close to what they actually are in stories since that info is heavily guarded and avoided. The tribe in question is highly superstitious about it and even talking about it makes them clam up and never talk to you again as talking about skinwalkers calls them to you and yours and you asking could mean you're one trying to trap them. This leads to almost no factual information about those stories available to the public.
Cultural appropriation is another boogeyman that drives others away and too many tribes have a narrow view on who is and isn't native. Most tribes don't recognize members if they're less than half and some like mine won't unless you're over 3/4 which means less people to carry the torch.
I have some notes around here somewhere from when I talked with my tribe's historian. If I can scrounge them up I'll post them. In fact, I may just pay him another visit, our last one was cut short. Also, I could visit my clan's medicine man to get more info on ceremonial/mythic stuff that our historian might not have access to.
>>44785041
Though honestly, being tied down to superstitions to the level where you take them that seriously is unhealthy. Guarding your mythology doesn't require you to actually believe in it, after all.
>>44785041
My roommate is from a tribe who refused to register since their closest related tribe got hit by that eugenics program shit back in the mid 1900s. She only just got back into contact with her great uncle who is the defacto tribal to my understanding. She's hoping she can learn more about her history despite the whole 'only 1/4th blood', since the rest of her close blood family were basically monsters to her. I hope he's not of the 'gotta be pure' persuasion, cause I think having some kind of root would really help her out.
Now, I can understand not spreading stories about the skinwalkers (which isn't even their real name as I recall?), that's built in. You don't tell anybody you don't have to for a variety of reasons, the top being it calls them to you.
But why not the rest of their histories? Why not record them in a digital format and export that stuff? Publish it so it's backed up in the library of congress?
Save what's left?
>>44785477
Saying this as someone who has had the actual skinwalker stories told to me. That shit is messed up, and not talking about it, not knowing more about them, is actually one of the defenses against attracting their attention. Only people with the proper training are supposed to know enough to pop up on their radar is my understanding.
>>44785536
>actual skinwalker stories told to me
granted maybe they just told me a spooky story anyway and said it was a skinwalker story. How would I know?
>>44785536
I get that, all I'm saying is that buying into superstition isn't healthy.
>>44774291
>be Indian
>find acorn
>worship it
>build nothing
>no history
>see coyote
>worship it too
>indians
>>44785571
I dunno man, I mean I agree on one level, and on another I can also understand why they cling to it so fiercly. It's not even about the BELIEF in it on some level, it's about ACTING as tradition states, because tradition is just about all you have left of your culture.
Believing in them or not may not even enter into it. You don't talk about them because you just don't, a cultural rule you keep alive regardless of whether you believe it or not.
>>44785511
Zealotry. They don't want non-natives and non-tribe members to know their history. We tried that it ended in genocide and attempted enslavement. We also tried it again and it got our kids taken from us then made it hard to exist outside of reservations.
Not saying it won't help us now but previous events left us with a bad taste and we have long memories. I know some tribes have computers with it stored locally but it does go against some traditions. A lot of knowledge is meant and designed to be shared vocally. Whole rituals and events revolve around it.
It doesn't help that we actively avoid modernization to some degree as its viewed as a poisoning influence on our culture by eroding the traditional ways which again tie into how we share our knowledge.
>>44785692
You'd expect to have some forward thinking people do something eventually, or at least what they can. Both in regards to modernization and recording something. Though I suppose a lot of those left to integrate into wider society generations ago.
>>44785728
>Though I suppose a lot of those left to integrate into wider society generations ago.
This. All of this. The problem is tribal leaders teach their children who become tribal leaders who teach their children. It is a lifetime endeavor that you undertake that education and modern kids especially don't want to take that time.
It essentially becomes an in-the-family type thing and even tribe members 3 houses down can be left out purely for not being family friends.
You guys have any links or text recommendations for native American folklore?
>>44785806
It's where a lot of those 1/8th and 1/16th people and such come from I guess, I know it's what happened with a few of my great grandparents (both sides). Decided they'd rather integrate than try and stay and be herded around or treated like outcasts.
>>44785953
Its harmful one way or the other.
>>44785606
>Pueblo
>Inca
>Mexica
>Maya
>Guarani
>Haida
>build """nothing"""
Dumb shitposter
>>44786111
It was.
>>44786151
They're probably from the eastern US. The big settled culture out there was the Mississipians, and they were utterly eradicated by plagues (as a culture, tribes formerly a part of it survived, if barely) by the time Europeans reached that part of the continent.
>>44774599
Arizonafag here. I have quite a few Native friends. Skinwalkers aren't some joke or interesting bit of legend for the Navajo, they're considered very real and even talking about them's a huge no-no due to the idea that speaking about the evil invites the attention of the skinwalker to you. Not saying you believe in it or have to, but it's one of those things that could piss a person off if you use it in such a casual manner.
>>44786268
This is like saying "Don't take the Lord's name in vain or you might piss of a Christian!"
Obviously you shouldn't be a dick to someone's face, but using elements of something in a game should be fair game, and you shouldn't let your hands be tied by the oversensitive. Especially in the context of this thread here, saying what amounts to "Don't use anything that they'd consider bad juju." in the game would be really crippling to the setting. Other than obviously being an important part of the mythology and setting of a place inspired by it, it's very important from a mechanical perspective to have this kind of threat.
>>44786346
It's something I have to take into heavy consideration. I'd rather keep a friend than use some bastardized version of their culture and beliefs and risk pissing them off, especially when said subjects have been a source for watering down and erasing said cultural identity. I know you're whitebread as fuck and will likely never encounter this scenario, but throwing shit in like thunderbirds, skinwalkers, Coyote and the like are things that would make you lose a friend and perhaps others when they go off and tell their family and associates that this asshole's bandying about your culture with little respect paid to it.
Meanwhile, in /k/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-AShfEmzEk
>>44786390
>I know you're whitebread as fuck
You know what they say about assumptions, homeboy.
Ignoring that mistake of yours, I'd say you should get more understanding friends. That or not be the person to make this kind of setting, if you're outright admitting you're incapable of doing it for fear you'd piss someone you know off.
>>44786390
I don't think its as bad as you say it is. Sure we can be uptight sometimes but so long as its visible that its not the actual skinwalker(/x/ tier) and give it a different name and it should be fine. Honestly it might even be better to have it wholly debased from the actual culture than have it bastardized a partially factual thing.
Heres a thing OP. A coup stick. You take this into battle and if you touch an enemy with it and come back you get some sort of marking to adorn it. Coup sticks are a family deal and its given from father to son. So long as someones there to witness it happen you can do it as many times as you want though that usually means a more elaborate single decoration than a lot of plain ones. You lose it in battle you just lost your families honor. They are hard enough to be used as an actual weapon and usually have a sharpened butt but you best not lose the decorations cause thats also losing honor and you bet your ass you won't be welcome back till you get it back.
>>44787876
Forgot to mention that they are around 8-12ft tall.
>>44786236
Nice, have to check this out.
>>44778402
Fun fact, horses got to North America before Europeans. They spread up through the Mexica people while the Spanish were still fucking around in South America.
Hypothetical time: If Columbus missed his Caribbean springboard and landed on the mainland his group would have been swallowed whole by the natives, who might have retained his peoples horses, bred them, and spread them throughout America. You could even have some of the iron weapons and armor as legendary items.
>>44778445
You.
I like you.
>>44779318
Everything about the Pacific Northwest is rad as hell. I visited Alaska a few years back and spent a few days hosted by an Athabaskan family. They and their neighbors were the shit. Told some awesome stories.
Spent some time in Northern New Mexico after that, lived with some Pueblo for a bit. Some of their really old stories would make Lovecraft shit his pants.
>>44774291
Brazilian fag here. Can talk about brazilian lore, I even know one of our experts about it, Mário Corso.
>boitatá
>caipora
>mão preta
>boto
>curupira
>mouros
>arrow ladder
>>44784063
The Spaniards were the ones copy-cating all the oral religions, historical and folklore texts in the Americas dude, or teached and trained the natives in the European way of doing things and then those guys were the ones recopilating etc, some Priest burned books and others recopilated, some Spaniards conquerors were worse than beasts with the native and others fought for the native rights. It's cool to point about the bad things than they did but point also the good ones.
>>44789995
>mouros.
I see old European legend got ported too. In the Iberian peninsula Mourous/Moros/Mauriak/Gentiles/Romans etc were a way to call the Fae.
>>44785953
So what you're saying is that it's a small clan of white people that have committed to learning fragmented and half-remembered lore over the generations stuck angsting over issues of identity and who else will learn it while also dealing with the fact reservations are a cesspool that make projects look like the suburbs.
Meanwhile my mongrel mestizo ass has that native looking phenotype active and arguably has more concentrated blood. But also free of such angst as I neither know nor really care about what group I'm from. Although it would be probably a clusterfuck. There's something about this juxtaposition that manages to be both tragic and fucking hilarious. But at least I know where the Autism in the family runs through. Pic very related.
My ancestors truly die for this moment. To shitpost and argue with people all over the world on a mongolian pornographic bone carving site.
>>44790411
>You will never have a rpg game based in the city of Potosi.
Such a devil may care city I doubt have never existed.
>>44784320
Right?
>>44789439
That's awesome. I'm on the east coast, and we have some cool museums with a lot of artifacts and such but I've never spent time with actualy people.
Just posting some more cool pics.
Tlingit Gandalf.
>>44791996
>Ctrl+f Wavoka
>Ctrl+f Ghost Dance
>0 results both
Get your shit together boys.
>>44791996
Sorry >>44792120 here, didn't mean to quote you
>>44774291
http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/CS/CSFourCreations.html
No Hopi creation story?
If you like mixing lovecraftian chocolate with native american peanut butter, you can't go wrong with this.
>>44790330
You mean stuff like mouros encantados?
Not quite. Festivals at several places around Brazil have dances/plays in which knights fight the mouros.
>>44790411
Nah, my family doesn't bother. The only legacy is that we look like Mexicans for obvious reasons.
>>44794335
kek
Bumping for interest
