If the Kadiz Nomads of the Dawnlands had cameras, these are their family snaps. In real life, these are pictures of the people of Siberia and Central Asia in traditional costume. Many of them date from the 19th and early 20th century. The Kadiz are a Turkic-like people (as are the Kaddish) who vary in appearance from "Turkish" and "Russian" looking to "Far Eastern" in appearance, and so the range of physiological variation is accurate to the setting. I got these off of Wikipedia, so they should all be Creative Commons.
looks like we're both mining Tartary/Turkestan - mind if I ask you why you're doing it?
ReplyDeleteIn my case it's because I read Robert Byron's "Road to Oxiana" and then started reading all this Great Game lit. and it struck me there was an opportunity to do a very non-Harryhausen, non-Arabian Nights, non-European game setting with it, that could still be accessible to players - because it's fascinating but also unfamiliar enough to most of us that no prior knowledge can be assumed and everyone can be comfortable with that.
There's a lot of different reasons. I was reading F.W. Mote's Imperial China: 900-1800 around the time 4e came out, and I'd read Against the Day a year or so beforehand, and these all fed into a desire to create a setting strongly influenced by nomads and central Asian history. I'd also just finished clarifying and defining a number of ideas I'd had about setting building.
ReplyDeleteBasically, I find it interesting, and a good balance of strange and familiar. I'm sick of Just Another Fantasy Europe (JAFE) and central Asia seemed a sensible place to go.
Damn right about JAFE: I don't really understand its neverending pull. It's like you can be as imaginative as anything about races and magic systems and uses for slimes, but imagination stops in the Levant, or at the straits of Gibraltar, or even more often at the English Channel.
ReplyDeleteI think the lure of JAFE is its ease of access. I often write primers for settings for my players so they can get a grasp on it before we play. I find these are very useful in getting people to play games set outside of medieval pastiches.
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