The Wild, Wild East - Part 1

You may have heard the notion that the default setting for Dungeons & Dragons is a blend of Hollywood movies like Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, and Jason and the Argonauts crossed with the frontier culture of the fictional American West. Udan's Against the Wicked City blog provides an interesting alternative to this Americanized setting:

The Wild East

• You have fur traders just like the late 18th and early 19th century in the lands that would be America and Canada, but instead of trapping beaver they are after mink.
• Instead of the farms of American settlers from the civilized and settled cities back east you have the farms and villages of Rus settlers from the more civilized and settled cities back west. 
• Instead of the American Great Plains you have the Russian steppes.  
• And instead of Native Americans you have Cossacks and Tartars.

I've mentioned Against the Wicked City before. It's an interesting blog that covers cultures and mythologies that are less familiar to me and to the vast majority of American and dare I say to many European players. This makes the setting outre while still remaining grounded in actual history and culture. For a number of reasons e.g. lack of time, lack of players, level of effort required, I'm unlikely to run this setting, but I'd love to be a player in it. And it is appealing enough to consider running an six month story arc set there similar to the H+I story arc I ran that was set in Flanders and Holland.

The links on the collected information page contain a lot of useful material for anyone interested in running a Wild East type of setting or check out Udan's blog posts with the Central Asia tag. And the cover image is also from Udan's blog.

In tomorrow's post I'll provide some more artwork and links for a Wild East setting.