How would a setting based on slavic mythology work?

Can you give one?

At least in russian "adventurer" would be avanturist (aвaнтюpиcт) or sometimes prikluchenec (пpиключeнeц). "Adventure" itself would be prikluchenie (пpиключeниe).
You can check the other languages in google translate if you are interested.

Пpиключeнeц is a BS word made up by early Pen&Paper players
Aвaнтюpиcт while largely works (let's omit the fact it comes from French) but it implies someone risking his everything for possibly very little instead of someone going on a fun adventure romp (so, more of a Gygaxian D&D sense)

Aвaнтюpиcт нe ocoбo пepeдaёт, пpиключeнeц - кpивaя кaлькa c adventurer. Eдинcтвeнный нe кpивoй пepeвoд, кoтopый я мoгy нaйти - "иcкaтeль пpиключeний"

Well, пpиключeниe is an old word, what I was saying, пpиключeнeц would mostly be short from иcкaтeль пpиключeний.
>someone risking his everything for possibly very little instead of someone going on a fun adventure romp
Isn't it what adventure originally ment though?

Nay, not in slav mythology at least.

I agree that adventure does translate into Russian directly. And I agree that adventurer would translate into Иcкaтeль пpиключeний (Adventure seeker... on empty street*). Пpиключeнeц is still a nonsense word that I wouldn't use in a translation, though I do admit to using it all the fucking time in conversations.

>Isn't it what adventure originally ment though?
In D&D, sure
In real life... I'm not certain. I'd say this word is significantly more positive nowadays and implies excitement in a much more significant degree than pointless danger.

* Sorry, random Queen reference

Everything from Melnitsa animation, just add more darkness and take away the stuff that keeps it family friendly.

I don't see these meme of Russian Mythology being "Darker" than European Mythology.

It's just while Russia for decades tried to utterly stamp out it's own culture in favor of centralised communist ideals, European culture was Bastardised by Americanisation and the big cultural wastebin that is Hollywood.

As for Slavic Adventurers, wouldn't a Cossask Analogy spawn tons of adventurers?

Probably. Just like any other martial culture with a lot of raider elements

Are Ravenloft and Innistrad slavic enough?

Ravnica takes more from Slavic myth than Innistrad.

I think it has to do with the perception that, due to the niche life and the vague source material we have, Russian folklore and mythology is much more obscure which leads to people assuming it must therefore be dark and grim.

Also add to that the situation that the majority of Slavic countries have a bad infrastructure outside major cities despite being a country on European soil, which in my opinion gives them an additional layer of uncertainty that could directly fuel into the perception of inherently grimdark mythology.

Granted, all mythology becomes thoroughly obscure and grim once you actually put some effort into finding original sources or contemporary transcriptions.

Wouldn't this make the heroes overpowered right from the start?

Yes, but that's ok. Just put nigh insurmountable odds in their way.

take slav believes and add whfrp rules. Warhammer fantasy roleplay is most popular system, here in polen for a reason

Exalted does OP heroes from level one and gets away with it. I'm sure you could do something similar in a 'Slavic fantasy' setting.

Wonderfully.

Slavic would work well
But throw a real curveball at them and use Albanian mythology.

I remember reading some stuff on slavic mythology and magic back in the days - please correct me if I'm wrong but here's the summary of what I remember:

- There's very little direct magic, no fireballs and magic missiles. The only direct thing I remember was called 'evil eye' and was some kind of curse where you had to look at the victim
- Most of the magic is based on rituals and offerings which indirectly affects you, others and the environment. E.g. you could offer some food to the river spirits in order to catch more fish or swim safely or do some kind of a ritual not to get lost in the woods or so that more children are born in your village
- Symbolism is the key to everything - using items, herbs, runes and symbols makes the magic more powerful - some of it won't even work without those items. Sometimes dressing or undressing in various ways helps if you enact certain roles in the rituals

- Time of the day, time of the year, seasons, weather and your surroundings matter greatly. Major holidays are great for rituals linked to a certain deity. If you want to cast evil shit you can only do that at night and not in the presence of any religious symbols because gods are watching and they dislike that.
- Nature is obviously super important as well - you need to know your plants as herbalistm and proto-alchemy are playing a major role in the slavic beliefs. But again it's not the witcher style alchemy which just like witcher magic are needed to be instantaneous for the sake of the setting - it's usually long term, because that's the only way it could work. Someone got lucky or healthy month after drinking a potion - fucking magic, praise Weles, totally not coincidence. Some plants really did heal though and some really caused miscarriage.

If you wish OP here's a pretty cool source for this stuff (sadly in polish).
welesowy_jar.fm.interiowo.pl/new_page_6.htm

Sounds like almost every other european pagan magic desu.

When did the concept of extremely direct magic come about? Like fireballs and shit? Because most magic in mythology tends to take the form of symbolic rituals and the waiting game. Was it from the descriptions of godly powers from places like the Greeks?

Americans and their large abomination known as Hollywood culture.

>There would be no adventurers. The word doesn't exist in those languages, or rather it has an entirely different meaning
How is that different from anything else?
In celtic/germanic/any other cultural background, adventurers and adventuring are as much fake concept made up by rpgs as in slavic background.

The thing is that you had direct magic from the gods even in slavic myths because you didn't need to see it happen - you just heard about it in the folk tales. But those people really performed the rituals and since magic isn't real there couldn't be any direct consequences when people used magic.

The rule I would apply is that the magic used by humans can cause anything that could be explained as a coincidence within the rules of nature. Everything else should be left to the gods and never witnessed directly - e.g. a bad slav killed a priestess of a local cult and escaped, when people chased after him they didn't catch him but found a large and vaguely human-resembling rock in the forest - BAM! gods turned him into stone, case closed, time to tell this story to every trader who visits us ever.

this is what I believe as well
I feel like the fact that America is so young and has no ancient/medieval period to base its fantasy upon is why their fantasy is so heroic when compared to low/dark fantasy of europe (see DnD vs Warhammer FRP/Witcher). This is so weird though since the US is made of immigrants and you would imagine they would merge their beliefs and traditions into something cool, fresh and deep but no - fucking dragons everywhere.

adventures and adventuring as understood by D&D I meant.

Wasn't it present in the early fantasy writers too, though? Like in Tolkien for example?

Not really. Tolkien's magic is mostly very indirect, unless explicitly divine in origin. Same for Howard and most other "classical" writers. Maybe Le Guin is one where it is more direct and staightforward, but still it is nowhere close gaming magic.

It's kind of a shame, speaking as a Murican, because Native folklore has a lot of cool stuff in it, even moreso when combined with the Wild West. Problem is, no one really seems to take Native culture seriously beyond the typical "I feel bad, but not bad enough to learn about their culture," thing.

As for the Wild West, that just doesn't have as much of a foothold as European-inspired settings, despite it basically being our equivalent in iconicness to medieval Europe or feudal Japan.

Fireballs started with wizards being reskinned siege engine pieces in Chainmail.

Big issue with folklore is lack of, pardon the word, documentation. That is to say a lot of it is lost or at best distorted to fit the times. Meaning only like a minor part of folklore survives to be used in any practical sense.

If you go looking, you will start noticing that most, for example, slavic folk lore sites are split between people trying to aggregate what little is left, and new age hippy bullshit. Take a guess which is more popular.

Still, with a creative enough DM there is more then enough to forge one.

I disagree with need for bogatir's to be OP as fuck from get go. You can always start small, just remember, it is rare for people to abandon a village to become essencially vagabonds when land between villages is so vast that you will simply die if you can't supply yourself on the road.

There are books that contain a lot about slavic folklore, but probably not so much of it is available online.
Here's a cartoon that fits the theme: youtube.com/watch?v=vlKFk2Hp5H0

Conjuring fire probably owes more to stage magicians than folk magicians; though the Zoroastrians sometimes called "Magians" in period texts, as their priesthood gives us the word "magus" used fire in their religious rituals, and were renowned mystics, second-hand accounts of whom would have been known across Europe.

Fire magic in a folk setting, at least in England comes from the Smith; a Smith's water-butt, which was used to quench hot metal was often purported to have healing properties; interestingly after being used for a quench the water does have mild antibacterial properties, though the precise reason why escapes me.

I don't think Cossacks, amusing as they are, are a good ground for your slavic folklore game. It's mostly about, well, cossaks, i.e. mix of pols slavs and tatars exaggerated to an extrime with some lore thrown in.

No, they don't start out overpowered, they earn that shit.

if youre playing a d20 variant you'd have to design some skills feats
for example the feat: Squat
what advantages would it grant?

There are, but they're used to desribe a boater or a mountain climber. The word also implies an antisocial loner, rather than a group of five.

It's a question of opposition. Generally those guys fight massive multi-headed dragons or whole armies or other supermen like themselves

>dragons everywhere
Describes pretty much all mythology ever

We had a discussion on it already. At least in Russian there is an analogue to "adventure" and "adventurer".
I don't think adventurer in rpg context would really mean the same in other languages before role-playing games either.
Which word are you reffering to exactly?

The fuck am I looking at?

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The cheekiest of breekis.
Baba Yaga is responsible for most problems.
Nobody's calling her(or sometimes them) on it, though.

Vampires are from Slavic myths.

Technically true. Modern vampires owe more to Bram Stoker and Anne Rice though

>ooga booga grim n dark

Bullshit, heroes journeys and quests are all over the fucking place in both chilvaric tales, traditional stories, fairytales, and mythology.

>There would be no adventurers. The word doesn't exist in those languages, or rather it has an entirely different meaning.

Monster slaying was literally a profession in many Slavic cultures.
In some periods it was fucking state sponsored.

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Spoiler alert: there's no actual monsters in real world

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One is a epic tale and myths, and other is an rpg party casual "adventuring". It's not exactly the same.

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Here is something from me.

Also a lot of Vampire myths came from the alledged Jewish practice of Blood Libel.

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Post the rest of this series of pictures even if it's Ancient Aliens tier crazy

You seem intent on not having fun. Why?

Besides bogatyrs, Baba Yaga, and Koshchei, what lesser known things from Slavic mythology/folklore would make for interesting campaigns?

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You have some problems with what I wrote?
Or you really think traditional tales are the same as DnD adventures?

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I've had it somewhere, but my image folder is too much of a mess to find it quickly.
Have this instead.

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It's a nice middle ground, aesthetics wise, between Mongolian and Scandinavian.

That doesn't change anything.

Wandering vampire hunters and the like were a thing, whether you like it or not.

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WFRP with no martial careers allowed, and where you may not leave the first career.

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>medieval Russian boxing

Anthing/Everything to do with Buyan Island.
Pantheon.
Bestiary. While it has many simularities with your run of the mill fantasy, it also has quite few divergences see The distrust. Every time some group of armed fuckers shows in a run of the mill setting, they usually have an excuse or an invite. If you are in a slavic setting, chances are you are from a fuck off far village and, as I said before, few people leave close nit communities, so why did you? While true that slavic hospitalty is praised, and if you are famous you will likely get a very warm greeting, if you are just a group of exiles, it's hard to tell you from bandits.

>Or you really think traditional tales are the same as DnD adventures?
I think you are boring. If you can't imagine a DnD campaign with the same level of epic acts/events of a folktale, you are simply lacking in imagination. Campaings can be very different, so can folktales. And your insistance on some rigid formula for either puzzles me.

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YOU GOT LAID THE FUCK OUT, FANCYPANTS

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>When you post the wrong image

It has nothing to do with "you are boring xddd". They have different style andf different structure. It was not as almost an "adventurer" job as it is in DnD, where there as much adventurers as there are street cleaners.
It again has nothing to do with being "epic" or "heroic" by itself, of course you can kill billion dragons with a sword of anal ruination in your super-not-boring campaign, but it doesn't change the difference between the structure of the world in the old myths and DnD.

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Again, you are operating under presumption that both campaings and folklore have rigid structure. I do not understand why you think it is so. Folklore varies from tales of heroic deeds and noble sacrifices, to tales of women fucking with vodyanoy because husband can't get it up. Campaigns vary from, go kill 5 gobos, to solve this ancient puzzle I spent a year designing because I'm an autist supreme. How, with such variety, are you so hell bent on structure, I do not know.

I don't think you still quite get it.
I'm saying how it is done in the whole DnD lore itself, which followed into a trend in rpgs in general, and how it is done in tales. I don't even understand why do you project it on me, I'm not the one who wrote either DnD lore or tales.
In DnD adventurers are common as flies and in tales adventurers are ususally one in a million chosen ones.
You are free to do what the fuck you want with your games, but the thing still is that "adventurer" in DnD is not the same is "adventurer" in old tales.

Ah, I see now, you mean to say that it wouldn't be by the book WOTC DND setting. I don't think it matters that much. If you want a basic DND campaign with a custom Pantheon/Bestiary/Plot based on slavic folktales you can do that. If you want a different expirience with dark woods, long trails, strange customs and monsters who will eat you for dinner if you are not prepared, you can do that too. I don't think you must follow either, do what fits your group and all that.

...is this bait?