What would a Russian-inspired fantasy setting be like?

This, Russian fairytales are very whimsical and hilarious when the Hero isn't an idiot.

Lots of nature spirits, mounted warriors, and wily peasant girls

Very true. Like Middle-Earth but written by snarky serfs.

Sounds like a typical European fantasy story.

It's called Russian formalism for a reason.

Well duh

People who say they wanna do "Slavic" or "Germanic" settings are usually just wanting a nice new coat of paint over typical European fantasy. If I told you any given fairytale from Europe without names you'd never guess the country of origin.

European folklore is a very distinctive grouping.

Fucking Awesome

fpbp

Like this.

Lots of scrying for information that will hurt a rival kingdom's rightful heir so you can put a buffoon you control on the throne instead.

Russia has extreme heat in summer, and rainy seasons too. It spans all sorts of climates.

Just look at Russian folklore and peasant culture. Base the setting in the Kievan Rus or somesuch ye olde Russia, make folklore and legends actually exist, and bam, you have a Russian inspired fantasy setting.

don't upload copyrighted pdfs bruh

Like this.

Don't go in the forest, all the bad shit happens there.

But user, we live in the forest

They published Frei in english? That's cool.

Please stop reposting this bullshit.

>Be Russian
>Be a Czar
>Automatically a saint

>Send pigeons to burn down an entire village
>Still a saint

The Orthodox Church is almost as lenient as Vatican II

I'm genuinely impressed and delighted nobody's mentioned Baba Yaga yet. You used to see that happening ALL the time and it always grated on me. No clearer sign someone is trying to pretend they know about Russian mythology even though all they did was read a comic about it or something. Good job, Veeky Forums!

>Send pigeons to burn down an entire village
>Still a saint

hey, you have to admit, that was metal.

A buddy of mine is half Russian and made an entire D&D setting based on it.
It deals a lot with the struggle between svarog, the God that taught mankind agriculture and metalwork, and the serpent, who is the big satan demiurge

diamond is unbreakable

full of people who are terrified of butterflies

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Actually, diamonds are very brittle. They're very HARD, which means you can't, say, squish them into a different shape, but that very hardness also means relatively little pressure will make them shatter into pieces.

user, you described every medieval kingdom ever.

Is that High Elves?

This meme needs to die.

He got it all wrong. Svarog is pretty much Hephaestus, he has no business fighting Veles, the serpent god (pretty much Hermes). Perun (Zeus) is the one feuding with Veles. Also none of them are explicitly evil, that's a misconception introduced by the Christian monks, who deduced that anything associated with serpents must necessarily be evil. If you need an explicitly evil god, use Morana (genderswapped Hades), Chernobog (the black god, nuff said) or Karachun (god of frost, slavic OC donut steel).

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That's ancient Russians as imagined by some Russian newage crackpot

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Just read classic Russian fairy tales.

Which are basically a heroic fantasy going in Kievan Rus.
Thus - fun as fuck

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Not sure what you're bothered by, friend. I'm Russian and can confirm that it's pretty spot-on.

A lot of the stuff that people frequently attribute to "Russian mythology" has been through a very heavy Soviet filter, which had been through a heavy Orthodox filter before that, so it's almost completely meaningless to ask for something "Russian-inspired" because you could be referring to any one of several periods where the prevailing mythos was drastically different.

Are you talking about the pre-Christian tribes? You're getting something very close to Norse but with that unconquerable Russian superstition.

Are you talking about Kievan Rus? That's a bit more unique, because you've got the Christian mythos dominating the old paganism, which is alive in some corners. The bogatyrs are typically seen here, but they'd be the ones fighting anything that smells pagan.

Are you talking about the 200 year period where Russia was dominated by the Mongols? Probably not, nobody really talks about that, but the meme image you seem to be so opposed to is basically set here.

Are you talking about the early Russian empire with the pivot towards the West with Peter and the rule of Catherine? Where Alexander liberated Europe? Again, probably not, since it's right before the Victorian Era which is where we get the steampunks and wanton colonialism, so this isn't the period of history that's interesting enough to get fantasy out of. Seems like a neglected niche, to be honest.

You're probably not talking about the slow decline of the Russian empire, since everybody just immediately jumps past that, past the rise of communism, past WWII and right into the classical dystopian communist state that's given so many fantasy settings their villains and Second Worlds. Well you know what to do here already, so it's kind of a moot point talking about it.

In short, there's a pretty long chunk of time when "things were good, but now they are bad, and getting worse" is accurate.

was wondering when that guy's art was going to show up, someone should dump more of it

GURPS Russia.

Now imagine that you're an intelligent but impoverished member of a formerly middle class Gallo-Roman family who lives in the muddy ruins of a once pretty and orderly Roman colony, now vandalised and taken over by smelly Franks. You used to have quite a chunk of land, but it was taken over by some Frankish pig who abandoned it anyway, because these barbarians can only pillage and loot, and now it's being encroached on by a forest. The aqueduct that used to bring fresh water to your town was vandalised by the Franks just for fun, and your family now has to dig wells and drink muddy water infected by all kinds of diseases. And if you thought the Franks were bad, wait until savage Magyars raid what remains of your town and loot everything that the Franks neglected to steal.

Now tell me if this doesn't match the text of this crappy image macro way better than anything you described.

The Romans didn't have quite so many myths about creatures in the forest and waters eating/consuming you, and were not as superstitious. Living for 2000 years in a large empire with a well-developed road system and the large cities of antiquity tends to get rid of most of that kind of superstition.

There's a big difference between the conquest of the Slavs and the fall of Rome. Rome fell from a great height, but even then the roads, aqueducts, and ruins were still there. Romans had epic poetry two thousand years before Cyrillic or Glagolitic were even invented.

There wasn't shit in slav-land except forests, superstition, and misery.

>and were not as superstitious

Most wore a medal of a winged penis they would frequently invoke to stop them from being cursed, and their most important government documents where given to them by oracles and esoterically presented the entire history of Rome from birth to collapse.

Also, let me point out:

>you're an intelligent but impoverished
>tell me if this doesn't match the text of this crappy image macro

The slavs were never educated dude, it all came from Christianity, after about 1000 AD, and this education was focused on religious instruction.

You clearly have no understanding of Russian paganism. It vastly eclipses that of Rome. Especially considering that it had about 600 years of a head start on Christianity than the slavic lands.

lol, why?

>The slavs were never educated dude
That is just flat out wrong.

Also also, to emphasize: due to the lack of written records as well as very active suppression campaigns by the Christian rulers, very little of Slavic myth can actually be reconstructed from primary sources. Even Baba Yaga isn't mentioned in writing until Lomonosov was around in the 1700s. This makes Baba Yaga a contemporary of Beauty and the Beast as written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740.

It's not accurate to say "Russian mythology" when most of it is literally fairy-tale tier.

Are you daft or something? That's from the 1400s. The slavs DID NOT HAVE A WRITING SYSTEM BEFORE ONE WAS MADE FOR THEM BY CHRISTIAN GREEK MISSIONARIES. There is no great legacy of Slav architecture, writing, music, culture, or empire-building. There's only mud, forests, and far-off lands that you'll never get to see, but you can hate if you want, that's fine, because they sure as hell hate you since they take your kin as forced laborers.

Have studied slavic mythology, this sounds pretty accurate.

Except you probably shouldn't even walk near any body of water that isn't the village pond.

Example convoluted way to kill fantastic creature:
Vampire:
Find a horse, have a priest bless the horse, have the horse lead you to the vampire's grave, hope the vampire is sleeping in the grave today, drive a wooden steak through the ground and through the heart of the body inside the grave, catch the butterfly that will come out and DO NOT let it escape, kill the butterfly.
And I think I missed a couple of steps...

Another good example. You have to somehow find Koshchei's soul to kill him.
Koshchei / slav dragons are fucking fantastic fantasy big bads.

Traditional slav dragons are also great for people who want to play FATAL.

>Traditional slav dragons are also great for people who want to play FATAL.

Afraid to ask why, will ask anyway.

Why?

I'm not sure if you're a liar or just that stupid, fuck off straight to /pol/ either way

Supposedly in almost all the oldest versions of the stories that barely survived as - I can't think of another way to say it so I just will - oral traditions the dragons never kidnapped princesses to eat them but to rape them every morning and evening. Their introductionary descriptions would never fail to describe their lecherousness. And sometimes the princesses would use the dragon's lust to trick them and kill them or learn their fatal weakness so that the inept hero or prince could actually kill the dragon and rescue the girl and earn the lord/king's favour.

The slavs absolutely enjoyed listening to dirty stories instead of just scary stories when they sat around their fires in the evenings.

Are you retarded? Are you illiterate? I'm talking about Russian myth before Christianity and you're posting a Soviet reconstruction of what they think something from the 11th century looked like despite there being no actual images of what it looked like.

>The slavs DID NOT HAVE A WRITING SYSTEM BEFORE ONE WAS MADE FOR THEM BY CHRISTIAN GREEK MISSIONARIES
Which happend in 9th century. For quick comparison, so your tiny brain can wrap around this data, Charlemagne died roughtly 40 years before Glagolitic was invented, just like you described.
Birchbark codexes are from 10th century.

Rings you a bell how fucking stupid you are?

>You can't do a building reconstruction without having an image of it
Son, don't want to break it for you, but that's entirely within grasp of archeology for PAST 200 FUCKING YEARS

>Are you retarded?
>Are you illiterate?
Are you?

>Le Soviet Orwellian retcon of myth!
Shame most of the written sources and research on that stuff comes from 19th century, predating Marx publication, not to mention Soviets

It's not a reconstruction so much as it is a complete re-building. It's not like restoring a mayan temple where there are ruins left. There was literally nothing left, so they just re-built it, and there's absolutely no reference for what it looked like. Might as well be just as made up as Koshei or Baba Yaga.

You're just proving my point. When Russians were learning to write, Charlemagne was buried in a then-five-hundred-year-old basilica. In Rome, a city that' would have been 1500 years old. When Russians were learning to write, the Iliad was two thousand years old.

Did you also miss the part where Christianity supplanted any pagan traditions without them ever being written down (unlike their Western counterparts)? And don't talk about Soviet revisionism like it's not a real thing, I lived through it, my parents lived through it, and my grandparents lived through it. A lot of history was omitted or presented in a specific way in order to promote the idea of unity-through-Communism rather than unity-through-ethnicity.

>Seriously being this dense

Do you actually have something to say or are you just going to call me names?

slavs are notoriously feisty mate, in all regards

also
>sat around their fires in the evenings
>not sat inside Banya with hot big tittied blonde farm girl

ishygddt

>When Russians were learning to write, Charlemagne was buried in a then-five-hundred-year-old basilica. In Rome, a city that' would have been 1500 years old. When Russians were learning to write, the Iliad was two thousand years old.
Yes, and?

Because I hardly see how this invalidates anything they've wrote down from the moment they've gained an alphabet. Especially since latopis (English doesn't even have a fucking name for those) are the most valuable type of medieval chronicles, since the amound of crap in them is put to minimum.

Also, you clearly seem to forget how the fact the Rome was 1500 years old didn't made it anything else than a small town full of ruins mined for easy-to-access marble by locals, who were mostly of barbarian descent. And the same shit was going in entire fucking Europe, with barbarian tribes living in ruins - or building their own mud-huts - of what was left by Romans.

There is no point arguing with you at all, since you are too stupid to graps... well, just about anything. Assuming you are the original Russian poster, it's just fucking amazing there could be a local who is so fucking ignorant in own culture and history. I am by no means any expert of Russian history, I just have a Masters in History, but we still spend entire semester doing nothing but Slavs (mostly focusing on Poles, Czechs and Rus as three distinctive paths each group have taken, with a small bit of Yugo stuff) and their history, from prehistoric times till 16th century, reading all the sources, textbooks and related shit.

You meanwhile are butthurt about... something, apparently being unable to precise what exactly is your problem with people pointing out that Slavs weren't just bunch of savages and adopted "higher culture" as soon as it was possible, instead trying to put them in a light of eternal barbarians.
No wonder people call you to go back to /pol/, since it's literally one step away from outright /pol/-tier "argumentation".

>focusing on Poles

t...thanks for noticing me s...senpai

>latopis (English doesn't even have a fucking name for those)
letopis is translated into English as chronicle. The term for the document is the (first) Chronicle(s) of Novgorod.

My point is that the original description of a Slavic setting I posted in is accurate and cannot be applied to the any kind of person living in the area formerly belonging to Rome, because
1) the slavs did not have nearly as lengthy a history of architectural, cultural, etc accomplishments as, say, any location ruled by Romans, hence the general bleak backwater feel of the whole thing, and the "tales of great cities from far away that you will never get to see."
2) the slavs were pagans for about 700 years longer than the Romans and kept more of their superstitions even after Christianity was introduced, hence all the "forest and lakes will eat you" parts.
3) were invaded from everywhere but the North (since there was nobody there), and especially from the East
4) only slavic myth has such a focus on killing things in a specific and convoluted way

>instead trying to put them in a light of eternal barbarians.
It's hard not to do that when they don't have their own writing or their own religion, and when the first rulers were foreigners (as were many of the major rulers later on).

That's not even that important, though, let's say that slavs aren't uneducated barbarians and have actually contributed something to humanity besides being able to take something from someone else and autistically obsessing over it, let's say that slavs are the best ever. What kind of setting does that make?

>My point is that the original description of a Slavic setting I posted in is accurate

Right, right if you ignore every single Slavic myth, legend, custom and cultural artifact it is accurate. It's a good thing we can just ignore anything that doesn't fits into our worldview on the internet.

You got some counterexamples or are you just going to say "wrong" and run away?

youtube.com/watch?v=nY6sI3muOjc
youtube.com/watch?v=tIcYfoaKkWA
youtube.com/watch?v=n5HcMnto5tk

Throwing in some inspiration.

St Olga of Kiev is too metal for our feeble Christendom

The slav stories survived the exact same way the Iliad did. People learned the stories, which were composed with lots and lots and lots of repetition to make them easier to learn, to make them easier to remember and to make them easier to retell, and people retold them again and again and again. It was closer to now than Kievan or pre-Kievan times that people went out and sought out remote communities and wrote down their elders' stories. But it took about that long for the church to start getting properly thorough with properly wiping out pagan tradition, and longer still for education and writing to become common.

Three lands, three kingdoms, and many sets of three princes or three princesses or three headed monsters or three great challenges. It's everywhere because it's a holdover from and important part of the oral tradition process. Going over something three times burns it into your memory better, and telling something three times gives you more time to remember what comes next.

The slav stories did suffer a lot from being altered. Particularly by the people who went out to research them. Most of them amalgamated the stories and changed them to appeal more to the wealthy upper classes of the 1700s and 1800s (actual Russians top culprits here), but some scholarly efforts did survive (the Yugos did good here)
The same goes for classical mediterranean stories, myths and folklore just as much. The canonical version of Medea - which has spawned expressions popular with modern upper class snobs - has Medea kill her own children, but there's evidence that suggests that in many older versions of her story her children were killed by the people of Corinth.

One way or the other, who cares? Stories are stories. If it makes a fucking excellent fantasy setting or inspires a cool campaign, perfect.

lel, classic
What was the more cartoony one with the goofy dragon and the businessman type guy that looked like a dwarf called?

Not him, but do you have any real examples, aside of carefully crafted bullshit that apprears valid if someone doesn't have a slightest clue about the subject in question?

youtube.com/watch?v=CnVd8FrEK80
Never forget THE SACK.

That's a great idea for a lich's philactery.

You're welcome. Kind of sad how your country completely fell apart twice, first due to shitty gavelkind for 5 sons (most likely based on a forgery of the last will) and then, right after the kingdom was finally united centuries later, it again ended up in shit, because your native dynasty died and was replaced by utterly incompetent Hungarians. But at least you get the Commonwealth out of it in the end, so it's still something.
On a side note - how the hell Poles can consider Hungarians their friends after Louis of Hungary and then his daughters? Unless it's some sort of Hungarian propaganda? Or propaganda created by nobles, since it gave the foundation to their rule over the country?

Koschei the Deathless was the OG fairy tale lich.

The Storyteller is excellent, but that one is by far the best.

Just search "Mythic Russia" as OP title in the archives and you'll get a ton.

What about Modern Fantasy in Russia?
Would there be pagan wizards and stuff?

Include Baba Yaga and her dancing hut.

There's an anime called First Squad. It's about fantasy WW2 with undead nazi teutons and soviet battle magic.

Technically more like High Dwarves.

Eh, i'm not that autistic to dissect that entire post, but:

-The creatures of nature are not usually evil and can often be placated or reasoned with. There are some that can't, but in general the grim defeatist tone of the memepasta is wrong.

-River trade was basically the main industry in pre-Kievan Rus and Kievan Rus periods. While the bit about foreign cities is correct, the grim defeatist tone of the memepasta is wrong.

-"Foolish noble who gets his comeuppance" is a very prevalent archetype of myth, although "noble who is actually a pretty cool guy" is prevalent too. Generally speaking, the higher you are on the nobility totem pole, the higher your chances to get beaten by the self-propelling club in the end. This actually continues to this day (not the self-propelling club thing sadly, some people here really deserve it).

-Back to the "trading" point, hard to trade if you despise your neighbors. "Don't be a cunt, but be wary" is probably a better characterization of slavic relations with neighbors (most of the time, other slavs).

-Chopping trees in the forest is probably the dumbest thing you can do in slavic myth. "Don't be a cunt, but be wary" applies here full-force. If you fuck with nature, let it at least be gentle lovemaking, else you gonna have a bad time.

I think it's pretty apt to draw parallels between old English Mythology and Slavic Mythology. I mean fuck; English Mythology is often cited as "Too overused" yet I have never seen a single Setting use English Mythology as the basis, only Tolkiens Mythology, which is a mismatched of many things.

The "kill the butterfly" part was common for most evil creatures. There are a lot of fairy tales where an evil sorcerer or the devil got outsmarted by a young lad/soldier/prince, and was burned, and the villagers had to stand near the pyre to kill snakes and birds that crawled and flied from the ashes so that no evil could escape. I'm gonna google if Propp's fairy tale books are available in English, hold that thought.

And yet we tend to forget our roots.

>Modern Fantasy in Russia
The Night Watch cycle of books/movies. Your classic "order vs chaos" conflict where both sides are dicks (Chaos side more apparently, but Order has its own MAJOR fuck ups).

The Secret City by Vadim Panov. While the writing often betrays authors' bias (and sadly not in a good way), it's still an entertaining read. Operators opeating operationally against power-hungry sorcerors, mad scientists and modern threats encroaching on the territory of remains of three pre-human civilizations now residing in Moscow. Never (to my knowledge) translated in English because fuck you глyпыe инocтpaнцы.