I'm sure all of us use myths and legends and things like that from other countries to spice up our games...

It's a moral victory, something a toaster like you can't understand.

We've got dumb shit like The Sidehill Gouger.

Yes, but only in Call of Cthulhu. It's the most AMERICA of games.

>moral victory
>the greatest among men cannot hope to compete with robutt
At least Paul took his defeat with some dignity, you could learn from him and Babe.

No. We've got plenty of home grown folklore, no need to import it.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folklore_of_the_United_States

The US has a lot of folklore that lends itself well to campy or spooky or lighthearted story telling.

Currently have a game where the party is dealing with the setting equivalent of the Jersey Devil, which is under the control of a witch that convinced it she's his mother.

Also, there is plenty of American folklore, even if has roots from other cultures. Various crytpids like Bigfoot and the Mothman, heroes of tall tales like Johnny Appleseed and Pecos Bill, countless ghost stories (The USA is considered to be one of the most haunted countries along with Japan and England), and more contemporary urban legends like Roswell, The Hook Hand Killer, and that Polybus.

Heck, in my area along, we got Civil War ghosts, the Mad Gasser, the Bunnyman, and Chessie the serpent of Chesapeake Bay.

I always loved the way American folktales were set up. They're different than a lot of other folktales because in stories like John Henry or Paul Bunyan, they're just doing normal hard labor, but in some ludicrous or extraordinary way. I like to mimic this format when doing some backstory for my setting, so I can have some big historical figures, while still allowing the player characters to be able to be the Perseus or Jasons of the world. Also I use jackalopes quite often.

In my elementary school, we had a this crappy book of Paul Bunyan that was the first book I ever read. It was the normal story, but had crazier feats like the Grand Canyon forming because he was dragging his boots across the desert due to depression, and he then proceeded to fill it with pancake mix and make giant hotcakes. I've never found that book since then.

>bunny man
Isn't that just a loom in a bunny suit with an axe?

My current 5e setting pulls a LOT from the trappings and folklore of the Appalachians and the Ozarks.

True, but the close down Bunnyman Bridge every year on Halloween because of people claiming they saw him there, and meddling kids getting themselves hurt.

Better have the tailypo.

I think I read that same book,but I remember it being his a?e he was draging that cut out the canyon.

And?

She's a girl.

Canadian here, can confirm, all our shit is stolen from the natives.

My personal favourite comes from my hometown of Thunder Bay, Ontario, and it's the Sleeping Giant. Apparently it was Nanabozho, who got so depressed when a rich silver mine was revealed to the white men that he turned himself to stone.

Put the Goatman in your games. Freak people out.

French canadian here. A lot of stuff is from native american, but in our culture we also have many thing from the European folklore. Witches (La coriveau), Werewolfs, Marsh-fire, Leperchaun, evil horses (Trois-pistoles black horse) and Satan himself doing shit during parties to make women look like sluts (for 18-19th century standard) until the priest stop everything by casting detect evil and throwing holy water fucking everywhere.

Shope papilloma is no joke!

Goatman and Mothman are my go-tos.

Always forget how weird the early simpsons art style looks in hindsight

WENDIGOS
AND
SKINWALKERS
NIGGA

It's the GHOST of of a loon in a bunny suit with axe. Totally different.

But skinwalkers aren't anything special user. They're relatively harmless for one. We hardly ever interact with people.

You tried.

I never knew this. Have I been using cancerous rabbits in my campaigns this whole time?

I'm legitimately trying to make an American Frontier/Lewis and Clark-like adventure game except in an America where all American folklore and mythology is real and i'm having trouble placing it at that point because a lot of it actually has to do with the Civil War or Native Americans.

Ran a brief game for a hiatus in GURPS a while back. Basic premise was 'pirates of the caribbean but with cowboys'. Plenty of folklore; wendigos, corpse powder, skinwalkers, the party played dice with the devil.

It was good shit.

>MFW Im from Quebec and i have enough legends to build a whole setting around it.

Suck it, you canadafags! QUEBEC LIBRE.

>I'm legitimately trying to make an American Frontier/Lewis and Clark-like adventure game except in an America where all American folklore and mythology is real and i'm having trouble placing it at that point because a lot of it actually has to do with the Civil War or Native Americans.
Check out Colonial Gothic. Might give you a couple of ideas.

I see what you're saying, though. At that time, most of the mythology was just straight European stuff.

I've always loved the fuck out of John Henry. no idea why, but I like to put subtle nods to it in games that take place in modern-ish times.

as per usual, /tg acts like they know stuff when they don't know shit. Lots of American folklore has been branded so much that people seem to stop thinking of it as "American". There's a plethora of folklore that people discount because they heard the basic bitch version 100 times when they were kids and assume there's no depth to it. some sources, in no particular order
Mothman
Man in the Mountain
Jersey Devil
Champ
El Dorado
Paul Bunyan
John Henry
Johnny Appleseed
Salem Witch Trials
Pecos Bill
Joe Magarack
Coyote
Blood Clot Boy
Captain Kidd
Billy the Kid
Black Bart
Blackbeard
Pretty much every famous pirate
Buffalo Bill
Calamity Jane
Emperor Norton
Geronimo
St. Elmo's Fire
The Fountain of Youth
Hiawatha
Rip Van Winkle

As far as I can tell people don't like American folklore because it doesn't feel as "mythic" as old world folklore, aside from the entirety of Native American myth (which most people have little to no knowledge of) American folklore focuses on people instead of gods or monsters.

>coyote
?

It was also a pyrric victory, since all he proved was that a man could surpass a machine at the cost of his own life.

>El Dorado
That's South America.
>Salem Witch Trials
Literally not folklore
>St. Elmo's Fire
Literally a worldwide natural phenomena
>Native American anything
Valid but people are trying to avoid it in favor of settler/colonial folklore.
>Real people
Not folklore

user are you aware of the myth surrounding Blackbeard? He was literally a living legend.

This is correct, fleshgaits are the real terrors.

closest I ever did was a really powered down version of the cherokee legend of Spearfinger

>Coyote
native american trickster god

on par with Loki for shenanigans if a little less promiscuous IIRC

Shapeshifters having babies. Not even once

>Salem Witch Trials

Pretty overrated, sure 20 hung witches might sound impressive but remember around the same time in Europe they're doing stuff like decapitating and then burning 70 witches in a single day.

I dunno, if vagina dentata didn't stop him what would?

Something, something, Zeus.

this is exactly the kind of faggotry I was talking about
>Salem Witch Trials
>Pretty overrated, sure 20 hung witches might sound impressive but remember around the same time in Europe they're doing stuff like decapitating and then burning 70 witches in a single day.
Yeah reality is pretty lame, good thing the story is about women holding black mass, fornicating with the devil, laying curses on the townsfolk. possessing people, attacking their souls, causing famine, turning people against each other, having trials and hangings creating paranoia as people try to survive and sell out their neighbors, so fucking boring.

Tbf out of those three two of them were fathered by him so he didn't go full shapeshifter degenerate.

wasn't he the mother in at least one case?

>Pretty overrate
Thats kind of the point, folklore and myth has grown up around it.

Does Sothothian Mythos count as American folklore?

I fucking LOVE the tailypo, that shit is tight.
Decided to pull it out when the party went all Dungeon Meshi.

Isn't goatman just a Satyr with an axe that hates dogs?

Wendigo are pretty cool.

Nah. He's a shapeshifty woodland spook a la skinwalkers.

but American folklore IS foreigner shit I use to spice my games up.

what are you even saying?

wait, what defeated paul? Last time i remember, he was having three men wade into his beard with axes to try and trim back the unruly scruff.

>as per usual, /tg acts like they know stuff when they don't know shit.
>posts Paul Bunyan, the marketing mascot

But John Henry's a nigger, not a man.

>all those fucking Americans always marketing their mythology, how disrespectful

>Emperor Norton
What's folkorey about him? He was a real guy.

tl;dr 19th century homeless crazy dude in San Francisco that declared himself Emperor of America and wandered around greeting his subjects. He was just so damn nice about it that the city council let him preside over their meetings.

harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=43

>wait, what defeated paul?

The chainsaw.

Mothman is the prophetic hermit that appears at night, standing in the trees or on the distant ridge. He always foretells doom and death to the party before flying away. all they can see of him is his great red eyes,luminous in the darkness. And his voice is Draconic, Dwarven, Orc and Elven (no humans in the party), spoken as one voice, with even tone.

It all started about a month into the campaign, with the party at level 5 and starting to feel confident. one night, while they were at camp, the orc passed his perception check, and saw pic related, standing on a distant boulder. Gigantic glowing red eyes, shaggy body, indistinct form with wings... but too distant and too concealed in darkness to see positively, except for the red eyes.
Being a good party member, he roused everyone else and made ready to bring divine fire down... except the Mothman stayed at a distance, unmoving, waiting for everyone to be awake and ready, and then spoke.

"Thirty two. They will not rest. At the next sunset. You can change the outcome."

And then he flew away.

Next day, the party came into a fairly big town, they were looking to find out what they whole thing meant, when the Rhombus Shirt Waist Factory (on the far side of town) caught fire, and all the workers were more or less locked inside. The party arrived just in time to see the first flaming spectre emerge from the fire, screaming curses at the cruel conditions that allowed her to die.

Yeah, Fighting off multiple waves of flaming undead (with assistance from the guard and firemen of the city) put things in perspective for the party. Made for a cool recurring NPC too.

Pecos Bill was an Exalt living in America. Raised by coyotes, he grew up speaking the language of the animals. until his brother with a matching tattoo found him and brought him back to society, by which i mean a ranch. When a wild horse proved too deadly to tame, he chased it on foot for three days just by running along behind it, and then, when he finally caught the horse, the horse said that he'd sooner die than be ridden by a man, but Pecos Bill told him that he was a coyote, so it was totally cool.

And then there was the time that he caught a twister and rode it across the great plains until it gave up and set him down, buck naked, in the middle of the mojave. The tornado was so fierce that it had reduced the five-dollar piece in Bill's hand to sixteen cents in change, and turned the knife he had clutched in his teeth into a nail.

>around the same time
Sure if you mean 300 years earlier and with "witches" you mean forgers, fornicators and heretics.

Dogman, frogman, deerman, goatman and apeman are pretty much the same creature with different animal features and considering skinwalkers/Wendigo has shapeshifting capabilities in some folklore, you could argue they're all wendigoes.

Does anyone have stuff like pic related except with american fantasy stuff

Aside from all the amzing lore surrounding the hundreds of tribes in the New World, you also have Frightful Critters haunting the lumberjacks, voodoo witchcraft in the south, the whole of the new england area is the home of so much Lovecraftian literature. Throw in some stuff about cowboys and the supernatural and you have a pretty solid supply of lore to build off of. I remember a thread a few years back where someone had the great idea to include lich oil-barons who drew their power from the oil itself. Also, aliens, so many urban legends about the huge variety of aliens trying to probe human booty.

lets not forget the head less horseman the horror at Donner pass, the legends around HH holmes. the lovecraft mythosand most creepy pasta including slender man

Or the time his bride-to-be tried to ride his mule, and it bucked her so hard she hit her head on the moon.

I like the alien stuff but its hard to call that mythology because of their inherent disconnect from the culture; but alien conspiracies is very much an American invention

He was the female horse and gave birth to Sleipner

You don't need American folklore. Actual American history is fucking weird enough as it is.

Look. read this:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oneida_Community

You cannot make this shit up.

Folklore doesn't become folklore out of thin air, user, this shit is formed out of weird encounters or weird people.

>and eventually become a silverware company
lmao wut

Wendingos sound like furries.

Yes sometimes, but as someone who's not american that is me using fokelore from another country to spice up my games, so it's all a bastardised blend of a wikipedia page passed through the filter of insomnia fuelled session prep.

America has a long history of individuals deciding that they have diving providence and trying to make their own society
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jemima_Wilkinson

Wasn't "The Mystery of Roanoke" literally that they all moved to a better site and even left a fucking forwarding address that said where they'd gone?

"When a clockwise gouger meets a counter-clockwise gouger, they have to fight to the death since they can only go in one direction."

Didn't Dr. Seuss write something like that?

I'd say that's a fair trade for having to be French.

something something political commentary

This is a pretty timely thread as I've been wrestling with something. I'm working on a wild west themed setting and I'm wondering if I should use general American folklore and urban legends, even if it's unrelated the west, such as Paul Bunyan or the Mothman and such. I plan on leaning heavily into native american stuff in general already as a theme (as it's kind of currently split between "wild west tropes" and "native american stuff" to exemplify "cowboys versus indians"), but I'm thinking, if I don't use American themed stuff in what's probably the most distinctly and iconically American setting, where else would you possibly use them?

The reason it's a bit of an issue is because someone else in a similar space also did a wild west themed world, and while that's normally not an issue considering there's many ways to diverge from such a broad concept, one thing they did was use general American mythology, and my worry of "where else would I use this if not for here" derives from that.

Eh, fair enough.

What magic system would you like for this setting
Louisiana voodoo- spirit protection magic, and occasional divination
Braucherei- Amish healing and protecting magic/ Cleric
Granny Magic- old fashion potions /alchemist
Witchraft- demonic deals/ warlock
Medicine Man- more protecting magic/ shaman

Deadlands would be my system of choice

I was more of a Pecos Bill guy.
Remember when he fucking Lassoed a goddamned tornado? Shit was sick as FUCK.

I assume it involves a lot of rape?

>Big Rock Candy Mountain

God dammit now I'm gonna have that song stuck in my head for the next week.

One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fires were burning...

Paul Bunyan would be a pretty good inclusion, historically he led the trail west and created the Grand Canyon when he headed north. His wrestling with Babe is what was said to create all the mountain ranges. Johnny Appleseed is also about westward expansion. Look to all the gold rush myths, since the history pretty much was that once the Rockies were crossed everyone rushed to California and then settled the "west" from all sides with missionaries heading back east, settlers from the west, and loggers from the north.

I actually didn't know Paul Bunyan was west related. But in general, what do you think about other american folklore that isn't related to the west? Do you think that stuff is enough to make its own setting? That's the part that's bugging me. For example, what I'm building for decided that Greek and Roman mythology was enough to seperate even though I think in most people's minds they are similar enough to combine, and the reason was that Greek mythology can be everything that encompasses that, whereas the Roman world would have enough space to sort of be a gladiator, polilitican-y world. That's the kind of difference I'm trying to see if I can make. I just don't want it to seem like I'm ripping off the other guy's western setting if I do use general American folklore as that's a pretty unique take on the wild west setting I think, whereas my take was mostly going to be an emphasis on native american stuff in contrast with the western tropes.

Alright alright, serious question
Who wins in a fight

John Henry or Joe Magarac?

He gave birth to Sleipnir, and I know I read a version of the myths that says he was the one who gave birth to Hel, as a result of the giantess who bore her brothers Fenrir and Jormungandr getting burned by the Aesir and Loki eating that giantess' heart.

You can always have the masked lawman, even though it was never really documented in the west.
Also moon men/ mars men...though no one ever agreed what they looked like... maybe MtG bunny people or even mothfolk.