Central Asia as a fantasy setting

>Comfy Buddhism
U wat m8?

A BLUE WOLF TOOK AS HIS SPOUSE A FALLOW DOE
THEY RAISED THEIR CHILDREN AT THE HEAD OF THE ONON RIVER
THERE WERE BORN THE MONGOLS

IIRC Turks were born from a youth fucking a wolf

*a young roach fucking a wolf

What would the difference be between this and a Wuxia setting?

>Against the Wicked City

Huh.

>No Kung fu
>No crazy retarded techniques
>No hermit sages
>No Immortals
>Basically everything

...But all those are aspects of central Asian mythology and fantasy?

count me in as interested, it's definitely an area that is not used very often. The only time I think I have heard of this are the Mardu from Tarkir and there supposedly is a module for a central asia setting for D&d 2E that no one seems to have a digital copy of.

...how? Central Asian myths are largely about murderhobos fighting monsters and other tribes with a cataclysmic conflict between a god of good vs a god of evil in the background

So you're just completely ignoring the pervasive influence of Chinese culture over that entire region?

Oh boy, here comes Xi Gong Lao

Protip: Even the Turks use Latin Script

might be in a minority, but I've always loved the tales of people like Timur just fucking shit up and creating something out of the ashes of conquest.

also samarqand is baller as fuck and its architecture is where i draw most of my person-islamic elements in games from

A girl I pursued for a long time is from Central Asia, moved here whens he was 19. Seljuk blood.

If she's anything to go by then your game should be bonkers

As someone who actually did a Master's in Central Asian studies, I love the region and its potential for role-playing. I've been working on a home-brew setting based on Central Asia for a while now. But the region is a lot more than "barbaric horse-nomads on the endless steppes and greedy merchants in the trading oasis cities".

The first question is what counts as Central Asia. Most everyone agrees that the former Soviet -stans (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan) are Central Asian. Mongolia usually gets into that list as well, as does Uyghuristan/East Turkestan/Xinjiang (depending on how much you like the Chinese). Beyond that, however, you start getting disagreements- does Afghanistan count? The northern (primarily Uzbek/Tajik) parts of it? What about the Turkic and Mongolic autonomous republics along Russia's border with the -stans (Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Tuva, Altai, Sakha)? What about formerly Central Asian peoples now displaced from the region (Tatars, Turks, Azeris, Manchu, Hungarians at a stretch)? And even within the core region, there are huge differences, ethnically and linguistically, between the Persians (including Tajiks, Wakhi, and so on) and Turko-Mongols (almost everyone else); within the Turko-Mongolic group there are distinctions between Mongolic peoples and Turkic peoples, and further subdivisions within each of those. Of course you can incorporate that variety into the setting, or not, but there's a huge amount of complexity that isn't fully recognised.

Another big question is the rough time period you're setting it in. In particular, the coming of Islam changed regional beliefs and customs greatly- although the practice of shamanism didn't really go away, it was absorbed into the framework of Islam, and Muslim beliefs and tropes were incorporated into regional traditions.

cont.d from above-

Almost all the great Central Asian epics (Manas, Alpamys, Korkut Ata/Dede Qorqut, Köroğlu/Körgöl, and so on and so forth) are set in a post-Islamic context, and the heroes claim Islamic values, but magic of one kind or another continues to pervade the setting, and is not seen as inherently evil by any means; on the contrary, the heroes often have latent magical powers, or have close contact with magical beings (Alpamys Batyr and Manas both have magical talking horses, for example).

Speaking of magic, let bards rejoice- magic, music, and storytelling were closely interlinked in Central Asian culture (the word "bakhshy", or a dialect variant thereof, means 'shaman' in Kazakh and 'troubadour' in Turkmen- originally, the word had both meanings, but it solidified into different uses in different contexts). It is generally believed across the region that humans aren't inherently magical, but can theoretically call upon spirits - nature spirits, ancestor spirits, jinni (post-Islam), or whatever else - and that those spirits can then perform what might be called magic. Calling the spirits is generally done via music (as is banishing them), with a combination of chants, wordless vocalisations, jaw harps, drums, and string instruments (of which there are a huge variety, played in a variety of ways by different people in different contexts).

cont.d again-

On a more meta level, there are fundamental distinctions between short stories about heroes (of which youtube.com/watch?v=aufTNYlDG2o provides an amusing modern interpretation), and the great epic cycles (dastan, or jyr, depending on where you live).

The shorter stories, as user said, are generally fairly simple in structure, with a hero (usually identifiable by some distinctive trait, such as the ability to run as fast as the wind (Zhelayak), or drink lakes dry) confronting a monster or the hero of a neighbouring group, beating the tar out of it, and getting the girl. The longer epics have some of the same features (semi-magical heroes, confrontations with local peers, and acquisition of beautiful women), but they occur in a much larger context, often opposition to a much larger external enemy (typically Persia for the Turkmen, China for the Kyrgyz, and Russia or the Junghars for the Kazakhs). The threat of the external enemy forces the hero to unite the 'nation' (wrong word, but there isn't really an equivalent for "eл" in English) to defeat them (which usually involves more defeating of local heroes, who are acknowledged as worthy opponents and sometimes incorporated into the main hero's forces). The enemy is defeated, the hero has children and dies, the tribes fragment again, and the cycle repeats (several Central Asian epics, most famously Manas, are traditionally told as inter-generational sagas, in which the story repeats (with minor variations) for each generation's great hero).

cont.d once more-

I'm not sure what more, if anything, people want to know, but I love the region and I love role-playing and world-building, so I'll lurk this thread and answer people's questions if they have any.

MTG's Tarkir block, or at least a part of it.

...

And before that arab script and before that sogdian script.

Turkish, or Turkic languages/dialects, have been written in everything from runic (Orkhon script), through Uyghur, Arabic, and Sogdian scripts, plus the Georgian, Armenian, and Greek alphabets, all the way to (variant) Latin and (variant) Cyrillic. Turks are adaptable enough to use whatever script is most contextually useful for their language (and it helps that 'Turk' has traditionally been a very fluid identity, so lots of people writing in Turkish originally learned to write in a different language).

Neato.

>an economy founded on slavery and foreign military service

Birthplace of heavily armored cataphract. I like it.

It's a libertarian paradise of no roads and inter-generational brutal and bloody internal family strife instead.

Not really. Slaves were certainly among the goods traded along the routes, and the steppe-dwellers were always in high demand as mercenaries thanks to their skill (as horse-archers and lancers) and loyalty (although the Seljuks are famous for having overthrown the Arab-Persian caliphate in all but name, Central Asians had a long native tradition of oathsworn bodyguards who would defend their leader to the death, and in small groups, they were generally ferociously loyal to their employer as an individual). But large-scale slavery is simply not an option for pastoral nomads (the cities are a different story), and many other things were also traded, including local animals and animal products as well as precious metals and stones from local sources (virtually all the lapis lazuli in use from ancient times until recent times came from the Pamir region, near the borders of Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and high value-add manufactured goods from the civilisations at either end of the silk roads.

Besides trade, the nomadic economy was based on herds, and the urban economy mostly on agrarian produce.

Slavery and mercenarism were certainly practiced, and we shouldn't pretend the region was a paradise, but they were hardly the foundation of the economy.

MtG's Tarkir was actually a pretty nice take on this, I feel

What can you tell us about the conflict between settlers and nomads?

Who exactly are the spirits that heroes call upon?

Which fantastical beasts exist in Central Asia?

Any stories on Samarkand, Bukhara or Karakorum?

Many Conan adventures took place in Hyboria's equivalent to Central Asia (Turan, Iranistan, Koth, Shem, Hyrkania).

Here OP, a central Asian setting I was never able to run.

Greco-Buddhist kingdom of Bactria would be greatest of all time.

What can you tell us about the conflict between settlers and nomads?

For the most part, the two coexisted, in a state of symbiosis rather than conflict. The nomads provided the settled (urban and agrarian) peoples with animal products, trade goods, and military service, while the settled peoples provided the nomads with vegetable products (flour was a big one) and metalwork (for jewellery as well as arms and armour). There were conflicts, certainly, but they were rarely existential or over land- the settled peoples couldn't use the land the nomads lived on, and the nomads had no need for the land the farmers lived on (this could and did change, due to pressure on the nomads' land from climate change or mass population movements, but it was the norm). An important feature of their relationship was that the settled peoples tended to be ethnically and linguistically Persian/Tajik, while the nomads, after the fall of the Samanid dynasty, were generally Turkic (that division has ceased to apply since the Soviet period, but I don't think anyone's looking at running games in Soviet/post-Soviet Central Asia, as fun as that would also be). However, many people were multilingual, and they rarely had issues with communication.

When it did come to actual conflict, it's important to distinguish between the two 'modes' of warfare that the horse-nomads employed, against each other and against settled peoples in Central Asia or on their peripheries. The first was small-scale opportunistic raiding, in search of plunder (especially if trade was not an option, for whatever reason), glory (always a strong incentive), or simple practice (as their oral tradition indicates, the nomads were always aware of the potential threat from external powers, even if there wasn't any immediate danger). This was an annoyance, but caused relatively few casualties, and could be tolerated if necessary. The second mode of warfare was more extreme.

Nice tripe. Do you know of any fantasy races that exist in Central Asian folkore like elves/orcs/goblins/etc. I think Asura might be one, though they are more Tibetan, I guess, what else?

cont.d

The second mode of nomadic warfare occurred when a nomadic group, on some scale (family, encampment, clan, tribe, nation) were no longer able to support their traditional pastoral cycle, whether because of overpopulation, or because the lands they traditionally cycled (pastoral nomads don't wander freely; they usually have quite a fixed cycle of pastures that they move between with the seasons, whether the movement is across the steppe (lateral nomadism, as practiced by the Kazakhs and Turkmen) or up and down hills/mountains (vertical nomadism, as practiced by the Kyrgyz)) were unavailable or no longer capable of supporting them. At these times, the group would move wholesale into the land of the next people over, and displace the existing inhabitants. This happened from time to time on the steppe, especially after particularly nasty droughts, without having a hugely negative impact on anyone- nomads can always move on, and the steppe is big enough to absorb smallish ripples of population movement until things settle down again. When the next people over were agrarian, rather than nomadic, the consequences could be horrific- although the nomads were almost never able to take walled cities (Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, both of whom had siege engineers, were exceptions), they could absolutely deny the farmers their fields, and the farmers couldn't move on (both because their property was geographically fixed, and even if it wasn't, the relatively limited amount of space available for proper agriculture makes mass movement impossible), resulting in massive death tolls from conflict and starvation.

Despite the dominance of the nomads in regular warfare, however, they couldn't generally take cities (as noted above), and their population was always minuscule relative to that of the agrarian societies, so they could never destroy them outright- which generally meant that conflicts rarely lasted longer than a season or two.

>that division has ceased to apply since the Soviet period
Haha, no. Look up the Kyrgyz-Uzbek conflict, the Kyrgyz actually look down on the Uzbek for being settlers and farmers and call them "Sarts".

>Master's
If you don't mind me asking of what benefit was it, I mean, academically or professionally? Or was it purely out of interest?
>eл
Do you mean "kaum", "watan"?
Thanks for sharing all this, it is all very informative. Could you recommend some books (fiction/non-fiction/historical) or documentaries on Central Asia?

Also, have you seen the tv series Kazakh Khanate?

I am very interested in the region myself but I mostly rely on the news.

Who exactly are the spirits that heroes call upon?

That changed from culture to culture, and over time. In pre-Islamic times, the predominant local 'religion' was a form of animist shamanism, generally incorporating a belief in Tengri/Tengger/[insert spelling variations here], the Sky God, as the most powerful spiritual being. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and various forms of Christianity (especially Nestorianism and Manichaeism) also made inroads, especially in the cities, but were generally overlaid on existing frameworks of belief rather than replacing them. Being animist, they believed there were spirits in everything in the natural world, and the more impressive the natural feature the more powerful the local spirits must be (several geographic features still have names that reflect this, including Ulytau (Great Mountain) and Sätti Tas (Sacred Rock) in Kazakhstan). The other major class of spirits was the ancestors, who were considered to live on in a spirit world that was much the same as the real one (which is why dead chieftains were often buried with useful, as well as valuable, goods). These ancestor spirits were not as materially useful as the nature spirits - they couldn't cause rainstorms or avalanches or floods, in the way that nature spirits could - but shamans could enter a trance to channel them, becoming voluntarily possessed for a time, and speaking in their voice (this practice still exists in Buryatia and some other more remote areas of C. Asia). As Central Asian cultures have always valued age and the elderly, the advice of venerable ancestors was considered extremely valuable, even if they couldn't directly help.

I've got two questions for you.

>What can you tell us about the difference in culture between the various ethnic groups like the Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen, Mongol, Kyrgyz, Pamiri, Uzbek, Uyghur, etc other than the nomad-settler dynamic?

>Second, which ethnic groups/clans/tribes do you think should serve as a template for a fantasy setting? Basically which ones according to you stand out?

>Answering questions asked an hour ago
I'm willing to wait

Will reply once I've finished responding to the post above.

I'm well aware of the Kyrgyz/Uzbek conflict. My point is that the division has ceased to be a clean one between Turkic peoples and Persian ones- the Uzbeks are mostly Turkic, not Persian, and so is their language (although the Uzbek/Tajik ethnic boundary isn't totally clear- the former president of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, was registered as an ethnic Tajik in Soviet censuses until he was in 10th grade and realised that it would be politically preferable to identify as a member of the titular ethnicity of the republic). Many Kyrgyz, despite their claim to be nomads and descendants thereof, are also thoroughly urbanised- look at O'sh and Jalalabad, both of which have hosted urbanised Kyrgyz for generations.

To repeat, the nomad/settled conflict still exists as a point of pride, but it's no longer neatly defined by ethnic origin.

It hasn't been much use professionally, though I continue to live in hope. It was immensely interesting, so no regrets, but I wouldn't recommend it as a career pathway unless you're looking to get into working with a resource company or an intelligence agency.

Linguistic variation across Central Asia makes it impossible to provide single words. eл is Kazakh, because it's the local language I know best; "watan" is more like 'homeland' than 'nation'- it refers to a geographic location, not to the people who inhabit it.

I strongly recommend the movie Жayжүpeк Mың Бaлa (translated as "Warriors of the Steppe", I believe), if you can find it with English subtitles. Sergei Bodrov's "Mongol" is also good fun, but largely a product of outsiders (Bodrov is Russian, the actor who plays Temüjin is Japanese), and not quite as authentic. Book-wise, Range of Ghosts is an interesting presentation of a fantasy Central Asia. For non-fiction, René Grousset's "Empires of the Steppe" and Svat Soucek's "A History of Inner Asia" are the classics.

It's cool, man. I'm just enjoying reading your posts

Who exactly are the spirits that heroes call upon (cont.d)

The coming of Islam changed these beliefs considerably. Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christian sects gradually died out in western Central Asia (though they continued to flourish for centuries further east- one of the Mongol Great Khans converted to Nestorianism), while Tengri was replaced by Allah, and the shamanist practices were incorporated into Islamic belief. This meant the elimination of ancestor spirits- though it's appropriate to pray for the wellbeing of dead people in most Islamic cultures, it's not appropriate to expect them to talk back from Heaven (or Hell, if you're willing to entertain that possibility), so that had to go. The nature spirits were not removed entirely, but replaced by local jinni (magical people made of fire, gifted with magical powers, common in one form or another throughout the Muslim world), angels, or God himself, who were considered to have similar powers to affect outcomes (ironically, the replacement of the not-omnipotent and relatively inaccessible Tengri with Allah made it much easier for people to call upon the ur-deity directly, rather than having to go through intermediaries or lesser spirits). When the hero Manas uses magic stones to summon a rainstorm to disrupt his enemy's army, he is continuing a longstanding pre-Islamic tradition, but in the epic itself, he is asking God to do it. For another (very recent) example, the Kazakh football team Shakhtar Karagandy sacrificed a sheep on the pitch before their UEFA Cup home game against Glasgow Celtic, and won; when they were refused the right to sacrifice a sheep on the pitch in Glasgow, they complained, and lost. Technically, they're Muslims; in practice, they're still performing shamanist rituals.

>What can you tell us about the difference in culture between the various ethnic groups like the Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen, Mongol, Kyrgyz, Pamiri, Uzbek, Uyghur, etc other than the nomad-settler dynamic?
Seconding this. Do you know any stereotypes, or cultural idiosyncracies that exist between different people? For a region this vast it's shocking how little we know of the people that live there.

>René Grousset's "Empires of the Steppe" and Svat Soucek's "A History of Inner Asia"
Got any ebooks?

Which fantastical beasts exist in Central Asia (I'll wrap my answer to up in here as well, I think)

There are many, many, fantastical beasts in Central Asia, but they're not quite as 'canonised' as the Western elves, orcs, goblins, etc. Many of the older ones are chimerical combinations of existing animals, especially more iconic/totemic animals- lion+deer, lion+eagle, tiger+goat, etc. Nature spirits, when they took a physical form (or when encountered by shamans during their journeys into the spirit world), often took a form of this kind.

The next most common kind of fantastical beast is a regular animal, but with speech and intelligence (like the horses of Manas and Alpamys Batyr mentioned above). Besides horses, there are a few other creatures that get this treatment - mosquitos as malevolent, sparrows and praying mantises as brave and benevolent (it's considered deeply unlucky to kill a sparrow in Kazakh folklore). Not much more to say about these.

Besides the animalistic creatures, there are a few more humanoid creatures, some imported from elsewhere (like Islamic jinni, and Russian shurale (forest-spirits with a fondness for trickery)), and some local ones, like Albarsty (a shadow-creature that throttles people in their sleep, and hates dogs and milk) in Kazakh and Kyrgyz folk-tales, and Osykpay (a shape-shifting spider/goblin whose main story is similar, but not identical, to that of Rumpelstiltskin). There are also dragons (called Aydahar), which are (as one might expect) a mix of Chinese and Western ones.

>, but I don't think anyone's looking at running games in Soviet/post-Soviet Central Asia, as fun as that would also be)
I'd love to run a game of Mercenaries in the vein of Black Lagoon, MGS and Blood Diamond, taking part in the Tajik Civil War but I can't find any proper information to make it work.

Is it common to consider snakes as somewhat good animals or that's just Mishari thing?

What about archipelagic regions or scattered islands like polynesia? I think it would seem like Wind Waker or something like that.

Any stories on Samarkand, Bukhara or Karakorum

Two of those cities (Bukhara and Samarkand) are extremely ancient; one (Karakorum) is not.

Before it became the capital of Genghis Khan's empire, Karakorum was little more than a Buddhist shrine/monastery, with a semi-permanent yurt encampment outside (not the same people at the same time- groups of people would cycle through at different times. Kind of like the Antarctic research stations). Many important things happened there, but few if any relate to the place itself.

Samarkand is a very, very, old city (it was old when Alexander the Great got there). It's impossible to know who the original inhabitants were, but from the time of the Achaemenid Empire onwards, the city was inhabited mostly by ethnic Iranians (Sogdians/Tajiks, for the most part, but still Iranian). Being mostly a trading city, Samarkand's prominence depended heavily on how well the silk roads were functioning (ie, it did better when Central Asia was more unified, and the Chinese/Persian/European states were willing to trade with each other)- at times, especially during the period between the Mongol conquest and the European opening of the sea routes to Indonesia, it was immensely rich, and was usually the capital of whatever realm it was part of (Tamerlane's capital was at Samarkand, and Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire whose base of operations had previously been at Samarkand, wrote poetry about the beauty of its gardens for the rest of his life). Most of Samarkand's great architecture comes from this time, but it was built on ancient foundations. With the decline of the silk routes in the 16th-17th centuries, Samarkand also fell into decline, and by the time the Russians got there in the 19th century, it was a relatively unimportant (albeit architecturally impressive) regional centre within the Emirate of Bukhara.

Any stories on Samarkand, Bukhara or Karakorum (cont.d)

Bukhara's story is similar to that of Samarkand, but it was historically less reliant on transcontinental trade, and had a greater reputation for scholarship (religious and otherwise). Several of the great Muslim scholars either came from or spent time in Bukhara, including Al-Bukhari, Avicenna, and Al-Khwarizmi to name a few. Bukhara also had some impressive architecture- after the Mongols conquered the city, Genghis Khan supposedly ordered the town razed to the ground for its resistance, until he saw a particularly beautiful minaret, at which he ordered his men to call off the massacre and destruction. Likely apocryphal (it's much more likely that Genghis Khan simply came to the realisation that a city as rich as Bukhara was more valuable alive and taxed than annihilated, and that the point of terrifying the shit out of the (surviving) civilians had been properly made at this point, if it happened at all), but still telling. Much later on, Bukhara eventually become the capital of one of the three last independent states in Central Asia - the Emirates of Bukhara and Kokand, and the Khanate of Khiva - and survived long enough for Russian ethnographers to take colour photographs of its emir, but it eventually fell, and is now just another city in Uzbekistan.

Pretty awesome.

Are you Russian by the way?

Was Babur a Tajik or an Uzbek? What can you tell us about him, didn't he conquer Afghanistan and Hindustan by the age of 15 or something?

Also, what roles do wolves occupy?

Do different ethnic groups/tribes have different, for the lack of a better word, totem animals? What are they?

>What can you tell us about the difference in culture between the various ethnic groups like the Tajik, Kazakh, Turkmen, Mongol, Kyrgyz, Pamiri, Uzbek, Uyghur, etc other than the nomad-settler dynamic?

My expertise is primarily in the Turkic world, especially the Kazakhs and Uzbeks, so although I do know about the other groups, it's largely about how they interact to my primary area of interest. With that said, I'll do my best!

There are three overarching ethnic groups (I don't count Tibet as part of Central Asia, though some do): Turkic (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, Tuvan, Altai, Bashkir, Tatar, etc.), Mongolic (Khalkha, Oirad, Buryat, Tsaatan, Kalmyk, etc.), and Persian (Tajik, Wakhi, Sogdi, etc.).

The Turkic family is further divided between three 'tribes':
Oghuz (south-west- Turkmen, Azeri, Qashqai, Turkish, etc.),
Karluk (central- Uzbek, Uyghur), and
Kypchak (northern- Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Karakalpak, all the Turkic republics in Russia).

Although all of those people speak a Turkic language, which is to some extent mutually comprehensible (there's a Kazakh joke that if you want to be understood in Turkey, just speak like you're a gay man with a lisp), the languages that fall within the same group are much easier to understand- a Kazakh and a Kyrgyz can communicate entirely in their own languages and understand almost everything that the other is saying without difficulty. The same goes for culture- there are similarities, and they're all on the same spectrum, but some are closer to each other than others.

All the Turkic peoples place a great degree of importance on hospitality (unsurprising, given that a lack of hospitality almost certainly means death, and anyone can potentially find themselves alone and caught in a storm at any time). The degree of hospitality required, however, is dependent on proximity of kinship.

Do you know any similar comprehensive books on the history of Eastern Europe as well?

Wow user, you are awesome. Very awesome. Learned a great deal from your posts!

Question: what are the classes you'd suggest in a central asian setting? I know there's the bard, any other? Is tweaking on existing class required in order to fit in the setting?

>Mongolic (Khalkha, Oirad, Buryat, Tsaatan, Kalmyk, etc.)
Wait, what? Mongol has further divisions as well? I thought they were just Turkic like their neighbours.

What relation do the contemporary Turks (of Turkey) have with Central Asian history? Ethnically and linguistically they are nothing alike.

What can you tell us about falconery, user?

Not that user, but I would suggest:
>horse-archer
>lancer
>shaman
>scout
>hunter
>falconer
>Monk

What do these other two groups think of Mongols? They were all conquered by those guys once.

cont'd. from above

The Kazakhs have a tradition known as Zheti Ata (Seven Forefathers), by which two Kazakhs, upon meeting, would list their seven forefathers, defined as follows:

1. Alash (the mythical ancestor of all Kazakhs)
2. The founder of their juz, or Horde (the Kazakhs are divided between the Big, Middle, and Little Hordes, which have traditionally inhabited different parts of the country and have different stereotypes associated with them)
3. The founder of their tribe (sub-juz grouping)
4. The founder of their clan (sub-sub-juz grouping)
5. Their great-grandfather
6. Their grandfather
7. Their father

The further down that list you share a common ancestor, the tighter the bonds of kinship, and the deeper your mutual obligations. A Kazakh should shelter any other Kazakh in their yurt while a storm blows over on the basis of their shared descent from Alash, but would not be expected to do much more; two Kazakhs who share a great-grandfather can be expected to do a great deal more for much other, even at substantial personal cost (relatedly, the Kazakh language has very precise terms for family members).

The Kyrgyz, despite being very similar ethnically, linguistically, and culturally to the Kazakhs, do not claim descent from Alash, and are not part of the Kazakh juz. Confusingly, however, the word 'juz' is also central to identity among the Kyrgyz, who are divided into 40 groupings also called juz (the word 'Kyrgyz' is traditionally claimed to descend from "kırk kız" (40 women/girls) or "kırk juz" (40 hordes), though neither etymology is universally accepted). Belonging to a juz is the single most important marker of identity for Kyrgyz, and each Kyrgyz juz has distinct patterns that they wear on their kalpak (traditional felt hats) and elsewhere.

still cont'd.

The Turkmen have similar practices to the Kyrgyz, but are divided into seven larger tribes.

The Uzbeks and Uyghurs are the odd ones out- rather than defining themselves and their relations with each other by kinship proximity, they generally use geographic proximity. Having been settled for longer than the others, and due to mingling with existing settled peoples, they tend to identify with their city and mahalla (urban district) first and foremost. The two are not mutually exclusive- Uzbek houses are generally multi-generational, and most marriages take place between members of the same mahalla, so geography and kinship are to some extent interlinked, but they are not identical, and definition by place rather than family is uncommon for Turkic people in Central Asia.

The Tuvans, who are otherwise very similar to the Kazakhs, are unique in that they're Buddhist (the flag of their autonomous republic was blessed by the Dalai Lama personally). For whatever reason, while almost all the other Turkic peoples converted to (a dubious form of) Islam, the Tuvans went Buddhist and stayed there. It's worth noting that it's a Mongolian variant of Buddhism that views Genghis Khan as a kind of saint, and the Tuvans can hardly be vegetarians, so it's not quite what we generally view as Buddhism, but it's a form of Buddhism nonetheless.

I know less about the Mongolic and Persian peoples, but I will say that the Tsaatan (who live further north, and in heavily-forested areas) ride reindeer like other Mongols ride reindeer, and I think that's neat.

You are literally looking for Tarkir, which is a setting in Magic the Gathering. It's basically Asia if Japan and China were removed, which is exactly what you asked for.

>Second, which ethnic groups/clans/tribes do you think should serve as a template for a fantasy setting? Basically which ones according to you stand out?

I have prejudices, but if I were world-building a fantasy Central Asia, I would incorporate not-Kazakhs, not-Mongols, not-Tajiks, and not-Turkmen.

The Tajiks are interesting because they're a kind of relic from ancient times, clinging desperately to their mountains and fortified cities while waves of people crash and roil around them.

The Turkmen inhabit the deserts between the great Silk Road Cities and their 'mother civilisation' (Persia, and beyond that the Mediterranean). Their proximity to civilisation means they're more heavily acculturated (Turkmen music is very similar to Persian folk music, whereas Kazakh music is completely different), but also that they're more organised, and potentially more dangerous (they understand how settled peoples do things, including make war).

The Kazakhs are, from the perspective of the city-dweller or the outsider, untamed nomads from the infinite steppes to the north, whose comings and goings are governed by mysterious causes, whose rituals are ancient and weird even when they claim to worship the same god, and who are harmless traders most of the time but occasionally, inexplicably, descend on civilisation like a pack of rabid dogs without warning or any hope of stopping them.

The Mongols are, in many respects, similar to - probably indistinguishable from, for most outsiders - the Kazakhs, but their rituals are different again, their language is completely incomprehensible, and their tidal movements across the steppes are a near-constant source of tension (both creative and destructive).

To say Babur was 'an Uzbek' would be misleading, as that group was never well-defined until the Russian period, and they certainly didn't call themselves 'Uzbek'. As user mentioned above, the term 'Sart' was (and in some places is) much more commonly used to refer to settled Turkic peoples. Babur was, however, a member of the Karluk group, and would be counted as an Uzbek by modern definitions. He was an interesting figure, who spent his entire youth and adolescence conquering then immediately losing empires again (not uncommon in the period of his activity, with dozens of rivals contesting Tamerlane's former realms). He lost and reconquered Samarkand twice before he was twenty, before finally losing it again, but by that time he was established in India, and lacked the time or energy to get it back again. What was unusual about Babur was that he survived his defeats, and was able to eventually set up a realm that outlived him in turn.

Wolves are totemic for all the Turkic peoples- according to a creation myth common to all of them, the Turkic peoples were either descended from a grey she-wolf named Asena, or led out of the valley of Ergenekon (somewhere north of Mongolia, inasmuch as it exists at all) by her. As the ancestors of dogs (who are invaluable as protectors of herds), they're generally considered sacred and benevolent. At the same time, they are recognised as dangerous- C. Asian nomads will almost never adopt stray dogs, in case they've been fed by wolves, which would allow the wolves to track them and slaughter their herds.

Everyone, without exception, loves and reveres horses.

Kazakhs generally revere the eagle as well as the horse and wolf, and use them as hunting birds from time to time (you occasionally hear about eagle-hunters in Mongolia- those people are ethnic Kazakhs living in Mongolia. The Mongols themselves don't hunt with eagles).

Like the entire rest of the world then.

cont'd from above

The Kyrgyz have a fondness for tigers- a tiger was one of the magical companion animals of Manas, along with his horse and an eagle.

Turkmen focus on the horse to the exclusion of almost everything else (in particular the Akhal-Teke breed), but also recognise the lion as an animal of significance (it helps that there were once lions in Turkmenistan).

Of course, there is overlap in all of the above - the Kazakh special forces unit is called Arystan, which means "Lion", although lions aren't terribly significant to Kazakhs otherwise - but in general, it's reasnable enough.

Sorry, no. I know something of Russian history, but it's not really my area, so I'll leave that to better-informed anons.

>what are the classes you'd suggest in a central asian setting? I know there's the bard, any other? Is tweaking on existing class required in order to fit in the setting?

Depends on your starting point, how many classes you think are appropriate, how general they should be, and so on. As a general stab, however, and using the Kazakh words to reflect overlap in role:

Bakhshy (bard/shaman)
Batyr (hero/warrior)
Jyrau (storyteller/herald/diplomat)

Obviously, they could be broken up into as many different classes as you wanted, depending on what you think a 'class' is meant to represent. Those are the roles you need, though.

Mongols are not Turkic. The Mongolic and Turkic languages are both Altaic, so they share some grammatical structures, and there's plenty of loan-words shared between them (depending on how close you are to the relevant culture- Kazakh has a lot more Mongolian loan-words than Turkmen does), but the languages themselves are entirely different, and mutually incomprehensible. The form of pastoralism traditionally practiced by Khalkha Mongols is, however, almost indistinguishable from that of the Kazakhs (horses, yurts, lateral nomadism, etc).

Anyone knows about the Persian, Scythians and the rest of Indo-Euro steppe nomads? Or any good page to learn about them?

What relation do the contemporary Turks (of Turkey) have with Central Asian history? Ethnically and linguistically they are nothing alike.

Ethnically, modern Anatolian Turks are the distant descendants of Seljuk Turks, who were Oghuz Turks from the region of modern Turkmenistan. The Seljuks who ended up in Turkey, however, had undergone centuries of interbreeding with Iranians and Arabs by the time they got to Anatolia, then spent the next few centuries interbreeding with the local Greeks, as well as Bulgars, Bosniaks, Albanians, and so on. There is an ethnic link, but it's very, very, diluted.

Linguistically, they're closer than you'd think. A Turk can communicate with a Turkmen without too much difficulty - there are a few loan-words that are different, and both Atatürk and the Soviets made it their business to 'tidy up' the language by purging old words they found ideologically disagreeable, and replacing them with new ones, as well as inventing new words for new things ('car' in Turkish is 'araba', which is an old word for 'cart', whereas the Central Asians adopted the Russian 'mashina'), so there's a decent chunk of the vocabulary that's different. Grammatically and syntactically, though, they're just the same, and enough vocabulary is the same or similar enough to be understood.

The Persians despise the Mongols, as it was the Mongols that finally cracked open their cities, as well as trashing Iran proper. The Turkic peoples, especially the nomadic ones, generally think the Mongols (at least Genghis Khan's lot) are pretty great- although they were technically conquered, they were given the chance to join the Mongol armies, and took it. A Kazakh horse-archer is just as good, and fights in just the same way, as a Mongol one, after all, so it made little difference once communication was accounted for. There's a sizeable ethnic-Kazakh minority in Mongolia (around 5% by most estimates), which gets on reasonably well with its neighbours.

cont'd. from above

There is significant enmity between the Turkic peoples and some specific Mongol groups, especially the Junghars, who were the last real steppe empire, and whose depredations led the Kazakhs and Kyrgyz to invite the Russians in as allies (with predictably unfortunate consequences). On the whole, however, the Turkic peoples view the period of Mongol greatness as the time of their own greatness, since they shared in the empire- even the Uyghurs, who didn't have so much military expertise, did very well out of Genghis Khan's empire and its successors as administrators (Classical Mongolian is written in a Uyghur script), and the khanates of Jochi and Chagatai saw a flowering of poetry in proto-Uzbek (also called Chagatai), which was the first real written literature in a Turkic language.

Read Herodotus' chapter on the Scythians in his Histories, and look up the archaeology of the Kurgans. That's pretty much all that is known about the Scythians. There's also a good Osprey book on them, if you're into the military angle, but I'm not sure if that's available for free anywhere.

That is some serious reductionism.
I get that the West doesn't really get other cultures, but damn are you stupid.

I've been messing about with a Tarim Basin setting for a while.
Might as well dump some inspirational images.

I read Herodotus already (well, nearly 12 years ago in my mother language), the ospreys too from that I got the itch to know more about them.
The Kurgan stuff tough, I didn't delve in that.

Also I really like the Siberian people, the Yukaghirs, Chukty, Yakuts and all those are pretty fun to learn about.

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This shit is blowing my fucking mind, just because how different it is from Western society. Really fucking hope someone gets down to making a setting out of it

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>have different stereotypes associated with them
Care to share any of them? Very curious about this. And, you're awesome user.

You may find this interesting: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamga

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Sassanids are totally over looked.

There is a Kazakh saying, to the effect that the Great Horde are writers, the Middle Horde shepherds, and the Little Horde warriors.

The Great Horde's territory is in the southeast (roughly, south of Lake Balkhash, and along the Kyrgyz border). Being closest to the major trade routes, members of the Great Horde are typecast as being cosmopolitan, quick-witted, and better-educated, but also as being somewhat cunning and manipulative.

The Middle Horde traditionally inhabited the area northwards of the Great Horde, up to the areas inhabited by non-Kazakhs. Although their territory is the biggest, it's mostly very unforgiving, and incapable of sustaining large populations, nomadic or otherwise (Khrushchev attempted to implement mass agriculture in this region in the 1950's and 1960's- they got a massive grain harvest for one year, then the crops failed every year thereafter, with substantial demographic and ecological damage), except for the region in the east around Zhetisu, which is the most fertile and pleasant part of the country. Its members are notoriously slow, both to think and to anger, but are generally held to be steady, amiable, types.

The Little Horde occupies the western steppe, the lands along the Syr Darya river, and the coasts of the Aral and Caspian Seas. Given to fishing as a supplement to pastoralism, and closer to Russia, the Little Horde has generally been better-organised than the others, and quicker to come together to fight (the Little Horde, or tribes of it, continued to fight guerrilla wars against the Russians well into the mid-19th Century). Little Horders have a reputation for being hot-blooded, with all that entails for good and for ill.

Thanks!

Once you get away from westabooing you'll find a shitload of great stuff in history.