Whats your Not!Arabia like?

Blue sand
Green water
Three suns.

Get triggered. This is the half-drow of settings

Ocean instead of sand. Islands instead of Oasis. Fresh water every bit as scarce. And mercantilism the primary thrust of the society- with long voyages taking the place of caravans, forcing the development of banking and social trust and the honor of a host and guest that could only be found in Old Arabia.

LIKE NOT!ARABIAN DAAAAAYS

If you had said blue GRASS, then you would have had Namek.

Full of Djins, corrupt officials and several thousand recently freed slaves due to player shenanigans.

Like Mesopetamia, was home to the earliest kingdoms of Man.
Due to contact from elves(my not!Asians), they managed to learn magic and, based on classic city states like Assyria, Babalonia and Ur, they grew into powerful magical kingdoms.
Enchanting their carpets to fly, building enormous palace-cities with walls a hundred feet high and hanging gardens fed by water magically pumped from deep below the earth. One of the favorite pass-times of the mages was binding evil spirits(Djinn) inside mundane objects. They would battle their bound Djinn like Pokemon.
One Mage king decided to erect an enormous tower, reaching over a thousand feet into the air. He meant to to bring him closer to the realm of the gods and to allow him to tap into their energy that he believed flowed high above the earth.
In a sense, was right. There were powerful leylines high in the air and he did successfully tap into them from the peak of his great tower.
Only his human body wasn't a powerful enough conduit for the energies and he promptly exploded. Which caused a chain reaction all the way down his magic-conducting tower, causing that to explode with such force that it wiped out all of the ancient mage-states in a single night.

(To be continued)

Now, over two thousand years later, the ruins of those ancient mage palaces and the grand city states are mostly buried beneath the sands.
New kingdoms have arisen in the intervening time, growing rich as the mid-point on the one safe trade route from the great kingdoms of Man(Not!Europe) and the lands of the Elves.

But off the beaten paths, lie the ruins of the days of yore. Hardy, adventurous sorts constantly feel the need to seek them out and plumb the depths for any hidden treasures.
Disregarding the local villagers' assertions that the places are haunted.
Most adventurers find out all too quickly that the locals were right. Many a trapped Djinn has broken from their prisons, and activating ancient magical constructs for their own nefarious ends.

I'm trying to encourage the players to release a trapped Djinn they found. But after mentioning they used to be battled like Pokemon, they kinda know not to trust the angry evil spirit, even if they released him from his prison.

exemplary, thanks

Volcano full of lava people

Every grain and every mote of dust of the desert sand is a tiny construct made by the ancestors. Bodies of flesh are just meat puppets; it's the sand sea where the soul is physically located. After the death of the body the spirit keeps evolving, slowly extending in its mental and other abilities far beyond their mortal self, starting as powerless ghosts but with unlimited potential, living in dreamworlds located in the sand sea or, once powerful enough, building temporary bodies for themselves in the physical realm again. Most will eventually rise their eyes to the Heavens above. They say there's an empire in the sky, extending beyond the farthest star you can see, and this is just one of its many nurseries. But how can that be, if the stars are all fixed in the firmament?

Post-Singularity space empire meets Arabian Nights, in short.

Why are the Inner Planes basically fake Arabia, except with efreet, djinn, dao, marids, and qorrash?

How did it get this way?

Thank you for sharing this.

1000 and 1 nights, user, fucking READ it.

Marids as water, djinn as air, dao as earth, etc. etc. shows up ONLY in D&D.

Not Arabian.

My not Spain is invaded, but by more culturally different factions. The leaders are distant, secular, seafaring, and early black powder using. The boots on the ground are from a nearby colony that is more pagan. They've got god-kings, herders and riders, and advanced metallurgy.

The leaders are cut off from their empire since the regime back home changed, and some of their nearer colonies were lost. The crusaders taking land back aren't 1:1 with the locals in language or lineage either, so the region is ready to get messy.

IT'S HOTTER THAN HOT, IN A LOT OF GOOD WAYS!

Everyone thinks of endless sand dotted by a handful of oases when they hear of Arabia, but the peninsula had some lush areas known for their fertility in Antiquity.
Take the southwestern region, Arabia Felix ("fertile/blessed Arabia" as the Romans called it), in modern Yemen. Multiple prosperous pre-Islamic kingdoms, like the Sabaeans, Himyarites and Qatabanians emerged in this mountainous land watered by wadis. The kings of Saba established their capital of Ma'rib on a wooded hill, and constructed the Great Ma'rib Dam, an engineering wonder of the ancient world that irrigated their land. When not ruled by kings, the tribes of the region were confederations linked by networks of alliances, ruled by priest-kings known as mukarribs. The post of Aden served as the nexus of trade of frankincense, myrrh and spices like cinnamon between India, the island of Socotra, Axum in Ethiopia and the Greco-Roman ports of Egypt. The people in Arabia Felix lived in prosperity, raised temples to Almaqah, Master of the Ibex and lord of lightning, and went on pilgrimages north to the Kaaba at Mecca.

I play in actual (pre-islamic) Arabia. It's full of jews, vampires and jewish vampires.

Thank you

Instead of a group of deserts, an archipelago where the main form of transportation are giant turtles. Trade is very important with islands specializing in certain goods.

CRAZY HASSANS USED GRIFFONS! ONLY SLIGHTLY MUTATED!

>whats your Not!Arabia like?
Arabia

>guy died before being able to finish last two volumes,
fuck, this is still however the most extensive stuff I have seen on this subject

Sorta like morrowind but on the moon.

I haven't fleshed them out as much but it's a much more savage place than the West. There's one large Empire that are basically the Persians, a smaller state they are on decent enough terms with, many nomadic tribes, and several few cities under one ruler type deals that cover a large area but it's mostly desert.
Lots of savage orcs and other monster races that roam as well, as well as my homebrew cat-folk shape shifters who are semi nomadic.

Asked this last time there was a fantasy arabia thread but it archived soon after.

How does one include the assassins without using a direct copy?

Key elements of the real assassins:
>Members of a small and persecuted sect/cult based in mountain castles, often seens as heretics.
>Murder, threats and sabotage intended to intimidate much stronger rulers into leaving them alone rather for money or as sacrifices for some assassin god TES-style.
>MO usually called for disguise and infilitration, sometimes with deep cover agents planted for months or years before suddenly stabbing the target in broad daylight.

What could you do with the concept to give it a fresh twist for a fantasy game?

Underrated

Use as is. Assassins that aren't just spooky hit men is pretty fresh given how infrequently people do that.

A lot like Arabia.

highly recommend pasolini's arabian nights for inspo

...

np.

I found a lot of stuff when searching for info for world building. I just wish I had more time so that I can actually read all of it. If anyone knows of historical info on Arabian / Islamic martial arts and maybe spirituality, please let me know. I couldn't find a lot of decent info on that. I want to build a Dunesque wuxia setting based loosely on 8th-10th century Baghdad / Arabia featuring plenty of nomads, African warriors and vikings and the ruins of an advanced Ancient Rome that had a lot of renaissance level tech.

There is a lot of especially academic stuff available on archive.org such as archive.org/details/TheNewCambridgeHistoryOfIslamVolume1
That's part 1 of a 6 volume set. I didn't save the links for the rest of it, but it's not hard to find with a google search.

If you're looking for more game-able fluff, then archive.org/details/GemsAndJewels_201403
It's a collection of Islamic short stories, parables, etc.
Actual Islamic stuff is available at kalamullah.com but I'm not sure how useful that is.

Yeah, that sucks, but it would have been post-Islamic so you could just take that from just about any other historical books.

It's fused with the Wild West, so you have Arabian Cowboys roaming the desert. They are both the merchants and the mercenaries that protect the merchants.

Rather beautiful, very rich, but with a layer of sleaze from open air slave markets and grimy mercenaries from more savage races returning from wars and plundering missions in the nearby cradle of several dead civilizations.

well its not arabia

It's quite a bit after the the period you're interested in but a fair number of late medieval Furusiyya/Mamluk manuals that survive with a few translations available online. Others have been scanned but unless you can read classical arabic are only good for the pictures.
They are primarily concerned with heavy horse with strong Persian and Turkic influences.

Earlier Arab armies were based around infantry archers and spearmen, with some mounted infantry and light cavalry raiders. I don't think there are any detailed texts on fighting technique from this period though. Towards the end of your period you do have Turkic Ghulams and conquered Persian heavy cavalry serving in Arab armies, as well as the the development of native heavy cavalry so while somewhat anachronistic the later Mamluk manuals could still be useful.

mamluk.webnode.hu/sources/period-texts/
duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/38812/Jensen_The_Mamluk_Lancer_Final_WEB.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

I've read other Mamulk texts online, but can't for the life of me remember where, including one that gave a quite detailed breakdown of equipment.

Islamic slavery was the best slavery. Where else in the world could a slave rise to 2nd in command of an empire?

I really like these.

bump

It stars with Dune

It ends with Dorfort....everything kinda ends with when you involve Dorfot, really.....

Not Arabic.

Rome, specifically under Claudius?

In rome a slave became King, read up on Servius Tullius, the last just king of Rome.

most of the grand vezirs of the ottomans were balkan slaves. most of the mothers (if not all) of the sultans were ukrainian or balkan slave girls. hell there were almost no turks living in the palace at all.