What could you add in a mesoamerican inspired setting?

What could you add in a mesoamerican inspired setting?

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Chocolate and chili based potions.

dinos

Blood magic and satan worship

Soccer

I would focus on the not!Inca. I feel like the central American civilizations are overdone compared to them.

And perhaps some of the northern cultures as well?

Mound builders and such?

Skin walkers and various were-jaguars?

That would be pretty interesting. The more settled aspects of north american native culture also feel pretty neglected.

Take one of your standard fantasy races and turn them into the setting's version of Conquistadors, coming from across the sea. Give them a technological and magical edge, turning them into a real threat.

Colorful military bodysuits

Yeah, I know next to nothing about them but I think some of them were pretty culturally advanced.
The nomadic ones were kinda shit, like nomads always are, but they're the ones that get all the press.

Have one of the battles just be a sports game with stakes.
Have the enemies be jaguars who have human-heads and work in groups, lizard-people, giant water salamanders, a fire elemental that's walking towards the jungle, etc.

And vampire conquistadors, apparently.

They're the ones that survived. We know fuck-all about the Mississippi mound-building Cahokia society because smallpox wiped them the fuck out. They were too densely, populated, the diseases just ripped through them all at once. The plains people were spread out enough that they didn't all die in a single generation; any group that got hit would lose a bunch of people, but there would still be other bands out there for the resistant survivors to join and spread their resistant genes.

There was also a large, complex civ in the Amazon which we know practically nothing about. We can tell with radar that there are rectilinear earth formations under the jungle, but we don't have much more info.

A lot of the "ancient, primitive tribes who have been living like animals for thousands of years" that explorers encountered were basically post-apocalyptic remnants. Their cities died a generation or two before the explorers showed up, as disease outpaced them along the trade routes.

ancient aliens, dinosaurs, lizardmen

if it aint broken dont fix it

In fact, forget the mesoamericans and the dinos!

>We can tell with radar that there are rectilinear earth formations under the jungle, but we don't have much more info.
That sounds spooky as fuck

>A lot of the "ancient, primitive tribes who have been living like animals for thousands of years" that explorers encountered were basically post-apocalyptic remnants.
To be fair, they were a neolithic society even before the plagues

It's kind of misleading to call then neolithic. They didn't have metal working, sure, but they were as advanced as the majority of Bronze Age societies in most all other ways.

Ran a GURPs campaign based on the The King's Fifth which inspired The Mysterious Cities of Gold

>in most all other ways
They had no, or very limited, writing systems.

Except they existed in the Middle Ages-Renaissance, thousands of years after the Bronze Age.

History isn't a straight line. Remember that the Greeks forgot how to read during the Bronze Age collapse and had to relearn writing from the Phoenicians.

The Americas just had apocalypses all the time so there weren't extended stretches where knowledge could accumulate.

Come to think of it, didn't the entire Aztec religion rely on the concept of the world being fucked every few generations?

That idea must have come from somewhere originally, a rome-like collapse or two in a row would certainly give that impression to build a religion around.

Yeah, the Aztecs were really interested in the ruins of Olmec and Maya civilizations, and intentionally adopted some Maya trappings. It's not surprising that they were fascinated by the idea of cyclical rises and falls.

I think they've began some careful exploration of those sites on the western slopes of the Andes just recently.

But as you said, there seems to have been some civilizations in the deep Amazon as well.

Also, there seems to be some differing opinions if they were wiped out before or after arrival of the whites and smallpox.

I'm fairly sure it weren't any Tupi-cities though.
Goddamn monkeys.

Speaking of the Aztecs, they had had some sort of major plague hitting them just before the Spaniards arrived.
This apparently had helped destabilize them asomewhat so it was easier (for a given value of "easy") for the conquistadors to fuck their civilization up royally.

All of Tékumel.

Megatheriums and this:

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>Cosmic Horror. The whole idea behind human sacrifice is that human blood is the only thing that keeps the god's powers running, and the god's powers are the only thing keeping thousands of titanic skeletal demonic horrors from descending upon the world and devouring it.

>Also some of those demons had rattlesnakes for penises. Aztec Mythology was weird.

>DnD style empowerment fantasies would be a poor taste for this setting. A more survival horror type deal where the players have to decide to so some shitty things for the greater good, all while never really knowing whether or not what they're doing is enough. Something like Call of Cthulhu or mesoamerican Delta Green.

>I'd play it with the looming threat of universal annihilation being ever-present. Maybe something that's part of the skyline? A hole in reality, a planetoid-sized monster slowly approaching. They're soldiers/elite warriors from one of many kingdoms, and must make sacrifices to their gods regularly. I'd put them in situations where they may not want to kill these people. Won't work for a party of murderhobos but people who get into it will end up alone with a little orphan child and the ritual knife. They can, of course, choose not to. At first it seems like there's no effect. But every now and then something big gets through and they have to fight it off (preferably with heavy casualties) and wonder if they could have prevented all this.

--

>wikiwand.com/en/Human_sacrifice_in_Aztec_culture#/Sacrifices_to_specific_gods
>Some captives were sacrificed to Tezcatlipoca in ritual gladiatorial combat. The victim was tethered in place and given a mock weapon. He died fighting against up to four fully armed jaguar knights and eagle warriors.
>Thats fucking PC material if I ever saw it.
>"Nah dudes, Immana die for the gods and become the pretty little hummingbird TODAY. BRING MORE WARRIORS!"

Same with the Inca. That's the general pattern

>White dudes arrive on coast
>Smallpox heads inland
>A generation later, white dudes head inland
>Find an empire that's collapsing because half the royal family died of smallpox

>the conquistadors to fuck their civilization up royally.
Don't forget most of the people fighting the Aztecs were natives who joined the Spaniards. The Aztec alliance were royal cunts.

>Except they existed in the Middle Ages-Renaissance, thousands of years after the Bronze Age.
If you want to do "civilization is like a videogame with tech trees" bullshit wank then technically speaking Americas reached bronze age sooner than the old world did considering they didn't get to americas until late in the game.

Naw, the disease that ravaged the Aztecs was actually not at all Western. It was a local hemorrhagic fever that cropped up just before white people made landfall.

>considering they didn't get to americas until late in the game.
The fuck are you talking about dude the Americas were settled ~15,000 years ago.

Make it a Bloodborne-esque setting where blood is power, monsters are everywhere, and all you've got is this fucking macuahuitl.

This except with terror birds instead.

Fpbp

New poisons, gods to favor, peanut butter, familiars and animal pets etc

A druid/ shaman haven

Aha, so that's what it was!

To be fair, the Aztecs did go out of their wat to piss their vassal states off.
Those flower wars to get sacrifices and shit, didn't exactly endear the Mexica to the Tlaxcalans.