Need interesting facts/general information about Korean history, folklore...

Need interesting facts/general information about Korean history, folklore, culture and/or mythology which might be relevant to a fantasy adventure game with a standard, monster-hunting-dungeon-crawling focus.

Anything concerning the Silla Kingdom would be particularly relevant, but anything recognizably Korean is good as well.

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_of_the_Phantom_Master
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Praise Yi Sun-sin daily.

Literally This.

Don't mind me. Just posting a recent urban legend.

Woochi the demon slayer is some good shit.

What's it got?

Kimichi is almost 3000 years old.

No wonder it tastes so sour.

Check out Hong Gil-dong and Dan Gun anyway.

All koreans are ugly

Korea's history is full of sucking China's dick, or being forced to suck Japan's dick

t. Lo Wang

I don't have much other than some stuff about Korea's craziest king, Yeonsangun
>mother is poisoned
>carries out two violent purges against the literati
>the first because they were critical of him
>the second after he found out his mother was poisoned
>beat two consorts to death, pushed his grandmother down the stairs
>turned the kingdom's top school into his personal pleasure palace

>turned the kingdom's top school into his personal pleasure palace
I think I've seen a hentai like this once.

I was just trying to shitpost, but that\s pretty neat

Hwarangs were fabulous ninja knights

1) knights gotta be armoured head to toe. Their horse too.

2) a knight's wake is basically his corpse being laid out next to his gear in public. It's a dare to take the shit to anyone who imagines he could be as awesome in life as the deceased had been.

You can take the stuff and try, but your peers and contemporaries will see to your social death if you fail to live up to the previous owner's legacy of being awesome.

>You can take the stuff and try, but your peers and contemporaries will see to your social death if you fail to live up to the previous owner's legacy of being awesome.
Do you have a source on this? It sounds really cool, but I can't find anything.

> nobody posted the king who led the country in despising the barbarians that conquered mighty china, only for them to come down and personally make him kowtow until his forehead bled

why koreans in particular? their history has no redeeming qualities beyond being so inept at chinese that they had to invent their own script, and on top of that making a poo in loo religion the state religion.

let’s not even get started on their (nonexistent) military record, yi sun shin was an anomaly in an otherwise pitiful account of themselves.

Like it or not, they exist, and they have a history, and it's one that doesn't often get drawn on for fantasy inspiration. So, really, because we can.

>Need interesting facts/general information about Korean
Stop right there.

Korea is pretty shit man, don't do it.

well, I don’t know if you’re the OP but they had a culture that we might find somewhat similar to modern day society.

koreans had their own civil service examinations, adapted from the chinese. as they also shared the same underlying confucian principles (chiefly to put the state and the collective good above oneself) a civil service job was very cushy.

mission creep over centuries resulted in the civil service practically becoming the nobility because of the functions they exercised and the prestige attached to the occupation. it eventually became the exclusive monopoly of a few wealthy noble families who alone could afford the time and expense required to prepare for the exams.

that was not to say that you couldn’t take a shot if you were the son of a dirt poor farmer from the ass end of nowhere, because they were open to everyone. you just probably wouldn’t have any chance of passing it.

exams have continued to remain a focal point of south korean society and your academic performance can quite literally determine your standing even today.

yeah and it is pretty fucking sad that the only interesting thing i could think of re: korea is exams.

Do you know if Silla was the period where certain types of bureaucrats basically became Warhammer 40K Inquisitors, or if it was later on? Because I've been told there were periods in Korean history where this was basically the case.

You're thinking of Chinese county magistrates. Closest thing Korea had, to my knowledge, was during the Joseon period.

It's a bit complicated. I'm working on a game which involves a meta narrative by which gamers in a cyberpunk-ish future experience adventures in various settings representing the futuristic MMORPGs they play. Specifically, due to reasons I'm not going to get into here, the games they play are all FAILED games.

I want one of those to be a dirt standard fantasy MMORPG. Dungeon crawling and all. I want it based on Korean mythology as a sort of tongue-in-cheek joke (Korea in this setting is a world leader in MMORPGs but the game in question was made by a Norwegian company with such a shallow understanding of the subject matter it was boycotted by the actual Koreans, leaving it without a target audience and doomed to failure).

So cards on the table, I'm looking to make what is a deliberately not very good "Korean fantasy D&D, as made by people with such poor knowledge of Korea it led to the actual Koreans refusing to play it."

Things I'm looking for in particular:

1. Character races (I got human, Imugi, Gumiho, and I've heard something about bear people I haven't found any references to, which means it might be perfect)
2. Character classes (Hwarang, Shaman, Taoist Sorcerer, now I just need some kind of rogue equivalent. Ninjas would be too obvious).
3. Interesting adventure concepts.

I think the main issue with making historic fantasy games set in a pseudo-korea is that right now, they're preferably painting themselves as a people so peaceful they didn't even have sharp kitchen knives. It's a point I saw reitarated in a couple of books already.

Doesn't that fit OPs idea that the game was a commercial disaster?

If you don't, Chilcheollyang will happen again.

Read-up on the accomplishments of King Sejung the Great.

is he the one that trolled the shit out of the mongols by moving his court to an island and staying there?

>he doesn't know about Yi Sun-sin
>Smug anime grils.jpg

I think that's about a century before his time.
He an his appointed team of scholars made the writing-system Korea still uses today because using Chinese characters was too hard, and literacy rates greatly increases after inventing the writing system. I think they tried to spread the writing system to other countries but there were no takers other than like 1 Indonesian town which may have been made-up. Writing system was so good at making literacy easier that eventually a Korean king generations later tried to ban the system out of fear of subjects gaining too much knowledge.
They also did some shit like water-clocks, had officials be appointed based on merit instead of blood, etc.

So basically a really good king. You can have the setting take place after an assassination, or generations later; with him still being remembered as a symbol as prosperity, justice, and knowledge.
You can have players searching for a lost piece of technology of medicine developed by himself or his scholars, you can have villagers who worship images of him as if he were a god on earth, etc.

Also look into Conufcianism, and korean Shamanism, as they are the two main religions of Korean history. Maybe throw in some Tengrism, Buddhism, or Shinto if you want to show that there has been influence by the Mongols, Chinese, or Japanese.

60% of Korean history is completely made up by right wing nationalists still mad about WWII, the rest is carefully rewritten to hide the parts where the country spent most of its existence being traded back and forth as China or Japan’s bitch, or to make it sound more appealing to foreigners in an effort to get them to think its “cooler“ than Japanese history.

I’m not even trolling. This is legitimately a thing and a huge problem with Korean academia.

op could add a few more classes

> fighting slave
I don’t know how accurate the movie musa: the warrior is, but apparently koreans kept slaves (during the joseon? period).

> scholar aristocrat
passed the exams, seen no fighting in his life up until this point, only knows how to use a bow and arrow and is a massive fucking coward. charisma and wisdom is off the charts but strength and dexterity is a negative integer.

> win a few battles at sea because they have the medieval equivalents of the uss iowa going up against a horde of literal junks

> army on land gets gangraped so brutally that they give up and become bandits pretending to be guerillas

> chinese have to sacrifice their ming dynasty (not kidding) for some semi-barbaric shithole whose sole redeeming quality is that they show up on time with the tribute every few years or so

koreans cling to yi sun shin like white on rice because he’s literally the only military hero they’ve got and they need to purge the humiliation of getting fucked by a lesser race such as the japanese.

Might find some inspiration here

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_of_the_Phantom_Master

>win a few battles at sea because they have the medieval equivalents of the uss iowa going up against a horde of literal junks
It's the design that was ingenious, and a testament of capabilities.

>win a few battles at sea because they have the medieval equivalents of the uss iowa going up against a horde of literal junks

Shit, even with those, the Korean navy wasn't immune to catastrophic fuck-ups like Won Gyun deciding that they could totally just sail straight at a fleet ten times their size. It's hilarious how fast the government went *crawling* back to Yi after Won got his head chopped off by the Japs.

Kitsune equivalents are a lot less benevolent than in Japanese folklore. Just straight up man eaters.

They destroyed the Finnish social skills in the Battle of Giza.

Go to library, enter History section, then go under K for Korea. Pick up entry-level books and read them, then go from there. Do the same for Culture section, but this time look for Korea AND China.
If you find that too much hassle - don't even bother then

Look at the kumiho on Wikipedia

>Go to library, enter History section, then go under K for Korea.
Confirmed for not knowing how libraries work.

Not him and that's exactly how library in my town works.
Maybe you should check yours, too?

As a Finngol, I can sympathize with Koreans in this regard

In my town, the books are organized by the name of the author, and only the sections are by subject.

Exactly how kitsune, and a lot of Japanese folklore in general, are depicted varies from era to era, and tend to reflect the times in which the tales originate.

don't sell yourself short, most of Swedish victories and achievements were built on the back of Finnish troops, to us swedes you will always be our favorite sibling, adopted, dour, drunk and violent brother, but family all the same.

>t. Finn

>traded back and forth as China or Japan’s bitch
>Implying it was even traded at all
>Implying it wasn't China's bitch up until Japanse modernised and took it by force, along with large set of concessions from China itself
The very existence of the country comes from Chinese outposts and Tang dynasty support to the weakest of kingdoms on Korean Peninsula, solely for them to conquer the rest and finally stop raiding Chinese border as an act of gratitude.
Vietnam, which started in similar fashion (locals getting in contact with high culture and civilisation via Chinese border garrisons), at least has a history by itself. Korea meanwhile can be best summed up as "that semi-free province of China pretending to be independent country most of its existence".
It's a little wonder Chinese didn't just annex North in the mid-50s

>Vietnam, which started in similar fashion (locals getting in contact with high culture and civilisation via Chinese border garrisons), at least has a history by itself.

>Korea has not

That is hilarious. The people of that penninsula have as much of a history murdering each other as the people of that other penninsula.
It's just that nobody in Korea or Japan's interested in finding their common past in Siberia, though the connections are obvious even at the current state of research.

Link?

It's not about lacking history. Guess I put it wrong. It's about the desperate ignorance of the fact they've been China's bitch for their entire existence and even more desperate pretense of trying to be "more papist than the Pope", as the saying goes. Seriously, if you go through Korean culture and politics in the past, it's one big "we will show those pesky Chinese we can be more Chinese, more Confucian and more bureaucratic than them". The only part that worked out was almost utter destruction of women's position in Korean society (which is still considerably stronger than what it ever was in China, but a far cry of what it was before Chinks knocked at the doors). Then comes the fact they would rather pretend they were everlasting "empire" ever since, or at least as long as China, coming to existence from vaccum, that admit - as you noted - they come directly from Siberian tribes
Seriously, the amount of deliberate ignorance that goes both in Korea and Japan, but most importantly, the allowance of international scientific community for them to roll with it is fucking disgusting. Nobody can question half the shit Japanese claim for their archipelago before 5th century AD, despite there being absolutely no source backing those claims. Just like nobody can question baseless or based in myths "events" for Korea and Japan starting from about 2nd century BC and back from then.
The father of first ruler of my country is not considered a historical figure, despite being absolutely mundane chieftain with no supernatural bullshit going and, you know, the ruler's need to have a father. He's not historical, because he's only mentioned in one source, making it impossible to verify with any other source if he was real or going under that name and not another. Meanwhile Koreans are allowed to run their fantasy about "Korean Empire" stretching half-way through Manchuria in 4th century BC, without providing a single proof at all and everyone must just accept that.

Wow, I love all this messed up history. Feels like it belongs in some kind of Shadowrun + Space Opera game

Student of Far East Studies here and I remember one of our lecturers describing her experiences with performing an archeological dig in Japan. Before she even arrived on site, she was already handled entire set of documents of what she "found" and how she should classify all her "findings", despite not even seeing the site yet. When everyone had their laugh about this, she then added she became persona non grata and can't ever perform any digs in Japan again after not signing those papers.

I’m reminded that the modern view of the honorable samurai was invented by a Californian

No different than Renaissance writers romanticizing knights, really.

There is also Nitobe Inazō and his "Bushido: The Soul of Japan", an almost entirely propaganda book written from the ground-up as a way of selling Japan to Westerners under the prerense of being a scientific paper. Legacy is so strong it's still part of study even after exposure as a hoax somewhere around the 60s, plus it still circles non-scientific circles as one of the most basic texts on historical Japan. Like being a go-to book for neckbeard weebs, who read it alongside "Hagakure" (which at least keeps its value for being a book how one should be a samurai, rather than "how things really were") and thus end up with the whole honourable samurai bullshit.

>who read it alongside "Hagakure" (which at least keeps its value for being a book how one should be a samurai, rather than "how things really were")
More like "how some crazy old hermit thought samurai should act." No one had even heard of the book until it was found to be a useful propaganda tool during WWII.

How about the early history we've got from Nihon Shiki? The three separate kingdoms, one of which had the support of Japan and all that.

Basically, why not simply use foreign sources on them.

That's just the result of living next to an Empire though. The sheer volume of communication those put out tends to define the style of political communication for all states in its regional sphere of influence.

The Bible's got the same issue, a lot of it is basically deformed by the mountan hillbillie Jews who wrote and compiled it getting their shit pushed in by their coastal cousins and the two major powers of the region.

You could draw parallels between the revival and re-interpretation of Bushido and the popularity of knightly romance fantasies in political communication in the European Atlantic world during the same period indeed.

We're talking about stuff that happened before Himika was mentioned by the Chinese. Stuff that dates back to malaysian and korean colonists arriving on Kyushu and siberian colonists settlng Japan from Hokkaido to the Kanto plains.

Still wins on account on being "how I imagine it should work" and flat-out stating so few times throughout the book, while "Bushido" is written as "this is how things really were and preferably still should be, despite desolution of samurai class".
In other words - Hagakure is self-aware idealisation as a coping mechanism with how fucked up things were irl, while Bushido is intentional (and really obnoxious at that) idealisation for the sake of propaganda, aimed from the very start toward Western audience.

You know Bible is no longer used as literal, historical account... right? Meanwhile, all sort of "accounts" from Korea and Japan are

Rest of your post indicates you have no clue what's the problem at hand, trying to draw more and more retarded and displaced parallels. So to reitterate and make it clear - the problem is that both Korean and Japanese scholars are using things that couldn't and shouldn't be used as historical or even semi-historical accounts and are both intentionally falsifying their own past to elevate their own position and importance, because it would be just too big hit for national pride of both to admit they were disfunctional collection of extremely backwater tribes for a really, really long time and only got civilised, because Chinese saw profit in quite literally uplifting them (Korea) and later had interest in foreign trade during Tang dynasty, looking for new partners (Japan). Japanese are EXTREMELY salty about being basically offshot of what was already an offshot of Chinese culture, since most of the people that kick-started centralisation and organisation of their country were Korean nobles and Chinese traders, along with bunch of missionaries from both. They've wrote themselves into a fucking corner by first running non-stop propaganda about "eternal Japanese Empire created by gods" ever since Meiji Restoration and then having to deal with the stark reality of actual research, digs and all sort of findings, meaning their country was a tribalistic clusterfuck up until 600s AD. Meanwhile, Koreans are just salty about being China's little bitch for all the "imperial" period and then Japanese colony after that, so they boast to the max how great and glorious their country was and is. This even includes paying all sorts of tourist attractions to have notes in Korean. Not because Korean tourists are going to reach them, but to show people from other countries that Korea is so big, rich and important that they have their own guides

Everything I know about pre-WWII Korean history came from a sci-fi visual novel where women were treated like shit and had their tongues cut out.

Not the guy you where talking with, but i have a question here:
Why aren't they (Korea and Japan) co-opting Chinese history like the west (well, the anglosphere) is co-opting Greek and Roman history?

>Character races (I got human
You mean Chinese or Japanese invaders? Because that's the only point in Korean ancient history that there were humans in the peninsula.

Many great Western leaders were well-read of the "western canon" of mediterranean philosophy, history and tactics, and more recently we've had Hollywood to portray Julius Ceasar, Alexander et al. as modern-looking white guys.

Koreans and Japanese have considered themselves distinct entities for the entire length of their recorded histories, and that distinction continues as they are clearly ethnically different.

Maybe if you had won the Hyperwar...

Because that would require admitting they aren't unique and were low-tier barbarians, while Chinks were already a "superpower" (all things considered) when they were still jumping from one tree to another.
It goes like this: in Europe, barbarians happend to sway over the superpower, and then tried to pretend they are the descendants or rebuilders of Rome. In Far East, the superpower was superpower up until about early 19th century, while everyone around was trying to pretend they weren't just uplifted by said superpower. Then comes 19th century nationalism, which was applied in heavy doses all over Far East as something "Western, thus superior" (see the copy-cat pattern here?), which drags to this day, since it became deeply ingrained as part of identity.
In short, they just can't co-opt for this. Especially since China is again a superpower.

If it helps, try to image situation where instead of collapsing, Rome was still around to this day. How would you feel about being just a random Germanic pleb who build his entire culture on what your neighbour had already been doing for past millenium and still is stronger, bigger and meanier than you will ever be?

wait, how does the fall of the ming relate to korea?

Not him, but
>Send out your loyal troops guarding northern border
>Troops return decimated
>Organise new army
>It's shit and disloyal
>They give up to Manchu without a fight

having traveled that region pretty extensively, i've found the general vietnamese perspective to be far less revisionist than the korean.

because the greeks and romans aren't around to deny it, and it's pretty well historically documented that they got their teeth kicked in at some point.

meanwhile, china, despite getting buttfucked by industrial western nations, STILL remained the regional big dog except for a brief period of Japanese military supremacy.

But they absolutely did. Especially in Japan, a school of "Japanese Learning" distinct from the imported chinese knowledge only developed pretty late.

>But they absolutely did.
>a school of "Japanese Learning"
>He genuinely buys into it
Out of the handful of genuinely own Japanese unique stuff you had to pick up pure propaganda.