I thought of an idea for either a ttrpg or video game about Native American cultures. You play as a Native American in the 1500s-1600s. You come back from a long journey to your village only to discover that it has been abandoned.
You can tell that your people weren’t attacked but that many are dead. You find makeshift burials far away from the village as if something was wrong with the bodies. You continue to travel and find more abandoned villages. You find people with strange red spots on their bodies, begging you to stay away from them.
You are now alone in this world that appears to be dead. You must rely on your survival knowledge and skills to perhaps find out where your people have gone and to one day join them.
I’ve always been fascinated by how natives would have reacted to the destructive nature of the old world diseases and it would be an interesting post-apocalyptic setting as you would have no idea what happened besides people getting sick and dying. Religious fanatics doing all manner of things to appease the spirits, tribes blaming outsiders and attacking anyone they see, the encroaching return of nature, and the possibility of meeting Europeans.
Plus, you could incorporate native survival and cultural practices to demonstrate how these cultures lived pre-contact and the usefulness of those practices in everyday life. We all know that Native Americans hunted for food, but how did they hunt, what strategies did they use and why were they successful? I think that gameifying those practices would go a long way for non-native people to understand native cultures than just placing those practices in a cyberpunk setting.
You have been lied to about western diseases and native americans.
After the spanish showed up, population levels were unchanged for many decades. It took 200 years for the populations in central mexico to drop 10 or 20%. The Aztecs, in fact after Cortez murdered their emperor picked up their arms and - under spanish command - proceed to go beat the shit out of the Mayas for their new Latino masters.
Moctezuma's grandson was elevated to nobility in the Spanish court, a royal title still held by his descendants.
Small pox was devastating to native populations because of deaths via exposure.
tl;dr there are two forms of smallpox. A highly lethal form that is less virulent (it was reasonably likely to kill you, but you had fairly low odds of catching it), and a low-lethality form that was highly virulent (you were very likely to survive, but high odds of catching. "if you can see the sores"). Due the travel distances involved, no one with the high-lethality form of small pox survived the atlantic crossing so the Americas got the low-lethality version.
So how did the "less lethal" smallpox wipe out entire towns and crash a population?
The answer is it didn't - directly.
Because it was the highly contagious version, in a population with no natural immunity, if one person in a village got sick, everyone got sick in a very short period of time. There was not enough stored food, and gathering water too much work, for people be sidelined for two weeks - this was extremely devastating for the Maya who lived in small communities in the rainforests, because they often only had a 1-2 day supply of food (since harvested food spoiled quickly, and they were surrounded by year-round food sources)
You didn't die of smallpox, you died of dehydration & starvation because the whole village got sick at once, and everyone was too weak to gather water or collect/prepare food. The small pox survival rates at Spanish Missions were orders of magnitude higher than Indians in the villages, because there were clergy to care to the sick.
Here's the thing; I'm not actually sure if the guy is actually Native American. For starters, he claims that he's Cherokee, which is by far the easiest tribe to claim citizenship with; I also don't think he's ever actually shown any legitimate confirmation of citizenship. Secondly, there has been a rather large rise in people claiming to be "trans-racial"; i.e., they claim to be another race than what they actually biologically are. Thirdly, as
@RA-5C Vigilante mentioned, there's a crippling lack of research into actual Native customs and such; if anything, a lot of the shit I read sounds more
Neopaganism than Native, which is backed up by a few of the C&C players I found mentioned fighting against the "Patriarchy".
All in all, this sounds more like a wokeshit game made to get oppression points and cater to self-hating whites.
The Cherokee were one of the few tribes to see a population increase after contact with Whites.
They saw Europeans, said "That. We want that" and nearly wholesale adopted European farming and social practices; they were primed for this better than some indian tribes in a manner I won't get into. The Cherokee absorbed a lot of Irish immigrants. They were 500% pro-slavery and contributed a number of skilled generals and officers to the confederacy, including the guy who the infamous "rebel yell" is attributed to.
Don't get me started on the shine job that is the "trail of tears"
Anyway when taking about "Full Blooded Cherokee" I'll my usual Cherokee story:
My great-great-great grandparents were fairly well-to-do store owners. My Great-great-aunt was an "old maid" that caught unending shift for not having a husband and shaming the family. So she found, and married, a full-blooded cherokee man to spite them. They did not have any kids.
Some 80 years later, representatives from whatever sub tribe Great-Great Uncle "Heap white women at?" belonged to contacted my grandfather (He later learned that it was due to the tribe trying to pad their membership before some election). The tribe was offering full blood recognition for him and his children. Having a great aunt spite-marry a member was enough to get full membership.
Grandpa turned them down. Then within a decade, the tribal casinos started.
Yeah, the Aztec civilization in particular was well-known for the staggering amount of sacrifice shit they did; that's exactly why the "evil whyte pypeo" were able to beat them, because the Aztecs ended up pissing off literally everyone else around them and practically handed the Spanish a shit-ton of allies on a silver platter. Seriously, trying to act as if the Aztecs would be willing to open up their borders and share their culture is just... completely insane; granted, the book didn't actually go too far into them, so it's possible that the mention of the Aztecs might be a set-up for future antagonists, but that's a bit too optimistic for this game.
The Aztec founding myth is the Aztecs were dumb, brutal war like savages who went around Texcoco. They were too dumb to farm or have weapons, so they mostly stole crops until they'd be chased out. This was until they settled near one city where the King took pity on them. In exchange for giving him soldiers help fight a neighboring city, he gave them land and his people taught them how to farm, hunt, and make/use weapons.
The Aztecs in thanks asked the King for one his daughters so they could make her a Goddess. The King obliged. The Aztecs then sent a message to the king to come see his goddess-daughter, and when the king shows up there is a feast with his daughter dancing before the assembled crowds.
Except its not his daughter. Its an Aztec preist wearing her freshly flayed skin. His skinned daughter is the main course.
Naturally the King is unhappy, and his troops come through, slaughter most of the Aztecs, and the survivor flee into the marshes where they see the Eagle eating the snake on the cactus. They settle, most die of disease or starvation, but inside a generation the survivors march back out and then kill the King, his family and take the city for themselves, using it conquer the other two major powers around the lake.
I want to be clear:
This story of being stupid animals who repaid the first person to show them kindness with treachery and cannibalism is not what the Aztec's enemies told about them. This the Aztec's own account of their history.
In the 80s my mother played old-school D&D. She said some of the guys in her group definitely thought it should be boys-only and kind of resented her presence, but obviously this exclusionary attitude was not much of a problem because she actually got to play the game and have fun.
In my experience, a group with a non-married girl in it is very unstable.
Either she dates one of the guys and when that ends the group implodes, she gets a boyfriend and stops coming to D&D, or she brings more of her female (or gay) friends and tries to make the game sparkle princess adventures.
I will heavily vet, but if you pass you're in.
