Jed Clayton
Mongoose
Sometimes when I am GM'ing a fantasy game like RuneQuest, I get complaints and criticisms from players for trying to combine characters from vastly different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds into one group of adventurers. Generally RuneQuest does not use or encourage the typical party of elf-dwarf-halfling-human-halforc, etc. That is D&D, not RuneQuest. What RQ has is a selection of many different human peoples.
When I played Hero Wars / HeroQuest, I found out it was nigh impossible in that game to have a lasting, on-going adventurer party made up of people from different cultures and religions, at least not without disrupting and/or ignoring some core concepts of that game, such as the concept of the "hero of a community" or the "hero bands" with common goals and so on. That was also a part of HeroQuest that was extremely hard for me to get across to my players. I am happy that RuneQuest in general is a bit more liberal in this area.
Playing an accurate Gloranthan campaign with the different major religions in place as they are written will still be hard, but that is not what I am doing right now. I still like to allow many different characters from different cultures in the same adventuring group.
That much for my introduction.
Now, I am actually looking for some real history to inform my gamemastering here. In fact I am looking for some obscure material from Arabic history:
Do you know that period film with Antonio Banderas, "The 13th Warrior"? Incidentally that one was recommended to me by a gamer friend all those years back, just at the time that the movie had opened in theaters.
For those who haven't seen it: Antonio Banderas plays a highly civilized Muslim Arabic scribe (who is also a bit of a swordsman) who travels all the way up to Scandinavia and lives among a savage Norse tribe, and joins the "Vikings" (or rather, the Norse) in a decisive battle against an even more savage people. The Arab later returns to his Caliph to report about his adventures alongside the Norse.
It's a pretty well made action film, but I had always assumed that the mere idea of an Arab dealing extensively with the Viking civilization in the (ca.) 11th century was, at best, a fiction of the screenwriter. That was, until a few months ago!
Recently I read an article in a Muslim newspaper, titled "Among the Northmen" (OK, I mean that was the title of the article, not the title of the paper). That story was detailing things from the historical accounts of an Arab fellow named Ibn Fadlan, written in the 11th century or thereabouts.
This guy wrote a history book about the Arabs' contacts with the Viking Norse, who according to these sources were not always as barbarous and bloodthirsty as the usual Western European accounts may make you think. You have to understand that the Norse seafarers had a spectacularly large trade area that stretched basically from contemporary Norway and Sweden to Baghdad and beyond. (This is why archaeologists found Arabic dirham coins in Viking gravesites.) It is now seen as an historical fact that individual Scandinavian traders repeatedly reached Baghdad in the era of the Abbasid Caliphs, and some of their trade expeditions used the Volga river in Russia to sail well into Central Asian territory, trading furs for silver. There even used to be a Norse-controlled principality around Kiev and Novgorod.
Interestingly, because of this Norse presence in what is today Russia and Ukraine, the Arabic name for these tall, often blond Northmen was usually "Rus". Historians say that they weren't Russians, but Germanic Scandinavians.
I now tend to assume that this Ibn Fadlan may have been the inspiration for Banderas' character in the film.
Ever since reading the article in that newspaper, I have wanted to get a hold of the actual text that Ibn Fadlan wrote. It was originally titled "Risala". I do not read Arabic, let alone medieval Arabic, so a good translation into English, French or German would be preferred.
A search on Amazon.com led to nothing so far. When I typed in "Ibn Fadlan" and "Risala" as my keywords, all I found was an out-of-print scholarly tome from the 1970s which would have cost some 80 dollars or more, were it still available.
So, any help on this subject would be welcome. If you know any translations of the Risala book, or al-Tartoushi's text "Description of a Danish Marketplace," please let me know. There are also said to be additional accounts, written even earlier, by authors named Ibn Khurradadhih (an intelligence agent of the Caliph Al-Mu'tamid) and Ibn Rustah, who was also an astronomer. Also feel free to recommend any other readable history books that deal with this Norse-Arab connection.
When I played Hero Wars / HeroQuest, I found out it was nigh impossible in that game to have a lasting, on-going adventurer party made up of people from different cultures and religions, at least not without disrupting and/or ignoring some core concepts of that game, such as the concept of the "hero of a community" or the "hero bands" with common goals and so on. That was also a part of HeroQuest that was extremely hard for me to get across to my players. I am happy that RuneQuest in general is a bit more liberal in this area.
Playing an accurate Gloranthan campaign with the different major religions in place as they are written will still be hard, but that is not what I am doing right now. I still like to allow many different characters from different cultures in the same adventuring group.
That much for my introduction.
Now, I am actually looking for some real history to inform my gamemastering here. In fact I am looking for some obscure material from Arabic history:
Do you know that period film with Antonio Banderas, "The 13th Warrior"? Incidentally that one was recommended to me by a gamer friend all those years back, just at the time that the movie had opened in theaters.
For those who haven't seen it: Antonio Banderas plays a highly civilized Muslim Arabic scribe (who is also a bit of a swordsman) who travels all the way up to Scandinavia and lives among a savage Norse tribe, and joins the "Vikings" (or rather, the Norse) in a decisive battle against an even more savage people. The Arab later returns to his Caliph to report about his adventures alongside the Norse.
It's a pretty well made action film, but I had always assumed that the mere idea of an Arab dealing extensively with the Viking civilization in the (ca.) 11th century was, at best, a fiction of the screenwriter. That was, until a few months ago!
Recently I read an article in a Muslim newspaper, titled "Among the Northmen" (OK, I mean that was the title of the article, not the title of the paper). That story was detailing things from the historical accounts of an Arab fellow named Ibn Fadlan, written in the 11th century or thereabouts.
This guy wrote a history book about the Arabs' contacts with the Viking Norse, who according to these sources were not always as barbarous and bloodthirsty as the usual Western European accounts may make you think. You have to understand that the Norse seafarers had a spectacularly large trade area that stretched basically from contemporary Norway and Sweden to Baghdad and beyond. (This is why archaeologists found Arabic dirham coins in Viking gravesites.) It is now seen as an historical fact that individual Scandinavian traders repeatedly reached Baghdad in the era of the Abbasid Caliphs, and some of their trade expeditions used the Volga river in Russia to sail well into Central Asian territory, trading furs for silver. There even used to be a Norse-controlled principality around Kiev and Novgorod.
Interestingly, because of this Norse presence in what is today Russia and Ukraine, the Arabic name for these tall, often blond Northmen was usually "Rus". Historians say that they weren't Russians, but Germanic Scandinavians.
I now tend to assume that this Ibn Fadlan may have been the inspiration for Banderas' character in the film.
Ever since reading the article in that newspaper, I have wanted to get a hold of the actual text that Ibn Fadlan wrote. It was originally titled "Risala". I do not read Arabic, let alone medieval Arabic, so a good translation into English, French or German would be preferred.
A search on Amazon.com led to nothing so far. When I typed in "Ibn Fadlan" and "Risala" as my keywords, all I found was an out-of-print scholarly tome from the 1970s which would have cost some 80 dollars or more, were it still available.
So, any help on this subject would be welcome. If you know any translations of the Risala book, or al-Tartoushi's text "Description of a Danish Marketplace," please let me know. There are also said to be additional accounts, written even earlier, by authors named Ibn Khurradadhih (an intelligence agent of the Caliph Al-Mu'tamid) and Ibn Rustah, who was also an astronomer. Also feel free to recommend any other readable history books that deal with this Norse-Arab connection.
