Polls Closed

What did it tell us? When the voting was taking place there were 10 followers/members of this blog, 7 of us voted. On the plus side we had a whopping 70% voter turn out rate, so kudos to us for being so civic minded :) The downside was the sample size was really small, so I am repeating the poll on my other blog, because even if only 1/2 of the people following the blog answer the poll that'll be more than four times as many as we have here. I probably should have thought of that before I put up a poll here.

All that being said, the most popular choices were Norsemen and Neanderthals tied at 5 votes each. Then in second position in the poll the Byzantine Greeks, Turks & Mongols and Arabs tied at 4 votes each. The Romans, Han Chinese, Japanese and Hindu all got 3 votes. The Aztecs and Romany each got 2 votes. The Kung San, the Basques and the write in candidate Iroquois each got 1 vote. The Kushites got 0 votes.

Did the Norsemen get a boost in the polls because everybody likes Vikings or because they got a write up during the polling time? Neanderthals were pretty much a shoe-in for making it into Garnia World's reboot anyway, because they have been in every incarnation to date; it is nice to see that most people think that they were a good idea though.

All of the second place people were a little surprising to me. Arabs have been there all along, even if I did forget about them. Turks & Mongols have been canon since the late 90s, but I had to work to find them a homeland on the map. Byzantine Greeks were invented as an "off-map" place to develop at some nebulous point in the future for my Norseworld campaign before it was part of the Garnia campaign world, so they have really never been developed at all*.

The third tier were all more canonical, more recently than some of the stuff that beat them. I was also a little surprised to see the Romans do as poorly as they did. The Han Chinese were the most canonical of the third tier, being the third major ethnic group in the Garnia campaign region. The Japanese were another "off-map" group, but, to be honest, they were about to invade Ming Liang (the Bright Empire) and win the mandate of heaven. Mostly because I found it easier to run a straight Oriental adventures campaign set in Ming Liang that way, with a Samurai ruling caste and all, but still. The Hindu people were mixed into the same area with the Arabs, and ruled over by the acolytes of the Necromancer.

Honestly I wouldn't miss either the Aztecs or the Romany, but they both provide some pretty good adventure opportunities. Aztecs are a good example of an evilly aligned Human empire, yes I understand it's ethnocentric to say so, but I believe that Human sacrifice on an industrial scale is probably evil. Gypsies as a fantasy trope are well played, but they are a cliché for a reason, the cliché works.

Kung San and Basque can probably go, I guess they were just there for their value as exotic cultures and the fact that I felt bad for how bad they got hosed here on earth. Iroquois are a good candidate to add, they are a super bad-ass culture of Native American Indian warriors and I know quite a bit about them, owing to the fact that I actually live in Iroquois country and am related to them. I don't know why I didn't think to add them before, probably just because they are too close and familiar.

The poor bloody Kushites got 0 votes in the poll, was that because I admitted that I just added them as an after thought because I realized there weren't any black people in my world? Or are the Kushites really that boring? Or too obscure? I had really wanted to use the Zulu but they were way too late in history for my purposes and required adding either time travel or some other type of paradoxical issues. There are other black African cultures I could export to Garnia World I suppose, but I am not an expert on African history, particularly not sub-Saharan Africa, and I was shooting for ancient, particularly pre-Christian and/or pre-Islamic peoples, although I guess that's not the deal breaker I thought it was going to be. But I still think the more ancient the people the better.

* Other than their name, The Trebizondic States.