Inspiration and preview

For those who missed it, the preview can be seen on Alephtar Games' website with a click on the image on the left of this blog: the shipments are now hopefully only a question of days. It’s therefore time for me to list a few sources which you may like to use as inspiration for your campaign or to impregnate yourself with the very exotic flair of the Nomad life and history. And if you still haven’t decided to have Nomads in your campaign, I hope they may awaken some interest for this theme. This entry will be regularly updated, hopefully with your own suggestions.

I also published a page with references where some more “scholarly” sources are available –see in the pages list on this blog.

Movies:

There are many movies about Genghis Khan, which has apparently become a very popular character for the Asian film industry in the last years. The most recent are:

Zhi sha / Kingdom of Conquerors, 2013, Ping Wang. Daoism confronting tengriism.

By the Will of Genghis Khan, 2010, Andrei Borissov

Mongol, 2008, Sergey Bodrov

Genghis Khan: To the Ends of Earth and Sea, 2007, Shinichiro Sawai

Other periods:

Musa / The Warrior, 2001, Kim Sung-su. Koreans vs. Late Mongols in the desert

The War of the Arrows, 2011, Han-min Kim. Koreans vs. invading Manchus.

花木兰: Huā Mùlán - Mulan: Rise of a Warrior, 2009, Jingle Ma. Chinese vs. Hsiung-nu. I still haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen Disney’s Mulan either.

Books:

Le Loup Mongol, Homéric.

The Secret History of the Mongols. Of course.

The adventures of Er-Töshtük. Traditional Kyrgyz tale. There are Russian and French translations, but I’m not sure there is any in another language.
The Wolf Totem,  Jiang Rong

Set in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, but full of Tatars. Just replace the guns with bows:

Taras Bulba, Nikolai Gogol,

Michel Strogoff, Jules Vernes,

Voyage d'Orenbourg à Boukhara (sorry, in French), Georges de Meyendorf, 1820: written as a log, it is full of practical infos about caravans and Nomads, and is free on Play Books.
Description des Hordes et des Steppes des Kirghiz-Kazaks ou Kirghiz-Kaissaks (in French as well, available on Playstore for free), Alexis de Levchine, Ferry de Pigny, a bit older as the above. About the same as above among the Kazaks. Full of prejudices but also of interessant pieces of information.

The travels of Giovanni dal Piano dei Carpini and Guillaume de Rubrouck can be found on Playstore for free.

And whatever you can recommend!