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Mayincatec / Tabletop Games

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  • Dungeons & Dragons: Several sourcebooks, including Deities & Demigods, have presented versions of the Aztec pantheon suitable for use in campaigns.
  • Forgotten Realms featuresnote  the continent of Maztica, far to the west across the ocean from Faerun, with a dominant culture, the Nexalans, based closely on the Aztecs. It was subject to invasion by the Amnians and their admiral Cordell and became the site of a burgeoning Faerunian colony. Based so closely on the Aztecs, in fact, that it might technically not count as Mayincatec: rather than generic ancient South American culture, the Nexalans are Aztecs. With a quick word-find-and-replace for proper nouns and a light sprinkling of taking the mythology at face value (this was TSR policy at the time, though Maztica was one of the most overt instances). Additionally, the sourcebook Serpent Kingdoms, describing the society and history of the yuan-ti (a race of evil snake people) gives them some distinctly Mesoamerican-inspired architecture and culture.
  • Greyhawk: Lost Shrine of Tamoachan has the Player Characters exploring the ruins of a Maya-themed temple. Later, the Olman people from Hepmonaland and the Amedio Jungle in the distant south were introduced with a culture that was pure Mayincatec.
  • Mystara: The Hollow World, being a collection of Fantasy Counterpart Culture nations, has the Azcan and Oltecs, who are roughly based on mixture of Aztec and Mayan cultures each, while hating each other (Oltec conquered Azcans in ancient past and Azcanshold eternal grudges). Their culture was also far less over the top in the offensive aspects of this trope, until Atzanteotl showed up and made them all be murderous snake-worshipping zealots making blood sacrifices on top of pyramids. Last king of Oltecs, shamed by his failure to stop his people's corruption, fled to the surface, where he took care of tribes descending from Azcan and Oltecs, who eventually became the Atruaghin Clans (counterpart to many Native American ethnicities)...and then Atzanteotl corrupted one of clans and made them move to the jungle, begin bulding piramids and do the entire Mayincatec shtick. He also made a group of Elves he corrupted, the Schattenalfen, adopt this culture, then convinced them Azcans stole it from them.
  • Exalted: The characters used to represent the language of Old Realm are pretty much directly based off of Mayan hieroglyphs. Also, the First Age was either completely loaded down with this trope, or it was mostly limited to the areas in the Southeast around Rathess, depending on your edition. The Dragon Kings go deeper into that aesthetic, sacrificing hearts to the Unconquered Sun, constructing geomantic temples and mastering astrology.
  • Feng Shui: The Darkness Pagoda from the Netherworld styles itself after the Aztec Empire, and its ruler, Ming I the Queen of Darkness, is one of the vilest villains of the entire Feng Shui setting.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • In the plane of Alara, which has been splintered into different shards each lacking two of the colors of mana. Naya has Red, Green and White mana but no Blue or Black, resulting in a sunlit jungle world with no need for progress and ambition. Its inhabitants are content to worship giant beasts as gods, down to occasional Human Sacrifice, and are fairly hedonistic. They are deliberately modeled after the Aztec and these aspects of their culture, but as the world as a whole lost their drive for more complex civilizations and has in fact lost their former empires they also resemble the Maya in this regard.
    • Ixalan is a more complete world, and has two factions that more properly resemble their real world counterparts: the Sun Empire, modeled after the Aztec with a few Incan trappings (alongside their brightly colored, feathered dinosaurs), and the River Heralds, a group of merfolk that is the local analogue of the Maya. There are also Vampire conquistadors called the Legion of Dusk (as well as pirates to round out the fourth faction).
  • Rifts tries very hard to keep them separate, and mostly succeeds. Several Aztec gods are featured in the sourcebook: "Pantheons of the Megaverse". "World Book 9: South America Two" features the Empire of the Sun, a Magic- and Technology-using state ruled by the actual Incan gods. In addition, they also have several Nazca influences, not due to poor research, but rather an in-universe alliance and assimilation with the ancient Nazca Line Makers and their descendants.
  • Scion: One of the pantheons player characters can choose from is the Aztec one. It features Mictlantecuhtli, God of death and the underworld, who is a sadistic SOB even by the standards of Aztec Mythology, and that is saying something. The "Aztlanti" pantheon are not the only Central American pantheon; they're just one of the last ones left following the war with the Titans. Others are still around, but not nearly as powerful. The Atzlanti signature character, Dr. Aaron Tigrilla, is fairly sympathetic — he was a surgeon who got around that "necessary blood sacrifice" bit by sacrificing the leftovers of heart surgery to Tezcatlipoca. As you can imagine, this didn't go over too well when the board found out. He eventually becomes the god of extirpation, and works to patch up soldiers in the war against the Titans note . 2E keeps the Aztec pantheon (albeit considerably reworked to be more sympathetic) and also adds the Incan pantheon. In this case, the trope is averted, as both pantheons are very different from each other (though their shared history means they're fairly close).
  • Shadowrun: Aztlan. Something of an invoked trope in that it's explicitly noted in-universe that the Aztlan powers-that-be have deliberately thrown random motifs from old Latin-American cultures together to create a national identity to suit their own ends. One of the narrators of the Aztechnology sourcebook sarcastically notes that most of the Aztlan leadership are descended from European ancestors and have little to no grounding in the "ancient culture" they've "revived" at all.
  • Wraith: The Oblivion is unusual in having sympathetic Aztec ghosts. The Flayed Lands — the Dark Kingdom ruling over Central America, sometimes referred to as "the Dark Kingdom of Obsidian" when others bundle the North and South American Dark Kingdoms into it — operated on a semi-theocratic system that allowed them to reap Pathos freely from mortal devotion. Unfortunately, wraiths fleeing Stygia saw this system and were all sorts of horrified — Renegades because it reminded them of the empire they were fleeing, Heretics because of the associated sacrificial practices — and went all Cortez. The destruction of the Flayed Lands is part of what set off the Third Great Maelstrom, so nobody won there.
    • ...until the 20th Anniversary Edition, where it's revealed the Flayed Lands survived, with some of their ruling houses diving deep into the Tempest and setting up redoubts before the lands were utterly scoured by the Third Great Maelstrom. They've now started slowly coming topside, setting up interests behind the scenes of the Stygian Necropoli that have colonized Central America in the meantime.
    • The Inca also had their showing in the Lands of Gold, which likewise got fucked six ways from Sunday by the Third Great Maelstrom. However, a few cities survived... because the ruling emperor sabotaged all his rivals, subjected them to Harrowings, and promptly sold out to Stygia. Meanwhile, one of his rivals who managed to survive has hidden in the Tempest, rallying his own forces to try to reclaim the empire once and for all.
  • Warhammer Fantasy: The Lizardmen, Fantasy Counterpart Culture of the Mayincatec. Culturally they're closer to the Maya, with the interest in astronomy and prophecies and the like; however one of their major gods is based on Quetzalcoatl (since they're, you know, Lizards), and the jewelry they often carry is more Aztec-inspired, as is their focus on blood sacrifice. To complete the hat-trick, they have a habit of mummifying dead rulers and displaying them as relics, which is taken from the Inca (said mummified remains are haunted by Slann's spirit and are the most powerful magic users in the setting).

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