I'm looking to flesh out Asamando cause I might be sending my players there soon. According to the ashes of The Sixth World, Cyberpirates has a few pages on this place, but alas I have not this book (doesn't really matter).

Now, from previous threads, here's what I got so far:

Kanada Ten:

The claws would have to be made of Unobtinium-238 to tear through milgrade armor.

How many mercs that an African country can afford have milspec? And how many of them like wearing it in the jungles of Africa?

Yeah, we're talking about tearing through, at most, armour jackets. The ghould could use their bare claws, but
a) having traditional warrior weapons (like zulu spears) is cool and adds flavour
b) probably easier on the claws. Killing 5 guys with your bare claws might cause damage to them, having a metal covering allows for unadulteraed killing all day!

Ghouls themselves can't realistically take out anything heavy like tanks or APCs and such. That's what mercs are for. But they sure can raid enemy camps at night and tear through infantry squads.

I'd have some ideas, having run a game set in Asamando once upon a time. Interestingly enough, the PCs were part of a merc unit hired to help protect the nation, just like you suggested. My ideas:

First, I agree they'd have problems with modern weapons, but that's nothing that a little modding couldn't fix, and they CERTAINLY have enough money to pay for that, for whatever native armed forces they have.

-With a 'ghoul nation', I have little doubt that the native Sanambonam Ghouls would feel tension with the foreign 'regular' ghouls. What sort of tensions would these be? Suspicion of foreigners? Simple tension at a limited food supply? Or gratitude and comradierie, because they're suffering the same affiction?
-How would their towns be decorated? Or their houses? I portrayed the capitol as not being very visually pretty, but having a lot of growing things, and music being a popular pastime. Lots of musicians played in ultra-high and ultra-low tones - not things outside of human hearing range, per se, but things that would lack definition unless one had a ghoul's heightened hearing. For household decorations...
-...I figure ghouls would have a hard time picking out any kind of fine detail in an object - I mean, they can tell a table's a table, because it's a square thing on pegs that blocks their field of vision. But they probably wouldn't be able to tell that it had an intricate series of dragons twining carved on the side, unless they ran their fingers over it. So I figured the ghouls would decorate their walls with lots of plants - vines and creepers over latticework, bonsai'd to grow in geometric patterns. The more well-off ones collected antique furniture, primarily due to the emotional resonances in it (so they could see it better, and for neatness' sake). Sometimes 'lighting' was taken care of by things like moths or firefly swarms kept in cages; I figured their living patterns would cast some kind of astral glow. For the zen-or-magically oriented, I figured being dual natured would be great for zen rock gardeners - you can see the chi flow through the garden, after all!

Just a couple of ideas.

If we're going non-canon to flesh (har har, pun intended) things out a little, I guess that they'd try to solve the meat-problem really bad. Thinking quickly this can be done in two ways:

a) Have a large, poor population that generates enough natural deaths. This could easily be done to some escape-from-hell scenario, with towns milling with scared people and ghoul guards that keep the from escaping.

b) Work the synthetic angle. The queen could, with all her money, hire researchers or hire runners to kidnap researchers. runners could be hired to ship researches to the nation, or free captured ones.

And if your runners are there to extract, they'll run into all sorts of nasty critters + mercs, aka other runners.

Well, seeing as how most ghouls are caveme-like in their intelligence level, I figure their abodes and the decorations of them is pretty basic. Since they hate the sun and are in Africa (haha!), they probably invest most of their effort to dig underground homes or pile up lots and lots of debri to make large "hives" they can live under.

You bring a very interesting point about Astral art though. It might look like nothing under normal vision, but look in the Astral and wow! In fact, I could see how Asamando art could be prized by Awakened collectors (yes! more run ideas!).

Ok, on to other details. The CIA world factbook had this to say about Northern Ghana:

hot and dry in north
mostly low plains

recurrent drought in north severely affects agricultural activities; deforestation; overgrazing; soil erosion; poaching and habitat destruction threatens wildlife populations; water pollution; inadequate supplies of potable water

English (official), African languages (including Akan, Moshi-Dagomba, Ewe, and Ga)

Well endowed with natural resources, Ghana has roughly twice the per capita output of the poorer countries in West Africa. Even so, Ghana remains heavily dependent on international financial and technical assistance. Gold, timber, and cocoa production are major sources of foreign exchange. The domestic economy continues to revolve around subsistence agriculture, which accounts for 35% of GDP and employs 60% of the work force, mainly small landholders.


Hey, look at that, they speak english! Ok, so the ghouls probably speak english too, although add deformed teeth to an already thick African accent, and well, it ain't exactly easy to understand english I bet.

Rest is more or less what we already knew, although maybe they're not quite as rich as I thought. Twice the output of "shit all" isn't that much.

Actually, not being particularly capable of operating heavy machinery, that also means the Ghouls must yet again call in external help for mining. The whole thing is probably privatized to Corps, and there is undoubtedly friciton between the foreign work force and those who regard them as hamburgers.

The last game I ran was set in Africa, and the pcs spent some time in Asamando. They came in exactly the wrong way, in a boat full of dead people being sold for 13 cents a pound (or five nuyen a kilo).

The way I was treating it, Asamando used the more mindless ghouls as sort of a buffer zone between their neighbors, so that there was areas of wasteland not unlike the Dawn of the Dead. The more intelligent ghouls lived inside this buffer. Whereas none of Asamando's neighbors really liked the idea of living next to them, nobody wanted to pay the exhorbiant cost of the war to eradicate them. Plus, since none of the nations in Cyberpirates really got along, Asamando itself was used as a buffer by its neighbors; no one is going to invade you if they have to cross the land of the dead to do it.

Since the pcs weren't dead when they were stripped and put on the boat to be sold to the ghouls (the group was two phys ads and mage; the mage was incap'd with Stun damage-- when his Stun was gone, he healed the phys ads from deadly to four boxes, then resist pained them for the rest, IIRC) there was some problems during the offloading process and it ended up with the three of them with clubs and a manaball cornered like rats. The ghouls sent in their negotiator who said, in effect, "Hey, we thought you were dead, so we were going to eat you. You're not dead, so no harm no foul. You're free to go." Thats when they realized they were a few hundred klicks from nowhere, in the middle of the ghoul lands, with only underwear for gear.

The pc's holed up in the Convent of the Merciful Virgin (I think it was called), which was staffed by non-ghoul nuns (Though you have to wonder what nuns have to screw up to get stationed in Asamando. But they're nuns, they looked at it like treating lepers. Violent, cannabilistic lepers.) until they were healed, and then did some runs for the ghouls in exchange for pants and beer (or whatever it was).

Since Asamando is the ghoul country, a lot of the ghouls there immigrated from places where being a ghoul wasn't cool. And ghouls have a variation of the HMHVV, I figured it would be cool to have all HMHVV's welcome there. The doctor who treated the pcs was a Nosferatu I used as an antagnoist years ago, except now he was just a guy on vacation who had come to Asamado to shoot a behemoth and relax a little. The fixer they hooked up with was a fat wendigo named Ferrari who ran a vampire bar called the Red Parrot (he was a direct stealing of Sydney Greenstreet from Casablanca). The ghoul negotiator who was sort of in charge of making sure they were okay was named Jean-Baptiste Zibodi, and for a ghoul, he was a pretty nice guy. I had a good time with it, despite the fact the pcs were freaked out pretty much the whole time (something about being lost in the land of the dead without your sniper rifle just makes some people uncomfortable, I guess).

To me, Asamando was a ghoul version of Israel. They had been persecuted the world over, so they formed their own country. I worked in some themes of ghoul nationalism; generally I have fond memories of the game. Considering the entire foray happened because the group got killed trying to steal a boat, it went pretty well.

That story rocked, thanks! Loaded with great ideas.