Practically everyone was pretty nice, compared with the Aztecs.
The Mayans did practice human sacrifice, and other gruesome rites. A quote from one recent account -
All the central american cultures seem to have been bloodsoaked by modern standards, not places many Nerimites would want to ally with.
And, of course, it would be very odd if Japan was the only placed where the wilderness was full of hostile supernaturals. The Mayan jungles would also be monster-haunted, and some of the priests would be able to gain real power from human sacrifice.
By the same principle, in northern Europe outside the great cities, there would be elf-lords holding court beneath the hollow hills, kobolds in the mines, and kraken in the ocean depths. Slightly further south, there'd be nymphs and drayds cavorting in the trees.
Presumably, all these creatures vanished before the present day worldwide for much the same reason as they did in Japan itself - the ultimate cause of which, for the purposes of this story, may be the bone-eaters well locking history into that shape.
Note too, Europe had martial arts schools, until gunpowder made them unfashionable, e.g the masters of defence. In the Ranmaverse, it would be reasonable to assume that the best of these schools were on a par with Anything Goes. (People, after all, are the same the whole world round, with the same range of talents, physical, mental and arcane, and the same eagerness to win fights.)
European schools might talk about quintessence rather than ki, and Aztec schools use different terminology again, but the practical results would be the same.
All things considered then, foreign adventures would have a good chance of going disasterously wrong, which might make for a good story.
The Mayans did practice human sacrifice, and other gruesome rites. A quote from one recent account -
Quote:The Maya were better than the Aztecs only in that they operated on relatively small scale - a few dozen deaths a year rather than the twenty thousand in one day the Aztecs boasted of.
Captives were tortured in unpleasant ways depicted clearly on the monuments and murals (such as yanking fingers out of sockets, pulling out teeth, cutting off the lower jaw, trimming of the lips and fingertips, pulling out the fingernails, and driving a pin through the lips), culminating, sometimes years later, in the sacrifice of the captive in other equally unpleasant ways such as tying the captive up into a ball by binding the arms and legs together, then rolling the balled-up captive down the steep stone staircase of a temple.
All the central american cultures seem to have been bloodsoaked by modern standards, not places many Nerimites would want to ally with.
And, of course, it would be very odd if Japan was the only placed where the wilderness was full of hostile supernaturals. The Mayan jungles would also be monster-haunted, and some of the priests would be able to gain real power from human sacrifice.
By the same principle, in northern Europe outside the great cities, there would be elf-lords holding court beneath the hollow hills, kobolds in the mines, and kraken in the ocean depths. Slightly further south, there'd be nymphs and drayds cavorting in the trees.
Presumably, all these creatures vanished before the present day worldwide for much the same reason as they did in Japan itself - the ultimate cause of which, for the purposes of this story, may be the bone-eaters well locking history into that shape.
Note too, Europe had martial arts schools, until gunpowder made them unfashionable, e.g the masters of defence. In the Ranmaverse, it would be reasonable to assume that the best of these schools were on a par with Anything Goes. (People, after all, are the same the whole world round, with the same range of talents, physical, mental and arcane, and the same eagerness to win fights.)
European schools might talk about quintessence rather than ki, and Aztec schools use different terminology again, but the practical results would be the same.
All things considered then, foreign adventures would have a good chance of going disasterously wrong, which might make for a good story.