37
D&D is anti-medieval (2016)
(www.blogofholding.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
37 points (100.0% liked)
rpg
3141 readers
40 users here now
This community is for meaningful discussions of tabletop/pen & paper RPGs
Rules (wip):
- Do not distribute pirate content
- Do not incite arguments/flamewars/gatekeeping.
- Do not submit video game content unless the game is based on a tabletop RPG property and is newsworthy.
- Image and video links MUST be TTRPG related and should be shared as self posts/text with context or discussion unless they fall under our specific case rules.
- Do not submit posts looking for players, groups or games.
- Do not advertise for livestreams
- Limit Self-promotions. Active members may promote their own content once per week. Crowdfunding posts are limited to one announcement and one reminder across all users.
- Comment respectfully. Refrain from personal attacks and discriminatory (racist, homophobic, transphobic, etc.) comments. Comments deemed abusive may be removed by moderators.
- No Zak S content.
- Off-Topic: Book trade, Boardgames, wargames, video games are generally off-topic.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
IMO, the big American bias in heroic fantasy RPG including D&D is how empty (most) settings are. If you travel (nowadays by car) in rural Europe, you'd find village every 5-10km, turns out that people walking to their field don't like to spend more than 1h commuting. While on some high fantasy map, you have like 3 day of walk through a dangerous forest, or an endless plain without much settlements.
Also it's worth mentioning that many European major roads/highway have been built at first by the Roman, and have been modernized through history. So again, middle age wasn't as empty, salvage as many D&D settings. Which indeed looks more like frontier era US.
And America wasn't actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.
@sirblastalot @Ziggurat And it's pretty clear that orcs and goblins and such started out as the stand-ins for those Natives.
Orcs in Tolkien’s work were rather a stand in for German soldiers since he fought them in WW1. Gygax simply sourced monsters from everywhere. Only later they became elevated to sentient beings and a playable race… uh… species now (D&D 2024).
Considering ~95% of the native population died of disease within 50 years of the settlers landing? Yeah you can say it was pretty empty. I'm always fascinated by the willful ignorance of "settlers" in the context of the old west. Journals talk of "miraculous" groves of fruiting bushes and trees or other edible vegetation and how it's clearly a gift from their white god while studiously avoiding any mention of the signs of previous habitation in the area. We're still discovering massive irrigation networks in AZ and NM with satellite LiDAR that no "settler" ever mentioned.
Don't overlook the first genocide of my people by focusing too hard on the second. The Europeans struggled to quell the survivors. I honestly don't think settlers had much of a chance otherwise, even with the difference in technology.
I didn't overlook it, I specifically used the term "plagued" in reference to that.
Except there's about ~200 years between plagues being introduced to the America's and the big westward settling pushes. Again, don't conflate one genocide with another.
The Sword Coast setting is essentially a post-collapse setting where monsters are an existential threat (in theory). There are no longer villages every 5k because only the best and safest lands are worth farming.
In theory. Though I guess you could argue the Sword Coast is also kind of a metaphor for American colonization? The barbarian tribes certainly have Native American coding going on at times.
I dont think that's American, it's a shit-ton of custom work to fill all that in. Are Europeans willing to spend 10 times as long worldbuilding their campaigns??