The magical elements aside, medieval Europe is not as dissimilar to the standard D&D setting as many would think. Egyptian monuments built hundreds or thousands of years earlier dwarfed what was being built in Europe at the time. Ancient Rome commanded armies and fleets numbering in the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands at Philippi. Cape Ecnomus was the largest naval battle in Europe until Jutland in WW1. Aristotle, dead for centuries and many of his works unknown, was considered the high watermark of science. Alexander, Pompey Magnus, and Hannibal were generals the likes of which nobody expected ever to see again. All the grand stuff was in the past, and usually the long distant past, and so much was lost.
Yeah, there was definitely a regression after the fall of Rome (as the obvious name implies "Dark Ages"). And we definitely still cite many classics for influence, inspiration and standards that still apply. So its interesting to see how we've evolved, but also retained so much over time too.
But that's only because medieval people deluded themselves into believing it so. Whether it was secular rulers envying the scale of Roman organization or religious authorities believing the farther away from original sin humanity was, the more evil they became. While by the High Medieval period most technologies had already advanced beyond Roman levels, as needing other solutions to problems besides "throw more slaves at it" led to much innovation, and the importing of advanced sciences from the East. As the Early Modern period progressed, the nascent European empires who were busy conquering distant lands, enslaving or eradicating their populations, and exploiting their resources decided to emulate...an ancient empire that had conquered distant lands, enslaved or eradicated their populations, and exploited their resources!
@@digitaljanus Agreed, albeit with the caveat that reductions in population (not least due to plagues) and long distance trade were real, non-psychological barriers to technological and sociological advances.
@@digitaljanus It's not really medieval people deluding themselves, so much as Renaissance people playing up the crappiness of Post-Roman Europe, to make their OWN developments seem better by comparison. Insisting that they, the Renaissance Men, were the inheritors of the Roman Empire's greatness after centuries of ignorance and squalor. Rather than the complex and constantly evolving world the medieval period actually was. Like, Renaissance people (and thus, by extension, historians for centuries after) loved to pretend Byzantium didn't exist. (I would be remiss if I didn't also point out that the obsession with Rome tended to have a White Supremacist and Imperialist undercurrent and motivation. Colonial powers loved to play up the greatness of Rome, and the tragedy of its fall, because they, too, were bloody-handed, slave-holding imperial civilizations. Eager to justify their own exploitation and atrocities heaped on other ethnic groups, by way of glorifying the last great civilization that did that.)
Rome stood on mass slavery and a constant war machine. They had incredible feats of organization and civic development, with everything from apartment buildings to highly effective plumbing and sophisticated road development. They were great and terrible. Egypt was subjugated to be the agricultural supplier. Citizens could vote and travel the entire empire freely, only free Roman Men could be citizens but foreign born men could serve the military to become citizens. Let's not reduce either their brutality or their achievements.
There is more time between Cleopatra and the building of the Giza pyramids that between us and Cleopatra. For thousands of years, the Giza site would have loomed in the desert, testament to the amazing wealth and power of the long gone builders.
This has seemed a weird observation to me. Cleopatra (the notable one) was a contemporary ofJulius Ceasar, who was born 100 years before christ. She was Greek, not Egyptian. The Ptolemys had ro ruled Egypt for hundreds of years.
That's the premise of Pathfinder's setting. There are thousands of ruins everywhere, many disasters destroyed past civilizations and the world is basically a graveyard full of ancient wonders and super advanced space tech.
I ran a campaign where the monsters in the dungeon were tired of humans slaughtering them so they started bringing all the treasures to the surface and dumping them wherever they could. It wrecked economies, left the world in the throes of constant war and caused kingdoms to crumble. How did my players deal with it? They hired armies of laborers and mercenaries to bring it back to the underworld, slaughtered any monster who opposed them and locked it all away in deep vaults.
Not creative enough. Obviously the solution was to take advantage of the political turmoil to overthrow the Monarchy and create the goods necessary for the spending so much money.
@@pandoraeeris7860 The world and setting are amazing, but it has a lot of mechanical problems. While I like the exploding dice the success System means you constantly are looking up things on a chart. 4th Edition tries to fix this but introduced more math and especially made spellcasting way, WAY more complicated than it needs to be.
This is why I love settings like Ravnica. The deadliest weapons require venturing into the most perilous offices and overcoming the epic challenge of filing the correct requisition forms.
Well, I would point a few things out: 1. The original creators of tabletop RPGs were collegiate war game players who used to re-fight historical battles and such, and it derived from them wanting to scale it down. The idea was the challenge of being able to represent what amounted to personal encounters, statistically, and of course as they got into this more and more fantasy was added. Originally things were very bare bones because the thrill was simply in being able to do it. It's so close to history in many cases, because the people doing it were history geeks, not just fantasy geeks, and the idea of sort of blending time periods was because they liked the idea of being able to throw stuff that didn't co-exist at the same time against each other. In drawing from fantasy novels, mythology, and other sources, a lot of what you see in D&D was chosen based on what was gamable, and to really understand a lot of it you have to look at the old war gaming rules which in many cases makes the evolution more obvious. It should also be noted that while the most popular, D&D was not the first game of this time, guys like Professor MAR Barker actually pre-dated them, and I think there were a few others. As copyrights started out being a lot less strict, you can also see some of what was going on with D&D, even as far back as the pamphlets, being a direct response to some of the earlier attempts to do this. Basically it should be no surprise how well it can stand up, given the types of people who made it, and what their parameters were. 2. One thing you need to also understand is that the ideas of modern RPG gamers and the people who created this, were very different. While these things always had a lot of story and world building behind them, I mean Gygax and Barker both put crazy amounts of work into their worlds, the idea was that it was a game and clearly there was winning and losing, and that goes back to wargaming. The idea of characters existing pretty much forever was a foreign idea, as in many respects it was a question of how far you could get, rather than the idea that a character would go on until the player, the group, or the GM got tired of them, and then they would just close it out. This is why there were draconian rolls for attributes, and those would dictate what classes you could even make in many cases, you couldn't just play what you want, and there was no guarantee any party was going to be balanced. Hence why there were comments about say parties made up of all fighters and rogues, as those were two of the easiest classes to roll and do well at from early on. This is also why adventures had level ranges as opposed to a set level, and there were ideas like say giving exps for accumulating gold, as magical items were relatively rare, this was part of the design intent that someone who say got "stuck with the money" would wind up being higher level than those with magical items. Magical items also had exps values, to attempt to keep a certain parity, but basically someone with a lot of magical gear within a given peer group would likely have a lower level character. This is also why the idea of say buying magical items was an anathema for so long, because allowing that would mean a player would get the exps, and then an item on top of it, making always taking the material wealth the far better option if such sales options existed. This is also why there were issues with what some called "Monty Hall" gaming. A foreign concept now, as the idea was that some character who succeeded at an improbable feat and got an incredible reward, could unbalance a peer group where people took turns GMing. See, that disproportionate reward, that someone would get just by being lucky... guessing right, having good die rolls, etc... still represents a level of power everyone else now has to deal with, and also makes that character harder to kill and remove the problem, where other characters will fall. It's a problem that can rapidly compound as improbable power can lead to more incredible feats, and then even more power, leading to a circle jerk that might make for a great story, but can be an utter headache for people playing as intended back then where it was assumed all characters would die, which is why getting stuck with a crappy one didn't mean much... a crappy character would die, and then it would be on to the next one.. and while each one might have some story behind them, the point was that only the exceptional would live on in the legends of D&D as being more than a transient fallen adventurer... you can even see some references to this logic in RPG inspired material with the dead adventurers everywhere. It's all part of a gag, a lot of entirely story based gamers don't even get anymore. I point this out because realize, it wasn't until like probably the mid-1990s that you started hearing arguments like "If I'm playing in character, I shouldn't get killed or have bad things happen to me, as that discourages role-playing" we've all seen that one play out now, but I remember when that was new (I'm 49 by the way, but do know a lot of OG gamers, as I was one of the obnoxious red-box kids that came in with the cartoon-fed 'second wave' of the hobby ). Nowadays GMing has even transformed from a framework where the PCs were expected to likely die somewhere in the mix, to a series of plot points to shuffle people between, with planning for their success happening before things even start. It's kind of funny. I showed some Gen Z gamers stuff like the original "Isle Of Dread", "Tegel Manor", and reprinted Arduin Grimoire stuff. Some of them assumed that had to be fake because the attitude was so anti-thetical to everything they believe about how this was supposed to be. I had someone lecture me about how Gygax believed someone should GM, going off about modern principles, and then showed them some of the adventures he actually wrote like "Isle Of The Ape". The dude could be a flat out sadist, even before looking at "Tomb Of Horrors"... I suspect that beyond the politics enough of us middle aged folks making this point might have something to do with why a lot of younger gamers hate the guy. They miss the point that while gaming has changed, and many things are better, other things, like challenge and the same kind of exploration and experimentation are missing. They can't for example understand why someone might actually want a 10' pole or 5' steel rod nowadays.
5e and Ad&D are different games for different people in a different society (because its not necessarly better), personally i enjoy more 5e because i get to play with a character which i create and love, having a chance to survive because of my own wit and not because of luck or viceversa makes the game better, as is currently, but i think AD&D treated gaming as the reward, it doensnt matter if you die because you come back, youre different, but back. I do think 5e is better, mainly because we grew to like actually caring and playing with a character that grows and dies, but i do like the idea that dnd is always in the regression, mainly because if you read about aboleths for example that there was in fact a civilization before all.
@@maxicane8698 Well, I won't go into Aboleths or Phaerim, but it should be noted they were Lovecraftian-inspired concepts based around the idea of truly alien, malevolent, civilizations. As far as 5E vs.AD&D goes, I actually did most of my gaming with D&D specifically under 2E AD&D and now do 1E Pathfinder. My issue with 5E+, and I guess I can see where your coming from, is that it removes most of the actual "game" aspects from the Role-Playing GAME. A big issue with the way it encourages people to play is that the GM is rarely out to challenge the players, but create the illusion of challenge and risk. I see a lot of modern gamers have this attitude that if they are playing in character they should basically be functionally invincible unless they actually enjoy the consequences. I also think that the way it's functionally working now it breeds more drama as it opens doors for more clear favortism and so on. While we're adjusting, my current group for example, not all of whom are young, seem to have a lot of trouble with puzzles or any kind of real reasoning. I've literally run some pretty basic adventures, and old dungeons as part of bigger campaigns, and they seem to think any kind of puzzle or lack of direction amounts to "guess what the GM is thinking" unless there is like an easily deciphered clue right in front of them. The idea of trial and error, exploration (the solution might be elsewhere in the dungeon), or not having a direct solution via a skill roll, is not something they can appreciate... I'm fine with story stuff, but I run into this more and more. I do see the appeal in doing things this way, but I will say that I think it diminishes feelings of accomplishment when your not really doing anything. Modern gamers would freak out over something like say "Isle Of the Ape", "Isle Of Dread", or other classic adventures because the risk of dying is very real, and it's possible to absolutely wreck the entire party by not figuring things out and learning to adapt and do things like manage resources. When success is more or less a foregone conclusion, I think it makes your character far less of a hero, no matter how well you write it. See a lot of people will look at something like "Tomb Of Horrors", "Return To The Tomb Of Horrors", "Dragon Mountain", or others and think old school game developers were terrible. The point is though that people did beat all of those without needing to have the GM lead them by the nose, and the simple knowledge that many people could not do it, no matter what they built for a character (Tomb Of Horrors is infamous for this, it's a challenge about thinking outside the box, not being billy bad ass, or pursuing it traditionally). Basically I feel like at least 80% of the current crop of RPG players are all that guy, or the GM's girlfriend, that is fun to play with but has no real idea what they are doing so they mostly cheerlead and play some 18/00 strength, 3 intelligence, 3 wisdom meat grinder, or whatever while the rest of the group figures everything out and they try and entertain while adding skill rolls once in a while or something. It was fine when in say a group of 4-6 you had one or two people like that, but when everyone is like that, and some of them are trying to play nuanced characters and want the GM to make them feel smart, clever, and capable, as opposed to being it through their characters, I wonder what happened to the game at times... we've entered into the territory of RPGs becoming a self validation based therapy session.
Tolkien ran into the same issue when first writing the Hobbit and LOTR. So he developed a backstory. And then he had to develop a backstory to his backstory for it to all come together. And then he was able to write and have a point of reference. Star Wars? Lucas had to do the same thing. Religion? Yeah it does that too. If you don't know, don't have evidence, just guess and fill in the blanks.
Even ancient story and mythology follows this. The Illiad, Odyssey, and Beowulf are all about the glory days and the height of civilization when the greatest figures lived.
With the Iliad/Odyssey it was essentially fact. It was probably composed in the Greek Dark Ages/Early Iron Age, where the impressive Mycenaean civilisation had more or less completely collapsed centuries before and classical Greece had yet to rise from its ashes. Beowulf was less about a height of civilisation and more simply of heroic age figures. The Danes and Geats aren't portrayed has particularly advanced politically, technologically, or economically.
@@nakenmil Which is really interesting when we consider we have literally nothing for what they could have been referring to. It's the oldest story we have, and it's talking about how much better things were beforehand.
I remember someone having a theory that the "lands between" in Elden Ring were composed of ruins stacked atop ruins stacked atop more ruins, , to the point where certain cliffsides and plateaus were composed entirely of some grassed-over ancient monolith of unknown make and purpose. "it's ruins all the way down" is an interesting way to frame things.
That is literally how some Italian cities work, modern day Rome is the extended medieval Rome, which was built atop of Old Rome. (Also Rome isn't even that old compared to most sites, not only in Italy but in the whole mediterranean area)
Luxor in Egypt is the longest continuously inhabited city in the world. It’s just a layer cake of older structures sinking into the earth under the weight of new structures that were built on top of them.
There was a prevalent suggestion in early D&D that magic and magic stuff was radioactive. Combined with the fact that the Greyhawk map was based on areas within the united states, there's a clear suggestion that the world of D&D is just post-nuclear earth. Much of fantasy in the wake of the atom bomb was based their worlds on a similar assumption.
Well,it also had martian landscapes and beings so... no i think D&d is more like an overlapping of many different worlds. I don't think Planescape is actually THAT far from it, only far less mundane.
Saberhagen's Empire of the East, for example, posited a post-nuke Earth in which magic had arisen and created god-like beings. And the sequel series, the Books of Swords, featured gods who came about in the wake of this, created magical swords which they gave out to humans as a game, causing wars to spread in an attempt to find and control these swords. And all of Brooks' Shannara Chronicles are set in a post-nuke Earth that is filled with all sorts of fantasy races, and magic which existed before humans was reactivated by the apocalyptic energies unleashed. That's just two examples, and they're both D&D AF. So yeah, totally lame. 🙄
I adore Eberron as a Dnd setting. It can have both the "old, lost tech and weapons" feel to it, and also the "cyberpunk-esque cutting edge weapons" produced by monopolizing mega corporations (Marked houses) feel. All in a noir 1920s aesthetic mixed with medieval/renaissance fantasy.
I delve into the Salvation Army when I want a +2 wool sweater, furniture of sturdiness, or Vinyl's Discs...artifacts that the modern world has forgotten how to produce.
World's Without Number by Kevin Crawford is fantastic for creating a world with layer upon layer of ruins and dungeons (and things that are like dungeons but aren't). Much of the book is devoted to creating these locations or hex crawls. There is even a default setting reminiscent of Vance's Latter Earth. Even if you don't use the setting you get lots of tools to make your setting and the dungeons to delve. It is openly OSR so it is easy to convert.
That's something I'd like to see explored more, beyond the practical campaign writing stuff there's a trope in fantasy which isn't just pseudo-medievalism that won't move forward, it's a surface-level medievalism where everything implies that the best days are long past. The Renaissance and Enlightenment will never happen. It's most blatant in Elden Ring and Dark Sun but it's there in almost most high fantasy settings and almost all game settings. I'd like to know more about why and if this trope has been subverted or averted by anyone.
short, probably incorrect answer: It is like that because Tolkien. Long answer? You can talk a lot about the politics of fantasy, and hoo boy, people talk about it a lot - it might not show on some people's radars because the idea that "the best days are long past" is deeply conservative and people that talk (or subvert it) are mostly not.
@@AL2VAR As a complete tangent, I always found the "best days are behind us" perspective very frustrating. We can be the "Strong Men" who bring about "Good Times" *today* if we can stop wallowing in yesterday's loss. The whole internet zeitgeist of believing we're witnessing the fall of civilization is based on comparison to some undisclosed past none of us were likely to have even been alive for. What such people want to achieve by going back is best accomplished by moving forward.
Ctrl-F "vance" 1 result in the middle of the word "advancement." Jack Vance created the "Vancian" conception of magic used in DnD whereby wizards "memorize" spells at the beginning of the day. He also wrote a series of books set in his "Dying Earth" which heavily influenced future fantasy writers including Gygax and GRRM. "Dying Earth" was a post-apocalyptic setting in which magic was technically advanced technology influenced by Vance's experiences in WWII and the fears of nuclear war at the time. The world is extremely sparsely populated with most humans having mutated into monsters and a few scattered wizards holed-up in castles. It really makes a lot of things in DnD fall into place: traps and monsters protect a wizard's keep because there aren't a bunch of people to hire as guards; the places are also not air-tight because there are so few actual humans left around that would try and break in; the abundance of mythological creatures is due to wizards purposefully making style choices to emulate mythology when creating those creatures. Like even more sparsely populated Mad Max with advanced far-future techno-magic.
Ctrl-F "vance" - find your post haha. Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Sun is also a "dying earth" tale, and is in an even more explicitly a far-future setting, after the fall of a great empire. But I think that only reinforces this connection between D&D and other post-apocalyptic stories. Look at Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1980) or Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World for more explicit versions of that. Dragonlance wrote that trope directly into the world history, with the gods mostly turning their backs on humans and letting them suffer. But seriously - if you haven't read Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, I highly recommend it to anyone who reads this!
We can borrow the basic shape of Myth and Legend, that our civilization arose from an apocalyptic ending to a previous civilization, with successive waves of growing civilization each ended by its own apocalypse. Way back at the very beginning was the Mythic time when the gods did the Mythic acts that created the patterns of True and correct living. After the gods came the heroes of the time of Legends who also shaped human life. And finally after many generations of humans we were born into the world created by these previous generations of humanity. Shall we be heroes or villains to those who follow in our footsteps? This structure works with either Noble-Bright or Grim-Dark campaign concepts and explains the persistent pseudo medieval level of technology.
Thing is, our modern civilizations are built on the collapse of older ones, if you consider the Bronze Age Collapse for example. Fantasy just makes it cooler.
One of my favorite things to do in world building for DND is to make a world, a fully fleshed out one with countries and governments, then hit it with magic nukes, apocalypse, wipe it off the map and raise a new world in its place out of the ashes. That’s how the elden ring world was made, George RR build an entire world then the Japanese writers destroyed it and made a new one, hinting at what used to be there
A good idea/bit of advice from Matt Coleville is how he had his world’s history cover three dead empires, inspired by Roman, Chinese, and some third classical civilization I forget, because of the variety they provide. That way, he varied the architecture of ancient ruins, tombs, and other dungeons in varied states of decay, it allowed for different art styles, languages, and the design of magic items, and it gave inspiration on the types of monsters that might populate each.
I recall my DM stating that a lord's tomb was built much like an outpost. So once we returned to the surface i asked could the next hill and the one after also have been outposts. And he said why not head for the center of the outposts? Empires built on the remains of Fallen empires. I agree it is a theme in D&D.
@ yeah, thanks, makes sense! The important thing to take away as advice though, is that you would benefit from having more than one dead empire overlapping the landscape. Not too much work and you get quite a lot of variability to play with.
Coleville's "Liber Bestarius" is underrated. Sketching out a world through its monster-manual was sort-of already done in the Scarred Lands (putting out the Creature Collection like three days after the real Monster Manual, what a boss move) but White Wolf kind of over egged the pudding there.
As a forever DM that doesn’t particularly care about fantasy, but runs mostly fantasy, I think of the D&D meta setting as a post-scarcity interstellar civilization that lives on theme park worlds, but they have collectively forgotten that they are the ancient high tech culture that created the ruins, that magic is technology, that all the human like races are humans, that the intelligent monsters are also humans, that angles, demons, elementals, etc, are sentient programs, and that the gods are humans with admin level access to the power grid with portfolios that define what areas of access they can grant to others. Magic users either have to figure out access codes and pull power from specific resources (prepared spell casting), are granted access from a patron (clerics, Druids, paladins, warlocks), or inherit access (sorcerers, specific monsters, etc). Crafted creatures like golems are programs imprinted on crudely constructed materials. Curses are programs imprinted incorrectly by accident or intent. This is why traps in dungeons reset, why treasures can be found in obvious places long after the treasure should have been looted, and Magic can be high or low in some places, and wide or narrow in others. This also explains why hybrid races/monsters can exist, and how people can travel to other worlds with near identical languages, customs, monsters, and gods. It keeps me entertained while my players play out their individual fantasies.
The assumption that "Older = More Powerful" is so ingrained in fantasy that it comes off as a surprise when it turns out not to be the case (see the Frieren vs Qual fight in "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End")
The Witcher books also bring that up. At one point Geraly needs a new sword, and the smith comments his Witcher sword was made with meteorite iron for strength from the included nickel and chromium. However in the 70ish years he had it, metallurgy improved so much that even a cheap sword is more robust.
DnD's Rome was the Netherese empire, their leader made a mistake so great it killed a god. Now the god replacing her set rules which is why spells are tiered at all the DnD.
My favorite repeated trope is wizards making floating cities, then pushing the weave so hard in their folly that they break the magic which made their city float in the first place.
I love having old empires inspire different ruins - for example, inspired by Rome, Egypt, the Aztec/Mayan/Incan Empires. You can imagine a Roman Empire style empire collapsing due to internal strife, a plague, and barbarian plundering. The sudden vanishing of the Eternal Court, the Egypt inspired-empire's ruling gods and demi-gods, led to chaos, rebellion, and fragmentation. While the Mesoamerican Empire fragments after a celestial event caused by a miscalculation of their famed star-charts shattered their magical stability, leading to apocalyptic event such as volcanic eruptions and a civil war and the populace abandoning their cursed cities for the wilds.
Fact: the implied setting of D&D *was* Oerth aka Greyhawk setting. I think the game started it';s long slide into mediocrity when that changed. But then, I am old and bitter, and don't get to play anymore. (Honestly I am very happy to see young people are keeping the game alive. It was my whole existence from 1977 to 1992...)
One potential thing to do if you don't want to spend too much work on fleshing out a history is simply to go back in 100 or 500 or 1000 year increments and role dice for how the "civilization level" of the surrounding society changed over each increment. This tells you what time periods in the past had better or worse artifacts than the present day in your setting. You can then assume a given percentage of artifacts lost per time increment to determine what sorts of stuff the party is likely to find.
I was fascinated to read the old, original D&D setting and realize that it seems to imply a very much open world setting, even as rhe game master you do not really know what mightbhappen next, you're thrown into a very hostile, alien world you don't know much about and have to explore a world that just takes shape as you play!
In tormenta (a Brazilian rpg) there is a villain caled Mestre Arsenal (Arsenal Master) who seek every magic item to restock the magic of his giant robot (something line a megazord).
This is why Frieren: Beyond the Journey is one of the greatest fantasy works of all time, and more GMs should incorporate its lessons into their RPGs :D 80 years ago, a demon lord created the greatest killing spell the world had ever seen, capable of penetrating all defensive wards. However, when he's released from his prison in the present day, he learns the hard way that the spell he created was SO terrifying at the time that the entire magical community spent the last 80 years studying it and developing work-arounds, and the new, more powerful defensive spells have become so commonplace that even the demon lord's own spell has become one of the most basic offenses that nobody needs to take seriously anymore. But when the demon lord SEES one of the new defensive wards that took the magical community decades to develop, he's able to figure it out in seconds, and when he uses the new defensive spell himself against the protagonists' attacks, it takes him seconds to figure out a weakness that he can take advantage of when attacking them again. If he'd won that fight, or even just escaped after losing, then he would've taken over the world within a week :D His power was not the spell he came up with - his power was the creativity that it took to come up with the spell, and after catching up on the other arcane advancements of the last 80 years, he would've used the same creativity to come up with even more new ones.
I'm reminded of General Patton studying cavalry technique for nearly a decade, only to have to scrap most of what he'd learned due to tanks and mobile infantry being developed.
The most popular D&D Campaign Setting, the Forgotten Realms, had an empire called Netheril thousands of years ago. The power of the empire was not in the spells they came up with, but rather in the secrets of even more ancient artifacts called the Nether Scrolls, which taught them the core principles underlying magic. Like that demon, their power was not in a single spell, but rather the creativity that the scrolls enabled them to use. If the Nether Scrolls had been united in modern realms, it would change the world. “One look at the Nether scroll and I've learned what a spell is. I've been collecting spells as if every one were different. That's illusion...spells are all the same. They're all a path through illusion to truth. One look, and I've seen the fundamental truth of magic.” - The mage Druhallen.
In what aspects? Musical arrangement? Visual storytelling? Screenplay? Art style? Framing? Dialogue? Comparing a 1000+ page novel to a manga and anime series is comparing apples and oranges. It’s like saying Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is better than Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. The two are working with a completely different set of tools. It’s not a serious comparison that any reasonable person would make. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is an excellent work of visual storytelling and fantasy fiction.
Really good return to our roots. I just established that 'the ancients' created all the magic items of the world last session. Thanks for the full story about why
i always felt that the term dungeon, outside of the clear marketing benefits of an alliterative title, is a bit of a misnomer, and ruins is what you mostly explore.
You could also view it as these powerful items tend to be in the hands of those already in power. If you or anyone else wants to rise above their power level you must choose your enemies. You could try and take the princes +3 longsword, angering him and his nation, or you could delve into places whose new ocupants the prince despises to take their sword.
This is all that I think about . . . all the time. You need to go to Germany, Czech, Republic, Italy, France, Belgium, etc. D&D worlds are all post-apocalyptic. I just hate that they say it is Medieval and then do not narrow it down and present us with Biedermeier clothing, ships and architecture that are at the earliest Renaissance. You have to think about how magic and dungeons would affect economies. Think of what a gold mine running out of gold did to some kingdoms in the Middle Ages or what the Silver train did to inflation on the Iberian peninsula. With monsters like those wandering around, I cannot imagine any village not having some sort of protective wall or magics to protect them. Certainly dragons would make a lot of fortresses obsolete. Maybe they would have pikes all over them like giant anti-bird spikes? Having druids around would be great for your crop yields. How are the adventurers going to get all that treasure out of the dungeon? I am sure that the local lord will tax them for the treasure that they gained. The good old treasure tax! If there are all these treasures in all these dungeons than there are going to be scads of robbers who prey on adventurers after they have delved into the dungeon!
Imagine accidentally coming across an un-excavated archeological dig site that seems unrelated, while under a time crunch because the land is torn with war and the call to action is pressing. However maybe some lost information about how the wars even started is found under that dig site which might influence the major politics waging war against each other....Your party could totally just pass this up due to the pressure of plot action and sequences of events happening elsewhere, only to aid the war for the wrong reasons within ignorance....or leave the dig site to an NPC, who then gets captured or betrays the party with this uncovered information that the party never knew about because they didn't stick around. However, maybe the party did stick around and uncover what information could sway the conception of world politics while letting the events elsewhere play out, because they chose to stay instead of getting to the next destination asap....so maybe there's a loss from that but traded for what they now know. Gobekli Tepe is one of the oldest ruins found recently and is being covered up, with trees being planted atop most of the un-excavated site, which will in no doubt destroy the ruins underneath, while they built a parking lot over it as well and a half dome to preserve the main feature. This has become more of a tourist site now, and the World Economic Forum has no incentive of continuing excavation for the next 100 or so years....This could for sure be taken as inspiration for what I mentioned above; of an NPC taking over a dig site and betraying the party with the info. Now drawing in other npcs to check out the site while the true source of info has been removed or tampered with, but still being erected as a distracting beacon for traveling scholars and wizards to then come there to a dead trail or mislead answers. The source of info however could be well shipped off in secret to aiding the antagonist.
in the setting I'm developing, there are the empires that people know about (analogous to the Roman Empire or Ptolemaic Egypt) and then there are the layers of civilization buried deeper down. I didn't go lore crazy in developing the history of the world, but I did bullet out a series of layers: - Ancient Elven high civilization -- the epitome of high magic - Magical Sumerians -- the first humans who learned to harness magic - Dark Age Warlords -- they pillaged from the ruins left by the previous two layers, then buried their finds as grave goods - Romans with SOME magical power -- it's already beginning to leave the world - Medieval Mediterrean (now) -- magic is strange and rare, the PCs (if any take a caster class) may end up becoming some of the most powerful magic users in hundreds of years if, somehow, the PCs delve deep enough, maybe theyll find layers deeper and stranger (I'll figure out something if i get there)
Had a Spelljammer campaign where the ships were able to travel between systems instantly via an ancient gate system created by a long dead god in the Astral Sea.
4th edition's default setting is definitely not Forgotten Realms. For example the gods are all wrong and the there's an ancient tiefling empire that doesn't exist in Faerûn. The developers referred to it as "Points of Light" and it was intentionally sparsely specified, because the DM is supposed to fill in any needed details.
This was made slightly more explicit in 4e and its brief discussion of the "points of light" campaign setting. The generic D&D setting is basically fantasy post-apocalypse, and it had been for decades when they explicitly said it in late 00s. I kind of late playing it as civilization not still in regression, but at its absolute nadir. There have been a couple generations or a couple centuries of gradual collapse (to taste) following some sort of apocalypse or cataclysm, and now the new order is emerging and the new powers that will rule the next empire are being decided. Playing through the actual collapse would be fun, if you had a DM would could convincingly portray it. I've never quite been able to convince myself I've got a good plan for how to do that.
I for one love to run campaigns with magic shops, and wizard schools, and both artificers and enchanters making lots and lots of money flooding the market with powerful objects. I like the flow of having my players invest all their gold into power early on in order to venture into more natural dungeons, where they can acquire rare minerals and monster pieces that can be brought back to those artisans in order to make even greater magic items. If there isn't war and turmoil in my world, I don't see how something like this wouldn't immediately become the norm, particularly with monsters, and dragons, and gods still around. You'd think a decently administered kingdom would invest in some young mages to keep the King's guard outfitted with enchanted weapons and armors, and a lot of other logical consequences of magic being available to anyone experienced enough to have killed a dozen of rats would have manifested themselves in your society. In a particularly economic-minded game I run, I even use electrum as coinage from ancient fallen civilizations that can only be recovered from ruins by adventurers, and thus its value fluctuates and affects the market depending on how successful my player characters and their competition have been plundering dungeons.
You can easily do this with a low magic campaign. Just make them black market and accessible only to those in the know. The PCs are in the know from lvl 1. Don't block them. But make the common folk treat even a +1 sword like the power of the gods.
See... you're _thinking_ about this from a real-world economic perspective. Most folks _don't_ treat a fantasy world like it's a real place full of real people... in fact, most people _don't spend much time _*_thinking_*_ at all_ . Which is sad, because what you're describing is _awesome_ and exactly what *would* happen if magic and martial powers were as quickly and easily obtained as is shown in most modern TTRPGs. On the _other_ hand, Player Characters in the original D&D were so _squishy_ that it makes _perfect sense_ that nobody in their right mind is going out 'adventuring', and those who _do_ are seen as (somewhat uncivilized) 'heroes' who are worthy of admiration and who regularly ascend to near-noble status on the basis of a few successful delves.
@@brentogara My first gaming shop during the late 1990's before WotC, all the dam gate keeping with AD&D and nonsense over multiclassing and limit limits to nonhumans. Best one, .. you have to start all campaigns at 1st-level. So in my early twenties I told some of them to F-ck off and I set up a mini campaign location where everyone was playing AD&D 9th-level wizards to brew potions & scribe scrolls. ( before they became first level wizard feats.) The wizards run a .. Walgreens .. in the under dark. There was a male drow that braided dwarves beards and braided decorative ropes. A dwarf knife smith that hands his blades off to a drow to engrave. Drow makeup was in the Walgreens. They came off as a lawful/chaotic .. good community, when business is good. If you wrong them, they will feed your feet to an ooze. Follow with torture for a few months and then sell you for mine labor or spell parts, a piece at a time. But if you were polite and down on your luck, they take you up to the green dragon nest on the main road back to the nearest trading output village. The green dragons are d-cks but they work under a lawful contract. Greens love new people to bicker and insult. Drow act like teenagers, the dwarves tale dad jokes in a dry matter of fact tone of voice.
Good video. One of my biggest struggles in making my own setting is identifying the implications of the current dnd system on the world itself. It's not super clear without some digging, so a video like this that brings some of there inferences to light is super helpful.
I think there's certainly an alternative that maintains the "best way to get cool shit is to delve deep" vibe while getting rid of the "lost golden age" element that it at first seems to require. Simply take a cue from the real world: the best weapons aren't for sale because making them requires restricted know-how and resources. As an individual or small organization, you can go buy a gun, you could even hire a decent craftsman to make something custom for you, but the actual high-grade gear is restricted to use by institutional forces. Of course, you could always just go dig through some old surplus (i.e. do the dungeon delving thing). Those things still aren't equal to what the current day big wigs swing around, but it'll still be of a higher caliber than what most people have. Bam, solved.
That was super interesting stuff, that I never thought about before! Thank you for that! Also it really reminded me of the world from "The Wandering Inn" Series...
The people who call it that don't take into consideration that from the Bronze Age, up until the proliferation of gunpowder, the level of technology, and the average person's access to it, remained about the same. Modern man has been around for about 100,000 years, but most big advancements have only occurred within the last few hundred. "Stasis" is the world's default setting.
@@fleetcenturion No, that discounts all the medieval advances in agriculture, animal husbandry, weaving, rope-making, textiles, metallurgy, windmills and watermills, castle construction, ship building, and more.
@@digitaljanus Yes, but the rate of change rarely hit any tipping points. The really big changes were ocean travel, gunpowder and the printing press. Once the expensively-trained and expensively-equipped armoured knight could be brought down by a man who'd spent a week learning to load and fire an arquebus, and when the middle classes could read, write and publish pamphlets criticising the feudal order, social change was inevitable and speeded up. There's a reason most people place their fantasy games somewhere between 500BCE and 1450CE, socially and technologically speaking, and disallow the inventions which would enable the escape from that era. Augmenting their societies only with minor magics keeps the 1% (the Lvl 20 PCs, if you like) in charge and societal change infrequent.
@@fleetcenturionEverything you just said is absolutely incorrect, even down to the fact that modern man has been around for 300,000 years not 100,000 😅
@@RichWoods23 Your proposed time scale is totally terrible. The Early Middle Ages only ran from 500 BCE until 1024CE, the End of Rome until the End of the Ottonian line in the Holy Roman Empire. After which came the High Middle Ages from 1024CE until 1300CE, in which Europe surpassed the technology and development of the Roman Empire. Fashion also started to change more often and advancements in clothemaking took place. If you are doing Medieval Reenactment, dessing for the Early Middle Ages is easy. But for the High Middle Age and Late Middle Age you have to be really careful, because the fashion changed every 50 to 20 years and your kit can be dated by how it looks. It's also only in the Late Medieval period from 1300CE until 1500CE, that you get the full European Plate armor and that was also a time when the first soldiers with guns started to run around. The Medieval Period in Europe only ended more or less during the religious wars caused by the 30 Years War. "Knights in shining armor" existed at the same time Europeans invented their own field canons and started to dig the first trenches to escape gun fire during sieges. The realy fantasy is RPGs having them standing together with Barbarians inspired by North Vikings and Roman Gladiators, both being dead for centuries by that point.
"Once, the Creator walked among us. There was untold bliss, harmony. We never knew sickness. But in his rage and jealousy, the Creator's brother struck him down, and slowly, ever so slowly, the world began to die. The light is fading. The days grow colder, and the sun itself gives less light. What was once a bright, hopefully paradise, is now a barren, winter wasteland. So much has been lost since the World Broke when the Creator Died... Much that was known is now lost. The mountains rose up, swallowing the valleys. The seas split, giving rise to new land. And the very foundations of the world changed, forever. Come, child, dance the sands. Melt the ice. Fight on. The Long Night is coming, but we fight on. Until the Final Sunrise."-A fragmented passage from a Syndicate letter, written to a nobleman's child on their coming of age birthday, date unknown, sometime before the Third Breaking, and the coming of the Long Dark.
This is why I run LotFP not DnD. The in system assumptions are a lot more weird and unknown than a system like DnD. And yes you can change any system to fit your wanted formula, players are often expecting something more specific depending on the system. Saying “I wanna run DnD” means something very different than say “I wanna run DCC.”
Why can't a dungeon just be a bandit stronghold in a cave or an old fort? There's no reason, other than a lack of imagination to limit a setting like this.
I haven't seen this as much. There is a focus on game-ification of things, shifting the setting away from that implication. Magic item shops, cool builds, neat crunch for players to explore, and what not have created new feeling and expectations. These aren't bad by themselves, they just don't really fit that setting as well. As you implied, I think that setting better fits old school rules and the expectations they bring.
Imagine if the ancient peoples actually did leave glittery magic item behind. Random guy pulls out a glittering curved bronze blade, inset with turquoise and fluted with gold. "Behold the blade of the fallen god Aten. If I knew how to wield a Khopesh you all would be in dire trouble."
I mean it depends on your point of view. In our world if you want wealth and power you delve deep into the earth for the remains of ancient creatures and the hearts of long-dead stars.
Great video! A good thought project- modern gaming civilization stand on the shoulders of giants- the secrets of the past can only be glimpsed by it’s lost ancient artifacts- like the pyramids of Egypt -
Very interesting video! In my own campaign setting, sat in an alternative 1200th scandinavia (we're scandianvian after all), a clash between the Asir and Vanir god, and the Jotunn in Midgaard has left the world in ruin and transformed it from a golden age of wonder to an age of mankind (implying that the wonders of the world has left.). Although mighty kingdoms of humans still exist, they look like specs of dust compared to the colossal ruins and mile wide old battlefields of the gods and jotunn still left in Midgaard.
I dunno. I think a lot of this more comes down to practicality. Magic Item Shops are rare because the amount of practice and training and learning a magic user needs to be capable of even basic enchantments is immense. Thus, a simple +1 Longsword is, monetarily, worth an incredible amount more than a plain old Master work Longsword. And there may well be a good few folks capable of creating new Legendady items. The Gods of any given DnD setting are also prone to creating new artifacts if the needs arise. But where are you, humble adventurer, more likely to be able to get your hands on one of these? With your poultry sum of 20 gold, can you buy a magic sword from the shop? Or is it easier, cheaper, less morally grey, and unlikely to attract the ire of the entire City Guard if you just wander into an abandoned temple and kill the Ogre guarding his little hoard of weapons? I mean, if the hoard doesn't contain that +1 sword you wanted, at least you might get paid for killing the ogre and his hoard should at least contain enough loot to fund your delve into the next dungeon. Spin the wheel and hope maybe the nest of Ankhegs you're here to clear out maybe contains the bodies of better equipped and less fortunate adventurers.
it would be nice if the dilapidated state of the world was in a larger part of the gameplay and the story that is told at the same time. why is the world so full of abandoned structures and buildings? etc. Great Video !
I would argue that the powerful magic items were only from era long ago. Ruins and stuff have items that just do not have a 'current' owner that the players would not be likely to want to kill to take such. A kingdom likely has many potent weapons. Its just the current user of some of them are not going to give them away and/or do not show off such power. So likely the lower power weapons are sold or openly made more while the much more powerful items would be kept by kingdoms as national assets.
I like magic item shops for small things, like a magical firecracker. The kind of sime thing creative players may use in unintended ways, like creating a diversion, starting a fire or making someone believe they're a powerful mage.
HUH. I'm really glad I seem to have intrinsically understood this. The TTRPG setting I'm running just barely got out of a bit of a Dark Age following a local cataclysm that struck just after a massive war, that was at the tail end of a golden age of colonizing a new land. And an RPG I'm making at the moment is essentially post-post-post- *multiple* apocalypses, both world-wide and localized.
Aw, man, the British Museum has so much cool stuff! Also, if you haven't been there and happen to visit Londond again, take a gander at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection!
This is also drawn heavily from D&D's Tolkien influence and his own influence from stories like Beowulf--which was written in a time when there wasn't technological standardisation, so the highest-quality swords were probably the oldest ones, because they had lasted longer, the only real way of testing that--hence the hero finds stuff of great power in barrows and ancient hoards.
I heard about how, before the first campaign settings, everybody played in 'fantasy land', just whatever people expected to see in fantasy. Then Greyhawk happened! Information courtesy of Matt Colville.
So, fun spin on the 'power is in the dungeons and from the past' thing. I played around with that in a campaign I ran once (in 4e D&D actually, though I'd made it for 3.5 originally.) and the general idea of how I did it is worth sharing. Basically, power has levels to it, from least to greatest they went like this: Let's use a sword as an example here. 0. What weapons, spells etc you see everywhere in much of the world. Easy to get, just barely good enough. Example: Basic longsword. 1. Professional soldier level gear for much of the world. Not ubiquitous, but because it's considered outdated in the setting, it's pretty common and affordable. Twenty years ago in setting this would have been several ranks higher. Example: Steel Longsword. 2. Modern military gear for much of the world. Limited in supply because of the geo-politics of the setting, so what little 'falls off a truck' and isn't worth hunting people down for sits here. It's absolutely better than level 1 gear, but not overwhelmingly so. Example: Alloy Longsword. 3. Top level Military gear from Belka. The gear so good (and limited in number) that it's letting one nation take on essentially the whole world. Inevitably, some of it's on the market. Makes a mockery of level 1 gear and is a clear step up (if sometimes weird, like swapping bows for magical guns) from level 2. Example: Carbon Blade Longsword. 4. Ancient Artifacts. Old school gear you'd have to find in a dungeon, so magically potent it can outpace level 3 gear, if not by that much. In any other setting, this stuff would be a 'Hay DM are you sure you should have this in your setting?' level powerful, is literally made by the gods. Example: Antikytheran Longsword 5. Creon Military. Isolationist nation that never lost their advanced stuff in the previous multiple cataclysms but faces a critical resource shortage. If you can get that resource, it's horrifyingly good. If you can get that resource, Creon's coming for you. (Is literally made for use by a massed army to fight the Gods.) Example: Regolith Particle Loop Longsword. 6. Bleeding Edge Belkan gear. Yes, their prototypes are pushing beyond 'use to kill Gods' but you'd have to steal it from them or work for them to get it. If level 3 is modern firearms, this is man portable railguns. Example: Beamsaber. 7. The Being Above's Gifts. Said being predates the Gods, is stronger than them by far, and existence continues because it can't be bothered to do anything about you. It's got servants for that who similarly rarely bother with mere Gods and consider level 6 gear like a Childs cute imitation of their own. You'd have to heroically kill one of them to get any of it. Example: The Sword With No Blade. (A handle hat acts like there's a sword blade attached when you swing with intent to harm and only harms what you intended to harm in that swing.) 8. Anti-Causal Weapons. Full on Artifacts as ancient in setting as the story of Gilgamesh is in our world, able to bypass causality and thus able to defeat The Being Above. Was bleeding Edge for the civilization that made The Being Above and thus comedically impossible to be rid of completely. Impossibly simple. Example: The Blade. (A mundane looking sword that just happens to ensure what you kill with it stays dead and is a pretty decent sword on top of that.) So you get this weird curve of age on power where it goes up with newer, than old comes in, then things spike to the best modern innovations, and then the antediluvian stuff stands at the top, menacingly. I deliberately made ruins both rare and utterly long plundered (save on the Moon itself for plot reasons.) because the setting was built on the idea of 'there was a D&D campaign in the past of this world and we've moved on since then.' with the biggest shakers up of history being those 'former Player Characters'. This meant that dungeons were not on the menu, it was more military compounds or sky ships that filled that 'hostile enemy filled location' role. Loot was often intelligence that the players would turn in for better gear from their grateful mercenary patrons, or high value expendables to snatch up.
I don’t want to say you’re wrong, but for me the DnD meta-setting was just another instance of the Golden Age archetype. It occurs all over the place in modern fantasy, and it was prevalent up until the human civilization came up with a novel idea of “progress”. When there is no advancement to be easily spotted during one’s lifetime, and year after year is basically the same, there is no hope for the better in the future, so naturally “the better” is placed in the past. On top of that, with slow progress, ancient weapons and artifacts aren’t seen as obsolete: your father fights with a sword, his father fought with a sword, and ancient heroes also fought with swords. In reality those swords improved a lot, but as far as the myth is concerned, they are basically the same, hence the ancient all-powerful sword treasure archetype. The magic is also an idea which explains the myth: it used to be commonplace but slowly disappeared. So it all clicks together, and there isn’t actually any need for a rational-minded explanation of a regress and/or disaster.
In my own homebrews, the ancient world was of magic and monsters, and while war between the sentient species happened, it wasn't common due to the danger of mosnters and demons. The modern world is a world of technology, where magic has (mostly) been left aside (but not forgotten) and monsters are few, weak and domesticated, more like the difference btween cows and urochs. A great worldwide earthquake caused widespread devastaton and the resurfacing of dungeons, ruins of the ancient world where magic is still strong. In that homebrew, most people can't use magic, but anyone who has delved into a dungeon can *awaken*, and modern weapons and armor are not inferior to the ancient artifacts of the past, as technology can replace a lot of the magic, but modern technology was made to combat the sentient species. They are weapons that don't do that much damage, comparatively, but are easy to handle and (crit bonus against sentient races and penetrate resistances), modern armor is likewise made to handle that type of weapon, a lot of AC, very few resistances. Ancient, magical artifacts were made to fight monsters first and foremost, big and strong creatures. No to-hit bonus, but pretty big dice and damage bonus, armor that is less focused on deflecting and more on adding damage resistance.
(i realize this more a comment about magic items than about the world building but...) i personally find +1 weapons to be fairly boring while they would definitely be priceless items and undebatably useful, if just a weapon with a few effect like maybe you can have glow and once a day cast divine favor is much more interesting than a +1 sword. Hell, a sword that is just a sword not even a +1 sword, but have it be a sword to EVERYTHING. to a mortal it is no more or less deadly than a regular sword would be to a commoner, but its just as deadly to anything else, it does have any bonuses to damage or anything, but it will ignore what ever insane supernatural craziness a monster may have. (I.E. is that a ghost that would be resistant to slashing/piercing/bludgeoning damage, yes it will cut the ghost like it cuts anything else. Is that a demon immune to non-magical damage, yeah the sword doesn't care, the demon takes full damage. is that a banerloth that will when you kill it the banerloth will slowly grow inside your soul and turn you into the banerloth you killed, the sword will permently kill it. no growing back. no revivals. no saturday morning villian that is back next week this sword isn't fancy but when it kills you, you stay dead. at low levels it just seams like slightly better and more durable blade but nothing crazy, but grows with you. and at the high tiers this is the kinda thing that gods tremble at the mention of. i guess my problem with +1 weapons is that the feel unmagical. they are just mechanics and no flavor. you could give some small mechanics to a simple sword but if you do the flavor right a very simple thing can be the seed of legends
For all the mistakes Bioware may have made with the Dragon Age games, they were still great world builders. In the first game, they introduce history through the legends that exist in the world. The church's version of history suits its purpose, as does the history of the elves and dwarves. As the games progress, you find out that most of those histories are untrue, usually through ancient big bads that reveal what really happened during their time of power.
My world’s sort of like this, except in reverse. In ages past, the world was ruled by the balance of good and evil, and was much like the typical DnD setting. However, over the course of millennia and a series of divine shenanigans, all of the old gods are either dead or cyborgs, and the forces of light and darkness fight in an eternal war that burns on for its own sake. Consequently, some of the strongest artifacts, and some of the thickest-blooded celestial- or infernal-born warriors are running around doing their high-fantasy thing. But all of that is because of the war. The country of Evyscara isn’t in power because it’s a source of radiance and virtue (the last quality being dubious in its veracity), it’s in power because they and their Lawful ‘Neutral’ war god are the only things stopping the Condassans from taking everything and burning it in the fires of glory, rape and literal nuclear fallout. This is an age of great power, of gods directly empowering men and grand mages penning new spellbooks and forging legendary, enchanted blades. It is also the most dismal and terrifying age in recorded history.
I sort of ended up doing the opposite of this, the players kept complaining so the best magic items were in exorbitantly expensive shops while ruins had ones they’d collect to sell to afford the better ones. They basically just wanted to be able to customize the enchantments and there wasn’t really an argument for why they couldn’t based on the reputation we’d established for the capital city by that point.
I think this might be very "obvious" advice, but the specific way you've framed it feels invaluable to me. "Showing, not telling" through the distinctions between item enchantments themselves I think is pretty brilliant. Sure, the best thing mortalkind can still make might be a +2 piece of gear, but a +1 scimitar that can produce fire (assuming the people who find it even know what a scimitar is) is actually incredibly useful, perhaps even more so than a weapon that can "cut" things better. The bit on "forgotten spells" and older edition D&D characters having less HP is something that's been on my mind a LOT the past couple of years. I feel it's something that might be implicit in recent editions, but it's not really a "default option" of the games themselves. They just tell you "oh, you know this is a cool idea if you want to use it". I remember an older friend of mine saying his years of playing AD&D as a wizard were mostly trying to figure out how to perform ancient ritual spells and mitigate the "system shock" of some spells. I don't know if any of that is part of the base mechanics of the game, or just good playing on both sides, but it sounds a lot more mysterious by "default" than what we've got going on these days.
All my youth, I liked the logical approach you take to world building-but I have warmed up greatly to illogical, “gonzo” game worlds. Flying Buffalo’s Tunnels & Trolls RPG is just plain fun, as are the herringbone tweed trousers that delvers often wear in the illustrations to the original GRiMTooth’s TRAPs books.
I feel like this is actually what I’ve loved about dnd, the total freedom and lack of inherent stories/world of most other ttrpgs feels overwhelming to me, and I never know where to start
"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of..."
Let me tell you of the days of high adventure!
@@Earthmote *kettle drums rock out*
*anvil of crom plays.*
The magical elements aside, medieval Europe is not as dissimilar to the standard D&D setting as many would think. Egyptian monuments built hundreds or thousands of years earlier dwarfed what was being built in Europe at the time. Ancient Rome commanded armies and fleets numbering in the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands at Philippi. Cape Ecnomus was the largest naval battle in Europe until Jutland in WW1. Aristotle, dead for centuries and many of his works unknown, was considered the high watermark of science. Alexander, Pompey Magnus, and Hannibal were generals the likes of which nobody expected ever to see again. All the grand stuff was in the past, and usually the long distant past, and so much was lost.
Yeah, there was definitely a regression after the fall of Rome (as the obvious name implies "Dark Ages"). And we definitely still cite many classics for influence, inspiration and standards that still apply.
So its interesting to see how we've evolved, but also retained so much over time too.
But that's only because medieval people deluded themselves into believing it so. Whether it was secular rulers envying the scale of Roman organization or religious authorities believing the farther away from original sin humanity was, the more evil they became. While by the High Medieval period most technologies had already advanced beyond Roman levels, as needing other solutions to problems besides "throw more slaves at it" led to much innovation, and the importing of advanced sciences from the East. As the Early Modern period progressed, the nascent European empires who were busy conquering distant lands, enslaving or eradicating their populations, and exploiting their resources decided to emulate...an ancient empire that had conquered distant lands, enslaved or eradicated their populations, and exploited their resources!
@@digitaljanus Agreed, albeit with the caveat that reductions in population (not least due to plagues) and long distance trade were real, non-psychological barriers to technological and sociological advances.
@@digitaljanus It's not really medieval people deluding themselves, so much as Renaissance people playing up the crappiness of Post-Roman Europe, to make their OWN developments seem better by comparison. Insisting that they, the Renaissance Men, were the inheritors of the Roman Empire's greatness after centuries of ignorance and squalor. Rather than the complex and constantly evolving world the medieval period actually was.
Like, Renaissance people (and thus, by extension, historians for centuries after) loved to pretend Byzantium didn't exist.
(I would be remiss if I didn't also point out that the obsession with Rome tended to have a White Supremacist and Imperialist undercurrent and motivation. Colonial powers loved to play up the greatness of Rome, and the tragedy of its fall, because they, too, were bloody-handed, slave-holding imperial civilizations. Eager to justify their own exploitation and atrocities heaped on other ethnic groups, by way of glorifying the last great civilization that did that.)
Rome stood on mass slavery and a constant war machine. They had incredible feats of organization and civic development, with everything from apartment buildings to highly effective plumbing and sophisticated road development. They were great and terrible. Egypt was subjugated to be the agricultural supplier. Citizens could vote and travel the entire empire freely, only free Roman Men could be citizens but foreign born men could serve the military to become citizens. Let's not reduce either their brutality or their achievements.
There is more time between Cleopatra and the building of the Giza pyramids that between us and Cleopatra. For thousands of years, the Giza site would have loomed in the desert, testament to the amazing wealth and power of the long gone builders.
This has seemed a weird observation to me. Cleopatra (the notable one) was a contemporary ofJulius Ceasar, who was born 100 years before christ. She was Greek, not Egyptian. The Ptolemys had ro
ruled Egypt for hundreds of years.
@@tsoliot5913 the observation is to put into perspective for long how the ancient egyptian existed
That's the premise of Pathfinder's setting. There are thousands of ruins everywhere, many disasters destroyed past civilizations and the world is basically a graveyard full of ancient wonders and super advanced space tech.
I ran a campaign where the monsters in the dungeon were tired of humans slaughtering them so they started bringing all the treasures to the surface and dumping them wherever they could.
It wrecked economies, left the world in the throes of constant war and caused kingdoms to crumble.
How did my players deal with it?
They hired armies of laborers and mercenaries to bring it back to the underworld, slaughtered any monster who opposed them and locked it all away in deep vaults.
How they hired them if currency is useless.
Sloppy toppy with a twist @@erig6596
@@erig6596a wrecked economy doesn’t mean an absent economy
Not creative enough. Obviously the solution was to take advantage of the political turmoil to overthrow the Monarchy and create the goods necessary for the spending so much money.
@@erig6596 carbohydrates
It's why I love Earthdawn as a system. It took a typical DnD world and setting and tried to find different reasons for such a settings idiosyncracies.
I loved Earthdawn!
@@pandoraeeris7860 The world and setting are amazing, but it has a lot of mechanical problems. While I like the exploding dice the success System means you constantly are looking up things on a chart. 4th Edition tries to fix this but introduced more math and especially made spellcasting way, WAY more complicated than it needs to be.
This is why I love settings like Ravnica. The deadliest weapons require venturing into the most perilous offices and overcoming the epic challenge of filing the correct requisition forms.
Well, I would point a few things out:
1. The original creators of tabletop RPGs were collegiate war game players who used to re-fight historical battles and such, and it derived from them wanting to scale it down. The idea was the challenge of being able to represent what amounted to personal encounters, statistically, and of course as they got into this more and more fantasy was added. Originally things were very bare bones because the thrill was simply in being able to do it.
It's so close to history in many cases, because the people doing it were history geeks, not just fantasy geeks, and the idea of sort of blending time periods was because they liked the idea of being able to throw stuff that didn't co-exist at the same time against each other.
In drawing from fantasy novels, mythology, and other sources, a lot of what you see in D&D was chosen based on what was gamable, and to really understand a lot of it you have to look at the old war gaming rules which in many cases makes the evolution more obvious.
It should also be noted that while the most popular, D&D was not the first game of this time, guys like Professor MAR Barker actually pre-dated them, and I think there were a few others. As copyrights started out being a lot less strict, you can also see some of what was going on with D&D, even as far back as the pamphlets, being a direct response to some of the earlier attempts to do this.
Basically it should be no surprise how well it can stand up, given the types of people who made it, and what their parameters were.
2. One thing you need to also understand is that the ideas of modern RPG gamers and the people who created this, were very different. While these things always had a lot of story and world building behind them, I mean Gygax and Barker both put crazy amounts of work into their worlds, the idea was that it was a game and clearly there was winning and losing, and that goes back to wargaming. The idea of characters existing pretty much forever was a foreign idea, as in many respects it was a question of how far you could get, rather than the idea that a character would go on until the player, the group, or the GM got tired of them, and then they would just close it out.
This is why there were draconian rolls for attributes, and those would dictate what classes you could even make in many cases, you couldn't just play what you want, and there was no guarantee any party was going to be balanced. Hence why there were comments about say parties made up of all fighters and rogues, as those were two of the easiest classes to roll and do well at from early on. This is also why adventures had level ranges as opposed to a set level, and there were ideas like say giving exps for accumulating gold, as magical items were relatively rare, this was part of the design intent that someone who say got "stuck with the money" would wind up being higher level than those with magical items. Magical items also had exps values, to attempt to keep a certain parity, but basically someone with a lot of magical gear within a given peer group would likely have a lower level character. This is also why the idea of say buying magical items was an anathema for so long, because allowing that would mean a player would get the exps, and then an item on top of it, making always taking the material wealth the far better option if such sales options existed.
This is also why there were issues with what some called "Monty Hall" gaming. A foreign concept now, as the idea was that some character who succeeded at an improbable feat and got an incredible reward, could unbalance a peer group where people took turns GMing. See, that disproportionate reward, that someone would get just by being lucky... guessing right, having good die rolls, etc... still represents a level of power everyone else now has to deal with, and also makes that character harder to kill and remove the problem, where other characters will fall. It's a problem that can rapidly compound as improbable power can lead to more incredible feats, and then even more power, leading to a circle jerk that might make for a great story, but can be an utter headache for people playing as intended back then where it was assumed all characters would die, which is why getting stuck with a crappy one didn't mean much... a crappy character would die, and then it would be on to the next one.. and while each one might have some story behind them, the point was that only the exceptional would live on in the legends of D&D as being more than a transient fallen adventurer... you can even see some references to this logic in RPG inspired material with the dead adventurers everywhere. It's all part of a gag, a lot of entirely story based gamers don't even get anymore.
I point this out because realize, it wasn't until like probably the mid-1990s that you started hearing arguments like "If I'm playing in character, I shouldn't get killed or have bad things happen to me, as that discourages role-playing" we've all seen that one play out now, but I remember when that was new (I'm 49 by the way, but do know a lot of OG gamers, as I was one of the obnoxious red-box kids that came in with the cartoon-fed 'second wave' of the hobby ). Nowadays GMing has even transformed from a framework where the PCs were expected to likely die somewhere in the mix, to a series of plot points to shuffle people between, with planning for their success happening before things even start. It's kind of funny. I showed some Gen Z gamers stuff like the original "Isle Of Dread", "Tegel Manor", and reprinted Arduin Grimoire stuff. Some of them assumed that had to be fake because the attitude was so anti-thetical to everything they believe about how this was supposed to be. I had someone lecture me about how Gygax believed someone should GM, going off about modern principles, and then showed them some of the adventures he actually wrote like "Isle Of The Ape". The dude could be a flat out sadist, even before looking at "Tomb Of Horrors"... I suspect that beyond the politics enough of us middle aged folks making this point might have something to do with why a lot of younger gamers hate the guy. They miss the point that while gaming has changed, and many things are better, other things, like challenge and the same kind of exploration and experimentation are missing. They can't for example understand why someone might actually want a 10' pole or 5' steel rod nowadays.
5e and Ad&D are different games for different people in a different society (because its not necessarly better), personally i enjoy more 5e because i get to play with a character which i create and love, having a chance to survive because of my own wit and not because of luck or viceversa makes the game better, as is currently, but i think AD&D treated gaming as the reward, it doensnt matter if you die because you come back, youre different, but back. I do think 5e is better, mainly because we grew to like actually caring and playing with a character that grows and dies, but i do like the idea that dnd is always in the regression, mainly because if you read about aboleths for example that there was in fact a civilization before all.
@@maxicane8698 Well, I won't go into Aboleths or Phaerim, but it should be noted they were Lovecraftian-inspired concepts based around the idea of truly alien, malevolent, civilizations.
As far as 5E vs.AD&D goes, I actually did most of my gaming with D&D specifically under 2E AD&D and now do 1E Pathfinder.
My issue with 5E+, and I guess I can see where your coming from, is that it removes most of the actual "game" aspects from the Role-Playing GAME. A big issue with the way it encourages people to play is that the GM is rarely out to challenge the players, but create the illusion of challenge and risk. I see a lot of modern gamers have this attitude that if they are playing in character they should basically be functionally invincible unless they actually enjoy the consequences. I also think that the way it's functionally working now it breeds more drama as it opens doors for more clear favortism and so on.
While we're adjusting, my current group for example, not all of whom are young, seem to have a lot of trouble with puzzles or any kind of real reasoning. I've literally run some pretty basic adventures, and old dungeons as part of bigger campaigns, and they seem to think any kind of puzzle or lack of direction amounts to "guess what the GM is thinking" unless there is like an easily deciphered clue right in front of them. The idea of trial and error, exploration (the solution might be elsewhere in the dungeon), or not having a direct solution via a skill roll, is not something they can appreciate... I'm fine with story stuff, but I run into this more and more.
I do see the appeal in doing things this way, but I will say that I think it diminishes feelings of accomplishment when your not really doing anything. Modern gamers would freak out over something like say "Isle Of the Ape", "Isle Of Dread", or other classic adventures because the risk of dying is very real, and it's possible to absolutely wreck the entire party by not figuring things out and learning to adapt and do things like manage resources. When success is more or less a foregone conclusion, I think it makes your character far less of a hero, no matter how well you write it.
See a lot of people will look at something like "Tomb Of Horrors", "Return To The Tomb Of Horrors", "Dragon Mountain", or others and think old school game developers were terrible. The point is though that people did beat all of those without needing to have the GM lead them by the nose, and the simple knowledge that many people could not do it, no matter what they built for a character (Tomb Of Horrors is infamous for this, it's a challenge about thinking outside the box, not being billy bad ass, or pursuing it traditionally).
Basically I feel like at least 80% of the current crop of RPG players are all that guy, or the GM's girlfriend, that is fun to play with but has no real idea what they are doing so they mostly cheerlead and play some 18/00 strength, 3 intelligence, 3 wisdom meat grinder, or whatever while the rest of the group figures everything out and they try and entertain while adding skill rolls once in a while or something. It was fine when in say a group of 4-6 you had one or two people like that, but when everyone is like that, and some of them are trying to play nuanced characters and want the GM to make them feel smart, clever, and capable, as opposed to being it through their characters, I wonder what happened to the game at times... we've entered into the territory of RPGs becoming a self validation based therapy session.
Tolkien ran into the same issue when first writing the Hobbit and LOTR. So he developed a backstory. And then he had to develop a backstory to his backstory for it to all come together. And then he was able to write and have a point of reference.
Star Wars? Lucas had to do the same thing.
Religion? Yeah it does that too. If you don't know, don't have evidence, just guess and fill in the blanks.
Even ancient story and mythology follows this. The Illiad, Odyssey, and Beowulf are all about the glory days and the height of civilization when the greatest figures lived.
With the Iliad/Odyssey it was essentially fact. It was probably composed in the Greek Dark Ages/Early Iron Age, where the impressive Mycenaean civilisation had more or less completely collapsed centuries before and classical Greece had yet to rise from its ashes. Beowulf was less about a height of civilisation and more simply of heroic age figures. The Danes and Geats aren't portrayed has particularly advanced politically, technologically, or economically.
@@cadian101steven Gilgamesh waxes poetic about the lost golden age.😊
@@nakenmil Which is really interesting when we consider we have literally nothing for what they could have been referring to. It's the oldest story we have, and it's talking about how much better things were beforehand.
I remember someone having a theory that the "lands between" in Elden Ring were composed of ruins stacked atop ruins stacked atop more ruins, , to the point where certain cliffsides and plateaus were composed entirely of some grassed-over ancient monolith of unknown make and purpose. "it's ruins all the way down" is an interesting way to frame things.
That is literally how some Italian cities work, modern day Rome is the extended medieval Rome, which was built atop of Old Rome. (Also Rome isn't even that old compared to most sites, not only in Italy but in the whole mediterranean area)
There some locales like that in the Levant and Anatolia.
Luxor in Egypt is the longest continuously inhabited city in the world. It’s just a layer cake of older structures sinking into the earth under the weight of new structures that were built on top of them.
I say bring back the "Enchant Item" and "Permanency" spells for high-level wizards to start making their own magical items.
2024 dnd has concrete item creation rules now.
@@ZyvenZ so did 3.0 and 3.5
The 2024 DMG items rules are just Xanathar’s item creation rules with a requirement for Tool Proficiencies tacked on. So it’s been around even longer
Why bring back when you could do it yourself or better play something other than 5e
There was a prevalent suggestion in early D&D that magic and magic stuff was radioactive. Combined with the fact that the Greyhawk map was based on areas within the united states, there's a clear suggestion that the world of D&D is just post-nuclear earth. Much of fantasy in the wake of the atom bomb was based their worlds on a similar assumption.
Thats a Terrible Take for D&D
@@Joker22593 lame
Well,it also had martian landscapes and beings so... no i think D&d is more like an overlapping of many different worlds. I don't think Planescape is actually THAT far from it, only far less mundane.
@@texassasquatch5734 whats terrible about it? its literally foundational to *many* of the most respected fantasy works
Saberhagen's Empire of the East, for example, posited a post-nuke Earth in which magic had arisen and created god-like beings. And the sequel series, the Books of Swords, featured gods who came about in the wake of this, created magical swords which they gave out to humans as a game, causing wars to spread in an attempt to find and control these swords. And all of Brooks' Shannara Chronicles are set in a post-nuke Earth that is filled with all sorts of fantasy races, and magic which existed before humans was reactivated by the apocalyptic energies unleashed. That's just two examples, and they're both D&D AF. So yeah, totally lame. 🙄
I adore Eberron as a Dnd setting. It can have both the "old, lost tech and weapons" feel to it, and also the "cyberpunk-esque cutting edge weapons" produced by monopolizing mega corporations (Marked houses) feel. All in a noir 1920s aesthetic mixed with medieval/renaissance fantasy.
I delve into the Salvation Army when I want a +2 wool sweater, furniture of sturdiness, or Vinyl's Discs...artifacts that the modern world has forgotten how to produce.
World's Without Number by Kevin Crawford is fantastic for creating a world with layer upon layer of ruins and dungeons (and things that are like dungeons but aren't). Much of the book is devoted to creating these locations or hex crawls. There is even a default setting reminiscent of Vance's Latter Earth. Even if you don't use the setting you get lots of tools to make your setting and the dungeons to delve. It is openly OSR so it is easy to convert.
That's something I'd like to see explored more, beyond the practical campaign writing stuff there's a trope in fantasy which isn't just pseudo-medievalism that won't move forward, it's a surface-level medievalism where everything implies that the best days are long past. The Renaissance and Enlightenment will never happen. It's most blatant in Elden Ring and Dark Sun but it's there in almost most high fantasy settings and almost all game settings. I'd like to know more about why and if this trope has been subverted or averted by anyone.
short, probably incorrect answer: It is like that because Tolkien.
Long answer? You can talk a lot about the politics of fantasy, and hoo boy, people talk about it a lot - it might not show on some people's radars because the idea that "the best days are long past" is deeply conservative and people that talk (or subvert it) are mostly not.
@@AL2VAR As a complete tangent, I always found the "best days are behind us" perspective very frustrating. We can be the "Strong Men" who bring about "Good Times" *today* if we can stop wallowing in yesterday's loss. The whole internet zeitgeist of believing we're witnessing the fall of civilization is based on comparison to some undisclosed past none of us were likely to have even been alive for. What such people want to achieve by going back is best accomplished by moving forward.
Ctrl-F "vance" 1 result in the middle of the word "advancement." Jack Vance created the "Vancian" conception of magic used in DnD whereby wizards "memorize" spells at the beginning of the day. He also wrote a series of books set in his "Dying Earth" which heavily influenced future fantasy writers including Gygax and GRRM. "Dying Earth" was a post-apocalyptic setting in which magic was technically advanced technology influenced by Vance's experiences in WWII and the fears of nuclear war at the time.
The world is extremely sparsely populated with most humans having mutated into monsters and a few scattered wizards holed-up in castles. It really makes a lot of things in DnD fall into place: traps and monsters protect a wizard's keep because there aren't a bunch of people to hire as guards; the places are also not air-tight because there are so few actual humans left around that would try and break in; the abundance of mythological creatures is due to wizards purposefully making style choices to emulate mythology when creating those creatures. Like even more sparsely populated Mad Max with advanced far-future techno-magic.
Ctrl-F "vance" - find your post haha. Gene Wolfe's The Book of the Sun is also a "dying earth" tale, and is in an even more explicitly a far-future setting, after the fall of a great empire. But I think that only reinforces this connection between D&D and other post-apocalyptic stories. Look at Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (1980) or Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World for more explicit versions of that. Dragonlance wrote that trope directly into the world history, with the gods mostly turning their backs on humans and letting them suffer. But seriously - if you haven't read Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, I highly recommend it to anyone who reads this!
We can borrow the basic shape of Myth and Legend, that our civilization arose from an apocalyptic ending to a previous civilization, with successive waves of growing civilization each ended by its own apocalypse. Way back at the very beginning was the Mythic time when the gods did the Mythic acts that created the patterns of True and correct living. After the gods came the heroes of the time of Legends who also shaped human life. And finally after many generations of humans we were born into the world created by these previous generations of humanity. Shall we be heroes or villains to those who follow in our footsteps? This structure works with either Noble-Bright or Grim-Dark campaign concepts and explains the persistent pseudo medieval level of technology.
Well said!
Thing is, our modern civilizations are built on the collapse of older ones, if you consider the Bronze Age Collapse for example.
Fantasy just makes it cooler.
One of my favorite things to do in world building for DND is to make a world, a fully fleshed out one with countries and governments, then hit it with magic nukes, apocalypse, wipe it off the map and raise a new world in its place out of the ashes. That’s how the elden ring world was made, George RR build an entire world then the Japanese writers destroyed it and made a new one, hinting at what used to be there
A good idea/bit of advice from Matt Coleville is how he had his world’s history cover three dead empires, inspired by Roman, Chinese, and some third classical civilization I forget, because of the variety they provide. That way, he varied the architecture of ancient ruins, tombs, and other dungeons in varied states of decay, it allowed for different art styles, languages, and the design of magic items, and it gave inspiration on the types of monsters that might populate each.
I recall my DM stating that a lord's tomb was built much like an outpost. So once we returned to the surface i asked could the next hill and the one after also have been outposts. And he said why not head for the center of the outposts?
Empires built on the remains of Fallen empires. I agree it is a theme in D&D.
The third one in Colville’s world was Indian in aesthetic.
@ yeah, thanks, makes sense! The important thing to take away as advice though, is that you would benefit from having more than one dead empire overlapping the landscape. Not too much work and you get quite a lot of variability to play with.
Coleville's "Liber Bestarius" is underrated. Sketching out a world through its monster-manual was sort-of already done in the Scarred Lands (putting out the Creature Collection like three days after the real Monster Manual, what a boss move) but White Wolf kind of over egged the pudding there.
As a forever DM that doesn’t particularly care about fantasy, but runs mostly fantasy, I think of the D&D meta setting as a post-scarcity interstellar civilization that lives on theme park worlds, but they have collectively forgotten that they are the ancient high tech culture that created the ruins, that magic is technology, that all the human like races are humans, that the intelligent monsters are also humans, that angles, demons, elementals, etc, are sentient programs, and that the gods are humans with admin level access to the power grid with portfolios that define what areas of access they can grant to others. Magic users either have to figure out access codes and pull power from specific resources (prepared spell casting), are granted access from a patron (clerics, Druids, paladins, warlocks), or inherit access (sorcerers, specific monsters, etc). Crafted creatures like golems are programs imprinted on crudely constructed materials. Curses are programs imprinted incorrectly by accident or intent. This is why traps in dungeons reset, why treasures can be found in obvious places long after the treasure should have been looted, and Magic can be high or low in some places, and wide or narrow in others. This also explains why hybrid races/monsters can exist, and how people can travel to other worlds with near identical languages, customs, monsters, and gods.
It keeps me entertained while my players play out their individual fantasies.
The assumption that "Older = More Powerful" is so ingrained in fantasy that it comes off as a surprise when it turns out not to be the case (see the Frieren vs Qual fight in "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End")
The Witcher books also bring that up. At one point Geraly needs a new sword, and the smith comments his Witcher sword was made with meteorite iron for strength from the included nickel and chromium. However in the 70ish years he had it, metallurgy improved so much that even a cheap sword is more robust.
DnD's Rome was the Netherese empire, their leader made a mistake so great it killed a god. Now the god replacing her set rules which is why spells are tiered at all the DnD.
Almost every d&d setting has a fallen empire like Civilization that once existed Netherese is just one of many
Technically, they had tiered spells before. They just had 10th and 11th level spells, and one 12th level spell as well beforehand. They went away.
My favorite repeated trope is wizards making floating cities, then pushing the weave so hard in their folly that they break the magic which made their city float in the first place.
I love having old empires inspire different ruins - for example, inspired by Rome, Egypt, the Aztec/Mayan/Incan Empires. You can imagine a Roman Empire style empire collapsing due to internal strife, a plague, and barbarian plundering. The sudden vanishing of the Eternal Court, the Egypt inspired-empire's ruling gods and demi-gods, led to chaos, rebellion, and fragmentation. While the Mesoamerican Empire fragments after a celestial event caused by a miscalculation of their famed star-charts shattered their magical stability, leading to apocalyptic event such as volcanic eruptions and a civil war and the populace abandoning their cursed cities for the wilds.
Fact: the implied setting of D&D *was* Oerth aka Greyhawk setting. I think the game started it';s long slide into mediocrity when that changed. But then, I am old and bitter, and don't get to play anymore.
(Honestly I am very happy to see young people are keeping the game alive. It was my whole existence from 1977 to 1992...)
It was organically grown from Blackmoor, which never quite stood on its own feet. Although Ritchie tried in the 1980s.
All of history, recorded or not, directly affects me, you, and literally everything that exists
D&D cribbed from Jack Vance's The Dying Earth way more than it did from D&D. If you haven't read that book yet, you are in for a treat.
And Vance ripped off Smith's Zothique (spicing it up with Howard).
One potential thing to do if you don't want to spend too much work on fleshing out a history is simply to go back in 100 or 500 or 1000 year increments and role dice for how the "civilization level" of the surrounding society changed over each increment. This tells you what time periods in the past had better or worse artifacts than the present day in your setting. You can then assume a given percentage of artifacts lost per time increment to determine what sorts of stuff the party is likely to find.
That's a nice simplification technique!
I was fascinated to read the old, original D&D setting and realize that it seems to imply a very much open world setting, even as rhe game master you do not really know what mightbhappen next, you're thrown into a very hostile, alien world you don't know much about and have to explore a world that just takes shape as you play!
In tormenta (a Brazilian rpg) there is a villain caled Mestre Arsenal (Arsenal Master) who seek every magic item to restock the magic of his giant robot (something line a megazord).
This is why Frieren: Beyond the Journey is one of the greatest fantasy works of all time, and more GMs should incorporate its lessons into their RPGs :D
80 years ago, a demon lord created the greatest killing spell the world had ever seen, capable of penetrating all defensive wards.
However, when he's released from his prison in the present day, he learns the hard way that the spell he created was SO terrifying at the time that the entire magical community spent the last 80 years studying it and developing work-arounds, and the new, more powerful defensive spells have become so commonplace that even the demon lord's own spell has become one of the most basic offenses that nobody needs to take seriously anymore.
But when the demon lord SEES one of the new defensive wards that took the magical community decades to develop, he's able to figure it out in seconds, and when he uses the new defensive spell himself against the protagonists' attacks, it takes him seconds to figure out a weakness that he can take advantage of when attacking them again.
If he'd won that fight, or even just escaped after losing, then he would've taken over the world within a week :D His power was not the spell he came up with - his power was the creativity that it took to come up with the spell, and after catching up on the other arcane advancements of the last 80 years, he would've used the same creativity to come up with even more new ones.
I'm reminded of General Patton studying cavalry technique for nearly a decade, only to have to scrap most of what he'd learned due to tanks and mobile infantry being developed.
The most popular D&D Campaign Setting, the Forgotten Realms, had an empire called Netheril thousands of years ago. The power of the empire was not in the spells they came up with, but rather in the secrets of even more ancient artifacts called the Nether Scrolls, which taught them the core principles underlying magic. Like that demon, their power was not in a single spell, but rather the creativity that the scrolls enabled them to use. If the Nether Scrolls had been united in modern realms, it would change the world.
“One look at the Nether scroll and I've learned what a spell is. I've been collecting spells as if every one were different. That's illusion...spells are all the same. They're all a path through illusion to truth. One look, and I've seen the fundamental truth of magic.”
- The mage Druhallen.
Most Fantasy works sleep on it with their superiority in all aspects. Recency bias is real.
What anime brainrot does to a weeb
In what aspects? Musical arrangement? Visual storytelling? Screenplay? Art style? Framing? Dialogue? Comparing a 1000+ page novel to a manga and anime series is comparing apples and oranges. It’s like saying Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time is better than Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. The two are working with a completely different set of tools. It’s not a serious comparison that any reasonable person would make.
Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is an excellent work of visual storytelling and fantasy fiction.
Carcosa has a magic system where you learn spells by going out to some stele in a tundra and transcribing the content.
The implied setting of 5e is modern day Los Angeles LARPers.
Oof, that cuts deep
Haha, very true.
I don't get it
@@arempy5836 it means they all have main character syndrome
@@ciscornBIG but what does that have to do with LA or LARP?
Really good return to our roots. I just established that 'the ancients' created all the magic items of the world last session. Thanks for the full story about why
DnD is a post apocalypse story.
or even a post-post-apocalypse story, depending on how you tweak the settings.
i always felt that the term dungeon, outside of the clear marketing benefits of an alliterative title, is a bit of a misnomer, and ruins is what you mostly explore.
well, "basement of the castle" was how Blackmoor started, and dungeons do exist under castles
You could also view it as these powerful items tend to be in the hands of those already in power.
If you or anyone else wants to rise above their power level you must choose your enemies.
You could try and take the princes +3 longsword, angering him and his nation, or you could delve into places whose new ocupants the prince despises to take their sword.
Good ideas!
This is all that I think about . . . all the time.
You need to go to Germany, Czech, Republic, Italy, France, Belgium, etc.
D&D worlds are all post-apocalyptic.
I just hate that they say it is Medieval and then do not narrow it down and present us with Biedermeier clothing, ships and architecture that are at the earliest Renaissance.
You have to think about how magic and dungeons would affect economies. Think of what a gold mine running out of gold did to some kingdoms in the Middle Ages or what the Silver train did to inflation on the Iberian peninsula.
With monsters like those wandering around, I cannot imagine any village not having some sort of protective wall or magics to protect them.
Certainly dragons would make a lot of fortresses obsolete. Maybe they would have pikes all over them like giant anti-bird spikes?
Having druids around would be great for your crop yields.
How are the adventurers going to get all that treasure out of the dungeon? I am sure that the local lord will tax them for the treasure that they gained. The good old treasure tax!
If there are all these treasures in all these dungeons than there are going to be scads of robbers who prey on adventurers after they have delved into the dungeon!
Yes, great points! It does present a lot of implications and challenges. It’s nice to see thought out world building ideas around some of them.
anti-dragon spikes are a hilarious idea
Imagine accidentally coming across an un-excavated archeological dig site that seems unrelated, while under a time crunch because the land is torn with war and the call to action is pressing. However maybe some lost information about how the wars even started is found under that dig site which might influence the major politics waging war against each other....Your party could totally just pass this up due to the pressure of plot action and sequences of events happening elsewhere, only to aid the war for the wrong reasons within ignorance....or leave the dig site to an NPC, who then gets captured or betrays the party with this uncovered information that the party never knew about because they didn't stick around. However, maybe the party did stick around and uncover what information could sway the conception of world politics while letting the events elsewhere play out, because they chose to stay instead of getting to the next destination asap....so maybe there's a loss from that but traded for what they now know.
Gobekli Tepe is one of the oldest ruins found recently and is being covered up, with trees being planted atop most of the un-excavated site, which will in no doubt destroy the ruins underneath, while they built a parking lot over it as well and a half dome to preserve the main feature. This has become more of a tourist site now, and the World Economic Forum has no incentive of continuing excavation for the next 100 or so years....This could for sure be taken as inspiration for what I mentioned above; of an NPC taking over a dig site and betraying the party with the info. Now drawing in other npcs to check out the site while the true source of info has been removed or tampered with, but still being erected as a distracting beacon for traveling scholars and wizards to then come there to a dead trail or mislead answers. The source of info however could be well shipped off in secret to aiding the antagonist.
in the setting I'm developing, there are the empires that people know about (analogous to the Roman Empire or Ptolemaic Egypt) and then there are the layers of civilization buried deeper down. I didn't go lore crazy in developing the history of the world, but I did bullet out a series of layers:
- Ancient Elven high civilization -- the epitome of high magic
- Magical Sumerians -- the first humans who learned to harness magic
- Dark Age Warlords -- they pillaged from the ruins left by the previous two layers, then buried their finds as grave goods
- Romans with SOME magical power -- it's already beginning to leave the world
- Medieval Mediterrean (now) -- magic is strange and rare, the PCs (if any take a caster class) may end up becoming some of the most powerful magic users in hundreds of years
if, somehow, the PCs delve deep enough, maybe theyll find layers deeper and stranger (I'll figure out something if i get there)
Sounds fun!
If they delve deeper... Illithids!!
Had a Spelljammer campaign where the ships were able to travel between systems instantly via an ancient gate system created by a long dead god in the Astral Sea.
Greyhawk until 3rd, Forgotten Realms from 4th onward.
this is the real answer.
4th edition's default setting is definitely not Forgotten Realms. For example the gods are all wrong and the there's an ancient tiefling empire that doesn't exist in Faerûn. The developers referred to it as "Points of Light" and it was intentionally sparsely specified, because the DM is supposed to fill in any needed details.
This was made slightly more explicit in 4e and its brief discussion of the "points of light" campaign setting.
The generic D&D setting is basically fantasy post-apocalypse, and it had been for decades when they explicitly said it in late 00s.
I kind of late playing it as civilization not still in regression, but at its absolute nadir. There have been a couple generations or a couple centuries of gradual collapse (to taste) following some sort of apocalypse or cataclysm, and now the new order is emerging and the new powers that will rule the next empire are being decided.
Playing through the actual collapse would be fun, if you had a DM would could convincingly portray it. I've never quite been able to convince myself I've got a good plan for how to do that.
Yes, it is the influence of Jack Vance and the Dying Earth books.
I for one love to run campaigns with magic shops, and wizard schools, and both artificers and enchanters making lots and lots of money flooding the market with powerful objects. I like the flow of having my players invest all their gold into power early on in order to venture into more natural dungeons, where they can acquire rare minerals and monster pieces that can be brought back to those artisans in order to make even greater magic items. If there isn't war and turmoil in my world, I don't see how something like this wouldn't immediately become the norm, particularly with monsters, and dragons, and gods still around. You'd think a decently administered kingdom would invest in some young mages to keep the King's guard outfitted with enchanted weapons and armors, and a lot of other logical consequences of magic being available to anyone experienced enough to have killed a dozen of rats would have manifested themselves in your society. In a particularly economic-minded game I run, I even use electrum as coinage from ancient fallen civilizations that can only be recovered from ruins by adventurers, and thus its value fluctuates and affects the market depending on how successful my player characters and their competition have been plundering dungeons.
You can easily do this with a low magic campaign. Just make them black market and accessible only to those in the know. The PCs are in the know from lvl 1. Don't block them. But make the common folk treat even a +1 sword like the power of the gods.
See... you're _thinking_ about this from a real-world economic perspective. Most folks _don't_ treat a fantasy world like it's a real place full of real people... in fact, most people _don't spend much time _*_thinking_*_ at all_ . Which is sad, because what you're describing is _awesome_ and exactly what *would* happen if magic and martial powers were as quickly and easily obtained as is shown in most modern TTRPGs.
On the _other_ hand, Player Characters in the original D&D were so _squishy_ that it makes _perfect sense_ that nobody in their right mind is going out 'adventuring', and those who _do_ are seen as (somewhat uncivilized) 'heroes' who are worthy of admiration and who regularly ascend to near-noble status on the basis of a few successful delves.
@@brentogara My first gaming shop during the late 1990's before WotC, all the dam gate keeping with AD&D and nonsense over multiclassing and limit limits to nonhumans. Best one, .. you have to start all campaigns at 1st-level.
So in my early twenties I told some of them to F-ck off and I set up a mini campaign location where everyone was playing AD&D 9th-level wizards to brew potions & scribe scrolls. ( before they became first level wizard feats.)
The wizards run a .. Walgreens .. in the under dark. There was a male drow that braided dwarves beards and braided decorative ropes.
A dwarf knife smith that hands his blades off to a drow to engrave.
Drow makeup was in the Walgreens.
They came off as a lawful/chaotic .. good community, when business is good. If you wrong them, they will feed your feet to an ooze. Follow with torture for a few months and then sell you for mine labor or spell parts, a piece at a time.
But if you were polite and down on your luck, they take you up to the green dragon nest on the main road back to the nearest trading output village. The green dragons are d-cks but they work under a lawful contract. Greens love new people to bicker and insult.
Drow act like teenagers, the dwarves tale dad jokes in a dry matter of fact tone of voice.
1:55 Sword of Goujian and the blade found in Chengyang. Turns out you really do find them in tombs.
Good video. One of my biggest struggles in making my own setting is identifying the implications of the current dnd system on the world itself. It's not super clear without some digging, so a video like this that brings some of there inferences to light is super helpful.
I think there's certainly an alternative that maintains the "best way to get cool shit is to delve deep" vibe while getting rid of the "lost golden age" element that it at first seems to require. Simply take a cue from the real world: the best weapons aren't for sale because making them requires restricted know-how and resources. As an individual or small organization, you can go buy a gun, you could even hire a decent craftsman to make something custom for you, but the actual high-grade gear is restricted to use by institutional forces. Of course, you could always just go dig through some old surplus (i.e. do the dungeon delving thing). Those things still aren't equal to what the current day big wigs swing around, but it'll still be of a higher caliber than what most people have. Bam, solved.
Think post-apocalyptic if you want to think about the implied setting
Whenever i built a world there has to be a reason WHY there are ruins as a key at the base of it.
this was actually one of the best rpg videos ive ever seen
That was super interesting stuff, that I never thought about before! Thank you for that! Also it really reminded me of the world from "The Wandering Inn" Series...
Glad you enjoyed it!
I've heard called and now call D&D and most "fantasy" games Mediaeval Stasis settings.
The people who call it that don't take into consideration that from the Bronze Age, up until the proliferation of gunpowder, the level of technology, and the average person's access to it, remained about the same. Modern man has been around for about 100,000 years, but most big advancements have only occurred within the last few hundred. "Stasis" is the world's default setting.
@@fleetcenturion No, that discounts all the medieval advances in agriculture, animal husbandry, weaving, rope-making, textiles, metallurgy, windmills and watermills, castle construction, ship building, and more.
@@digitaljanus Yes, but the rate of change rarely hit any tipping points. The really big changes were ocean travel, gunpowder and the printing press. Once the expensively-trained and expensively-equipped armoured knight could be brought down by a man who'd spent a week learning to load and fire an arquebus, and when the middle classes could read, write and publish pamphlets criticising the feudal order, social change was inevitable and speeded up. There's a reason most people place their fantasy games somewhere between 500BCE and 1450CE, socially and technologically speaking, and disallow the inventions which would enable the escape from that era. Augmenting their societies only with minor magics keeps the 1% (the Lvl 20 PCs, if you like) in charge and societal change infrequent.
@@fleetcenturionEverything you just said is absolutely incorrect, even down to the fact that modern man has been around for 300,000 years not 100,000 😅
@@RichWoods23 Your proposed time scale is totally terrible. The Early Middle Ages only ran from 500 BCE until 1024CE, the End of Rome until the End of the Ottonian line in the Holy Roman Empire. After which came the High Middle Ages from 1024CE until 1300CE, in which Europe surpassed the technology and development of the Roman Empire. Fashion also started to change more often and advancements in clothemaking took place. If you are doing Medieval Reenactment, dessing for the Early Middle Ages is easy. But for the High Middle Age and Late Middle Age you have to be really careful, because the fashion changed every 50 to 20 years and your kit can be dated by how it looks. It's also only in the Late Medieval period from 1300CE until 1500CE, that you get the full European Plate armor and that was also a time when the first soldiers with guns started to run around. The Medieval Period in Europe only ended more or less during the religious wars caused by the 30 Years War. "Knights in shining armor" existed at the same time Europeans invented their own field canons and started to dig the first trenches to escape gun fire during sieges. The realy fantasy is RPGs having them standing together with Barbarians inspired by North Vikings and Roman Gladiators, both being dead for centuries by that point.
"Once, the Creator walked among us. There was untold bliss, harmony. We never knew sickness. But in his rage and jealousy, the Creator's brother struck him down, and slowly, ever so slowly, the world began to die. The light is fading. The days grow colder, and the sun itself gives less light. What was once a bright, hopefully paradise, is now a barren, winter wasteland. So much has been lost since the World Broke when the Creator Died... Much that was known is now lost. The mountains rose up, swallowing the valleys. The seas split, giving rise to new land. And the very foundations of the world changed, forever.
Come, child, dance the sands. Melt the ice. Fight on. The Long Night is coming, but we fight on. Until the Final Sunrise."-A fragmented passage from a Syndicate letter, written to a nobleman's child on their coming of age birthday, date unknown, sometime before the Third Breaking, and the coming of the Long Dark.
This is why I run LotFP not DnD. The in system assumptions are a lot more weird and unknown than a system like DnD. And yes you can change any system to fit your wanted formula, players are often expecting something more specific depending on the system.
Saying “I wanna run DnD” means something very different than say “I wanna run DCC.”
Why can't a dungeon just be a bandit stronghold in a cave or an old fort? There's no reason, other than a lack of imagination to limit a setting like this.
I haven't seen this as much. There is a focus on game-ification of things, shifting the setting away from that implication. Magic item shops, cool builds, neat crunch for players to explore, and what not have created new feeling and expectations. These aren't bad by themselves, they just don't really fit that setting as well. As you implied, I think that setting better fits old school rules and the expectations they bring.
Imagine if the ancient peoples actually did leave glittery magic item behind. Random guy pulls out a glittering curved bronze blade, inset with turquoise and fluted with gold. "Behold the blade of the fallen god Aten. If I knew how to wield a Khopesh you all would be in dire trouble."
I've been playing D&D since the mid 90s, and I've rarely actually considered a lot of this. Thanks for giving me some things to think about!
Thanks for watching!
I mean it depends on your point of view. In our world if you want wealth and power you delve deep into the earth for the remains of ancient creatures and the hearts of long-dead stars.
You simply just need to use the random tables in the back of the AD&D dmg and it will naturally create a mysterious, post-post apocalypse world
Earthdawn did this well
Great video! A good thought project- modern gaming civilization stand on the shoulders of giants- the secrets of the past can only be glimpsed by it’s lost ancient artifacts- like the pyramids of Egypt -
Very interesting video!
In my own campaign setting, sat in an alternative 1200th scandinavia (we're scandianvian after all), a clash between the Asir and Vanir god, and the Jotunn in Midgaard has left the world in ruin and transformed it from a golden age of wonder to an age of mankind (implying that the wonders of the world has left.). Although mighty kingdoms of humans still exist, they look like specs of dust compared to the colossal ruins and mile wide old battlefields of the gods and jotunn still left in Midgaard.
You make some great points.
wondering what that skull waterfall clip was at 5:30
0:40 I feel you Brother. I feel you.
You talk about all the things pinging around in my brain with a kind of mellow Ryan Reynolds voice.
I dunno. I think a lot of this more comes down to practicality.
Magic Item Shops are rare because the amount of practice and training and learning a magic user needs to be capable of even basic enchantments is immense. Thus, a simple +1 Longsword is, monetarily, worth an incredible amount more than a plain old Master work Longsword.
And there may well be a good few folks capable of creating new Legendady items. The Gods of any given DnD setting are also prone to creating new artifacts if the needs arise.
But where are you, humble adventurer, more likely to be able to get your hands on one of these? With your poultry sum of 20 gold, can you buy a magic sword from the shop? Or is it easier, cheaper, less morally grey, and unlikely to attract the ire of the entire City Guard if you just wander into an abandoned temple and kill the Ogre guarding his little hoard of weapons? I mean, if the hoard doesn't contain that +1 sword you wanted, at least you might get paid for killing the ogre and his hoard should at least contain enough loot to fund your delve into the next dungeon. Spin the wheel and hope maybe the nest of Ankhegs you're here to clear out maybe contains the bodies of better equipped and less fortunate adventurers.
it would be nice if the dilapidated state of the world was in a larger part of the gameplay and the story that is told at the same time. why is the world so full of abandoned structures and buildings? etc. Great Video !
I love this, great practical thinking about the game setting.
I would argue that the powerful magic items were only from era long ago.
Ruins and stuff have items that just do not have a 'current' owner that the players would not be likely to want to kill to take such. A kingdom likely has many potent weapons. Its just the current user of some of them are not going to give them away and/or do not show off such power.
So likely the lower power weapons are sold or openly made more while the much more powerful items would be kept by kingdoms as national assets.
Yeah for sure, the (found) magical artefacts would wind up in the hands of the powerful. Be it kingdoms or other factions.
Magic items should be found underground, not in a 'magic item shop'. I prefer dungeons over Kwik-E-Marts
I like magic item shops for small things, like a magical firecracker.
The kind of sime thing creative players may use in unintended ways, like creating a diversion, starting a fire or making someone believe they're a powerful mage.
HUH. I'm really glad I seem to have intrinsically understood this. The TTRPG setting I'm running just barely got out of a bit of a Dark Age following a local cataclysm that struck just after a massive war, that was at the tail end of a golden age of colonizing a new land.
And an RPG I'm making at the moment is essentially post-post-post- *multiple* apocalypses, both world-wide and localized.
I'm just dropping by to say this thumbnail looks really cool.
Aw, man, the British Museum has so much cool stuff!
Also, if you haven't been there and happen to visit Londond again, take a gander at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wallace Collection!
Very interesting video, thank you
This is also drawn heavily from D&D's Tolkien influence and his own influence from stories like Beowulf--which was written in a time when there wasn't technological standardisation, so the highest-quality swords were probably the oldest ones, because they had lasted longer, the only real way of testing that--hence the hero finds stuff of great power in barrows and ancient hoards.
I heard about how, before the first campaign settings, everybody played in 'fantasy land', just whatever people expected to see in fantasy. Then Greyhawk happened! Information courtesy of Matt Colville.
Excellent point about making a campaign's ancient history relevant to the PCs era and goals.
Good video thanks. I've been thinking about similar things for a while and was good to have you talk it out to help me think through it.
So, fun spin on the 'power is in the dungeons and from the past' thing. I played around with that in a campaign I ran once (in 4e D&D actually, though I'd made it for 3.5 originally.) and the general idea of how I did it is worth sharing.
Basically, power has levels to it, from least to greatest they went like this: Let's use a sword as an example here.
0. What weapons, spells etc you see everywhere in much of the world. Easy to get, just barely good enough. Example: Basic longsword.
1. Professional soldier level gear for much of the world. Not ubiquitous, but because it's considered outdated in the setting, it's pretty common and affordable. Twenty years ago in setting this would have been several ranks higher. Example: Steel Longsword.
2. Modern military gear for much of the world. Limited in supply because of the geo-politics of the setting, so what little 'falls off a truck' and isn't worth hunting people down for sits here. It's absolutely better than level 1 gear, but not overwhelmingly so. Example: Alloy Longsword.
3. Top level Military gear from Belka. The gear so good (and limited in number) that it's letting one nation take on essentially the whole world. Inevitably, some of it's on the market. Makes a mockery of level 1 gear and is a clear step up (if sometimes weird, like swapping bows for magical guns) from level 2. Example: Carbon Blade Longsword.
4. Ancient Artifacts. Old school gear you'd have to find in a dungeon, so magically potent it can outpace level 3 gear, if not by that much. In any other setting, this stuff would be a 'Hay DM are you sure you should have this in your setting?' level powerful, is literally made by the gods. Example: Antikytheran Longsword
5. Creon Military. Isolationist nation that never lost their advanced stuff in the previous multiple cataclysms but faces a critical resource shortage. If you can get that resource, it's horrifyingly good. If you can get that resource, Creon's coming for you. (Is literally made for use by a massed army to fight the Gods.) Example: Regolith Particle Loop Longsword.
6. Bleeding Edge Belkan gear. Yes, their prototypes are pushing beyond 'use to kill Gods' but you'd have to steal it from them or work for them to get it. If level 3 is modern firearms, this is man portable railguns. Example: Beamsaber.
7. The Being Above's Gifts. Said being predates the Gods, is stronger than them by far, and existence continues because it can't be bothered to do anything about you. It's got servants for that who similarly rarely bother with mere Gods and consider level 6 gear like a Childs cute imitation of their own. You'd have to heroically kill one of them to get any of it. Example: The Sword With No Blade. (A handle hat acts like there's a sword blade attached when you swing with intent to harm and only harms what you intended to harm in that swing.)
8. Anti-Causal Weapons. Full on Artifacts as ancient in setting as the story of Gilgamesh is in our world, able to bypass causality and thus able to defeat The Being Above. Was bleeding Edge for the civilization that made The Being Above and thus comedically impossible to be rid of completely. Impossibly simple. Example: The Blade. (A mundane looking sword that just happens to ensure what you kill with it stays dead and is a pretty decent sword on top of that.)
So you get this weird curve of age on power where it goes up with newer, than old comes in, then things spike to the best modern innovations, and then the antediluvian stuff stands at the top, menacingly. I deliberately made ruins both rare and utterly long plundered (save on the Moon itself for plot reasons.) because the setting was built on the idea of 'there was a D&D campaign in the past of this world and we've moved on since then.' with the biggest shakers up of history being those 'former Player Characters'. This meant that dungeons were not on the menu, it was more military compounds or sky ships that filled that 'hostile enemy filled location' role. Loot was often intelligence that the players would turn in for better gear from their grateful mercenary patrons, or high value expendables to snatch up.
The best settings of D&D and your favorite Fantasy novels that you should be using as settings all have rich, developed histories
I don’t want to say you’re wrong, but for me the DnD meta-setting was just another instance of the Golden Age archetype. It occurs all over the place in modern fantasy, and it was prevalent up until the human civilization came up with a novel idea of “progress”. When there is no advancement to be easily spotted during one’s lifetime, and year after year is basically the same, there is no hope for the better in the future, so naturally “the better” is placed in the past. On top of that, with slow progress, ancient weapons and artifacts aren’t seen as obsolete: your father fights with a sword, his father fought with a sword, and ancient heroes also fought with swords. In reality those swords improved a lot, but as far as the myth is concerned, they are basically the same, hence the ancient all-powerful sword treasure archetype. The magic is also an idea which explains the myth: it used to be commonplace but slowly disappeared. So it all clicks together, and there isn’t actually any need for a rational-minded explanation of a regress and/or disaster.
In my own homebrews, the ancient world was of magic and monsters, and while war between the sentient species happened, it wasn't common due to the danger of mosnters and demons.
The modern world is a world of technology, where magic has (mostly) been left aside (but not forgotten) and monsters are few, weak and domesticated, more like the difference btween cows and urochs.
A great worldwide earthquake caused widespread devastaton and the resurfacing of dungeons, ruins of the ancient world where magic is still strong.
In that homebrew, most people can't use magic, but anyone who has delved into a dungeon can *awaken*, and modern weapons and armor are not inferior to the ancient artifacts of the past, as technology can replace a lot of the magic, but modern technology was made to combat the sentient species. They are weapons that don't do that much damage, comparatively, but are easy to handle and (crit bonus against sentient races and penetrate resistances), modern armor is likewise made to handle that type of weapon, a lot of AC, very few resistances.
Ancient, magical artifacts were made to fight monsters first and foremost, big and strong creatures. No to-hit bonus, but pretty big dice and damage bonus, armor that is less focused on deflecting and more on adding damage resistance.
(i realize this more a comment about magic items than about the world building but...) i personally find +1 weapons to be fairly boring while they would definitely be priceless items and undebatably useful, if just a weapon with a few effect like maybe you can have glow and once a day cast divine favor is much more interesting than a +1 sword. Hell, a sword that is just a sword not even a +1 sword, but have it be a sword to EVERYTHING. to a mortal it is no more or less deadly than a regular sword would be to a commoner, but its just as deadly to anything else, it does have any bonuses to damage or anything, but it will ignore what ever insane supernatural craziness a monster may have. (I.E. is that a ghost that would be resistant to slashing/piercing/bludgeoning damage, yes it will cut the ghost like it cuts anything else. Is that a demon immune to non-magical damage, yeah the sword doesn't care, the demon takes full damage. is that a banerloth that will when you kill it the banerloth will slowly grow inside your soul and turn you into the banerloth you killed, the sword will permently kill it. no growing back. no revivals. no saturday morning villian that is back next week this sword isn't fancy but when it kills you, you stay dead.
at low levels it just seams like slightly better and more durable blade but nothing crazy, but grows with you. and at the high tiers this is the kinda thing that gods tremble at the mention of.
i guess my problem with +1 weapons is that the feel unmagical. they are just mechanics and no flavor. you could give some small mechanics to a simple sword but if you do the flavor right a very simple thing can be the seed of legends
For all the mistakes Bioware may have made with the Dragon Age games, they were still great world builders. In the first game, they introduce history through the legends that exist in the world. The church's version of history suits its purpose, as does the history of the elves and dwarves. As the games progress, you find out that most of those histories are untrue, usually through ancient big bads that reveal what really happened during their time of power.
My world’s sort of like this, except in reverse.
In ages past, the world was ruled by the balance of good and evil, and was much like the typical DnD setting. However, over the course of millennia and a series of divine shenanigans, all of the old gods are either dead or cyborgs, and the forces of light and darkness fight in an eternal war that burns on for its own sake.
Consequently, some of the strongest artifacts, and some of the thickest-blooded celestial- or infernal-born warriors are running around doing their high-fantasy thing. But all of that is because of the war. The country of Evyscara isn’t in power because it’s a source of radiance and virtue (the last quality being dubious in its veracity), it’s in power because they and their Lawful ‘Neutral’ war god are the only things stopping the Condassans from taking everything and burning it in the fires of glory, rape and literal nuclear fallout.
This is an age of great power, of gods directly empowering men and grand mages penning new spellbooks and forging legendary, enchanted blades. It is also the most dismal and terrifying age in recorded history.
Woop Randall is back, I missed my weekly Earthmote last week.
Yeah, I was travelling for work, and then caught a cold at the end of it. So I needed the week for my voice to recover. We are back at it now though!
@@Earthmote all good my dude, glad you're doing well. Thanks for all the great content.
You speak of some sort of... Forgotten Realms
I sort of ended up doing the opposite of this, the players kept complaining so the best magic items were in exorbitantly expensive shops while ruins had ones they’d collect to sell to afford the better ones.
They basically just wanted to be able to customize the enchantments and there wasn’t really an argument for why they couldn’t based on the reputation we’d established for the capital city by that point.
Yes! You can look at implied worlds with Appendix D. The original games were inspired by sword and sorcery + Dying Earth. It changed over time.
Good insights in this video. Thanks.
I think this might be very "obvious" advice, but the specific way you've framed it feels invaluable to me. "Showing, not telling" through the distinctions between item enchantments themselves I think is pretty brilliant. Sure, the best thing mortalkind can still make might be a +2 piece of gear, but a +1 scimitar that can produce fire (assuming the people who find it even know what a scimitar is) is actually incredibly useful, perhaps even more so than a weapon that can "cut" things better.
The bit on "forgotten spells" and older edition D&D characters having less HP is something that's been on my mind a LOT the past couple of years. I feel it's something that might be implicit in recent editions, but it's not really a "default option" of the games themselves. They just tell you "oh, you know this is a cool idea if you want to use it".
I remember an older friend of mine saying his years of playing AD&D as a wizard were mostly trying to figure out how to perform ancient ritual spells and mitigate the "system shock" of some spells. I don't know if any of that is part of the base mechanics of the game, or just good playing on both sides, but it sounds a lot more mysterious by "default" than what we've got going on these days.
This video is great
Great insights!
But, thank god for x2 speed.
All my youth, I liked the logical approach you take to world building-but I have warmed up greatly to illogical, “gonzo” game worlds. Flying Buffalo’s Tunnels & Trolls RPG is just plain fun, as are the herringbone tweed trousers that delvers often wear in the illustrations to the original GRiMTooth’s TRAPs books.
Gonzo can be fun too as long as everyone buys in!
Yes D&D is post-apocalyptic or at least quasi-dark age.
I feel like this is actually what I’ve loved about dnd, the total freedom and lack of inherent stories/world of most other ttrpgs feels overwhelming to me, and I never know where to start