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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 -
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.
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.
1. It’s not implied, it’s stated 2. I love people complain about medieval “stasis” when most heroes for from 1st to 8th (most common level) in a few weeks not days 3. Building your own works is hard, despite what RU-vidrs say 4. Go find a game that fits your tables needs. The actually couple of sessions getting used to new rules is far less painful than shoehorning into a game not built for the game you want to play
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...
So one fun way to play with that history if your players decide to investigate it before you had given it much thought is to have intentional destruction, we know that there were at least a couple of pharaohs where their successors went through and removed their names or defaced whole walls of of hieroglyphics. Not only does this buy you a few sessions to start coming up with this past, but also implies a certain degree of historical rewriting in what you will find. Was this done to protect the future from eldritch secrets, is this simply the removal of one dynasties propaganda by the next, or perhaps was that dark lord of legend merely a mortal king?
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.
Great weapons being hidden in ruins does not necessarily mean a world has regressed. For example perhaps deities just no longer hand out weapons of great power anymore specifically because society has advanced enough that people no longer need that help against long past defeated monsters and challenges.
Magic items are just difficult and expensive to make -- thousands of GP worth just for the mundane components (possibly tens of thousands for powerful items), plus months of work for a high level magic user (of which only a handful might exist at a given time), plus rare ingredients that cannot simply be bought. It takes a long time for them to accumulate, even though they are, occasionally, still being made. Extensive world building is really a bad idea; better to have a rough jist of what's probably out there and then make up the details as you go.
wow this scenario you're describing sounds truly awful and endtimes-y, 40k or walking dead kind of stuff. Do your gametables involve no inventors, alchemists, or artificers? No wizards, no colleges, no churches, no places of learning at all? Living in an age of strife post-golden era feels so suffocatingly grim as you propose it
Honestly, while this is the "implied" setting of original D&D and sadly poorly designed products thereafter, this type of setting bores me to tears. Honestly, do you want this forced "tolken-esk" setting where people are primitive and can't invent a simple +1 dagger without spending a mountain of gold and a year of enchanting, OR do you want Dark Sun or Eberron, even Critical Role??? Fantasy can be more than what you describe. Think grander!!!
It sounds more like an OSR thing than "DnD". I would argue that DnD stopped being like this a long time ago, when it stopped being a simple dungeon crawl simulator
@@AKNero40C yes and no. Yes in that it certainly was more prominent in the OSR but you can definitely see traces of this in the forgotten realms even as current as 5th edition products.
I’m more inclined to a post apocalyptic setting, where the players are unaware this is an Earth of a future and all those races are all humans just evolved differently due to magic returning, there are gods and humanity are racist to each other as they don’t understand they’re ALL human in origin…
Any post apocalyptic setting makes the easiest environment to design and play in. Why is it there? It was made the the great (fill in the blank) in the before times. Dungeons simply provide a gathering place for some of this loot. Don't overlook that the monsters in a dungeon may not even know some of the items are there. As for magic shops, consumables yes but expensive, weapons, no, they have to be found.
The most ridiculous thing ever introduced to modern D&D, is the addition of "Ye Olde Magick Item Shoppe." It is about the laziest thing a DM can do, and it destroys emersion. It's out of place, even in a high magic setting.
I think its best if they are earned personally! Scrolls can be okay since the Magic User can scribe those. And maybe potions, but I'd have limited availability and pretty high costs. But the other stuff? Need to delve for that.
If there's a trade in magic items at all, it should be like buying a Stradivarius or a Rembrandt. There's a limited number of these objects available. Only an extremely wealthy and privileged class can even participate in the market. And all the uncovered items and their current ownership would be well known to everyone participating in this trade. News of the discovery of a new magic item would spread like wildfire and probably kick off a bidding war among that community.
People delve for items > people find items they don't want > other people want those items > delvers sell the items they found. I don't think it has to exist in the game, but I don't think it's hard to justify either
I wonder how much magic items would cost if obtaining them meant risking your life? Based on some rough economic studies (comparing lethality rates of jobs to wages), people value their own lives at around $10 million. So if you could go into a dungeon to obtain a magic item, but you had a 10% chance of dying in the dungeon, would the item be worth $1 million?
In this context, Numenera nailed worldbuilding: There have been eight previous worlds. You may refer to them as ages, aeons, epochs, or eras, but it’s not wrong to think of each as its own individual world. Each former world stretched across vast millennia of time. Each played host to a species whose civilizations rose to supremacy but eventually died or scattered, disappeared or transcended. During the time that each world flourished, those who ruled it spoke to the stars, reengineered their physical bodies, and mastered form and essence, all in their own unique ways. Each left behind remnants. The Ninth World is built on the bones of the previous eight, and in particular, the last four. Reach into the dust, and you’ll find that each particle has been worked, manufactured, or grown, and then ground back into drit-a fine, artificial soil-by the relentless power of time. Look to the horizon-is that a mountain or part of an impossible monument to the forgotten emperor of a lost people? Feel that subtle vibration beneath your feet and know that ancient engines-vast machines the size of kingdoms-still operate in the bowels of the earth.
Sounds like a good implementation of the ideas! Even though its not D&D, but its own system. I've never player Numenera, but heard good things about its worldbuilding.
Because of the type of content you make, you need a teleprompter that goes in front of the camera. It seems like you're from the Buffalo NY area, as you pronounce 'ing' words with 'ine' instead.
