DnD Has an Implied Campaign Setting

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[Michael-Has-Opinions]

"Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of..."

[ericjome]

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.

[saryakan]

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.

[EriktheRed]

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.

[jab]

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.

[mr.pavone]

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.

[jeremyrichard]

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.

[adamjchafe]

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.

[Da_maul]

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.

[SyrEmilon]

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.

[Oddmanoutre]

I say bring back the "Enchant Item" and "Permanency" spells for high-level wizards to start making their own magical items.

[OceanusHelios]

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.

[ayoutubewatcher]

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.

[ljmiller]

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.

[colerape]

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.

[Joker]

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.

[Jacksonstreet]

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.

[ajdynon]

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")

[inventist]

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.

[jeffersonian]

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.