When Fantasy meets Medieval Europe

Thomas Bowman said:

I'm not a purist, and I don't care what medieval people thought and believed, to the extend that I can mold this D&D setting to their beliefs without changing the classes or how magic works, I will. Basically I am substituting this historic setting for something comparable to the Forgotten Realms.

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Oh, okay. Nevermind, then.

Knightfall said:

Okay, so you're creating an alternate version of Earth that exists on its own Prime Material Plane. You're using the Holy Roman Empire near the end of Henry IV's reign as your starting point. This puts the setting in the time period of the High Middle Ages. You want God and the Devil (or Satan) to exist but that "Capital G" Deity isn't meant to be any real world God(s) that is worshiped by Christians, Jewish people, or Muslims. Yet, that Deity stands in for God for those religions. Personally, I think you're going to end up with a lot of friction if any of your players are religious. (BTW, I'm Agnostic, but I grew up Christian.) Of course, it will depend on the players you select for the campaign. If you know them very well and have talked to them ahead of time, it probably will end up being okay. But if you recruit new players or select a group of players that might object, it could go very, very badly.

One suggestion I have is to give your fictional God a campaign specific name to separate the Deity from the God(s) of real world religions. Since this is the Holy Roman Empire, you could simply use a Latin word for God such as Deus or Divus. If those don't appeal to you, you can use Google Translate to pick something else. Of course, Satan is already a Latin word for the Devil, but you could also use either Diabolus or maybe even Antitheus. Or perhaps instead of saying worshipers of the Devil are satanists, say they are diabolists. It is similar but unique "gaming" enough that you won't have to deal with players cringing when 'sensitive' real world terminology comes up in-game.

Also you could use this Latin word for Christianity, Christianitas, to create a fictionalized version of the religion. Then again, you could also use the Latin word 'Nazarene' and call your in-game version of the Christian religion, Nazarenity (or maybe Nazarenitas). (Those might feel weird to use, but it's a good alternative if you want to truly fictionalize your alternate Earth.) You could do the same for Muslim (Latin: Musulmanus) and Judaism (Latin: Judaismus). Of course, all that might feel to forced for you and your players, but it might prevent any real world religious debates that could come up between you and your players.

Also, I'm assuming that when it comes to the Americas, your elves and halflings won't have any connection to Indigenous religious beliefs. Or am I wrong? Of course, your players might hear that elves are the 'natives' of North America and they'll play them as Indigenous Peoples of North America (likely with bad tropes attached). It something for you to consider when creating this setting. Let them know ahead of time that elves and the other races follow the norms for those races as presented in D&D, if that is your plan.

There is a books series you might want to read: Deryni Universe by Katherine Kurtz.

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I will consider this advice, but really it is just a Generic Monotheistic God, many religions have their different and conflicting belief in this God, but God is not revealing who is right and who is wrong in this, that I why their are Holy Wars. In this setting God answers prayers but so do other deities as well. God is not the deitie's proper name, Christian call him "Jehovah", Jews call him "Yahweh", and Muslims call him "Allah". I don't plan on using those religious words except in quotation when referring to them. I think the term God is sufficiently generic. If you like we can assume it is a parallel God, not the ones that real world Christians, Jews, and Muslim worship, this is a fictional world after all. It is a fictional Three worlds in fact. Venus is closer to being a standard D&D world, it has cities, it has wizards, clerics, and druids, and it is mainly a pagan setting. Wizards from Earth, who for the most part have the ability to teleport there, have no interest in acting as missionaries for the Church, they have better things to do with their time and with their spells. Venus has two large gates above its South Pole connecting that Venus to our Venus. The gate does not allow the passage of atmosphere just solid objects such as spaceships like this one:


The BFR in question was investigating an atmospheric anomaly in the upper atmosphere of our Venus and it got sucked through the gate, and was forced to land. The crew of that spaceship is sort of stuck on Venus at the start of this campaign, and has to deal with the natives, some of whom can cast spells. the people on the Earth I am talking about here, don't know about this yet. The ship can reach orbit if it fills its tanks with methane and oxygen, the natives don't have this refueling capacity, as they are stuck in the Bronze age. The crew might be doing something about that! he ship's lift capacity is much reduced without that bottom stage, but it can reach orbit, can't go beyond that however! Perhaps it can pass through the gate back to our Venus and reach orbit there. But first it must be refueled, and if it was refueled, it can't carry all 100 passengers, maybe 3, and then someone would have to rescue them in low Venus Orbit before their life support runs out! They could launch though the gate, reach orbit, and then send a message back to Earth, and then reenter the atmosphere, pass through the gate and then land the ship once again and wait to be rescued, that is the current plan, as they can't communicate with Earth from the surface of the planet they are now standing on. Until that happens, they will just be deemed as missing by SpaceX and presumed dead. The passengers were colonists bound for a floating aerostat high in Venus' poisonous atmosphere, they would have been dropped of and the crew would have returned to orbit once the fuel for reaching orbit was manufactured onboard the aerostat, for te return trip to orbit, and then a mothership would take them back to Earth. But they aerostat can't provide fuel if there is no people onboard, and there are no people on board, instead they are on the surface of the other Venus when the ship was sucked through the gate. the crew and passengers were presumed lost in in accident. That is what is going on at Venus at the time of his campaign.

I'm not interested in religion other than to complete this setting, and I'm not going to dwell on this subject, I am moving on and completing my map.

Celebrim said:

Because right now the griefers and the haters are busy distracted with another thread. But as soon as they get bored there or they succeed in locking that thread, they are going to come around here and notice this thread.

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By the time they do that, I will tell them, I am not interested in discussing religion with them, and suggest they go to another site. I am moving on and discussing other aspects of this world, their time to talk about God and religion is passed, too bad for them!

Umm, so do I get this right that your earth gods (minus Mars/Venus) are just for earth and have no business in the rest of your universe? And Mars/Venus are quasi-omnipotent active caretakers of their respective, habited planets?
Then why would anyone be polytheistic (and not monotheistic) on these two planets?

Oh and: Am I right to assume that the people on Mars/Venus were created or at least brought there by their gods?

Lylandra said:

Umm, so do I get this right that your earth gods (minus Mars/Venus) are just for earth and have no business in the rest of your universe? And Mars/Venus are quasi-omnipotent active caretakers of their respective, habited planets?
Then why would anyone be polytheistic (and not monotheistic) on these two planets?

Oh and: Am I right to assume that the people on Mars/Venus were created or at least brought there by their gods?

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That is correct, in ancient Greek and Roman times of this world, the gods were associated with six planets. Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The Earth goddess is also known as Terra to the Romans or Gaia to the Greeks. Gaia was the primordia deity, she is the mother of all the other gods of Olympus, and also the mother of their adversaries the Titans. She spends most of her time sleeping, or so the legend goes, when she wakes you have things like Earthquakes, volcanoes erupting, she is also known as "Mother Nature" and the "Mother of Monsters". Venus is like that for her planet as well. Mars plays that role for his planet as well, besides being the "God of War" Mars is also worshipped on Venus and Venus is worshipped on Mars, and each planet has its own set of local deities as well. the other gods weren't able to do much with their planets. Mercury was too close to the Sun, the Moon didn't have enough gravity, Jupiter and Saturn didn't have a solid surface to stand on.

Venus brought some of her worshippers, and those include not just the Greeks and Romans, she goes as far back as Ancient Babylon where she was known as Ishtar, she was Isis to the Egyptians, and Freya to the Norse people, she has been doing this for thousands of years all the way back to the stone ages from before there was writing.

Mars requires some additional work, it has a high tech past, has cities of great technology and magic, it was settled by the Ancient Atlanteans before their continent sank beneath the waves on Earth. Some of the Atlanteans became Merfolk living in their sunken kingdom out beyond the Pillars of Hercules (The straights of Gibraltrar), but others were taken by Ares to settle on the planet Mars. Ares/Mars might have had something to do with the destruction of Atlantis, there were rumors of a civil war there prior to its sinking. Kind of ironic that descendents of the Atlanteans would settle on a planet that is mostly desert. For a time they had a great civilization and dug canals to distribute the water from the poles to the drier areas, but then their civilization fell to warfare and never quite recovered since. Perhaps Ares just got bored and decided to start something.

Here is my map of Europe with the labels removed and the hexes renumbered. There are some stray hexes I have to take care of, but here is what I have so far, to give you an idea of what I'm working on.

This can be found at https://thomasbowman255.deviantart....Hex-Map-735444935?ga_submit_new=10:1521038663

This is the map without the hex numbering
found at
https://orig00.deviantart.net/482f/...100_ad_hex_map_by_thomasbowman255-dc5v7f2.png

I am working on this map, replacing labeled hexes with unlabeled ones and then putting the labels back on for a much clearer map, and with layering I can use this empty Europe map to detail other settings that take place on a version of Earth. This is as far as I have gotten so far.

Back to this setting, the way I see it, it could be used with D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, and possibly D&D 5.0, and since I introduced a spaceship from our near future, I would say D20 Modern/Future, since that is compatible with those other systems. Originally I got this idea as a setting with an habitable and inhabited Venus and Mars, the best way to do this is to have a gate to a parallel universe, one with magic, the magic includes magical beings called "gods" two of these "gods" terraformed these two planets and populated them, yet I wanted characters we would recognize from our own future, I am thinking sometime in the 2030s perhaps. Elon Musk's dream has gotten off the ground, he has started a colony on Mars and other people are looking to start a colony in the clouds of Venus where the pressures and temperatures are tolerable. I am thinking of a starter colony of 100 people, an aerostat, gets sucked into the gate along with a spaceship.



After repairing the refueling the spaceship, they can use it to resume contact with Earth, and with some help from their mother planet, they can explore other parts of the parallel Solar System. So now we come to the idea of what to put on Earth in the fantasy Solar System, so I figured it would be a Medieval Earth approximating the year 1100 AD since I found this Hex map of 1100 AD. Since the original map was small, I enlarged it by 200%, each hex is numbered, but the numbers were blurry when I look at them close. I can fix that, or maybe put the numbers on the edge of the map instead of in each hex. Eventually someone from the near future Earth is going to land a spaceship here, what happens then? Interplanetary travel is still expensive. Ticket prices are about $200,000 per individual, to send a family of 5 would cost $1,000,000. Since there are now habitable planets to colonize, the incentive to bring down costs increases. SpaceX is working to reduce costs further, but now their is the question of original inhabitants of these planets, that matter is being brought up by the United Nations. The population of the Future Earth is around 8 billion, and to suddenly have 3 additional planets to colonize is a very tempting prospect. There are people both pro and con. The gate high in the atmosphere of Venus is making some NASA scientists nervous, they wonder what kind of technology could produce such a warp in the fabric of space in close proximity to a planet? Maybe an extraterrestrial civilization. The inhabitants of the Venus on the other side of the gate look primitive, and their technology does not look capable of producing such a gate, the idea of magic doesn't immediately occur to them, until they are forced to confront it. All this is going on unbeknownst to the people of the fantasy Medieval Earth.

For added fun and games, you could make the D&D Earth follow Aristotelian physics (object move if force is applied and otherwise fall down) and the Ptolemaic cosmology (earth centered and all planets move in their own crystal sphere). At least on the prime material plane. However, the ethereal plane is close enough to real world physics for the space ships to operate.

It would be hard to have three habitable planets in a Ptolemaic cosmology. One of those three planets would have to be in the center of the Solar System. So the Sun orbits the Earth at 1 astronomical unit or about 93 million miles. The Sun only holds a relatively constant distance from one of those planets, the others would have variable distances from the Sun, since they would be orbiting one of those planets along with the Sun. Copernicus' idea was just common sense. How could a big star 333,000 times the mass of the Earth orbit around the Earth at an average distance of 93 million miles? the other planets Venus and Mars would have to do what to stay a constant distance from that Sun? You can see why Galileo rejected that physics when he observed mountains on the Moon.

Naw, I figure I'd stick to conventional physics so I can have three habitable planets, just add D&D magic and monsters.

Anyway I want to create a setting that accommodates both science fiction and fantasy. Mars has in places a higher technology that future Earth does, I think denizens from the Starfinder Alien Archive could inhabit its surface as Martians. Humans live there too of course. But the Martian ecology is much more "alien" than either Earth or Venus, items of technology exist on the red planet's surface and of course techno-magic taken from the core rulebook of Starfinder as well as character classes, and the spell lists found there. Most of Mars' technology is equivalent to early gunpowder era, they have muskets and swords, with pockets of technology that is much more advanced. What draws the Earthling on Venus to Mars is the fact that they receive a radio signal from that planet, and their is also magic as well. The Deity Mars has been a lot more creative with his planet than Venus was. Venus is a sort of "Land of the Lost" with dinosaurs, cavemen and women, lizardfolk and other primitive and prehistoric creatures.