Vaalingrade
Legend
He is soooo mad that awesome things exist.
He is soooo mad that awesome things exist.
Because in D&D there are no lawless frontier towns which need protection from bandits. There are no adventurers-for-hire riding in with their weapons proudly displayed. There is no wilderness. The characters never have to create their own justice, because the local law officers take care of everything. Nobody ever rides off into the sunset. And the sudden influx of gold being compared to the Alaskan gold rush was for illustrative purposes only, and not meant to parallel the Western Frontier at all.The DMG actually shows that Alaska isn't the inspiration. Adventurers bringing back lots of money is.
DMG page 90: "An active campaign will most certainly bring a steady flow of wealth into the base area, as adventurers come from successful trips into dungeon and wilderness."
That means that the PHB quote was just Gygax looking for a real world example of the inflation inspired by successful adventurers so that players could better understand what he was saying.
Gygax apparently claimed that it was inspired partly by a book series called The Destroyer, whose protagonist was a cop from Newark who was trained in a fictional Korean martial art and who was also an avatar of Shiva. Whether Gygax was correct, I don't know.
That is the series Remo Williams was based on
This is where I see a lot of connections with the Points of Light concept that was around D&D a long time and was solidified in 4e.
Agreed, but I often wonder was Tolkien also using the "King is the Land" type idea. That the health of the kingdom is tied to the health of the King. Arnor is largely depopulated due to the absence of a king. Gondor is in decline (slowly) under the Stewards and loosing population. it is remarked in the LOTR of the declining armies of Gondor.Not very different from Middle Earth, in other words.
Look, I'm not going to deny that there's an aspect of the American frontier to it all. But other big fantasy template worlds like Middle Earth and Narnia probably figure into it as well.
Go look in the mirror. The thing in the middle of your face is your nose.
Show me a little village in Western or middle Europe that is more than 20 miles from another village. D&D villages are often really isolated, many days ride through untamed wilderness to the nearest other place of civilisation.D&D a western? Don't get me laughing.
The lonely village in the wilderness is not an exclusivity of westerns. The little village in Europe, Australia, Africa, South America and Asia say hello to you. These little villages are literally all around the world. And almost all of them have... a tavern or an inn... Even today you can get in these little villages in Europe and all around the world. Heck, I live in America and and just a few miles from town you have small villages with less than 800 souls and they do have a bar...
The "wild" in D&D is exactly that, a wild unexplored or unsettled piece of land. Here be dragons is not an elucubration in D&D, it is a real thing. Empires fell to hordes, dragons, magical disasters and any other causes.
Take an old dragon. Angry at the settling of its land. The beast wait for the dead of winter, set aflame the village's food resources and housing. The people will die from cold and starvation. Cruel, but efficient. In the spring, the dragon comes back to pick on the survivors and to get whatever riches they might have had.
Many empty zones in the world's of D&D are empty for a good cause. Dragons, giants, orcs and so many other treaths exists that "civilization" is often destroyed. And this is where we get our beloved dungeons to explore. Maybe an evil cleric got mad and buried the castle/town in an earthquake? Who knows.
But one thing, American Westerns are not the inspiration for D&D as a whole. For some scenari? Sure, I could believe that. For the whole game? No way....