D&D General D&D, magic, and the mundane medieval

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I don't know.

For my campaign, magic requires talent. Sorcerers have an excess of it, and don't need any formal training. They often get by with a tragic backstory. Wizards have an average amount, and with proper training they are able to cast spells. Warlocks may or may not have talent. The pact allows them to use magic either with no training or no talent. Also, you need an Intelligence of 10 + spell level to understand a given spell. So you'll need to find peasants with an Intelligence of 11 or better (~45%, I think?). Again, IMC.

The farm mage being first level may not understand the techniques well enough to teach them. His friends an neighbors may not have the talent or be able to understand.

I think that was their point. If just anyone can learn magic, then it is indeed a learned skill and can indeed multiply exponentially until everyone is a wizard.
If magic is less common, and being a PC-level wizard is something fewer people have the potential to become, then this will have knock-on effects. Hence why how common magic is being an important part of worldbuilding.


In some settings.
In others, PCs are special. In Eberron for example, most people can learn to do magic in specific, limited ways, but actually being a PC-wizard-comparable spellcaster is very unusual.

Well, this is a table issue, and for me, PCs are no more inherently special than anyone else.

 

[Oofta]

Spinning off a bit from some discussion in the Dragonlance thread.

D&D derives a lot of its aesthetic and assumed setting from the medieval to renaissance period in Europe. I've just been thinking about some of the historical factors that were enormously prominent, everyday, and important in the real world, but which D&D either neglects completely, or just casually makes assumptions about without really thinking about how the everyday presence of magic and the verifiable existence of a polytheistic pantheon of gods would affect it.

I'm not sure D&D "neglects" those effects as much as leaving it up to the creator of campaign worlds to decide. Any speculative fiction on this topic is always just going to be guesswork and there are many, many ways it could affect things.

For example, magic works. Check. Are the gods actively involved or distant? How many priests are actually granted clerical abilities? How does anyone really know whether or not deities are "real" and that clerics are not simply manipulating magic in a slightly different form from wizards? In a world where powerful illusions exist, could mass believe create even more powerful illusions? Conversely if the gods are real and truly created the world and are actively involved, what kind of impact is that going to have? How much free will do the different races really have and how much is the influence of gods?

There are a lot of different options.

Tax, for instance. It was probably the cause of the majority of medieval wars and uprisings that weren't caused by religious differences. When was the last time your PCs paid taxes? Who does pay the tax in your campaign world? How does money get raised to build castles, city walls, sewers, and roads, or to pay soldiers and bureaucrats? Higher-level PCs are some of the richest people in a campaign setting (other than dragons...) - if they're not paying tax, who is?

Monarchy. Historically, monarchies almost always drew their legitimacy from the endorsement of the Church, who spoke for god. Divine Right of Kings and all that. Are your D&D campaign world monarchies divinely endorsed? If so, by which gods? What do the residents of the kingdom who worship other gods think of this? Does the endorsing god ever revoke their endorsement when a monarch goes off the rails, or starts worshipping something else, and if so, what happens then? If the monarchy is not tied to religion, where does it draw its legitimacy from? And the same with all the lesser aristocracy further down the chain.

I don't bother with taxes any more than I make people track how many arrows they have. It's assumed to be part of their living expenses.

In my campaign world, some areas are monarchies, some are democracies, some are a hybrid with a council and a monarchy. The church tends to be advisors and, while important, are not the monolithic central power that the church was in Europe. In part that's because it's a polytheistic society, in part because there are different religious beliefs. So it just depends on where you're talking about. In the area I primarily run campaigns religion is important but it's just sort of integrated into everyday life, you don't go to church on a holy day but you will likely do small rituals and remembrances here and there. There are temples, but they tend to not be dedicated to specific gods.

In another region, ancestor and spirit worship is the norm. There is an emperor who is said to be advised by all of the ancestral emperors and is almost regarded as a holy being.

Land. Who owns it? Who decides who owns it? There's a lot of Generic Wilderness in most D&D settings, in your setting is this on nominally owned by someone and it's just too monster-haunted for them to use, or is it legitimately unclaimed? Do you have a squattocracy of powerful adventurers picking bits of land out that they like, slaying the monstrous inhabitants and setting up domains of their own regardless of who owns the title in a dusty ledger hundreds of miles away? And even in more rural and tamed areas, or in cities - who owns the land? Is your average farmer or shopkeeper a yeoman who owns a small holding of their own, or are they tenants paying rent to a noble or landlord? And in a world of dungeons and underdarks and subterranean dwarven cities how deep does title run?

There is a lot of land that is not controlled by anyone, especially in the current timeline because over a century ago 2/3 of the population was wiped out. It's a time of rebuilding and reclaiming, but honestly I rarely focus any campaigns on conquering the wilderness or similar. There is an ongoing fight against (literal) extinction, especially now that the "civilized" races took such a major hit, but colonialist-adjacent stories have never been my style.

Spell lists. Most D&D spells are intended for adventurers obviously, because that's what the game is about. But that leaves a lot of conceptual space for spells that'd be incredibly important in the non-adventuring world. The Ceremony spell is a nice gesture in this direction, and Plant Growth has some great agricultural utility, but there's some fairly obvious gaps. Does your world have people researching/casting spells like Ease Childbirth, or Improve Dwelling, or Increase Fertility, or Accelerate Fermentation, or Grind Grain, or Contraception, or Permanent Dye? If not, why not? Are there any other obvious utility spells that a pre-modern society would have developed that DON'T centre around bashing monsters?

I assume there is a lot of low level magic in the world that make peoples lives better and more efficient. Magical cures especially greatly decreases childhood mortality, and there is corresponding birth control herbs. This means that it's less of a patriarchal society in most cases because women do not need to be constantly having children in order to maintain population levels. Magic helps with crops and livestock making farms nearly as productive as modern society. Particularly in long lived races where decades or even centuries may go between births, the balance between the sexes is different.

I don't have a completely magitech world like Eberron but many people use a little bit of magic throughout the day without even realizing.

Punishment. Pre-modern societies were very big on corporal punishment. Floggings, hard labor, and mutilations and so on. There's some fairly obvious Rule Zero reasons that this stuff wouldn't be welcome at a lot of tables, but in that case, how do minor crimes get punished? Corporal punishment works because people are afraid of pain and injury, but this is D&D, when most injuries disappear after a good night's sleep and pain (or deprivation, or discomfort, or boredom, or bad food) only matters if you choose to roleplay it. What sort of punishments do your rulers apply? Are there magical options - application of spells like geas?

This is something I discuss in session 0. Punishment is harsh and often brutal by today's standards. There are jails, but very few long-term prisons. People either suffer some sort of corporal punishment, up to execution. Others are forced into servitude to pay off their sentence. Many crimes are punishable by fines or taking away property.

Social mobility. Ancestry and birth were historically very important. Even if you were rich and successful, if you were low-born you could almost never truly achieve equality of social status with those who were born noble, or high-caste, or royal. How tightly do the nobility guard their class integrity in your world? Can your successful adventurers purchase a title, or can their wealth open doors into high society and will they be genuinely accepted there? Can the commoner hero marry the princess without comment, revolution, or ostracism? But if there's no meaningful dividing lines between noble and commoner, what does being a noble even mean?

This varies widely depending on where you are. In most areas there is little difference between a noble and a successful business person. Because of the current timeframe, some noble families are trying to hold onto their old titles, but some are fading into irrelevance while others gain more power with new noble families coming to the fore. In part I did that so that PCs have more options. They can be of noble birth, but the family is broke. They could be trying to regain the glory lost, or establish themselves as leaders.

 

[pemerton]

I'm kind of surprised that D&D and the fantasy genre overall haven't gotten the sort of "look at how bad this world would actually be" approach that the Superhero genre has (Watchmen, The Boys, Umbrella Academy, etc).

Isn't there a revisionist version of LotR by a Russian sci-fi author? I don't remember the title, but someone here probably will.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Isn't there a revisionist version of LotR by a Russian sci-fi author? I don't remember the title, but someone here probably will.

Never heard of it. But maybe someone else has.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Tax, for instance. It was probably the cause of the majority of medieval wars and uprisings that weren't caused by religious differences. When was the last time your PCs paid taxes? Who does pay the tax in your campaign world? How does money get raised to build castles, city walls, sewers, and roads, or to pay soldiers and bureaucrats? Higher-level PCs are some of the richest people in a campaign setting (other than dragons...) - if they're not paying tax, who is?

You make some great points about it here, but I would caution that "taxes" as you are conceiving them were generally a much smaller part of the Medieval and Renaissance experience than the modern one. Generalized taxes as we know them tended to mostly be a special wartime event (and part of why tax revolts were relatively common is because of these special taxes, which people were comparatively unaccustomed to and which often came at times when people were already suffering). Day to day government tended to be run on a relative shoestring budget based on a few traditional, specific and easy to collect taxes (such as port fees), with a substantial part of government revenues derived, in some places, by claiming a government monopoly on some sort of business and then selling the rights to someone, and, much more foundationally and endemically, from the income generated by direct land ownership by kings, lords, towns, churches, etc. Now the nature of rents paid to a person or entity who also has legal authority over the place you live is always going to be a bit amorphously tax-like, but it's clearly not quite the same thing. In some ways the closest thing to the taxes modern people know is probably church tithes.

Which is all a lot of gross oversimplification, because I am discussing about a thousand years of history in many jurisdictions, trying to highlight parts that are different than the modern experience. The part relevant to the discussion is that DMs should probably think about what forms of taxes are being paid more than about tax burdens in general (as government revenues can largely be handwaived as coming from land rents where need be). Medieval and Renaissance government loved weird specific taxes that would not upset the general populace, particularly ones that shifted tax burdens onto marginal people who weren't stakeholders in their society. In a D&D context there should definitely be a weird tax on something adventurers regularly do that normal people don't, because naturally you want to bilk the itinerant murder hobos for all they're worth. And in a medieval context, with less general tax revenues there were a lot more short term levies for specific causes, so the steep new tax on health potions might be a plot hook on dealing with the mysterious force that knocked down the bridge or the band of bandits being paid tribute.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Isn't there a revisionist version of LotR by a Russian sci-fi author? I don't remember the title, but someone here probably will.

The Last Ringbearer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[niklinna]

Isn't there a revisionist version of LotR by a Russian sci-fi author? I don't remember the title, but someone here probably will.

Well I know there was a Soviet revisionist film about the Sampo part of Kalevala.

Sampo (film) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[Shiroiken]

Everything is going to be dependent on the individual political state, as each runs things their own way. The answers given would be the most common in civilized areas.

Tax, for instance.

Most taxes are paid on trade goods, which the PCs tend not to deal in. Technically there's taxes on entering any city or town, but since it's normally only 1 cp I don't bother. A few places have a sellsword tax, requiring 1 gp for entering the city and another 1 gp every month of residency. Many places institute an adventuring tax, which is usually 20% the material value of recovered treasure (magical properties aren't typically evaluated). Smuggling, including recovered treasure, is a profitable practice with dangerous consequences, typically death or enslavement.

Monarchy.

Divine Right of Kings really isn't a thing, although a few states do have official religions that would endorse the ruler. Something important not mentioned is succession in a world where resurrection magic exists. Most states have laws that remove all rights upon death, meaning that a resurrected a person would have no goods or station (with kin having already inherited it). A resurrected person might acquire new goods and station, which would be inherited upon their next death. This makes character death rather important, as technically they'd have to give up all their treasure to their kin, but unless publicly revealed, most adventurers hide their demise to avoid it.

Land.

Much more complicated and varied. There's a lot of unclaimed wilderness that technically belongs to various kingdoms, but the boundaries are fluid based on border skirmishes and monster occupation. This allows an inventive player to seize some of this land and then simply pay off the kingdom it supposedly belongs too. Interior land belongs to the gentry, so that the merchant and peasant classes pay taxes for the land they use.

Spell lists.

Only a tiny percentage of population are even at the power level of having a class, and even fewer of spellcasting classes. These few usually never rise above 1st level (mostly because they die), thus magic has very little impact on the daily lives of people. There might be a few hedge mages or priest that offer their services, but those come at a steep price to everyone, even the local rulers.

Punishment.

Imprisonment is the most common punishment, usually including forced labor. IME this usually have very little impact on PCs, since they tend to fall into the "fight to the death" category whenever confronted with a crime. If I use arrest as a plot point, I usually start the campaign with it to avoid this mentality.

Social mobility.

Just like in real history, there's two types of social status: official and financial. You can have poor nobility that puts on a good face, as well as rich merchants that have enough to buy small countries, and they often intertwine. Nobility will often marry into a rich merchant family, granting the family descendants nobility while giving the noble house current funds. Knights of Nyrond are seldom born nobility, having purchased the title from a poor Knight that needed the coin more. While the merchant class may be looked down upon by most nobility, few take for granted the power they can muster due to their financial abilities. It is possible, however, for a great deed to grant peerage, but it's a rare event (usually involving PCs).

 

[Baron Opal II]

Well, this is a table issue, and for me, PCs are no more inherently special than anyone else.

So, could just anyone learn magic given time and opportunity, at your table?

 

[Micah Sweet]

So, could just anyone learn magic given time and opportunity, at your table?

Yep. I don't see any reason why not.