Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9414820" data-attributes="member: 58172"><img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60d.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":love:" title="Love    :love:"  data-smilie="16"data-shortname=":love:" />Mainly yeah. Most fantasy maps tend to roughly correspond to the reallife planet.For Oerth the correspondence is intentional, a kind of file cabinet. So if you as a DM are exploring Egyptian or Hindu inspirations, there are places where you might want to plug it in.Flannaess started with a rough version of North America for C&C, and evolved from there. Likewise Darlene seems to enjoy a playful romp thru North America.Meanwhile, the coastlines often imitate and trace reallife coastlines for the sake of having a "realistic" geography. (For example, in Flanaess, in the peninsula of the Corusk Mountains one can see parts of the Greenland and Baffin Island coastlines. So sometimes it is possible to match the rough fantasy locations with precise reallife locations.For planet Oerth, the main areas are known from quasi-official sources, including Dragon Magazine. So locations for populous ethnicities are in place. Then ethnicities of smaller populations often fit well geographically in relationship to the more populous neighbors.Many Americans came from Europe and brought medieval Europe with them! So the fantasy of Flanaess is like King Arthur in a context of the Wild West. The setting assumptions in Flanaess feel American.Moreover, on Oerth, the actual fantasy Europe is on the west side of the supercontinent Oerik, not Flanaess on the east side. The Empire of Lynn (spelled variously) is the Holy Roman Empire. Arypt is Arabia-Egypt, for a Mideast region. The French comic book details some of these areas. And so on. The reallife references are on purpose.The Nordic Lands are around the northerly "Jotnumheim" Sea, while Fireland is Iceland fusing some other northerly islands. Correspondingly, the viking-esque areas in Flanaess are more like Viking communities in Canada (and the US where Vínland seems to refer to Massacheusetts where grapes grow). Overall, the supercontinent of Oerik is like reallife Earth, but if the tectonic plates had crashed Siberia into Washington State, and most of the Pacific Ocean disappeared, thus forming a supercontinent. The Americas are on the East of the supercontentinent, Europe and Africa on the West, and Asia in the middle. The Atlantic Ocean is moreorless in place.D&D follows the fantasy formula of mixing something from reallife that is familiar with an element that is unexpected.The main benefit of intentionally linking reallife ethnicities to fantasy versions, is a reminder of how many reallife ethnicities we have, and how different humanity can be. It helps players be a bit more modest about ethnocentrism and to avoid the assumption that the rest of the humans species is exactly the same ones own culture. Reallife humanity is meaningfully diverse.At this point, we need to remember to treat fantasy cultures with sensititivity and dignity. Because ultimately, every culture is inspired directly or indirectly from reallife cultures.</blockquote>

Verification