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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9246167" data-attributes="member: 18">Doesn't it?Its takes on slavery, for example, are incredibly American-specific and extremely 1990s-esque (I've talked about this a lot when discussing how they could fix this if they wanted to do Dark Sun again - but they don't want to). The mindsets of the "normal people" in the setting also seem to have fairly modern values and ideas (which is fine - it's Planetary Romance or long-time Post-Apocalypse, not historical) - it's the Sorcerer Kings and their minions who don't. The baddies. They largely sidestep religion by "the gods are dead and everyone knows it".I've read a ton of Dragonlance and it's one of the most profoundly 20th-century settings ever written. It could only have been written in the 1980s (or maybe the late 1970s). The mindsets of the characters, the things they care about, the ways they operate, their attitude to religion and the gods (which is clearly much inspired by the more hippy-adjacent parts of 20th century Mormonism, let's be clear, they ain't "golden discs" by accident). Right down to stuff like how they think those godawful Kender (= kinder, as in children) are "cool" and "righteous" and to be tolerated, not horrible little twerps - because that aligned with a lot of 1970s and 1980s ideas about "free range" parenting, and how it was okay for kids to behave (this has been discussed in extreme detail elsewhere). The "plains barbarians" are a deeply romanticized, late-20th-century, cheesy cultural appropriation of Native American culture (to the point of making blue-eyed blondes also Native Americans). Let's not even start on the "sea barbarians", who are basically "Lando Calrissian as a race".Does it have its own perspective? Yes. Is that a 20th-century perspective? Also yes. There's no serious attempt to be "in a different mindset" (particularly not with religion) outside of maybe the Solamnic Knights, who I feel are where it comes closest to genuinely offering a perspective that is a bit different.Taladas is a very different matter, but given like three people ever played it I won't bore us with it right now.Ravenloft doesn't have consistent or thought-through ideas about mindsets. It just has cheap Hammer Horror-style stereotypes for how peasants behave in various places. Which does make it superficially slightly closer to things like Warhammer or HeroQuest which make serious attempts in that direction (indeed HeroQuest is probably the most committed I can think of in the 20th century, maybe even in the 21st, to doing "different mindsets" - this is obvious even in the videogames based on it - King of the Dragon Pass, and both Six Ages games), but it's entirely superficial, at least in 2nd edition. Also weirdly racist. But let's not dig into that! Maybe 3E Ravenloft changed that, but 5E passes over everything with such blinding haste that it's hard to tell.</blockquote>

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