dave2008
Legend
Interesting, I guess you haven't been to the pacific northwest (or the northeast, or southeast, or midwest) of America
D&D General D&D is now Steampunk (poll)
- Thread starter GMMichael
- Start date
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Yeah. It's a big country with just about every kind of climate. Heck, California alone is incredibly diverse in biome.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
The “vibes” I get from early D&D are Wild West. Nothing remotely medieval. Which is why I’m asking people to explain what they mean. So far all they can come up with are things that have always been around, or never existed, like wizards in robes and pointed hats.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I'm having a really hard time accepting that you have no idea what we're talking about.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
I haven’t been anywhere. Everything I know about America I learned from D&D. Like other people seem to have learned their history.
Kichwas
Half-breed
Fantasy was always Steampunk and often even had high SciFi.
It was only D&D that wasn’t and that bled into other tRPGs and fed back into some post D&D “litRPG” fantasy.
But we’ve always had rayguns, aliens, and robots in fantasy. Let alone steampunk.
Terry Brook’s Shannara was originally written as a post apocalypse setting with all sort if sci fi until the editor At Del Ray forced him to rewrite it into a formula designed to copy Tolkien. Before him heroes could go one chapter fighting serpent cults to the next fending off raygun using serpent aliens… Fighting dragons to raising dragons on a distant colony planet long ago settled by Earth.
And actual medieval fantasy would have guns and canons. Just not at the scale of mass production.
It was only D&D that wasn’t and that bled into other tRPGs and fed back into some post D&D “litRPG” fantasy.
But we’ve always had rayguns, aliens, and robots in fantasy. Let alone steampunk.
Terry Brook’s Shannara was originally written as a post apocalypse setting with all sort if sci fi until the editor At Del Ray forced him to rewrite it into a formula designed to copy Tolkien. Before him heroes could go one chapter fighting serpent cults to the next fending off raygun using serpent aliens… Fighting dragons to raising dragons on a distant colony planet long ago settled by Earth.
And actual medieval fantasy would have guns and canons. Just not at the scale of mass production.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Guns and cannons have always been part of my homebrew worlds. Always felt silly not to have them with all the other stuff D&D has.
Tonguez
A suffusion of yellow
Isnt Hommlet in a temperate forest region? I also thought it was a standard English Midlands hamlet or maybe somewhere central france-like
Keep on the Borderlands is in the Balkans - especially with its Karst limestone caves (though it is very informed by old US forts)
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Reynard
aka Ian Eller
I am not sure I would go back to running it, but I will say this: 3.5 was much more of an intentional toolkit than 5E, and it knew how to support the GM with publications.
That’s interesting - I admit I’ve always tried to envision the weather in the locations in my campaign and being an American raised in Northern CA, I’ve largely settled on West Coast/Pacific Northwest climate unless the characters are specifically in a desert or a jungle, and even then it becomes more based on what I see in movies rather than anything I’ve ever actually experienced, I.E. Death Valley versus the Sahara. I think what we imagine for our campaigns are more drawn from movies - which can be CGI or a mishmash of unnamed real world locations- than from real world locations we’ve actually been to.
