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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 9741038" data-attributes="member: 2205">I said technically no, but I voted yes. I've said that and then quoted it again, and now I'm explaining it yet a third time. I don't know how else to say it.D&D was always based on Gygax's own Medieval historical wargaming hobby. This is, if it wasn't already, immediately obvious before, when you read his Gord the Rogue stories they get really into Medieval armies, troop movements and equipment and logistics, and social structures. Talking about D&D overlapping with Chainmail doesn't make much sense unless you're talking about mechanics early on; it's clear that both were from the same "setting" and they weren't seen as anything different, other than that the D&D "alternative" combat rules eventually won out and were what were published later on. I'm a little more dubious as to how well D&D actually looks like sword & sorcery and weird fiction, although that's a tangent for another discussion. It clearly borrows liberally from that tradition, but nothing in Greyhawk really looks like Lankhmar or the Hyborian Age exactly; because it's too Medievalist in tons and tons of ways. Heck, even the inclusion of the cleric "archetype" which is clearly a Medieval crusading priest with a dash of Van Helsing has no analog whatsoever in sword & sorcery, and yet that was one of the three original classes. D&D makes no sense for years without having a decent understanding of Medieval history. Only later could you fill in the blanks with pink sludge vanilla high fantasy the likes of which you refer to below instead of Medieval history to make sense of D&D.Not me. I remember D&D as it was. If anything the bookshelves in the 80s filled with the likes of David Eddings, Terry Brooks, Raymond Feist, or whatever were often much less Medieval than D&D, as it was presented. And the period that you're calling Medieval is the period I'm saying where the Medievalism was actually much more subdued than it had been previously. More ren faire rather than historical, as you say.</blockquote>

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