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<blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 3553958" data-attributes="member: 18832">I don't think Dungeons &amp; Dragons has ever really been very medieval - it may have started out as an adjunct to a medieval wargame, but once Gygax and Arneson started building worlds that operated like their favourite fiction settings, that became the dominant influence - and Leiber, Vance, Howard, Lovecraft, and Tolkien were not writing stories set in an analogue of 13th-century western Europe.I mean, the Dying Earth stories take place in the impossibly far future . . . Howard's stories in the legendary, ahistorical past. Leiber and Tolkien were both disconnected from medieval social realities, even as we understood them at the time - neither Lankhmar nor Minas Tirith are particularly realistic! Lovecraft's stories were either set in an ahistorical legendary past like Howard or roughly contemporary (at most, within the early modern period). Even Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions is set in more of a fairytale milieu than anything approximating history, and its protagonist is a legendary medieval figure!I don't enjoy D&amp;D games where it's assumed that the world operates like high medieval Europe did, simply because such an assumption seems to me to be essentially contrary to everything I like best about fantasy. I like strange worlds and weird tales, not leaden rules about plausible social structures.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="mhacdebhandia, post: 3553958, member: 18832"] I don't think [i]Dungeons & Dragons[/i] has ever really been very medieval - it may have started out as an adjunct to a medieval wargame, but once Gygax and Arneson started building worlds that operated like their favourite fiction settings, [b]that[/b] became the dominant influence - and Leiber, Vance, Howard, Lovecraft, and Tolkien were [b]not[/b] writing stories set in an analogue of 13th-century western Europe. I mean, the Dying Earth stories take place in the impossibly far future . . . Howard's stories in the legendary, ahistorical past. Leiber and Tolkien were both disconnected from medieval social realities, even as we understood them at the time - neither Lankhmar nor Minas Tirith are particularly realistic! Lovecraft's stories were either set in an ahistorical legendary past like Howard or roughly contemporary (at most, within the early modern period). Even Poul Anderson's [i]Three Hearts and Three Lions[/i] is set in more of a fairytale milieu than anything approximating history, and its protagonist is a legendary medieval figure! I don't enjoy [i]D&D[/i] games where it's assumed that the world operates like high medieval Europe did, simply because such an assumption seems to me to be essentially contrary to everything I like best about fantasy. I like [b]strange[/b] worlds and [b]weird[/b] tales, not leaden rules about plausible social structures. [/QUOTE]

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