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Message: <blockquote data-quote="T. Foster" data-source="post: 3558152" data-attributes="member: 16574">Very good post, but I feel it's worth pointing out that most of the non-medieval elements you cite are things that were added to the game later, and weren't there in the more explicitly medieval-based earliest editions.Pantheism doesn't really exist in OD&D (as Delta has already described upthread, OD&D clerics are at least implicitly Christian -- "holy symbols" are described specifically as crosses, most of the level titles (except for Lama) come out of the Catholic church, and most of the spells are miracles straight out of the Old and New Testaments) and wasn't really introduced until AD&D (the OD&D supplement Gods, Demigods & Heroes gives combat-stats for various pagan deities but no info on characters worshipping them). The druid class is inspired by something from antiquity, but note what Gygax says about them in the 1E PH (p. 21): "Druids can be visualized as medieval cousins of what the ancient celtic sect of Druids would have become had it survived the Roman conquest." So, druids, in 1E AD&D at least, are a deliberate anachronism, an imagined medievalized version of an ancient sect. Thus, even when pantheism was added to AD&D in Deities & Demigods, it was in this spirit -- a medievalized version of an ancient concept. Let's not overlook the real-world issues as well -- in OD&D it was okay to gloss over the issue and have clerics be implicitly Christian, but in the more detailed AD&D game it was no longer possible and the issue of who or what clerics are actually worshipping and getting their powers from had to be addressed, and it was (wisely) decided to use fictional deities (both from ancient mythology and authored literature) as a way to side-step real-world theological issues.Paladins and cavaliers, at least as depicted in OD&D and 1E, are also clearly medieval (from Charlemagne and assorted Arthuriana). I wouldn't peg the barbarian as particularly medieval, since it so clearly comes from a modern literary source (Conan and the various ripoffs and pastiches that followed). Also, characters' dress as depicted in the artwork of Sutherland, Trampier, etc. was very medieval-inspired.Plate armor wasn't introduced to D&D until 1985; prior to that the best armor available was plate-mail, which comes straight out of the 14th century. The same for most of the other Renaissance-era technology now found in D&D -- for instance, there were no rapiers in OD&D or 1E AD&D. As for the more modern social outlook, I think that owes more to 19th century America (which I'll get to in a bit below) than the Renaissance.Repeating crossbows weren't a part of OD&D or 1E. The monk was, but like the druid was designed as a deliberate fish-out-of-water anachronism, inspired, presumably, by the similarly anachronistic "Shaolin Monk in the Old West" premise of the tv show Kung Fu (which was running in primetime contemporary with the monk class' first appearance in OD&D Supplement II). Oriental monks were not, I don't think, ever intended to ever be a part of standard D&D-world society, they were always supposed to be a rare anomaly. (It's perhaps also worth noting that in later years (c. 1983 on) Gary Gygax expressed regret at including the monk class in the standard AD&D rules, and intended to move it to a separate Oriental game/setting in the revised edition.) Ninja and samurai were popular house-rules, and appeared in Dragon magazine and third-party supplements, but were never part of "official D&D" until 1985, and even then they were specifically introduced as part of the Oriental Adventures sub-game/setting.Absolutely, though there are a fair number of monsters that do come specifically from medieval bestiaries.Steam-engine gnomes were introduced via Dragonlance in 1984 and were not a part of D&D prior to that (though there were other wholly anachronistic elements prior to that -- usually sci-fi technology from crashed spaceships! See both Blackmoor and AD&D module S3). Also note that from its earliest days D&D allowed, and even encouraged, travel to different planes and dimensions which wouldn't necessarily have a medieval flavor, and that characters could bring back anomalous/anachronistic artifacts -- one of Gygax's early accounts of play in Greyhawk Castle ("Expedition to the Black Reservoir") features a character using a ray-gun brought back from a trip to Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure, and the Greyhawk quasi-deity Murlynd (from module EX2) has many anachronistic artifacts in his house (which is itself located on the Wonderland demiplane) -- but these were always set as contrasts and anomalies in the otherwise-medieval-based world.This is absolutely spot-on, and I think is the key to the non-medieval aspect of early D&D. Whereas the elements from other historical eras and locations are by and large either later additions or deliberate anomalies (such as the monk and druid and sci-fi technology from other planes), the "Wild West" aspect as you describe it is absolutely fundamental to the game and has been present from the very beginning (and, like the medieval element, was I think stronger then than it is now). What you're really getting in D&D, then, are the trappings and appearance of the "legendary medieval" superimposed atop the social order of the "legendary Wild West," a combination of quintessentially European folklore with quintessentially American folklore. No wonder D&D is so appealing! (And as much as I'd like to give Gygax and/or Arneson credit for this brilliant fusion, I suspect the actual innovator was Robert Howard, and that D&D was just following naturally in the path he set out via his Conan stories.)</blockquote>

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