Marandahir
Crown-Forester (he/him)
If we're talking backstage developments, my game world is largely based on a theoretical future earth continent orientation and what that would mean for ocean and wind currents, climate, evolution, and biogeography.Reply to OP.
As far as a scientific mindset goes, I mostly use it to help with the “backstage” construction and expansion of the various campaign settings I use in my home games, usually with regards to the monsters. It’s still a fantasy game at its heart though, so magic and supernatural forces can and do supersede natural selection.
But all that is stage dressing that I then built my civilizations upon. The idea to some extent is that the humanoid PC peoples are either evolutionary descendants of humans or of other animals, etc, but the passage of hundreds of millions of years have essentially allowed for biological and cultural evolution in such a way that we might as well be in a fantasy setting.
This would allow for paleogeologists to identify the anthropocene layer in sedimentary rocks, if someone was looking for it. And some creatures from our time might show up in fossils. But it's largely a fantasy setting, or people see it through a fantasy lens. There is at least one city that's been lost in time, though, carrying on their existence as if it was the 21st century CE for 170 million years (repeating the same cycle over and over again ever century as part of a mad scientist "God"'s "experiment").