"Modern" things in your game?

[S'mon]

This thread has really impressed me how relatively little 'modern' stuff there is in my campaign - few NPCs IMC go around covered in filth, but I use a Roman-era model of attitude to hygiene combined with 15th century technology. I don't have gender equality, NPCs regard slavery as routine (albeit PCs aren't required to), literacy is confined to the middle & upper classes, military organisation is regressing from Roman-style professional to dark ages/medieval-style feudal, etc. Where my campaign seems 'modern' it's because I use a lot of Greco-Roman-style ancient-world stuff re laws, philosophy, etc, which was a lot more like our modern day than the middle ages were. The Goddess of Democracy IMC doesn't oppose slavery but she does oppose autocracy.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I get no particular joy out of trying to authetically recreate medieval Europe, so the modern encroachments are multitudinous and embraced.

It's about the fun of the story, not the accuracy of the peasant-stink.

 

[Orius]

Relative gender equality is one of the few "modern" aspects of my campaign, and that's more of a metagame issue than anything else. Gender inequality may lead to player alienation, so there's fairly good reason to not use it. Economics tends to be fairly modern too, the players can usually find any sort of mundane item they want for sale and I use standard D&D coinage. Again, this is a metagame reason, it's just simply more convenient this way.

But I do not have widespread literacy, there are several nations that practice slavery, there is some degree of racism and bigotry (generally towards goblinoids and the like), and druids and elves are not card carrying members of Greenpeace and PETA.

 

[STARP_President]

Oh, and drugs.
Younger druids in my old campaign, like one of the PCs, smoked, chewed or sniffed herbs that made them relaxed and a bit out-of-it. I know any Americans might find such a reference uncomfortable, but it so works for druids to be stoners. They even said 'dude' a lot - or the PC did, anyway.

 

[Rabelais]

Medieval but moreso

Gender Equality natch, the GM is a woman after all...

Enlightened Monarchies. Socio-politically our campaign is closer to the 18th Century rather than the 14th.

No Racism to speak of. Very cosmopolitan outlook for all of the races. I always thought that the Dwarven/Elven thing was too cliche anyway.

Our biggest modern convenience is our Fantasy FedEx. Not sure precisely where our GM got the concept for the White Riders, but they operate essentially as an Overnight delivery system. We had killed an Adult Red in his lair, and to get the statuary and other heavy items out, we stuck what amounted to routing stickers on the packages. A few moments later the items teleport to our groovy adventurer's pad. Very expensive, but man alive, those statues were priceless.

 

[aurance]

Our biggest modern convenience is our Fantasy FedEx. Not sure precisely where our GM got the concept for the White Riders, but they operate essentially as an Overnight delivery system. We had killed an Adult Red in his lair, and to get the statuary and other heavy items out, we stuck what amounted to routing stickers on the packages. A few moments later the items teleport to our groovy adventurer's pad. Very expensive, but man alive, those statues were priceless.

Ha! So cool!

 

[Wombat]

One big one everyone seems to be forgetting:

Standardized, stable currency -- very modern concept there, especially when added to "decimal" currency.

 

[RFisher]

Probably I don't even realize most of them.

Another point, however, is that the "adventuring class" is pretty different from the rest of society. Some modernisms aren't as out-of-place among them as they would be among the rest of the campaign world's society.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I'm sorry, could you expand on this a bit? Do you mean here that races could rapidly expand and strip-mine the entire planet, and the druids would do nothing? Or do you mean something less extreme?

I mean that druids aren't concerned about protecting the planet, since it protects itself quite well. Yes, vicious strip-mining would go ignored by druids (although frankly, the technology needed for large-scale strip-mining doesn't exist yet, so it's a moot point).

 

[eris404]

Our campaigns have most of the "modernisms" mentioned here, gender equality, literacy, stable currencies, etc (though hygiene sometimes depends a lot on the character...). The only additional thing I could mention is that one campaign has a higher level of technology and does have gunpowder and firearms as well as some clockwork mechanisms. Not completely steampunk, but a few gearish things crop up from time to time.