"Modern" things in your game?

[Ace]

Modernisms--

well all the humans in my D&D campaign are derived from SCAdians and Rennies, Reinactors and the like so quite a few slip in

the big ones -- higher social status for women, birth control herbs, anti slavery movements, more literacy, M. Lackey like kingdoms, modernish clothing (trousers and shirts and coats)

 

[reanjr]

Still, most D&D adventurers in games I have played had one set of clothes and never washed.

Really? One of my player's is almost addicted to public bathhouses. Whenever the party reaches a town with a bathhouse, whe immediately goes there to wash up. The other players are fairly hygienic as well. The three elves all have several sets of clothing and one grooms himself regularly. The Dwarf and the Barbarian are the only filthy ones.

Though I'd imagine the stench of cheap ale and wine on the dwarf would mask his malodorous nature.

 

[Type2demon]

Not everything modern is "New".
The Romans in 20 B.C. bathed on a daily basis and cleaned themselves with oil based solvents (forerunner to modern soap). They had sewers and proper drainage. They had paved roads and had invented concrete. Some Roman architecture is still so advanced that we cannot duplicate it today.

Roman culture included "sports" arenas that would not be shamed by their modern equivelents. They sold tickets to events, had organized seating plans, Vendor walked the stands selling beer and bread to spectators. The Colosseum even had a retractable fabric roof for shade in hot conditions.

The nearby Minoans had invented hot and cold running water systems and flush toilets using pressure from natural springs and ceramic pipes...they used pine tar as an effective pipe glue.


Many ancient peoples had very complicated culinary recipies that can rival those today. (not just meat on a stick and gruel that seem to be the staple of Hollywood movies of the time) Hell, maybe they even had an Iron (age) Chef contest!

Of course, much of this knowledge was lost in the Dark Ages, but that does not have to be so in a fantasy campaign. Different societies exibited various modern socilogical ideas throuout history, So a gender equal society is not impossible....especially in a world where magic can be the equivelent of real world technology.

 

[Templetroll]

When I thread the subject, my mind immediately raced to something very literal.

In high school, the norm in my area was to take characters with you from game to game. So, often times, you would play with someone's character who had been ran under multiple DMs. Anyway, one of the guys I played with had a character who had come across, in a treasure horde of some kind, a Black & Decker power drill, or something like it. Of course, it had a plug-in, so was absolutely worthless. But, as a curiosity, he carried it around with him.

I always thought that was funny.

A campaign I played in back in the early 80s had the DM's Traveller campaign as the ancient history of his D&D campaign. Finding batteries for all the cool, but otherwise useless stuff was the best treasure ever. I'm certain Lum the Mad was based on Bill Gates; only way to explain the Machine.

The one time he ran his Traveller campaign I played the ancester race of Brownies, leprechauns, etc. They were banned from most civilized worlds. I played him as a spacefaring Munchkin. I had a good time, annoyed my friends, they tried to kill me. What more can you ask for out of an adventure?

 

[jester47]

And let's consider hygene. Bathing was considered dangerous, so everybody stank like the alcoholic street bum on the corner. Everybody had lice, and fleas and probably lots of rashes and oozing sores as well. Being in a crowded venue such as a church must have been a torment. Also, if you got some sort of infection, if your immune system did not overcome it then you would either have a chronic illness for the rest of your wretched life, or it would kill you outright in an acute bout of suffering. Nearly everyone had rotten teeth, so that means their smiles were a horror, and their breath was worse than a sewer. And that just scratches the surface.

No, modern players, including me, wouldn't be all that enamored of playing in a truly realistic medieval setting.

It really depended actually. Mainly on who, time, and place. Newer research indicates that those who could afford it bathed fairly regularly up until the Black Death. It was after the Black Death that people developed the idea that bathing was bad. Again, teeth was a class/diet thing rather than a no technology thing. This was a society without sugar. Honey was pricy. Tooth rot was not as common as once believed. Peasants in places where the nobility did their job well (keep order and provide defense) had fairly ok teeth. In fact peasant teeth are showing to be better than the nobility and the clergy who could actually afford sugary foods and had sedentary lifestyles. The thing is they never dug up peasants. They only really studied clergy (rich ones at that) and nobles. The assumption was that obviously nobles had a better life and so if they were missing teeth... But the only thing that would cause you to loose teeth is fighting or advanced tooth decay. With the peasant diet being much healthier (fruits, vegetables, and grains with less meat with more rounded out exercise) than the noble one (assuming what they owed the nobles was fair) they typially had better teeth. The misconception about teeth also occured because typically men were studied rather than women and children. People were in fact much cleaner and healthier (on the most part) than we have been taught to believe previous to the black death. This misconception can be pretty much traced back to sexist assumptions when carying out archeological studies.

Further confirmation of the tooth misconception can be traced to two things: One is the colonial period. What made detal technology better in the colonial period? There were no serious advances. True there was the occasional dental catastrophy (George Washington is known for his wooden false teeth) but the fact that history makes a point of it means it was an oddity, not the standard. The other is nicknames. From the middle ages all the way to modern times, nicknames with regards to missing teeth were on the record. However, this indicates that missing more than about 25% of your teeth was somthing worthy of a nickname. As a result, we can assume that this was relatively uncommon.

This is not to say that the middle ages were all hunky dory. If you were injured, you were pretty much forked for life, and considering that most peasentry was involved in the agrarian sector, farming injuries must have been common as well as some random brutality.

What wrong with stuffing kids in armor and letting them fight with sticks? Man I would have loved some real armor when I was fighting with sticks as a kid!! Such sanitised upbringings these days... back in the dark ages of my youth jungle jyms were made of steel, and we hit each other with sticks, and we liked it!!

 

[CRGreathouse]

Many ancient peoples had very complicated culinary recipies that can rival those today. (not just meat on a stick and gruel that seem to be the staple of Hollywood movies of the time) Hell, maybe they even had an Iron (age) Chef contest!

While I agree with the rest of your post, I'm not sure I agree with this. (If you have more information than I do, great -- I'd be interested to know!)

I've seen a fair number of recipe books from the Middle Ages, as well as an ancient Roman cookbook. The recipes struck me as very basic -- things like "spiced honey wine: add 1 part honey to 2 parts wine, stir, add spices, serve warm". I'm just not convinced that cooking was particularly advanced until the agricultural advances that came with the Renaissance.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

I've seen a fair number of recipe books from the Middle Ages, as well as an ancient Roman cookbook. The recipes struck me as very basic -- things like "spiced honey wine: add 1 part honey to 2 parts wine, stir, add spices, serve warm". I'm just not convinced that cooking was particularly advanced until the agricultural advances that came with the Renaissance.

Well, what else are you going to put into spiced wine? Fish? The thing I'd want to know is, what spices did they have? Had they opened up trade to the far East to get nifty stuff like cinnamon and saffron? Or were they using mostly native European spices?

What wrong with stuffing kids in armor and letting them fight with sticks? Man I would have loved some real armor when I was fighting with sticks as a kid!! Such sanitised upbringings these days... back in the dark ages of my youth jungle jyms were made of steel, and we hit each other with sticks, and we liked it!!

Man, I miss my old jungle gym. They tore down all the good old ones that let you get more than six feet up off the ground and replaced them with these plastic monstrosities that fade in the sun and are about as fun to play on as a slightly rounded-off rock. Where's my catwalk? Where's my fireman's pole? Where's the 1/2 geodesic dome made of galvanized steel that kids get their tongues stuck to in the winter? Man, falling off 15 feet of climbers builds character!

 

[Buttercup]

Really interesting stuff about dental health and hygiene, and the sexist assumptions of scholars....

Obviously you've been in college more recently than me, since you know about recent research. What books would you recommend on these subjects?

 

[CRGreathouse]

Well, what else are you going to put into spiced wine? Fish? The thing I'd want to know is, what spices did they have? Had they opened up trade to the far East to get nifty stuff like cinnamon and saffron? Or were they using mostly native European spices?

No, you misunderstand me -- that was the recipe. It didn't say "cinnamon and vanilla, with some cloves"; it said "spices".

Many of the others were similar, as I recall. For example, one was "how to make good flour with bad flour": "add 3 parts good flour to 1 part bad flour, let sit".

 

[Tonguez]

Man, falling off 15 feet of climbers builds character!

Exactly broken bones, chipped teeth and near strangulation never hurt anyone!