MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Playing in the 80s, it was sword-n-sorcery peanut butter with all manor of chunks of sci fi, planar, elder horror weirdness candies mixed in. We just bought modules of somewhat appropriate levels for our characters. A "campaign" may involve clearing the caves of chaos, surviving being shipwrecked and running from dinosaurs on the island of dread, exploring a crashed spaceship in some remote mountains, following the rabbit into the lands beyond the looking glass, getting sucked through the mists into Ravenloft, add to that in converting our AD&D characters to play in Boot Hill and Gamma World. Man...trying to come up with a list of assumptions for D&D gives me a headache. I mean they published dungeons where you could come upon a film crew filming a "star trek" rip off.
70s and 80s D&D didn't seem to be as hung up on verisimilitude as we are today.
The Greyhawk boxed set was the first time I started thinking in terms of having a somewhat coherent setting. But all that weirdness could be--and was--dropped into Greyhawk. About the only thing that Greyhawk changed for me was developing new fetishes for heraldry and cartography.
I think all of the features and assumptions listed in the OP are accurate. But they are just the assumptions to often be juxtaposed with all manner of anachronistic, genre-bending weirdness.
Sometimes I miss the incoherent wonder of my childhood D&D.
70s and 80s D&D didn't seem to be as hung up on verisimilitude as we are today.
The Greyhawk boxed set was the first time I started thinking in terms of having a somewhat coherent setting. But all that weirdness could be--and was--dropped into Greyhawk. About the only thing that Greyhawk changed for me was developing new fetishes for heraldry and cartography.
I think all of the features and assumptions listed in the OP are accurate. But they are just the assumptions to often be juxtaposed with all manner of anachronistic, genre-bending weirdness.
Sometimes I miss the incoherent wonder of my childhood D&D.
