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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 7976480" data-attributes="member: 5948">Yeah, I'd agree with that.  There's certainly not very much actually historically medieval about most D&D other than the tech and (sometimes) the aesthetic.  In fact, you can almost argue that after 40-ish years of D&D settings, the main inspiration that modern D&D settings are built on is ... other D&D settings.  For most D&D games, from a metagame point of view, you want ancient mysterious fallen empires (so there's lots of ruins and dungeons to explore) and limited strong central government (so that the PCs get to be the ones who prevent the looming disaster, rather than the govt just saying 'we got this' and activating plan 152c that the Looming Disaster Prevention Department drew up years ago).  You want lots of fights.  You want no real cultural taboo against looting tombs etc (cos that's what adventurers do all the time!) and you often want a fair bit of social mobility so that PCs who start as farmkids can get involved in politics or become nobles or rub shoulders with rulers at 15th level without getting shunned or have the weight of tradition/religion/caste fall on their heads.  You generally want a polytheistic pantheon in which some members are actively mortal enemies of others (rather than sort of bickering families like the Greek pantheon, for instance) because that's the way you can have your PCs fight against bad guy clerics.Not to say there aren't settings that ignore some or all of these.  But these are kind of the base assumptions that make a D&D campaign easier to run, and most D&D sourcebooks are written with them assumed, consciously or unconsciously.  I think what we see as the 'conventional' D&D settings like FR, Golarion, and Greyhawk etc are basically the result of game designers applying the metagaming requirements above with a Western set of cultural assumptions, Western formative media influences, etc etc.  And that's not a bad thing!  It'd just it'd be interesting to see what you'd get if someone brought up with a completely different set of cultural assumptions/influences put together a setting...</blockquote>

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