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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 7958813" data-attributes="member: 14159">Maybe it's my background having started playing with AD&D 2e, but D&D used to explicitly model itself on historic and folklore characters and openly encourage, or outright expect, characters and campaigns built around historic characters and events.  It has been explicitly historical in the past.The 2e AD&D PHB specifically Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart as examples of the Fighter class, it used Homer and Will Scarlet as examples of Bards, it used Reynard the Fox and Ali Baba as examples of the Thief class, it used Robin Hood and Orion as an example of the Ranger class, it lists Roland, the Peers of Charlemagne and Sir Galahad as examples of Paladins.  It explicitly said that the Druid class was based on the Germanic tribes of Western Europe during the era of the Roman Empire, it gave Archbishop Turpin from The Song of Roland as the example of an iconic Cleric, it notes that while the Wizard has no direct historic counterpart that examples from folklore would be Merlin or Circe.   D&D sourcebooks used to often assume that a D&D game was set in a world that was essentially the same culture, technology, and mindset as Medieval Europe, with magic and monsters being real instead of folklore and superstition, that demihumans would exist only on the fringes of society with humans presumed to being predominant, that magic was rare, and that to a typical peasant the only real difference between D&D and history would be that instead of a monotheistic religion, they had a polytheistic one.  The Castle Guide, a D&D sourcebook meant to be a guide to castles in D&D, was almost more a textbook on the role of castles in the middle ages with annotations on how D&D magic and monsters would change things and a few notes on how demihumans might build castles differently.  There was the entire "Green Book" historic reference series that was explicitly about using various historic eras from antiquity until the 17th century as D&D settings (I once ran a year-long using those rules for a campaign set during the 3rd crusade).. . .and even then in the main D&D multiverse we had Masque of the Red Death, which was explicitly a D&D campaign set in a Ravenloft version of 19th century Earth.The idea that D&D is meant to model pre-modern society as well as purely fantasy worlds is hardly an alien one, and until not too long ago was even an outright official presumption in the core books and officially published settings.</blockquote>

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