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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7785009" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I'm not sure I buy the static vs. dynamic moment in history. If things had gone differently in the Middle Ages, it's quite plausible to think the Industrial Revolution wouldn't happen and 500 years of dynamism might well have skipped. We don't know and it's an interesting thing to play with in a campaign. Static society or dynamic one is IMO not crucial here and I think misses quite a bit about Tolkien's world, for example. It's quite clearly a post-apocalyptic world in decline when the War of the Ring happens. It's filled with ruins and a declining population, with society really declining after the fall of the Northern Kingdom and the Great Plague. (Also, as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2U6RG4HOwM&t=1221s" target="_blank">this video of Matt Colville's</a> points out, in many ways, The Shire is the Garden of Eden, while Bree and the rest of the world represents having left Eden. He utterly denied that LotR was a crude allegory for World War II, which I do totally agree with, but a lot more of Tolkien is metaphor or allegory than even Tolkien himself liked to admit..) I think a way to extend this is to focus on relevant verisimilitude. For instance, if the campaign is focusing on things from 1000 years before the time of the campaign arising, it's pretty important for the DM to have an idea of what happened then and how it's important to current events. It's not, however, important to have super-detailed history for the intermediate days that's not relevant to the campaign. No reason to drown the players (or the DM, for that matter) in that material. In a lot of ways, Tolkien himself does focus on the relevant: There are certain really crucial moments in his narrative and that's got some detail---think the end of the Second Age, when the Last Alliance defeats Sauron in a Phyrric victory and Isildur took the Ring but failed to destroy it---while a lot of the rest is simply just a list of names.</blockquote>

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