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<blockquote data-quote="doctorhook" data-source="post: 9645574" data-attributes="member: 58401">This is a good point about discoveries. Often we fall into the trap of imagining that we know 95% or 99% of the details of these historical cultures “Because it 2025, we’ve got museums, it’s all been discovered, right?” Turns out there’s lots that we still don’t know, and many things we haven’t even realized we don’t know.My favourite example is Meso-America, especially the Mayans (and many other cultures in the same region). Only since laser-radar mapping was invented and applied to archaeology have we realized that there are LOADS (thousands? tens of thousands?) of unexplored ruins all throughout the jungles. They’re hidden under dense forest and buried under centuries of dead forest matter and forgotten by the people who live around them; over centuries, the forest and time swallow up a pyramid and turn it into a hill. But the ruin is still there, untouched! And when you realize how much is still out there to be explored, you have to conclude that there must be sooo much we don’t even know about these peoples yet, even though the people never really left. The Mayans are still there, but the history is forgotten and the ruins buried.I recall a good blog post from long ago that argued “D&amp;D is NOT medieval”. (If you search for that, you’ll surely find it.) IIRC the whole thesis was that D&amp;D is pseudo-medieval, the adventures are usually set in American-style frontier towns with European medieval-ish tropes and technology applied. In particular, there’s no feudalism (or only the facade of feudalism), and there’s no medieval mindset or worldview. Certainly (like someone else wrote) D&amp;D was written mostly by modern Americans, and mostly for modern Americans.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="doctorhook, post: 9645574, member: 58401"] This is a good point about discoveries. Often we fall into the trap of imagining that we know 95% or 99% of the details of these historical cultures “Because it 2025, we’ve got museums, it’s all been discovered, right?” Turns out there’s lots that we still don’t know, and many things we haven’t even realized we don’t know. My favourite example is Meso-America, especially the Mayans (and many other cultures in the same region). Only since laser-radar mapping was invented and applied to archaeology have we realized that there are LOADS (thousands? tens of thousands?) of unexplored ruins all throughout the jungles. They’re hidden under dense forest and buried under centuries of dead forest matter and forgotten by the people who live around them; over centuries, the forest and time swallow up a pyramid and turn it into a hill. But the ruin is still there, untouched! And when you realize how much is still out there to be explored, you have to conclude that there must be sooo much we don’t even know about these peoples yet, even though the people never really left. The Mayans are still there, but the history is forgotten and the ruins buried. I recall a good blog post from long ago that argued “D&D is NOT medieval”. (If you search for that, you’ll surely find it.) IIRC the whole thesis was that D&D is pseudo-medieval, the adventures are usually set in American-style frontier towns with European medieval-ish tropes and technology applied. In particular, there’s no feudalism (or only the facade of feudalism), and there’s no medieval mindset or worldview. Certainly (like someone else wrote) D&D was written mostly by modern Americans, and mostly for modern Americans. [/QUOTE]

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