How medieval are your fantasy games?

General
#1

Like the title says, I’m curious as to how medieval your fantasy games tend to be. For example, on one end of the spectrum would be someone like Skerples who tries to model a realistic feudal system and even has taxes! On the other end you have completely gonzo settings like Electric Bastionland.

Have you found any particular advantages to leaning into the medieval/gonzo when running your fantasy games? Any downsides? And finally, what’s something similar to Earth in your setting and what’s something that is completely unique?

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D&d is anti-medieval
#2

My CX campaign is late medieval Switzerland in its implied setting, and I’ve made a few efforts to lock that in, what with royal tax collectors, inheritance drama and the like. But none of it is really specific to the time period. Using an assumed setting is great for getting into the action quicker, especially with more experienced roleplayers. No particular disadvantages, besides not being able to fit in some gonzo content.

The mundane world of late medieval Switzerland is effectively the same (give or take a castle of evil undead and the odd magic-user). Finally, they haven’t actually shown up in my campaign, but I justify the adventures I’m homebrewing as taking place in the same world, so elsewhere in the world there’s Journey to the Center of the Earth-style underground dinosaur reserves created by mad angels, a fleet of undead submariners captained by vampires and directed by a lich patrolling the oceans, and a decrepit dwarven undersea geothermal plant encased in an iceberg.

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#3

I usually go for Reinassance, more than Middle Ages, because I think it’s more fun (slightly improved technology, the first firearms, a more comprehensible political structure) and always spice them with a bit of gonzo content.

Since I usually go for small areas, I could decide to take @nroman’s route of having everything take place in the same world, but this is something I haven’t decided yet.

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#4

My games are medieval-ish, in the sense that the general look and feel swings between 10th century and 15th century Europe. I do like adding a smattering of Bronze, Iron Age and older trimmings to suggest a history for any given place. I do like everything to feel lived-in and organic, and being from a rural part of England has fed into the way places and people appear. I don’t go in for the sort of wispy stuff where elves are art deco-ish fops with a mystical bent or anything of that kind of thing. I also don’t always rely on there being an absolute feudal system based around royalty. For example, a recent homebrew I ran using 1E AD&D was based around a city that was pretty much run by a temple and a guild of merchants.

TBH I’ve always considered ‘standard’ 1E AD&D as being a bit too what I call ‘Technicolor Fantasy’, as D&D seemed very influenced by American movies from the 50s and 60s with knitted chainmail the overuse of cod-medieval phraseology - Ivanhoe, The Magic Sword, etc etc. Granted this makes D&D an American take on medieval Europe, but as a European that’s always seemed a bit cheesy, or at least a bit saccharine IMHO. This in turn also means that standard tropes such as taverns to me look just like some sort of theme pub that’s missed the mark a bit. Mine tend to be more based on actual pubs, and old ones at that (where I was born and raised has quite a lot of those to choose from).

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#5

My campaigns usually have a sword & sorcery feel: so, historical medieval age with 12th-13th century technology with some areas and cultures having a bronze\iron age level of development. I also add a lot of weird stuff like Cthulhian gods and advanced artefacts.

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#6

Not medieval at all, since I play LotFP, Into the Odd and now Mörk Borg, these are not medieval settings. LotFP is early-modern, 17th Century (1600s), ItO is Victorian gothic/fantasy, and MB is dark fantasy, with medieval tropes, yeah, but twisted for a darker experience.

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#7

The two main games I’ve been running have kind of odd smattering here and there if medieval trappings.

For one game, its Pathfinder 2e using the Carrion Crown Adventure path (which is set in the Galora setting). Assumed to be more early renessance, but it’s taken a slight Sword and Sorcery turn, so it’s does have a tiny pit of a medieval feel.

For my other game, it’s the Gonzo/“high-ish” fantasy Wild West game I’ve spoke about on occasion. Even though it has clearly western wrapping, some of the core things in the lore are medieval. Like the Rail Barons, they operate on a semi-fedual structure where the barons are at the top and the station masters are effectively their vassals. In a similar stroke, the Cattle Ranches that dot the setting are effectively minor nations with the Cowboy serving as Knights or Merceranies for the Ranch Owner or lord. I might be forgetting some stuff but it’s the basic gist.

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#8

I must admit that I still don’t know what’s meant by ‘gonzo’ WRT to RPGs. I see how the term works with journalism but am not sure how it figures for RPGs.

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#9

From my understanding, it means “anything and everything goes” since one minute you could be fighting bandits in a medieval forest to flying a spaceship through the rings of Saturn or fighting aliens raids away from your medieval village.

It’s really a single word that can summarize what could be in store for a game or setting.

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#10

I like that idea a lot.

Most of my games have been modern weird, but I’ve also run a brief Knave campaign set in late-Victorian England. The player characters dealt with Ogre bouncers, a twisted fey prince and leapt head-first into a very bad deal with a demon.

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#11

Thank you and it’s kind of the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. I’m currently putting together my own little zine for my setting, partially to organize my thoughts but to hopefully share with my players and others (still early in on it though so can’t speak about a timeline).

But what you descibed in your Knave game is kind of the stuff I hope to get them in. Currently the party is enthralled in a war with the a Sorceress by the name of the Coalball Queen (Yes, they are basically fighting a hoard of offbrand Kolbolds). Been fun so far with everyone enjoying the game, hopefully it keeps going.

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#13

I think it’s hard to describe medieval in terms of degrees. Some people may take “realistic” as medieval (like the collection of taxes). The feudal system worked differently at different times and places and some specialists in medieval history want to stop talking about feudalism.

Otherwise, it’s a matter of picking a century and a country to represent the medieval. But different countries had different cultures and governments and economies in the Middle Ages, so there is no uniform medieval anything. Add to this the problem that specialists in medieval history disagree about what counts as medieval, and we are likely to get lost.

One way to think about this may be to ask, “What technology is not present?” Most fantasy settings lack industrialization, coal and electricity power, telecommunications, mass-production factories, high-power firearms, and a tight relationship between the individual and the state (poor census, no numerical identifier for the individual). Also, the typical medieval state itself was run by dynastic principles and personal ties.

Maybe what we need to think about is “pre-industrial societies.” There is a book called Pre-Industrial Societies by P. Crone. I recommend it to fantasy world-builders (but not in the 2003 edition!).

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#14

WRT gonzo, D&D has always seemed a little like that to me from the outset anyway. The very first monster I ever encountered in D&D was a Carrion Crawler and I have a very distinct memory of being a bit freaked out by it. Granted, as a new player I thought the game was more based in something like The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, but I just wasn’t expecting it to be that weird :laughing:

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#15

People use “gonzo” to mean whimsical, wacky stuff, but I think there is more to it. I think it often means stuff that is funny for the player, but not for the character. I reflect on it in a blog entry, here. The main point is that I suppose that the appeal of the gonzo aesthetic is that it emphasizes a gap between player and character. I take this psychological distance from the character to be one of the hallmarks of the “old-school revival,” as when they emphasize that “it’s a game, not a story-telling vehicle, and I’m a gamer, not an actor.”

There’s definitely more to the gonzo aesthetic than just that, but it’s still worth thinking about.

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#16

I see what you mean. At the same time, I do think that early D&D and some other games were already gonzo, but perhaps after a certain amount of time various tropes set in WRT RPGs that perhaps people took that gonzoness for granted. So today’s gonzo is tomorrow’s normal. For instance, when I first got to roll up a character for Runequest in 1984 or so, the setting and the fact that you could play ducks seemed much much different to D&D for me, and I already thought that D&D was weird.

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#17

Jerry, I agree about the ducks in RuneQuest. And the Jack O’Bears! The expectations of role-playing games were a lot less serious in the 1970s. Some people played in a goofy style on purpose because it was all a make-believe joke past-time. You’d find monster casinos in dungeons, where you could gamble your treasure, or wandering squids or buffalo or rolling meatballs in the corridor. When I started playing in 1981, I had more serious tales in mind, and I think a lot of role-playing gamers had shifted that way, too. It’s interesting to think about why tastes may have changed. Were gamers getting too dramatic, or were those earliest players too self-conscious about what they were doing to suspend disbelief and make an internally consistent and believable fantasy story? I think that when players inhabited their characters more, the stories got more serious. The longer one played, the more one craved an inhabitable world.

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#18

I agree with you about the change in attitudes in Roleplaying Games over the decades. I admit I’m from the younger crowd coming into TTRPGs, but the attitudes about gaming certainly have shifted looking back at the older games and modules. I think the shift from Gonzo/Crazy/Weird settings to more “serious” settings is what content is being consumed by DMs and players alike (which is partially moving back with Books from writers like Sanderson floating around). Certainly play time and interaction with the game affects the desire for more Serious/Medieval and stepping away from Gonzo style games.

If my memory serves, some of the books that helped inspire were more in the vein of Gonzo fantasy than say Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time (which has appeared more and more in reading lists since D&D’s first founding).

@JerryB whole heartedly agree with you on early D&D being Gonzo and kind of miss that style of “Anything goes” mentality in today’s games or having “out there” trappings like the Ducks in Runequest.

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#19

I think the tropes just became entrenched. To a certain extent, there were some tropes already in D&D from the get go (I mentioned Technocolor Fantasy previously), but generally D&D a certain theme in itself and it’s almost like it’s weirdness is now taken for granted. Aside from monsters, I still think the whole concept of a dungeon - as they exist in D&D - is weird. From the get-go I wondered if they were really like some sort of bunker and, if so, what were they designed to protect the occupants from? I mean, why build all that stuff underground?

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#20

Excerpt.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q9wIoRUi86R-6gbm7in-Yig3yfYu2C6a/view?usp=sharing

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#21

The only caveat that might be possible to this is the fact that magic exists in the world of D&D. So one would have to wonder if it made some things quicker/better than was actually the case in the pre-industrial period. So, is there some form of magical communication over distance? Bad crops this year? Perhaps call in a Druid, etc etc.