You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
IMO, the big American bias in heroic fantasy RPG including D&D is how empty (most) settings are. If you travel (nowadays by car) in rural Europe, you’d find village every 5-10km, turns out that people walking to their field don’t like to spend more than 1h commuting. While on some high fantasy map, you have like 3 day of walk through a dangerous forest, or an endless plain without much settlements.
Also it’s worth mentioning that many European major roads/highway have been built at first by the Roman, and have been modernized through history. So again, middle age wasn’t as empty, salvage as many D&D settings. Which indeed looks more like frontier era US.
I dont think that’s American, it’s a shit-ton of custom work to fill all that in. Are Europeans willing to spend 10 times as long worldbuilding their campaigns??
The Sword Coast setting is essentially a post-collapse setting where monsters are an existential threat (in theory). There are no longer villages every 5k because only the best and safest lands are worth farming.
In theory. Though I guess you could argue the Sword Coast is also kind of a metaphor for American colonization? The barbarian tribes certainly have Native American coding going on at times.
And America wasn’t actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.
Orcs in Tolkien’s work were rather a stand in for German soldiers since he fought them in WW1. Gygax simply sourced monsters from everywhere. Only later they became elevated to sentient beings and a playable race… uh… species now (D&D 2024).
IMO, the big American bias in heroic fantasy RPG including D&D is how empty (most) settings are. If you travel (nowadays by car) in rural Europe, you’d find village every 5-10km, turns out that people walking to their field don’t like to spend more than 1h commuting. While on some high fantasy map, you have like 3 day of walk through a dangerous forest, or an endless plain without much settlements.
Also it’s worth mentioning that many European major roads/highway have been built at first by the Roman, and have been modernized through history. So again, middle age wasn’t as empty, salvage as many D&D settings. Which indeed looks more like frontier era US.
I dont think that’s American, it’s a shit-ton of custom work to fill all that in. Are Europeans willing to spend 10 times as long worldbuilding their campaigns??
The Sword Coast setting is essentially a post-collapse setting where monsters are an existential threat (in theory). There are no longer villages every 5k because only the best and safest lands are worth farming.
In theory. Though I guess you could argue the Sword Coast is also kind of a metaphor for American colonization? The barbarian tribes certainly have Native American coding going on at times.
And America wasn’t actually empty frontier, either. It was full of the native people that had been living there since time imemorial, and the ex-europeans slaughtered and plagued their way through.
@sirblastalot @Ziggurat And it’s pretty clear that orcs and goblins and such started out as the stand-ins for those Natives.
Orcs in Tolkien’s work were rather a stand in for German soldiers since he fought them in WW1. Gygax simply sourced monsters from everywhere. Only later they became elevated to sentient beings and a playable race… uh… species now (D&D 2024).