Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Ral of Tyr 04-21-06, 08:41 PM	From A Historical Point of View. When Do They Adventure? D&D is not solely based on the Middle Ages. There are lots of elements of paganism (multiple gods), etc. The land they live is waking up out of a dark age. An age in which there were monsters and magic that fought for dominance in the land, however, the humans won. If the players were alive during an age similar to the one that most fantasy settings are placed in, they wouldn’t have time to go off and adventure. They would have to stay home and protect their family or they would be forced by their lords to fight in on of these battles (which would be the only adventuring they did). Secondly, treasure doesn’t last long before looters find it. Adventuring must be rather new. The dark age before prevented scores of plunderers from finding all the mysterious of the land. Now, with stability, people can seek their fortunes from the chaos of the past. Also, there has to be a surplus in the population. Players can’t go off to adventure when they are needed at home to work the fields. Who Are The Adventurers? Well, they’re not your average person. Your average person in the D&D world was a peasant (maybe even a serf), who farmed the land in rural villages. They couldn’t save money. If the players were born in the lower classes, they would stay in the lower class and never be able to save enough to buy anything for adventure. Therefore, the players must be from a wealthier family similar to yeomans of the later Middle Ages or lesser nobility seeking fame and fortune. They can also be successful merchants from the town. Family Family plays a big part in our world and it should play a big part in a fantasy setting. Players seldom just arrive at a town with no one in their world. Back home they left siblings, parents and maybe even a spouse who will seek the player out if they hear he or she is rich. If there’s a death or problem back home, someone will seek that player out for his or her help. The Adventure Gold Rush Adventures are like Gold Rushes. Someone comes back to town rich and says there’s long forgotten city with treasure and everyone rushing to go to that area followed by the merchants and thieves looking to profit from it. Those too poor to adventure, will turn to banditry. Perils Of The Town Not everyone today is a nice, lawful good person and it shouldn’t be assumed townsfolk are either. The recent surge in adventurers will tempt those to find ways to take a bit (or all) of their money. There will be tons of maps to ancient treasures for sale, most fake or already looted. Shopkeepers will increase the price for adventuring equipment. Taverns and inns will raise their prices. Bar wenches and prostitutes will take their money. Thieves will rob them. Con artists are everywhere praying on the young naïve rural village folk seeking fame and fortune. Even the local governments and the nobility will want a piece of their profit. The town will heavily tax the adventurers. Town officials will have to be bribed. Lords will cite some forgotten legal clause and take their treasure. Most adventurers will return home broke, not having gone on an adventure in the first place, losing all their money and equipment in the town. A note on Demihumans If you look at history and the anthropological record, most small groups do not last with a large group. One tends to either absorb or extinct the other leaving eventually, only one group. The increasing human population, will force the demihumans to the fringes of the land. Elves will retreat to the forests. Dwarfs will retreat to the mountains. Orcs and goblins will have to live wherever they can defeat the dwarfs and elves. Halfings will be almost extinct as humans start to move in to their vales. The age of D&D is an age of dying and change. Monsters If the players are fortunate (or unfortunate) to face a monster, they probably will never face a similar monster again. Most Monsters will either be some mad creation of a wizard or on the verge of extinction due to pressure from the expanding human population. Not to mention the hunting and killing of dangerous monsters such as dragons. Note, it is the job of the local lord and or the local town government to rid the land of monsters. Adventurers are only hired usually because the first expedition resulted in catastrophe. New Lands When the Red Wizard and his Army of Orcs and Goblins are slayed, there are new opportunities for growth and settlement. After all, the Red Wizard had lands. He had a tower and fields to grow grain and raise pigs to feed his army. Now that land will go to the victor. Settlers, mostly peasants and the dirt poor will rush in to claim their piece and maybe in time, rise to the ranks of yeomen so their children can go off and adventure. It’s highly doubtful adventurers alone will be able to defeat the Red Wizard and His Army or Orcs and Goblins alone. There mostly likely the help of some lord or town government back home, who will claim legal rights to the land (adventurers aren’t lawyers). However, land can be granted to the players if they helped. This is the pressure. The Red Wizard and his Army of Orcs and Goblins could be an elven city, a dwarf stronghold or whatever. The slow march of time and humans are squeezing the lands. Soon, elves and dwarfs and adventures will be fables and nothing more.
Seeker95 04-21-06, 09:00 PM	This is very good. :tiphat:
JulesCARV 04-21-06, 09:05 PM	Hmm... it seems more likely, if you're going around plundering old ruins and fighting monsters, that rather than coming out of a dark age, the adventuring PCs are most likely in the midst of one, and the ruins of the past are from a previous golden age. Think of today -- if you find a 200 year old gun, it's going to be a piece of crap compared to guns you can get today. Why use a musket when you could have an FN FAL? If you find a 200 year old sword in D&D, it's quite likely to be better than anything that anything but master blacksmiths can create. Thus, it seems to me that the most likely explanation for a typical D&D setting, with the roaming monsters, the powerful ancient treasure, and the like, is that PCs are living in the middle of the world's dark ages.
Beezelbob 04-22-06, 09:31 AM	This is a very good write-up. I've actually used a number of the items in campaigns that I've run in the past. Ranging from a younger sibling searching out an older sibling due to problems at home, to the encrouchment of human held lands upon the lands of other races (a concept that IIRC is principle to the FR CS).
Art_Tillary 04-22-06, 07:24 PM	Good questions / comments. I generally set my campaigns after humans & allies have been pushed back by monsters such as Orcs, Goblins, etc. Human lands had been over run which is the source of lost cities, temples, loot, etc. The PCs are the looters, and correct, it doesn't last long around them. I assume that there is a more civilized core area that humans come from. For a real world example, they live in western Europe in the 1600s and are traveling to Russia. Russia is mostly unsettled. Europe has a surplus of population that provides adventurers and settlers for the steppes. The fight for dominance is on the edge of human lands, not near it's center. I like the background family ideas. Need to remember that as a means of messing with my players.
purpledragon 04-22-06, 07:56 PM	well, mostly. I even keep the dungeons as the last group left them so the next group finds "evidence" of someone having already "looted" it. However, none of the groups have ever completely cleaned any of my dungeons out, so there is still something left when the next group comes. I also will restock some of the dungeons with "new" monsters, even if those dungeons were originally tsr products that I still have. This represents the monsters running from other areas that have been cleared out.
Ogrebear 04-25-06, 11:06 AM	This is very cool write up and inspires the following idea: The Humans have been expanding at a incredible rate. The Elves, Dwarves and Halflings have tried living amongst them to teach them, to guide them but it’s failed; the Humans are overtaking the Vales, overrunning the forests and out mining the Dwarves. The Orcs, Ogres and Goblins tried the other approach: war! it worked for a while but even the Orcs cant keep up with the Humans- the mercurial race changes its fighting styles, its technology and its population grows and grows and grows. So in the end their was an Alliance formed. The Older Races had to stop the Humans before they where all gone. Some of the Elves claimed this was how it was supposed to be but the Orcs, never ones to go down without a fight pulled them round, arguing that the world was as much for the Older Races as it was the Humans and that the Humans had to be pushed back, and it had to be done NOW! Eventually all agreed and the Great War began. The Humans where shocked at this turn of events; some nations- friends with the Elves or Dwarves could not believe their Allies would turn on them, while in other places defences that had seen off Orc Hordes could not bear up against Dwarf sappers and Elven magic. The small, weaker Human lands fell. Never united before suddenly Humans found they needed to and nations and kingdoms merged; stronger armies came into being, Humanity pushed its magical knowledge to the limits and everywhere there was War. Eventually all the armies became exhausted. The Humans had been pushed back towards the core of their nations, but many of the Alliance where dead too; their Homelands in ruins. Knowledge had been lost, monsters unleashed and civilization crushed. Now it is a time of rebuilding, agreements between all the races has changed the balance – the Humans understand the price of unrestricted growth; the Elves have learnt the power of being long lived (the powers they unleashed scared even them); the Orcs have experienced the benefits of technology and organization; the Dwarves have realised they must learn to live on the surface and not just deep in the earth; and the Halflings have simply been saved from extinction. It is a new world, it is now!
JulesCARV 04-25-06, 11:26 AM	I should note that, while the ideas here are plausible for a given fantasy world, they're not somehow more realistic than other coherent ways of looking at things. For example, one might say that, instead of humans displacing other races, as the humans did the Neanderthals, or as the Chinese are doing to the Tibetans, they exist in roughly stable proportions: that's not to say that they live in harmony: they could be hostile but evenly matched, or they could be apathetic toward each other. This doesn't require elves and humans (for instance) to be equally numerous. Indians are more numerous than Pakistanis, but that doesn't mean that they're slowly wiping them out or anything. Or maybe humans aren't overwhelmingly the most numerous race. Maybe they're only 45% of the humanoid population. Or maybe only 20%. This isn't a matter of authenticity, once you've conceded that you're going to include unreal, fantastic things (like gnomes) in your game in the first place: just taste. Or, one might say that adventurers are not likely to be those from the upper-middle echelons of society, but the poor and the desperate: day laborers who don't have a fief of land to farm, who beg, borrow, steal, and mostly end up dead, but if they're lucky, may end up being able to acquire a cuir boili jerkin and a spear, and go off looting ancient sites in the hopes that they'll find enough to live. It's another plausible way of doing things (given that many adventurers probably have a life expectancy of about eight months, whereas peasants probably can expect to live to... oh... 50 or so?). There are ways of creating incoherent fantasy worlds. For instance, one might create a fantasy world where high level magic is easily available, but most people live as if it weren't, toiling as peasants in fields. This seems incoherent and inauthentic. However, just as there's more than one way to be incoherent and inauthentic (within the bounds of unreal fantasy), there's more than one way to be coherent and authentic. I hope you don't take this as criticism, Ral of Tyr. Yours is certainly a coherent and authentic approach. I'm just saying that is not exclusively so.
Ral of Tyr 04-28-06, 12:47 PM	Hmm... it seems more likely, if you're going around plundering old ruins and fighting monsters, that rather than coming out of a dark age, the adventuring PCs are most likely in the midst of one, and the ruins of the past are from a previous golden age. True, however, how are they going to find the time to adventure? They'll be to busy trying to stay alive from other groups trying to take what they have.