How about your own setting. Do you ever think about the limits of the tailoring industry in your world?
Does Drizzt's pants have buttons, clasps, or zippers?
Do Zippers exist in Faerun!?
some are more advanced, some the opposite.
to me it reflicted how different worlds were at different development levels, not every world is stuck in the 1500's
Nentir Vale was our 'home' domain for instance. Each mini-setting had a similar small map. They all had varying levels of technological and cultural development. We used Cultural Levels (CL) as described in the d20 Ravenloft core rulebook. For instance, CL 1 was a stone age setting, CL 6 was early middle ages, and CL 9 was renaissance (the most advanced culture).
= = =
We spent more time in the early early and late levels (stone age or renaissance) then in the middle ages. Firearms and fencing were cool; great change of pace from the typical heavy weapons and armor seen in D&D games ;).
Just a goofy thought, those vampires are in 18th century swag while everyone else is mucking around in their 15th century jerkins.
How about your own setting. Do you ever think about the limits of the tailoring industry in your world?
Does Drizzt's pants have buttons, clasps, or zippers?
Do Zippers exist in Faerun!?
Well, in my setting, Dwarves tend to cloth themselves like in traditional India and the middle east. Halflings prefer kimonos. Hobgoblins are clothed (and armored) like ancient Romans, Eladrins like 17h or 18th century spaniards. Elves like kilts for the males and close fitting long pants for the females. Cloaks are a typically human fashion, rarely used in other societies. They use buttons (as do the elves), other races mostly use strings or fibulas. Gnomes are known for their hats - a fashion that recently entered human society. And so on.
So yes I spent a lot of time thinking about the clothing habits of my NPCs
And pottery, table manners, courting, art and decoration, dancing styles, etc.I've got plenty of time...
Ravenloft's aesthetic is based partly on Victorian Horror, which also inspired one of the classic goth styles. Thing is, D&D is also only vaguely similar to the real world, so there's no reason for fashion to match a specific time period - a wizard can Fabricate a denim jacket if they want. It's all a matter of personal taste.
good point
Just a goofy thought, those vampires are in 18th century swag while everyone else is mucking around in their 15th century jerkins.
How about your own setting. Do you ever think about the limits of the tailoring industry in your world?
Does Drizzt's pants have buttons, clasps, or zippers?
Do Zippers exist in Faerun!?
Dracula was set in the 1890s, so Ravenloft has always been a little more advanced in some areas, like fashion or having guns?
But in regular D&D there are people with armour and weapons separated by centuries. It's just more obvious elsewhere.
As previously stated, although it varies from one domain to the next Ravenloft overall was specifically designed with a bit more of a Gothic or Victorian feel to it - and on a more general note, a largely horror/dark-themed setting is much more flexible when set in a late-Rennaissance or Victorian-era analog... A more complex society usually generates a more complex psychology in its inhabitants and more depth of ambiance than would be found in an earlier era where the concepts of good and evil were more clearly defined and of greater cultural import than the finer shadings of human nature.
In most of my campaigns (for the general populace at least), the farther away one gets geographically from a major city or population center (and/or the further down the scale from Noble to peasant to barbarian one gets) the farther back historically in "real world fashions" the clothing gets unless I happen to be basing the look of that particular society in question on a specifc real-world culture...
As for my PCs, it varies wildly from one to the next, largely based on the influences that helped inspire their creation... My female swashbuckling rapier-and-main-gauche-fighting tempest fighter|ranger Anna Domenica dresses like a cross between a pirate and a late-18th-century gentleman with a ruffled shirt, breeches and an embroidered silk waistcoat, whereas my male 3.5 rogue/swashbucker/fighter Mephistopheles dresses in breeches and tunic more closely reminiscent of standard Rennfaire garb. One of my warlocks, Harrow the eladrin male, wears something like a standard wizard's robe while the other, Malachaiah (a female human), dresses like a 16th century Puritan woman.
Ravenloft's aesthetic is based partly on Victorian Horror, which also inspired one of the classic goth styles. Thing is, D&D is also only vaguely similar to the real world, so there's no reason for fashion to match a specific time period - a wizard can Fabricate a denim jacket if they want. It's all a matter of personal taste.
This.
It's like asking why "Call of Cthulhu" is set in the 1920's while D&D is set in a generic fantasy setting - the more recent versions of "Ravenloft", out of the box, assume a different genre and setting from "plain vanilla D&D".
It doesn't HAVE to be that way, of course - there's really nothing stopping a creative DM from adapting any of those settings to different time periods and genres, and nothing in the rulebooks say you HAVE to set D&D into a vaguely Dark Ages Europe setting and tech level (the 3.5E D&D DMG, at least, was presented as a sort of world-building toolkit that provided DMs with options for setting D&D games in settings ranging from a stone age up to the age of gunpowder and beyond, while the 3.5E-compatible Ravenloft books presented nothing that couldn't be adapted to a similar range of settings.)