You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
Interesting take. I look at it as less “anti-medieval” and more anti-government. Gygax was a libertarian and it grew out of wargaming. Gygax just wanted a world where he could fight dragons and didn’t bother to do the world building of an economic or political system. I think this was more out of disinterest in the topics rather than as a political stance.
