Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;873734But how can anyone be so deluded to be "historically accurate" when you have elves and dragons in your one-hundred-and-one year's war?

If your elves and dragons play the same role as they did in the real middle ages, there's no trouble with historical accuracy.  Elves and dragons were real to medieval people. So was God, and demons, and the undead.  And conjurers and witches.

The historically IN-accurate thing would be to treat the 15th century as though everyone was 20th century rationalists or 21st century relativists.

Quote from: RPGPundit;874723On the other hand, the real world and real history affords you a ready-made set of NPCs and events you could most likely never come up with in total on your own.

I think, for example, that the War of the Roses makes for a more interesting setting than the War of the Five Kings in Westeros. There's a lot of interesting characters in Game of Thrones but there's an order of magnitude more characters in the real War of the Roses.  There's a lot of setting lore about Westeros, but not nearly as much as the setting lore of 15th Century England.

I can't argue with that. Having real world characters to draw on is definitely an advantage of using historical settings. For me neither approach is better or worse. I think both are viable (but they each have their challenges).

I disagree with the argument that a wholly fictitious world gives the GM more freedom. With few exceptions, fantasy settings are lazy pastiches of real world historical cultures and geographies. Even the lauded Game of Thrones franchise slavishly follows this convention and in a truly astounding display of laziness makes the continents perfect rectangles that neatly fit onto A4 paper.

So playing in actual Europe saves time by spotlighting the real cultures that the GM would otherwise photocopy ad nauseum anyway. Rather than visiting Wutai, characters could visit China, Japan, Korea or any of the many other diverse countries in southeast Asia.

Quote from: Premier;874368Yes, and that's what I already described as "bog standard D&D with a map of Europe".

Has anyone done this?

Just taken the map of Europe and run BOG standard D&D? AKA, you visit Paris and meet some elves, fight some orcs and eat croissants?

If so, how did it go?

Quote from: TristramEvans;874377Yeah you can have a fantasy version of our reality where "urban legends are true", but its not our reality, it doesn't account for the manner in which our reality would be altered.

What if you worked backwards?

AKA, take an event, keep the historical outcome and add fantasy elements.

We know the Normans invaded England in 1066. What if that invasion also involved Normandy dragons fighting vs. Saxon manticores?

Quote from: Arminius;874439Isn't Backswords & Bucklers indisputably OSR? It's not fantasy Europe, but it obviously shows that historical D&D is viable.

Has anyone played Backswords & Bucklers?

If so, please start a thread about it!

Quote from: Christopher Brady;874459The 'echo effect' changes everything the moment you introduce certain fantasy elements.

I agree for high fantasy D&D magic, but low fantasy games have small ripples. In our world, there was superstition, but no reality to their fears. In a low fantasy game, the peasant superstitions would sometimes be justified.
 
CHILL does this. Chill monsters don't eat cities. They eat a family here, a hobo there, and a troublemaker or two. The authorities can't fathom what is really happening and not much of an investigation happens unless the victim is important.  

In a medieval world, that would be even easier to conceal.

Quote from: Bren;874496Really I think what matters is a subjective thing. Some people will find the historical setting makes it really hard, even impossible for them to suspend disbelief. (I have that feeling about supers games , it's one reason I don't play or run them.) But some people have the same problem with the inconsistencies of the average fantasy setting.

Good point. It is subjective.

I often lose immersion with more "realistic" setting elements.  I am totally good with supers games, but a game that brought down real world physics and real world penalties would actually lose me.

Quote from: Spinachcat;874743Just taken the map of Europe and run BOG standard D&D? AKA, you visit Paris and meet some elves, fight some orcs and eat croissants?

Sounds like fantasy Shadowrun (reminds me of the backlash against the Earthdawn supplement which did pretty much that with fantasy not-Italy, fantasy not-Germany, etc.).

I don't know why but I would have no interest in playing in a historical setting. Of any period in history. Especially if it had famous people that I knew about. I'm not precisely sure why, but the idea just ticks my "not interested" box.

I'm the same with games directly based on films, TV series, books (even something like MERPS), video games, or whatever. Anything that is directly attempting to emulate or "channel the goodness" from a specific real or fictional source immediately turns me right off.

I wish I knew why!

Furry Outlaws and Pirates are both set in historical Europe with animal people instead of humans and a touch of magic in there. The trick is that magic is much more low key hedge wizards and druids style than flat out D&D. And in Furry Pirates its optional.

I believe aside from magic and maybe some elementals and possibly demons the supernatural was on the fringes rather than pervasive.

The novel Operation Chaos is still one of my favorite go-to examples of extrapolating how the modern world might look if the settings past had been fantasy Europe. WWII is being fought against the Arabian nations instead of Germany. Machinegun clips have every 10th round silver in case theres were-creatures in the enemy ranks, flying carpets as bombers and so on.

Quote from: Bren;874235Except people believing magic, demons, and monsters are real isn't the same thing as magic, demons, and monsters actually being real. People do believe and always have believed in lots of things that are utter bullshit. Medieval people were no different in that respect.

But for them it was real, in a totally different way, a different paradigm, than how some religious person today might say that their beliefs are real (unless said religious person belongs to a truly nutso evangelical cult, or we're talking about some brands of African christianity or tribal leftovers or stuff like that).

Quote from: TristramEvans;874237Belief in something and that thing actually existing and interacting with people is a bit different of a thing, I'd say. It's one thing to take the stance that all those stories and legends told by the people of an age actually happened, but say, for example, witches actually existed: that single fact drastically alters the Inquisition and its role in history.

Leaving aside that by "inquisition" you actually mean the early-modern Witch Craze (the Inquisition was mainly concerned with heresy, and in Spain with hidden jewish/muslim backsliders, not with witchcraft), how would it change?
To the people involved the witches REALLY DID EXIST. They weren't all just going around being all tongue-in-cheek about it. They really thought that witches were cursing them, ruining their crops, plotting against the king, and what's more they had really seen animals talk or women having sex with the devil in the woods.

QuoteWhere in our world people were making grabs for property and wealth, or political coups, or providing scapegoats to superstitious yokels, instead we have an actual holy war against Satan's minions.

This is ridiculously cynical. You are making assumptions based on a perspective that has no actual context to the time or place. Of course, there were some hucksters and opportunists, but even most of these were people who really did think they were taking advantage of real problem to benefit themselves.  There may have been time they knew the person they were accusing probably wasn't a witch, but that's different from not thinking witches existed at all.

And no, it's not like the modern UFO maniacs. It's like if EVERYONE was sure that UFOs were real and alien abductions were really a thing that happens.

The mistake you and others in this thread are making is in thinking like a 21st century person, and assuming that these guys didn't really think it or mean it (because how could a rational person possibly think these things?), but the fact is they did.


From a setting-building perspective, the problem is not about making the supernatural real or not, it's all about how you do it.  If you have a friendly kingdom of elves in the middle of the Holy Roman Empire, or magic shops selling wands of fireball, then obviously that's not going to work. But if your fantasy elements mirror the way people actually thought (which are the principles that inform Dark Albion), it works just great.

Quote from: Bren;874297What I was objecting to was Pundit's claim that magic is real because people believe in it.

Good thing that wasn't my claim. My claim was that medieval society was a society BASED on the belief that magic (and things like salvation and damnation) are literally real things, and that monsters and demons literally exist. And that people interacted with these things to some extent.
I'm not saying "it is real because people believed in it", I'm saying the belief was real and all kinds of things in the society was based on the assumption (the paradigm) of those realities.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;873555For the same reason Ellen Kushner sets her novels in someplace other than fantasy-Earth:

"So that if I get one detail wrong I don't get 10,000 letters telling me that the crossbow was banned in 1103 and not 1104, or whatever."

Same thing.  Sweet Crom's hairy nutsack look at the arguments people have over gun stats in games or calling a "magazine" a "clip."  Claim your game is in "fantasy Europe" and 90% of people won't give a fuck and the other 10% will argue about trivialities constantly.

I speak from experience.  Been there, done that, said fuck it.

"The crossbow was banned in FUCK YOU ASSHOLE, that's when it was banned!"

"Mead is for closers."

JG

Quote from: Premier;874311Putting your D&D game, impregnated as it is with its numerous social and cultural assumptions, into Medieval Europe will thoroughly fail to feel medieval or European. You might have a map of Medieval Europe on the table, and the characters might interact with historical figures, but the "world at large" will be nothing like Medieval Europe. What it will feel like is D&D Disneyland where the social structure and culture of Feudal Europe has been utterly ripped out and replaced by a 20th century libertarian fantasy through the goggles of Western stories and a fucked-up California gold rush economy turned up to 11.

Not if you do it RIGHT (like Dark Albion does).

QuoteIn D&D, the party NEVER has to pay toll at tollhouses along the road

In Dark Albion there's rules on tolls and gate taxes. And sumptuary laws. And which social classes are allowed to wear swords. And medieval-accurate rules on law and justice in general.

Quotethey NEVER have to turn in all of the loot because the dungeon was located on the King's land and therefore all its contents are the King's property, they NEVER have to face the propect that they will die in the same social class and most likely the same village they were born in, or that if a 0 level local nobleman says "jump", the only socially acceptable thing they can do is ask "how high?"

All of those things are in Dark Albion. Social class is an important statistic, maybe in some ways one of the most character-defining elements of character creation.  Petit Treason is a crime and there's punishments listed for it. There have been several times in the Dark Albion campaign where the PCs had to do exactly what you described (negotiate with a local lord, usually through the lord they had as a patron, as to just how much of the loot the lord would be willing to let them keep in exchange for them taking care of a problematic haunted barrow for him).

Quote from: Christopher Brady;874316This, so much this.  You have no wiggle room in a pseudo-historical campaign, if you want it to feel like a historical setting.

D&D style adventuring just doesn't happen.  It's called banditry.

That's not quite right either. Again, look at Dark Albion. There's lots you can do.

Of course, banditry is one of the things you can do!

Quote from: RPGPundit;874943Leaving aside that by "inquisition" you actually mean the early-modern Witch Craze (the Inquisition was mainly concerned with heresy, and in Spain with hidden jewish/muslim backsliders, not with witchcraft), how would it change?

That's easy.  First, instead of being a land grab under the guise of 'Heresy' (there's evidence that the Church picked targets entirely based on territory they wanted), the Inquisition would focus entirely suppressing magic.  Witches and other spellcasters, would be resisting heavily, some secret, others obvious.  You'd have visible battles in the streets, where Divine fire (cuz you know, Clerics in the service of God and other Church aligned casters would exist, otherwise, the witches won hands down if it's D&D style magic) vs. Arcane fire blowing buildings and people.  Subtlety wouldn't last, as one side would want to 'make an example' of the other.  Or to sow fear or whatnot.

It's historically, generally accepted that the Inquisition got it's way, it 'won'.  But in a world where magic is a quantifiable force there's no guarantees that the Inquisition wouldn't have been destroyed in a blaze of likely literal hellfire.

This is assuming of course, a D&D like Paradigm of casters.  If only one side got magic, like the aforementioned witches, then it all changes even more.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;874968That's easy.  First, instead of being a land grab under the guise of 'Heresy' (there's evidence that the Church picked targets entirely based on territory they wanted), the Inquisition would focus entirely suppressing magic.  Witches and other spellcasters, would be resisting heavily, some secret, others obvious.  You'd have visible battles in the streets, where Divine fire (cuz you know, Clerics in the service of God and other Church aligned casters would exist, otherwise, the witches won hands down if it's D&D style magic) vs. Arcane fire blowing buildings and people.  Subtlety wouldn't last, as one side would want to 'make an example' of the other.  Or to sow fear or whatnot.

It's historically, generally accepted that the Inquisition got it's way, it 'won'.  But in a world where magic is a quantifiable force there's no guarantees that the Inquisition wouldn't have been destroyed in a blaze of likely literal hellfire.

This is assuming of course, a D&D like Paradigm of casters.  If only one side got magic, like the aforementioned witches, then it all changes even more.

Keep in mind the witch craze in early modern Europe wasn't exclusively an activity of the Catholic Church, some of the most affected areas were Protestant. And it didn't reach its height until the reformation period. The trials themselves were usually conducted by secular authorities rather than religious ones in areas where central authority was weaker. If you did happen to be tried for witch craft, there is some evidence you stood a better chance of a fair trial and survival if you were tried by a Catholic court. Again not an expert, but in every single class I took on this subject, the standard text books spent considerable time explaining the intellectual and religious foundations of the witch craze. Basically what Pundit refers to as the paradigm. I found it incredibly difficult to come away from reading that, and all the primary source material we had to read where these beliefs were expressed, and not see this as being based in very real beliefs (like pundit says, there are always people exploiting developments for themselves, but we shouldn't't assume people at the time were thinking like modern secularists. I also found that thinking about the churches role has greatly changed as more evidence has come to light and as earlier long held assumptions have been put under scrutiny. They lived in a world where they thought God was real and magic was real. And not all magic was regarded as bad. It was when the idea of witchcraft and diabolical combined that people started going truly crazy about it (and the church didn't even take witchcraft that seriously until about the 15th century). There were probably a lot of external factors feeding those beliefs but the beliefs were still real.

It is true that is magic were real, things could have panned out differently. But they might not have because if their beliefs were reality, that also means the church had God on its side. For the purpose of a roleplaying game, I have no trouble accepting a Europe with real magic and basically the same history.

Quote from: Spinachcat;874743We know the Normans invaded England in 1066. What if that invasion also involved Normandy dragons fighting vs. Saxon manticores?
.

I like using Secret History in a lot of my historical campaigns. This is something the game Colonial Gothic is based on where you take real world events and don't change them at all, but just explain them through alternative motives, causes, etc. That opens up some interesting possibilities with the supernatural or with things like aliens.