Functioning spaceport
Newspapers

Following Ray Winninger's Rules of Dungeoncraft, I have a secret for every major feature of my campaign setting.  For the presence of firearms and cannon, which exist on the level of smoothbore muskets and the cannon one expects of immediately after the 30 Years War.

The secret is this: the figure responsible for their existence--"The Artificer"--already has knowledge of how firearms and ordinance of the 21st Century work, but lacks the means to make them in the numbers that would-be users would want- he has his own, which he not only can keep working, but already enhanced with magic.  (i.e. dude knows how to make contemporary guns, ammo and bombs; dude has better guns than PCs can get, and his guns are enchanted)  

As the campaign progresses, the guns and ordinance available would improve as the Artificer's faction developed and improved.  (i.e. make him and his better, and PCs get access to better guns)

In my D&D campaign: Printing presses and "Copperflaps", cheap dime novels (1 CP) that detail the "Real" (often exagerated and sexed up) tales of famous dungeon-crawlers.

Does taking your dirty clothes to your local "dwarven dry cleaners"  count as an anachronism?

Quote from: Soylent Green;591273Does taking your dirty clothes to your local "dwarven dry cleaners"  count as an anachronism?

Depends: do they use some kind of machine-like contraption?

RPGPundit

If I ever get around to starting a new campaign of something in a medieval fantasy vein, I'm planning to include Restoration-era hand-presses and an exhaustive analysis of how the hand-press book trade interacts with the need for spellbooks.  I had to learn all of this crap, I'm going to use it somehow.

Quote from: Soylent Green;591273Does taking your dirty clothes to your local "dwarven dry cleaners"  count as an anachronism?

Do they use anything resembling modern dry cleaning processes?
There's nothing particularly modern about "Pay me two sestertii/folles/pennies and I'll wash your toga/tunic/doublet and hose."

More social anachronisms than anything...I tend to whitewash over gender rights issues and racial/tribal/jingoism for the most part in my historical games.

Well, except Call of Cthulhu, where random bizarre racism is part of the fun.

Quote from: TristramEvans;591672More social anachronisms than anything...I tend to whitewash over gender rights issues and racial/tribal/jingoism for the most part in my historical games.

Well, except Call of Cthulhu, where random bizarre racism is part of the fun.

Ah yes, "She was a negress!"
Seriously though, in historical games I generally prefer to acknowledge issues of gender/religion/race. However, the player characters get to deviate from the norms of the day quite a bit, as adventurers are (at least in my games) a bunch of anomic weirdoes anyway.

Quote from: TristramEvans;591672More social anachronisms than anything...I tend to whitewash over gender rights issues and racial/tribal/jingoism for the most part in my historical games.  Well, except Call of Cthulhu, where random bizarre racism is part of the fun.

Didn't even think about that one, but its a huge one!

The happy cosmopolitan urban middle ages fantasy trope always got on my nerves. When people would rarely be allowed to travel to the net county without leave from the manse house, and look at strangers in askance, why would all the good humanoid D&D races mingle without incident. Culture and taboos is a very real thing and the glossing within games as time went by started to get under my skin.

And don't get me started on the stupidity of Common as a language across the planar multiverse. Yes, the whole universe speaks Esperanto, the language has been frozen for millennia, and yet new thoughts and ideas burgeon organically with negligible difference throughout. Outside of grunts of pain and other simple gestures denoting hunger, thirst, etc. "common" is not a true language.

Banking
Unions

Quote from: Opaopajr;591757The happy cosmopolitan urban middle ages fantasy trope always got on my nerves. When people would rarely be allowed to travel to the net county without leave from the manse house, and look at strangers in askance, why would all the good humanoid D&D races mingle without incident. Culture and taboos is a very real thing and the glossing within games as time went by started to get under my skin.

And don't get me started on the stupidity of Common as a language across the planar multiverse. Yes, the whole universe speaks Esperanto, the language has been frozen for millennia, and yet new thoughts and ideas burgeon organically with negligible difference throughout. Outside of grunts of pain and other simple gestures denoting hunger, thirst, etc. "common" is not a true language.

Hmmm...but what does any of that have to do with anachronisms in your games?

I already mentioned anachronisms in my games up-thread. I'm commenting on a tangential point upon more egalitarian cosmopolitan life (what our modern life would be comfortable with) being generally anachronistic and extending that to language. Globalized, let alone universal, language is also rather anachronistic for fantasy medieval and is a pet peeve of mine.

Quote from: Opaopajr;592098Globalized, let alone universal, language is also rather anachronistic for fantasy medieval and is a pet peeve of mine.

I understand, its a pet peeve of mine as well, though not as much as the "universal communicators" of SciFi shows. Of the ones I've seen, only Farscape proposed anything even remotely believable besides, weirdly enough, Hitchhiker's Guide.