european fantasy cultures and how to fit them

[OgreBattle]

So out of the standard dnd settings does any particular one do it well? I’m familiar with Drizzt land but didn’t think much of what the real life equivalent of icewind Dale was.

In making one’s own European fantasy setting what are the main cultures to get down?

Something Arthurian, something gothic, maybe have muskets or not

[jt]

https://www.deviantart.com/eotbeholder/ ... -245738593



(I've used this without people noticing.)

[OgreBattle]

What kind of European culture lives in the suckmarsh, the hills, the hellfire imperium?

[Chamomile]

The Hellfire Imperium is very probably the Holy Roman Empire but more overtly evil. You could also go with the OG Roman Empire but more overtly evil if you wanted. The hills for the hillfolk are mainly Celtic or Saxon or any other European civilization that hadn't yet been Romanized but also wasn't vikings. You may get some traces of the hill people of central Italy before Rome conquered them. The Suckmarsh isn't human territory and doesn't draw on human civilizations. It's where lizardfolk and zombies hang out.

[Harshax]

Great map!

[jt]

As a more serious response, I don't think that covering a variety of European cultures is actually that helpful to any campaign style I know how to run.

Dungeon crawls / exploration / West Marches - Your neighbors don't matter nearly as much as your predecessors. Having a bunch of past cultures so you can have dungeons made from architecturally distinct ruins helps a lot. Knowing about the culture of the next region over rarely comes up.

Thwart a series of evil plots that turn out to all be run by the same guy then save the kingdom - The plot of the week is the point so anything about the place you're in that isn't part of the plot is wasted. Reusing the same places a few times can let the players grow attached so they actually feel like they're saving somewhere specific. So you don't really care about the next country over.

Travel to exotic new lands and solve their problems along the way - Exactly the same thing as the previous one but this time the point is the wild new places you go to, so you want to leave fantasy Medieval Europe as soon as possible so you can go tour vaguely problematic orientalist versions of the Middle East and Asia then graduate your way to cloud cities and lava factories.

Political intrigue - The entire game revolves around whatever political structure you're working with, whether it's the shadowy council that runs the city, a bunch of bickering fiefdoms, some great big feudal hierarchy, the favors of rival magicians, or whatever. Dealing with the neighboring city/region/kingdom/university/whatever is weird because their politics work some completely different way that doesn't directly interact with yours, and you'd rather pretend they don't exist so you can feel like your machinations matter.

[Chamomile]

Back in 1954, a journey through a vaguely European wilderness full of spiders and orcs was new and wondrous. People haven't stopped copying it since, and the bloom came off that rose like fifty years ago. We're well into the point where if you want to run a fantastic journey through a vibrant and lived-in world, pretty much the only thing you should be lifting from psuedo-Europe is the Shire or Gondor, because one of those two is going to be your starting location.

So, in other words, I think jt has the right of this: Relying on a single psuedo-European culture to be the backdrop for a dungeon crawl or political intrigue or save-the-kingdom plot, that can work fine, because everyone knows what Gondor looks like and that frees up conceptual space for other stuff. I don't see why you'd want multiple European civilizations in the same setting unless you're creating something extremely thorough and need all the inspiration you can get to fill in all the gaps of a stupendously massive world map.

[zeruslord]

I don't see why you'd want multiple European civilizations in the same setting unless you're creating something extremely thorough and need all the inspiration you can get to fill in all the gaps of a stupendously massive world map.

That's only true if your vaguely medieval vaguely European civilization is itself vaguely defined. Depending on how you define "medieval", you've got something like 1000 years of history across an entire continent to draw from. If you can't come up with something interesting based on Viking-age Scandinavia that's different from what you could do with post-Roman Britain or 15th century France, that's a failure of imagination on your part, not a lack of distinctive source material to draw on.

[virgil]

Point of fact: I'm currently running a robust campaign set to mimic early 15th century Venice in structure, and that restriction of time period and geography is still proving to be more world-building data than I could possibly need (D&D-ism translations notwithstanding).

[Chamomile]

That's only true if your vaguely medieval vaguely European civilization is itself vaguely defined.

You're about ten years late on this one. Most European societies have already had their fads and passed. You point out vikings, but have you not seen how big a deal vikings were just a couple years back? That style is played out. You can use it as a generic backdrop to conserve conceptual space the same way you can use medieval France, but it can't be your hook anymore. You're not going to be "that viking setting." You're going to be "yet another viking setting."

Also, point of fact: Virgil's campaign is a spelljammer campaign set in space Venice. Renaissance Italy is significantly less over-exposed than many other European societies, but Assassin's Creed II did its level best to drive that era into the ground just about ten years ago and the damage hasn't fully worn off. You can freely add elements like fantasy space travel to it because people are already familiar enough with it that it doesn't take up much conceptual space.

[jt]

That's only true if your vaguely medieval vaguely European civilization is itself vaguely defined.

I think it holds even if your vaguely medieval vaguely European civilization is well-defined though. Most campaigns want a fixed area and stakes so you only need one of these, and the exceptions are travel-based campaigns where the more different each region is from the last the better.

Within fixed area campaigns there are a lot of useful models in the medieval period. And it might be useful to dig through there and point out particularly useful ones. The Italian Condottieri were mercenary companies that made an art out of not actually showing up to fights, who I think are a fun basis for an intrigue campaign, military campaign, or combination thereof.

For a traveling novelty campaign, I think the expected highlights are a still-functioning (or decaying) Roman Empire, Vikings (possibly with pointy hats), and the Italian Renaissance (possibly plus Zorro). Maybe you could squeeze a pastiche of the Arthurian myth in there.

[OgreBattle]

An approach I've been mulling is the biome and geographic orientation. People that live in the fjord glacial north are going to have clothing that viking stuff slots into well.



Temperate forests
- Germanic tribes, celts, gauls
- Dense terrain, mountain areas are good for castles
- Cleared forests = agricultural civilization spreading
- Deep forest = 'lower tech' tribal civilization, Fey Critters

Steppes, Taiga, Tundra
- Good terrain for herding, less fertile than the forest folks
- Scarcity can lead to raiding
- Steppes can be vast leading to more foreign civilizations (Eastern Europe)
- Spain kinda has a steppe so they eat a lot of beef

Coast
- Sailors, fishing, whaling,
- If resource scarce (cold), leads to viking raiders
- If resource rich, the target of viking raiders
- Can border the vast ocean and familiar civilizations (Britain) or at the border of foreigners across a small sea (Spain, North Africa)

Islands
- Depending on distance can be neighbors (Britain, France) or legendary lost stuff
- Pirate haven when isolated or natural resource low
- Target of pirates and vikings when resource wealthy

Major rivers and mountains
- Often cite of early stone age civilization
- Source of ores (washed up in waters, mined)
- Can form borders of rival civilizations, resource to fight over
- Rivers flow from mountains, mountains also a border
- Can drain into huge lakes, inland seas (Volga river)
- If difficult to traverse this land contains the defeated, outcasts, orcs, dragons, swiss

Decide on some 'monocolor' civilizations and then depending on map placement you get 'multicolor' civilizations that form via interactions or with each other.

Can mix things up like what if the Mongol types from beyond the steppes conquered and hung around as long as the Moors did in Spain, so now you've got a multicolor civilization. Your terrain that resembles Spain is then isolated from the foreign border areas so they look like Riders of Rohan.
The fantasy scandanavians are land locked so instead they have mammoths pulling wagons to raid their temperate neighbors, but mammoth wagons are not suitable for the forests where the arthurian knights live.

[Username17]

The map that K posted is tongue in cheek, but it's a pretty good starting point. It has most of what you want from a fantasy world in about the physical relationship you want between them.

The regions are defined vaguely enough that you can stamp some of your own concepts on it. The Hellfire Empire in Dominions is having a zombie apocalypse, while in my personal setting the Hellfire Empire are the good guys whose noble families and empress have a bunch of fiend blood because they only recently overthrew fiendish overlords. The broader point that you want an area with lots of intrigue and dark magic that borrows liberally from Roman or Italian tropes is well taken. Your kitchen sink does want something like that.

The dark magic could be secretly performed by sinister cabals or front and center with temples to demon lords in the capitol. The dark magic might be necromancy, demonology, some kind of blood magic, or even Mythos cultism. The Italian/Roman influences could be Holy Roman Empire where it's actually a council of Germanic Kings or it could be togas and senators. The empire could be rising, falling, have fallen, or be at the height of its power. There are lots of design decisions to make about this area and lots of those potential end points are wholly defensible.

I don't see why you'd want multiple European civilizations in the same setting unless you're creating something extremely thorough and need all the inspiration you can get to fill in all the gaps of a stupendously massive world map.

This is basically a ridiculous thing to say. Let's consider a kitchen sink fantasy setting, and ask yourself the following questions:

• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Hungarian vampires?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Norse bear warriors?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Iberian inquisitors?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-German villagers menaced by werewolves?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Italian guilds?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Greek city states?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-Turkish imperials?
• Would it be cool to have pseudo-British pirates?

The answer to all of those things is "Yes." But beyond that, the cultural coding for those things is actually well foundationed in our culture. The pseudo-Norse bear warriors don't take up a lot of conceptual space and don't need a deep dive into their culture and history and motivations. You kinda know what they are about without me having really said anything about them other than invoking the relevant tropes.

-Username17

[tussock]

Warhammer 40k does medieval Europe (in space) pretty well. The relics and lost arts and purges and the space-pope from whom comes all truth and the heresies against him. The "diseases" that empty whole worlds. The ludicrously over-specialised super-expensive armies that work anyway. The specially bred soldiers. The demons tempting everyone all the time, with knowledge, because even geometry is a tool of the devil. The drive to exterminate change and newness. It's a nice mix of appropriate tropes.

All they're really missing is the random nature of silver mines running out and sending the entire continent into generations of persistent economic collapse that emptied all the cities, again.

[Chamomile]

In what campaign would you actually use all of those elements? Because if you're making a setting for personal use, it's probably purpose-built for one campaign, and if you're making a setting intended for broad audiences, then you need a hook, that hook needs to be pervasive, and it will probably work better if you ditch all but a maximum of maybe two or three of the listed elements. You can't compete with Forgotten Realms by emphasizing the things you have in common with it, and you don't want to detail a dozen regions for a one-campaign world that will probably visit like two of them before going to the Elemental Plane of Mid-Level Adventures.

[Username17]

In what campaign would you actually use all of those elements?

In Kitchen Sink Fantasy, the answer could easily be that you use all of them in a pretty short campaign. And more importantly, those could all be available player character options.

Because if you're making a setting for personal use

It's important to remember that personal use involves three to six other people. Your typical four person adventuring party might include a Berserker from Norseheim, an Assassin from the Hellfire Imperium, a Cleric from Ravenholm, and a Wizard from the Sorcerer Isles. You've got nott-Norse, not-Italian, not-Romanian, and not-Greek.

But equally importantly, the Berserker player chose to play a not-Norse character. They could have chosen to be not-Scottish from the Hillfolk Hills or not-German from the Black Forest. And this choice is just as important as the decision to play a Human, an Orc, or a Dwarf. Even without going off script and insisting on playing an Elvish Berserker from Fancy Magic Town, you still have quite a range of cliché options at your disposal in kitchen sink fantasy.

And that's good. It's good that we have several Berserker culture archetypes available at our disposal.

and you don't want to detail a dozen regions for a one-campaign world that will probably visit like two of them before going to the Elemental Plane of Mid-Level Adventures.

This is a non-argument. The amount of detail that cliché regions of kitchen sink fantasy need is near zero. They are clichés! If major characters are from Norseheim there can be more discussion about what's going on there. But to begin with you just need a region on the map and a one sentence description that there are bear people there.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

In Kitchen Sink Fantasy, the answer could easily be that you use all of them in a pretty short campaign.

In the same sense that you could have a campaign that was an even more dull Lord of the Rings retread. When someone asks for setting building advice, "remember that you always have the option to suck" isn't especially helpful. All that shit is played out. It's been done. You can use it as an easily understood background upon which to build other, newer concepts, but there's pretty much no way you'll actually need even half of the list to do that. If you're going exotic places, you need them to be exotic, which means even a pastiche of China/Japan is probably not a good idea since the 90s are over. If you're not going exotic places, you're better off staying put on focusing on just one region.

The amount of detail that cliché regions of kitchen sink fantasy need is near zero.

No, it's actually zero. Making an explicit list or a fully filled in map of things so vaguely sketched out that they are wholly reliant on player familiarity to fill in the blanks anyway means that all you're doing is excluding anything that you didn't think to put on that list or map. If your campaign is about local events, thoroughly detail the one, specific kingdom that it takes place in, give one line descriptions to its neighbors, and let the rest be "and also there are more kingdoms," because that way, whether or not someone gets to play a psuedo-Spaniard is not dependent upon whether or not you happened to have psuedo-Spain on your finite list of options. If your campaign is about a journey through many and varied locales, have one psuedo-European starting point on one edge of the map and an ambiguous number of other psuedo-European cultures off the edge of the map in that direction.

And a suspiciously high number of players seem to pick whatever the most conveniently located nation on the map is, if they specify a particular nation of origin at all, even when playing with settings like Golarion or Faerun where the world map is completely filled in. When people do specify a specific culture that informs their backstory, more than half the time it's either a non-European mundane culture or they're from the Elemental Plane of Mid-Level Adventures. Admittedly, given a list of options that was selected to specifically include only things that are actually cool and not just random junk like Faerun and Golarion are made out of, the number of people who made characters from specific cultures rather than just being ambiguously an adventurer might increase, but I doubt it would be by all that much.

[Username17]

All that shit is played out. It's been done.

So what? You're not Hemingway, you're some pretentious guy running a fucking D&D campaign. The other players aren't even that, they're just playing a game.

Telling players that they can't play the character they want because it isn't "original enough" is elitist, lazy, and almost certainly bullshit anyway. Yes, the fact that the Berserker player has decided to do so as a Dwarf from the Hillfolk and speak with a Scottish accent has "been done" but so fucking what? It's the character they want to play, and in any case none of the other characters are completely original either. Even without going into the overly reductionist Hero With a Thousand Faces claims, we still have Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classifications, and those will pretty much cover any story you intend to tell.

You just aren't that interesting, and if other people at the table want to play their Paladin as French because that is the only accent they can do, who are you to get in their way? What possible justification could you have for telling people in a fucking Role Playing Game that they need to get a more original character concept?

It's even ironic and self refuting, because of course you're suggesting that player characters be asked to draw on a smaller body of source material in the support of your weird critical demands.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Telling players that they can't play the character they want because it isn't "original enough" is elitist, lazy, and almost certainly bullshit anyway.

Which part of "leave undefined spaces so players can select literally any option" sounded like I supported rejecting players' concepts?

[Username17]

Telling players that they can't play the character they want because it isn't "original enough" is elitist, lazy, and almost certainly bullshit anyway.

Which part of "leave undefined spaces so players can select literally any option" sounded like I supported rejecting players' concepts?

Minimalist prompts are better than no prompts. Like, we're doing amateur improv theater and it is obviously true that putting out prompts that are one word or one sentence is better than giving no prompts and telling people to do whatever they want.

This isn't contentious in any way. It's not up for debate. It's just true. And you're just wrong.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Citation needed. Again: I have run a lot of games for a lot of different people lately, and close to zero of them have bothered to interact with the prompts given in existing settings in any way. When they do interact with the prompts, it is usually to distinguish themselves from the European default. And even the ones who associate themselves with a specific European psuedo-culture often ignore the prompt actually given to them to rewrite the culture to fit the European culture they're emulating. One guy did specifically say he was from Icewind Dale, for example, but only because that was the closest thing to Russia that he could find. He had a culture he wanted to emulate first and then he went looking on the map for a place that could facilitate it. And he couldn't find one, and would not have found one in a setting based on the list you gave, either.

Throw a temper tantrum all you want, I'm speaking from experience with actual players, you're going to need a Hell of a lot more then just "you're wrong 'cuz I said so."

[Username17]

Citation needed.

Fine. Also, stop being an asshat.

In order for an improvised scene to be successful, the improvisers involved must work together responsively to define the parameters and action of the scene, in a process of co-creation. With each spoken word or action in the scene, an improviser makes an offer, meaning that he or she defines some element of the reality of the scene. This might include giving another character a name, identifying a relationship, location, or using mime to define the physical environment. These activities are also known as endowment. It is the responsibility of the other improvisers to accept the offers that their fellow performers make; to not do so is known as blocking, negation, or denial, which usually prevents the scene from developing.

Bits on the map like Norseheim and the Black Forest are offers in the improvizational theater sense of the term. They have value, and are a cornerstone of the medium. Not in spite of being thoroughly previously used, but because they are well trodden paths. With very few words I can endow Ravenholm or the Black Forest with a reality in the cooperative story. And once established, other contributors can enlarge upon those places or the people who come from there.

Or not. They could choose to enlarge upon something else instead if that takes their fancy, and that's fine because I haven't used very many words to define those setting elements.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

Ravenholm is so named because it is the homeland of a tribe of Germanic raven-men who make their homes in high places, treetops, cliff faces, and such. The Ravenmen in general are isolationist, and it is difficult for ground-bound people to reach their homesteads. Ravenholm's most well known export is highly disciplined mercenaries who specialize in use of the crossbow at high altitudes.

[Chamomile]

Bits on the map like Norseheim and the Black Forest are offers in the improvizational theater sense of the term.

No they're not. You admit as much later in the same post when you assert that it's not a particularly big deal if people ignore the prompts. As your own Wikipedia quote says: Blocking an improvisational offer by ignoring it or contradicting it is bad for the scene. If you're asserting that something can be ignored or recharacterized at no harm, it is not an improvisational offer. It doesn't behave in the manner that improvisational offers behave.

Places like Norseheim are useful only to the extent that it's very easy for players to know what's up there which means you can build other, more engaging things on top of them: Specific characters, a shiny new monster, that dungeon you spent all weekend mapping out, whatever. There's just not any reason you'd ever want more than one or two of those settings in the same campaign. If someone wants to be a viking, they don't need a specific prompt telling them that. If someone wants to be a Russian aasimar insecure about his demon-slaying prowess in a culture where no other quality is more important, he definitely doesn't need you to give him a world map with no blank space but also zero aasimars or Russias on it.

The only point at which having a globe-spanning map where adding in one of everything becomes useful is when you have a playerbase so gigantic that people who have never met each other before might plausibly show up and play in your campaign world without you being there to officially incorporate their weird character ideas into the setting. At some point, it becomes useful to have one of everything, but that point is when you have good reason to believe that people will use the setting despite not one of any of the people at the table having any personal contact with you at all and you want it to be able to contain not one, but multiple campaign's worth of content. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's probably not the use case OgreBattle had in mind.

Now, he does seem pretty fixated on having a detailed Europe, and since he's probably worldbuilding at least in part just for the sake of it, that's fine. But it is not invalid to point out that this is completely unnecessary and, indeed, what little effect it has is probably harmful, in that it provides slight resistance to players who have a character concept that does not fit into any of the boxes on the list and there is no blank space for more.

[...You Lost Me]

If I'm reading you right, Cham, you seem to be implying that a long list of explicit possibilities will implicitly rule out anything not on that list ("there is no blank space for more"). I don't think that's true.

A bunch of these fantasy locations have extra space for you to draw a dot and write in "here there be russian tieflings". Kitchen sink maps (including the one from jt) also always seem to cut off on the edges, leaving plenty of handwavey room for characters from unknown kingdoms.

Given that, I'm not convinced that the occasional player who wants something outside the kitchen sink is going to encounter any meaningful resistance. On the other hand, the payoff for your kitchen sink map is huge, because your average player can riff off one or two of the 50 concepts on your map.