I'm going through Lost Mines of Phendelver and Dragon of Icefire Peak and I've noticed a few ideas the feel more Western than Medieval and i'm wondering if this is just me.

• Redbrand Ruffians are clearly based on the Cowboys from Tombstone.
• Butterskull Farm guy has a cherished cowboy hat.
• I watched two videos on handling NPCs in Phandelin (One from Bob World Builder, the other from was Mathew Perkins?) and both said to lean into the Western vibe.
• The new Orc image had them in sombreros.

Maybe its just a coincidence, maybe some folks have a limited view of what a frontier is so they lean in too much. I don't know but I think it's odd and I was wondering if anyone else had noticed this trend elsewhere.

Interesting. I hadn't noticed this as a trend, but the next campaign I'm working on has a bit of a "fantasy Oregon Trail" vibe, so maybe it's in the air.

A lot of people will certainly argue that the western genre has been baked into D&D from the beginning. IIRC Gygax was relatively open about the idea that his vision of the D&D world was much inspired by the American Frontier, and you can see that in the ubiquitous wilderness, isolated towns, and general lawlessness, all of which fits more neatly into the Wild West than it does into Medieval Europe. The stereotype D&D adventurer has more in common with the lone gunslinger who rolls into town looking for work and trouble (and with his eastern equivalent in the Chanbara genre), than with the kind of heroes you get in medieval literature. Robert Howard was a Texan and doubtless heavily influenced by cowboy stories, etc. etc.

So as far as narrative genres, D&D has probably always been part Western. Putting overt Western aesthetics into D&D is a bit more of a new thing (though not unprecedented). Maybe it's just a result of mainstream D&D increasingly abandoning whatever limited pretense of medievalism it ever had, and the general fact that Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy aesthetics are getting so extremely tired and played out, and wild west aesthetics are an easy well to tap to try and spice them up.

Yeah including actual cowboy clothes is too much, but the general layout of the setting and genre definitely has a lot of overlap.

What gets really annoying is when people use this to infer that the goblins, orcs, etc. are stand ins for native americans, which is not the case.

Quote from: Spobo on October 03, 2024, 12:56:09 PMYeah including actual cowboy clothes is too much, but the general layout of the setting and genre definitely has a lot of overlap.

Emphasis mine.

I do really feel that the standard knights-and-wizards aesthetics of fantasy gaming badly need a shakeup at this point, but I agree that the Wild West aesthetic is a bit too modern. I think if people want to take influence from the American frontier, they could much more profitably turn their eyes to the earlier colonial period of the 16th-18th centuries. That still provides a fresh look and feel while being close enough to the Renaissance to not clash so jarringly with the more traditional elements of dungeon fantasy. A lot of aesthetics from that time period have already been incorporated into general fantasy anyway because people always want to include Golden Age pirates in their supposed medieval games.

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 03, 2024, 01:16:43 PMI do really feel that the standard knights-and-wizards aesthetics of fantasy gaming badly need a shakeup at this point,

I'd assumed the standard knights-and-wizards was changed when the LotR movies added waistcoats (1666 according to wikipedia) which have been reproduced in a lot of art since but that was a subtle bit. Cowboy hats and sombreros are not subtle at all.

I've kicked around coworcs and halflindians before.

D&D has always borrowed heavily from the Western genre, thematically if not visually.

To me, it only makes sense that as our understanding of what authentically Medieval culture and norms were has grown, the association of D&D's conceits with Medieval trappings has diminished, but something has to replace those trappings as people tend to be very mediocre to outright bad at imagining wholly original cultures and trappings (see most period sci-fi including the present "iPod future" designs) most will start pulling from other historical periods that make sense for the themes being explored.

D&D practically turning magic into a science and magic items into essentially technology (at least as far as PCs are concerned) is likely at least partially responsible for D&D's growing SteamPunk aesthetic which itself pulls from a Victorian aesthetic.

The thing is, the Victorian era (corresponding roughly to the reign of Queen Victoria c. 1837-1901) almost entirely overlaps the era of the Old West (c. 1860s to 1900s) and so the frontier of the SteamPunk setting is essentially a fantasy Western already... leaning into it is simply a natural extension that naturally meshes with D&Ds default themes.

The Old West is basically America's mythology in the same way someone living in Ancient Greece would hear the stories of Heracles or Perseus recounted to them. Gygax pulled from the themes of American Mythology he knew would be familiar to his audience even as he dressed them up in basically RennFair tier trappings  (unless you really grew up in the era its almost impossible to convey just how skewed our perceptions of the Medieval period were in the 70's and 80's... ex. knights who had to be lifted onto their horses with cranes and would be stuck in armor too heavy to move in if they fell from their horse in battle).

D&D picking up Old West elements is just returning to its actual roots in a sense.

I'd say that D&D has had a lot of old west setting structure from the beginning, with a medieval/renaissance facade built on top of it.  It kind of jumps out at you if you compare something like Lion and Dragon to TSR's early stuff.  Mixing the medieval and western facade looks decidedly odd though.  If you're going to do western aesthetic, go all in, like Firefly or The Dark Tower.

Quote from: ForgottenF on October 03, 2024, 01:16:43 PMI do really feel that the standard knights-and-wizards aesthetics of fantasy gaming badly need a shakeup at this point, but I agree that the Wild West aesthetic is a bit too modern.

Murlynd of Greyhawk would disagree. He's been jamming the wild west asthetic since 1972, and started doing so at GG's own table.

Keith Baker recently released an Eberron-based product called Frontiers of Eberron - Quickstone where the wild west meets D&D angle is very much the whole point.

I blame Stephen King and the Dark Tower.

Quote from: Mishihari on October 03, 2024, 05:18:13 PMI'd say that D&D has had a lot of old west setting structure from the beginning, with a medieval/renaissance facade built on top of it.  It kind of jumps out at you if you compare something like Lion and Dragon to TSR's early stuff.  Mixing the medieval and western facade looks decidedly odd though.  If you're going to do western aesthetic, go all in, like Firefly or The Dark Tower.

Quote from: HappyDaze on October 03, 2024, 07:25:14 PMKeith Baker recently released an Eberron-based product called Frontiers of Eberron - Quickstone where the wild west meets D&D angle is very much the whole point.

I haven't seen the Frontiers product yet, but I played in an Eberron convention game run by Baker that had a definite wild west theme. I thought it fits reasonably with the existing Eberron esthetic, which has modern-ish trains and armies and so forth, even though there are no guns per se.

I also agree with Mishihari that old-school D&D has a lot of wild west tropes in it. Off the top of my head: 

• The typical D&D tavern is much closer to an old-west saloon than to a real medieval alehouse.
• The "general store" or "trading post" of towns like Hommlet is definitely an old-west trope that is not at all medieval.
• Keep on the Borderlands is architecturally medieval, but in how it is run it is closer to an old-west army fort. Having a standing army of troops barracked in a border post is not feudal or medieval.

While I agree that Icespire Peak and Eberron Frontiers having deliberate old-west aesthetic, the case for Phandelin seems shaky. It seems like a trope that a few modules lean into - like how the Ravenloft and others leaned into 19th-century gothic tropes.

Way back Gygax would occasionally cross over his D&D campaign with Brian Blume's Boot Hill campaign and if I recall right one of Gary's Metamorphosis Alpha PCs had an excursion into the wild west as well.

The current interest is just a resurgance of old interests fostered by the 5e DMG having some example firearms. Back in the 90s White Wolf, Palladium and others were putting their own spins on the weird west. Also theres weird west HeroQuest/Warhammer Quest style board game called Shadows of Brimstone thats been around several years. That one has mixed all sorts of genres.

Also during 2e TSR played around with this idea a little with the Mystara campaign setting Red Steel and the Savage Baronies with little wild west elements popping up.

Another factor is that because the Wild West is basically America's version of founding mythology it feels much more recent to us than it actually is because we're living in a culture that still uses elements of its aesthetics.

Upthread the use of trains is mentioned as "modern-ish", but the first locomotives are over two hundred years old. The first paddle wheel steamboat was built nearly a quarter millennia ago (c. 1783). Cannon and early firearms date right back to the Medieval period.

Heck, even "modern" actually dates to what we now call the Medieval period. Originally "Modern" referred to regions where Christianity had been adopted to distinguish the radical change in perspective from pagan Antiquity. It wasn't until the Enlightenment that it was labeled Medieval as Enlightenment thinkers believed their views were now the radical change from the past.

The TL;DR is that the reason "Western" doesn't feel quite right isn't the time period it's from (the Old West is closer in time to the Age of Piracy than it is to the present day).

Rather it is because Western elements are too familiar to us as their legacy fully permeates mundane American culture in a way that knights in armor, castles, and tunics over leggings don't. Western aesthetics don't feel fantastical because we can still see aspects of them in our everyday lives.

By contrast, the aesthetics of a contemporary (1860's) but less familiar culture will likely feel more distant and more fantastic because they are less familiar.

Tom Wham did that Iron Dragon fantasy train game way back and TSR published the novel.