Karl Edward Wagner meets Clark Ashton Smith meets Thundarr through a Frazetta lens.

You're probably sick of "it depends" answers by now, but it really is a question of the specific game and campaign. For Dragon Warriors or Pendragon, I really want lean into that curious combination you see in Arthurian Legend, where the events are ones that would have taken place at the very beginning of the Middle Ages (the migration period, really), but the aesthetics and technology are all high medieval. One of the settings I really want to run is R.E. Howard's Thurian Age (the setting for the Kull stories). For the Kull/Conan stories, I think it's best to imagine them as aesthetically and socially classical, but technologically high medieval.

I think the question is more directed at what people do when they run D&D-like "general fantasy or "dungeon fantasy" campaigns though. Years ago, I was intent on running my campaign in a dark ages mold, to the point where I banned plate armor. Over time, though, my tastes have run later and later in time. At this point, I run my dungeon fantasy as very late-middle ages bordering onto the Renaissance. I'm running Dolmenwood at the moment, and I expressly made it a Renaissance or early modern setting, because I felt that time reference made more sense for what's presented in the Dolmenwood books. Also you get black powder guns, and muskets are awesome.

Partially I just prefer the aesthetics of that era, but I also think it works better for a fantasy adventure game. I may have rehearsed this argument on this forum before, so apologies if it's getting redundant, but the borderline where the late medieval and early modern periods meet nets you so many things that make for an awesome campaign. It's a period where knights in armor are sharing the battlefield with cannons and musketeers. It's an era of huge social mobility, the golden age of guilds and mercenary companies. There's much more international travel and trade than there was earlier, and the development of printing means it's also a period of rising literacy. The great cities of Europe were really becoming great cities at the time, so there's more opportunity for urban adventures. It's also an immensely violent period, arguably more so than the medieval period was. Not only do you get the rise of mercenary armies during the Italian and Burgundian wars, but it actually became more generally legal for the common man to go armed (with the rise in criminal violence that entailed).

There's an appeal to a truly medieval setting, but I find the restrictive nature of feudalism and the limited population density can really limit your adventure options, if you try to play it faithfully. A lot of the standard tropes of dungeon fantasy: the thieves' guilds, the professional adventurers, the coaching inns, the common literacy, the readily available arms and equipment, etc. all don't fit to me in a period modeled on anything between the 6th and 14th centuries.

I rarely worry about being "medieval authentic" in any fantasy game. My concern is just that the world be internally consistent with its own materials. While adherence to reality can help give it consistency, it just as easily go against  the setting in favor of "reality" (even where it doesn't really fit), so that's why I don't care for it.

Quote from: SHARK on June 04, 2024, 03:35:25 PM*LAUGHING* Ah, yes, my friend! Yeah, I have periodically through the years wrestled with precisely these kinds of issues, and their deeper campaign implications! I love it, too! However, several friends of mine basically argued with me, explauning, that once you have established an absolutely powerful empire like the Roman Empire, or the Gupta Empire, or the Tang Empire, or the Song Empire, with unimaginable access to wealth, near-infinite natural resources, and populations of tens and hundreds of millions of people--take those basic foundations, and then add the fantasy game's magic system to ut, then you can forget having an ancient or Dark Ages/Medieval fantasy world. You won't even have what we know of as the "Modern World." Your campaign world--so rich and historically deep and awesome--will very rapidly transform into an uber-Gonzo High-Fantasy Science-Fiction campaign world. That development will blow past anything we know of today, and will eventually distort what we can even comprehend on a campaign level. Everything within a few centuries would change so fast and so horrifically dramatically, that everything would be unrecognizable.

I would disagree largely because if the Empires of yesterday and our own Empire's problems are any indication; intense urbanization breads insanity and dissolution of said empires.

No city in history has managed a self-sustaining population; they always relied on members of the rural classes coming to the urban centers seeking their fortunes (and bringing rural values with them) to maintain themselves.

The big collapses throughout history are invariably the result of too much urbanization exceeding the carry capacity of its rural population. In the modern world, much like a high-fantasy one, we've been able to forestall this somewhat through our technology (or magic for fantasy), but it doesn't negate the demographic requirements and urban life's universal driving down of birth rates to unsustainable levels.

The result is always an urban collapse and reset to a more decentralized rural way of living (and slow march back to urbanization as the cycle of history repeats); the more extreme the urbanization, the more severe the collapse.

Basically, infinite progress and centralization isn't likely for any group with a psychology akin to humans; instead it's going to be rises and falls... heights of Empire with "Dark Ages" in between.

Where in the cycle you place your setting could range from nigh post-apocalyptic (and really that's what the fall of Rome was... an apocalyptic collapse of central authority and the survivors having to fend for themselves) to the verge of a new Renaissance/Age of Empires.

Quote from: ForgottenF on June 04, 2024, 05:44:21 PMYou're probably sick of "it depends" answers by now, but it really is a question of the specific game and campaign. For Dragon Warriors or Pendragon, I really want lean into that curious combination you see in Arthurian Legend, where the events are ones that would have taken place at the very beginning of the Middle Ages (the migration period, really), but the aesthetics and technology are all high medieval.

  This is 'authentic medieval' ... from a certain point of view. C.S. Lewis, in The Discarded Image, points out that medieval literature, art, etc., do not have the sense of technological or social variation between eras that we have. To the medievals, the past was just a superior present.

Quote from: tenbones on June 04, 2024, 01:07:47 PMSo what kind of fantasy medieval elements do you prefer in your game? Do you adhere to a specific era? Or are you pretty much just into ren-faire pseudo-medieval with whatever is fun?

Or are you a purist? Do you go for a realistic era of the "Low" or "High" middle-ages? Or are you more into Bronze/Iron age sword-n-sandals?

Feel free to cite details, likes/dislikes and why. Also - I'm interested in how your tastes have changed over the years.

My default is the usual psuedo-medeival/renissance/ kitchen sink fantasy setting.
Though, of course, I go full swords-n-sandals for Dark Sun games.

Like many others, my campaign world is a bit of a mash-up.  Its greatest influences are probably Tolkien and Mystara (the old BECMI setting), with a bit more history sprinkled in.  So there are analogues to Asian realms, a desert setting that's mostly ruins, Mayan & Polynesian islands in the south, Hyperborea at the north pole.  Overall tech is late Medieval with limited black powder weapons.  But I've got a fairly detailed chronology so I'll set campaigns in different eras to get different flavors and political configurations.

Quote from: Krazz on June 04, 2024, 04:24:26 PMI like late Dark Ages with low fantasy, though I see the charm of knights in plate and princesses in towers. One of the things I find fascinating is feudalism as a way of structuring society. All too often, fantasy stories have what's essentially a modern state, except it's led by a hereditary monarch rather than an elected government.

This, along with some of the other points people have made about "heroic fantasy not really being medieval" is why I've gravitated towards the 600-800 AD Western Europe as a basis. There's enough of the proto-feudalism emerging that it's not hard to go with some of the those tropes in the fantasy world, but it is still loose enough that you can rationalize all kinds of differences from what came later in our history.

It's a good starting point from someone like me who doesn't want authentic medieval (or other historical fidelity), doesn't want a hint of Renaissance (let alone ren-fair), but who very much does want a divergent set of fantasy trappings that on first glance shares a lot with the medieval view.  If Barbara Hamby wrote a sort of historical fantasy novel set in Jack Vance's Dying Earth, without the gonzo, you'd get pretty darn close to where I like to land.

Another great historical pivot point for a game is the Black Death.  There's a case to be made that the plaque set back technology progress by three centuries.  Even if you want to be more conservative with the effects, moving the Renaissance up to somewhere around 1400 can be a huge diving line.  If like me, you want to go the other way, simply make the plague worse. That used to be my general idea when doing a D&D game with all the usual equipment, but explaining why things had regressed so much.  Assume that the magical Black Death is much worse, but hits later.  So plate armor and printing presses comes into existence--and then society disintegrates.

Quote from: tenbones on June 04, 2024, 01:07:47 PMSo what kind of fantasy medieval elements do you prefer in your game? Do you adhere to a specific era? Or are you pretty much just into ren-faire pseudo-medieval with whatever is fun?

Or are you a purist? Do you go for a realistic era of the "Low" or "High" middle-ages? Or are you more into Bronze/Iron age sword-n-sandals?

Feel free to cite details, likes/dislikes and why. Also - I'm interested in how your tastes have changed over the years.

I want a logical spectrum and progression.

The setting I've been hashing out began as a high magic infused Renn Faire type of medieval using DnD 3.x (with a side step into Dark Sun sword & sorcery and another side step into Iron Kingdoms sorcery & steam). Following an apocalyptic calamity of undead, the setting has transformed into a low magic infused Renn Faire kind of medieval using my three favorite retroclones (Advanced Labyrinth Lord, Basic Fantasy, and Old School Essentials) which has large swaths of desolation which are very sword and sorcery in flavor.

I think that there must be a sensible before which draws from actual play experience to the now which is the result of what happened before. One world has room for a lot of variation based upon it that incorporates what rules system is being used.

Well, my own setting I've been working on is basically a mythic fantasy RPG inspired heavily by Tolkien and Norse myth. I've also got 4 tie-in Light Novels in various stages of completion (I'm terrible at managing my thinking process for writing). Its right before the start of an 'ice age' (reimagined Younger Dryas) with a technological level about that of the late Migration and/or early Conquest/Crusades Era. It's also clearly on Earth in Europe-Africa-Asia, but with some twists, turns and anachronisms added in "BECAUSE FUCK YOU! THAT'S WHY!"

- Men are the predominant Kith (and I use that word specifically, because Men, Elves, Orks, Dwarves and Changelings are all descended from a common ancestor). And I mean Men make up ~90% of the whole. Elves and Dwarves are almost gone. Elves are fleeing to The Summer Lands or else fading and the Dwarves are sealing themselves in their mountain strongholds.

- Maille is the best armor and black powder exists thanks to Alchemy, but hasn't yet made the leap to guns.

- I allow for things like Dwarves and Dark Elves (not evil Elves, just Elves who live more like Dwarves) being able to produce mechanical clocks, porcelain, plant fiber-based paper and moveable type print/Guttenberg Press, among other things.

- Setting is also technically pre-religious after a fashion (there is a 'Church' but it doesn't have really have scriptures or hymns and serves more as a clearinghouse of information and promotion of banking). People don't really worship the Gods and their 'clergy' are really more like agents in the mortal realm that have trained (or are naturally gifted) to channel divine magick. Its a henotheistic system (a Creator/High God who charged his followers with ordering Creation according to his plans). The Gods never appear as anything other than shrouded figures, never showing any part of their bodies but their hands and the lower part of their face (namely their jaw). Thus there are no graven images of them and any art in 'temples' is more pastoral and less 'religious'. 

- There is some resistance still to 'older' beliefs, a sort of non-theistic animism that are 'the old ways' and there are cults dedicated to demons (fallen servants of The Gods) and Cosmic entities (which I call 'The Vomitted Ones' as they were birthed when The Creator separated the Firmament and The Abode <the 9 worlds> from the Void). Dwarves are the only ones that have a sort of 'worship' in that they revere their ancestors and it was the Soot Dwarves, a house of Petty Dwarves (ie - Rust) that created Necromancy by enslaving their dead who were hanging out in The Shadow Realm adjacent to Midgardr.
 
- Magic is based on the principle of 'You can't get something for nothing'. If you want to toss a 'fireball', you better have some pinecones or acorns handy to turn into flaming grenades. Gandalf's admonition of 'But I must have something to work on. I cannot burn snow.' when The Fellowship was freezing near to death on Caradhras comes to mind. Even the closest spell to 'free fire' is more igniting the oxygen around you than conjuring it from nothing (so you cannot use such spells when underwater, for example). Magic is more like accessing the 'code' of Creation, though Seer-types (ie - Clerics) beseech The Gods to lend them their powers instead of 'hacking' reality like Mages or pulling magick from Ley Lines like Druids. 

I guess my current campaign is mid to late medieval.  No printing press, the only person seen in plate armor has been the queen, there was a plague-level event (fast contagious zombies, cause unknown), the world is on the mend and the land needs to be re-united to face an external invasion.

I'm burnt out on the Middle Earth-ripoff renfaire stuff because it's oversaturated. I already played Baldur's Gate 1 and everything else is redundant. I want absolutely anything else.

It depends on which country I'm using in my campaign. I do a haphazard mix of countries based on real world themes and locations. Country A is based on 13th century England, Country B (a thousand miles away) is ancient Egypt, Country C (way up north), Country D is a dwarven nation, is an arctic wasteland, and so on.

I don't try to be realistic (in modern terms) except in what is realistic for the world. Dragons fly, the tallest mountain in the world is ridiculously tall and has breathable air all the way to the top, floating citadels exist, ancient space craft wreckage can be found, humans have yet to make plate armor (dwarves have it), gun powder doesn't ignite...

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on June 05, 2024, 10:45:22 AMI'm burnt out on the Middle Earth-ripoff renfaire stuff because it's oversaturated. I already played Baldur's Gate 1 and everything else is redundant. I want absolutely anything else.

I'm honestly the same. My home settings "Medieval" is mostly trappings atop a Post-Apocalyptic Science Fantasy setting.

Originally, I'd made the science fantasy elements blurred enough that you had to squint to see them behind the façade of "traditional medieval fantasy setting", but it got tiresome and repetitive so I opted to make them overt... the "elves" of the setting are literally video game/sim AIs brought to life by a Cataclysm that glitched the "Arcane Web" (i.e. the Internet) into burning a bunch of "Arcane Reagents" (i.e. engineered proto-matter used by replicators) to actually create artificial life forms.

The example vehicles went from just carts and boats to including hoverbikes and mecha. Pistols and Rifles became simple (in the sense of training required) ranged weapons and the armor designs now look sci-fi enough that you could imagine them stopping bullets as easily as they would swords.

The medieval elements largely leak in via it being still Post-Apocalyptic and ergo akin to the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. Governmental structures (etymologically Lord comes from the same root as Guard and Warden... The Lord is the Guardian of the people under him and absent other currency is paid in labor for that protection. It evolved into a hereditary system down the line, but at the start of the Dark Ages it was more Strongman protecting his turf levels of legitimacy) and infrastructure absent a centralized authority and supply chains (the only reason we left the Bronze Age was the supply chains for Tin broke down so we had to start using what was, at the time, inferior iron due to lack of bronze) starts to look very Dark Ages after a century or so... you just also see people with relics of the bygone era in the mix as well in the same way that Roman suits of armor persisted in the kits of soldiers long after the Empire in the West had collapsed (because well-maintained mail is still fully effective mail even if its a century or more old).

For low/no-magic settings I try to be as authentic as possible, either medieval or ancient. The medieval era I like the most is Late Medieval, although I also have a soft spot for the Dark Ages, especially the time of the Merovingian Dynasty.
In a high-magic setting, I take the impact of magic fully into account, so I end up with 16th/17th century clockpunk, including things such as flying ships, magic firearms, giant automatons, and magic-focused universities.