The Gaming Den

Okay, so the EQ Next Roundtable forums are up, and already people are completely losing their minds over whether or not firearms and shinobi 'belong' in a pseudo-medieval fantasy setting.

https://forums.station.sony.com/everque ... t-next.25/

There's some other things being asked as well; but this has me thinking of one way of looking at fantasy heartbreakers:

Is there a specific century that would be best looked at, as an example of what a pseudo-medieval fantasy heartbreaker should look like?

or

Should a fantasy heartbreaker be a post-apocalyptic Vancian resurgence of magic sort of setting?

it really depends on what era you are going for. then what area...

medieval england has its own things, while the same time frame in china had different technologies. the world was apart then, so you just have to make something and stick with it, or just clusterfuck it all together.

the "ages of man" aren't cast as centuries, but in various ways, so if you want the tech ages, then you have things like bronze, iron, etc...

you just have to know your audience well enough to know what they are wanting in the design. the moment firearms are stable and used, then every sword or bow wielder is out-gunned. so if you include such, then you pretty much just killed off all sword and bow use as the superior weapon will take over.

what worked for Mage Knight the minis game, doesn't always translate to an RPG in any medium since it has no real connection to the fluff other than this ability comes from MCGuffin Y and the other from McGuffin X so Black Powder Rebels can lose to Elemental in the gun vs sword fight. I dont think guns belong in EQ thoguh, since there are plenty of gun games out there.

maybe Sony should make a MGS MMO?

Fantasy Heartbreakers really want to be during the height of Viking Era, and into the Crusades.. so 800AD-1200 AD.

That's a good 400 year gap to have yourself a Fantasy Heartbreaker.
Although, realistically with the magic available, you should be more looking at a magical early Ren.. so 1400-1600 roughly.

The Dungeonomicon wrote: When people are asked to name a historical point that D&D most closely represents, they'll usually say something like "The Middle Ages", or perhaps a date between 1000 AD and 1500 in Europe. Truth be told, to find a historical period which has a social setup anything like D&D, you're going to have to go back. Way back. D&D represents a period in history that is most closely identifiable with the Iron Age: the landscape is dotted with tribes and aspiring empires, the wilderness is largely unexplored, and powerful individuals and small groups can take over an area without having a big geopolitical hubbub about it.

Emphasis mine.

And, yes, I acknowledge you didn't specifically ask about D&D. I just thought I'd go with the one that springs immediately to most folk's minds.

Game On,
fbmf

Thanks, all three answers are pretty helpful.

If I'm going "iron ages"; I'll have to set it in Northern Africa around oh... 2000 BCE; India around 1200 BCE; and Europe by 1300 BCE.

Which means that I should be looking at my notes for a "bronze heat-beams and steel steam-engines" Afro-Indo-Hellenic setting that I was researching for again.

Originally, I wanted to avoid retreading ye old iron vikings idea rife with its eurocentricism that gets used so often; and spent some time looking up the first and earliest iron ages to figure out where and how it all came about. The results were interesting, and had me thinking about an alternate Earth where Europe didn't rise to be a colonial power.

Which means that other factors will have to change; most likely the wider distribution of the domestic animals common to Europe; and a larger threat to force technological development than Europe's winters would.

Going for an After Sundown tack; this makes me contemplate an Earth where the "3 Worlds of Horror" (Dream Wilds, Charred Reflection, Frozen Darkness) established more permanent holds on Earth; forcing technological development in the face of ongoing supernatural war. Getting to the point where the geopolitical landscape is vastly different than ours would be.

I sort of canned it because of insecurity in my ability to tackle it to my satisfaction, and was preoccupied with an other project the last couple of months.

I might uncan it again though.

Enlightenment and post-enlightenment ideas also seem to make a lot of appearances in defiance of the other social, political, and geographic forces.

For example, a lot of players default to modern ideas about women and how they aren't property, a relatively new idea (with some exceptions).

It's a paradox of fantasy settings that sorcerer queens in chainmail bikinis require the fantasy equivalent of women's lib on a global scale.

K wrote: It's a paradox of fantasy settings that sorcerer queens in chainmail bikinis require the fantasy equivalent of women's lib on a global scale.

No, sorcerer queens can get away with a whole lot. They have both personal firepower and the "state" (such as it is) to allow them to do that kind of crap. It's all the other women who need the global women's lib.

But yeah, the whole idea of considering women fully equally to men is pretty much a modern idea. (It's almost certainly happened somewhere in the past, but not in the societies I can think of off-hand.) And when it comes to hand-to-hand combat women simply are not, only the most exceptional woman is going to be as strong or have the reach of the average man.

I like Ninjas with guns



Final Fantasy XI had ninjas with guns, it's my favorite MMO world.

"Iron Age" is a technical term in archeology, with a precise meaning. 2013 still is the Iron Age for almost all regions of the world, and will be as long as we know how to do ironwork and steelwork, because archeology has no name for what may happen after stone age, bronze age and iron age (give it a few thousand years, and archaeologists of the time maybe will have coined a term like carbon age, silicon age or rare earths age).

But archaeologists "hand over" regions to historians when written records appear, moving from prehistory to history. In Scandinavia, the Iron Age ended in 794 CE, when English monks recorded a viking raid on Lindisfarne. And they're serious about that, all Scandinavian museums I have been to have their Iron Age section go up to late 8th century CE. The end of the iron age may actually be pushed back as new writings may emerge. History of Egypt starts circa 3150 BCE because of a text written in the 3rd century BCE, but the oldest know ironwork dates back to only 3000 BCE. The same goes for most Pre-colombian civilizations, who never mastered ironwork before the Europeans came. The Mesoamerican ones had writings and thus had an history, but some tribes jumped directly from stone or bronze age to History (though it seems some ironwork left by viking settlers circa 1000 CE did pass over centuries from tribe to tribe who were unable to replicate it).

Almost all fantasy settings have steel weapons, so it is certainly Iron Ages, but it is quite meaningless since they also have writings. Suggesting D&D should be set "way back ... in the Iron Age" is actually either implying that there should be no writing and no historical account, or that the person who wrote it has no clear idea of what "Iron Age" means.

Nath wrote:"Iron Age" is a technical term in archeology, with a precise meaning.

A precise meaning which is argued about vociferously, but sure.

Nath wrote:2013 still is the Iron Age for almost all regions of the world

Uh... no. The Three Age system only applies to pre-historical periods. The Iron Age ends with the dissemination of writing. We aren't still in the Bronze Age because we still do shit with Bronze, nor are we still in the Stone Age because we still pile rocks on top of each other. The development of each new tool not only begins a new age, it ends the previous age in that system. And the Iron Age ends with the development of written historical records. That's how it works.

So stop being a twat. The Iron Age ends before the end of the first millennium CE. There are no people on the Earth who work iron and don't have access to writing. The Iron Age was simply skipped in some places, but in no cases does it presently pertain.

-Username17

Going back to the op... yeah... people don't know history. Standard Fantasy heartbreaker bullshit should definitely go out of it's way to state that it is NOT a specific period "plus magic and dragons!", but rather a completely fantastical pastiche of multiple influences filled with random anachronisms.

When you don't you just get people making stupid spaz out arguments like "guns and ninjas are wrong because I think my game is history and I think history is the Lord of the fucking Rings!"

Like... I have told you I was a member of Elfwood (an online amateur fantasy art community) back in it's hey day, a relatively early long standing member even. So I was there when they instituted fantasy genre enforcement police.

It was instituted in arguably the stupidest way imaginable.

Step 1) recruit moderators from amongst the community under the organization and leadership of a closeted internet nazi with open mental health issues.

Step 2) define "Fantasy" as "medieval Europe plus fantasy elements!".

Step 3) institute a rule that anachronisms from other eras were "not fantasy" and were to be banned. This rule (and all others) to be applied by remarkably unskilled and amateur internet nazis under the the leadership of an actual mad woman.

This resulted, unsurprisingly, in a situation where a bunch of artists who did not know history (and often wondered why they were supposed to care) where having their "fantasy art" rejected as, well, not being fantasy for containing things which random moderators who did not know history either imagined, often falsely, were not "historically accurate" to, well a purely fantasy time period.

No really. People were having work banned for having high heels on shoes. Not even like stilettos, but really, just mildly elevated heels. Because some dumb chump though that wasn't historically accurate enough for a dragon wizard or whatever bullshit to wear. There were arguments about acceptable belt buckle designs

I could go into more of the mess. But basically one of the main things I learned from that is that the idea that you can just take a real time period, paste dragons and wizards in it and call it some sort of "definitive template for the fantasy genre" is stupid. And more to the point it will generally be done poorly because people are stupid about history, and even if you DID go and do it well it wouldn't actually look like typical fantasy and the idiots who make demands that fantasy conform to this sort of idea would be too dumb to recognize or appreciate such an effort.

FrankTrollman wrote:Uh... no. The Three Age system only applies to pre-historical periods. The Iron Age ends with the dissemination of writing. We aren't still in the Bronze Age because we still do shit with Bronze, nor are we still in the Stone Age because we still pile rocks on top of each other. The development of each new tool not only begins a new age, it ends the previous age in that system. And the Iron Age ends with the development of written historical records. That's how it works.

So stop being a twat. The Iron Age ends before the end of the first millennium CE. There are no people on the Earth who work iron and don't have access to writing. The Iron Age was simply skipped in some places, but in no cases does it presently pertain.

History does not start with the dissemination of writing. It starts with the existence of known historical accounts, that can have been produced by another people. The classical school holds that it must be a written historical account intended as such. But depending on whom you ask, mythological accounts can be included. Some historians even consider that oral historical accounts should count to not exclude civilizations that never bothered inventing writings.

The three-age system is used by archaeologists to classify prehistorical periods based on material evidence, but the end of prehistory itself is subject to change. Writings relevant to a period can be found or dismissed anytime. 2013 items would qualify for iron age, but also qualify for more precise historical datation. You can safely bet that 20th Century is going to stay firmly rooted in History for some time, so, yes, it is unlikely an archaeologist will ever need to use the three-age system on 20th century material findings. But there are periods for which a single text can move the line by a few centuries. For instance, treating the Icelandic Vinland saga (written in the 12th century) as historical account makes Inuit history starts in the 11th century, instead of 17th century. If not, that period in-between was stone age.

The three-age system relies on the idea that the knowledge required to create bronzework would allow to create stonework, and the knowledge required to create ironwork would allow to create bronzework. The knowledge required to write has nothing to do with that, and being written about even less so.

Several American people, like the Pueblo/Anasazi or the Chibcha entered History in the 15th century. Aboriginal Australian had no history prior to British settlement in the 18th century. What's true however is that all civilization who reached Iron Age had either disappeared or entered History by about 800 CE (for the last two I can think of, Scandinavian history starts in 794, while the Nazca culture is considered extinct by 750-800 CE). Past this point, all the civilization who remained at prehistoric stage were either in the stone or bronze age, and did not move into iron age before someone started writing about them.

Note: if we're talking about European History which we are, the "Iron Age" isn't actually part of the three age system, and is an actual specific time period that ends at the "Roman Age". Whether or what archaeologists use Iron Age for in the three age system in Pueblo lands has less than nothing to do with this conversation.

In any case, yes the three age system ends in the historical period, because it's a term whose exclusive domain is pre-history. 2013 isn't considered Iron Age in any system for any part of the world. Stop faffing about.

-Username17

Both Frank and Nath are missing the point, which is that you want a culture and technology setting similar to that or iron age Greece.

Grek wrote:Both Frank and Nath are missing the point, which is that you want a culture and technology setting similar to that or iron age Greece.

Well, sort of.

Any Fantasy work is going to be an anachronism stew in terms of culture and technology. That's because you don't want to perfectly reproduce Iron Age Greece. You want to take the coolest bits from multiple ages and cultures and sort of mix them together into a whole that is cooler than the sum of its parts.

You want multiple chivalric orders of knights who wear full plate armor and carry cruciform swords, and you want huge high-walled castles, which are both distinctly Middle Ages.

You also want shitty roads and vast unexplored wilderness between castle-states and tiny hapless villages.

So you want medieval tech and trappings with iron age society and culture right off the bat.

Then you're adding magic to the mix, which you could take from lots of different places. If magic is rare then you can get away with limiting it to epic heroes and sorcerer-hermits who sit in caves communing with spiritis all the time and thus have no impact on civilization.

If you want a magic-heavy setting, though, it's probably going to mimic a lot of modern innovations, so you'd have things like crystal ball televisions and shit and the heroes would have magical ipads. That gives you a setting that heavily resembles the modern world but without any guns or cars.


And on top of that you might want to add some Ren Punk, so that the PCs can use diVenci-style flying machines and clockwork tanks and shit.


So uyeah, at the end of the day you're fantasy heart breaker is probably going to resemble a ren-faire organized by someone who did not try to do any research at all. And that's cool. That's what it's supposed to look like.

What you really want is social denamics similar to mythological iron age Greece. You want a low population density and weak inter-community ties with the most states limited to a single castle and some surrounding farmland such that it's possible for one strong dude to just show at and take over a country by proclaiming "by this axe, I rule, and if you don't like it then you're free to try to take it from me".

FrankTrollman wrote:Note: if we're talking about European History which we are, the "Iron Age" isn't actually part of the three age system, and is an actual specific time period that ends at the "Roman Age". Whether or what archaeologists use Iron Age for in the three age system in Pueblo lands has less than nothing to do with this conversation.

I have strictly no idea what you're talking about.

The only use of "Iron Age" prior to the three-age system was Hesiod's Five Ages, which had an Iron Age after the end of the Trojan War. And as far as I can tell, this Iron Age is still underway and will as long as might makes right and gods no longer walk the land. Even Ovid, who lived under the Roman empire, was still referring to the Iron Age as ongoing.

Otherwise, "Iron Age" was only used as part of the Three-age system. And happens it was first used for the study of Scandinavian artifacts, precisely because there was no historical records for the area before 9th century CE. By design, the Three-age system accounts for ages ending in different time in different places.

You could define an European Iron Age as the period during which Europeans people at large had ironwork but no history, dumbing it down to lump the war of Peloponnese in 411 BC (the classical beginning for history, though we now have much older records) with the battle of Allia in 390 BC (which was the last time the Roman had their ass severely beat down and the city of Rome invaded before 410 CE) and call what came after as Roman Age. Even though it overlooks Alexander the Great conquests and two centuries of history before Rome became the dominant force in Europe. And it'll be quite arbitrary, considering Greece and Rome had much strong ties to the Mediterranean world, parts of which were already well into History, than to northern Europe.

And this would still be based on the Three-age system.

Nath wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:Note: if we're talking about European History which we are, the "Iron Age" isn't actually part of the three age system, and is an actual specific time period that ends at the "Roman Age". Whether or what archaeologists use Iron Age for in the three age system in Pueblo lands has less than nothing to do with this conversation.

I have strictly no idea what you're talking about.

The only use of "Iron Age" prior to the three-age system was Hesiod's Five Ages, which had an Iron Age after the end of the Trojan War. And as far as I can tell, this Iron Age is still underway and will as long as might makes right and gods no longer walk the land. Even Ovid, who lived under the Roman empire, was still referring to the Iron Age as ongoing.

Otherwise, "Iron Age" was only used as part of the Three-age system.

Uh... no. Try using Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ar ... al_periods

Western Europe gets divided into ten periods, of which the "Iron Age" goes from 800 BCE to the start of the Common Era, when the "Roman Age" starts. It's just that eight hundred year block. In any case, under no system is anywhere considered to still be in the Iron Age. This is simply not a thing that any system does. Even if you're going strictly with the archaic "three age" thing, it's still the three ages of prehistory, and automatically ends as soon as the historical period starts.

Look, I know that the three ages thing was first proposed by some Danish dude, so you're probably all hot and bothered by it. But seriously: archaeology has moved on. Being pedantic about that shit is annoying at the best of times, but in addition you're flat wrong and should eat your damn crow.

-Username17

The timeline you refer to applies to Western Europe, not Europe at large.

It only concerns the stretch of land that goes from northern Spain to southern Germany (you may add or not the British Isles). If you restrict yourself to this area, then, yes, Iron Age is an actual specific time period, that begins circa 8th century BCE and ends with the Roman conquest in the 1st century BCE (classical history starting with Julius Caesar Gallic War. And this is totally based on the three-age system.

If you're talking about European History without mentioning a specific part of it, which you were, you should deal with the fact that "Iron Age" is also a different period in Northern and Southeastern Europe (as shown in the Wikipedia article you linked to).

Nath wrote: If you're talking about European History without mentioning a specific part of it, which you were, you should deal with the fact that "Iron Age" is also a different period in Northern and Southeastern Europe (as shown in the Wikipedia article you linked to).

You understand that in both of those alternate versions, it still ends and you are still wrong, right?

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:You understand that in both of those alternate versions, it still ends and you are still wrong, right?

On 2013 being Iron Age? I am wrong and will remain for all people who consider that historical records for the last ten centuries can never be lost. Call me wrong all you want, I respect your faith in technology.

On "Iron Age" expression referring to either one Hesiod Age of Men or one of CJ Thomsen Three Ages, and on Iron Age not being an 'actual specific time period that ends at the "Roman Age"' in European History, but only in Western Europe History, no, I didn't understand it yet.

The standard fantasy setting is post-apocalyptic in terms of tech and culture.

There are:

1. Unexplored ruins of former empires, far too many for anything but a profound breakdown of cultures and nations on a world-wide scale.

2. Remnants of high-end tech and culture, like ideas about women's liberation and brassieres.

3. Large cities and vast wildernesses combined.

Judging__Eagle wrote:Is there a specific century that would be best looked at, as an example of what a pseudo-medieval fantasy heartbreaker should look like?

Seems the idea of a fantasy setting gets turned on its head about half as often as it is employed. One of my favorite challenges to it was Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" in which the protagonist travels around an advanced, decadent age that seems like a fantasy setting at first, and only later reveals itself to be science fiction. So where's the line between the two if magic=science? If your lost artifact is a fireball-shooting wand enchanted by an unknown being from another plane, the main difference between that and a phaser from ST is reproducibility. If someone plopped a phaser into the hands of an Olmec pepper farmer, that thing is a magic artifact from an unknown being from somewhere other than the known world. While reading that tale we wouldn't recognize it as such, but only because of our own expectations.

The fantasy genre started with myth. Make up some escapist tales to entertain your friends and don't stop them from pretending it's the truth. Those tales look an awful lot like the world you already know, with speculative stuff tacked on like "what if there were a family of gods that looked a lot like my crappy family?" and "what if the stranger who saved Timmy from that fire last winter was actually a great hero who could shoot lightning out of his nostrils?" Tolkein just went with the speculative leap of "what if people lived on a different world?" and went nuts making something that looked just like mythology, so now we have "fantasy" which really just means "speculative fiction that looks like Tolkein's stuff".

Tolkein was making a mythology for England, so it looks a lot like English history, in which gun-toting ninjas would be out of place because they aren't in his England, and a Ford would be out of place because those aren't found in the mythology he was emulating. EQ already established it has no guns, ninjas, or indoor plumbing, so those would be out of place on Norrath. But if you're making speculative fiction for someone other than myth for western Europeans and you're starting from scratch, it really doesn't matter what century it looks like, or even if humans are in it at all.

Stop calling it fantasy. It's all SF.

Bihlbo wrote:Stop calling it fantasy. It's all SF.

I think you have this exactly backwards. Most Sci works Fi have elements that as far as we know are pure fantasy (FTL travel, aliens, psionics, strong AIs with personalities, etc), with only the barest of technological dressings over them.

Sci fi and fantasy are both called genre fiction for a reason. Sufficiently advanced, and all that.

All of this is making me think that the setting I work on have the following:

-Have it's own 'history' begin before human patriarchy was established (~4000 BC)

-Introduce "some" reason for there to be conflict with supernatural monsters (The Dominions 3/Frank suggested blend of "magical upwellings" that create 'power', and 'monsters'; using the 3 After Sundown worlds to determine what specifically creates said upwellings (ex. dreaming minds, fires, wells))

-Funny enough, the same rise of agriculture and domestication which led humans to patriarchy, also leads to monsters showing up in/around settlements and cities; and the fact that the Luminaries best suited to combat them aren't gender specific... might actually help disestablish patriarchy from establishing itself the way it has on our Earth since Sorceror Queens and Slayers establish the fact that women are an important part of fighting back the madness that civilization spawns

-Have technology continue progressing; ideally until say 400 BCE, where the Aeropilie (Hero(n)'s Jet-Steam engine) and the Diolkos[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad]'railroad' of 600 BCE; and have an age of steam that occurs more than 2000 years before earth's does [maybe?]

-Potentially: have a 'modern' era that looks like something out of Buck Rogers, or Shadowrun. >_>