Early D&D's Implied Setting

[TristramEvans]

As a spin-off from the Sci-Fantasy thread, I was reminded of a blog post I read a few weeks ago where the assertion is made that D&D was originally a post-apocalypse setting by default.

The Implied Apocalypse of Dungeons & Dragons

AD&D's implied setting was a post apocalyptic, untamed wilderness.

www.brainleakage.com

Last week, I talked a little about the corporate same-y-ness that overtook later editions of D&D, and how it differed from the kitchen sink, anything goes weirdness of 1st Edition AD&D.

That post was written largely in response to a recent episode of Geek Gab, in which guests P. Alexander and Jeffro Johnson discuss some of the stranger, more overlooked aspects of the game. Once again, I recommend checking it out. The discussion is fascinating, lively, and in-depth.

One of the meatier subjects they breach is the idea that AD&D's implied setting is inherently post apocalyptic.

I had to spend a little time chewing that over, largely because I'm fairly new to the 1st Edition ruleset. I never had much exposure to it as a teen, aside from one group I played with after High School. Even then, it was just a handful of optional rules cribbed from Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures, bolted onto a 2nd Edition chassis.

In a nutshell, the argument is that—independent of campaign setting—the rules of AD&D imply the game takes place in the wake of some unspecified, civilization-ending cataclysm.

For what it's worth, classic sword and sorcery fiction tends to make this same assumption. Conan's Hyborian Age is perhaps the most famous, taking place thousands of years after "the oceans drank Atlantis." Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique tales are more properly classified as Dying Earth stories, but the effect is the same: the last vestiges of humanity cling to superstition and sorcery on the Earth's last remaining continent. Not to mention The Dying Earth itself, where technology and magic are both remnants of long dead empires, and are completely indistinguishable from one another.

Simply put, without the collapse of some ancient civilization (or several), the landscape wouldn't be littered with ruins for the characters to go dungeon-diving in. But that assumption can hardly be called unique to AD&D. Later editions still feature plenty of ruined temples, lost cities, and dungeon delves, even if they are significantly less lethal than the old school variety.

So what was unique to AD&D that made it inherently apocalyptic? What was missing from the later editions that pointed to a post-cataclysmic world?

According to Geek Gab host Daddy Warpig, the answer is domain level play.

For those of you weaned on newer editions, a quick definition: "Domain" was a word that had nothing to do with the Cleric class back in the day. Rather, it referred to the fact that at 9th level or so, characters would begin to attract loyal followers and build a base of operations.

Furthermore, these weren't just optional rules, buried in an Appendix of the Dungeon Master's Guide. These were class features, listed in the Player's Handbook under each character class' description.

At first glance, that might not seem too apocalyptic. But the rules for Territory Development by Player Characters (found on page 93 of the DMG) are written assuming a vast, sparsely-populated wilderness as the default setting. A wilderness controlled by monsters, and littered with the ruins of countless, long-dead civilizations.

According to these rules, characters building a fortress go through considerable time and expense, selecting a construction site, clearing the area, paying and staffing a garrison, and conducting regular patrols to sweep for monsters. Once construction is complete, these strongholds attract settlers looking for safety and security.

In Warpig's opinion, this doesn't just represent a post apocalyptic style of play. It represents a specific kind of post apocalyptic play. The AD&D apocalypse isn't Mad Max, Warpig says, with humanity dropping into savagery and barbarism. Rather, it's at the point where humanity is climbing out of savagery, retaking and reestablishing civilization in a monster-infested wilderness.

Interestingly enough, I made a nearly identical point a few weeks back in my review of Rutger Hauer's The Blood of Heroes. In fact, a new DM trying to figure out domain play could do much worse than to look at that movie as a blueprint. The sparsely populated desert wastelands. The clumps of agrarian survivors gathered in Dog Towns. The powerful, governing elite clustered in the Nine Cities, demanding tribute and loyalty. The Juggers traveling around, engaging in ritual combat, and scouting new recruits.

Add some roving monsters and some dungeon-diving, and you've got a pretty good representation of what the world looks like according to domain play rules.

Domain play was still around in 2nd Edition, though I vaguely remember the rules for it being a bit more generic and simplified. I can't speak for 3rd, 3.X, or 4th Editions, having never played them. But in 5th Edition, it's entirely gone. Which means in terms of game mechanics, a 9th level character doesn't have any more responsibilities to his community than a 1st level one.

In that sense, it's easy to see Warpig's point. 5th Edition doesn't presume the characters need to establish safe areas, because it assumes there are already enough safe areas. Whatever near-extinction event caused all those ruins the PCs are exploring, 5th Edition's rules imply it's far enough in the past that humanity's overall survival is no longer in question.

But the argument for an "apocalyptic AD&D" doesn't stop there. The Geek Gab folks also spend a good amount of time on Vancian magic.

I've written about the subject before, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say, the Vancian Magic system might be the single strongest argument for an apocalyptic D&D setting. But not in the sense of "fire and forget" spells.

In AD&D, the only way for a Magic-user to learn more spells is to find them, typically by recovering old scrolls or spell books from dungeons. Even then, there's a chance the character will completely fail to understand any spells they do manage to find.

In other words, AD&D Magic-users are a cargo cult, parroting scraps of mostly forgotten spells they barely comprehend, and risking life and limb in the ruins of lost civilizations to find more.

Granted, the "classic" Magic-user still exists in 5th Edition, as the Wizard class. But it exists alongside Warlocks and Sorcerers. And therein lies the difference.

Vancian Magic implies a lot about the setting, but only if it's used in isolation. If an accident of birth or a demon sugar-daddy can grant the same powers as those lost scraps of magic, how lost were they? How fantastical and rare are they now?

In the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Gary Gygax spends several paragraphs stressing the the scarcity of magic spells, and how difficult it is for the Magic-user to obtain them. NPC spell casters should be reluctant to divulge their secrets, demanding exorbitant fees, rare magic items, and quests in exchange. It's advice that makes sense, but only if magic is a forgotten art from a lost golden age.

And that's the thing.

That lost and forgotten nature was a base assumption about magic in 1st Edition. Taken along with domain play, the sparsely populated wilderness, and the sheer number of ruins players were expected to encounter, it's obvious the core rules had an apocalyptic setting in mind.

It's interesting reading through the AD&D rulebooks now. Like I mentioned last week, I don't have any personal nostalgia for this edition. So it's not like I'm viewing it though rose-colored glasses. Even so, it's hard not to come away with a feeling that something incredibly cool was lost in the transition to the slicker, more polished game I grew up on.

Thank God for reprints and second hand stores...

Though not a D&D fan, as I've mentioned before, I am fascinated by the evolution of the hobby and the kitchen-sink style approach to fantasy that existed prior to the "mainstreaming of fantasy". This theory reminds of nothing so much as Adventure Time, one of my favourite fantasy series of the past decade.

I do find a few of the author's arguments a little specious, starting with the claim that Howard's Conan is a post=apocalypse setting because it takes place "after the sinking of Atlantis". But some of it is rather intriguing.

 

[Séadna]

Whether it's true that it was the actual intent of Gygax I don't know, but this idea of a post-apocalyptic science fantasy world got me into D&D. It's one of the coolest things ever!

 

[Baulderstone]

The post does seem to be stretching the definition of post-apocalypse a little thin, to the point of meaning any world that contains earlier fallen civilizations, but it makes some good points. D&D was certainly a lot more free to mix in science-fiction in the early days.

The Wilderlands of High Fantasy is an an early D&D setting that clearly that clearly has layers of post-apocalypse lying underneath it. Encountering a tribe of orcs living in half-buried submarine isn't that unlikely. Empire of the Petal Throne is also set in the future on an alien world after some unspecified disaster.

I've seen the point that taking a post-apocalyptic approach avoids a lot of the questions about why societies in D&D aren't more formally shaped by magic use. It's because high-level magic and interplanar incursions periodically destabilize everything. Small clusters of survivors live in feudal baronies, huddling in fear or venturing out to scavenge the ruins and expand.

 

[Dumarest]

I believe this was Doc Sammy's original premise for the PBP OD&D game: https://www.rpgpub.com/threads/interest-check-original-dungeons-dragons-play-by-post.1746/

Whether it's true that it was the actual intent of Gygax I don't know, but this idea of a post-apocalyptic science fantasy world got me into D&D. It's one of the coolest things ever!

Just you wait!

 

[Edgewise]

First of all, I definitely agree with the quoted text. Prior to establishment of the Forgotten Realms, AD&D felt like it was set in the recovery phase after a collapse.

This is a good place to reprise one of my periodic refrains, which is that most of the fantasy I've encountered is post-apocalyptic. The idea of a previous Fall is integral to many settings. Not just the existence of dungeons and ruins, but the lack of social control i.e. the profession of "adventurer" itself. One would imagine that in a non-apocalyptic setting, magic would be tightly controlled in one way or another, and monsters would not be roaming the countryside.

I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Check out this Kickstarter.

 

[EmperorNorton]

Not a RPG setting, but one of the things I always liked about the Terry Brooks Shannara novels was that it was the far future of the real world, and that if you aren't paying too much attention it is easy to miss in the descriptions, at least in the earlier novels before he had one enemy just be a literal AI from before the fall of the modern world. (In one of the early books they actually go into the ruins of a modern city, and it sounds alien in description unless you know it is a modern city.)

 

[Tulpa Girl]

Saberhagen's various Swords books are also post-apocalypse. It's easy to miss, but those books take place long after the Empire Of The East trilogy, where it's a lot more obvious.

 

[TJS]

Is it that the setting is implied to be post-apocalyptic, or is merely that post-apocalypse is a rationalisation of the setting details as written.

I've always read early D&D as having a range of elements that could lead to this: a frontier like setting, lots of dungeons stocked with magic items, and no rules for creating magic items.

Now if you put all these things together and try to make a coherent setting out of them - then a post-apocalyptic setting is a nice rationalisation. But I'm not sure it's implied.

There are after all plenty of things that don't really fit that context - like the long list of historically specific pole-arms - or the presence of plate armour (which surely implies a society that's well part the rebuilding stage of post apocalyptic event.)

One could probably just as easily suggest that the implied setting is a mythic high middle ages in which the characters venture off the edges of the map of the known world into lands haunted by myth and the weird.

 

[Akrasia]

Are the Dark Ages 'post-apocalyptic'? It seems a bit of a stretch to call them that.

I always interpreted the early D&D/AD&D default setting assumptions to be that there had been some 'ancient civilizations' (analogues to Rome, Egypt, Babylon, etc.) that no longer were around, but which explained the ruins, ancient knowledge, lost magic, etc. that motivated adventurers.

In the Greyhawk setting these are the Suloise Imperium and the Baklunish Empire -- both destroyed by a magical nuclear war (the 'Invoked Devastation' and the "Rain of Colourless Fire'). But by that happened a thousand years *before* the time of the campaign setting.

 

[T. Foster]

D&D is absolutely implied to be post-collapse, in that the world used to be a more civilized place than it is now - with people building a lot of now-abandoned castles and cities, minting all of those coins and jewels that are now found mostly in buried treasure hoards, fabricating all of those magic items that are now very hard to replicate (using the magic item creation rules in D&D there's pretty much no way anyone would have ever bothered to create all of the magic items that the treasure tables say are floating around), and (as the OP says) discovering/inventing all of those spells that present-day wizards scrounge around for and have trouble learning and jealously guard to maintain advantage over other wizards. The world was once a civilized place, but now it's mostly ruins and wilderness overrun with monsters and bandits until and unless the PCs come along to clean things up. All this is very strongly implied in D&D.

What's not necessarily implied is that the pre-collapse civilization was necessarily modern or technological in the way the term "post-apocalyptic" usually signifies, and is the case in works like Saberhagen's Empire of the East or Lin Carter's World's End series. A bit of that stuff shows up (mostly in the magic items - the Mighty Servant of Leuk-O is a giant robot, the Apparatus of Kwalish is a submarine, wands of magic missiles are effectively ray-guns, etc.) but D&D also posits a multiverse with occasional intrusion from parallel worlds (like the crashed spaceship in "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks") that is probably sufficient to explain that stuff, because if "D&D World" was really meant to be post-apocalyptic we'd surely see a lot more of it (the way you do in Gamma World, say).

 

[Akrasia]

This discussion reminds me a bit of a scene in The Winter King trilogy by Bernard Cornwell.
Arthur and his troops cross a magnificent (but decaying) Roman bridge en route to an encounter with some Saxons. As they cross Arthur comments (with sadness) that nobody in Britain would know how to build such a thing anymore.

 

[T. Foster]

Are the Dark Ages 'post-apocalyptic'? It seems a bit of a stretch to call them that.

I always interpreted the early D&D/AD&D default setting assumptions to be that there had been some 'ancient civilizations' (analogues to Rome, Egypt, Babylon, etc.) that no longer were around, but which explained the ruins, ancient knowledge, lost magic, etc. that motivated adventurers.

Exactly. D&D World exists in the shadow of a fallen civilization. But that civilization is more Rome/Egypt/Atlantis/Numenor than anything modern and technological.

 

[Gronan of Simmerya]

OD&D had fuckall to do with the Dark Ages.

Blackmoor and Greyhawk both had spaceships, robots, and Ray guns.

It's Dying Earth.

 

[Akrasia]

Well, I interpret Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting to be very much a 'Dark Ages' setting -- as opposed to a 'post-apocalypse' setting.

There are cities, countries, etc., in the DE. But these are all in the shadows (and amidst the ruins) of past, greater civilisations. (Just as the historical Dark Ages were in the surrounded by the ruins and memories of Rome, and often tried to 'mimic' Roman ways.)

As for spaceships, robots, and ray guns, Vance's DE stories don't have those at all (but then only a small fraction of the various artifacts from earlier eras are mentioned). Published 0e D&D and 1e AD&D books certainly don't focus on them (aside from modules like S3 and the like). It may be that robots and spaceships were the foci of the games played by Arneson and Gygax -- you would know after all -- but one certainly would not get the impression that they are part of the 'default setting' from the books themselves.

 

[saskganesh]

I think these themes get overstated and it's really a kitchen sink of cool shit thrown into blender and then microwaved for heat. Like there were Martians in encounter tables in Underworld and Wilderness, but no Martians in Creatures and Treasure. It's not a game about Martians, but Martians are in there, if you want them to be. D&D supports many frameworks, part of the reason for its success. There is no default.

 

[Edgewise]

Well, I interpret Jack Vance's Dying Earth setting to be very much a 'Dark Ages' setting -- as opposed to a 'post-apocalypse' setting.

It may not be purely post-apocalyptic, but I feel that it's more that than Dark Ages. A Dark Age usually leads to a brighter one.

But these are all in the shadows (and amidst the ruins) of past, greater civilisations.

It's more than that. The people of Vance's setting were slightly nostalgic, but they were even more jaded. It was as though everything had been done, and done many times again, so why bother? They didn't forget that magic was really technology - they just didn't care, anymore. The greatest wizards had no aspiration to return to glory. They preferred to while their days away in comfort and distraction.

In The Dying Earth, there is an expectation of continuing decline, to be followed by extinction, and it's met mostly with a shrug. There's not so much a reversion to barbarism as the gradual sybaritic rot of an exhausted culture. Not so much post-apocalypse as apocalypse in slow-motion.

 

[Vargold]

It's all Gibbon and Spengler.

 

[Voros]

I think these themes get overstated and it's really a kitchen sink of cool shit thrown into blender and then microwaved for heat. Like there were Martians in encounter tables in Underworld and Wilderness, but no Martians in Creatures and Treasure. It's not a game about Martians, but Martians are in there, if you want them to be. D&D supports many frameworks, part of the reason for its success. There is no default.

I agree, it's a cool idea but barely supported by much in the game or the early modules which are more kitchen-sink fantasy.

 

[AsenRG]

It may not be purely post-apocalyptic, but I feel that it's more that than Dark Ages. A Dark Age usually leads to a brighter one.

It's more than that. The people of Vance's setting were slightly nostalgic, but they were even more jaded. It was as though everything had been done, and done many times again, so why bother? They didn't forget that magic was really technology - they just didn't care, anymore. The greatest wizards had no aspiration to return to glory. They preferred to while their days away in comfort and distraction.

In The Dying Earth, there is an expectation of continuing decline, to be followed by extinction, and it's met mostly with a shrug. There's not so much a reversion to barbarism as the gradual sybaritic rot of an exhausted culture. Not so much post-apocalypse as apocalypse in slow-motion.

That fits my reading of Dying Earth as well.

 

[Akrasia]

...The greatest wizards had no aspiration to return to glory. They preferred to while their days away in comfort and distraction...

It's been a ~6 years since I last read it, but Rhialto the Marvellous does travel to the very edge of the universe in one story, and more generally does not seem to fit this description.

That nitpick aside, I don't think we're disagreeing that deeply regarding the nature of the Dying Earth. I think that you interpret 'Dark Ages' somewhat differently than I do (many people who lived during that time -- which, of course, they themselves did not refer to as the 'Dark Ages' -- did not think that a 'brighter' age eventually would emerge).

I agree with (and quite like) your last paragraph.

 

[PolarBlues]

The adventuring under the shadow of a mysterious, long gone advanced civilisation is common in sci-fi gaming too, particularly the more exploration driven kind. It comes down to providing a ready rationale for losts treasures and macguffins.

 

[Simlasa]

Does the prior civilization need to have been more technologically advanced?
I suppose that discounts Westerns... though many D&D sessions play like them.

 

[dokel]

When I saw the thread title I thought that it might relate to this pdf.

 

[PolarBlues]

The lost civilisation needs to be advanced if you want to install that sense of wonder and rise the stakes of the adventure. What would be the point seeking treasures at great personal peril if a similar or better item can be bought for a resasonable price back in any major city?

The Western is different frontier/civilisation has a similar but diferent dynamic. All the gold and beaver pelts are only valuable becuase you have markets in the East (and Europe.. which is suppose is also East). And while you can absolutely create an adventure around mundane treasures like beaver pelts, it doesn't have quite the same resonance as, say, a ring that grant immortality, so to get the same levels of excitment you conflict very personal. And that is one of the great things about the Western, the conflict are very personal.

 

[TristramEvans]

The lost civilisation needs to be advanced if you want to install that sense of wonder and rise the stakes of the adventure. What would be the point seeking treasures at great personal peril if a similar or better item can be bought for a resasonable price back in any major city?

The Western is different frontier/civilisation has a similar but diferent dynamic. All the gold and beaver pelts are only valuable becuase you have markets in the East (and Europe.. which is suppose is also East). And while you can absolutely create an adventure around mundane treasures like beaver pelts, it doesn't have quite the same resonance as, say, a ring that grant immortality, so to get the same levels of excitment you conflict very personal. And that is one of the great things about the Western, the conflict are very personal.

Human beings being what they are however, certain mythologies did grow around the frontier exploration - lost cities of Gold, the Fountain of Youth, etc.

 

[Stevethulhu]

It may not be purely post-apocalyptic, but I feel that it's more that than Dark Ages. A Dark Age usually leads to a brighter one.

The Dark Ages aren't called that because of the violence and the collapse of civilisation. It's because of the lack of historical records, forcing historians to rely on archaeology to piece together the events and the way people lived in that era.

Rome left Britain a good 400 years before the Dark Ages. The connection is appealing, but not very historical.

 

[TJS]

I think people are really looking back a bit too much with the modern gaming assumption that the game world needs to make sense as a world.

From my understanding of early D&D this was very much not a given.

The fact that dungeons are filled with magic treasure which you can't buy in town - doesn't imply anything unless you first make the above assumption.

Failing that, things are the way they are because that is the way the game is.

 

[dbm]

Does the prior civilization need to have been more technologically advanced?

If the prior civilisation wasn’t more advanced in some way you are basically doing archaeology

Possibly with extreme prejudice, of course...

 

[dbm]

I think people are really looking back a bit too much with the modern gaming assumption that the game world needs to make sense as a world.

This kind of summarises my feelings on the topic. ‘Implied setting’ = ‘post-hoc justification’

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Eberron was intended as a ‘logical’ extension of the 3.x rules system, and it is my favourite D&D world.

 

[TJS]

This kind of summarises my feelings on the topic. ‘Implied setting’ = ‘post-hoc justification’

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Eberron was intended as a ‘logical’ extension of the 3.x rules system, and it is my favourite D&D world.

God no. I certainly didn't mean to imply it was. I think some of the best OSR stuff has come about by thinking of creative ways to make older D&D make a certain kind of sense (even if it's a surreal weird sense like Vornheim or the Hill Cantons setting).

 

[Edgewise]

It's been a ~6 years since I last read it, but Rhialto the Marvellous does travel to the very edge of the universe in one story, and more generally does not seem to fit this description.

Ho boy, Rhialto is the worst. He's a fop who expends his powers on indolence and petty revenge against the slights of his peers. He's not actively awful like Cugel, but the only thing that can urge him to leave his house is the promise of obtaining advantage over his fellow wizards by acquiring a cache of IOUN stones.

 

[TristramEvans]

"post-hoc justification" is how most fantasy worlds are built, especially in RPGs. I disagree that there's no value in exploring these implications, however, as ultimately the rules and the setting form a symbiotic relationship and evolve in reaction to each other.

 

[dbm]

the only thing that can urge him to leave his house is the promise of obtaining advantage

Sounds like a classic adventurer to me!

 

[BlackWolf]

As someone who 85% of D&D time was spent with Dark Sun, I rather agree with this statement.
My opinion may be biased.

 

[Simlasa]

I think some of the best OSR stuff has come about by thinking of creative ways to make older D&D make a certain kind of sense (even if it's a surreal weird sense like Vornheim or the Hill Cantons setting).

It's not OSR but that's the main impetus behind Earthdawn, which is very much post-apocalypse fantasy.

I don't recall the name but there's another fantasy RPG that set out with intent of presenting the pre-apocalypse, the apex at the moment of turning toward collapse... which could be what Eberron is, unintentionally.

 

[dbm]

ultimately the rules and the setting form a symbiotic relationship and evolve in reaction to each other

They do, however as a person who tends to go with a light-weight link between rules and setting I think there are other factors that also influence the world.

Consider being a magic-user in D&D. Looking quickly at OSRIC and BECMI D&D as early examples, the barrier to being an MU is very low. There don’t seem to be any constraints in BECMI, and in OSRIC you need 6 for most stats and a 9 for Int. Just by the rules alone there is almost nothing stopping everyone in a campaign world being an MU.

That clearly isn’t the case, so there are other factors which don’t seem to be directly rules based which are also shaping the world. From a world perspective, the DM can of course decide what proportion the population is an adventurer or specifically an MU.

As an honest question: do you think that early D&D character creation facilitates the assumed setting?

 

[Atelerix]

There's the AD&D spell Imprisonment too. The reverse stated that there's a 10% chance of finding 1-100 previously buried at any spot you cast the spell.

The implied world is vastly ancient.

 

[TristramEvans]

Consider being a magic-user in D&D. Looking quickly at OSRIC and BECMI D&D as early examples, the barrier to being an MU is very low. There don’t seem to be any constraints in BECMI, and in OSRIC you need 6 for most stats and a 9 for Int. Just by the rules alone there is almost nothing stopping everyone in a campaign world being an MU.

I'm not sure I'm following the correlation you're making between how hard it is for a player to roll up a magic character vs any human in the game, unless we assume player characters are meant to be atypical representation of an average gameworld resident, which I'm pretty certain isn't the case. You can't just as easily roll up a merchant or peasant farmer, yet presumably such archetypes greatly outnumber adventurers in any given D&D gameworld. Suggesting that the majority of the populace is not the product of the same parameters of chargen.

That clearly isn’t the case, so there are other factors which don’t seem to be directly rules based which are also shaping the world. From a world perspective, the DM can of course decide what proportion the population is an adventurer or specifically an MU.

Sure, but that doesn't alter my point.

As an honest question: do you think that early D&D character creation facilitates the assumed setting?

It facilitates it insofar as the assumptions of what role the player characters will be adopting in the game. But what implied setting are you referring to? The one proposed by the blogger quoted in the OP, or something else? And if you don't think that D&D character creation facilitates the implied setting proposed by the OP, how would you see chargen being different if it were? It certainly implies something about the setting, insofar as it is obviously a pseudo-medieval world where magic and Tolkienish demihumans exist and gravitate towards certain roles, or at least embody archetypes from a certain genre of fiction.

 

[Altheus]

I think the world in D&D had an apocalypse a couple of hundred years ago. Civilization is recovering but people aren't expanding to where they were before.

The existence of dungeons implies that people had time to prepare for something, dungeons are complicated, time consuming and expensive to build. Some people then moved down to dungeons to wait out whatever was going to happen. After a time, those people left the dungeons and rebuild civilization but based on half-remembered stories it was a shadow of what had gone before. Those who didn't emerge from the dungeons were transformed by some element of their environment in to goblins.

Are dwarves an engineered adaption to underground conditions? There hasn't been enough time for evolution to do its thing, and yet we have dwarves. Dwarven cities are ancient and underground, have they survived previous waves of apocalypse? Is this apocalypse cyclical?

Also, much of the science, technology and magic has been lost, which is why people don't know how to make a wand of magic missiles or create a persistent enchantment on a sword and the like.

Civilization is expanding again so we have frontier towns, reclaiming the wilderness and finding ruins and dungeons full of wealth and magic items. If they are really lucky, libraries will survive explaining how to do things like build arches (more complex than you think), enchant wands, make consistently effective potions and the like, turning arts and crafts in to sciences.

 

[dbm]

I'm not sure I'm following the correlation you're making between how hard it is for a player to roll up a magic character vs any human in the game, unless we assume player characters are meant to be atypical representation of an average gameworld resident, which I'm pretty certain isn't the case.

I have seen other people argue that typical stat distribution and class pre-requisites is a guide to how many X there are in the world, be that magic-users, paladins and so on. I’m not saying you look at game this way, and the blog doesn’t say that either. But it is an extreme interpretation of the concept that the game mechanisms define the world, which is what we are discussing?

My position is that the linkage between rule and world is very loose (as a player of generic systems, this is my default baseline), whilst you are suggesting a stronger link, I think? So the question becomes one of degree. How strongly do the mechanics define the world? If it was super-tight then character creation rules would say something definitive about the type of people found in that world, but we both agree that is not the case.

This is why I commented in the balance thread that I like PCs and NPCs to be built using different processes - because I don’t think that PCs are strong indicators of what general people in the game world are like, just what adventurers are like. And they may be common or rare amongst the wider world population.

If you buy-in to the idea that rules define the world, what would you consider a good example of the feedback loop?

what implied setting are you referring to? The one proposed by the blogger quoted in the OP, or something else? And if you don't think that D&D character creation facilitates the implied setting proposed by the OP, how would you see chargen being different if it were?

WFRP would have to be the poster-child for this, with it’s life-path generation system that can start you out as a rat catcher etc. Most life-path systems are probably good examples. You create a fairly ordinary person who then chooses to become an adventurer (or who has that life thrust upon them).