Older post but I really like the idea of setting a D&D game directly in a historical setting, as Lamentations encourages you to do. So much of the work is already done for you by Wikipedia. The Thirty Years' War, the Viking Age, the Levant during the Crusades and the Caribbean in the pirate era would all be natural places to do it.
I'm stealing some of these from Robert E. Howard. We're used to secondary worlds now but sword and sorcery stuff in the Weird Tales era used to be set directly in real historical settings, rather than alternate "fantasy versions" of them. I think we should bring it back. Access to the internet makes the research vastly easier and there's a million details in real history you'd never be able to think of by yourself.
I've been meaning to do a follow up post to this as I've been running Wolves Upon The Coast lately, which has a pseudo historic setting. I might be too much of a stickler for detail to run an actual historical setting with the level of creative freedom needed to GM. The "heavily inspired by history" setting of Wolves opened up a lot of doors, and running a game like "it's literally May 1623" closed too many. I think having a setting firmly rooted in, but not set in, a particular time and place gives it a much needed internal logic.
Wolves Upon The Coast looks extremely cool, I've never heard of it of before. Developing your own set of D&D rules that are specifically designed for the exact hexcrawl you're packaging them with seems like a constructive approach.
I agree you need a little bit of ambiguity so as to not be constrained by too many existing historical facts. I think you can say "the game is set in the year 162X" and shift events and characters around a bit while still maintaining the internal consistency of the period. You don't want to get bogged down in like "wait, where was Cromwell on October the 2nd..."
Older post but I really like the idea of setting a D&D game directly in a historical setting, as Lamentations encourages you to do. So much of the work is already done for you by Wikipedia. The Thirty Years' War, the Viking Age, the Levant during the Crusades and the Caribbean in the pirate era would all be natural places to do it.
I'm stealing some of these from Robert E. Howard. We're used to secondary worlds now but sword and sorcery stuff in the Weird Tales era used to be set directly in real historical settings, rather than alternate "fantasy versions" of them. I think we should bring it back. Access to the internet makes the research vastly easier and there's a million details in real history you'd never be able to think of by yourself.
I've been meaning to do a follow up post to this as I've been running Wolves Upon The Coast lately, which has a pseudo historic setting. I might be too much of a stickler for detail to run an actual historical setting with the level of creative freedom needed to GM. The "heavily inspired by history" setting of Wolves opened up a lot of doors, and running a game like "it's literally May 1623" closed too many. I think having a setting firmly rooted in, but not set in, a particular time and place gives it a much needed internal logic.
Wolves Upon The Coast looks extremely cool, I've never heard of it of before. Developing your own set of D&D rules that are specifically designed for the exact hexcrawl you're packaging them with seems like a constructive approach.
I agree you need a little bit of ambiguity so as to not be constrained by too many existing historical facts. I think you can say "the game is set in the year 162X" and shift events and characters around a bit while still maintaining the internal consistency of the period. You don't want to get bogged down in like "wait, where was Cromwell on October the 2nd..."
It is very cool, but i think it's probably more fun for a DM to read than to run.
Many such cases unfortunately