Worldbuilding, melanin and appropriation

[zzzzzzzz414]

These are the kinds of things you need to consider when building a setting. And yeah, some details can absolutely be washed over, but at least the basics should be covered and make some degree of sense. And, of course, once we add in magic/tech to this, things can change as well. But it's a good idea to at least have some basic idea of "where does the food come from" and "how do they build stuff".

yeah, the problem i notice with a good number of dnd settings is that they tend to feel like...theme park attractions, rather than places anyone actually *lives*. You've got The Pirate Port and The Barbarian Village and The Jungle Tribe and the Vaguely Racist Aladdin City and Rome But Like Everyone Lives In A Mini Parthenon For Some Reason, and they all feel very shallow because they're clearly designed to be...well, exactly that, theme park attractions essentially, places meant to be in the background during the 2-3 session Jungle Temple Arc and then go away. And if you try to interact with them on a deeper level than that or as like, a few token lines in a character's backstory, it becomes very clear that nobody really thought about how exactly the society functions when fully 50% of your population are scowling axe-wielding viking expies, or where exactly the food for the big shiny paladin city high in the mountains comes from. magic can handwave this, yeah, but ime its just that: handwaves, with no real thought into *why* it exists like this, just *that* it exists like this, and magic of some sort is presumed to be filling in the gaps.

and maybe that works for some situations and campaigns yeah, like not everything has to have 10 pages of backstory, stuff can just exist to Be Cool, but it's also where you tend to run into problems because when a society exists first and foremost as wallpaper for Special Episodes, people tend to reach for the shallowest, tropiest, most obvious, most problematic stereotypes to fill it out. Which is obviously bad, and also boring to me. I want these places to feel actually lived in, i want to be able to turn and poke my nose in and hit more than drywall.

An old review i read for the Tomb of Annihilation 5e module a few years back pointed out that Chult really only existed as a backdrop for the adventure hook; the actual substance of the place was too shallow to ever serve as, say, the basis for an actual full campaign. It's not treated as a full-fledged place where people *live* and have societal and economic complexities to deal with outside the scope of that one shot. And i honestly think of that as a pretty good baseline to at least think about when trying to put together setting ideas: if i were to use this place as a main campaign setting, and not just a pit stop, how much depth would i need? Would this or that element still make sense?

[KorvinStarmast]

Point is that I'm willing to overlook stuff like that for the sake of a story, and the sake of needing to make the characters appeal to us. But we should not mistake this for actually being a true representation of what people in the Federation would have to be like.

{snip} Roddenberry was a bit of a wishful thinker, yes.

Otherwise, inevitably, the most greedy people will gravitate to the conveniently created positions of almost absolute authority and run things for their own benefit.

That was only the "other" characters in the ST episodes.

The more perfect a society may present itself or appear to be from the outside, the more likelihood for great adventures involving discovering and exploring all the deep dark hidden problems said society actually has.

Plenty of stories, short and long, written on that theme.

How does that powerful wealthy nation feed its people, and build/maintain its armies, and build big cities and walls and advanced tech/magic/whatever? And how do the people living within it feel about this?

The more cogent question is how does this society/empire/nation/kingdom build and maintain its roads/transportation networks. There's a book called "The Pursuit of Glory" which takes a look at Europe from 1648 to 1815, and the author beats the "roads yield prosperity" drum pretty hard. Interestingly, canals and roads were a huge boost to the economy in the New World during a similar time period. (He also discussed canal building in the British Isles, and its effects on trade).
I raise this as a world building point.

Lots of people would choose to live there rather than out in said wilderness where they are subject to raids by bandits, wild animal attacks, random unlucky weather events, whatever, right?

And yet elves live in the wilderness and somehow get buy in the standard fantasy setting. Hmm, what do they know that everyone else doesn't?

And we can (and should) consider a whole range of "less than perfect" societies. But that's kinda the point. Let's start with "nothing's perfect" and move from there. I think that a lot of GMs don't always consider the logistics of the game settings they are running.

See my point about roads further up. (And for that matter, sea lanes/trade routes).

[awa]

And yet elves live in the wilderness and somehow get buy in the standard fantasy setting. Hmm, what do they know that everyone else doesn't?

To be fair the elves are in the woods but not the wilderness. Generally elves (forest) are depicted with impressive tree top villages, that are often heavily patrolled. I mean the logistics of all that might be dubious but lucky for the elves they tend to be depicted as more magically powerful/ technologically advanced than the average human society.

Logical it does make sense though, if the number of elves is small with minimal replacement but they are extremely long lived it makes sense that you would want to get the most utility out of any given elf. So you gain more bang for your buck with education and such.

[kyoryu]

yeah, the problem i notice with a good number of dnd settings is that they tend to feel like...theme park attractions, rather than places anyone actually *lives*. You've got The Pirate Port and The Barbarian Village and The Jungle Tribe and the Vaguely Racist Aladdin City and Rome But Like Everyone Lives In A Mini Parthenon For Some Reason, and they all feel very shallow because they're clearly designed to be...well, exactly that, theme park attractions essentially, places meant to be in the background during the 2-3 session Jungle Temple Arc and then go away. And if you try to interact with them on a deeper level than that or as like, a few token lines in a character's backstory, it becomes very clear that nobody really thought about how exactly the society functions when fully 50% of your population are scowling axe-wielding viking expies, or where exactly the food for the big shiny paladin city high in the mountains comes from. magic can handwave this, yeah, but ime its just that: handwaves, with no real thought into *why* it exists like this, just *that* it exists like this, and magic of some sort is presumed to be filling in the gaps.

Part of the issue with that is that, really, to make things feel "unique" at first you need to make something obvious to grab the attention of people. So, sure, have your pirate port or your Rome-like-analogue or whatever. But then think a bit further than that and peel the next level down. Not everything has to be specced out, but at least get to the point where there aren't obvious logical contradictions that make you go why.

So you want a pirate nation (and I'm picking on this one because "marauders" is usually one of the poorly thought out ideas). Great! Who do they plunder? Kinda hard for an entire nation of marauders to survive, right? Okay, so maybe scale it back so it does make sense.... it's one port. Why aren't they blown out of the water? How is there any kind of order there? How do the shopkeepers live, especially without getting ganked? These are at least the first level of questions, and a lot of them can open up others as well (if you're a shopkeeper, what happens when you meet someone and start a family?). Imagining these things from the perspective of an individual that's required to exist by the society can help, too.

Even Big Authors aren't immune to this - the Dothraki make no sense whatsoever. They kill multiple of themselves at a wedding? Where do they get food? There's too many of them to really work as a pure marauder culture, and the rate at which they seem to kill their people (see Khal Drogo's wedding) makes you wonder how they continue as a society - if each wedding ends up killing multiple of your people, that's hard on the population!

[King of Nowhere]

To be fair the elves are in the woods but not the wilderness. Generally elves (forest) are depicted with impressive tree top villages, that are often heavily patrolled. I mean the logistics of all that might be dubious but lucky for the elves they tend to be depicted as more magically powerful/ technologically advanced than the average human society.

Logical it does make sense though, if the number of elves is small with minimal replacement but they are extremely long lived it makes sense that you would want to get the most utility out of any given elf. So you gain more bang for your buck with education and such.

it depends on having the right trees, but a treetop village may be sustainable. i mean, you have to carry goods up to treetop level, but no special difficulty besides that. you need to build roads on the trees too, while in a city roads are just packed dirt, but on the plus side you don't need a city wall.

in my world, elves started building treetop villages for defence, because their forests didn't have much access to the amounts of stone needed for a city wall. still, it's quite uncomfortable in the long run, with the occasional tree falling and forcing the rebuilding of several houses. the elven grand cathedral is made entirely of interlocking wooden panels, to be disassembled and moved to different trees. so, in modern times when war was less of a concern, the elves started building on land again. now building on trees is an extravagance for the rich. the one city that retained a large treetop area was a major tourist attraction, though. i described it as "take venice, drain the channels, and put the islands on trees". Most importantly, railings WERE included
I did point out how impractical it is to maintain a major city like that, but it was an important cultural heritage at that point.

[Boci]

Dwarves too I feel. What do they eat, living underground? Hill farms are a thing, so maybe that works, but mountains? No way. Stray mountain goats will only get you so far, and you can forget the alcohol.

[gbaji]

I have a Mr Aldous Huxley on line 1. He'd like a word.

Lol. Yeah. I was actually thinking about that. Combination of pre-genetic manipulation (DNA didn't exist when he wrote it, by like 20 years, so close enough), and massive social engineering/pressuring to build their society. And yeah, it was on paper a utopia, but underneath? Pretty darn distopian.

{snip} Roddenberry was a bit of a wishful thinker, yes. That was only the "other" characters in the ST episodes.

Yup. Again, a great idea on paper, but becomes increasingly problematic the more you actually look closely at it. They explored some aspects of this in DS9, but still kinda left some core bits left out IMO.

The more cogent question is how does this society/empire/nation/kingdom build and maintain its roads/transportation networks. There's a book called "The Pursuit of Glory" which takes a look at Europe from 1648 to 1815, and the author beats the "roads yield prosperity" drum pretty hard. Interestingly, canals and roads were a huge boost to the economy in the New World during a similar time period. (He also discussed canal building in the British Isles, and its effects on trade).
I raise this as a world building point.

Yeah. Absolutely. Don't need to go into detail drawing every bit of this on a map, or something. But at least realizing that this sort of infrastructure and logistics must exist, and allow for it. It's just always been amusing to me how often settings will just have some city sitting somewhere, and absolutely zero infrastructure around it to actually support it in any realistic way. And yeah, this gets even more relevant when you have whole kingdoms/empires/whatever, covering an area.

Which, as an aside, is where I kinda toss sideways glances at games in which a group of adventurers walking down the main road from cityA to cityB inside some kingdom/territory/whatever, magically still have X level appropriate encounters per day (cause that's what the rules call for, right?). Um... How on earth do normal people, who should literally be crowding along those roadways, actually survive to transport stuff around?

When I run encounters along such routes, it's usually fun/interesting (hopefully) RP stuff with the other folks also traveling along those same roads/canals/etc. You're just not going to run into a pack of wild beasts in that situation. But you can introduce RP opporunities by having them run into "Joe the merchant", and notice that some of the crates on his wagons seem to contain illegal merchandise (drugs, weapons, whatever). Or unsavory types seeking to get the party to assist them in some scheme. Stuff like that works far better, and can create a feel for a region as well (and just makes a lot more sense). And I think that players actually appreciate a break from just grinding meaningless random encounters.

And yet elves live in the wilderness and somehow get buy in the standard fantasy setting. Hmm, what do they know that everyone else doesn't?

Yeah. Depends on how elves are run in the setting. I tend to go towards "they have magic that makes the plantlife itself provide for them". So trees over time grow into the structures they want need. And plants just yield up the food and materials they need. Apply some sort of "bender" style magic and they can manipulate the natural stuff into whatever they want. Um... Things like metal armor and weapons do become a bit harder to justify though. Er... Maybe they have special plants that extract minerals from the earth and process them, producing workable metal of exactly whatever type they desire? Dunno.... Kinda depends on how alien you want your elves to actually be. Similar bits can apply to other non-human races and how they interact with their "natural environment".

So yeah. There are ways to do this in a fantasy environment, but it doesn't hurt to have spent a little bit of time asking the "how does this work" question, and then coming up with some sort of answer.

So you want a pirate nation (and I'm picking on this one because "marauders" is usually one of the poorly thought out ideas). Great! Who do they plunder? Kinda hard for an entire nation of marauders to survive, right? Okay, so maybe scale it back so it does make sense.... it's one port. Why aren't they blown out of the water? How is there any kind of order there? How do the shopkeepers live, especially without getting ganked? These are at least the first level of questions, and a lot of them can open up others as well (if you're a shopkeeper, what happens when you meet someone and start a family?). Imagining these things from the perspective of an individual that's required to exist by the society can help, too.

Yup. Funny you mention this. We had the concept of a "pirate king" introduced into our game setting, and (me being me) I had to come up with rules to justify how this band of pirates actually worked logistically. The result turned into a semi-coastal sized operation, including some "legit" shipping businesses, and some psuedo-legit ones, in order to manage the inflow and outflow of stolen goods they were accumulating (and hiding it from interested parties looking to figure out who the pirates were and how they were operating). It turned out to work well, because the pirates would actually attack "their own ships" from time to time, just to keep suspicion off of their legit businesses (largely used for laundering their goods), but also served to ensure that they could provide specific goods needed to maintain their operation without having to rely on more or less pot-luck from what they could get via piracy. Turns out that the trickiest part of operating a secret pirate island isn't the piracy, but actually selling the stuff you steal that you don't need, and buying the supplies that you do, all without leaving a trail leading straight to you.

It was a fun excersise in logistics though. But then, that's the kind of stuff I do find to be fun.

[King of Nowhere]

Dwarves too I feel. What do they eat, living underground? Hill farms are a thing, so maybe that works, but mountains? No way. Stray mountain goats will only get you so far, and you can forget the alcohol.

I solved the whole underground thing with plants that feed on background magic (and I don't see other way to solve it, you need an external energy source and you need a primary producer. fungi won't do, they feed on decaying matter that itself has to come from somewhere). this allows a subterranean ecosystem.
trade would be possible, in principle; dwarves mine ores and sell them for food. but having 100% of your food supply coming from trade makes you extremely vulnerable, both to war and to any kind of trade interruption. especially before modern railways, carrying that much food long distances would be very difficult even in the best circumstances.

incidentally, most dwarven cities are dwarf-sized. any taller creature is advised to keep to the cosmopolitan sections - whose ceiling was raised specifically to accomodate visitors - and to wear a helmet to visit the other areas.

We had the concept of a "pirate king" introduced into our game setting, and (me being me) I had to come up with rules to justify how this band of pirates actually worked logistically. The result turned into a semi-coastal sized operation, including some "legit" shipping businesses, and some psuedo-legit ones, in order to manage the inflow and outflow of stolen goods they were accumulating (and hiding it from interested parties looking to figure out who the pirates were and how they were operating). It turned out to work well, because the pirates would actually attack "their own ships" from time to time, just to keep suspicion off of their legit businesses (largely used for laundering their goods), but also served to ensure that they could provide specific goods needed to maintain their operation without having to rely on more or less pot-luck from what they could get via piracy. Turns out that the trickiest part of operating a secret pirate island isn't the piracy, but actually selling the stuff you steal that you don't need, and buying the supplies that you do, all without leaving a trail leading straight to you.

It was a fun excersise in logistics though. But then, that's the kind of stuff I do find to be fun.

and sometimes, some players pick up the trail and follow the logistics. when it happens, it can be very satisfying; gives the feeling of having a real world instead of, as somebody called it, a theme park attraction.

[paladinofshojo]

well it is relative, if we had two societies next to each other say one of the nordic countries with a high happiness index and stuck them next to a primitive society that is rife with disease, internal strife, every kind of ism on top of being technologically and militarily inferior an outside observer/reader might rightly say this one is the utopia even if the society is not literally perfect.

You don’t see anything problematic with this scenario at all without any sort of context?

It’d be one thing if you offer up some sort of explanation as to why one society is much more ideal than the other, but in the context of your example…. the only logical explanation is that the Nordics are “just inherently better”….

[King of Nowhere]

You don’t see anything problematic with this scenario at all without any sort of context?

It’d be one thing if you offer up some sort of explanation as to why one society is much more ideal than the other, but in the context of your example…. the only logical explanation is that the Nordics are “just inherently better”….

I don't see any problem whatsoever. because your "only logical explanation" is actually one in dozens of possible explanations.
the first step is to understand that the better society is just more advanced. societies develop technology, that makes life better, that makes possible to develop more technology. this generally also reflects on social development; when you live in a tribe of hunter gatherers where most children die of disease or malnutrition and most adults die in fights with other tribes to secure food resources, it's kinda hard to develop the idea that people have rights. actually, they don't, because that society doesn't have the capability to grant rights to anyone. things that we consider essential to a civilized society, like public schooling, welfare, emancipation, can only exhist when the society has enough resources to provide those things.
and the advanced society is better in the same way that a smartphone is better than smoke signals. a smartphone is a much better form of communication. it also does many other things. however, it can only exhist in a certain environment.

once established that the "nordics" are simply ahead of the other guys, plenty of explanations exhist.
it could be a matter of land
- the nordics had land more suitable to agriculture, they got greater numbers from the stone age, so they developed faster.
- the nordics had a geography more suitable for trade, so they gathered innovations from many other cultures and developed faster.
- the nordic had resources that allowed them to kickstart an industrial revolution earlier.
- the primitives had a lush land that never encouraged them to develop technology, because they had no needs
or, it could be an accident of history
- the nordics united into a cohesive society that could develop, while the primitives spent their energy warring among fractured tribes
- the primitives came under the joke of a tyrant, that thoroughly destroied their culture to stay in power and promoted evil values
- the primitives were long dominated by another nation, that treated them as b-class citizens at best. this hampered both their scientific progress (they had no access to higher education) and their moral progress (they saw society as a mean to dominate them, and didn't develop a civic conscience)
or, since we're positing a fantasy world, it could be the result of magic
- all of the previous reasons, except justified by magic instead of geography
- the primitives live under emanations from the negative plane, that makes them more prone to evil - and less prone to seeking long term advantage for all society.
- the nordics live under emanations from the positive plane
- the primitives had some kind of disadvantage when it comes to develop magic
- the primitives had innate magic, and this prevented them from developing a technology

I could expand a lot on this if discussing real life wasn't forbidden. because, really, a lot of the arguments I used were real history for some populations, or they were theorized for some populations.

the only thing I see as "problematic" in this whole business is that we seem unable to say "this is better" without drawing all kinds of nasty implications.

[awa]

You don’t see anything problematic with this scenario at all without any sort of context?

It’d be one thing if you offer up some sort of explanation as to why one society is much more ideal than the other, but in the context of your example…. the only logical explanation is that the Nordics are “just inherently better”….

I mean yes If you choose to ignore context of the conversation it could look bad, but in that case the problem is you ignoring the context, primitive is a relative descriptive term in this context. I was talking about the viability of calling something a utopia if it was relatively better that the other options even if it was not absolutely perfect. I actually did give an example of how this could come about in a latter post more context that one could acknowledge or ignore.

the argument was made that utopia is impossible because people want different things and I was giving an example of how by the power of relative prosperity a "happy" utopia could exist. I never claimed it was good story telling, because my goal was merely to describe a utopia that people can be happy in that could plausibly exist.

So just as an exercise I will create such a scenario, let say we start with two groups who are roughly equal than one group gets hit by a meteor containing a zombie virus. Group A is a self sufficient island and sets up strict quarantines managing to stop the virus from reaching their shores. Group B loses most of its government and then is wracked by a series of civil wars as various warlord use the opportunity to take over one after another. By the time a zombie cure is created group B is just a bunch of small hateful kingdoms constantly at each others throats squatting on the ruins of their civilization, and group A has been continuing to advance the outside threat providing a unifying force that helps unify and stabilize their society.

So I dont think your comment is a fair assessment of my post.

[KorvinStarmast]

And yeah, it was on paper a utopia, but underneath? Pretty darn distopian

Aren't they all?

It's just always been amusing to me how often settings will just have some city sitting somewhere, and absolutely zero infrastructure around it to actually support it in any realistic way. And yeah, this gets even more relevant when you have whole kingdoms/empires/whatever, covering an area.

This is one of the shortcomings of Game of Thrones/ASoIaF in the books as well as the TV show. The connective tissue between cities/castles is lacking.

...a group of adventurers walking down the main road from cityA to cityB inside some kingdom/territory/whatever, magically still have X level appropriate encounters per day (cause that's what the rules call for, right?). Um... How on earth do normal people, who should literally be crowding along those roadways, actually survive to transport stuff around?

That's a problem with the game forgetting its roots. The game originally had a bit of a tabula rasa for a map, and you discovered what was in each hex. The world wasn't pre-built, you went out from civilization's edge to carve out a bit of the chaos/wilderness to add to civilization's spread. But there are often vestiges of an older culture that had fallen, so some roads, ruins, etc.

We ran into the challenge of "What does an encounter along the road look like?" along the Sakbe Roads when I ran Empire of the Petal Throne, and I made sure that encounters on the roads were more social than monster.
For the monsters, you had to go to ruins or the non-developed areas (Of which there were plenty) of the wilderness.

I tend to go towards "they have magic that makes the plant life itself provide for them".

Well, Melian and Galadriel did set a certain example ...

Apply some sort of "bender" style magic and they can manipulate the natural stuff into whatever they want. Um... Things like metal armor and weapons do become a bit harder to justify though.

Trade with those who make them. Elves who live in mountains that are forested. Lots of options.

As to the last bit and the two different societies: mountain ranges can be daunting barriers. (See the Andes of South America as but one example). Mountains can also be barriers to trade and transportation.

As but one example, expansion west from the Mid Atlantic states in the Colonial America's, and early America's, east coast was a huge challenge.
Road building (corduroy roads) was hard and eventually waterways and canals provided the first transportation networks west. (As did places like the Cumberland Gap). Waterways were far more important commercial arteries in the initial move into the midwest. Roads and then railroads came later.

I tend to lean into rivers as highways but that's based on a class I took in college called Economic Geography. Water is a necessary resource, that's an embedded assumption worth keeping.

This leads me to the "high happiness" society next to "bloody miserable society" illustration.

If the mountain range is big enough and rough enough, that acts as a substantial barrier to movement and contact between societies. Further that point, it will inform dialect development as various areas have small amounts of contact with one another over the years. Again, the FR is an egregious case of importing the anachronism of 20th century living on a pseudo medieval setting.

Keeping the roads in good repair is the kind of thing taxes (and for that matter forced labor) at the macro level (empires, kingdoms) invest in (see the Roman model as one fine example). With most D&D being "after the empire fell" as a base presumption (and for sure 4e) the more apt setting for a D&D world is a Dark Ages feudal period, before the Renaissance.

This isn't a digression, this is a world building point that I see far to often missed. (Worlds without Number does a decent job of capturing this).

[Satinavian]

Honestly, i don't think it is that much of an issue in most of the more recent official fantasy RPG settings. Cities usually have settled surroundings, extensive road networks are not only deacribes but tend to actually connect different trade regions and commercial centers. Food production is described and plenty enough. Wilderness areas are sparsely settled. Really dangerous monsters are either rare or remote.
Single GM homebrew settings are often way worse.

As for D&D in particular : It is a game that classically did not care much for worldbuilding because it assumed that the DM would do their own thing. And most of the official ones read like the afterthought they actually were. Some esceptions exist, but all of those are not standard D&D. And what is worse are several books full of monsters that would actually impact settings a lot if they existed but are treated as optional background element everywhere.

But there is more than D&D.

As for ASoIaF, well, it is known that the author is really bad with numbers. While he certainly knows the importance of logistics and commerce etc, he is just not very good at making them work in his fictional world.

[KorvinStarmast]

As for ASoIaF, well, it is known that the author is really bad with numbers. While he certainly knows the importance of logistics and commerce etc, he is just not very good at making them work in his fictional world.

FWIW:
1. Monsters of certain kinds, like an ancient dragon, will dominate a region and it won't be near a city in most cases. I give adult dragons about a 50 mile radius around their lair, and an ancient dragon about an 80 to 100 mile radius around their lair. (But it could be larger depending on whether or not their cult is large, medium, or small in number). You could argue that the radius would be larger. Dragons in particular are apex predators and very intelligent: they 'll treat their region as their own private hunting preserve, at the least, and poachers will become an hors d'ouvre.
- A variety of other major monsters have similar "regions" that are something like "The Desolation of Smaug" from Tolkien's The Hobbit.

2. Martin and his numbers: yeah, he stinks at that. In his defense, though, I think he was leaning into the kind of numbers in battles from the War of the Roses (which inspired the work in the first place).
For example, at the battle of Towton tens of thousands of troops were involved. (Granted that was one of the largest battles).

3. For a better approximation of gritty battles, Bernard Cornwell has battles with well less than a thousand per side as the standard fight in his Arthurian based (dark ages, after Rome, before Alfred) trilogy (The Winter King, Enemy of God, Excalibur) with Badon Hill being one of the few battle scenes with over a thousand on a side.
That sized battle, is IMO almost doable in D&D 5e but you need to already have some wargaming experience to fit that into a D&D game.
There are other games which handle this better.

[GloatingSwine]

Dwarves too I feel. What do they eat, living underground? Hill farms are a thing, so maybe that works, but mountains? No way. Stray mountain goats will only get you so far, and you can forget the alcohol.

The answer is not to make them live underground in the classical Moria fashion, but make them Hardcore Hobbits.

They carve their cities in tiered galleries out of the mountainsides, so their buildings are still burrowed into the rock, the material they remove is used for their fortifications, and they use the valleys and foothills for farming and hunting.

2. Martin and his numbers: yeah, he stinks at that. In his defense, though, I think he was leaning into the kind of numbers in battles from the War of the Roses (which inspired the work in the first place).
For example, at the battle of Towton tens of thousands of troops were involved. (Granted that was one of the largest battles).

Yeah, the problem is that he transposed those into a setting with much much vaster distances and didn't really think about how that might affect matters. Westeros is the size of South America, that means that moving large armies about it is very very different to moving them around England & Wales.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by GloatingSwine
…but make them Hardcore Hobbits.

Hobbitcore, I dig it.

Originally Posted by GloatingSwine
...the material they remove is used for their fortifications, and they use the valleys and foothills for farming and hunting.

Beyond this, the material they remove can be used to create terraces on adjacent slopes for farming and aquaculture. These slopes would be too steep and rocky for ordinary plowing of the sort humans know, but dwarven stonemasons can craft terraces suited for any crops that can handle the mountain climate.



And speaking of Bernard Cornwell, his Uhtred novels give outstanding descriptions of both the tactics and the visceral experience of fighting in Saxon and Danish shieldwalls, usually involving a few dozen or a few hundred men.

.

[hamishspence]

The answer is not to make them live underground in the classical Moria fashion, but make them Hardcore Hobbits.

They carve their cities in tiered galleries out of the mountainsides, so their buildings are still burrowed into the rock, the material they remove is used for their fortifications, and they use the valleys and foothills for farming and hunting.

As I recall 4E did exactly this (as well as removing their Darkvision).

[KorvinStarmast]

The answer is not to make them live underground in the classical Moria fashion, but make them Hardcore Hobbits.

They carve their cities in tiered galleries out of the mountainsides, so their buildings are still burrowed into the rock, the material they remove is used for their fortifications, and they use the valleys and foothills for farming and hunting.

Heck yes. I have dwarfs in my original world living like that: a better version of Mesa Verde/Cliff dwellers of the American Southwest.

Yeah, the problem is that he transposed those into a setting with much much vaster distances and didn't really think about how that might affect matters. Westeros is the size of South America, that means that moving large armies about it is very, very different to moving them around England & Wales.

I could go on about some of the novels' shortcomings that I found to detract from what started out as a ripping good tale.

[gbaji]

Aren't they all?

Hah. Yeah. Clever you...

This isn't a digression, this is a world building point that I see far to often missed. (Worlds without Number does a decent job of capturing this).

Yup. Again, I don't expect detailed math being involved, but at least a decent eyeball estimate of "things that would need to exist for this to work". And yeah, this doesn't necessarily detract from my enjoyment of a typical RPG game. As long as the direct action/adventure bits are good, I don't really care how stuff is made. But if this is a setting I'm going to run or play in for any length of time? That's where I kinda want at least some thought given to this sort of stuff.

Someone mentioned the size of military's in ASoIaF. Yeah. Martin is pretty terrible about some of this stuff. Unfortunately, lots of fantasy writers are, so I can kinda give that a pass. I think most modern audiences would be amused (and a little underwhelmed) if they were to see a film of an actual typical medieval battle. They'd be like "where's the army?". There are historical accounts of massive battles with 10s of thousands of soldiers on each side, but we focus on them historically precisely because of how rare they actually were. Most battles at most involved a few hundred people on each side and I think most people would be shocked at just how small an area that actually takes up.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Someone mentioned the size of military's in ASoIaF. Yeah. Martin is pretty terrible about some of this stuff. Unfortunately, lots of fantasy writers are, so I can kinda give that a pass. I think most modern audiences would be amused (and a little underwhelmed) if they were to see a film of an actual typical medieval battle. They'd be like "where's the army?". There are historical accounts of massive battles with 10s of thousands of soldiers on each side, but we focus on them historically precisely because of how rare they actually were. Most battles at most involved a few hundred people on each side and I think most people would be shocked at just how small an area that actually takes up.

I can't say I'm very good at the rest of the issue here (my kingdoms tend to be way too big and empty for historical standards and I don't have enough farms), but this makes me feel a little better. I've always tended toward much smaller armies. A recent invasion had a battle with 200-500 horse-nomad raiders throwing themselves at ~50-100 defenders. And this was intentionally suicidal on the nomads' (leaders') part--they intended for basically total casualties on both sides (for blood magic purposes). And that was one of the larger confrontations in recent history. Mostly skirmishes numbering in the high 2 digits per side at most.

Even the "apocalyptic" Cataclysm War's final battle, between the Forces of Order and the Forces of Chaos, supposedly all gathered in one spot (minus the stragglers who didn't make it) only had a few thousand combatants on each side. Because most of the forces just couldn't get there in time--they were busy elsewhere (a continent is a darn large place) or in transit when the two main forces met.

[MonochromeTiger]

One issue with the "that army's too big to make sense" and "how can they live in that environment" points is that they are, inevitably, based on real life limitations and a fantasy or science fiction or science fantasy setting can easily give an answer that resolves them.

George "I really want to be the next Tolkien" Martin screwed up in that regard because he went for large scale on everything while trying to keep a "grim and gritty realistic fantasy setting" and promptly forgot how distances and logistics work so that months of travel get rounded down to a few days and everyone gets where they need to be for the next step of the story purely by plot convenience. That doesn't mean having massive armies on continents of that scale is impossible to do with a medieval aesthetic but it does mean the fantasy elements of a setting would need to do way more heavy lifting than he was willing to let them.

"How do Dwarves have sprawling underground Kingdoms when there's no obvious way to farm down there?" Congratulations, it's fantasy, for the same reason that Drow don't wander out of the Underdark and get instant sun burn there's an entire convenient ecosystem down there abundant with edible fungi and moss and animals that consist on those going all the way up to strange subterranean megafauna with meat that could feed a few hundred for weeks as long as it's preserved right. Or there's plentiful farmland in the neighboring countries and Dwarves are actually skilled traders putting the riches of their underground Kingdom to use through diplomacy and mercantilism to supply their people with food that their allies have in excess.

"How do armies of thousands or hundreds of thousands get to battles?" Aside from time and really good supply chains? Again, it's fantasy, for all we know your setting has some ready access to mass teleportation reserved for government and emergency (read: there's a metric ton of dragons coming or a literal army of thousands of Demons or Devils who have the luxury of just stepping out of a portal near their target) use. Maybe airships are a thing and you can cram a bunch of people into those, maybe the area they're from has gotten really good at travel along its extensive rivers and a convoy of ships can get them there in a fraction of the time, and thus a fraction of the resources needed to feed them, that they would take up marching.

Point is, it's fantasy. Something sounding impossible by the standards we had historically shouldn't be the thing that breaks immersion or interest, the author or DM not bothering to even make a reason is.

[Mechalich]

Someone mentioned the size of military's in ASoIaF. Yeah. Martin is pretty terrible about some of this stuff. Unfortunately, lots of fantasy writers are, so I can kinda give that a pass. I think most modern audiences would be amused (and a little underwhelmed) if they were to see a film of an actual typical medieval battle. They'd be like "where's the army?". There are historical accounts of massive battles with 10s of thousands of soldiers on each side, but we focus on them historically precisely because of how rare they actually were. Most battles at most involved a few hundred people on each side and I think most people would be shocked at just how small an area that actually takes up.

Well, the population and political organization of Western Europe were unusually low during the Medieval Period compared to much of the rest of the world. For example, the Battle of Crecy - a major battle in the Hundred Years' War - involved maybe 40,000 combatants in 1346. Meanwhile, just a few thousand miles to the east and a few decades later Timur was marauding around the medieval Islamic world with armies of 100,000+ and routinely massacring whole cities.

A lot of this is dependent upon agricultural base. The medieval Ottoman Empire, for example, was not much better organized, as a state, than a feudal European court, but the comparatively mild climate of the Balkans, Greece, and Anatolia allowed for more people and much larger populations, which meant larger armies. Similarly, Feudal Japan crammed huge numbers of people in narrow rice-producing coastal plains which allowed for more numerous and larger battles than found in Western Europe even as most of the country remained very wild.

So there's potentially a lot of variability, but it's important to match the military outputs to the population and political structure.

[PhoenixPhyre]

One issue with the "that army's too big to make sense" and "how can they live in that environment" points is that they are, inevitably, based on real life limitations and a fantasy or science fiction or science fantasy setting can easily give an answer that resolves them.

George "I really want to be the next Tolkien" Martin screwed up in that regard because he went for large scale on everything while trying to keep a "grim and gritty realistic fantasy setting" and promptly forgot how distances and logistics work so that months of travel get rounded down to a few days and everyone gets where they need to be for the next step of the story purely by plot convenience. That doesn't mean having massive armies on continents of that scale is impossible to do with a medieval aesthetic but it does mean the fantasy elements of a setting would need to do way more heavy lifting than he was willing to let them.

"How do Dwarves have sprawling underground Kingdoms when there's no obvious way to farm down there?" Congratulations, it's fantasy, for the same reason that Drow don't wander out of the Underdark and get instant sun burn there's an entire convenient ecosystem down there abundant with edible fungi and moss and animals that consist on those going all the way up to strange subterranean megafauna with meat that could feed a few hundred for weeks as long as it's preserved right. Or there's plentiful farmland in the neighboring countries and Dwarves are actually skilled traders putting the riches of their underground Kingdom to use through diplomacy and mercantilism to supply their people with food that their allies have in excess.

"How do armies of thousands or hundreds of thousands get to battles?" Aside from time and really good supply chains? Again, it's fantasy, for all we know your setting has some ready access to mass teleportation reserved for government and emergency (read: there's a metric ton of dragons coming or a literal army of thousands of Demons or Devils who have the luxury of just stepping out of a portal near their target) use. Maybe airships are a thing and you can cram a bunch of people into those, maybe the area they're from has gotten really good at travel along its extensive rivers and a convoy of ships can get them there in a fraction of the time, and thus a fraction of the resources needed to feed them, that they would take up marching.

Point is, it's fantasy. Something sounding impossible by the standards we had historically shouldn't be the thing that breaks immersion or interest, the author or DM not bothering to even make a reason is.

I don't necessarily need the DM to say the reasons (I think that it often makes the setting/game/fiction quite turgid and bloated if you feel like you need to explicitly explain every deviation from "Holy Reality" (scare quotes intentional (and so are the nested parentheses )). But they should at least have a reason/explanation.

My dwarves, for instance, are much more like what you said--in my setting plants don't photosynthesize. They need energy inputs, sure. But since it's all elemental anyway, sources such as concentrations of elemental fire or other such energies can feed underground life in new and fantastic ways. Of course, underground life is harsher (resource-wise) than surface life--such underground life is sparser and more monotonous. Lots of lichens and other fungi, relatively restricted diets. So you get a bifurcation in "subtypes"--the deep mountain dwarves (those who rarely see the sun) are smaller and thinner, with fewer "unnecessary" expenditures of energy. And their diet is quite bland and monotonous. And not particularly tasty, as far as surfacers go. The surfacers are farmers, traders, etc. And while their Holds are often built inside mountains...they're built right at the edge so they have access to farm lands in valleys.

But the armies are kept small for a lot of reasons. In largest part because the setting is currently mostly at peace (at least in the area I'm mostly writing in). There are issues, but they're handled by adventuring squads, not armies. Most nations either don't have a standing army or "feudal levy" (relying on militias locally where necessary) or only a very small one. There's really only one nation that keeps a larger army on hand, and that's a relic of the past[1] that they're struggling to figure out what to do with.

[1] A time when that nation spent every winter under existential threat down a particular mountain pass for most of a century and so mobilized basically their entire economy and culture around the army. But that ended ~40 years ago...and now the military-industrial complex is having to justify its own existence.

[gbaji]

Sure. Fantasy elements or tech can totally change things. And again, while I'm not going to get too bogged down in detail, at least having an eyeball "they use <some magic/tech/whatever> to do that, should be a minimum here. So, for example, if you're assuming that your D&D game, has an army that travels long distances because they have clerics that use create food and water to feed the troops, you should at least have some approximate idea of how many clerics of which level(s) are required for the number of troops they're feeding. If you're transporting folks via magic, then some ballbark figure of how many people you can teleport at what rate of speed, via which sorts of spells (based on what exists in the game), is something you should take into account.

Even those special elements have rules, and we should at least look at them to see what large scale effect they may have. Now, of course, there are some examples of spells that just "break" settings if you apply them straight though. So that's maybe something you should consider fixing or at least having some explanation for how things don't break (D&D is just rife with this, with various spells that create things). Eh. Or you just let the setting break in some ways (which can be interesting as well).