Everywhere is England
I was recently chatting with some others in a TTRPG community about some people's hesitation to play in settings with established lore, and I pointed out that I feel a similar hesitation keeps people from playing in games set in unfamiliar times and places, or even games which utilize elements from cultures they are unfamiliar with. Honestly, I think my comment was not entirely on-topic, but it did get me thinking that this is probably actually a bad thing, even though I don't think people are doing it maliciously. I think many well-intentioned TTRP gamers avoid settings of which they have little knowledge because they're afraid of "getting things wrong." When this is something like not wanting to play the One Ring RPG because you've never read the Silmarillion, it's one thing. But I think this same impulse prevents people from playing in historical games or settings based on non-European folklore.
This isn't to say that setting your next D&D game in ancient China is some kind of activism, because it isn't, nor are you a bad person if you've only ever played games set in Generic Medieval European Fantasyland™. All I'm saying is that there is a lot of interesting play experiences that people are unwittingly preventing themselves from accessing. Instead, the overwhelming majority of material created for fantasy roleplaying games is set in an analog for England (or if you're feeling spicy, Germany) with elements from English, Celtic, and Western European folklore. This is a huge shame! There's lots of interesting stuff in these kinds of folklore, no doubt, but this means that your games are effectively set in a small sliver of the world during a small sliver of history.
Why do people do this? It's interesting because a lot of the media D&D is based on is not strictly inspired by Western European myth and folklore,1 and even early editions of the game did not necessarily push players and DMs toward medieval European settings. I've been listening to the excellent Monster Man podcast, and it's kind of astonishing how many entries in the Monster Manual are either prehistoric creatures or beasts from Africa, India, or the Americas, creatures which you'd never expect Frodo or a knight of the Round Table to encounter. I'm not certain why this is exactly, but I think the monopoly that Tolkien and his imitators had over fantasy fiction of the '80s and onwards promoted this hegemony of Western European folklore, perhaps aided by the (honestly kind of disastrous) attempts to represent non-western cultures in the Oriental Adventures and Al-Qadim setting books for AD&D.
On the other hand, what do we stand to gain? Why put in the effort when a lot of gaming material assumes a generic, England-y setting? As I alluded to before, I think people rob themselves of a good time when they take for granted the idea that they can't run a game in a time or place they wouldn't immediately have thought of. I had this revelation for my upcoming Veins of the Earth game. I had already committed to setting it in the modern day rather than in a medieval day setting, but I thought the US in the 2020s was kind of overdone, and after thinking about it for a little while, I decided to set it in Thailand in the 1980s. I think Thailand popped into my head cause I had been reading a book which mentioned Thailand a couple times, but even though I know very little about Thailand, the possibilities became much more exciting.
A lot of this has to do with presumed expectations. A party of adventurers in a medieval, vaguely English, fantasy world will have one set of expectations. A group of government agents in the United States in the 2020s will have quite another. And a group of underpaid, underinformed independent contractors in Thailand in the 1980s will have a completely different way of relating to the things that they encounter. My next thought was how could I tailor things, even in a small way, to this new setting? Doing my cursory skim of Thailand's Wikipedia page, I saw something about guerrilla warfare by Thai Communists, and almost fully formed, the concept of a band of guerrillas getting trapped in the Veins popped into my head as a faction for the PCs to interact with. I honestly think it would have been harder to come up with good ideas in a more conventional setting, since the ideas I came up with occurred to me precisely because I was unfamiliar with the setting and didn't have as many preconceptions or cliches blocking my creativity.
I created this Perchance generator which will give a random combination of time and place. Here's some examples of placing well-known OSR modules in random times and places2:
- Tomb of the Serpent Kings in 7th Century Brazil
- Winter's Daughter in 1920s Southeastern US
- The Hole in the Oak in 1770s North Africa
- The Caverns of Thracia in 15th Century Canada
- Deep Carbon Observatory in 1920s East Africa
- Castle Amber in mid-1600s Eastern Europe
All of these seem like fascinating and exciting concepts for an adventure to me: my favorite is the first one, which is literally the first pairing I generated. What if you don't know anything about these places and times? I would argue that that's basically fine. To be quite honest, the average person (even the average D&D player) knows next to nothing about medieval Europe. Even setting aside all of the fantastical elements that show up in fantasy games, the Generic Medieval European Fantasyland™ is effectively a pastiche of medieval Europe anachronistically combining disparate aspects of several different times and places. As one example, most D&D games include plate armor but not firearms, despite the fact that European armies were utilizing firearms for centuries before plate armor was invented.
This is not to say you shouldn't try to learn more: you should! That's kind of the point of this whole exercise. Anything you can learn, whether it's from a Wikipedia article or a documentary or a book about that place and time, will help you prepare and give you top-tier fodder for your creativity. On the other hand, you shouldn't let your lack of knowledge stop you from stepping out of your comfort zone. Just as you don't need a PhD in Medieval EuropeanSstudies to run a game set in the Forgotten Realms, you should allow yourself to run a game set in ancient India or pre-Columbian America with only a modicum of research. As long as you and the people you play with are aware that you're not representing actual historical facts,3 it doesn't really matter if things aren't 100% factually correct, and it lets you explore a space in gaming that I think is sorely underutilized. You can even do the classic thing of saying "This isn't meant to be a 1-to-1 representation of 7th century Brazil, it's a fantasy world inspired by ancient Brazil."
This is certainly something I will do more of in games I run, and I would love to play in more games like this, either set in or heavily inspired by settings we don't see as much in genre fiction.
I'm thinking specifically here of the Conan stories, some of which I have read, but I am not an expert. If I recall correctly, many of the Conan stories are set in the geographical area that will become Western Europe, but the setting itself bears literal resemblance to medieval Europe. I think Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road effectively demonstrates that Howard's Hyborian Age resembles 11th century West and Central Asia much more than it does 14th century France, say.↩
I did curate this list slightly, but these are my favorite 6 of about 15 pairings I generated.↩
And obviously not leaning on stereotypes or presenting other cultures insensitively, etc. I think this is a big reason people might avoid attempting to depict cultures unfamiliar to them, but I personally feel that it's better to have potentially flawed but well-intentioned representations rather than no representations at all. I suspect using safety tools like the X-card will also help this.↩