The more I read ACKS and realize how much this game is like an "OSR Runequest," and the more I learn about the Middle Ages, and the more I contrast this with the Renaissance and the game Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the more I realize what a freaking mess D&D made of the fantasy genre.
Granted, Runequest is "Bronze Age," and ACKS is "Middle Ages," but the parallels are there. What are we used to? Renaissance fantasy. What are we getting? The age before, without as many world-changing technologies, without the modern tropes, and with a lower, more primal technology level and set of survival-oriented concepts and kingdom-building stories. So much of B/X thrusts you into already divided-up and settled Europe-like worlds, and you feel nothing is left to explore - with only politics and "threats to civilization" as your driving campaign forces.
In the Middle Ages, you are in the ruins of empires, discovering and settling the land.
The D&D fantasy genre isn't in the fantasy genre anymore; it is "science fantasy," with magic replacing science. This is as bad as people thinking all science fiction is Star Wars or every space adventure should be Guardians of the Galaxy. By default, the D&D genre is Renaissance-flavored with "magic Star Wars technology" thrown on top. Everyone is a Jedi Knight/caster class.
100% Recycled Fantasy Content
And we could be in a better place. Fantasy feels stuck in D&D, and while this started with Tolkien and the Appendix N greats, the genre now is just recycled tropes and stereotypes done over and over. We have always stayed in the typical D&D fantasy style, and we can always escape its generic gravitational pull. Today's D&D fantasy style is like when people complained about "corporate rock" in the 1980s; it sounds like it was made for radio play, please, no guitar solos, and keep it ear-friendly and non-controversial. And corporate rock really had no artistic or musical merit.
It sold well, and it sounded good, but what was it?
And these days, we are stuck in this horrible generic "corporate fantasy," and you know it when you see it. It whitewashes any injustice or conflict inherent in the genre, ignores history, and the world is essentially a modern world dressed up in Renfaire clothing full of cosplayers and cartoonish tropes.
It does not even feel like fantasy; it feels like a "dress-up action battle game" where you are meant to win, and the same generic tropes enable these almost "Power Rangers" style fights where violence as conflict resolution is encouraged. The consequences of using violence are ignored. Using magic to kill enemies and blades to hack living things apart is "okay" and "fun."
And these tropes and almost ignorant simplification of the world become a part of the modern-fantasy genre, and you see this recycled again and again. To escape it, we either need to do new and different things or go back to the past and rebuild the genre entirely.
The Renaissance
You look at the actual Renaissance, and you have the origins of:
- Colonialism
- Slavery
- The Killing of Native Populations
- The Modern Banking System
- The Wealth Gap
- The Founding of Nations
- The Rise of Science and Modern Knowledge
- International Trade
- Modern Religion
- Climate Change
- Environmental Destruction
- Wars as Commerce
- Gunpowder, Coal, and Oil and the Printing Press
- And the beginning of the Industrial Revolution
Yes, there is a reason I prefer Lamentations as my Renaissance game and not D&D because a horror game better fits the era and all the destruction and damage that we are still living with to this day. Renaissance societies were lavish and wealthy because they went around the world killing native populations, enslaving them, and stealing their resources. The characters in a Lamentations game are as guilty as characters in a horror movie and meet the same ends due to their sins and greed.
But my D&D world is a fantasy world, not that! In the real world, the empires used gunpowder and science to subjugate native populations; in D&D, it would just be magic. Look at the magic in a D&D game and figure out how today's corporations and governments would use it. Yeah. It isn't good. it almost is a Robocop-level of corporate greed bad.
D&D characters with their ultimate powers thematically feel like the "have it all" western society.
They have that "savior complex" built in. Granted, the hero has the same thematic arc - but a hero typically has to fight against the odds, going from zero to hero. D&D characters start as entitled and get more entitled. And they reach the ultimate epic levels of entitlement, where they are too entitled to even face death. D&D characters feel too invulnerable, especially at higher levels, and that is a problem for basic storytelling.
They are all Superman.
The Middle Ages
And a setting change to the Middle Ages would not help since that would not fix broken rules. Also, the Middle Ages were not so squeaky clean either, and you have:
- The Fall of the Roman Empire
- Nation Building
- The Crusades
- The Silk Road
- Vikings and Marauders
- Mongol Invasions
- The Dominance of Religion over Society
- Religious Wars
- Inquisitions and Religious Persecution
- The Rise of the World's Major Religions
- Peasantry and Serfdom
- Religion's Persecution of Science
- The Destruction of the Old Faiths and Gods
- And, of course, let's end it all with the Black Death
If the Renaissance is Star Wars, the Middle Ages is "hard sci-fi" Traveller. And there is a clear difference between the genres and times. My lists are a bit loose and have a lot of overlap, but in gaming, there are some things more Renaissance than Middle Ages, and I see the concepts and themes mixed all the time. And it drives me crazy.
I like the Middle Ages as a fantasy setting. It strips away a lot of the more-modern themes in a Renaissance game, and brings the entire Conan-like "ancient culture" decline into sharp focus, and pits that "old ways of magic" against the "new religion" and of course, the seeds of state power. It gives us the typical "destroyed empire" to explore and rebuild in, and many lost cities and places of ancient power. The fight between the old ways and the new is happening now, and by the Renaissance, that battle has been already won and the fleets of empires are out sailing the world and killing off native populations. The Middle Ages does have a very 4X "survival horror" feeling.
The modern D&D genre is this strange recycled reality built off Tolkien. Then it goes through a series of game world transformations - Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, the D&D 4 and 5 planar cosmology, and pop culture rebranding. It gets mixed with the MCU and anime, and it just is this own reused and regurgitated set of assumptions and standards that feels "D&D" to us. It is very much like recycled cardboard, endlessly derivative of itself and repetitive. Even the art style feels "D&D" after a while, and you can tell immediately.
The easiest way to resolve it is by saying D&D is not in the fantasy genre anymore.
D&D is its own genre, like Star Wars is its own genre (and not sci-fi).
While D&D is Renaissance-flavored, it isn't really that time. This is science-fantasy. They play on the Renaissance tropes, though, sometimes to their detriment (Spelljammer's art comes to mind). Instead of hiring and cultivating visionaries, they rely on the past 50 years of fantasy gaming as their genre. They endlessly recycle, borrow, appropriate, and copy, and I feel they suffer for it.
Just like Hollywood.
Not Real, Recycled
I have a bit of D&D fatigue, like Star Wars fatigue. I go back to my real history books, and I read, and I get this feeling the recycled modern D&D genre is just too corporate and clean. It feels sterile. It feels overly safe. There does not feel like there is any conflict built into the setting, nor is there much danger. Play a high-level campaign, and you realize that all the danger is manufactured, death is impossible, and failure is infrequent. The entire game feels like a video game in "easy mode," you are meant to win, and you get the option to skip challenging sections. And you can jet off to other planes and live in utopias if you want.
I crave the real these days.
I crave enlightenment, not entertainment that repeats ideas from the last 50 years only, like some sort of Hollywood nostalgia time loop. I feel stuck in the D&D genre, and I can't break free. Even now, the way I think about fantasy feels stuck wearing the D&D rose-colored glasses. To get away from this, I need to play OSR games.
I need my history.
I need lower fantasy and OSR games that give me that "real" feeling. I don't want magic to be the answer to every problem (another D&D trope) and for every class to have magic. If most of the classes are casters, magic isn't special anymore. One D&D is making more classes full casters - thinking magic will fix a broken class design. It won't. You will have D&D 4 all over again. Everyone is a caster, and nothing feels special.
Magic is Not Technology
We also have the pitfall of "magic is technology" in the modern fantasy genre, and you end up giving it to every class thinking technology solves all your problems. It can create more problems than it fixes.
And thematically, magic in history was never technology. It was always heritage and culture, peoples' beliefs, and that faith created temples, great cities, and pyramids. To say magic is a metaphor for technology is to colonize magic with the Western ideal. It is not that, nor was it ever. Magic as technology was never a thing, and I bet it was made up by 1950s advertisers trying to sell toasters.
But most of all, the nature of magic created the universal set of myths we all live with - and we are born with. Magic is metaphorically myth, and myth is rooted in culture and heritage.
Why does that ship sail through the stars, and the city float on an island in space? Is it because you need a cheap science-fantasy excuse to make that happen? Or are those concepts part of a culture and part of their beliefs and ancestry? If you say it is the former, you take away the latter.
If magic is an essential part of a culture, you give power to the people of the world and cultures.
If magic is technology, you worship and cede power to the corporation.
Magic has no resource cost! You can regain spells and cast them as much as you want! Magic is progress! And you replace magic with the climate-destructive consumer culture, and you begin to see why modern fantasy is so "corporate-friendly" with these concepts. You make people ignore the costs of progress and power, and you can continue to siphon money from them by playing on that belief that all progress comes without a cost.
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