Thirty years of D&D and look where it's got me!

I first played AD&D first edition in the early eighties using the original Gary Gygax Greyhawk Campaign. In those days that was all there was as this was before Forgotten Realms and the campaigns that came later. You either ran Greyhawk or you made up your own setting. I never got around to using the later developments such as Greyhawk Wars or whatever they were.

As a player I played in other campaigns such as Ravenloft, Oriental Adventures and Dark Sun but with an established campaign, with multiple player characters embedded in the world, I never felt the need to branch out.

Later, when Third Edition came out, I fancied running a proper feudal campaign with orders of knights, lords, earls and dukes, etc., with a king at the top of the pile. However, feudal settings are incredibly complex to invent as you have to create all the various dynasties, family structures, political wranglings and power struggles. You've only got to look at Game of Thrones to see how much detail you have to create to build a world such as this. However, I'm from England so there was a simple (or at least simpler) possibility.

adventures

So about ten years ago I started to create a campaign world based on England in the late 14th Century. Choosing the period is quite important as the D&D books include elements that range from the time of the Norman Conquest through to the Elizabethan period and even beyond. Many published adventures will describe situations like a treasure hidden in a cushioned sofa that simply wouldn't have existed in medieval times. Just look at the clothes in Peter Jackson's Hobbiton and you can see that they are clearly not living in the medieval period. Of course D&D is a fantasy but if you are going to base a campaign in a historical setting then you might as well stick to what was available at the time.

The late 14th Century is about right for a number of reasons. D&D has always included plate armour, variously plate mail, full plate or other variations. D&D without the classic knight in shining armour, dressed from head to toe in metal, just wouldn't be D&D. Also a feudal campaign with the chance that a character can become a member of an ancient order of knights sort of requires plate armour. Orders existed before this time but armoured cavalry is part of the fantasy genre. Plus I couldn't run a game without giving the players the chance to say, "Clank, clank, I'm a tank." So that puts the period at least in the mid 14th Century. There were some great historical figures such as The Black Prince or later Sir Harry Hotspur that just fit this perfectly. A nice touch that I discovered was that, while plate armour was available in the late 14th Century, it was only manufactured in Germany and Italy. Having this sort of heavy armour available but extremely difficult to get hold of makes it all the more interesting.

cannons

Picking a period later than the 14th Century begins to get into the development of guns and cannons. Certainly by the time Henry VIII there are cannons and that simply don't exist in the Players Handbook. (There were some primitive guns at the time of the Battle of Crécy but they were as likely to kill the user as they were the target, not dissimilar to the mention of guns in the DM's Guide.) So the books seem to suggest the second half of the 14th Century.

In 1348 the Black Death swept across Europe and this had some dramatic influences on the way society operated. With the death of large swathes of the population labour became scarce and the restrictions of movement of labour began to break down. This was, in fact, the beginning of the end of the feudal system. This sort of solves a problem for the DM because having a truly feudal society would place restrictions on the movements of the player characters that would cramp the adventuring spirit. In a feudal world peasants are, largely, tied to the estate of their lord. This makes adventuring problematic unless the adventures are right on the doorstep. However, with the drop in population land owners had to begin to allow people to move about a bit more and this freedom works better with a D&D campaign.

enemies

The other thing that makes a feudal campaign interesting is the politics. Of course politics is just the background, while the bread and butter of the game is chasing orcs and the like. However, when your lord is a member of an alliance that is the enemy of the lord in the next county then the whole background comes alive. With politics as it was in that period you might want to consider who you ally yourself with as alliances were constantly shifting and friends could so easily become enemies. The late 14th century was also the time of the Hundred Years War, a time of intermittent campaigns between England and France, so there's plenty of scope for word of battles overseas and people returning with plunder which might include spare sets of plate armour. It's also worth remembering that at this time the nobles were still able to fight and lead an army so the chances are that if you met a Duke or Earl he would be a proper warrior, possibly using one of the NPC classes from the DMG or a mixture of NPC and Character classes. Much later in history you couldn't imagine the King or one of his nobles riding into battle, which probably ceased with the death of Richard III. By then they were blowing each other away with cannons as well as archers and mounted combat.

So in the end I plumped for 1390 as the starting point. Royal politics was particularly interesting at the time. The feudal system was still in place while not being too restrictive and the Hundred Years War was in a lull but could kick off again at any time. Plus the age of chivalry was just about still alive although it was beginning to be seen as a golden age that was passing away.

novels

At the time of writing this I'm still developing the campaign but I have ambitions to, one day, publish it as a series of PDFs on this blog, but at the moment it contains too many holes and my priorities are to work on my Hidden Masters novels. However, one day you might see the release of the campaign if I ever get the time to finish it, but there is a lot of work to do.

Of course there are many other considerations in such a campaign, such as how to integrate the races, magic and not least the gods, plus where do you locate the wilderness areas and the like. However, I'm using medieval England merely as a starting point from which you have to make some pretty radical decisions but I'll describe that in future blogs or the eventual release of the campaign as a whole.

In the mean time I'll probably post some rule expansions that I've used over the years as and when I get round to tidying them up suitable for publication.