Product upload 6: Mistakes

Section 1: What not to do

Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy game. The common campaign settings of Dungeons and Dragons imagine a universe with more or less nonfunctional laws of physics (or at least, very complicated and illogical ones), implausible biology, and sometimes a flat Earth. The 3.5 weapon, “Longsword”, is a 1-handed weapon more akin to an Arming Sword than a true Longsword, which the game renders by the alternate name, “Bastard Sword”. Tridents and nets a la Gladiatorial equipment are available alongside Gurisarmes, Zweihanders (rendered as “Greatsword”), Rapiers, Scimitars, and Falchions. It includes suits of armor made from Dragon Scales, Mithral, and Adamantine. It features spellcasters who, by virtue of knowing more, can survive an arrow to the throat (Longbow critical max damage = 24, well below the health of any character with 5-10 levels). For that matter, it includes spellcasters.

What a DM should always remember in the creation of a game: Dungeons and Dragons is not based on reality in an accurate or precise fashion. If you are trying to create a game to be a truly historically accurate recreation of Bronze Age life, you should not use D&D as your source. Rules systems such as d20 Modern and d20 historical exist precisely to make paper and pencil reliving of real events happen. If you want your characters to ride by Ramses against the Hittites at Kadesh, D&D is probably not the rules system you want to use. If you desire a fantasy experience, you can try describing the historical battle in a hallucination, prophecy, or dream that relates to your D&D campaign. However, for your characters to actually move in a fully accurate Bronze Age is impossible in D&D. For that matter, it's probably impossible, period – there is simply too much that has been forgotten irrevocably to safely say 'daily life in Mycenae was like this' and create new classes and completely remodel the D&D world. Some specific cultures and roles are well known-about, but constricting your campaign to, say, the Hittite Empire and the New Kingdom of Egypt will probably become stifling and certainly won't give a complete picture of the “Bronze Age”.

Even if a DM had the material and fortitude to create a D&D setting with purely historical roots, why would one want to? The Bronze Age was a complicated, confusing period about which many people know nothing and whose main cultural legacies are not necessarily precise pictures of the Bronze Age. The Iliad and related poems were written by Homer at the end of the Greek Dark Age, 500 years after the supposed war at Troy, during which there was no writing and stories would have been passed down (and revised) orally. Similar processes doubtless occur in the even older Epic of Gilgamesh, and the enormous controversy over the historicity and dating of the Old Testament (especially Exodus, which would have occurred at some point in the Late Bronze) mean that the predominant images of the Bronze Age that players will carry into the campaign will be different from the fact. When I conceived of my project, I envisioned educating people about the real story, replacing “the Greeks” with “a hierarchical confederation of Mycenaean city states whose ancestors invaded Greece ca. 2000 BCE”. Dungeons and Dragons is a medium dependent on the imagination of the player, and to an extent therefore about the player's cultural preconceptions. The game can – if well-crafted – be an excellent medium to change or challenge such preconceptions, but radically redesigning the rules and the underlying (High Fantasy) assumptions behind the game is unnecessary when non-fantasy rulesets are can be modified more easily.




A Bronze Age D&D campaign should then not shun mythology, but nor should it avoid the history of the Bronze Age. Few myths give a good idea of what weapons were available in what numbers, as modern research has done; or the true diversity of political ideas, ethnic groups, and economic models in existence during this period. Nor do myths provide a complete vision of what life among the commoners was like, or the boring accounts of bookeeping, accounting, and legal work provided in bulk in Hittite, Mycenaenan, and Minoan tablets. It is up to the creator of a campaign setting to determine the specifics of the setting: how prominently will myth and history play against one another and against the default assumptions of the D&D game? From which cultural areas will the campaign be mostly based?

To describe my point above, I will provide brief descriptions of possible campaigns:
A “Greco” world based heavily on the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeniad, and historical information about Mycenaean pottery and weaponry. Classes are reworked, along with feats, spells, skill lists, and existing equipment
A “Greco” world based primarily on other Greek legends, and relying more heavily on the normal D&D rules for spells and filling in the cracks. Weapons are taken from history but the campaign isn't overly fussy about categorizing things like “This is a Type A Mycenaen sword, not a Type C Minoan from Knossos, and therefore has a -1 penatly to.....”
An “Aegean” world based on real history between the Myceaneans, their colonies on Anatolia, and the Anatolians themselves. It could feature real-world geography, inclusion of the Hittite Empire, and complicated diplomatic, linguistic, and legal minefields for players to navigate. Such a world would borrow heavily on History and might only use magic in small, “special” quantities, or to fill in the gaps where cultural information is lacking

The same exact cultural theme – Mycenaean and Minoan Aegean culture – create in the space of 5 minutes 3 radically different campaign adaptations. This doesn't take into account larger settings featuring more themes; or hotspots like Assyria and Canaan, where constant war, shifting borders, and high population density give rise to endless possibilities for a campaign. For some groups, such as the Sea People that unmade the Mycenaeans, Hittites, and indirectly Egyptians, history remains very mysterious and the things about them – both in the known and unknown – provoke endless possible scenarios pitting the party with or against them. For this reason, the options available to a DM wanting to create a campaign are more or less limitless but require choice and fiat. In creating a world, a balance must be struck or decided on at the beginning to establish the role of the core rules, myths, and history in creating the campaign. The campaign will not be a perfect image of the greater Bronze Age, nor will it cover every tribe and subculture, nor will it cover every myth and tale (try getting Gilgamesh and the Iliad together, I dare you) and it shouldn't. Your players may lose some insight into the breadth of Bronze Age history but you will keep your sanity and your players will ultimately learn more by covering less breadth and more depth. If the idea catches, you can try out other Bronze Age campaigns and eventually weave them together. Even then, however: this will be D&D Bronze Age, not a curriculum.

In short, the main hurdle that will make or break a campaign before ever it is played is whether the creator knows not to overreach. Ambition is important, but best when it can be fulfilled.