When I first started playing D&D, the first thing I did was homebrew a world. I don't know how most people do it, but I feel like creating your own setting is one of the big joys of being a DM.
My setting is called Sarkon, and I've been running a campaign set there for a few years. It's not the first fantasy setting I've come up with, and in a lot of ways I built it specifically to work for D&D - my settings tend not to have elves and dwarves and such, but I figured that we should embrace that in this case.
Despite the medievalism that comes with D&D, I've created a sort of "schizo tech" setting in which a long-lost civilization's relics are sparking a condensed industrial revolution, so you have knights in armor fighting robots. While I get that a Game of Thrones-style commitment to medieval technology and social concepts can make for a compelling setting, I've never really felt that this approach is actually better than an alternate take on things. Given that Stephen King's Dark Tower series is one of my biggest influences, this shouldn't come as a surprise. (If you're not familiar with the series, it's about a post-apocalyptic Gunslinger - a cross between a knight errant and, well, a wild west gunslinger - on a surreal quest to save the multiverse that involves time travel and universe-hopping, and most of the other major characters are from a version of our world. His world, which may or may not be a far-future version of our own - though I lean toward not - saw the downfall of a technologically advanced civilization that then led to a medieval knightly culture that arose after, which eventually evolved into something more like the wild west, until that civilization also fell, and the protagonist is the last Gunslinger from that time.)
But it occurs to me that maybe I wasn't even going far enough.
I've become more comfortable homebrewing things like playable races and monsters lately. I haven't really done much in the way of homebrewing rules systems, but I do like to play a lot in tone and setting.
Personally, I've always been fascinated by mid-20th century American culture. I guess it makes sense given that that's the era that my parents grew up in. My first memory of the Cold War was its ending (I was in kindergarten and remember seeing a newspaper on the kitchen table talking about the Soviet Union collasping.) But there's something I've always found really compelling about that period - one in which American simultaneously felt supremely confident after emerging from World War II relatively unscathed but also incredibly paranoid due to the fears of Soviet influence and infiltration.
This was also the era of Roswell, and one in which the public imagination began to run wild. Sure, you had Lovecraft decades earlier, but the 50s really saw science fiction become a cultural phenomenon - a perfect genre for exploring the fears and hopes of that period.
Given that it's an era more closely associated with Sci Fi, you could make the argument that there are better systems than D&D for an RPG set in that era.
But I'm interested in finding the intersection between the two tones. To be clear, what I am not doing is just recreating America in the 1950s. My intention is to create an original setting that looks like that period.
And while Sci Fi will certainly be an influence, I aim for it to truly be a fantasy setting. Magic exists, gods influence things in undeniable ways, and there are supernatural monsters both major and minor that one encounters.
So where do we start?
1. I think the defining characteristics of the mid-20th century are the following:
2. There has just been the end to a major war.
3. There is now an uneasy geopolitical state where spycraft and technology are how things are being fought more than armies and weapons.
4. There is a state of mistrust and paranoia.
5. There is a strong desire for conformity, largely due to the previous two characteristics.
6. Major social changes are coming to the setting, and there's a backlash to them.
7. The public imagination and culture is changing far faster than previously.
Now, obviously, there's some overlap here between this concept and that of Eberron. Eberron has its catastrophic Last War, but unlike WWII, which had a profoundly definitive ending, the Last War ended without any real victors or any real resolution. Still, it works perfectly as a set-up for the Noir-ish detective stories where you can play a traumatized veteran like a lot of classic Film Noir.
And that's obviously a popular genre that it makes sense to interact with. But I think I'm more interested in the kind of conspiracy-thriller, alien cover-up stories that grew out of that period.
Admittedly, the real golden age of the conspiracy thriller was the 1970s, thanks to Watergate (one wonders if we're going to see a resurgence of them these days) but mid-20th century doesn't just have to be the 40s and 50s.
As a bit of a tangent (not to get into the weeds here,) I do think an important step here is to create a distinction between demons and aberrations. Given D&D's distinction between Devils and Demons (and other fiends like Yugoloths,) the place for its Lovecraftian monsters is always a little tricky - despite the fact that two of its most iconic monsters, the Beholder and the Mind Flayer, are aberrations. But when you have things like Demogorgon's sigil working basically like Hastur's does from the Lovecraft mythos, or when you have Tharizdun, the most Yogg-Sothoth/Azathoth-like entity in the game also tied to the Abyss, it makes things a little less clear. Indeed, just having Devils to play the more classic "horns, wings, tail, hooves" role already makes demons into something a little more Lovecraftian and alien than other fantasy settings might do with them. I'd lean strongly on aberrations playing the role of flying-saucer aliens (which, if you actually read Lovecraft stories, is actually how a lot of his monsters come off. Also, there's lots of racism, which is unfortunate.)
So, the seven characteristics I listed above are pretty key to giving it that 20th century feel. I think the other important factor would be technological and cultural. Democracies, nation-states, cars, telephones, radios, television, and neon lights are all things that I think would be very important to giving the setting real signifiers that it's not your classic knights-in-castles kind of setting.
But once you've done that, you then need to consider how those fantasy elements are going to work in. Because just from the mechanics of the game, you've got people fighting with swords, wearing armor, and casting spells.
On the matter of firearms, this is something I've already written about before. You could simply give some story reason for why they don't exist - either they never got invented or some big cosmic thing got rid of them (I kind of like the idea of some good-aligned god watching whatever big war just happened and saying "ok, we're going to just take these away thank you very much.") Or you could try the various things I suggested in that post.
This is all kind of a jumping-off point. I imagine I'll continue to mull this concept over for a while, but it's something I've been wanting to do for a long time.
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