(original/ a ghost & a few knights) by Joshua Leupen
An exceedingly rare Flat-top Great Helm, Holy Roman Empire, 1251-1300, housed at the Germanisches Historisches Museum.
A Longsword for armored combat with dull sections of blade for half-swording, South German, ca. 1500, housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
heeheeehee *steals shamelessly from media that my players don't know about*
historyarchaeologyartefacts
Armor of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor, (Detail of Breastplate), 1549 [2542 × 4000]
Random mansion generator
The Procgen Mansion Generator produces large three-dee dwellings to toy with your imagination, offering various architectural styles and other options. Each mansion even comes with floorplans:
Oooooh! Saving this
That’s fun
Hey, but don’t fall asleep on this Medieval Fantasy City Generator
If you want the next step up from cities, check out this world map generator!
A random example:
It can also show you the heights of regions of the maps, what kind of biomes you might expect, generate border shifting, upload base maps from images, assign areas where specific cultures or religions are practiced, you can add, move and name every single town in a country, add provinces within the country, generate place names from language databases, shift rivers, change the direction of global wind patterns and see how that effects the climate… There’s a bunch of stuff you can do with it!
Whenever your character is not in a scene, you have to leave the room.
I’m a little embarrassed to admit, I’ve played with groups where we enforced this. I guess they wanted to keep player vs. character knowledge as authentic as possible. It made for some fun surprises, ngl.
You can also do this to a certain extent with DM controlled rolls / notes on things like stealth, perception, investigation, etc.
Even if your players are very good at thinking in character, there is a TON of tension that is created when a player takes a note from the DM and just nods rather than the DM saying the same thing out loud for the whole group
As a DM, denial of information can be just as valuable in setting the tone as the information itself
I have in the past occasionally handed someone a note that says “this is a note. Look briefly surprised, then hand this back” and you wouldn’t believe what it does for the paranoia levels of a party who are used to note passing from the GM.
In my understanding, a lot of Typical DnD set ups are more akin to the wild west, less 'medieval times'. Especially adventurer fantasy style.
(With reference to this post here.)
Nah, not necessarily. While there is a great deal of the Wild West in your typical D&D setting, the Wild West was by no means historically unique. What your average D&D setting gets wrong is that such periods of romanitcised outlawry are transitory, generally cropping up in the decade-or-so of social upheaval following a major war.
This pattern holds for the Wild West (the decade following the American Civil War), but also for the second great Age of Piracy (the decade following the War of the Spanish Succession), the period that spawned the Robin Hood mythos (the decade following the Anarchy), and even the heyday of American outlaw biker culture (the decade following World War II).
You don’t need to resort to anachronism to justify a roving adventure fantasy campaign in an authentically medieval setting; all you need is a big fuckoff war that wrapped up about five years before the campaign’s start date.
I expect it could also happen during a war, if one goes on long enough. E.g. the Thirty Years War.
Oh, absolutely, though it has to be a war that’s both long enough and sporadic enough for there to plausibly be a decade-long lull in the middle of it. One of the essential elements of such periods is a big influx of veterans and ex-mercenaries who’ve been cut loose and cheated of their pay, and are now looking for a little payback!
(It’s almost comical how predictable that trajectory is. Screw your veterans out of their paychecks in order to save a few bucks, then five years later you’ve got strangely well organised bandits all over the place, and nobody ever seems to make the connection – which just goes to show that kings are dumb.)
