Styles in Dungeons & Dragons

Hey Game Fans, today i’m going to talk a little bit about something i find interesting in the RPG community (the title says Dungeons and Dragons, but it can be splashed around a little harder than that). Dungeons and Dragons has a lot of characteristics that define its style, and you can mix and match them if you want to get creative. Let’s talk about those styles and how you can stretch them to fit your needs for your games at home or the adventures you may be writing or stories you’re trying to tell.

So what are the characteristics of Dungeons and Dragons as a style? Well, let’s do some thinking.

• Late Dark Ages/Early Renaissance technology level
• Predominantly focused on Western European culture
• Polytheistic Religions with active gods that grant favors and spells to their faithful
• Magic is real, and in most cases can be utilized by people who either have a natural talent for it or the right training.
• The world is an unsettled place with bastions of civilization (either major cities and their immediate environs or small countries ruled by powerful people) holding back the wilderness.
• Monsters take many forms but most can’t be reasoned with or convinced to take a better course of action.
• The ruins of ancient civilizations dot the land and these contain powerful magic, dangerous monsters, and/or fabulous wealth. 
• There are alternate planes of reality that don’t conform to our understanding of the physical universe. These are occupied by creatures composed of either basic elements (earth, water, air, or fire, for example) or complex concepts (law, chaos, good or evil, for example). 
• There are special categories of people who focus on a particular type of problem solving that can be called on to go out and deal with the threats that other people are incapable of dealing with.

Taken together, these are the characteristics that blend together into the style of Dungeons and Dragons. If you’re working on a setting, or a story, or an adventure in the D & D style, these are basically the pillars you can build that concept around, but a more important consideration is what happens when you tweak one of the characteristics or replace it with another.

• What happens if you take the tech level and turn it up to an Industrial Revolution era tech?
• What happens if you use Africa or Asia as your cultural starting point (From a macro level and then branch into smaller cultural areas as you build)? 
• What happens if there’s a Monotheistic religion and that particular god has specific things he or she dislikes? 
• What if the world is dominated by a seemingly all powerful empire that’s in a state of decline? 
• What happens if the monsters are on the run because they’ve been hunted to the point of extinction? 
• What happens if magic is a barely understood force and the people who practice it have to do so in secret for fear of retaliation by the powers that be? 

You can reweave the fundamental aspects of the game without changing the mechanics in the slightest, and that’s one of the things that i truly find enjoyable about Dungeons and Dragons. D & D is flexible enough to exist as a mutliverse (and with the number of alternate prime material planes, pocket realities and just plain weird things) and that gives you an amazing level of freedom for building your own setting, story, or adventure. You don’t even have to change any of the characteristics to have a perfectly fun setting to play in.


But you could if you wanted to.


(This is my gentle sarcasm tone)


Now in the ancient times before indoor plumbing and the internet, We had a company of people who made some of the first adventures and settings for our brave new concept, the RPG. Some of these were simple concepts and ideas, but others took parts of what we had seen and gave them a new treatment.

(End Sarcasm Tone)


There are some neat things in those early settings. Whether it’s the Greyhawk struggle to contain Iuz and the rest of the forces that would tear apart the civilized kingdoms, or Dragonlance’s complex interaction of lunar cycles, magic, the hubris of men and the wrath of a goddess, these settings gave us new ideas to take bake into our home games. The Forgotten Realms would give us a bigger world to explore, and a new idea about what makes gods and goddesses truly divine beings.


Flash forward to the 2018 era, and there are is a storm of settings, ideas and concepts you can blend together or borrow ideas from. Have an idea about running an anime style magical princesses punishing bad guys in the name of the moon? You can find a workaround for that. Want to explore dozens of strange new worlds and the civilizations that call them home? You can do it.


I’m going to talk about two of my favorite publishers and the reasons i greatly enjoy their work. First up, I absolutely love the works of Hydra Cooperative (here). I got started with the Mortzengersturm, The Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak adventure and i have been in love ever since. They take a twisting look at what fantasy can be and create a remarkably groovy atmosphere to go adventuring in. You can check out their catalog of works on Drivethrurpg here.


The other new hotness in my gaming life is the Retroverse, from Lasers and Liches. Retro style game play built on the engine of Dungeons and Dragons. It looks like nothing i’ve ever seen as a concept for Dungeons and Dragons, and they are getting ready to Kickstart their production tomorrow, so you have time to get in on the ground floor. If you want to check it out early, here’s the free preview they put together for the campaign (Here) Be sure to check them out at Lasers and Liches (Here’s a Link ).


If you want to find out more, you can check out the various links and other ways of finding stuff on the internet. If you want us to do some more articles about these characteristics, let us know. You know how to find us on the interwebs. Game On, Game Fans.