History's Greatest Hits

I've posted a fair amount on this blog about the Dragon Quest series, and in particular Dragon Quest III, a game that I grew up with and which influenced my approach to DMing. I've always been intending to go back to the game and see how well it holds up from when I was a kid, and I've finally gotten around to doing it. It's definitely made me more interested in pursuing the rest of the series, both out of personal interest and to mine it for gameable ideas, but for now, I'm starting with the one I remember. In doing so, I noticed one thing interesting about the game and its world, and something that I've seen in quite a bit of fantasy worldbuilding.

See, the world of DQ3 is recognizably a malformed, rotated version of our Earth. The continents are largely recognizable, and there are areas based on real-world regions located where you'd expect them to be. However, while the geography matches up, the history not so much. The game plays it fast and loose in respect to historical accuracy, and it's not afraid to mix and match different eras in its inspiration. The first town you go to after leaving your homeland is noticeably based on imperial Rome, complete with colosseum. But across the sea is a region that recalls ancient Egypt, where you delve into an ancient pyramid (of course) to retrieve a magic key that allows you to access a town that corresponds to Portugal during the Age of Sail, and from there you get a ship you can take to areas reminescent of feudal Japan, medieval Scotland, and a town of settlers on the continent equivalent to North America. It's all there in the same world, at the same time, and nobody questions it - it just is.

It's an approach to worldbuilding I've dubbed a History's Greatest Hits setting, and DQ3 is far from the first time I've seen it. There are plenty of settings out there that flippantly and shamelessly crib from real-world history, mashing together the fun parts of different eras into a single world. Probably the most famous literary example is Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, which grew out of him wanting to write historical swashbuckling adventure, but not wanting to tie himself down to accurately depicting any one era - it's a setting where Conan can fight knights in one story and Egyptians in the next without anyone batting an eye. The Known World of Mystara has also often been described this way, with its Byzantines, Mongols, Vikings, and Arabs all a stone's throw from one another, although it's perhaps not quite as drastic with how it's willing to stretch the limits of contemporaneity. Warhammer Fantasy, although its baseline is somewhere around the 1500s, still has a Renaissance-era Holy Roman Empire with a (French-speaking) Arthurian England to its west and marauding Norsemen to the north. And, yes, my own Lunar Lands is no stranger to this phenonmenon either, with regions based on Dark Ages Scotland, colonial Mexico, Renaissance Italy, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the Abbasid Caliphate all coexisting, to name a few.

Deadliest Warrior

It's easy for me to see why a setting like this might come to be. While a History's Greatest Hits setting might risk questioning by historians on how plausibly the different cultures and technologies of these far-flung eras can coexist, and perhaps that stretches the boundaries of versimilitude, they're usually designed with a more utiltarian purpose - versimilitude comes second to providing a theater where exciting adventures in different settings can happen with the same characters in the same world.

They're also helping in providing touch points to players and readers to understand the setting - not everyone is willing to sift through an eighty-page history of the Great War between the Zornaphian Satrapies and the Oligarchs of Runos, but if you pitch it as "it's basically ancient Greece," say, people will instantly have a good idea of what things look like, how people act, and what they can do. They're easy to handle on the writer/DM side of things too, since a lot of the worldbuilding is already filled in for you; the most you might have to do is throw in a few points of divergence to make things interesting ("It's like the Aztec Empire, but with the dueling culture of 18th century Prussia!") or to see how things can fit together ("Why would there be Landsknechts on the border with Mongols anyway?"). Plus, there's just some people who recognize that seeing a samurai and a musketeer team up to fight cavemen is just inherently kind of neat. I don't think it's any surprise that so many fantasy writers fall back on settings like these, and there's almost certainly many examples out there that I missed.