Quote Originally Posted by Cosi View Post
D&Dland is medieval. People are always starving everywhere because they live at a subsistence level on land being farmed with premodern techniques in a feudal relationship with the local lord (who, incidentally, is not exactly in favor of them having whatever lifestyle they want). Medieval Europe was at a level of growth we would have called depression or recession for hundreds of years. The infant mortality rate was somewhere between a third and a half. D&D is like that, but there are manticores and apocalypse cultists.
I tend to see D&D world as a weird non-historical mixture of renaissance and post-apocalyptic.

Sure, you've got diseases and manticores and tsochar and cultists, but you also have druids and clerics and paladins and angels. In areas where the druids & clerics et al. are dominant, life might be pretty great, with enhanced crop yields and diseases cured. In areas where the manticores & cultists are winning, life might be rather nasty, brutish, and/or short.

High fantasy, renaissance, and post-apocalypse all feature themes like exploring ruins for valuable lost knowledge, which seems like a very central conceit for D&D.



Hmm, if implemented in a certain way, then a natural implication of that might be every city-state has a "load-bearing boss" NPC whose personal power guarantees the safety of the nearby region, and that might be a great in-game excuse for PCs to retire at some high-ish level.