Why the 1970s?
I'm starting this blog because I have a D&D/OSR campaign setting that I keep going on longwinded Discord rants about, and for everybody's sake, I need a blog to start writing about this stuff. So, to start out, let's justify the core element of my campaign setting.
I have always been a large fan of Eberron, and my own worldbuilding is heavily inspired by Eberron. Eberron is a setting where magic industrialization has allowed a D&D setting to approximate a 20th century level of technology and society, despite still largely using Medieval weapons and armor. Specifically, Eberron is intended to feel like the 1920s or the 1930s, and it is deeply rooted in 1930s media.
My approach for my own world is similar, except it is intended to reflect the 1970s, with some elements of the 1960s and 1980s, and it is rooted in the media of that period. It is primarily based in horror fiction, with secondary influence from crime fiction and comedy.
So, why the 1970s? The 1960s and 1980s are both decently popular eras to set nostalgia based works in, but the 1970s isn't (not that I have nostalgia for any of these decades, given I was born in 1991). I was talking about my setting to someone at the local game store recently, and their first comment was that you just don't see the 1970s used much. In fact, originally this setting was based on the 1960s, not the 1970s.
A significant reason I changed my mind is that I find the politics of the United States in the 1970s particularly interesting to engage with in fiction writing. By the mid-1970s, we'd experienced our first unambiguous military failure in the Vietnam War, we'd watched our president turn out to be openly corrupt, resign to avoid accountability, and then get pardoned by an unelected president, and we were moving into an era of independent cinema and uncensored television.
We were in the early days of desegregation after the Civil Rights Act, which was by no means uncontroversial. LGBT rights were a public battle, and we saw the legalization of homosexuality, visible gay rights organizations in school, and electoral defeat of an attempt to ban gay people from teaching in my home state. The economy was poor and people fed up, and we faced two significant energy crises. Environmentalism has become a serious political force for the first time.
Crime was on the rise, and our presidents decided to wage an idiotic War on Drugs that has devastated minority communities for generations. Terrorism and low level political violence was constantly in the news. The media was obsessed with serial killers, and cult activity was massively on the rise. Overall, there was an environment of distrust in the government and in institutions, and a sense almost like the nation was tired, hungover, and reacting to the 1960s.
This is all very rich material to work with in an Eberronish setting, but there is another element. D&D has always been about Rule of Cool for me, and in terms of graphic design, I really like the way the 1970s used fonts and color. I particularly like the heavy use of wood paneling mixed with bold use of color. It is simultaneously the decade of bringing nature indoors and the "polyester decade", with woodsy, cozy design coexisting with brightly colored and patterned artificial fabrics. The fonts and colors of 1970s advertising create an iconic look that I can't get enough of looking at. I even like the hairstyles. Music is a significant part of my worldbuilding (which will be its own blog post at one point), and I really like that late 1970s elf rock era, with Ronnie James Dio and Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow. I also like 1960s and 1970s folk, and the early days of metal, like the Ozzy Osbourne era of Black Sabbath.
Of course, a D&D game needs adventures to have, and this is where the horror influence comes in. I am a huge fan of 1960s and 1970s monster horror, and this makes for good, flavorful D&D villains. The 1970s was also the rise of the media sensationalism of the serial killer, which can fit in here. Primarily, though, this is where Scooby Doo of all things has a significant influence on the setting. It's a great gameplay loop. You travel around Fantasy Counterpart America, visiting places that each have their own distinct local flavor, and encountering a local Monster of the Week in each place that has to be dealt with. It's similar to, but not quite, a hexcrawl. Monster of the Week is great for me because it means an episodic campaign where each adventure is a self-contained story. I'm a busy adult with a full time job and health and stamina issues, and scheduling regular games isn't feasible. An episodic game structure means being able to fit in games as time and energy allows, and not relying on having the same players every time.
Another reason Scooby Doo looms heavily over this setting is that it's spooky, but not really scary. I love old horror movies, they are one of my great passions in life, but I have never been scared of Dracula or Frankenstein's Monster. Even more recent stuff that I've loved deeply, like Sinners or Weapons, doesn't frighten me. I am a Call of Cthulhu fan, and I find CoC game sessions quickly turn into joke cracking, with nobody actually the horrors seriously. I've brought that same tone to this campaign setting. This is a setting that loves B movies, exploitation, and Hammer Horror, but at the end of the day it's all in good fun and we can joke and laugh about it. Sort of like how Scooby Doo is drowning in spooky and horror set dressing, but doesn't actually want to scare kids.
So, this is ultimately a setting about hunting monsters, but one of the big themes of Eberron is that there are no evil or usually evil races/species. I think the idea that there are no races/species that are bad really, really fits the 1970s well. I do want to be careful how I say that, though. Multiple works of fantasy have had ham-fisted metaphors where they replace either black people or indigenous people with a fantasy race/species or a group of magical people or monsters, and these metaphors are very often quite cringeworthy. I have a particular dislike of Bright clumsily replacing black people with orcs in modern Los Angeles and talking about elf privilege. My setting is not going to pull any stunts like that or directly compare monsters or orcs or goblins to black people, I know better than that. However, the general theme of "orcs and drow are no better or worse than anyone else and entitled to the same rights" does work very well. I'm just not planning to write in an orc or drow civil rights movement or anything, I'd rather just integrate them into the setting.
With monsters, though, I do like the idea of there being a political movement to coexist with monsters where possible, and a general legal environment that states that being a monster isn't in and of itself a crime. So the player characters are hunting monsters that have actually done something wrong, rather than hunting monsters simply because they exist. Starting a session out with a dead body is a great way to do that. There's also a lot of room for monsters to ultimately not be the villain in a situation. I am a big fan of The Witcher, and the times where Geralt can decide the monster should get to live are usually my favorite quests in the games. In Scooby Doo, the villain of every episode is inevitably Capitalism, and while it would be too much to do that every single adventure, there is certainly room for times where it turns out the monster was manipulated and the Capitalists or the local politicians are the villains. Which fits the aforementioned air of distrust in the government and institutions.
Also, Dungeons and Dragons was first invented in the 1970s and this is an OSR compatible setting (how Eberron and OSR even fit together is a whole other blog post). This means you can make a bunch of meta jokes about a 1970s setting being able to have player characters actually play D&D.
So, that's why the 1970s. I still have a lot more to discuss, the media inspirations of this setting are a post in and of themselves, and I may discuss musical inspiration separately from film and television. I also want to discuss how the D&D 5E/Daggerheart/Pathfinder version of this setting is meant to play fundamentally different from the Shadowdark/Old School Essentials version of this setting. How Eberron and OSR can fit together is another discussion. Finally, there's a whole discussion to have about technology, because I didn't even mention that, while Eberron develops magitech on top of a Medieval technology base, my own setting develops magitech on top of a Long 18th Century technology base. This creates a distinct visual style and a lot of interesting opportunities to discuss. But this is all for another day, in between work and keeping up with my second Master's thesis.