Reddit reviews Breckie, His Four Years: 1914-1918 (1918)
We found 1 Reddit comments about Breckie, His Four Years: 1914-1918 (1918). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews Breckie, His Four Years: 1914-1918 (1918)We found 1 Reddit comments about Breckie, His Four Years: 1914-1918 (1918). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I'm assuming by medieval/renaissance you mean the traditional European inspired fantasy. Here's a brain dump:
Feudalism:
I feel like I see a lot of fantasy where heroes turn up at some village and get asked to fight someone or other because the villagers have nowhere else to turn to. What I don't often see is the local knight living in the manor across the field whose responsibility it is to be a warrior and protect his fief and who probably doesn't appreciate strangers turning up and undermining his authority by doing his job for him.
There would probably also be a lot of small wars going on at any given time between knights and barons and earls that provide lots of work for dangerous people but have nothing to do with the greater battle battle between good and evil.
Knighthood:
Speaking of knights a knight isn't "someone who fights with plate armour and a sword," that's what they were IRL because that was the most effective way to fight and you needed a certain amount of wealth and status to afford the huge investment in training and equipment. If you have a fantasy world where with enough training and expensive equipment people can learn to shoot fire and call down lightning that will break a cavalry charge then that world's knights will almost certainly all be wizards. And very few other people will be allowed to be.
Era-appropriate firearms:
That aesthetic of people in plate armour with cannons is something you almost never see depicted.
Renaissance fashion:
Speaks for itself.
Medieval medicine and science:
A physician diagnosing you by cross referencing your symptoms with the alignment of the stars to decide how to properly balance your humors isn't something I've seen a lot of in fantasy. That element of earnestly applying the scientific method to things you don't understand based on what seem to us like completely ridiculous variables and assumptions. Also more folk medicine like plants that only had medicinal properties if you found them by accident or sympathetic magic like curing a rabid dog bite using the literal hair of the dog that bit you.
On a similar note you don't see a lot of importance put on folk superstition like hanging horseshoes above doors to keep out evil spirits/the devil/elves trying to steal your children. I feel like basing a fantasy world's idea of magic around the small everyday things might make a change from the usual Big Magic stuff.
The equator:
Not really something that will affect the day-to-day feel of a world but I read once that some people believed that the equator was hotter because it was closer to the sun and that right on the equator it would be too hot for anything to survive or cross. So they thought the entire southern hemisphere was inaccessible due to this deadly heat barrier. Not sure what you could do with it but I thought it was a neat idea. Maybe the discovery or creation of a tunnel under the equator would be an interesting way to introducing a "new world" to explore that developed totally independently.
The devil:
You know where medieval people got magic powers? By serving the devil. You know how they became werewolves? Made a deal with the devil. You know how women learned arithmetic? You better believe that's the devil. A lot of fantasy treats the monsters and magic and whatnot as just the natural flora and fauna of the world but these days I don't feel like I've seen much that filters the world through that lens of everything comes from one or two sources that have strong moral stances associated with them and, therefore, everything that comes from them does too.
Pilgrimages:
I don't know, you just never see them in fantasy but in the middle ages they were quite the thing from the noble woman who spends ten years of her life travelling constantly between holy sites to the common folk for whom the trip to visit the bones of St Whoever is basically the closest they ever have to a holiday.
Ships:
Don't have your medieval knights cross the sea on what amounts to a 17th century galleon like I feel like I keep seeing. Not when there are cool medieval and renaissance ships you could use:
Level of material wealth/standard of living:
When you turn up in a sleepy little farming village there probably won't be a big inn with a roaring fire, a dinner menu and a dozen rentable rooms. There will be a family that'll let you sleep on the floor of their one-room cottage for a few coins and might even share some of their latest batch of beer with you. Even the lord of the castle may very well sleep in the same room as their whole family and several servants. When you try to sell your stack of looted swords to the local blacksmith they aren't going to have cash sitting around to pay you. But they could offer you a box of nails and some of the loaves of bread the baker owes them.
Little things:
I feel like a lot of the reason "medieval" fantasy tends to feel stale is that it's mostly made up of just all the bits and pieces of history that people are familiar with smooshed together. Good for acccessibility, bad for originality. Often just adding little details or taking away familiar things can make a difference. Look up the things they had in place of anything resembling modern law enforcement like Tithings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tithing) and the Hue and Cry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hue_and_cry) or people bringing their own mugs to taverns because the taverns couldn't just buy bulk mugs off the shelf or the fact that it could take members of ten different guilds to make a suit of armour and anyone trying to do the bits that are covered by another guild will find themselves out of work pretty quick. Maybe read something like https://www.amazon.com/Distant-Mirror-Calamitous-14th-Century/dp/0345349571. Look up medieval bestiaries to learn how lions are born dead and brought to life by their mothers or how vultures can see the future.